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Review
'McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity is a stellar accomplishment, a combination of hard tack fact and unfettered hope, an overview in delightful narrative of the long way of our coming to this time and of the multiform ways of our arriving. In every way, a dispatch from the front, it is also a love-letter of sorts – a love letter from an affectionate, but seasoned pastor to those who would dare to believe, worship and serve not only now, but also beyond now, into the roiling, churning decades ahead.' (Phyllis Tickle, author of The Great Emergence )
'Just a few books capture and articulate the imagination, angst, hopes and aspirations of a generation, as Brian did in A New Kind of Christian. Almost ten years later, in A New Kind of Christianity, Brian lets us listen in to the key questions and conversations catalysed by his work that have taken place around the world since then.'
(Jason Clark, Deep Church )
'Some books provide us with information about the world, but every once in a while a book appears that enables us to imagine new, more wonderful worlds. The book you hold in your hand is one of these.'
(Peter Rollins, Ikon )
‘Brian’s writing is brave and honest, vulnerable and courageous, disturbing and unsettling, reassuring and hopeful. Every now and then you come across a book you’ve been waiting for. A New Kind of Christianity is that book.’
Product Description
Groundbreaking author Brian McLaren, voice of the Christian emergent movement and author of the 'New Kind of Christian' series, poses ten controversial questions that could lead to a radical redefinition of the Christian faith.
What is the overarching storyline of the Bible?
What is the Gospel?
Why is sexuality such a divisive issue among Christians?
How should followers of Jesus relate to people of other religions?
McLaren gives his own responses to these questions, inviting the reader to a new and generous way of thinking about Christianity.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
42 of 46 people found the following review helpful
Format: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.
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.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
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.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Don't read if you don't want to think
It is rare to find a book that stimulates and challenges your faith as effectively as this book. As the first reviewer says it does not particularly look at areas that have not... Read more
Published 7 months ago by John Belstead
Amazing
This was one of the most thought-provoking books I have ever read. It's expose of the Structural Church was non-critical and profoundly sensitive. Read more
Published 7 months ago by nettie
Of course it's a polarized debate!
First of all, an extra star because McLaren is a brilliant writer, and very engaging. His treatment of the Ethiopian Eunuch and Jonah passages, for example, was full of useful... Read more
Published 10 months ago by Jon Hughes
Not Christianity at all
The errors, heresies, eisigesis and outright Bible twisting that McLaren engages in while putting forward his beliefs are breathtaking to behold and any careful reader of the... Read more
Published 14 months ago by R. Cartwright
The most thought-provoking Christian book I've read in years
This book was so good I read it through twice, straight off. The first chapters (which constitute the Preface), describing the author's growing discomfort with, and then rejection... Read more
Published 15 months ago by Chris Nash (Barcelona, Spain)
Another winner
This is another winner from Brian McLaren. I did not find it quite as informative & challenging as "Everything must Change" which I have also very recently read. Read more
Published 15 months ago by DB MORGAN
The Quest For Something New
Brian McLaren has written a most thought provoking book and is asking for a collective response from the church to help find solutions. Read more
Published 22 months ago by Thurman L. Faison
Answering the questions many of us have been too afraid to ask
I found this a interesting and stimulating book. It is a good follow-on from the 'New Kind of Christian' trilogy. As always, McClaren writes accessibly and succinctly. Read more
Published 23 months ago by Daysie Day
I simply believe the premise is flawed
I am not a Calvinist. Like Mclaren I am charismatic and non-Reformed. I gave it 2 stars (instead of 1) because I felt the book, like Tim Keller's "Reason for God", addressed good... Read more
Published on 3 May 2010 by Joshua D. Jones
Another thought provoking and important book by McLaren
Some will find Brain McLaren's gentle but powerful questioning of the generally accepted view of what faith in God and Christianity in general is upsetting, but, as someone who has... Read more
Published on 29 April 2010 by ian Fifield
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