Hodder and Stoughton ISBN 978-0-340-99548-8 £11.99
I always look forward to Brian McLaren’s writing and to his speaking. He is eloquent and accessible; challenging and a man of great humility. I find him to be one of those fascinating people with the ability to articulate my own thoughts and questions before I even know I have them! I guess I am therefore predisposed to embrace this new book positively.
However, of all McLaren’s recent prolific writing, this book draws particularly on the author’s experience of the North American church scene and the challenge of polemics associated with a strident and politicised US brand of conservative evangelicalism; a tribe to which McLaren, to some extent at least, owes his own formation, but from which he has undeniably parted. There are echoes of Philip Yancey within his narrative. Many readers in the UK will be approaching the issues raised in this fast-paced book from very different perspectives. There is nonetheless sufficient here that chimes with UK experiences and perceptions.
“A New Kind of Christianity” is in many ways a systematic theological distillation of the pioneering narrative developed through the “New Kind of Christian” trilogy. The book is structured around the exploration of ten questions that McLaren suggests many Christians are asking more and more and with greater urgency. These questions are:
1. What is the overarching story line 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 Gospel?
6. What do we do about the Church?
7. Can we find a way to address human sexuality without fighting about it?
8. Can we find a better way of viewing the future?
9. How should followers of Jesus relate to people of other religions?
10. What do we do now? (How do we translate our quest into action?)
McLaren rarely provides definitive answers to these questions, rather he offers thoughtful and thought provoking responses, which always leave the door open for further exploration – a defining ethos perhaps of ‘Emergent Christianity’. McLaren’s tone throughout the book is typically self-effacing and mostly, irenic. This is not a book for those who like to be told what to believe. Rather the author seeks to encourage the reader to bring his/her own theology into the light and take an honest look at what he/she believes, and why he/she believes it. The challenge is always there to rethink a thing or two (or ten). Sometimes (often?) you may disagree with or be exasperated by McLaren’s thesis. He graciously allows dissent. It represents ‘emergent conversation’.
A key idea running throughout McLaren’s narrative is a challenge to what he terms the “Greco-Roman” paradigm of Western expressions of Christianity. McLaren radically deconstructs what he identifies as the prevailing implicit world-view and presents in its place an alternative, but (in his view) authentic "Hebrew" perspective (with further echoes, this time of Tom Wright). This paradigm (at least in the reviewer’s view) is certainly vibrant, hopeful, winsome. “A New Kind of Christianity” may be a misnomer – McLaren’s thesis claims ancient roots.
James Mercer is the Associate Minister within the Benefice of St Aldhelm, Purbeck.