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A New Kind of Christian:
A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey
Brian D. McLaren
Jossey-Bass, 192 pages, $21.95

Is the church at a monumental crossroads, like those created by the rare epochal shifts of moving from the ancient world to the Middle Ages, or from medieval to modern times? Are we witnessing the slow death of one expiring age and the groaning, struggling birth of a new one?

Many thinkers believe that is exactly where the church finds itself at the dawn of the 21st century, and they have written books to help us understand the grand implications of this crossroads. Of these books, Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christian is among the most helpful. McLaren, a pastor, has a passion for Christ's church to accomplish God's will in this unique generation. His understanding of how we should go about it is uncommon.

What is this epochal change? It is the postmodern turn, and McLaren's explanation can help those who know they should understand postmodernism but are not sure they do. McLaren's interest in postmodernism is not as a positive philosophy with an ideological superstructure constructed at the hands of Foucault, Derrida, and Rorty, but more importantly the natural result of the exhaustion and slow death of modernism—with nothing yet replacing it.

Modernism is dying because experience brought the Enlightenment project up short in some important areas. For instance, working in a closed, naturalistic system, science cannot answer the ultimate questions of why the universe is this way rather than another, or whether there's any meaning behind it. Those answers can come only from a transcendent source, for which modernism makes little room.

Enlightenment science also failed to provide a sufficient basis for acting morally in a civil society. The modernist promise of inevitable progress fueled by the inherent goodness of knowledge has been judged a fairy tale by the experience of the last century, the bloodiest in all of history. As Diogenes Allen asserts, the modernist Enlightenment project was an "embargo on the possibility of God" for its supposition that ultimate reality was a self-contained, mechanical universe and nothing more.

While modernity produced good things that enhance our humanity, from the printing press to penicillin, it also suppressed our humanity by denying the possibility of the transcendent. The death of modernism has us listening anew to a rumor of angels, as Peter Berger put it more than 30 years ago, and rediscovering the supernatural. It finds us seeking something more.

That is the postmodern turn. It doesn't promise good things for the church, but it does provide a massive opportunity, if only we will seize it. Postmodernity is opportunity.

McLaren seeks to help the church seize this unique opportunity by helping evangelicals do some serious self-analysis. His method of explanation is itself postmodern. He doesn't make his case with systematic propositions like 95 theses. Rather, he allows the reader to eavesdrop on a conversation taking place over weeks and months in the developing relationship between Dan Poole, a burned-out, questioning pastor, and Dr. Neil Edward Oliver (Neo for short), a pastor-turned-high school biology teacher who has done a lot of thinking about the church and the spirit of our age.

The substance of the conversation is some honest (and at times brutal) questioning of contemporary evangelical methodology. Some will find the discussion hopeful and comforting, glad to hear others articulating what is often held privately. Others will be unsettled that some of the questions are raised at all. But the ensuing discussion is good for our community and natural in such changing times. McLaren believes evangelicalism has had two variant relationships with modernism that it must overcome if we are going to fulfill God's call in the coming age. One relational form is well known; the other is not.

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June 10 2002, Vol. 46, No. 7