By: Keith Miller

27 March 2005 Telling the Story of a Pluralistic Kind of Christian: Review of Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christian

In the last five years, Brian McLaren has assumed a leadership role within a segment of Evangelical Christianity. His influence has spread so wide that TIME magazine recently named him one of the "25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America." A New Kind of Christian and its sequel, The Story We Find Ourselves In, have been very instrumental in winning him this broad audience. This month he is releasing the final piece in this trilogy, The Last Word… and the Word After That.

The conclusion of his series is a good time to look back and reassess the book that started it all. What is McLaren calling us to change about the Church and Christianity? Should we become this "new kind of Christian?"

Interpreting McLaren's Parables
Starting with the introduction, the reader realizes that A New Kind of Christian is not the run-of-the-mill Christian book. Author Brian McLaren tells a story and uses his narrative to convey his ideas and opinions.

Despite the unorthodox form, we should understand that McLaren has a position; he has an agenda. Unfortunately, he might disagree with this point. In interviews, McLaren disparages the notion that he is leading a movement, rather, he claims, he is engaging in a conversation. He might point to the fact that his books are stories rather than dissertations as evidence that he doesn't have a narrow agenda.

But let us look at another famous Christian storyteller: Jesus. The Lord often told stories to convey the truths he was teaching his followers. We call them parables. Are we to say that he didn't have an agenda? Of course he had a plan: he came to seek and save the lost.

Jesus effectively used narratives to force his listeners to grapple with the issue at hand. But a lot of time, even his closest disciples could not understand what he was talking about. In those cases, Jesus would stop and explain his point for them.

In this review, I want to distill a couple of McLaren's stories and show what points he is making with them. This is part of the point of stories; we're supposed to try and understand them.

The Characters: Dan Pool and Neil Everett Oliver
In order to understand the story, we must start with the characters. McLaren's story centers around an Evangelical pastor, Dan Poole, who is becoming disillusioned with his church, his ministry, and even the gospel. The narrative picks up when he meets Dr. Neil Everett Oliver, a high school science teacher who seems to understand what he is going through.

On one level the relationship between Poole and Oliver can be understood as something of an allegory. Pastor Dan represents today's disaffected evangelical church and Dr. Oliver, who insists on being called Neo (the Greek prefix for new), is none-too-subtly cast as a prophet for a new, postmodern Christianity.

Through this allegorical subtext and the conversations these two characters share, McLaren articulates a revolutionary vision of how the Church should accommodate itself to the changes going on in the culture.

The Setting: The Dawn of a New Age
As mentioned above, Neo leads Pastor Dan into an understanding of postmodernity. His first objective is to prove that such an age exists.

So McLaren has Neo, a history buff, present a Cliff's Notes version of history; explaining that the era of modernity is coming to a close and postmodernity is dawning. Neo claims that the year 2000 AD is a pivotal turning point just like 1500 AD.(1) Appropriating the consensus that 1500 marked a shift from Medieval times to the Modern era, McLaren wants the reader to believe that finally, in the year 2000, the stars have aligned for the birth of a new era.

For both 1500 and 2000, seven categories of crisis are listed: a new communication technology, a new scientific worldview, a new intellectual elite, a new transportation technology that "shrinks" the globe, the transition of economic systems, a new military technology, and a revolutionary religious movement.

It's a great list. All of those new things coincided in 1500. All of those new things coincided in 2000. The problem with his thesis is that those preconditions are present in almost every time.

For example, take the year 1900. It had the telephone, evolution, Marx and Nietzsche, Trains and Steamboats, the rise of Neo-Colonialism, Breech-loading rifles, and the Modernist/Fundamentalist controversy. Did it signal the dawn of a new age? Not according to McLaren.

Why does McLaren want to establish the dawning of a new era? For starters, it would free one of any responsibility to disprove the tried and true ways of the past. A new era would enable a broad-stroke dismissal of the traditions of American Evangelicalism something like, "Those ways might have worked in the past, but the future is different rendering that experience irrelevant."

Neo almost articulates this sentiment word for word, asking some college students

Will you continue to live loyally in the fading world, in the waning light of the setting sun of modernity? Or will you venture ahead in faith, to practice your faith and devotion to Christ in the new emerging culture of postmodernity?(2)

Plot Development: The Reformation, part deux
To win support from his Evangelical readers, McLaren draws repeated parallels between the "Emerging church" and the Protestant reformation. In the introduction, after expressing his frustration and disillusionment with the modern Church, McLaren conjectures:

"Maybe Martin Luther felt this way in his life as a monk. Maybe when he was told to preach about indulgences or to make room for emissaries from Rome to do so, he thought to himself, 'I can't take this anymore. Maybe I'll go back to being a lawyer." His experience seemed bad to him. (He must have been frightened: Am I losing my faith? Am I falling away from God?) But Protestants would agree, at least, that something good was afoot."(3)

McLaren is appropriating the pro-Reformation sympathies of modern evangelicals to engender support for his project.

Later, when some eager college students ask what they should do to usher in this new postmodern church, Neo asks them to imagine they were giving Luther advice in 1507. The advice he places in their mouths is cleverly supposed to represent the core attitudes of the Reformation:

"Be open to new ideas and new interpretations of the faith.
"Don't be too quick to criticize...
"Don't resist change. Go with it...
"Keep going back to the Bible, but not with the standard interpretations blinding you to new interpretations."(4)

Subtly, McLaren has just badly misrepresented the philosophy of the reformers. Luther, along with the vast majority of his peers, believed himself to be returning to the original doctrines of the New Testament church not looking for "new ideas and new interpretations of the faith."

The reformers would have never talked about themselves "updating the Church" for the new demands of modernity. They were willing to challenge some authorities, but only when supported by the early church and the original sources. Remember that their rallying cry was "sola Scriptura" not "sola Modernity."

The Climax: A Pluralistic Jesus?
So McLaren's setting and plot seem to be pointing towards something. If we are at the dawn of a new age, we should be receptive to "a new kind of Christian." If the Reformers changed doctrine to keep up with the times, we should change ours as well. But what is McLaren telling us to change?

Much of the remainder of the book seems to focus on one particular answer to this question. Tentatively at first-more and more as the book goes on-the idea of religious pluralism is endorsed. I believe that this is the core doctrinal change for McLaren's "new kind of Christian."

The subject is first broached when Pastor Dan asks, "Neo, what does a guy like you say about other religions? I mean, do you believe Jesus is the only way?"(5) Neo dodges this question. Dan then properly asserts, "You're more or less a pluralist,"(6) linking Neo's beliefs with those who believe that many religions lead to God. Neo responds to this accusation by getting angry, comparing this question to an "inquisition," and forcing Dan to apologize.

Through this exchange, McLaren attempts to diffuse the reaction in his doctrinally sound readers to his support for religious pluralism. The reader likes Neo and thinking he is a pluralist made Neo mad. Therefore, the thinking goes, don't call Neo a pluralist.

But Neo goes on to make claims about other faiths that are in clear opposition to the Gospel: "the world is better off for having these religions than having no religions at all, or just one, even if it were ours,"(7) and "I believe that [Jesus] is the way… [but] too often, when we quote the verse about him being the way, it sounds like we're saying he's in the way-as if people are trying to come to God and Jesus is blocking the path."(8) Even if it makes him feel bad, Christians should call this heresy by its name: pluralism.

After an episode where Neo overtly embraces a syncretic method of evangelism, he roots his pluralism in a story from C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. In the story, a servant of the false god Tash meets the true God Aslan and realizes that he has erred and will surely die. But Aslan welcomes him and explains, "I take to me the services which thou hast done to [Tash], for I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him."(9)

Both of McLaren's characters agree that Lewis' story "make[s] you want to worship God," and complain that "many people [like] to read C. S. Lewis at home, but somehow, when his ideas or approach are taken into the pulpit at church, they get nervous." From these approvals it seems clear that McLaren is not merely contemplating this position, but has endorsed it.

This is a problem for bible-believing Christians. Acts 4:12 says, "1Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved." McLaren is venturing far a field from this established doctrine.

Neo goes even further in a chapter entitled "It's None of Your Business Who Goes To Hell." McLaren's chapter title is his attempt to articulate his position on the debate over soteriology (how people are saved). He thinks that "exclusivists" who articulate that only those who have a saving knowledge of Christ will gain eternal life are "quite odd, if not heretical."(10) While there is no explicit endorsement of universalism or inclusivism, the position of "through Christ alone" is subject to criticism.

The Cliffhanger
While we should remember that McLaren has some good points on many other issues, it is hard to understand why so many evangelicals have embraced him. He is presenting a wrong position on his core issue and his support for it is questionable. It is not clear that we are entering a new era that antiquates the past. The Reformers did not think of themselves building a new theology for a new era.

What more is in store? The final installment of the trilogy may positively resolve some to these questions. But unless McLaren clarifies his position rigorously, it may be time for the "old kind of Christians" to reject a "new kind."

(1) pp. 29-31.
(2) p. 38.
(3) p. xii.
(4) p. 41.
(5) p. 60.
(6) Ibid.
(7) p. 63.
(8) p. 65.
(9) C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle (New York: Collier, 1956), pp. 164-165.
(10) p. 127.