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The questions of what exactly needs to be changed and what needs to be conserved are crucial. Does A New Kind of Christian offer an accurate diagnosis? That much in the church today is in need of reform should not be in doubt, and McLaren has rightly described some of the problems we face:
- The evident lack of transformation in the lives of many evangelicals.
- The meanness of many fundamentalists.
- The shallowness of much that passes for evangelism, whether through coercion or intimidation; the mass-marketing of conversions and the ubiquity of the unbiblical phrase "accepting Christ as your personal savior"; the distorted counting of conversions.
- The privatization and wrong individualism which have come to characterize vast tracts of American evangelicalism. McLaren's concerns about systemic injustices are appropriate concerns for Christians to have, providing a needed corrective—so, too, his call for Christian generosity in an age of affluence.
In all of these areas, among others, McLaren raises important concerns. But has he rightly traced the causes of the problems he identifies? Here I am less certain. Much of McLaren's analysis is composed of stereotype. Let me give some specific examples.
1. History is distorted. Postmodernists often write of "tyrannizing metanarratives," that is, sweeping explanations of history and reality that twist facts in order to justify their own coherence. But surely the way the adjectives "premodern" and "medieval" are thrown around throughout this book are themselves distorting (an ironic problem for a teaching that suggests that "the need to put everything into nice neat categories is part of the problem"). Must categorization always be simply the creatures of small minds in need of mental neatness?
At its worst, this book posits a new, simplistic dualism which will result in the exact opposite of what its author desires—a reducing of everything to either modern (and therefore to be dismissed) or otherwise (pre- or post-) and therefore to be carefully considered. The book abounds with dichotomies between the bad old and the good new. Because of the way McLaren understands the changing of the ages, old comes to equal obsolete. But apart from such invidious comparisons there is the matter of basic historical accuracy.
Are all of our theologies really "basically modern"—including our Chalcedonian Christology, our Nicene Trinitarianism, and our Anselmic understanding of the Atonement? Do we really want to be guided by what McLaren admits is the "gross simplification" of saying that control, machines, and analysis mark the modern age, and then vilifying them? Neo's paean to the postmodern world, inviting us to "become postconquest, postmechanistic, postanalytical, postsecular, postobjective, postcritical, postorganizational, postindividualist, post-Protestant, and postconsumerist," has far more rhetorical heat than light, and is more akin to the sweeping denunciations issued by the Christian fundamentalists so detested in this book, than it is to anything that is likely to engender more careful, searching self-criticism. Or consider this statement: "Remember, modernity only wants abstract principles, universal concepts, and disembodied absolutes … all truth is contextual." Oh, the irony of self-refutation!
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