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Given the limitations of the term, then, the good news is that neither Neo nor his friend Dan is "a postmodern kind of Christian." A postmodern kind of Christian would be cast adrift in an irrational, subjective, and profoundly consumeristic world where personal choice is paramount and personal fulfillment is the only game left in town. Far from it. McLaren has Neo and Dan engage in carefully crafted conversations that, while not philosophically rigorous in the strict sense, are anything but subjective feeling-sharing. (Indeed, one of the failings of A New Kind of Christian as literature is that it is hard to imagine two adults having such intelligent and honest conversations these days.) They may be "postorganizational," but they are profoundly responsible—which is to say, committed and sometimes frustrated—actors within human communities like school, family, and church. They are undoubtedly consumers—more than one brand name, from Dan's Honda Accord to Neo's beer of choice, Pete's Wicked Ale, gives McLaren a nifty way to sketch his characters—but they are defined by a deeper story that anchors their friendship in something beyond affinity. Except for a certain restlessness, these characters have little in common with the human tumbleweed that populate the works of writers like Douglas Coupland.
Something deeper and more durable than postmodernity is being explored in A New Kind of Christian. It is significant that McLaren has chosen to make his case in the form of narrative and dialogue—a kind of dialogue that is much closer to the Symposium than to Euthyphro. This is not a Socratic deconstruction of a novice's philosophical intuitions. It is a conversation between friends which, like the Symposium, takes place in the midst of human loves and longings. If Dan undergoes a kind of enlightenment under the tutelage of the more learned Neo, Neo also experiences his own transformation in relationship with Dan. McLaren's "two friends on a spiritual journey" are much more than talking heads. They are persons, enmeshed in particular histories, who are seeking truth in relation to one another.
Perhaps more than anything else, then, McLaren is reacting against a Christianity—or a kind of Christian—which feared and evaded this turn to the personal. Modernity, from the factory floor to the sociologist's data model, has little room for particular persons with their infinitely complex stories of disappointment and hope, love and loss, faith and doubt, even as it revels in the ability to exercise control on a massive scale by abstracting away from personal history. Twentieth-century evangelicalism was hardly immune from fascination with the possibilities of technique, from fill-in-the-blank teaching devices like Evangelism Explosion to the "transferable concepts" of Bill Bright to the "observation, interpretation, application" method of Bible study I was taught as a student in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.
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