December
2007
Brian McLaren: Roots Christianity and the 21st Century Challenge
It is always and everywhere a good thing for people like me (smug, self-satisfied religious liberals – yup, that’s me) to be thoroughly doused with fresh cold water. In this case, with living water.
I knew a little bit about Brian McLaren’s remarkable nurturing of emergent Christian thinking and emergent Christian communities before reading his new book, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope (just published by Thomas Nelson). But I must say I was not in the least bit prepared for McLaren’s theological range and depth or for his completely compelling social analysis. In a former life McLaren taught college students how to write, and his skill with language shows in the compression and clarity he exhibits in this volume.
This book is ideally suited for small group study. Like many others, I am usually annoyed by scripted discussion questions—particularly when these are plopped into works of fiction. But McLaren’s material here is so rich and provocative that everyone who reads it will feel the urge to be in conversation. The suggested starter questions are thus welcome in this instance.
So what is the book about? In a word, it is about idolatry; specifically, it is about American idolatries of all sorts—and also about the Jesus call to change our lives at the most profound level, to live differently and to become a saving remnant of folks who can still speak truth in love.
Eight sections and thirty-four chapters altogether. They alternate between what we used to call scriptural exposition (do they still call it that?) and social exposition. McClaren is equally adept in both modes. I particularly want to recommend Part 2: Chapter 7 – “Three Interlocking Systems,” which accurately names three subsystems within a larger “suicidal machine” that is (for the most part) steadily killing off our spirits and numbing our consciences in 21st century America. Two of the subsystems—our preoccupation with prosperity and our preoccupation with security—are tempered—but just barely—by our diminished residual concern for social equity.
Following this solid critical analysis, McLaren goes on to supply nine tight chapters that reframe and re-introduce the figure of Jesus as a spiritual and social revolutionary whose “dangerous memory” (Gustavo Gutierrez) has been all but expunged—can one say malled over?—in our consumerist and increasingly mindless U.S. culture.
Then once more, only this time through a still-sharper theological lens, McLaren examines our self-defeating security and prosperity systems in the clear light of core gospel values before taking us out with a strong coda on the Christian imperative for social equity and the nascent revolution of hope that is inextricably linked to “a wild and radical believing.”
The concluding chapters are among the strongest in the book, especially McLaren’s discussion of the relentlessly reinforced “covert curriculum” that seeks to accommodate all of us to continuing social oppression and, in consequence, to the death of our own spirits.
Oh, and did I mention that this is a superb book for use in adult study circles? I guarantee that it will be received as water in a weary land. Get it, read it, talk about it, and live it out.
It goes without saying that the revolution of hope McClaren describes is always God’s revolution (“thy kingdom come…”), but it is also our human task and privilege to seek to bring it to blessed fruition in the here and now (“…on earth, as it is in heaven”).