Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Words
by Brian D. McLaren
250 pp. $25.99, HarperOne
I remember well the Christian Ministries: Formation (CMF) courses I took in seminary a decade ago. Because I was in there with some really good people, not least my professors, they were painless enough. That said, the books that I bought for those classes, those books that we Biblical studies types and our theologian friends called “spirituality books,” were the first to go in the box and then on to Mr. K’s Used Books in Johnson City. The books weren’t in their own right bad books; they just weren’t our sorts of books. We were the sorts who preferred the Book of Common Prayer to Experiencing God and a good, difficult book of systematic theology to brief inspirational essays. In other words, when it came to “spirituality,” we preferred to dig in rather than to read about someone else’s digging in.
I write this not to elevate myself but to note at the outset that, as is often the case, I’m precisely the wrong sort of person to review Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Words
Seasons of the Spirit
McLaren’s organizing schema in this book is a variation on the four-seasons-of-life idea that I, as an English teacher, associate with Northrop Frye
Readers of last year’s McLaren offering, A New Kind of Christianity, will no doubt recognize the same sort of evolutionary/Hegelian schema that McLaren deploys there to describe different sorts of Christianity that occupy the current world Church. As schemata for naming differences go, it’s not a bad one, and although such a schema requires that the writer place himself (occasionally herself but usually himself) at the end of the evolutionary process looking backwards, as long as one can put one’s Lyotardian suspicion of metanarratives on hold (which I can some days and can’t others), it’s a schema that does have some explaining power. McLaren is also careful to note that the four-stage cycle of spirituality is no simplistic one-pass succession but can occur as a spiral throughout one’s life, a post-critical season of affirmation yielding to a post-critical simplicity, then a new kind of complexity, and so on.
Such is the basic shape of the book: for those wanting a summary, the book is a walk through three words associated with each of four spiritual stages, arranged in a basically Hegelian manner, in which the contradictions of each stage produce the energy to move on to the next stage. It’s not nearly as polemic as A New Kind of Christianity, and for that reason, it stands as an even better introduction to McLaren’s particular brand of liberal-Protestant, secular-pluralist vision of the life of the spirit.
The Strangeness of Evolution
As is often the case when I read books from folks whose starting places differ wildly from my own, I found myself needing to articulate certain counter-positions in ways that were clearer than what I’ve attempted before, largely because before, I didn’t realize I needed a counter-position. That’s the joy of these sorts of books, and that’s why I recommend that process-theology types read some conservative Calvinists every once in a while and that Anglo-Catholics occasionally pick up some Emergent Village material. In the case of this book, although I have not really given much thought to biological evolution since my own journey through a violent opposition to the concept as a teenage convert to Christianity, then an accommodation to the system as a college and seminary student, then a sort of testy apathy for most of the last decade, I realized, upon reading it, that I really should have something to say about evolution, mainly because what McLaren writes about it strikes me as wrong, and I should be able to say why it does.
McLaren’s poetic paean to evolution that strikes me wrong happens in his chapter on petitionary prayer. McLaren has just come off of a paragraph saying that Genesis teaches a doctrine of creation in which human and non-human neighbors are inherently interdependent (a position which I can endorse both as a reader of Genesis and as someone who enjoys sitting on the shore of our small state park’s lake and thinking when I get a moment to do so). He then turns to evolution and writes a sort of prose hymn to it, which I quote at length:
The theory of evolution teaches the same lesson. If survival were easy, species wouldn’t develop new adaptive features. If survival were stress-free, there wouldn’t be 20,000 species of butterflies, 300 species of turtles, or 18,937 species of birds (at last count). In fact, there would be no butterflies, turtles, or birds at all, because it was stress, struggle, challenge, and change that prompted the first living things–slimy blobs in a tide pool somewhere–to diversify, specialize, adapt, and develop into the wonders that surround us and include us now. Seen in this light, evolution isn’t a grim theory of “nature red in tooth and claw”; it depicts the planet as a veritable laboratory for innovations in beauty and diversity, fitness and adaptability, complexity and harmony. It renders the earth a studio for the creative development of interdependence in ecosystems or societies of life. Put beauty, diversity, complexity, and harmonious interdependence together and you have something very close to the biblical concepts of “glory” or shalom. (108)
I’ll admit that my own first reaction to this paragraph is that McLaren seems to view biological phenomena in the same light that George W. Bush’s treasury secretary Paul O’Neill viewed economic disasters, holding that those entities who fall victim to such phenomena are simply experiencing “the genius of Capitalism.” This is a CEO’s view of “economic forces” or a modern president’s view of “military actions,” something that likely seems quite lovely from a view in the sky but really, really stinks for the living beings (among them the folks thinking they were going to retire) who are, at the ground level, victims of such systems.
That someone would be callous about such things is no shock to me: after all, I’ve read more than one article about military actions in Fallujah that framed the event in terms of “exterminating the rats” and scores of pro-abortion articles that ignore the strangely literary crime of ending a potential human character’s story before it gets past the prologue. What surprised me about McLaren’s treatment of evolution is that he can’t seem to hold onto it when it moves from the “beauty” of a deer’s being torn to shreds by a pack of wolves (this, after all, is the mechanism of McLaren’s “laboratory for innovations”) to the results of the human species and our contribution to the non-teleological order of biological change. I quote again at length:
So our compassion, if it is to join with God’s, must include all the animals, all the plants, and all the ecosystems that connect them to one another–and to us. The compassionate Spirit of God, Paul claims, helps us feel the groaning of all creation, a groaning for release from evil, decay, futility, and abuse (Rom 8:19-24). The trees groan as forests are destroyed by human greed. The seas groan as its fisheries are depleted and toxins accumulate due to careless human behavior. The forests and jungles groan as species disappear, victimes of our failure to be wise stewards of God’s good world. Even the winds groan as the earth warms due to human haste, waste, and greed. Creation’s groaning becomes part of our groaning, and it is all taken up into the Spirit of God, who in some way brings all of our intercession into God’s own heart. (134)
Thus stands McLaren’s dilemma: a population of wolves (always the model, in my memory at least, when statistical biology gets taught in high school) killing off scores of deer in a region, eventually starving their own population out because of their inability to curb their own animal desires, is a “laboratory for innovations,” but the process of altering environments so that species of life that can live in the ruins of oil spills and the abandoned cities of the Industrial Revolution is somehow a violation of divine compassion. In one case, the course of biological desire, leading to massive death, is “a studio for the creative development of interdependence” (108), in the other an occasion for creation (which suddenly cares about death rather than its lovely aftermath) to groan (134).
I’ll go ahead and say (not that people who have read much of my writing have to guess this) that I relate to the environmentalist McLaren far more readily than I do the CEO-evolutionist McLaren. As a dedicated front-porch sitter (who longs for the days when I can sit on the front porch and watch my kids play rather than chasing my daughter away from the stairs, the cars, the stray dogs, and all the other things that fascinate her from the moment we step outside to the moment I surrender and go back in), I think it’s a triumph of the moral imagination rather than any “sympathetic fallacy” when I can look up from the book I’m reading and watch the wind move the trees across the street, observe the comings and goings of the buzzards of Barrow County (yes, I’m a vulture-watcher), and even occasionally catch a family of deer wander through our neighborhood. And although I’m a strong opponent of ecological alarmism (for entirely pragmatic reasons–the more ecological concerns that strike the public as silly, the less effort elected officials are going to put forth resisting the profit-motive in the name of stewardship-duty) and a would-be hunter (I’m fine with my cousins’ and uncles’ hunting, but I can’t shoot straight), my large-scale take on the world is that we human beings have certain, real duties to the rest of creation. It’s in Genesis, after all.
What occurred to me in reflecting on these things is that Christian theology doesn’t need to pronounce a priori about the adequacy of biological evolution as a scientific theory in order to have something to say about it aesthetically. In the absence of a more adequate conceptual framework that makes sense of the vast array of biological observations, Darwinian evolution (or its descendants like Gould’s punctuated equilibria or Dawkins’s genes-and-memes theory), I’m alright with those schemata as tools for explaining the succession of physical phenomena. (I realize I just alienated about a quarter of our readers with that one. I’m about to alienate another quarter; don’t worry.) What I wonder is whether Christian theology, which at its root confesses a Christ who overcame death, should be rejoicing at such a death-driven system and calling it the glory of God. (There’s the other quarter. To the half of our readers who are still going I offer my thanks.) If in fact biological evolution is the best theory/framework at hand for the moment, and I don’t have too many good reasons to doubt that it is, then by all means Christians should admit as much and start doing our theology in light of the most adequate theory available. But my hunch as someone who reads Psalms (as McLaren suggests that folks do) is that our own groaning for creation ought to encompass the systems of death that transcend the human species, and our songs celebrating YHWH’s glory in the world should not revel in the death even of a fly at the fangs of a spider but should look forward, eschatologically, to the day when the lion lies down with, rather than kills for the sake of “innovation,” the lamb.
Because this is not an essay about the theology of evolution but a review of McLaren’s book, I’ll leave that reflection where it is for the moment, but I do want to commend this book in particular and Brian McLaren more generally for something that he genuinely contributes to my own intellectual life, namely occasions to think rigorously and rhetorically through the questions that animate popular spirituality. This marks him as significantly different from (and in my own view better than) writers like Bart Ehrman in the pop-atheist camp and Erwin McManus in the pop-Christianity camp, whose books (and I’ve not read all of ‘em, so readers can suggest to me the books that redeem their literary outputs) seldom give me an occasion to think something I haven’t thought before, and the differences between the two sorts of books really should give folks pause when we look at books from folks with whom we disagree.
Thus ends that sermon.
The Big Picture
I’ve been told, in articles about classroom pedagogy, that the first things and the last things in a session are usually the ones that folks remember, so now that I’ve gotten my little rumination on evolution and spirituality out of the way, I’ll close with some of the best points of the book and a bit of praise for its overall vision even though I tend not to agree with it. I’m tempted to joke that McLaren took last year’s review on this site seriously, since in this book he actually quotes philosophers (158) rather than doing mile-high paraphrases, but in this section, instead, I’ll stick to big-picture reactions.
McLaren is right to frame spirituality as an embodied, gradual, sometimes dull and often painful, lifelong pursuit. He does well to note that Christian spirituality grows out of the conviction that the Church is God’s royal priesthood (132) and that priests are there not to save themselves but to pray and to proclaim in behalf of others. He’s right to see that, when one petitions God in prayer, the act of praying both addresses a real Person (or three) and frames the events of human life in very different terms from problem-solving or fatalistic visions of reality (116, 126-27). He even encourages people to GO TO CHURCH (79), something that I tend to be a cheerleader for. In other words, McLaren in this book articulates love rather than scorn for the normal, the regular, and the common. He wants to incorporate more of the text of the Bible into the lives of regular Church folk than sometimes pop-evangelicalism will allow (and we’re shoulder to shoulder in that fight), and in his lovely paraphrase of Plato’s Republic in his closing chapters, he asserts that the purpose of reaching a fuller vision of reality is never to remain aloof from those who have not but to return to the folks who aren’t privy to that vision and to help them out (207).
As I said before, I do think that the evolutionary/seasonal picture of spirituality has some explaining power, and I’m not sure that, without writing a book of my own, I have much of a place to say that my own vision of things is more adequate. That said, I do wonder whether his four-season picture of the spiritual life does enough to account for those folks who become more, not less, committed to bold doctrinal pronouncement in the wake of personal disaster. I wonder whether his categories “perplexity” and “harmony” really journey beyond “complexity” or simply stand as more capacious and adequate iterations of “simplicity.” And I wonder whether the category of “harmony,” standing as it does at the end of a process, is too much of a temptation for someone like me. I can’t pronounce on McLaren’s morality, but I do know about myself that, when I’ve allowed myself to think about my differences from folks who disagree with me in terms of development and maturity instead of in terms of historical contingency and rhetorical responsibility, I’ve fallen into a sort of pride (not a new kind by any means) that’s hard to shake until I pry myself loose of that belief.
Perhaps some day, when I start writing the sort of book that certain sorts of people don’t normally read, I can lay out that picture of radical contingency and rhetorical duty, citing the Bible and David Hart along the way, but that day is not today. I have finals to grade and year-end assessments to prepare, and I probably should go pray before I get too deep into ‘em.
Nathan Gilmour has (publicly and privately) referred several times to Emergent 
theology—or, so I’m sure not to oversimplify a complex and varied intellectual movement, to the version of Emergent theology set forward in Brian McLaren’s latest book—as a sort of Neo-Hegelianism.
Nor is he the only critic to make that claim. McLaren’s friend Scot McKnight, writing in the March edition of Christianity Today, remarks that “Brian, though he is thinking more systematically, has fallen for an old school of thought. . . . For me, Brian’s new kind of Christianity is quite old. And the problem is that it’s not old enough.” (McKnight, it must be noted, connects McLaren not to Hegel directly but to Adolf von Harnack, but the nineteenth-century liberalism represented by von Harnack owes a big enough debt to Hegel that in making such a comparison McKnight is in effect calling McLaren a Neo-Neo-Hegelian.) The Neo-Calvinist Kevin DeYoung, meanwhile, notes that McLaren’s theological forbears are “a lot of process theologians from the last century”—another movement that never could have existed without Hegel’s progressive and evolutionary view of history.
I can neither confirm nor deny these claims; I’ve not yet read A New Kind of Christianity, nor have I read Hegel. My notions of what it means to be a Hegelian have been formed mainly from people like Kierkegaard who write in conscious rebellion against him—hardly the most accurate or charitable way to learn a person’s ideas. I still haven’t read him, but at least I’ve now read a sympathetic reader’s account of him (Walter Kaufmann, in From Shakespeare to Existentialism), and I am going to attempt to delineate what I think Gilmour and others mean when they call McLaren a Neo-Hegelian.
First, a disclaimer. My knowledge of Hegel is, obviously, second-hand and limited. Kaufmann himself would be disgusted at this project; he notes scornfully that of the “analysts, pragmatists, and existentials” who criticize Hegel, “very few indeed have read as many as two of the four books that Hegel published.” He spends more than thirty pages savaging Karl Popper’s chapter on Hegel in The Open Society and Its Enemies, a masterpiece, we’re told, of shoddy scholarship that relies not on primary texts but on Scribner’s Hegel Selections.
I am even worse, so I will attempt to keep my criticisms of Hegel himself to a minimum. My perceptions of the Emergent Church’s utilization of Hegelian thought is less ill-informed, but they by no means come from an expert. Input from actual experts in Hegel and/or McLaren would be much appreciated.
I should also note that I have nothing in particular against McLaren, that I read A New Kind of Christian in graduate school when I was struggling with reconciling Christianity and poststructural philosophy and that I found it quite helpful. If I’ve turned away from my interest in such a reconciliation now, it doesn’t imply any particular judgment on those who have not; I think what the Emergent Church is doing has value, even if it’s only as a dialectical tension for more traditionalist forms of Christian theology. So I hope no one reads this as an attack on McLaren or anyone else.
I was surprised how complimentary of Hegel Kaufmann is, given his many connections to existentialism. (His are the canonical translations of Nietzsche and Buber, and he edited the excellent anthology Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre.) But he seeks to destroy the myth of Hegel that has built up in academic and popular circles at least since Kierkegaard and Marx revolted against him. He admires Hegel because of Hegel’s attacks on Christianity, frankly, which means that the relatively religiously conservative among us may be biased against Hegel for entirely different reasons after reading Kaufmann’s account.
But the connections to the Emergent Church come rather naturally. Hegel is one of the great proponents of what we today would call political liberalism, positing that “man’s freedom to develop his humanity and to cultivate art, religion and philosophy” is made possible by the State, in fact “are possible only in ‘the State.’” This does not seem to me a ridiculous idea—though it could easily result in a blind liberalism, especially once you throw religion into the mix. (In its rebellion against the “religious right,” the “religious left” strikes me as equally infantile and reactionary.)
One of the major tenets of the Emergent Church—one of its most attractive tenets, in my view—is so-called narrative theology, the belief that (to put it simply) the Bible should not be understood as a series of propositions to be affirmed or denied but rather as a story told by God. McLaren himself notes on his website that narrative theology has much in common with process theology, and he’s right: they both flow forth from Hegelian views of history.
“Hegel,” says Kaufmann, “like Augustine, Lessing, and Kant before him and Comte, Marx, Spengler, and Toynbee after him, believed that history has a pattern and made bold to reveal it.” He is separated from these other thinkers mainly by two components of his thought: (1) the idea that history is steadily improving; and (2) his refusal to make real predictions about the future. Kaufmann notes that Hegel lived totally in the present, which in his case meant that he viewed the 6,000 years of recorded history were aiming directly at him, his time, and his thought. (Neither Kaufmann nor I mean this to sound as self-centered as it probably does.)
Narrative and process theology seem also to take this viewpoint, especially once one incorporates progressive revelation into the mix; if the world is not getting steadily better for the narrative or process theologian, we at least know more about God and Christ than any generation that came before us—again, not necessarily in a self-centered way. What else would “narrative” and “process” mean? As the story progresses, there is more story to consider, and if this is indeed a narrative or a process, we’re headed toward a particular end, which God either knows (traditional Christianity) or can make a pretty good guess about (openness theology).
There appears to be a blithe optimism in Hegel’s view of history that I’m not sure I can accept. Says Kaufmann:
His attitude depends on his religious faith that in the long run, somewhere, somehow freedom will and must triumph: that is Hegel’s “historicism.” Those of us who lack his confidence should still note that he does not believe that things are good because they succeed, but that they succeed because they are good. He finds God’s revelation in history.
So do I, obviously, but the revelation I see in history is primarily negative; what seems to triumph on earth is not what is good but what is ugly, unjust, and debased. (Tune into MTV any given night and let me know what you think.) This is the reason behind the traditional Christian belief in the Second Coming of Christ—this world is not, in fact, steadily improving, but staying the same or getting worse, and we need a deus ex machina to rescue us. I believe this; the Emergent Church seems to believe it less and less as time goes on. I think there’s a steady Hegelianism behind that disbelief.
McLaren’s alleged Hegelianism may also explain the curious fact that, as many reviewers have noted, his “new kind of Christianity” is in fact not all that new, that it rings strikingly true with traditional nineteenth-century liberalism. But if we believe in progressive revelation, McLaren must claim that his thoughts are new—otherwise, he wouldn’t be a progressive theologian. Hegelianism demands a denial of Hegelianism.
The most interesting section of Kaufmann’s Hegel discussion, for me, was the chapter on “The Young Hegel and Religion,” which examines a series of early essays by Hegel collected under the title Early Theological Writings, a title which Kaufmann dislikes:
Are these early papers really theological? Only insofar as Webster defines one meaning of theology as “the critical, historical, and psychological study of religion and religious ideas.” By the same token, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Nietzsche’s Antichrist, and Freud’s Future of an Illusion could also be called “theological writings”—which would certainly be most misleading.
Hegel’s essays are not antireligious but consistently depreciate theology in any customary sense of that word.
I don’t think it would be fair to call most of the Emergent writings I’ve read “anti-theological theology,” but many of the things Kaufmann reports about Hegel’s religious beliefs seem to apply strikingly to many Emergent thinkers. Allow me to quote Hegel himself: “Objective religion is fides quae creditur, . . . can be systematized, presented in a book or a lecture; subjective religion expresses itself only in feelings and acts. Subjective religion is all that matters.” In this assertion we see the common Emergent distaste for systematic theology—always opposed against narrative theology—which reaches its apex in a pitting of Christ against Paul. (I am not, please note, accusing McLaren or any other individual of such a move.)
Notice also that Hegel’s attack on theology leads to his own “new kind of Christianity”; Kaufmann notes that “he is opposed not only to theology but also to all Christian institutions—not only to the Catholic Church, for which he never developed any sympathy, but also to the Reformation.” Certainly we see a similar opposition in the three-tiered view of history McLaren suggests in A New Kind of Christian—the Catholic Church represents the premodern world; the Reformation represents the modern world; and that “new kind of Christianity” represents some form of Hegel’s “subjective religion,” freed from the strictures of intellectual or systematic theology.
In the end, Hegel’s attack on traditional Christianity comes from the same place as all theological liberalism; for Christianity to be valid in Hegel’s eyes (and in von Harnack’s, Whitehead’s, Schleiermacher’s, Tillich’s, et al), it “must not contain anything that universal human reason does not recognize—no certain or dogmatic claims which transcend the limits of reason, even if their sanction had its origin in heaven itself” (Hegel’s words). In other words, for Christianity to be valid, it must conform to the premises of the Enlightenment—nearly every heresy of the past three hundred years has flowed forth from this pronouncement.
To their credit, I don’t see this attitude in Emergent theologians, which may be where their progressive theology differs from the progressive theology of past movements. The postmodern mind is no great friend to the Enlightenment. With this in mind—and if McKnight and DeYoung are to be believed about A New Kind of Christianity—it may be more correct for McLaren to refer to A New Kind of Hegelianism. From what I’ve been told, it takes an old view and makes minor tweaks to an existing critique of traditional Christianity.
And again, if I’ve got Hegel or McLaren wrong, please let me know. I am open for correction.
Reviews and Interviews: A New Kind of Christianity Round-up
I have to admit that I’m more star-struck than someone my age should be at the fact that a writer of Brian McLaren’s public prominence has responded at length to something that I’ve written. Michial and David have extended me the favor of responding quickly to his post, on the understanding that I’ll lay off a bit in the weeks to come. (I’ll likely have plenty to do anyway, but that’s a story that folks already know.) Because you took the trouble to address my post at some length, Brian, I’m going to try to write this post in second person, not talking about some chump who wrote some book but writing to someone who has taken the time to respond.
I should start this little foray by saying that I probably played the consultant angle too hard. When I looked at the opening to the “Unlocking and Opening” section, with its harsh change in typeface and rather strident tone, I did take it as a direct, head-on charge at designated teachers of the church (one of which I am) in general and at seminary grads (one of which I am) in particular. So when the consultant bit came out of the blue towards the end of the book, I did become suspicious. I probably should have mentioned (for those who have not been reading my material as long as I have) that I’m one of those English teachers who finds most kinds of hermeneutics of suspicion inadequate to a genuinely open life of the mind, and when I said I was getting suspicious, I was reproaching myself for the hypocrisy of practicing that hermeneutics of suspicion just as much as I was expressing irritation with the pitched battle that I thought I saw shaping up. So I’ll take your word that you weren’t trying to start a fight so long as you’ll take mine that I didn’t think I was throwing the first punch.
That out of the way, I want to make clear that I don’t expect every book to be a commentary on one or more Platonic dialogues. I think that Jacques Derrida does just that masterfully in his book Of Hospitality
For what it’s worth, as you read in my initial review, I do find some of your theological points quite compelling, and I’ve been teaching the Bible-as-library model for some time. (My senior sermon from seminary, “The Last Word,” does things with Job that resonate pretty plainly with the ways you read Job in ANKoC.) And honestly, I think that you’re doing valuable work when you call into question certain modes of interpreting Matthew 25, Daniel 12, and other passages that folks often deploy to support what you call a “soul-sort” narrative. If those doctrines are true, they should be able to weather some criticism, and I welcome writers who articulate such criticism. My problem with the way you went about it is that you’ve actually obscured the urgency of and your contributions to those Biblical-exegetical conversations with faulty reference to writers and books that don’t have horses in those races. (As I’m sure you told your students in your college teaching days, and as I tell mine, it’s a pity to derail a good thought with material that doesn’t advance the argument.)
I should back up and tell a bit of a story of my own. I’ve been a part of the Ooze Viral Bloggers program since it ramped up, and although I’ve enjoyed the free books, none yet has really knocked me over with its power of argument. (The one I’ll be reviewing for this Wednesday was really quite good, but that will have to wait until Wednesday.) When Mike Morell sent out the email soliciting reviews for your book, I threw my hat in the ring, figuring that all the copies would get snatched up and that I’d likely hear about your book second-hand, and that would be about the end of it. But as it turned out, I was one of the quick ones or the lucky ones or whatever governed the selection process. So when my copy arrived in the mail, I knew that the book came with responsibility, and after digging in I started thinking about what I could do in a review that other reviewers couldn’t do as well as I can. When I got to the fourth chapter, I had a feeling that would constitute a healthy part of my review, not so that I could play “gotcha” with my book review but so that I could attempt to take something about your book and advance a discussion about the way that Christians use such terms as “modern,” “Greco-Roman,” “feminist,” “postmodern,” and other shorthands for complex debates among important writers. Since I’ve spent the last three years teaching Plato to undergraduates at a state university, I figured I could position myself as someone who knows those particular texts and by extension call for a degree of caution when we Christians cite familiar names whose texts aren’t as familiar.
Of course, I didn’t count on the strange ways of the Internet. I expected, when I gave myself too much credit, to appear in some list akin to Mike Clawson’s, perhaps the sixth of seven “generally positive” reviews of the book, and not hear much after that. As it stands, it appears that I’m being claimed and condemned by folks who hold the book in all sorts of degrees of esteem and scorn.
Go figure.
That said, I set about writing my review as “the pedantic Plato guy,” hoping that other folks would articulate the points that I thought other folks could articulate, and for the most part, because of the sheer volume of reviews the book has gotten, I think that mission is accomplished. That said, since I’ve gotten some attention, I figure I can go ahead and keep hammering on my point about relationships between philosophy and theology. So behold as I raise my hammer.
I’m glad to read that you’re also an admirer of John Howard Yoder
And that’s really my concern with your use of “Greco-Roman” as an umbrella term, Brian. As I noted in my initial review, I think you’re a skillful and articulate advocate of a form of Christianity influenced by Hegel among others, a vision with which I’m going to disagree at many points but which forces me, precisely at those points, to examine and to articulate why my own vision of how things differ. In other words, precisely where I think you’re wrong I want you to be the strongest sort of wrong that you can be, partly because I know that, as a mortal, I might actually be the one who needs to rethink things; and partly because someone who’s wrong in an intellectually powerful manner inspires me to try to get things right in a manner that rises to the challenge. (Incidentally, that’s why I teach Plato to undergrads–it’s not that he’s right all that often but that he’s wrong in such compelling ways that he inspires my students in their own thinking and writing to produce Plato-caliber responses.) And I think that, when you’re taking on the content of the theological questions at hand and performing exegesis of Bible texts, you’re at your best, especially in places where I disagree. So when I see those places where you fall short of the argument you could make because of a sloppy guilt-by-association move, I’m disappointed because I know you could have done better, and I might have had occasion to attempt to raise my inquiry to match yours.
My call to you is not to stop doing the theology that you’re doing by any means; my call is to do so better, engaging the question at hand with the right rhetorical tools for the moment. If that means bringing particular texts from the Greeks or the Romans to bear on the question at hand, by all means break out the Cicero, and let’s reason together. But if you want to talk about eternal conscious torment, that’s not a question Plato’s interested in (unless you want to take his allegory of reincarnation at the end of Republic far more seriously than I do). It’s not a question that especially concerns Aristotle. It’s a Christian-era question, and my challenge to you is to frame your opponents’ positions not in terms of a syncretism that doesn’t find support in the texts to which you appeal but in your opponents’ own terms, matching Scripture for Scripture and contending on the open field of interpretation rather than avoiding the real Christian questions by slapping a label on your opponents that doesn’t really fit.
You express a hope towards the end of your email that you hope that we can meet some day and talk as neighbors and as friends. As you’ll see if you click on “Why Christian Humanists?” at the top of our own site, we Christian Humanist writers are at our core dedicated to a vision of friendship advanced in its classical form by Aristotle in the last books of the Nicomachean Ethics, one whose basis is the common pursuit of excellence. Part of that pursuit is honesty in difference, and if you do indeed wish to engage in the sort of friendship that the vocation of teaching calls for (and I believe you do), please believe me that my critiques of your book are not for the sort of points-scoring that Plato condemns in his Sophist opponents but all come your way in the spirit of friendship, a sincere conviction that you’re dedicated to doing the absolute best that your abilities will allow in the enterprises of writing good questions and trying out interesting answers.
(As you see, I’m quite inclined to cite Plato and Aristotle, which might account for my own focus in these exchanges.)
Oh, and Brian? If you’re ever in North Georgia, look me up. I’ll buy lunch.
Sometimes folks who normally impress me with their breadth of vision and maturity ways of existing in the world slip into frames of mind that I can only call adolescent.
Now normally I try to be very cautious with “appeals to maturity” when I argue against positions. After all, as someone who believes that nonviolence is more faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ than is the use of coercive violence in the service of this or that authority, I often run across people who refuse to articulate an argument that it’s good to kill people at the behest of national governments, doing the predictable end-run around the question by citing either my age (not so much as the years go by) or my profession in an ad hominem implication that someone in my station of life just hasn’t achieved the maturity to understand the “necessity” of such a way of life for Christians. So I’m hesitant to call such things immature because I’d rather not be called the same. Nonetheless, the alternatives that I can imagine right now (laziness and relativism) strike me as far more comprehensive criticisms, so for the moment, I’ll use immaturity to signal a hope that some folks at least might grow out of certain, intellectually sloppy moves, or perhaps that someone will explain to me why these moves are good ones so that I can stop hoping.
Now I should get to the occasion for this essay before I lose even myself.
When I wrote a review of Brian McLaren’s latest book a couple of weeks back, I figured that I would run into criticism. After all, McLaren is a controversial figure, meaning that, like Stan Hauerwas or Mark Driscoll or George W. Bush, McLaren does not invite lukewarm reactions. Most folks tend either to love him or to hate him, and someone like me who sees parts of his project as helpful and others as wrong-headed is bound to disappoint everyone involved. (That’s the case in many situations in my life.) What I didn’t expect was that a couple of folks (whose reviews of the book one can read here and here) took issue with me not for any theological content or objections to McLaren’s theological content but because I was overly hung up on getting the particulars of Plato and Aristotle right. “[T]hat is to be expected, given his audience,” the former holds forth, and “[He] necessarily reduces some complexities,” the other adds. According to these folks (one of whom I like a great deal and think a comrade, the other of whom is as of yet a stranger to me and thus not anyone who’s wronged me), there’s just not much call for an account of Greek philosophy that acknowledges its complexity; it’s enough, they seem to imply, for a book aimed at a popular audience and for certain polemical ends to nod to the possibility of a slight skewing of things, then get on with using the Greeks as clubs for beating whatever theological position one prefers not to hold.
Balderdash.
My beef, of course, is not mainly (certainly not only) with these two bloggers but with the big cultural trends in which they seem to partake. In the rest of this brief post, I’m going to try to address two common excuses that folks exhibiting the same trends give for references to other texts that become so sloppy that I can only call them name-dropping, and I’m going to argue that neither excuse is adequate. Then, if my strength holds up, I’ll suggest a path or two that might be more adequate to a Christian writer’s calling.
It’s Too Hard
The sense that I gleaned from the two reviews responding to my review is that, in an academic treatise, the sort that eggheads like myself pass back and forth, there might be some place for precision in one’s citations, but in a book intended for a popular audience, one that’s likely not read Plato and Aristotle, one can use such names without much concern for what might actually be in the best Greek texts or even in English translations, using their names as code-words without incurring any sort of ethical responsibility. Folks who are concerned with Brian McLaren’s big questions, after all, don’t care that much about such historical quibbles.
Balderdash.
The fact of the matter is that such sloppy citations only work when the sloppy citation happens in a certain quadrant of possible sloppy citations, namely that in which the names are familiar but the texts cited aren’t. The move derives its force from familiarity and its potential to evade a generally educated audience from the relevant texts’ unfamiliarity. To demonstrate my point, I’ll cite an excerpt from the beginning of the section where McLaren starts to lay out his version of “the Greco-Roman narrative”:
“What we call the biblical storyline isn’t the shape of the story of Adam, Abraham, and their Jewish descendants is the shape of the Greek philosophical narrative that Plato taught! That’s the descent into Plato’s cave of illusion and the ascent into philosophical enlightenment.” Some time after that, in a conversation with another friend, I realized it was also the social and political narrative of the Roman Empire, and so I began calling it the Greco-Roman narrative.
what we call Western civilization as the project grew from a marriage between Greek philosophical tradition and from Roman political, economic, and military empire. Greek philosophy was energized by seminal argument between Plato and Aristotle. (37)
Because most folks educated enough to want to read a Brian McLaren book know who Plato and Aristotle are, the identification of one’s opponents with them bears weight, but since a relative sliver of that demographic have read either philosopher recently or carefully, he eludes those same readers’ ability to recognize significant deviations from Plato’s and Aristotle’s texts. Now the dynamics of the moves McLaren makes are mostly invisible, and that’s why they work. But if one does a brief thought experiment and substitutes for the familiar-but-unread names a set of names that are unfamiliar-and-unread, the rhetorical move loses its force:
“What we call the biblical storyline isn’t the shape of the story of Adam, Abraham, and their Jewish descendants is the shape of the Existentialist philosophical narrative that William of Ockham taught! That’s the divorce of ontological intelligibility from arbitrary relationships between signs and signifiers and the resulting political suspicion of claims to metaphysical priority for monarchs.” Some time after that, in a conversation with another friend, I realized it was also the social and political narrative of the Dutch Enlightenment, and so I began calling it the Ockham-Spinoza narrative.
What we call Western civilization as the project grew from a marriage between Nominalist philosophical tradition and from Enlightenment pantheistic, faculty-psychological, and prosaic density. Nominalist philosophy was energized by seminal argument between Ockham and Duns Scotus.
Of course, I realize that I rather butchered both Ockham and Spinoza putting that together, but most folks wouldn’t realize that, and that’s why such a move could still elude notice. It’s entirely false that Ockham used the language of sign and signifiers, though a relativist could argue that he was concerned about the names of things. It’s also rather strange to connect without any more than bare assertion the Nominalist tradition and the Spinozan tradition, but again, one could make the relativist argument that Ockham and other nominalists, by some winding road, ended up influencing the philosophical scene in 17th-century Amsterdam in ways roughly analogous to the ways that the Greeks influenced the Roman Empire. I also realize that a fair hunk of the population, even those generally educated, will have no familiarity with or opinion on Ockham or Spinoza, and that’s why such a move would have little force. The general reading public couldn’t care less what Ockham wrote, and my citation of Ockham for this sort of audience would be pointless. To butcher obscure figures doesn’t do any work, so that’s not what McLaren did.
In another thought experiment I’ll shift it from familiar-but-unread to familiar-and-read:
“What we call the biblical storyline isn’t the shape of the story of Adam, Abraham, and their Jewish descendants is the shape of the Jedi narrative that Yoda taught! That’s the teaching that taking the blue pill will just leave people trapped in the Matrix and the fact that what we think of as the real world is really just a construct of evil robot oppressors.” Some time after that, in a conversation with another friend, I realized it was also the social and political narrative of the Decepticons, and so I began calling it the Jedi-Transformers narrative.
What we call Western civilization as the project grew from a marriage between Jedi philosophical tradition and from the Decepticons’ tendencies to change themselves into jet fighters, mid-eighties tape players, and firearms. Jedi philosophy was energized by seminal argument between Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi.
More people, I would guess far more people, would realize that I just butchered that one. Many generally-educated readers would no doubt object that I’m attributing to Yoda what rightly belongs to Morpheus, that Star Wars as a pop culture artifact no doubt existed in the same world as Transformers as a pop culture artifact but didn’t flow into it in some necessary manner, that if I were to write a book based on these basic axioms, that book would be almost worthless even if my arguments ended up resembling something based on the actual films. The reason is that Star Wars, The Matrix, and Transformers are popular enough in our moment that most people will recognize their names, but because a greater segment of the population, either through watching the films (or cartoons) or hearing folks talk about them, nobody could get away with this kind of sloppy “paraphrase” of their arguments, so that rhetorical move would be unable to elude notice even as the familiarity of the figures might potentially have some rhetorical force.
So I’ll repeat my criticism: McLaren’s move in A New Kind of Christianity only works if he cites well-known names who wrote little-read books, borrowing force from familiarity and potential for evasion from unfamiliarity. And that range of possible coordinates on the name-recognition axis and on the text-familiarity axis, and the corresponding range of possibilities that exist on those axes, mean that those particular moves do indeed deserve criticism because he could have done otherwise in a number of ways. What’s at stake here is not the difference between “popular” and “specialist” but the difference between writing honestly to and exploiting a popular audience, and that is an important distinction.
Everyone Else is Doing It
Unless I’m reading the McLaren fan base wrong, one of the most frequent and significant complaints from their side of things, whenever McLaren becomes a topic of discussion, is that McLaren’s critics (and Tony Jones’s and Doug Pagitt’s, in other texts I can recall immediately) focus on one or two “incidental” passages, defining the author by a phrase or two pulled out of context in an attempt summarily to discredit the author or, in some cases, to smear the entire constellation of phenomena known as Emerging or Emergent. I wholeheartedly agree that such moves are bad-faith moves, and those familiar with my online persona know that I’ve written against such moves.
Part of the reason why I don’t abide such moves is that, whatever one thinks of this or that twentieth-century debate over authorial intent, most folks can at least agree that such texts make certain ethical demands on a writer setting forth to criticize. In other words, if one makes claims about a text, one should state the content of the text in such a way that, even if the summary leads to a criticism (especially if the summary leads to criticism, I’d say), the summary itself stands as something others who have read the text carefully could look at and say, “Yes, that’s basically what the text says.” Such an ethical demand is especially important when addressing a writer or camp with whom one disagrees strongly: in a system in which texts have no inherent meanings such an agreement is unnecessary, but in such a system, there’s no sense in criticizing this or that text’s meaning. To say that this or that text is inadequate is to assume that there’s a there there, and to make such an assumption puts on the interpreter a responsibility to interpret what is there, not what the interpreter wishes were there but in fact ain’t. Although one could easily point to dozens of folks who neglect this basic responsibility, as Christians I should think that such duty should be a minimum expectation.
“Whether or not it’s Greco-Roman, that narrative does govern some Christians’ imaginations,” some might say (and some have said similar things), and to that I reply, “If it’s the structure that’s the point, why associate it with anything at all?” The answer, of course, is that by baiting certain unfashionable intellectual movements and authors, and by associating one’s (sometimes unrelated) opponents with those unfashionable movements, one scores rhetorical points without the hard work. Guilt-by-association is a powerful and deceptive means of persuasion, and if there’s no real influence from Plato and Aristotle, then one should stay away from them when one tries to paint one’s opponents with broad strokes as proponents of some kind of Pagan Christianity (a book whose scholarship is beyond sloppy–I was almost ready to break my own rule about assigning bad motives when I read the first few chapters of that one) rather than taking the time to argue against the points that you actually mean to oppose.
If the theology is bad, argue against the theology. Don’t allude to texts with which your familiarity is inadequate.
If the theology shows bad influences, show where in both texts the influence shows up. Limit your criticisms to points to which you can point in this or that extant text.
If you can do neither, just note that your own emotional reaction is discomfort, and be humble enough to wait on someone else to articulate rigorous arguments. There’s no harm in such an argument; if nothing else, it might inspire some more widely read but less intuitive reader to make the real, rigorous critique that the Church needs made.
Such sloppiness, of course, is neither new nor uncommon nor the property of Brian McLaren alone. Certainly, as I noted before, opponents of McLaren often excerpt with no concern for context, intent, or any of the marks of careful reading when they attack McLaren’s books, and what’s more, sectarian literature (Protestant versus Catholic, liberal versus conservative, Calvinist versus Anabaptist) has a long history of getting the other writer wrong for the sake of scoring easy points. But moral relativism is not an answer to such things: if anything, criticizing a real person should be one of the basic hallmarks of the way that Christians go about intellectual dispute. That the other feller does it worse doesn’t mean it’s right if I do it with slightly less intensity.
When moral relativism comes to govern speech within a community, the truth-seeking about which McLaren boasts and seems to take as a necessary precursor to his “violet stage” of interconnection becomes impossible; the only work that a sentence can do in that sort of Foucaultian universe is to sway the arbitrary emotions and wills of those manipulated, and there’s no room to be concerned with more adequate or more truthful means of naming and analyzing and synthesizing and evaluating ideas and theories. If “the other guy” does this, the proper response is not to be a more ruthless Machiavellian but to bear witness truthfully, to trust that our God (Theos or Elohim, I’d take either) is a God who vindicates truth when truth suffers from the machinations of duplicity. Such seems to be a bare minimum of what we should expect from Christian teachers.
How Then Should We Cite?
As I’ve noted elsewhere, in my own practice, I try to invite the authors about whom I write to respond should they feel the need (and as Tony Jones once did on Hardly the Last Word) and to encourage other readers of the common text to correct my own accounts of things when I get them wrong. After all, if I’m going to take issue with a text, I want to take issue with the text, not with a strawman that I’ve set up that only bears faint resemblance to the text. To be honest, I think that this sort of caution sets apart genuine philosophers like Jacques Derrida from the sloppy “postmodernists” that claim to follow in his wake: for the former, the reading of Plato is always before deconstruction, while the latter crew too often satisfies itself with caricatures. Likewise I’m far more likely to respond favorably to criticisms of theologians (even theologians whose disciple I happen to be) when those criticisms stand in relation to the theologians’ texts rather than sloppy caricatures of those theologians. If there’s falsehood, bad faith, or other sorts of duplicity going on, by all means speak boldy, but let boldness and rigor fight shoulder-to-shoulder, neither waiting back at camp like Achilles, waiting for the other to die before picking up a sword.
Please understand that I’m not calling for a moratorium on using philosophers’ and theolgians’ names to signify complexes of thought. For one, I’m just enough of an intellectual conservative that I think that sweeping moratoria are bad ideas in general, and for two, I use that device when I write (in fact, I’ve done so in this post), and I think that, used responsibly, such moves can be very handy for locating one’s own thought relative to groups of thinkers rather than singular books.
Please note as well that I would never deny anyone the chance to speak or write about God simply for having a tenuous grasp on the Greeks, on physics, on Chicago Cubs baseball, or on any other subject of intellectual weight. God speaks when God speaks and through which vehicle God speaks. I would be the last to deny any possibility for divine oracles. I would, far less radically, ask that folks with tenuous grasps on Plato, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, Seneca, and other actual writers from actual historical periods refrain from gigantic condemnatory claims about “Greco-Roman” this or that.
(While I’m in the neighborhood, could some folks read some Bacon and Locke and Kant before making grand claims about “modern” or “modernistic” this or that, and contrary to my usual distaste for moratoria, could we keep glowing praises of Evolution at least on different blog posts from sweeping condemnations of “modernism”? Okay. I’m done.)
On a larger scale I do call for a shared expectation among Christians that, when we discover in one another’s writing that this or that use of a philosopher’s or a philosophical school’s name in sloppy manners, we should expect of one another quick correction, an apology for the oversight, and some manner of proceeding-differently in further work. Nobody, not Brian McLaren and not Mark Driscoll and certainly not Nate Gilmour, should be above that expectation, and no audience, least of all an educated Christian audience, should be thought so worthless that they don’t deserve a basic level of historical caution and precision.
When I slow down a bit and think about why someone’s sloppiness with Plato and Aristotle offends me the way it does, it has to do with who’s writing to whom. If Richard Dawkins proves entirely unable to understand Thomas Aquinas’s purpose in setting forth “proofs of God” (and he proves just so), I can smirk and note that the biologist who ventures to do theology often finds himself out of his depth. Beyond that, sloppy arguments from militant atheists don’t do anything to sully the reputation of Christians’ ability and willingness to think carefully; if anything, they make us look rather good. But despite some of his more adolescent critics, Brian McLaren does not hate God, and he’s not a radical atheist. In fact, as my review noted, I think he’s popularizing some genuinely helpful theological movements, and I think that’s valuable work. But in the end, that doesn’t excuse sloppy use of well-known, little-read names. If Brian McLaren wants to make the Hegelian argument that he eventually makes, namely that a certain strand of Christian thought has evolved beyond Augustinian orthodoxy and provides a new (if by “new” we mean early-nineteenth-century) ways of going about being Christian, that’s fine. I welcome such books, and I’ll criticize those parts that I read as especially Hegelian. (Did you catch that? I just made another name-reference.) All I ask is that, on the way, we put away Pagan Christianity and other childish things, that we read like adults, that we set out not to hoodwink the other but to reason together.
A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith
By Brian D. McLaren
320 pp. HarperOne. $24.99
When I praise Plato and defend my teaching Republic to college freshmen, I often say that Plato’s excellence lies not in the fact that he’s always right but that when he’s wrong, he’s wrong in compelling ways, ways that inspire me to imagine a better alternative. While Brian McLaren is no Plato, parts of his most recent book A New Kind of Christianity have that Platonic character to them, getting things very wrong in ways that set me thinking about how I’d improve on his points. Other parts of the book resonate quite nicely with things that I try to do as a Christian teacher or realize now that I should try to do. But other parts still, alas, smack of the sleight-of-hand, the well-poisoning, and the other dirty trickery that make me mistrust apologetics literature of various sorts. In other words, A New Kind of Christianity is a complex book, not consistently excellent but nonetheless very helpful in places.
Brian McLaren Gets it Right
As Phil Rutledge pointed out in response to our podcast on the Haiti Earthquake, when I talk about the Bible, I tend to talk not about one unified document but a library, various not only in cosmetic details but in a more robust sense of genre, asking certain questions in this book that lie out of bounds in other books, offering teachings here that seem to stand at least in tension with teachings there. (I should note the obvious, namely that I do not speak for the other Christian Humanists on this point or necessarily on any given point.) I tend to think that the flexibility of such a collection is part of the Bible’s strength, that the practice of being Christian community is richer because Christian teachers can pull from a broad range of resources depending on the contingencies of the moment without having to pretend that every moment is the same as every other moment. When we need a text that shakes us out of complacency, the Bible has a book for that. When we lean over the precipice of despair, the Bible has a book for that. And so on. I think that McLaren offers a handy next step in that thought process, noting that the Bible is a true collection of texts precisely because of the “spaces between” those strong positions of Deuteronomy or 1 Chronicles on one hand and Ecclesiastes or Job on the other.
Furthermore, McLaren highlights the God-defining character of Christ and insists that the Palestinian Jew Jesus of Nazareth and not the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover is a better starting point for disciplined reflection upon the character of God. I know that making the historical Jesus that radically central flies in the face of much systematic theology (including that of Thomas Aquinas, one of my favorites), but I agree with McLaren that such a move is ultimately more faithful to the gospel of John among other Scriptural witnesses.
Finally, when McLaren gives advice to parishioners and clergy who find themselves resonating with progressive ideas, and his counsel leans consistently towards humble and peace-seeking measures rather than grandstanding, intellectual and moral arrogance, and other vices that so often characterize folks who think they’ve gotten something right while their neighbors still get it wrong. His exhortation to “be a blessing” is probably my favorite part of the book.
I noted above, and I write again, this book does get some things very right, and by no means should anyone think that it’s error, error, error all the way down.
Brian McLaren Gets it Wrong
That said, as someone who loves intellectual history and who values some degree of historical precision, I do blame this book for playing fast and loose with historical identifications for the sake of scoring cheap rhetorical points. One of the jokes that was current during my days at The Ooze forums was that the Emergent words for “really quite bad” were “modern” and “modernist,” and the word for “so much better, don’t you think?” was “postmodern.” McLaren seems to have left that ugly and misleading binary pair only to settle on another pair, just as ugly and even more misleading (and also a binary that I started encountering back in seminary), the Manichean dualism of “the Bible” and “Greco-Roman religion.” Resisting the temptation to examine every instance of “Greco-Roman” meaning just plain “bad,” I’ll point out a few that drew a chuckle from me for their historical naivete: Greco-Roman religion, apparently, has no place in it for homosexuality (175–apparently all of that Athenian praise for pederasty as superior to love-of-women doesn’t count), does not allow for multiple religions (212–never mind the Roman Empire’s grand scheme of syncretism that incorporated pantheons as diverse as the Celts’ and the Egyptians’), and stands as a pernicious idol called Theos, who stands as enemy to the Biblical god Elohim (65–I suppose the New Testament authors didn’t get the memo that the Greek language had that idol mixed in there).
The content of McLaren’s “Greco-Roman” tradition came about as the fruit of a conversation he relates in which an epiphany came to him, namely that the broad outlines of the traditional Evangelical narrative (he extends it to Catholic and Magesterial Protestant traditions as well) derive not from Biblical narratives but from Plato. Unfortunately, McLaren casts Plato only as the first step in a larger metanarrative, and that move is what makes things go downhill in a hurry. In McLaren’s “six-line narrative” to which he refers again and again as he digs into his ten questions, Plato is only the first stage in the grand narrative, ruined when the world falls from Platonic perfection (which sounds more like Plotinus’s realm of Ideas) into the “storied” world of Aristotle.
I’m certain Aristotle would have been surprised to find out that he was writing a simple sequel to Plato rather than supplanting his philosophy, but even more surprising to Alexander’s tutor would no doubt be that, according to McLaren, Aristotle held that forms do not have any existence, properly speaking, save as mental constructs. (If Dante’s right that Aristotle is in Limbo, where he might converse with future ages’ non-Christian philosophers, no doubt someone has told him by now that the forms as purely mental was actually one of William of Ockham’s central contributions to philosophy in the fourteenth century.) Perhaps more surprising still would be that, after dwelling in the Aristotle trench, the eternal souls that Plato does talk about (though sometimes in terms of reincarnation) return to a “Platonic” stasis, some by achieving salvation (another category rather alien to Plato and to Aristotle) and then reaching a final Platonic (neo-Platonic?) ideal, and some by falling into what McLaren calls “Greek Hades,” a construct that of course predates Plato and Aristotle by a few centuries and has little to do, in the texts I’ve read, with punishing earthly evil. If one says anything about Homer’s Hades, one should say that it’s terrifyingly egalitarian, and that’s what Achilles hates so much–he’s forgotten just as readily as all of the other shades about him.
If all of that sounds familiar through the haze of misused Greek texts, it’s because the “Greco-Roman narrative” that McLaren would impose upon Plato and Aristotle (the tag team!) is far more akin to what Origen, Augustine, and other Christian writers would call the narrative of creation, fall, and redemption. Although certain iterations of that narrative sequence deserve criticism, McLaren does nobody any favors (especially those of us who love teaching Plato) by inventing a syncretic thought-system that simply does not exist in classical texts and then loading that cumbersome burden on some of Christianity’s best tutors.
As a passing comment in the introduction to one of his chapters, McLaren notes that, although he’s not been a seminarian, he has read “thousands of theology books” (78). I suppose my own counsel for aspiring Christian writers is that we read fewer books, perhaps dozens, but take the time that good books deserve to understand and live with them.
Brian McLaren Gets Sneaky
Given the unhappy choice between accusing a writer I like (and I do like Brian McLaren) of duplicity and insinuating that the same writer has forgotten or misread, I’ll usually err on the side of charity and say that, for example, McLaren probably read some really bad books about Greco-Roman philosophy instead of reading translations of Plato and Aristotle themselves, and that likely led to his strange construction “Greco-Roman.” But there are moments of this book that make me deeply suspicious, and although I’d prefer not to approach people I like with suspicion… well, here goes.
In an early section of the book, McLaren relates a talk he gave at a conference in which he lined up seven people on the stage, each representing a historical figure. In a diagram that I won’t reproduce here (I’m going to be cross-posting this review, and so I’m trying to keep html to a minimum), McLaren labels seven stick figures as follows:
Jesus, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther or Erasmus, Calvin or Wesley or Newton, Pope Benedict or Jerry Falwell or Billy Graham
After he briefly notes that folks who get their theology from this stream aren’t “directly seeing Jesus” (36), he gives the people in the row a different set of names:
Adam, Abraham, Moses, David, Amos or Isaiah or Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Jesus
His point seems to be that the reading of Biblical texts that will follow in his book, unlike the “Greco-Roman” version of things, would work forwards up to Jesus rather than backwards to Jesus, therefore giving a different sort of story.
The problems are obvious, of course: without even reaching for my bookshelf, I could tell you in which books Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Erasmus, Calvin, and Pope Benedict talk about the six figures that McLaren seems to think he’s rediscovering. Beyond that, McLaren’s progressive theology, a tradition that doubtless deserves a hearing in its own right and on its own terms, has its own “hidden six” that McLaren never names. So if I might offer one possible lineup, some whose influence I detect globally and others with page numbers where I detected some of their influence:
Jesus, Vico (50-51), Hegel (239), Marx (239) or Darwin (14-15), Nietzsche or Wellhausen, Foucault (31) or Freud or Bultmann, Ehrman or Crossan or Borg
Such is not to say that the Traditionalist Six automatically deserves more of a hearing than do the Progressive Six. But I do think that anyone, left-wing or right-wing, should have the honesty to name one’s own influences rather than pitting one’s own Bible-loving self against one’s traditions-of-men enemies. All of us who come to the Christian tradition know Adam and David; let’s have some honest conversation about how we’re using them and how they influence us.
Beyond the invisible-influence suspicion, I had some real troubles with the ways that McLaren talks about professionally trained authority figures. In one passage he would say that folks who hold seminary credentials likely have good intentions but, because of their need to support themselves and because they haven’t progressed along his (Maslow-flavored–this is another instance of invisible influence) color-coded scale of theological awareness. In another he would refer to clergy-types as prison guards (31) who are keeping folks from their spiritual freedom. And with regards to formal training itself, McLaren in this book, as in his other books, makes a point of boasting that he’s not had formal seminary training (though apparently he’s read thousands of theology books), but late in the game, giving advice to clergy who think their congregations might be interested in moving up a step on the Maslow-McLaren rainbow, writes thus:
Get a consultant. There is enormous power in having the guidance of a wise, gifted, and experienced person who remains outside your congregational or denominational system. Good consultants are expensive, I know, but so are good heart surgeons, and the two have a lot in common. (247)
First of all, as someone who loves Plato (the real Plato, not the one whom McLaren invents earlier in the book), I immediately recognized Plato’s community-leader-as-physician riff, and I chuckled (just for a second) that McLaren was now out-Platonizing Plato. For those who have not read much Plato, his argument for appointing the best and the brightest to administer a community rather than trusting such things to democracy involves comparing justice to medicine and noting that very few people want medical decisions made on the basis of popular opinion. I would have expected such an argument to extend to ordained and seminary-trained clergy rather than freelance consultants, given the rather structured and hierarchical world of heart surgeons, but I was still chuckling.
But then, once the immediate amusement wore off, I remembered the mercenary and self-serving motives assigned to folks who actually dedicate their lives to one place as pastors and priests, and I was quite angry that he reserved none of that fury for hirelings who jet around the country collecting “consultant fees.” For whatever reason, my angry self thought, McLaren prefers temporary fee-grabbers to those who practice the old monastic virtue of stability.
Then I realized that both Brian McLaren and Tony Jones pitch themselves as consultants, and after a bit of Google searching, I realized that Doug Pagitt and Len Sweet also advertise themselves as consultants. That’s when the anger turned to suspicion.
Please understand that I’m an equal-opportunity religious-consultant-hater; if Mark Driscoll or Jim Dobson or Ken Ham do the same, I don’t like that either. As an Aristotelian (the Aristotle whose Nicomachean Ethics I love, not the Ockham-Aristotle that McLaren invented), I believe that leadership happens best, especially for communities dedicated to reconstituting the body of the Cosmic King (that would be churches, folks), when those communities look within rather than shuffling through resumes, and I’m inclined to hold consultants far below the permanent-hire-from-out-of-town in terms of the goods they do for a community. And given that McLaren in other places fires pot shots at the folks who dedicate their lives to particular communities in particular places, I couldn’t help but continue in my suspicion.
I realize that not everybody is as suspicious of out-of-town “experts” as I am, and I’d be fine if McLaren were consistently sanguine. But as it stands, it looks like he decided to use this book, which pitches itself as a moment of honesty, as a platform to promote himself and his Emergent Village buddies while calling dedicated ordained folks prison guards, and that’s an inexcusable bit of duplicity.
Brian McLaren Gets the Nod
As I wrote at the beginning of this marathon review, a book’s excellence lies not in its being right but in its being interesting. Given that criterion, I’d still recommend this book for folks interested in reading some philosophical-progressive alternatives to modern evangelicalism. There are some moments of sloppy thinking and others of outright self-serving dishonesty, but on balance, I can accept those sorts of things in a book that spurs me to think for a while, and I think that this book did. If you run into folks like the ones in the book’s opening anecdote, folks who tell you that Brian McLaren is too dangerous a writer for Christians to read without throwing their souls into peril, do those folks the courtesy of saying what the old lady in McLaren’s story told him: “I don’t see what the fuss is about” (2).
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