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The Story We Find Ourselves In: Further Adventures of a New Kind of Christian
By Brian McLaren
Jossey-Bass
198 pp.; $21.95
Brian McLaren continues to toss up ideas that surprise, inspire, convict, and alarm. My copy of his latest book is full of underlining, question marks, explanation points, and hastily scribbled notes. That's true of my reaction to postmodern evangelicals in general. They're energetic, iconoclastic, and brimming with creativity about how we can talk about the gospel in fresh ways today. Whenever leaders of this movement speak—Doug Pagitt and Chris Seay are two others—believe me, I listen, though I sometimes also wince.
In his last book, A New Kind of Christian, McLaren's hero Neo declared, "When we let go of [the Bible] as a modern answer book, we get to rediscover it for what it really is: an ancient book of incredible spiritual value for us, a kind of universal and cosmic history, a book that tells us who we are and what story we find ourselves in so that we know what to do and how to live."
That becomes the subject matter for the sequel, The Story We Find Ourselves In: "I hope that this book will help 'non-religious-but-spiritual' people discover how their lives and world might look in the context of this new-old story," McLaren writes, "while helping modern Christians reimagine our story beyond the grid of its modern telling."
Once again, McLaren embeds his theology in story. This time agnostic biologist Kerry Ellison has a series of conversations with Neo that lead to her conversion. Along the way, her cancer reemerges, and in the end she dies, a subplot that entails a few others as well.
Through Neo, McLaren lays out what I would summarize as an evolutionist/environmentalist version of the gospel, one that highlights the role of humankind in the biblical story. Thus in nearly every case in which he takes up a biblical episode, Neo glosses over the dominant theocentric interpretation of the passage at hand and searches out its anthropocentric meaning. Early on Kerry summarizes what Neo has taught her about the opening episodes of Genesis:
"We've broken the robust dynamic harmony of goodness, so men and women struggle in conflicted relationships, like Adam and Eve. New economies arise and compete, often with lethal results, like Cain and Abel. Languages and cultures strive for dominance, as at the Tower of Babel, and civilizations develop in the flood plain of complete chaos and self-destruction [as in the story of Noah]. We've mucked up the story. That's the crisis, the crisis we find ourselves in."
Neo indeed tips his cap to the traditional notion that the fundamental crisis is a disrupted relationship with our Creator, but it is the above theme that he pounds home.
It is no accident that much of the story takes place on the Galapagos Islands, in the context of Kerry's research on tortoises. One theme of the book is to reject literal creationism and embrace a biblical understanding of evolution. Another is to interpret the Bible so that scientists and environmentalists will give it a hearing.
When she first meets Neo, Kerry announces, "I'm a scientist" and noting that he is scientifically trained as well, she asks him to explain the moving worship service she had just attended. Later she wonders, "How could he, an obviously intelligent man, and a man of science no less, believe all that stuff?" And how can he "reconcile God and evolution"?
In response, Neo tries to help Kerry reimagine the biblical story in a way that makes evolution central to the unfolding drama of creation. The opening verses of Genesis, he says, reveal a story of "emergence, evolution, development, order arising from chaos, life being coaxed from the waters."
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