Customer Reviews

A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey (Jossey-Bass Leadership Network Series)

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A New Kind of Christian is Brian McLaren's introductory work into understanding how the postmodern era--as well as the modern, medeival, and Roman eras--have all shaped our perspectives on Christianity. McLaren argues that current evangelical Christianity is one cultural motif--one modern achievment--in conceptualizing the Christian God. Though many aspects of evangelical Christianity are beautiful, true, and good, many aspects are mere "byproducts" of a modernistic worldview and do not necessarily reflect truth and love of Jesus Christ.

McLaren calls Christians to confront the components of Christianity that reflect human culture more than authentic spiritual encounter, and also confront the current postmodern age.

Tired of conforming to orthodoxy that you're not sure is so accurate? Are you being pulled to something different, deeper, more meaningful yet you still want to be a follower of Jesus? If you are, you're not alone and this book confirms it. I personally don't believe you should read this if you're content in the traditional teachings of mainstream Christianity if you're beholden to orthodoxy. But if you're thinking that you want to expand your thinking,to have that freedom of thought in your faith, to truly search for truth then this book helps to confirm that it's OK. You're not a heretic and you're not leaving God. I must say, I was wondering if I was becoming a "heretic" and some may think that I am with this freedom of thought but I truly believe I'm growing into a deeper, richer relationship with my Savior.

The first book of a trilogy written in the style of The Shack, McLaren introduces you to A New Kind of Christian.

Pastor Dan Poole has almost given up on the ministry. He is disillusioned and isn't even sure what he believes anymore. Upon taking his daughter to a homegrown rock concert, Pastor Poole meets Neil Oliver - a High School science teacher.

Dan and Neil begin a relationship that will cover faith, doubt, reason, mission, leadership and spiritual practice.

This relationship isn't without its barbs. Some readers may find themselves identifying with Dan as his foundation of spirituality is reconstructed in the postmodern world.

Have you given up on faith, God and the church?

If you've read The Shack and were impacted by it in a positive way, I believe you will gain much from reading the first book of McLaren's New Kind of Christian Trilogy.

Brain McLaren shares his views on a number of topics via the conversations between two fictional characters. It's amazing how a story can present ideas better than a lecture or even a non-fiction inspirational book.


This book was provided for review by Jossey-Bass Publishing.

I really appreciated this book. In it, McLaren begins to address some of the most challenging questions facing the Church right now. The story and the plot were weak, but the author admits this himself in the intro, saying that they merely serve as a medium for the ideas he wanted to present. Overall, its a great book.

This book is a wonderful tale of a fundamentalist conservative pastor questioning his faith and what he teaches. Through his relationship with a friend named Neo, this pastor learns to understand what the Christian faith IS and how to live and teach it authentically. A story like this is a much better way of explaining the questions emergent Christians wrestle with.

Brian Mclaren believes that the church, thoroughly enmeshed as it is in modernism, is becoming increasingly irrelevant to a culture that is moving away from modernism and toward a new paradigm of postmodernism. To be able to speak to a culture that is well underway in making the transition, he argues that the church must also embrace this worldview.

The problem is, he never gives us anything close to an adequate description of postmodernism. He doesn't tell us that its main feature is the repudiation of truth, the common-sense notion that we have access to a mind-independent reality "out there"; rather, we create our own model of reality by our use of language. We are stuck in a bubble, the walls of which are mirrors that reflect only ourselves. There is no truth in the sense of correspondence with reality; there is only "truth" in the sense of coherence between the ideas in our story. Thus there can be no conflict between the "truths" of one community and those of another. Christians have their story, Muslims have their own story, and so on for every conceivable group. Each is "true" insofar as it is true to itself. Postmodernism, then, has no use for the idea of "metanarrative", a story which claims to actually be in contact with reality and thus is true for all peoples in all times. This is, of course, a perfect description of pluralism.

A second, related feature of postmodernism is that there is no singular, correct meaning in a text established by the intent of the author. Instead, there are as many meanings in a text as there are communities, be they Marxist, feminist, Southern Baptist, or any other group, ad infinitim. To say that one interpretation is correct is oppressive, because what's at play here is power, not truth.

Now, it is critical to realize that notions of truth and knowledge are not features of modernism. For almost two thousand years prior to the modern era, people took for granted ideas that postmodernism would have us jettison. These would include the idea that there is a mind-independent world, the basic reliability of our senses and reasoning capacities to obtain truth about that world, and also that God could reveal his Word to all peoples through the pages of the Bible. Though we might disagree among ourselves, it was thought that there was a singular meaning to the text and that it was reasonable for us to put our best efforts in disputation and exegesis in order to discover that meaning.

Thus Mclaren would have us repudiate not only modernist thinking, but premodernist and ancient thinking. This would cut the legs out from under Christianity. For two thousand years, and not just since the modern era, Christianity has understood itself as proclaiming a metanarrative, a singular gospel of salvation through one Saviour.

Mclaren plays his cards close to his chest on the issue of religious pluralism, perhaps anticipating resistance if he too quickly endorses it. But he does seem to reveal this postmodern commitment in a few places. In one place a character declares that Christianity doesn't own God, and that God is at work in the lives of non-Christians as well as Christians. That second statement is ambiguous: Christians have always affirmed that God works in the hearts of non-Christians in order to bring them to saving faith. But I get the feeling that this is not what is meant; in light of the odd statement that "Christianity doesn't own God" I think what is being communicated is that other religions are just as valid as Christianity in bringing people to God. My hunch is confirmed in the endnotes where Mclaren credits someone "for his insight that pluralism (recognizing the world's many diverse religions) means seeing the world more the way God has always seen it."

Truth (correspondence between a thought and the way the world really is) and knowledge (justified true belief) have no place in postmodernism because they presuppose access to the world. Mclaren doesn't openly denounce these but he does seem to downplay them in a way that is consistent with postmodern denial. For instance, he declares that the theological distinctions between evangelical and liberal, Calvinist and Arminian, and Protestant and Catholic, are modernist notions and thus to be dispensed with in the postmodern era: "Modern Protestant seminaries are still fighting the battles of yesterday, like the Protestant Reformation and the liberal-fundamentalist debates. Somebody tell them those wars are over". He doesn't appeal to the Bible, he just waves his hand in dismissal. It seems to me that he views these "warring" theological camps as different communities, who because of their distinctive use of language, construct their own truths so there's no way to adjudicate between them. Indeed, he says that since the time of Christ there have been "twenty centuries of Christian universes".

I am not defending modernism, regardless of whether or not the case against it might be overstated. Its enthronement of reason, its banishment of God and establishment of a religious belief/knowledge dualism, its consumerism, radical individualism, and the inauthenticity and hypocrisy that can result - these are all valid critiques that contemporary Christians need to face squarely. But if there is a sense in which the contemporary church is like a sick patient, embracing postmodernism would be a treatment that actually kills the patient. Efforts to contextualize the gospel to a changing culture must not result in changing the gospel itself.

The bottom line that illustrates the danger is this: Does Christianity give us an accurate picture of the way the world really is, and can we know it to be so? Is truth correspondence? Or does Christianity just tell us a story?

We ought to learn from the example of the first-century church, which was almost destroyed by absorbing the worldview (gnosticism) of the surrounding culture. In our case, Ravi Zacharias warns that postmodern pluralism and denial of knowledge is going to "produce a generation of people who will not be able to handle the challenge of Islam and other major world religions." When doctrine is dismissed as "too dogmatic" we lose the ability to distinguish between the real thing and a counterfeit.

To conclude, in the words of Greg Koukl, "There is no virtue in this view, only danger. If you are convinced there is no truth, there is nothing to protect you from being destroyed by lies; there are lies, and they do destroy. Truth and knowledge are essential to Christianity. Postmodernism denies truth and knowledge, therefore postmodernism is a philosophy that is not in accordance to Christ. It is a philosophy we should not only defend against but we should be tearing down."

As a self-proclaimed progressive Christian and a "believer in exile" (John Shelby Spong's words), I was a little disappointed that this story was not more progressive. While this author certainly reflects some progressive Christian thought, he still reflects a key element of the "earlier Christian paradigm" (Marcus Borg's words): that Jesus is the only way to God. I am a Christian - a Jesus follower. The "Christian" claim that Jesus is the only way to God is exactly the kind of thinking that Jesus warned us about.

This is a novel about a dissatisfied pastor who seems to be a little lost and perhaps a bit tired of dishing out well worn platitudes every Sunday.

Along comes Neo the science teacher, who just happens to have a theological pedigree himself. Neo convinces pastor Dan Poole after many discussions that he is on a journey which is leading him away from a position based on hard propositional truth and more into an actual experience of the mystery of God. It wasn't all that interesting a book to begin with, plus I wasn't all that convinced that this was Dan's real problem. Dan just needed to be spiritually refreshed and to spend time studying the Word, he didn't need to do what Neo was suggesting. Just my opinion.

BACKGROUND ON THE AUTHOR:

Brian McLaren is an author, speaker, and former senior pastor of the Cedar Ridge Community Church near Washington DC. He is a key figure within the "emergent church," a loose, late-20th-century movement that reacts against the influence of modernity within present-day Protestant Christianity. On one hand, emergent church is a continuation of the "Willow Creek Phenomena" in its emphasis on evangelism and its willingness to adapt Christian practice in response to culture. On the other hand, it is a reaction against the devaluing of traditional symbols and practices and the marketing approach so characteristic of Willow Creek.

New Kind of Christian is McLaren's third book in a series of nine books, all of which advance Emergent Church. The first two were (1) The Church on the Other Side: Doing Ministry in the Postmodern Matrix (1998) and (2) Finding Faith (1999). Later books include (1) More Ready Than You Realize: Evangelism as Dance in the Postmodern Matrix (2002), (2) A is for Abductive (coauthored with Leonard Sweet, 2002), (3) Adventures in Missing the Point (coauthored with Anthony Campolo, 2003), (4) The Story We Find Ourselves In (2003), (5) Church in the Emerging Culture (coauthored with four other authors, 2003), and (6) A Generous Orthodoxy (2004), (7) The Last Word and the Word After That (2005), and (8) The Secret Message of Jesus (2006).

SYNOPSIS OF THE BOOK:

New Kind of Christian is the story of a friendship between Dan Poole, a disillusioned Evangelical pastor, and Neil Everett Oliver (Neo), a high school teacher and former Presbyterian pastor). On a literary level, the relationship is a fairly transparent allegory with Poole representing a bewildered and demoralized traditional Christianity and Neo (McLaren's protagonist) playing the part of the prophet (as his name implies) who leads the truly faithful into a new era. This review assumes McLaren's viewpoints are found on the lips of Neo and in the mouths of those Neo has enlightened.

Neo (a cipher for McLaren) sees Poole (a cipher for the church) as besieged and disoriented by the transition from modernity to a post-modernity in which familiar categories disappear or are inverted. Modernity was an age of conquest, control, machines, analysis, scientism, objectivity, criticism, nation-states, organization, individualism, institutional religion, and consumerism. Post-modernity is post-conquest, post-control, post-machine, post-analysis, post-everything modern. The transition arises from a confluence of seven changes: (1) new communications technologies, (2) new scientific worldview, (3) new intellectual elite, (4) new transportation technologies, (5) new economic system, (6) new military technologies, and (7) new challenges to existing authorities. All of these factors came together at the beginning of the 16th century. They have come together again in the 21st century -- hence the need for a "new kind of Christian."

Unfortunately, most within the church are blinded to emerging postmodern realities by their captivation with modernism. Many of them, like Poole, are suffering the consequences without knowing the real source of their malaise. Nero sees the root cause as a model or paradigm shift. The world has changed, but the church has not. Instead, it is stuck in Stage 2 of what he describes as Roxburgh's five stages of paradigm change: (1) stability, (2) discontinuity, (3) disembedding, (4) transition, and (5) reformation.

The church is experiencing discontinuity because it has become foreign to the larger society. Its "good news" is now interpreted as "bad news" by a postmodern majority that has largely made the transition to a different view of the way the world works. "Born again" now has a negative connotation. "Friendship evangelism" is seen as just another manipulative scheme so common within Christianity. Christianity is no longer seen as a force for good by most people. People are alienated by its slick sales pitches and phony spirituality.

One reason Stage 2 is traumatic is because the church continues to read the bible, an ancient book, anachronistically through the lens of modernity. Christians approach it as an answer book rather than the story of God's people. They feel obligated to have all the right answers. Pastors in particular are expected to be "the answer man." Debate, dialectic, and argument are deployed to demonstrate proficiency in answering objections to Christian faith. The result is a profusion of a certain kind of truths, but they are truths without honesty.

Pastors find it especially difficult to live genuinely before God because their constituencies are more interested in being right than being good. Their congregations are motivated by fear rather than love, fixated on avoiding hell rather than gaining heaven, more interested in having their sins forgiven rather than being a good neighbor, and unperturbed by doctrines that limit salvation to only a few. Their desire for salvation has little to do with God and much to do with their own self-absorption. They isolate themselves from the world by withdrawing into protected enclaves where the focus of evangelism is only among those who already meet their moral standards. And after having lived the good life, they expect a home in a Platonic sort of heaven that religion (Christianity included) can provide. From beginning to end, they view life in modernistic, reductionist categories, not knowing that their westernized, commercialized, industrialized, compartmentalized, bureaucratized, sanitized version of Christianity has lost its grip on the emerging postmodern culture.

The resultant disconnect between church and culture guarantees the church will be unfaithful to and fail its divine purpose. Confusion over the nature of the church is key. Most Christians think the church and the kingdom are synonymous, but they are not. The church is not the kingdom -- it is the catalyst for the kingdom and that kingdom includes all of creation, from humanity to inanimate objects. Christianity, with its exclusive claims to truth, knowledge, and election, has become the enemy of the gospel. Its exclusive truth claims have been overthrown by experience with other cultures. There are many valid approaches to God, many religions. Islam and Buddhism, for example, offer wonderful insights. Pluralism is a positive thing. Christianity does not own God or salvation. God accepts all who seek truth. All cultures have truth seekers among them. The "new kind of Christian" is therefore at home among non-Christians. He or she converses freely among and within different cultures, recognizing the importance of conversations, not conversions -- conversations that transcend the narrow, outdated categories on which traditional Christians tend to focus. Whether or not non-Christians are saved through other religions, for example, cannot be answered because "it's none of our business." Evolution is "one of God's coolest creations."

Modernistic Christianity has become narrow and outdated because modernism has reduced it to a consumer-oriented task of saving isolated souls -- "of getting my butt into heaven." It is fascinated with technology and automatically assumes new things are better than old. It asks people whether Jesus is their "personal savior," not recognizing how culturally conditioned such questions are and how foreign they are to scripture.

There is, however, no such thing as pure Christianity. Even New Testament Christianity is culturally conditioned. No one occupies a context-free place to assess different cultures. The important thing is the journey. The pastor's role today is to be the pioneer who leads the church on a journey -- a journey toward a new kind of Christianity. Exactly what that will be is not apparent, but it will be holistic and ecologically aware rather than otherworldly. It will be the kind of holistic reconciliation with God, others, ourselves, and the environment that Jesus set it motion -- a radical revolution. It will recognize the systemic nature of sin. It will be a place where the church is "saved for service," rather than "saved for privilege." Narrative will take precedence over theology and doctrine. Evangelism will proceed more like a dance than a sales pitch. There will be no winners or losers -- everyone just tries to "move to the music." Church members will not look to their pastor for all the right answers, but will instead expect him to formulate the right questions.

Different traditions will present different challenges. "Fundamentalism" in both its liberal and conservative guises will be a major obstacle. Christians from conservative traditions will be the most difficult to lead and transform. Shutting down whole churches and starting over with a core group may be necessary. Bringing in outsiders to aid transformation will be powerful. Openness to radical change and new ideas will be central. Incremental changes will be the biggest enemy of true innovation. Discontinuity should be emphasized rather than minimized. Stability will come, not through fixed truths, but rather through a balance of dynamic principles. Christian life will be established, not on a single foundation, such as the bible, but from many anchor points, more like a spider web. The Holy Spirit will guide.

COMMENTS: Since it is unclear how well McLaren's protagonists (Neo and his protogee) articulate McLaren's thoughts, the following observations are directed toward those protagonists (with Neo being their chief representative) rather than McLaren.

Although Neo envisions radical changes in church and ministry, he follows a well-worn pattern in subordinating a theology of ministry to a theology of the church. For Neo, the latter has much in common with liberal Christianity in its de-emphasis on the distinctiveness of the church vis-a-vis the world, its corresponding emphasis on a common humanity, its withering critique of traditional Christianity, its positive attitude toward culture, its faith in social progress, and its insistence on the church's role in that progress. In all of those respects, Neo seems more modern than postmodern -- more an infuser of liberal Protestant theology into evangelicalism than a pioneer into a new age.

Neo succeeds so well, not by marshalling compelling arguments, but by using rhetoric that often hides the very things he disparages. He crafts false dichotomies, dismisses critical issues, and blurs real distinctions, all the while appearing most charitable. He conflates moral failure with moral confusion; religious failure with religious confusion; and limited subjectivity with total subjectivity. Yes, different cultures exhibit different rationalities, but those rationalities are not incommensurable. They are, in the end, amenable to analyses in terms of values and worldviews.

Although Neo denigrates analysis, labeling, categorization, etc., he excels at those very things. Yet he often fails to apply them when they are most appropriate. He takes a prophetic stance while denying that such stances are possible. His free floating sentimentality often has no compelling connection with the points he promotes. (The entire book, for example, could be commandeered to support acceptance of homosexuality simply by recasting Poole and Neo as gay characters. Nothing else need be changed, thereby demonstrating the degree of moral confusion Neo's program for church and ministry would permit. The only bounds would be preference.)

Neo often treats scripture simplistically and then finds fault with the simplifications. So yes -- the Mosaic Law prescribed stoning for children who disrespected their parents. And no -- Christianity does not. So true -- scripture does reflect some prominent differences in the way God deals or has dealt with mankind. But alleging some kind of present-day imperative for change or some kind of serious problem over such differences is the theological equivalent of a drive-by shooting. Scripture is too complex to be treated so randomly.

Neo's passion for postmodernism as a corrective to modernism is problematic on a number of points. Most prominent is his inconsistency. A good example is Neo's enthusiasm for naturalistic evolution -- a creation myth made necessary by modernism but rendered irrelevant by postmodernism. Another example is Neo's optimism. Postmodernism is anything but optimistic, yet Neo is buoyant in his confidence in postmodernism, in societal progress, and in the church's role in that progress. The resultant impression is more post-millennial than postmodern.

Such contradictions are probably traceable to a faulty diagnosis of modernism's shortcomings. Modernism has problems, not because it values the conquest of nature, control, machines, analysis, science, objectivity, reason, organization, etc., but because it over-values them. The corrective is a reordering of values, not their negation. Neo doesn't seem to see that; and as a result, he views postmodernism as progress rather than the further, self-inflicted descent into ignorance that it really is -- an ignorance made invincible because devotees can no longer be shamed by their contradictory beliefs.

Neo is not inconsistent with postmodernism, however, when it comes to his esteem for culture. Postmodernism reacts to modernism's exaltation of the self by elevating culture over the self -- culture creates the self. Neo seems to agree; but in doing so, he rejects a Christian worldview -- a worldview that sees culture, not as expressions of truth, but as historical embodiments of humanity's alienation from God.

One of Neo's major concerns is the fate of those who never hear the Christian message. His answer is politically sensitive but theologically suspect. Contra Neo, humanity is not an innocent victim and does not deserve to be saved. As C.S. Lewis would say, "we are rebels [against God] that need lay down our arms." God saves us, not from Satan, but from His own wrath. Although God loves His creation, He does not idolize it. Its goodness is a reflection of His goodness -- a goodness that disappears in His absence. To use the "goodness" of humanity to argue against the realization of God's goodness within history is pluralistic but also perverse. Pluralism and perversity notwithstanding, Christianity is still good news. It does not make the fate of those who never hear its message any worse than it would have otherwise been, but it does have the potential for changing the fate for the better of those who do hear.

Neo's theology follows the delegitimizing pattern of liberal theology, albeit more subtly. That is true of his theology of the church. It is also true of his theology of ministry as well. The debunking of the traditional church also debunks any traditional understanding of ministry. Little is left, for example, to sustain an objective sense of calling or the ordering of souls except for habits future generations will most likely abandon.

The religious program implied by Neo's thought has a fairly narrow target audience, being most applicable to those who are rich, healthy, and well-educated. Others are going to need and demand more substance, more certainty, and more clarity. It would be hard to envision, for example, Neo's followers successfully competing with Islam or conservative Christian groups in a public housing complex. His program appears to be the product of a tradition in decline -- an attempt to make comfortable those caught up in it. Future generations will most likely become uncomfortable and judge any synthesis of Christianity with postmodernism as strained and tedious -- why should they bother with the Christian part? (Note that many scholars are already questioning whether postmodernism itself is a long-term phenomena.)

Neo is good at identifying problems with the contemporary church and present-day Christians, but he is naive if he thinks the system he envisions will be any more resistant to the influences of sin than the one it replaces. Its subjectivity and pluralism will almost certainly make it worse. Neo's thoughts are too abstract and too complex for sincere people and too subjective and too open-ended for the rest.

The power of a lie is that it's almost true. There's enough truth in Neo's critique of contemporary Christianity to give his arguments tremendous power. So pity the poor pastor who has dissatisfied members inspired by Neo's vision. Most will not be equipped to deal with discontent shrouded in a fog of sophisticated language. Pity also the hapless members who have pastors who experiment with the kind of "conversations" Neo endorses. A foggy experience lies ahead for them too.

It is exhilarating to throw off the burden of commitments. It is wrong to mistake that exhilaration as proof of a right choice. Christianity has core functions, core beliefs, and core commitments that cannot be jettisoned without altering its fundamental character. Absolute truths do exist and it's wrong to betray them. Dispensing with those truths is tempting, but it leaves a hollowed-out religion that cannot sustain a believing community.

McLaren obviously did not write A New Kind of Christian as a comprehensive exposition of his thoughts. So any comments based on it alone will obviously be unfair to his thinking. This review is therefore offered with the preceding qualifications and with advance apologies for any misrepresentations. Much of it hinges on how accurately McLaren's protagonists reflect his true views. In the end though, its value is not in addressing McLaren's thoughts, but rather in pointing out the implications of his protagonist's religious program.

-- Bill Brewer
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Brian McLaren is not a Christian, he's a heretic.

In his book, he ridicules true Christians - you know, the ones who read the Bible, believe it is the sufficient, inerrant Word of God, and seek to follow it.

If you hate the one true God and prefer a god of your own making, drop your money on this book. If you prefer truth, why support heresy by giving McLaren your money?

If he marketed this book as sheer fantasy, I would not have given it 1 star.