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This is the second in a series of three responses to Brian McLaren's influential book, A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey (Jossey-Bass). The previous issue [January/February] featured a response by Andy Crouch; the series will conclude in our May/June issue with a response by Tony Jones, author of Postmodern Youth Ministry, and reflections by McLaren, who is already at work on a sequel.
Let me come clean at the outset. I picked up this book with some wariness, assuming that I would be a critical friend of its perspective. After finishing the book and reflecting on it, I would call myself a friendly critic, finding it less helpful than I would have hoped and more dangerous than I would have thought.
This book is an account of a journey out of that kind of reactionary conservatism that acts as if it is already in possession of all answers to all questions—as if omniscience were one of God's communicable attributes. McLaren has chosen to write his suggestive critique in the form of a fictional dialogue between two characters: Dan Poole, a middle-aged pastor, weary of external trials and internal questions, and Neil Edward Oliver, a high school teacher (himself a former pastor) who serves as Pastor Dan's sherpa guide into the inviting wilds of postmodernity.This second character is called—acronymically—"Neo" throughout (perhaps with a nod to the protagonist of The Matrix). Yes, he really is. This well prepares the reader for the subtlety that marks the book.
Questions of literary merit are best left to others. Just know that I had the temptation to review the book with a Peter Kreeft-like dialogue between J. Gresham Machen and Father Stephanie, rector of the nearby Church of the Holy Inarticulate Conception. But I resisted.
Certainly truth can come in the garb of fiction. This is no new insight of our narrative-loving age. From the brief parables of Jesus to Erasmus' In Praise of Folly and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, works of fiction have long been understood to be appropriate vehicles for bringing uncomfortable facts to light. Behind the masks of characters, we may entertain and empathize, criticize and consider ideas which, had they appeared straightforwardly, we would quickly dismiss or wrongly defend. But art not only reveals; it also conceals.
Throughout the book, there are many flashes of wisdom that reveal the author's pastoral experience. The pastorate is difficult. Lack of success does lead to a willingness to change. Those who have a "believe the worst" suspicion are distracting and debilitating. It is hugely important to work with young people. But this book was not written about any of these topics. Nor was it written simply to bring the reader to engage empathetically with the characters. It was written to change the mind of the reader.
In his autobiographical introduction, McLaren says that this book is about exactly what its title would suggest: learning "to be a Christian in a new way." For him, he says, this was the only way forward, if he did not want to fall into hypocrisy on the one hand, or apostasy on the other. But are these in fact the only alternatives?
Certainly all Christians must recognize the importance—even necessity—of change. Apart from embracing change, we Christians have no salvation. The churches of the Reformation have at their core an understanding of the need for always being reformed according to the Word of God.
This isn't to say that all changes are good. Until fairly recently (let's say, until the Enlightenment) in the West, change was taken as almost equivalent to decay. Though this is hard for us to believe, "novelty" was for a long time a pejorative term. The great historical changes that were in the foreground of our Protestant parents' thinking were the fall of Adam from the garden, and the apostasy of the church from the gospel. With such changes in mind, the Protestant Reformation was a conservative revolution. Its attempt was not a realization of a new vision but the recovery of a lost one. In that sense, there is something in the genes of Protestantism that is conservative—wanting to keep—even recover—the good. Even the New Testament itself was a set of revolutionary writings only in the most conservative way. The New Testament documents, from the earliest epistle to the latest gospel, were written not to augment, but to confirm and assure the faithful continuance of the message of the gospel to the rising generations.
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