McLaren vs Pascal vs Neuhaus, Part 1

Every generation and culture has something like an 'emerging generation' that is all the rage right now in Christian worship circles. While Brian McLaren is the big star name in emergent church circles, there is nothing new about McLaren's views or the challenge of aligning, in a biblical way, how the church does church that is relevant to the emerging generation. I am occasionally asked about my views on McLaren. So in the next three blogs, I'm going to discuss and compare how McLaren, Blaise Pascal, and Richard Neuhaus see the church's relationship with the world and what it looks like. This particular blog will focus on McLaren and his views as articulated in his A New Kind of Christian. A good bit of all 3 posts will come from an answer I gave to a final exam question earlier this year. I apologize in advance for the length of this post.

In attempting to better align the church to speak relevantly to the larger culture in its latest form, McLaren seeks to do a number of things; some good, some not so good. McLaren is right to question the gap between cultural Christianity and the Christ of Scripture. The organizational church has subsumed Christianity so that it is no longer the church to the unchurched. In previous generations, it made sense to assume that a certain amount of Biblical literacy and familiarity with the Christian story existed among those who did not attend church. But to assume such a thing today is perilous, and McLaren is right in urging the church to better reckon with the environment it finds itself in and adjust its worship and ministry accordingly. He is also right to point out that we are far more affected by culture than we think we are, and that there is a divide between our culture-shaped Christianity and Jesus. He is offering a critique of the modernist church, particularly consumerism, individualism, rationalism, institutionalism, etc. American Christianity is not the only legitimate manifestation of Christianity, and we should not dismiss the degree to which our Christianity is tied to our particular cultural expression. This is especially vital in light of America’s ever-increasing cultural diversity. McLaren believes modern rationalism and the scientific method really drive our interpretation of Scripture, and this is problematic. McLaren is clearly rebelling against what he believes is something of a hermeneutical tyranny that insists that Scripture be read through modernist lenses. To the extent he is insisting on other legitimate approaches to Scripture interpretation and how that plays out in the church, he is doing the church a predominately good service. In some ways, the culture has moved past a scientistic approach to understanding reality. McLaren is correct in saying that the church cannot be enslaved to a way of presenting the Gospel that has less and less points of contact with the emerging generation.

Unfortunately, his alternative to a systematic approach to reading the Bible is that truth is contextualized, and the challenge is considerable in moving between the original context and ours. He advocates a personal engagement in which the Bible should read us. This is good. But just as rationalism can abuse the text, so can the loose approach of McLaren, in which Scripture offers us possibilities for meaning, instead of presenting us with meaning. The problem is that his loose approach to the text is not derived from the text itself any more than the rationalist approach that McLaren wants to free the church from. He’s adopting the same kind of hermeneutical tyranny that he’s fighting against. All he’s doing is putting a different roof on top. McLaren’s approach brings into question whether there is a ‘best meaning’ to the text, because his approach is anti-essential. He says, “So the authoritative text is never what I say about the text or even what I understand the text to say but rather what God means the text to say…So the real authority does not reside in the text itself…instead, the real authority lies in God, who is there behind the text or beyond it or above it.” (p. 50) The text becomes a resource in which individuals find stuff to work with in an individualistic way. But Scripture presents itself as something that has meaning given to it, so there is a best meaning. So when he says that the Bible should read us, he doesn’t actually apply it; instead, he’s bringing his perspective to the text every bit as much as the modernist and is not allowing the Bible to read him. The text offers possibilities for generating meanings, and that’s it. But that’s not what Scripture itself says. McLaren is far more tied to larger cultural trends than he thinks. He has adopted the anti-essentialist framework of modernist and postmodernist culture and has applied it to questions of hermeneutics and worship without asking whether this culture has any points of contact with Scripture itself.

McLaren holds an uncritical attitude toward postmodernity, in large part because he doesn’t seem to realize how much in common his postmodernity has with the modernity he’s trying to undo. The great pillars of Western modernity (democracy, technology, and capitalism) are all very present in McLaren’s thinking. Democracy’s endless proliferation of individual freedoms has resulted in the lack of any universal idea of the highest good, or even the shared good. The lack of boundaries to individual freedom is seen in McLaren’s thinking about Scripture, in which Scripture offers a plethora of potential meanings to its readers that they then actualize. It’s the ultimate form of American democracy applied to hermeneutics and interpretation. He also seems to apply it to the question of comparative religion when he says, “[M]y understanding of the gospel tells me that religion is always a mixed bag, whether it’s Judaism, Christianity, Islam or Buddhism. Some of it reflects people’s sincere attempts to find the truth, and some of it represents people’s attempts to evade the truth through hypocrisy….I don’t think Christianity has, on the whole, proved itself much better than Peter. But isn’t that the point of the gospel – that we’re all a mess, whatever our religion, in need of God’s grace?” (p. 66) The religions of the world are like choices in the voting booth, with each having pluses and minuses, each having about the same track record, and each containing about the same kind of people.

Technology’s triumph of the new over the old and the almost obsessive need to update the old with the new with ever greater speed has rendered the old as outdated, rather than wise. By insisting on a ‘new kind of Christian’, he is not only distancing himself from the wisdom of the past, but is also devaluing the institutional church itself as an essential agent of redemptive history. McLaren is not stressing community and relationships, but individual exploration of possibilities (his whole book being an exercise of such exploration), with no concrete restraints or boundaries to govern what is appropriate to explore and what is not. He says, “I can’t tell if I’m being insubordinate in exploring these thoughts or if I need courage to go farther…If I let go or loosen my grip on some things I’ve never before doubted, will I fall away from you?” (p. 25) This is an inevitable consequence of his seemingly eager dissociation from his historical tradition (the church throughout time). He muses, “I’m not against our systematic theologies. I’m beginning to see them as an artifact of worship from the modern era…Medieval theologians had different questions, concerns, and approaches; so did ancient ones and biblical writers and characters.” (p. 24) And while McLaren clearly dislikes the commodification of the American church today, he is advocating a 'commodifying' hermeneutic that encourages people to treat the content of Scripture as a commodity to be put to use in a consumerist manner. It’s ironic that approaching the Biblical text with the intention of extracting bits of data to support the theology we bring to the text led McLaren to a place of great spiritual crisis. Having emerged on the other side of this crisis, he is now advocating the same thing by treating Biblical data as giving the consumer possibilities and options that lead to the consumer making useful choices and becoming the kingmaker of his own theology. He notes, “[2 Timothy] says that Scripture is inspired and useful…That’s a very different job description than we moderns want to give it…When we let it go as a modern answer book, we get to rediscover it for what it really is: an ancient book of incredible spiritual value to us…a book that tells us who we are and what story we find ourselves in so that we know what to do and how to live.” (p. 52) In doing this, McLaren has turned Scripture (as well as church worship) into a kind of Target or Kohl’s, where the consumer is presented a vast array of choices for how to accessorize their lives, and it is the consumer, not the product, who chooses based on the choices presented, or just goes to a different store if the choices at Kohl’s are not to her liking. McLaren doesn’t seem to see that his eyes are still thoroughly American and rooted in very American modernistic pillars that he is then bringing to Scripture and asking the church to conform with. He himself has not escaped the very thing he perceives to be the problem in the first place.

It’s unclear whether McLaren is just bashing modernity and saying postmodernity is fundamentally better, or is saying that modernity was good when the world was modern, but now that it’s not, we need to change. But either way, his emphasis on the new is ironically thoroughly modern. McLaren has fully adopted the rat race mentality of modernist/postmodernist culture and is telling the church to get with the program. What McLaren doesn’t see is that his program is not rooted in Scripture. The result is that he is advocating that the church replace one culturally-dictated approach to ministry with another without asking whether either cultured approach can be traced back to Scripture. It’s hard to operate within a Biblical framework when the Bible is reduced to possibilities to be tried on in the spiritual dressing room, rather than an authoritative (and divinely inspired) commentary on God, the human condition, redemption, and living in time and space with a Biblical understanding of the goal of all history.

How does this compare with Pascal? Read on...