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.
