I haven’t really kept up on the emerging church conversation, but Anthony Smith highlights something in Brian McLaren’s newest book I think we already saw happening with Everything Must Change: there is a movement from “deconstruction” to “reconstruction.” And this is why I think the emerging church movement is basically post-evangelical: a dissatisfaction with evangelicalism, the megachurch and church growth movements led a bunch of pastors to break away and seek something else–hence the largely critical early phase of the emerging church. But now they’ve found something else: namely, the long Christian tradition. So they’re writing books like (his newest) A Naked Spirituality, A Generous Orthodoxy, and Finding Our Way Again: The Return of the Ancient Practices. To which I say, amen. It’s just a shame many people stopped listening too early.
Category Archives: Brian McLaren
Brian McLaren on the Kingdom of God
On Adam Walker Cleveland‘s blog, there is a guest post by the—by now somewhat legendary—emerging church leader, Brian McLaren, in which he speaks about the kingdom of God. You can find it here. He elaborates many of the same themes I learned from him (and NT Wright) in my post here, but with greater clarity, thoroughness and vision. For more of Brian McLaren’s work on the theme of the kingdom of God, see his books, The Secret Message of Jesus and his newest, Everything Must Change.
Hope and Obstacles
It’s just an illusion. I’m not really blogging–because I know I said I wouldn’t. Actually, I’m just pointing out this wonderful podcast by Brian McLaren, that crazy emerging church dude, who talks very helpfully about stuff like postmodernism, the mainline-evangelical fracture line, Christian unity and missionality, prophetic imagination, and the need for a “deep ecclesiology.” Wonderful, wonderful stuff. If you need to get a hook on what the emerging church is up to, this will do it for you–and hopefully deeply excite you.
Brian McLaren on Peace and War
Wow. This message from Brian McLaren is really… quite… brilliant. It’s a bit old… it’s from the 2003 Emergent Convention, but it only came out on Emergent Village‘s podcast a few weeks back. In it, McLaren reads a letter he wrote to President Bush just prior to the outbreak of war in Iraq and then discusses the eschatological nature of pacifism and the nonviolent vision of early Christianity and the Anabaptists. Very interesting, challenging and refreshing. (Even more interesting is that I had a discussion about this issue driving home from Crabby Joe’s, just a few hours after I first posted this.)
Find the message here. The first four minutes is intro, so you can skip it 
.
Words, Words, Words
Oh, how I love Hamlet. (I just used a Shakespearian allusion. I’m so proud of myself.)
I just finished The Secret Message of Jesus by Brian McLaren. Wow. Ever since I discovered Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell of Mars Hill fame, and the whole emerging church along with it, I’ve been caught up into this theological renewal that’s going on in areas from ecclesiology to missiology to ecumenism to biblical studies to… It’s been a beautiful thing that perfectly epitomizes the type of “theological journeying” that my blog is (mostly) centred around.
And in wonderful postmodern fashion, for McLaren, Bell and other EC crew, “Das Gespräch ist der Geburtsort aller Theologie.” I myself learned painfully and reasonably quickly that my personal interpretations of Scripture are not necessarily the most correct interpretations. For postmoderns, truth-acquisition occurs through intersubjectivity, which means truth appears neither in an objective, abstract vacuum nor in the inner recesses of the individual. We are all twisted by our own Weltanschauung, and therefore, the best interpretations are derived communally.
(Yeah, that last paragraph was a tangent. Sorry guys.)
What I really loved about this book was the way in which it delved into and incorporated so much of Jesus’ teaching into the conversation. I’ve recently become uncomfortable with understanding “the kingdom of God” as synonymous with “heaven after you die”, sensing somehow that it had some deeper, broader meaning, and it’s precisely this concept that McLaren deals with in his work. He holds that “the kingdom of God” is the reign of God coming to earth in all its beauty and majesty–and its power to heal the nations–embodied in the person of Jesus, and the Church, the “body of Christ”. “Eternal life” is not simply “heaven after you die”, but is a way of life that we begin here and now–the way of living that God originally intended for us–”life to the full”–that will continue into eternity. (This line of thought is explored in Velvet Elvis as well.)
There are certain passages where it does make sense to conceive of the “kingdom of God” and “eternal life” in traditional terms, but there are plenty of instances in which understanding these phrases simply as “heaven after you die” does not add up. Here are a few: Luke 18:18-27, John 5:39-40, and John 17:3.
P.S. I think I’m going to embark on a reading of the four Gospels in light of this understanding of these two key phrases. Maybe I’ll blog my way through it .
