In his next chapter of A Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren addresses the question of why he is a “post/protestant.” He hangs the discussion on two ways the word protestant can be taken. The first is the common one. “The dominant meaning of protestant relates to the verb it contains: protest” (p. 123).
This is great when there is stuff to protest, but centuries afterwards, when all the bygones are bygones, what is the hapless protester to do? He is like a disciplined soldier in the middle of a glorious millennium of peace. According to McLaren, someone in protester mode has to bring his own trouble with him. “After protesting Catholic excesses, Protestants started protesting each other. Whenever a Protestant group manifested a problem — complacency, confusion, weak leadership, whatever — a subgroup would arise from within and protest those failures” (p. 125). Exactly. This has honestly been a real problem. And when the complacency, or confusion, or whatever, is not addressed quickly enough, the protester guys gather up a group of like-minded people and they get the heck out of there, creating what can only be called yet another emergent church. Although I believe his formal training was in literature, the detection of literary ironies is not McLaren’s strong suit.
But the fact that McLaren is doing it too is certainly not a defense for it. The fact that he describes himself as a post-cafeteria-food-fighter, all while rubbing green jello in Billy’s face, should be commented on. At the same time, this does not justify the, um, rambunctious approach to polity taken by many individualist Protestants. Do anything controversial in the church and you might have yourself what we call a Scottish revival — people streaming out the doors in all directions, and some out the windows. This is not good — and I want to be in the forefront of those saying it is not good. At the same time, it sure beats the old ways of making the faithful stay, which consisted of tying the recalcitrant to stakes of wood and setting them on fire.
In addition, it should also be noted that Protestant fractiousness, while a real problem, has been drastically overstated by Roman Catholic apologists. An earlier post in the Roman or Catholic? thread addresses the question of how many “denominations” there really are. Here is a paragraph from that discussion.
“Countering this optical illusion, Barrett goes on to break the seven major ecclesiastical blocs into what he calls “major ecclesiastical traditions,” where I think we come up with an accurate number. So that I don’t bore you, let me just focus on the division of three of the major blocs. The Orthodox are divided up into nineteen traditions, the Roman Catholics have sixteen, and the Protestants have twenty-one. If we throw the Anglicans in, they account for another six. Far from Bedlam, this appears to be simply the cost of the gospel doing business in a fallen world. But whichever door you choose, you have lots of work for private judgment to do in following up that choice.”
McLaren then comes to a second way of defining protestant and asks a reasonable question, “What if we were to redefine protestant as pro-testifying, pro meaning ‘for’ and testify meaning ‘telling our story’?” (p. 127). McLaren does not say this, but this sense of “giving a positive testimony” was actually the original sense of the word protestant. And while this is not the understanding of that word in common use, the substance of testifying is being done. It is not rare at all. As much as I hate to break the news, Protestants have been remarkably diligent in testifying positively to the gospel for some centuries now, and a good portion of the globe is Christian because of it. We are coming up on the five hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation, and during that time we Protestants have built a great Protestant civilization. I am no perfectionist, which is good thing, because our cities aren’t exactly alabaster, but it is still a very great civilization. My favorite papist (Chesterton) said somewhere that a courageous man should be willing to oppose any error, but some errors had earned the right not to be patronized.
This is precisely what makes a book like McLaren’s so exasperating. He urges Protestants to state clearly and positively what they believe, which they have been doing for centuries now, and yet at the same time he won’t testify. Sure, he writes, he uses words, but they all go smudgey right away. Put him on the witness stand, and it is like trying to get a Zen Master to testify about what he saw on the evening of the 13th on the corner of 5th and Main. “Did you see the yellow Volkwagen collide with the green pick-up truck?” “I saw yellow and not yellow. I saw green and post-green.”
And so then we come to the craziness of a parachurch ecumenism (!) grounded in somebody’s individual feelings about various individuals being friendly across denominational lines. “Perhaps this kind of pro-testifier would be better called post-Protestant, since the first definition is so dominant. Either way — this to me is truly wonderful — both Catholics and Protestants and Eastern Orthodox, too, can come together as pro-testifiers or post-Protestants now, because together we are reaching a point where we acknowledge not just ‘their’ failures, but ‘ours'” (p. 128). Post-protestant, ha!. This is yet one more example of what happens when a certain kind of protestant thinking goes to seed. It results in rabid individualism. Think about it for a moment. When we use prefixes like post, it makes sense when we have enough distance to make out a clear distinction that we then need a word for. This is why we have post-colonial eras, and post-Nicene fathers, and whatnot. But when an individual does this in order to describe his own personal identity, the result is just funny, on the same order as me personally seceding from the Union and establishing the Republic of Doug.
To describe yourself as a post-Protestant in a world still full of millions of regular old Protestants and regular old Roman Catholics is an attempt to wrap your personal thought preferences in the cloak of history — moreover in the cloak of history that hasn’t happened yet. I might just as well describe myself as an ante-Elizabethan writer (Elizabeth IX of the United Kingdom and Greater New England). At the end of the day, McLaren is just attempting to describe the thoughts in his head, and he is trying to make us feel like they are part of some larger historical necessity. But there is no reason for believing this to be true.