I'm cross-posting this review from The Christian Humanist Blog, so do forgive any html oddities.
When I praise Plato and defend my teaching Republic to college freshmen, I often say that Plato's excellence lies not in the fact that he's always right but that when he's wrong, he's wrong in compelling ways, ways that inspire me to imagine a better alternative. While Brian McLaren is no Plato, parts of his most recent book A New Kind of Christianity have that Platonic character to them, getting things very wrong in ways that set me thinking about how I'd improve on his points. Other parts of the book resonate quite nicely with things that I try to do as a Christian teacher or realize now that I should try to do. But other parts still, alas, smack of the sleight-of-hand, the well-poisoning, and the other dirty trickery that make me mistrust apologetics literature of various sorts. In other words, A New Kind of Christianity is a complex book, not consistently excellent but nonetheless very helpful in places.
Brian McLaren Gets it Right
As Phil Rutledge pointed out in response to our podcast on the Haiti Earthquake, when I talk about the Bible, I tend to talk not about one unified document but a library, various not only in cosmetic details but in a more robust sense of genre, asking certain questions in this book that lie out of bounds in other books, offering teachings here that seem to stand at least in tension with teachings there. (I should note the obvious, namely that I do not speak for the other Christian Humanists on this point or necessarily on any given point.) I tend to think that the flexibility of such a collection is part of the Bible's strength, that the practice of being Christian community is richer because Christian teachers can pull from a broad range of resources depending on the contingencies of the moment without having to pretend that every moment is the same as every other moment. When we need a text that shakes us out of complacency, the Bible has a book for that. When we lean over the precipice of despair, the Bible has a book for that. And so on. I think that McLaren offers a handy next step in that thought process, noting that the Bible is a true collection of texts precisely because of the "spaces between" those strong positions of Deuteronomy or 1 Chronicles on one hand and Ecclesiastes or Job on the other.
Furthermore, McLaren highlights the God-defining character of Christ and insists that the Palestinian Jew Jesus of Nazareth and not the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover is a better starting point for disciplined reflection upon the character of God. I know that making the historical Jesus that radically central flies in the face of much systematic theology (including that of Thomas Aquinas, one of my favorites), but I agree with McLaren that such a move is ultimately more faithful to the gospel of John among other Scriptural witnesses.
Finally, when McLaren gives advice to parishioners and clergy who find themselves resonating with progressive ideas, and his counsel leans consistently towards humble and peace-seeking measures rather than grandstanding, intellectual and moral arrogance, and other vices that so often characterize folks who think they've gotten something right while their neighbors still get it wrong. His exhortation to "be a blessing" is probably my favorite part of the book.
I noted above, and I write again, this book does get some things very right, and by no means should anyone think that it's error, error, error all the way down.
Brian McLaren Gets it Wrong
That said, as someone who loves intellectual history and who values some degree of historical precision, I do blame this book for playing fast and loose with historical identifications for the sake of scoring cheap rhetorical points. One of the jokes that was current during my days at The Ooze forums was that the Emergent words for "really quite bad" were "modern" and "modernist," and the word for "so much better, don't you think?" was "postmodern." McLaren seems to have left that ugly and misleading binary pair only to settle on another pair, just as ugly and even more misleading (and also a binary that I started encountering back in seminary), the Manichean dualism of "the Bible" and "Greco-Roman religion." Resisting the temptation to examine every instance of "Greco-Roman" meaning just plain "bad," I'll point out a few that drew a chuckle from me for their historical naivete: Greco-Roman religion, apparently, has no place in it for homosexuality (175--apparently all of that Athenian praise for pederasty as superior to love-of-women doesn't count), does not allow for multiple religions (212--never mind the Roman Empire's grand scheme of syncretism that incorporated pantheons as diverse as the Celts' and the Egyptians'), and stands as a pernicious idol called Theos, who stands as enemy to the Biblical god Elohim (65--I suppose the New Testament authors didn't get the memo that the Greek language had that idol mixed in there).
The content of McLaren's "Greco-Roman" tradition came about as the fruit of a conversation he relates in which an epiphany came to him, namely that the broad outlines of the traditional Evangelical narrative (he extends it to Catholic and Magesterial Protestant traditions as well) derive not from Biblical narratives but from Plato. Unfortunately, McLaren casts Plato only as the first step in a larger metanarrative, and that move is what makes things go downhill in a hurry. In McLaren's "six-line narrative" to which he refers again and again as he digs into his ten questions, Plato is only the first stage in the grand narrative, ruined when the world falls from Platonic perfection (which sounds more like Plotinus's realm of Ideas) into the "storied" world of Aristotle.
I'm certain Aristotle would have been surprised to find out that he was writing a simple sequel to Plato rather than supplanting his philosophy, but even more surprising to Alexander's tutor would no doubt be that, according to McLaren, Aristotle held that forms do not have any existence, properly speaking, save as mental constructs. (If Dante's right that Aristotle is in Limbo, where he might converse with future ages' non-Christian philosophers, no doubt someone has told him by now that the forms as purely mental was actually one of William of Ockham's central contributions to philosophy in the fourteenth century.) Perhaps more surprising still would be that, after dwelling in the Aristotle trench, the eternal souls that Plato does talk about (though sometimes in terms of reincarnation) return to a "Platonic" stasis, some by achieving salvation (another category rather alien to Plato and to Aristotle) and then reaching a final Platonic (neo-Platonic?) ideal, and some by falling into what McLaren calls "Greek Hades," a construct that of course predates Plato and Aristotle by a few centuries and has little to do, in the texts I've read, with punishing earthly evil. If one says anything about Homer's Hades, one should say that it's terrifyingly egalitarian, and that's what Achilles hates so much--he's forgotten just as readily as all of the other shades about him.
If all of that sounds familiar through the haze of misused Greek texts, it's because the "Greco-Roman narrative" that McLaren would impose upon Plato and Aristotle (the tag team!) is far more akin to what Origen, Augustine, and other Christian writers would call the narrative of creation, fall, and redemption. Although certain iterations of that narrative sequence deserve criticism, McLaren does nobody any favors (especially those of us who love teaching Plato) by inventing a syncretic thought-system that simply does not exist in classical texts and then loading that cumbersome burden on some of Christianity's best tutors.
As a passing comment in the introduction to one of his chapters, McLaren notes that, although he's not been a seminarian, he has read "thousands of theology books" (78). I suppose my own counsel for aspiring Christian writers is that we read fewer books, perhaps dozens, but take the time that good books deserve to understand and live with them.
Brian McLaren Gets Sneaky
Given the unhappy choice between accusing a writer I like (and I do like Brian McLaren) of duplicity and insinuating that the same writer has forgotten or misread, I'll usually err on the side of charity and say that, for example, McLaren probably read some really bad books about Greco-Roman philosophy instead of reading translations of Plato and Aristotle themselves, and that likely led to his strange construction "Greco-Roman." But there are moments of this book that make me deeply suspicious, and although I'd prefer not to approach people I like with suspicion... well, here goes.
In an early section of the book, McLaren relates a talk he gave at a conference in which he lined up seven people on the stage, each representing a historical figure. In a diagram that I won't reproduce here (I'm going to be cross-posting this review, and so I'm trying to keep html to a minimum), McLaren labels seven stick figures as follows:
Jesus, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther or Erasmus, Calvin or Wesley or Newton, Pope Benedict or Jerry Falwell or Billy Graham
After he briefly notes that folks who get their theology from this stream aren't "directly seeing Jesus" (36), he gives the people in the row a different set of names:
Adam, Abraham, Moses, David, Amos or Isaiah or Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Jesus
His point seems to be that the reading of Biblical texts that will follow in his book, unlike the "Greco-Roman" version of things, would work forwards up to Jesus rather than backwards to Jesus, therefore giving a different sort of story.
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