A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith [Hardcover]

I recently went to a conference (Faithworks 360) and heard Brian McLaren talk. While the talk was more concise than the book (obviously) it was just enough to give me a hunger to read more.

I can barely put it down (i'm about halfway through). I don't find reading non-fiction books easy as, with 2 young children, i often only read to go to sleep, yet i've found myself curling up with this book like a good novel. The style of writing is both massively informative and warmly informal, drawing you into a web of hope and challenge.

There are times when it can become a bit 'listy' saying similar things repetitively...but then it is a recognised preaching technique (tell them what you're going to say, say it and say it again) and as i like what he's saying it's not yet got annoying, though i can see how it could do. This same inclination to preach does gloss over huge areas of accademia, but throughout the book this is acknowledged and comprehensive notes at the back give you further scope for reading and exploration.

There's nothing in here, so far, that i haven't felt and explored myself at some time or other. They really are 10 questions i feel compelled to explore and have had niggling at the back of my mind forever...

1. What is the overarching storyline of the Bible?

2. How should the Bible be understood?

3. Is God violent?

4. Who is Jesus and why is he important?

5. What is the Good News?

6. What do we do about the church?

7. Can we find a better way to address the issue of homosexuality?

8. Can we find a better way of viewing the future?

9. How should followers of Jesus relate to people of other religions?

10. How can we translate our quest into action?

Having studied at Bible College for 3 years i know there will be many Christians who will find this book more than challenging and upsetting. For them this will not be a comforting book at bedtime. While i have been labelled both liberal and conservative, depending who i'm talking to, for searching for the reality of God in the midst of difficult questions, others have stuck to what they know and have been taught. Reassuringly, this book does not condemn people for not thinking the same as the author, it encourages continued growth "with the renewing of your mind". McLaren puts reasoned and faithbased arguments to open up the discussion and encourage more debate.

This is not anti-Bible...i've never felt from one author more of a love for the Bible and its reading that i get from reading this. He loves the Bible and just as you love a person, you don't love them in a way you think they 'should' be loved, you love them as they would wish to be loved. He reads the Bible as the Bible demands to be read, not as a legal document with one style of writing but as many styles of writing from a growing, maturing culture in relationship with God.

This is not a book of answers. It is a book of Godly questions to encourage further discussion and enrich, potentially, the global community. Therefore, it is not a history book or a social analysis of where we are today. If it were, i wouldn't have read it and i wouldn't feel stronger and more hopeful in my faith and i am closer to God for that.

I look forward to my nightly read so my trashy novels will just have to wait.

Is the Bible meant to be read as a constitution, or is it more like a library ? Is it either heaven or hell for every soul at the Last Judgment, or does something more redemptive await us all ? And do Jesus' words `I am the way, the truth and the life; no-one comes to the Father but by me' really mean adherents of other faiths have got it wrong ? In this brave, honest and engaging book, Brian McLaren seeks to provide responses to these and other key, and often troubling, questions. And while his thinking will lead some to dismiss him as another evangelical turned to the liberal `dark side', there's a passion, an erudition and a thought-provoking use of Scripture that are compelling in what he writes.

McLaren frames his vision of a new Christianity against the backdrop of what he sees as the paradigm that has ensnared it: a way of thinking inherited from the ancient Greeks and Romans that has at its heart a god he calls Theos (the Greek for `god'). For Theos, there are those who are `in' and those who are `out'; a right way of knowing about God (and reading the Bible) and many, equally damnable, wrong ones; and an approach to religion that is anxious to enforce conformity to its dictates as widely as possible. But the author contends this `six-line Greco-Roman narrative' is not only morally unbelievable, it also bears no resemblance to the redemptive and restorative story arc of the God of the Bible, supremely revealed in Jesus, and it's on the foundation of this 'more moral' reading of the Bible that McLaren sets out to construct an alternative.

He writes really well, and has an intriguing approach to Scriptural texts in support of his thesis. Thus, the story arc of the book of Jonah, with its tale of salvation for biblical Israel's implacable enemy, the nation of Nineveh, and its ending on a question, may imply scope for a more open reading of 'Final Judgment' than the rigid heaven/hell schema that some derive from the Bible. So why not five stars ? Well, I thought the focus of its questions and its preoccupations suggested it was pitched more at the American mindset than a European one - it hasn't travelled all that well across the Atlantic. Its solutions were also at times rather vague and bland, I felt - as when McLaren appears to be saying little more than that Christians should be nicer to gay people: surely a new kind of Christianity needs to go further than that and embrace faithful, committed gay relationships ? Sometimes, I disagreed with his philosophical assumptions: in seeking to explain why the God of the Bible is not violent, for example, he used the idea of the biblical writers' thought `evolving' in what I thought was a rather dubious way, and one that Bible scholarship suggests may not be the case.

And the same assumption resurfaces in the notion of religious thought continuing to evolve through `stages' of a `quest', until, lo and behold, it has - precisely now - reached the point where the intellectual framework is right for exactly the new approach McLaren advocates. He could usefully reflect on where the idea of `intellectual evolution' comes from and appears to be taking him. Admittedly, he doesn't say he has arrived at the final stage (for, quoting Jean Daniélou, sin is a `failure to grow'), but the whole schema seemed a bit too - well, Greco-Roman, really. These disagreements aside, though (and they're not insignificant), you'd have to go quite a long way to find a more stimulating discussion of what's wrong with Christianity, and how we might put it right, than McLaren's book.

A really good read if you're open to new ideas about your Christian faith, this book will challenge some folk who are stuck in one expression of Christianity, but for those who see that change is the essence of Christianity and that the Christian discussion is open-ended this book has some real gems, good meat to chew over, I would love to see more Christians get out of the rut (which by the way is a grave with the ends knocked out) of living a Christianity that is a relic of long past teaching, yet not throw the baby out with the bath-water. The truths that were are still so, but there are many more to discover.