A New Story? # 7 - Free Fallin'

The story of Genesis is a "compassionate coming-of-age" story. So says Brian McLaren in his book A New Kind of Christianity. It is in this context that the section known as "The Fall" fits.

The Greco-Roman way of viewing this section is of mankind undergoing an ontological shift from perfect to sinful. The perfect state is traded in for a messy story. Paradise is lost.

I've had difficulties with this viewpoint for a while. It's like a chicken and egg scenario: Did Adam sin because he was sinful, or did Adam become sinful because he sinned? Can someone who is perfect do something imperfect? Can someone who only knows one language suddenly utter words in another?

This is usually the point when "free will" is mentioned, but I'm not so sure that solves the problem. Consider where the Biblical story ends: New Creation, with human beings created in the likeness of Jesus. For the sake of argument we'll call this "perfection". If the story of "the fall" is a story of perfection descending to imperfection, who is to say that this won't happen again?

Well, I don't think it will happen again. Therefore I think the beginning of the story was something quite different to the end. Adam was "very good", but he couldn't have been "perfect" in the sense of the absolute finished product. That he wilfully disobeyed God leads me to believe that he wasn't much different to you or me. As I said before, the goal is not for us to recover the life of Adam pre-Fall. The goal is new life in Christ.

Where, then, does this leave "The Fall"? Why the move from unashamedly naked to deep shame? Before there is blessing, now there is curse. Before there is garden, now there is wilderness. Adam's disobedience had major ramifications, but the traditional notion of the Fall seems to put more weight on Adam than a man of dust should have to bear.

Here's another way of framing the opening of the story:

Creation, call, disobedience, decay

I'm running ahead of myself here, but there are two good reasons for tracing the narrative as such. I'll call them "Abraham" and "Jesus".

The call of Abraham was God's first step in his re-creation of a world in decay. The obedience (or faithfulness) of Abraham was the required response, and was a counter move to man's (Adam's) disobedience to God's original call to be his representative on earth. Jesus, as the seed of Abraham, also had a call ("Out of Egypt I called my son"). His obedience unto death was the climax of the old creation and the beginning of the new.

Perhaps a simpler way to frame the story is to list every story's central component: Characters.

God, Adam, Abraham, Jesus, Church

What say you? Does the Fall need to be re-thought in light of the story's ending?

A New Story? # 6 - The Journey So Far

We've been having a conversation with Brian McLaren over the past week. It started with simply opening our eyes and ears to what he has to say. His most recent book, A New Kind of Christianity, generated a lot of heat when it first came out. The general impression I got was that, ironically, the "Brian McLaren is dangerous" camp were happy with it while the "Brian McLaren might be on to something" camp were unhappy. The former thought that with this book McLaren finally came out of the heretic closet, and so they were happy to have some concrete evidence against thier danger man. The latter thought that McLaren may have veered too off course for them to follow his trail, and so reluctantly they pulled up. Of course many are still side by side with McLaren on his spiritual quest, willing to journey with him to the depths of orthodoxy and unorthodoxy in order to emerge with a hidden pearl of great price.

I am none of the above people. I'm new to this environment. A visitor from out of town, seeing some commotion and asking McLaren what it's all about.

The launching pad for McLaren's exploration is his disillusionment with the traditional overarching story of Scripture and discovery of a new narrative. For McLaren, the old story is neither morally believable nor biblical. It is, rather, a story steeped in Greco-Roman thought, which is wholly different to the very Jewish worldview of the Bible - the worldview McLaren seeks to recapture.

He begins this mission by looking at the creation narrative in new light. The result, so far, is more a severely edited version of the old narrative than a brand new one. McLaren's argument is not without deliberate provocation and obvious contradiction (nothing new for the man who is both conservative and liberal, Catholic and Protestant, Calvinist and Armenian), but I find in many of his thoughts a deep resonance with my own when I am most honest.

The conversation has been interesting so far, and will remain so as we discuss what is commonly dubbed "The Fall".

A New Story? #5 - Creating With Clay

What's cooler than being cool?

"Ice cold!", answer Outkast.

What's better than perfect?

"Good", answers Brian McLaren, author of several books that irk Al Mohler.

"Jewish goodness...is far better than Greco-Roman perfection" asserts McLaren, who appears to be having a go at the Greco-Romans. One of the problems with the Greco-Roman narrative, as McLaren sees it, is that it leaves no room for other narratives. But has McLaren's narrative not just destroyed the Greco-Roman narrative, or at least claimed superiority over it? It surely has, which sounds suspiciously like an imperial, dare I say Roman, maneouver. I don't doubt that it's been pointed out before, but McLaren is merely creating a new "us/them" - the very thing he condemns in the previous chapter.

What the Greco-Roman narrative says to any other narrative that comes its way is "There ain't enough room in this town for the both of us, punk". Is the Greco-Roman narrative right? Is there only room for one sherrif (story) in town? Or can the history and future of the world have multiple overarching narratives? Consider a film like Crash. What is the overarching plot? Is there one, none, or several?

I wonder how McLaren would answer some of these questions, because he seems to say one thing yet do another.

But quibbles aside, his contrast between "perfect" and "good" is an interesting one. Both the six-line narrative and McLaren's lineless narrative begin with creation. The difference, as McLaren would put it, is that one act of creation begins a "state" whereas the other begins a "story". The state is perfect (it was created by a perfect God after all), but the story has room for improvement (and deterioration).

This, I think, is another place where the traditional re-telling of the Biblical story falls down. I'll sum up the myriad things I could say with this: Adam is not the end goal of our existence. Salvation does not consist of getting things back to the way they were before "the fall", because God has more in store for us than what he had for Adam. The creation of humanity was indeed a "very good" thing, but God's story will take humanity beyond Adam. God intended as much from the beginning.

Rather than a static, wound-up creation-product, we must allow for an "open" view of creation; a creation able to grow, able to groan, and able to be renewed by its Creator. Think of her as clay in a potter's hand, being spoiled by sin but being re-shaped by grace. The conventional telling of the Biblical story does not evoke this kind of Creator/creation relationship. Perhaps I'm guilty of a McLaren-esque caricature here, but it is easy to get the impression that God created the world, dusted off his hands after the fall, and then finally intervened through the life of Jesus.

C.S. Lewis says that the Incarnation -- God becoming man -- is the Grand Miracle. It is the event that makes sense out of all other events. But in our popular version of events, it is the event that is a total anomaly; the event that makes no sense whatsoever. We can affirm it, but we can scarcely believe it true; scarcely believe that God was actually pleased to undertake it. This disbelief springs not so much from reverance as from a lack of real, intimate knowledge of God. At root, our story is muddled, therefore our knowledge of God is muddled.

In order to unmuddle, do the existing acts of the six-line narrative simply need to be edited for content; do we need to actually add and cut some acts; or does the whole story need to be thrown on the ol' scrapheap with a fresh one emerging in its place?

McLaren proposed the latter, but so far he has simply edited the first line of the traditional story for content. He does hint at something more radical in one of the endnotes, and it is something I hope to get back to, because it is something that I had been thinking about myself and was very excited to read.

A New Story? #4 - How Should We Now Think?

What do you get when you mix the philosophy of ancient Greece with the power structure of ancient Rome?

(Can anyone think of a way to turn this into a joke?)

You get, according to Brian McLaren, the Greco-Roman narrative- which is the six-line narrative discussed already. McLaren's arguement is that we've read the Bible trough a Greco-Roman lens, though we've scarcely noticed it...just like we scarcely notice a window as we look through it. To sum up a few pages of writing, we've created a Biblical world akin to the world of Plato. It begins in a state of absolute perfection, it falls into the cave of illusion, and its rescue looks like an abondment of this storied world and a return to a state of immaterial bliss. The Roman influence is on our imperialist attitude when it comes to this story - we hold it to be the only story, and those whose lives stand outside of it are enemies to be either assimilated into our masses or destroyed.


Is this fair commentary by McLaren?

The man with the square lenses wants us to see not with Greco-Roman eyes but with the eyes of a Jew. We are not to look "backwards" at Jesus through Aquinas, Augustine, Calvin etc. Instead, we are to look "forwards" at Jesus, through Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah etc. Only in this thoroughly Jewish story does Jesus make sense; not as the Messiah who would re-enforce Israel's national pride, but as the promised, faithful Israelite who would bring blessing to all the nations of the earth, thus fulfilling Israel's call.

Whatever else about McLaren, he is surely right on this. The six-line narrative as it is popularly described leaves no place for Israel. Jesus appears in it like a bolt of lightening rather than as the climax of Israel's (and therefore the world's) story.

(At this point it would be immoral of me not to mention Chris Wright's book Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament.)

Nevertheless, I do wonder - just how "Jewish" are we supposed to think? Paul's address on Mars Hill has been happy hunting ground for emerging/emergent types over the years, but here it seems to work against Mr Emergent's argument. Paul didn't spend his energy trying to get Greeks to see Jesus through Jewish eyes. He created a way for them to see Jesus through Greek eyes.

Some of the questions that arise out of this story are: How paradigmatic are we to view Paul's sermon in Athens? How much was such a way of communicating the Christian story part of his methodology? And if it played a significant part, how should Christian theology look in 21st century Ireland? Greco-Roman? Jewish? Irish!?

The forwards, Jewish way of looking at Jesus is certainly in harmony with Scripture, but is it the only helpful way to look at him? The people of God do not now have to live under Jewish law, but do they have to think like Jews?

I don't know any of the answers to these questions, so I'm going to stop writing now. Please weigh in with any insights.

A New Story? #3 - More Than Belief

Eden, fall, condemnation, salvation, heaven and hell - the six-line narrative that Brian McLaren presents as both conventional and dubious Christian theology. He has many questions, two of which stand out: Is this story morally believable, and is it found in the Bible?

McLaren's answer to both is 'No'.

Where McLaren is mistaken is that you can "find" this story in the Bible. Eden is there. There is the first case of disobedience; the "original sin". There is humanity living in emnity with God. There is the salvation found in Jesus Christ. There is a heaven and there is a hell. The six-line narrative can be formed...if you want it. Is it morally believable, however? Is it, in other words, the kind of story we'd expect the God revealed in Jesus to weave?

I agree with McLaren's 'No' on this...kind of. I think the six-line narrative, as it would be expressed by Joe Church, is inherently human-centric and does an injustice to the character of God. Of course every shorthand (or longhand) version of this epic drama will fall short of doing its chief protagonist justice, but if an overarching story of Scripture exists, I think it has to be about God; the six-line narrative, for the most part, isn't.

McLaren and I part ways as he paints a caricature of specific beliefs held within this narrative, creating the god Theos as a foil for the real God Elohim. According to McLaren, six-line-narrativists (trust me, it will catch on) believe that we are saved and perfected so that Theos can love us again. I don't know anyone who actually believes that, so saying things like this is a waste of ink. But what McLaren may be getting at -- though it goes unsaid -- is one of the narrative's symptoms as I see it: The doctrine contained within is good and sound, but it doesn't quite seem to fit with the big picture, and thus our belief and our experience come into conflict (cognitive dissonance?). For example, we assert that we are loved by God even as we live in wilful rejection of him, but the big picture doesn't portray this kind of God from beginning to end (his love seems to happen somewhere toward the end), so assertion struggles to become experience. Many lives, including my own, deeply struggle to dwell in the love of God.

Unlike McLaren, I don't think there is anything necessarily unbiblical about the six-line narrative. I'm just not fully convinced that it is a helpful depiction of the Bible's story. Perhaps it merely needs to be tweaked? McLaren aims not at a tweaking, however, but at a ripping up and rebuilding. If I thought the the six-line narrative compelled me to believe in the Theos McLaren describes then I'd be by his side with a sledge hammer in hand, but McLaren's deliberately provocative argument makes it almost impossible for me to follow his footsteps. I have always held to a version of the six lines, but Theos is not the God it has lead me to believe in.

Nevertheless, story is always about more than belief and teaching. It involves the emotions, the shared experience. The story of creation, fall, condemnation, salvation, heaven and hell does not emphasize just what Scripture is: a love story between Creator and creatures. Each of the six words does not evoke all that should be evoked. There is no doubt that instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater (never a good idea...trust me), some of the words need to be reclaimed after years of abuse. The Christian language needs to be relearned if our story -- whatever it is -- is to have any impact on us at all.

That being said, a fresh look at the acts in the narrative may lead to more than semantics. It's been a little while since I read the next chapter in McLaren's book, so I'm interested to see what story he proposes. If my memory serves me correct, however, it's not actually that different to the six-line narrative as it is fleshed out by some Christians. We shall see.

A New Story? #2 - Questions

The line begins on the left-hand side of the page and works its way across. It drops straight down until eventually heading right again. Then comes a fork in the road. One prong goes directly up to the level where the line began, and then continues to the right indefinitely. The other way goes down - not straight down, but veering downwards, again indefinitely.

It looks like this (with explanatory words attached):


How did we get to this diagram?

McLaren begins his journey towards A New Kind of Christianity by tackling what he calls "The Narrative Question". "What is the Overarching Storyline of the Bible?" is the foundational question posed by McLaren. This question assumes the Bible to be telling a story, which is an assumption I share. At its heart, Scripture is not an instruction manual, though it does instruct. It's not a repository of doctrine, though it does teach. It's not a book of divine wisdom dropped out of the sky for our enlightenment, though it does contain wisdom and it can enlighten. Scripture is story -- God's story about...well...we'll get there in due course. But McLaren notes that,

To be a Christian...has required us to believe that the Bible presents one very specific storyline...

This storyline, which McLaren seeks to dismantle, is the one diagrammed above. It begins with perfection in Eden, it descends into a fallen world of sin, and then comes the divide - salvation which leads to eternity in heaven, or damnation which leads to eternity in hell.

Does that sound like the story of the Bible in a nutshell?

It does to me. Or at least it sounds like the story that I've been taught, which is a story that seems to be created by Scripture itself. But is this really the story Scripture tells? In the midst of some caricatures, McLaren makes a simple observation and asks a profound question:

Few of us acknowledge that this master-narrative starts with one category of things, good and blessed, and then ends up with two categories of things, good and blessed on the top line and evil and tormented on the bottom....Can we dare to wonder, given an ending that has more evil and suffering than the beginning, if it would have been better for this story never to have begun?

This is a heartfelt question that musn't be swept under the rug. A story depends on perspective. Ask Hitler to tell you about World War II and you might get a sob story about how he failed in his mission and now lives in permanent disgrace. Ask Eisenhower or Churchill the same question and you'll get a very different answer, though they are all talking about the same event(s). Can it be that most people's story -- if we take the above outline to be more or less true -- will turn out for the worst, with the few living to tell a tale with a happy ending? If the story the Bible weaves will largely end up with individual stories of anguish and defeat, why even begin to tell it?

Or perhaps we don't quite have our story straight. Maybe we have misread the Bible; misunderstood what the Storyteller was saying, about both himself and his purposes. Our lines might be going the right direction, but our insight into what they entail might be too narrow in some places and not narrow enough in others. Or, if McLaren is on to something, our lines may be missing the point entirely.

The following questions, asked by Daniel Kirk, are the reason why I am interested in what McLaren has to write, even if he is wrong:

Again the question comes to us how the gospel is actually good news for someone who has experienced nothing but injustice, whose life is defined quintessentially by her status as a victim. Is the gospel good news if it means that such a victim, upon death, will meet a judgment that makes her life of perpetual rape seem like paradise in comparison.

I am not about to abandon everything I once knew, but I do want to be open to a re-shaping of the biblical narrative as it springs from the character of the God who is over, above, and even in, the story: the God revealed to the world not primarily in words on a page, but in the person of Jesus.

A New Story? #1

Brian McLaren is not a heretic. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a heretic, but he's not a porn star.

Honestly, I don't know much about Brian McLaren. Back in my "Catholic" days of being a Christian -- when I used to let various authorities decide what was and wasn't true without any investigation or thought on my own part -- Brian McLaren was a known danger. He was even a step up from the dreaded Rob Bell, which is really saying something.

During the course of my journey towards enlightened bliss, however, I grew tired of the spoon feeding, the policing, the defending and protecting. The same people going after Brian McLaren were going after Tom Wright, and that's just not on! If Wright is a threat to the church then he is a much-needed threat, and his voice demands urgent hearing. But the powers that be would like a safe church, and so voices that attempt to shake her out of her comfort zone are to be screened, steralised, or just silenced. They're banned, 'cause the Regime don't like it, man.

If it sounds like I've simply replaced one group of popes with another (Wright), rest assured that I have not. But what I like in Wright and others (such as Daniel Kirk) is their approach - wrestling with the text of Scripture honestly, and letting it speak for itself to a community eager to hear. This is not to ignore tradition. But as Scot McKnight writes in The Blue Parakeet, we are best reading the Bible when we read it not through tradition but with it. There is a difference.

What's all this got to do with Brian McLaren? Well, I guess I felt it was time to read Brian McLaren for myself rather than letting the opinion of others also be my opinion. And why am I even writing about this? Well, I want to examine a couple of chapters at the beginning of McLaren's latest work, A New Kind of Christianity. These chapters have to do with the Christian story, the story of the Bible.

To sum up, McLaren says we have gotten it wrong.

Expect a conversation between McLaren and I (and perhaps even you?) over the next week or two.