McLaren vs Pascal vs Neuhaus, Part 3

So what does Neuhaus add to the discussion in Parts 1 and 2? Some observations from his Freedom for Ministry:

While Pascal seems to be to the right (for lack of a better word) of McLaren, Neuhaus actually seems to be to the right of Pascal. The gist of what Neuhaus is saying is that the church, its ministers, and its people should not conform to secular notions of success. He says, “Our certifications and diplomas are as doubtful as are the authorities that issued them.” (p. 68) The church should be radically different in accordance with its radically different worldview. While I see much of what McLaren is saying as utilitarian pragmatism, Neuhaus radically divorces himself from such notions, believing that pragmatic utilitarianism is fundamentally anti-Christian. While McLaren sees the (perceived) weakening of the American church as a sure sign that the church needs to change how it does things, Neuhaus takes a longer view in saying that the church throughout time has enjoyed differing degrees of respect and authority. Our response to the church’s weakened condition is not to adopt secular measurements of success and thought, but to return to character as the doorway to society’s transformation and submission to divine authority. He notes, “The concept of character has a venerable place in the Christian tradition…In current understandings, character has little to do with pastoral counseling, and that is a measure of how thoroughly counseling has become captive to secular ideology.” (p. 89) It is here that we can see a major difference between McLaren and Neuhaus. Neuhaus appeals to the historic Christian tradition as a reliable guide to present and future conduct, while McLaren seems to want to free himself from this same tradition for the sake of relevancy. What Neuhaus is saying is that ongoing relevancy is actually tied to some degree to previous ideas of relevancy. Like Pascal, Neuhaus is arguing for a Christianity that is eternally relevant because it uniquely speaks to each cultural shift and offers consistent remedies for its ailments. Neuhaus and Pascal both believe the viability of the Christian faith is fundamentally rooted in the history of God's people and His church.

Where Neuhaus seems to differ from Pascal is in his tendency to truly dissociate from social science disciplines. Pascal never did this. While suspicious of human reason, Pascal never swore off human reason as illegitimate and anti-Christian. Neuhaus would have been on better ground taking the same approach to the social sciences. But instead, he seems to go farther by implying that the church should have nothing to do with such things. While saying that “the ministry should not be scornful of psychology…” he goes on to say that “the dominance of counseling theory and technique in many seminaries and many ministries reflects a massive failure of nerve, perhaps even the idolatry of wanting…” (p. 85) He concludes, “It is at least unbecoming and probably blasphemous to norm the Christian life by the criteria of the therapeutic…If we rummage through what Yeats called ‘the rag and bone shop’ of the human heart, the discoveries are ghastly.” (p. 87) But to me, this is exactly what Pascal set out to do, with the result that his thoughts remain profound and relevant 300+ years later. Neuhaus is right to call us to engage the world with great discernment, since Pascal called for the same thing. But the views of Neuhaus of an almost strict separation from the world’s disciplines and thinking need to be tempered by the approach of Pascal, who sought to engage the world by finding commonalities with it, and then offering the Christian faith as the best explanation of realities all people acknowledge. This is the best course of action in being the church in the world.

We need to engage the culture without being thoroughly assimilated into the culture. In my view, where both McLaren and Neuhaus offer us differing degrees of imbalance in our interaction with the emerging generation, Pascal offers an approach that best incorporates the seemingly paradoxical emphases of engagement and separation that the NT gives us.