RYAN KWAAK     

       

        Is the current form of evangelical Christianity going out of style? Apparently, Brian McLaren thinks so. One of his latest books, A New Kind Of Christian (Jossey-Bass, 2001), reveals a highly relativistic perspective on how to do church and evangelism better in contemporary America. His latest aim is to make the Bible open to any form of dissection and interpretation. He claims the methods of evangelism, discipleship, and worship currently employed by evangelicals should be revised to fit the postmodern context.

        As McLaren says in Chapter 4, “Most of your peers live in a different world from you. They have already crossed the line into the postmodern world. But few of you have. Why? Because you want to be faithful to the Christian upbringing you have received, which is so thoroughly enmeshed with modernity.”

        What is this modernity that he speaks of? According to his system of thought, the Western world is making a transition to the new postmodernist philosophy wherein all opinions are equally valid. It does not carry with it a total denial of truth, but it does deny the absolute nature of Biblical meta-narratives.

        McLaren goes into detail on his view of what is foundational truth in Christendom in Chapter 7. “What if faith isn’t best compared to a building, but rather to a spider-web? Instead of one foundation, it has several anchor points. Those points might be spiritual experiences, exemplary people and institutions whom one has come to trust, that sort of thing.” So, where exactly does Scripture fit in this analogy?

        He goes on to say: “It could be seen as one of the anchor points. Or perhaps every passage in the Bible that has affected your life could be seen as an anchor point. Or perhaps the Bible isn’t only in the anchor points.”

        How convenient! Let’s see how this plays out within a conversation one of the main characters has with a non-Christian who attends an emerging church service. “Whenever I get to know individual non-Christians—I mean really get to know them—I am completely convinced that I find God already there and at work in their lives. It doesn’t matter if they’re way-out New Agers or even atheists. So it’s clear to me that God doesn’t limit himself to working in Christians’ lives. We try to serve God, but we don’t own him, and deep down I have always known that, but you’re the first member of the clergy who was, like, real enough to say it. Somehow, hearing you talk about God working outside the context of the ‘saved,’ I really felt validated.”

        To paraphrase this passage, McLaren is saying that all other religious philosophies have a little of God in them, and even the unsaved are considered good enough for heaven. Hogwash! We are all sinners by nature (Romans 3:23), and that sin needs to be purged, not swept under the rug. Hebrews 9:22 says, without shedding of blood is no remission. Brian, why don’t you read John 14:6 again. Jesus is “The Way, the Truth, and the Life. No man comes to the Father but by Me.” And second of all, it is not our job as Christians to make the unsaved feel validated. If they feel validated, they are lost and in their sins. The Gospel is to be believed, not to be made relative.

        Now, to make sure we understand McLaren correctly, we look at how he describes emerging postmodernism in his brief article The Three Postmodernisms. “It sees relativist pluralism (the irrational idea that all opinions or views are equally valid) as a kind of chemotherapy intended to stop the growth of modern reductionistic rationalism (the oppressive idea that all reality can be reduced to mechanisms that the mind can understand via validation by the five senses). In order to kill the malignancy, the patient has to take dangerous medicine that would prove poisonous if taken in too high doses or for too long.” In other words, relativism is a kind of treatment for rationalism.

       However, McLaren’s relativism extends to the validation of religions outside the true Church. Although we need to allow differences of opinion in theological discussions, the whole Bible is not open for liberal interpretations. We cannot simply pick and choose which verses to believe. The church needs to rise up above the postmodern philosophy, not legitimize it. Because, as we know, where postmodernism goes liberalism is sure to follow. There is an overabundance of absolute truth recorded in Scripture, and it is our responsibility to share that truth in love. We must not conform to postmodernity, but we need to be redeeming this generation for God.

A New Kind of Hogwash from McLaren