Category Archives: Generous Orthodoxy

The Murky Marriage of Love and Truth

23 Saturday Dec 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, Emergent Conversation, Generous Orthodoxy

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In an interview by Next Wave, Brian McLaren defines the purpose of his book, A Generous Orthodoxy (which I am enjoying and have been responding to over the last few days):

In a sentence, A Generous Orthodoxy is an attempt to remarry two things that never should have been divorced — truth and love….

This reminds me of an old “Father Knows Best” episode in which the teenage daughter is trying to change her boyfriend’s character, and Robert Young says,”why don’t you try something easy, like moving the Rocky Mountains.”

Truth and beauty, even, would be a lot easier, as they do not require us to bend our minds to embrace what repulses us.

For all my adult life I have pursued Truth with a capital T. Sometime in my late 20s I started adding Love to that quest. This dual pursuit became for me the impossible dream, because Truth took me beyond the boundaries of my Christian upbringing, and began to make my concept of Love grow broader than was normal in my denomination. Truth and Love were at war, and the more I was able to reconcile them in my own mind and philosophy of Christian fellowship, the less my longtime brothers and sisters could handle it.

Initially, love seems to take the lead, arguing in defense of those who seem nice but don’t fit our “truth” definitions. For example, as a young man I learned this Joaquin Miller verse and kept it with me as a tolerance builder:

“In men whom men condemn as ill
I find so much of goodness still.
In men whom men pronounce divine
I find so much of sin and blot.
I do not dare to draw a line
Between the two, where God has not.”

It has only been in recent years that I have begun to discover how the Bible resolves its own seeming flip-flops in preference between Truth and Love..

It is indeed a murky area, where the ability to embrace paradoxes and to have a healthy degree of self-doubt seem to be pre-requisites for making progress.

Tomorrow I will explore the story of the Prophet from Judah who was killed by a lion for not obeying every detail of God’s word to him. Within that story, I believe, are some important clues as to why love and truth must learn to coexist within the emergent, unfinished, presently-divided Christian community.

My McLaren Colloquy: 3. New fields of opportunity

21 Thursday Dec 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, Generous Orthodoxy, orthodoxy

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On page 140 of A Generous Orthodoxy Brian McLaren writes:

When I imagine what a generous orthodoxy can become, I realize I must seek to honor both conservative and liberal heroism. And when I do, I want to consider myself both liberal and conservative. I must learn from their mistakes, and when I do, I don’t want to be boxed in either category. Instead they can look up for a higher way and look ahead to the new fields of opportunity and challenge that stretch from here to the horizon….

In my own journey I was once characterized as a liberal, and my response was that I am only liberal if one takes a rather narrow slice of conservatism.
That is the trouble with labels — they are snapshots taken by someone else, usually with a macro lens and with a specific point of view. And yet labels are the stuff that Protestantism consists of.

So I greatly appreciate, and strive to copy in my own ministry, the inclusive, kind, non-polemical, post-protestant spirit I observe in Brian, in Jim Henderson, and in other “Revolutionaries” I am meeting.

Where are these attitudes taking us? As Brian put it, into new fields of opportunity. New fields that were anticipated, as usual, by the Master himself.

Matthew records a most amazing promise, a signed blank check that empowers all followers of Jesus, whatever label they answer to:

And Jesus said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has become a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like a head of a household, who brings out of his treasure things new and old

To me this means that any scribe or writer/teacher of the Word — (greek, grammateus) — is like a steward who is empowered to bring from the storehouse both old things and new. The old things, it seems to me, are what the Bible says directly, what we learn from the text itself … things that all disciples of Christ have seen more or less clearly. The new things, to my way of thinking, could be realizations about spiritual truths, about the fulfillment of prophecy in our own time, and insights into the character of God that come from our personal walk — meditations, interactions with others, etc. There is room here for the rational as well as the mystical/poetical insights that Brian writes about in the next chapter of AGO.

Knowing God is the very fountain and purpose of eternal life, and all who have experience with God, as students of his word, are enriched and empowered to record meaningful insights along their way. These are the sources of one type of the heroisms, plural, that Brian refers to (it seems to me), coming from both sides of the spiritual aisle.
Think of all the scribes, past and present, who have recorded their insights and yet whose works are lost to us because they were not part of our particular ism.

It is for this reason that I feel called to disregard sectarian fences and to pray to God for the strength to make the assembly and compilation and comparison of all these different heroic threads — writings from every Christian stream of thought — for the edification of the present and future generations of disciples. That is what my dream of the Grammateus Institute is all about.

For me, this is one of the great, new, fields of opportunity created by the convergence of Web 2.0 technology and an Emergent, Revolutionary ethos among Christian brothers and sisters.

My McLaren Colloquy: 2. Restorationism

20 Wednesday Dec 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, Generous Orthodoxy, restorationism

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One of the most fascinating and vigorous sectors of protesting Protestanism has been “restorationism” — a belief held by a succession of groups through church history that, by finally getting the last or lost detail right, they now represent a full-fledged restoration of “New Testament Christianity.” – A Generous Orthodoxy, p. 128

Like Brian, I was raised with such an ethos. And my experience jives with his: “if you are part of a restorationist group, the group dynamics of your group will be nearly identical to those of every other restorationist group.” And while I no longer identify with the “group dynamics” of my spiritual heritage, I appreciate and share the kind sentiments with which McLaren describes the individual Christians within it:

Fortunately, beneath these squabbles over distinctives, one nearly always finds an idealism among restorationists, a belief that Christianity should be and can be better than its common manifestations. This is a good thing, and needed….One often finds a beautiful, sincere, childlike desire to follow Jesus whatever the cost and however lonely the road.

I am not sure where Brian is headed with his search, now that he appreciates the strengths and weaknesses of many different spiritual streams. At times he seems to envision a sort of ecumenical fusion — gaining a kind of institutional strength from many people who, it would seem, would have to miraculously lay down their points of difference and grow silent on the areas that up till now have been their sources of identity.

For myself, I think the model will be more like WIKI — devoid of institutional frameworks and fully free to embrace individual distinctions of thought and action.

I agree with McLaren, though, that the revolution must embody kindness, not as a surface gloss but as a defining, foundational principle. And in so doing it will radically depart from constant “protest”-isms.

Thus I expect that the Lord’s people who Barna says are now leaving the institutional church in droves will gather around Jesus, will sense the spirit of Christ in each other, and will be driven by humility rather than sectarian pride toward common understandings of the kindness of God and his happy plans for the human race.

It seems to me that the processes which will serve this gathering will incorporate both the rational, evidential tradition of Protestantism and the poetic, visionary disposition that is emerging through post-modern influences. Both isms are dangerous and extreme. But we do not need to choose either extreme, or lukewarmness either. We can, in Brian’s gracious words, find a balance that through generosity and humility walks that edgy middle road of Christlikeness — and honors what has been good in both the orthodox and heterodox thinking of preceding generations.

The only restorationist movement that will ever work is the inclusive, broadminded, and kindly one that God fuses together from every corner of His world.

McLaren/MacArthur colloquy: 1. Honoring evangelicals

20 Wednesday Dec 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, evangelicalism, Generous Orthodoxy, John MacArthur

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I appreciate the honorable treatment Brian McLaren gives to evangelicals when he writes: (A Generous Orthodoxy, p. 119)

“evangelicals have a passion that drives them into action: their emotion puts them in motion. And this emotion goes right to the heart of what it means to follow Jesus: loving God and loving others…. That’s why you’ll find evangelicals passionately at work around the world — including every dangerous and difficult place they can get themselves into. They have a mandate from Jesus to get out and make a difference. They love Jesus and they’re not going to let anything stop them. I love that.” He goes on to say, “evangelical passion for spiritual experience, for spiritual understanding, for mission is precious. If it could be bottled, one quart of it would be worth five libraries full of religious books (including mine) …. Even though it can’t be bottled, it cann be acquired, because, ultimately, “it” is the Spirit of Jesus, and Jesus gives himself freely to all who ask.”

I, too, have observed this evangelical zeal and I love it. The evangelicals who are attacking McLaren for what they perceive as dangerous perspectives in “Generous Orthodoxy” would do well to copy his kindness. I think that this missional spirit, this zeal to learn truth and stand for what is right and obey God’s commands and reach out to bring a message of salvation to the unsaved world are all noble impulses — as McLaren said, “the spirit of Jesus”.

I think Jesus was referring to this wholesome part of evangelical traditions when he praises the Philadelphia church — the only one of the churches he did not rebuke — in Rev. 3:7-13.

Unfortunately, the current church is not Philadelphia, which I believe was the 19th century church. Today we’re in Laodicea. We’ve moved beyond the missions of Dwight Moody and Hudson Taylor into the “hour of tempptation” realm of the 20th and 21st centuries. The historic period of “justice for the people” (literal translation of Laodicea).

John MacArthur’s contribution to this colloquy:

He agrees with me that the Philadelphia church is a “true, faithful church”. And he agrees with me that the Laodicea church is “a graphic picture of the church in the Tribulation.” Well, actually, Revelation doesn’t say “Tribulation,” it says “hour of temptation”. Which I think is now. And I do not share MacArthur’s black and white view of reality, that there are “no true believers, only false” in Laodicea; any more than I think there were only true and faithful believers in Philadelphia, a century or more ago. Why then, does Jesus say to them (us) “as many as I love I rebuke and chasten; be zealous, therefore, and repent.”? And why does he counsel the lukewarm believers of Laodicea to obtain from him gold, and fine linen and eyesalve, so that they can see their nakedness etc. and be healed of it? So I agree with McLaren’s perspective, that we need to keep “flipping the script” as he put it in the Revolution conference — keep recognizing that by fits we each are what we despise.

Laodicea feels to me like Evangelicalism

Brian McLaren points out that where he got off the Evangelical (capital E) train was when he began to notice finger-pointing, strife, and debate more than bringing the poor to their house (to put it in Isaiah’s words). In Brians’s words, they seem to have “started identifying judgmentalism and anger as fruits of the Spirit.” (p. 117)

So I join McLaren in honoring what is good about evangelicalism, the focus on a good message with passion and creativity — and call to them to open their ears to the words of Jesus in Revelation 3:14-22…. something that clearly they are hearing, hence the many different strains of “revolution”.

It is the Emergent movement that is finally trying to prick the conscience of the church with this century-old social theme of Justice for the People. [that God is not on the side of the powerful but the powerless]. So I share McLaren’s observation that evangelicals need to balance their passion for getting the details right with an appropriate emphasis on the mercies of God. It is indeed above all else a Revolution of Kindness. Tomorrow I’ll give a brief reaction to his thoughts on page 125ff about Protestantism.