‘A New Kind of Christianity’ by Brian McLaren

A New Kind of Christianity is nothing like I expected it to be.  I assumed that I was picking up another defense of the Emergent Church tradition.  What I picked up, instead, was the first truly Emergent volume of systematic theology.  I know…  I was confused too.

However, McLaren’s book is far from the type of systematic theology that you’d find written by Evangelical Fundamentalists.  Rather, A New Kind of Christianity is a systematic theology more akin to that of Stanley Grenz or Jürgen Moltmann (who McLaren cites as inspirations in his Introduction).  It is a systematic exploration of the traditional Christian doctrines with an intentional focus on inclusivity and refusal to assert the final answer on any doctrine.  McLaren never says “Thus says the Lord!”  Instead, he spends his time saying “Evangelicals: Thus the Lord DID NOT say!”  I will leave discussion of his success in this endeavor to other readers.

McLaren divides his theology into two primary categories, and positions his theology around 10 organizing centers.  The broad categories are: 1) “Unlocking and Opening” and 2) “Emerging and Exploring”.  McLaren describes these categories as “something real and something wrong” (7).  The transcendent revelation of Godself (the something real) composes the reality.  The cultural baggage clouding the revelation of Godself (the something wrong) therefore must be removed, so that the Church may embrace and embody that revelation in its present context.  To achieve this two-fold goal,  McLaren first focuses, in ‘Unlocking and Opening’, on how the Church ought to understand narrative revelation, the authority of revelation, the nature of God, the person of Christ and the nature of his Gospel.  McLaren then turns, in ‘Emerging and Exploring’, to questions about the nature of the Christian Church (ecclesiology), human sexuality (theological anthropology), the future (eschatology), pluralism, and, finally, how one lives a life that embodies the previous nine discussions (though it is also scattered throughout as well).

What is different about this systematic theology, however, is its limited focus and pastoral concern.  Brian McLaren has carefully selected his topics and language to accommodate any reader (McLaren opens his Christology with an extended quotes from Mark Driscoll and the movie Talladega Nights: the Ballad of Ricky Bobby).  This is both the book’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness.

An observation of McLaren’s that I found quite notable was in Chapter 8: From Legal Constitution to Communal Library.  In that chapter, McLaren argues that the Bible cannot be read as a political constitution, a handling of the biblical text “as if it were an annotated code instead of what it actually is: a portable library of poems, prophecies, histories, fables, parables, letters, sage sayings, quarrels, and so on” (79).  Obviously, here McLaren is speaking mostly to an American, Evangelical audience, but his message is moving and necessary, nonetheless.

Unfortunately, however,  McLaren’s theology is also often poorly defended and fraught with inconsistencies.  Admittedly, as a developing theologian, I am not McLaren’s intended audience and am trained to find such shortcomings.  Nevertheless, as Brian would readily admit, theology matters in people’s lives; it is not just an academic discipline.  Therefore, I am concerned that emerging Christians will blindly adopt A New Kind of Christianity as its theology without asking the tough questions back to McLaren.  I think that Brian McLaren has a great start to an Emergent systematic theology, but needs to be pushed to address his larger inconsistencies, such as “How Jesus can be the truest revelation of God when we have no direct access to Jesus, only second-order reflections on Jesus, mediated through the Gospel writers?” or “What is the role of the Spirit (a noticeably absent character in McLaren’s book) in the Emergent Christian’s life, and  the Christian’s reading and interpretation of Scripture?”.

In summation, I think that A New Kind of Christianity is a great first-step towards developing a systematized, emergent theology (as paradoxical as it may seem).  However, McLaren’s book leaves many questions unanswered, and therefore leaves room for a more exhaustive work.  I recommend this book for anyone who wants their beliefs challenged and their faith strengthened.  But I also suggest reading this book with a community of others.  While McLaren has some great ideas, he also has some ideas that need a lot more work.

-  Earl