The title of McLaren’s book, A Generous Orthodoxy, comes from a phrase coined by Hans Frei. And while there are serious objections to what Frei argues for elsewhere, he certainly has a firm grasp on the nature of pre-critical Christian thought. As he puts it, “In the earlier Protestant interpretive tradition, we have noted, the literal and religious meaning of texts and the judgment about their factual accuracy had been wholly united. The point to realize is not that they had been conceived to be in harmony with each other but that they had not even been generically distinct issues” (Hans Frei,The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, p. 56). This is exactly right, and the only contribution I would like to make to the discussion at this place is to point out that some of us still think this way. We do not divide the Scriptures into pieces, and then decide on our own authority which pieces to defend and which not (which is what liberals do), or on the other hand decide to defend all the pieces by whatever means handy (many conservatives after the Enlightenment). But there are Trinitarian Christians who don’t divide the text into pieces at all, and who refuse to defend the Scripture against secularist attacks while wearing secularist armor. But this next point cannot be emphasized enough, and is the place where many Christians (who should know better) are being taken in by the emergents and postmodernists. The notion that the events described in the Bible “actually happened as described” is not a notion borrowed from the Enlightenment. The precritical world was not a place where the medievals and early reformers had the epistemic jitters. They knew what they believed, and they believed it as the sure Word of God. But the apostasy of the liberals confused things (and is still confusing things).
D.A. Carson’s comments on this whole issue are worth noting. “Frei argues that whereas earlier Christians simply lived in the narrative of the biblical text, by the eighteenth century liberals under the influence of modern thought began to question what really happened. Conservatives, replying to the liberal skepticism, tried to show that what really happened was more or less what the text says. So suddenly both sides were far more interested in the minutiae of what ‘really’ happened and were no longer living in the narrative text of Scripture. Both sides had been snookered by modernism. But this analysis is grossly unfair. The reason why earlier Christians lived so comfortably in the narrative of the biblical text is that they believed that the biblical narrative is true. When liberals began to doubt that it is true, conservatives replied in similar detail that it is. Of course, in itself such discussion does not constitute living joyously within the narrative. But the suggestion of Frei, and of Lindbeck and others who followed him, that we must simply return to living within the narrative, while refusing to consider, once these doubts have been raised, whether this narrative is telling the truth, is myopic counsel” (D.A. Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, pp. 143-144). And amen to this three or four times.
I would simply want to add that Christians must be careful to contend for the truthfulness of Scripture in a particular Trinitarian way, and not in the way our fathers have found ineffective. But in doing this, the first thing we must do is banish from our apologetic ranks all who confound categories like arrogance and certainty, and humility and uncertainty. Bad whiskey doesn’t cease to be bad whiskey simply because bartender McLaren has an aw shucks demeanor about him. If it does not matter to them whether these things really happened (Jesus coming back from the dead, walking on water, David eating the shewbread, Abraham offering Isaac, Adam accepting the fruit from his wife), then the emergents should simply join up with the liberals now and be done with it. If they personally think that it all really happened, but they welcome others to the emergent conversation who like the Buddha dismiss such inquiries as unedifying questions, then they should not be surprised, and I hope they will not take it amiss, if I have nothing whatever to do with their damned project.
Many years ago I was talking with a young man who was under the influence of some liberal hooey or other, and he was wanting to use any number of superlatives in talking about Jesus. But he did not want these superlatives to ever be grounded and anchored in what was actually the case. We were at a mountain retreat center, and so I pointed at a mountain across the way and asked, “Did Jesus of Nazareth make that?” And despite all the superlatives, humbly expressed, he could not answer the question. And despite what anyone might say, his uncertainty was biblically defined as unbelief, and not humility.