For the most part, I have stayed out of the fray over the orthodoxy (generous or otherwise) and orthopraxy of Brian D. McLaren for one simple reason: although I’ve read a lot about him, I really haven’t read much of him (only The Church on the Other Side). Most of what I have read about him has seemed polarized: he is either the second-coming of a Minor Prophet or the latest emanation of a False Prophet. Few indeed have been the reasonable voices: Scot McKnight comes to mind but I couldn’t accept all that he had to say, either. That has nothing to do with him and everything to do with me: in my ignorance of McLaren, I didn’t know how to evaluate McKnight’s interaction with and frequent defense of the Emergent contingent. (Finally I emailed him and asked him if he were still orthodox in his beliefs; he assured me he was. I believed him; I still believe him.)

Not much has really changed - I am still ignorant, but slightly less so. I have just finished McLaren’s The Secret Message of Jesus and have found what I believe are some valuable insights and perspectives therein, some of which are intended and at least one that is not.

The purpose of this post is not to provide an apologetic for McLaren nor even to review his book. It is to attempt to shed a wee bit of light on him as an individual and perhaps make him a bit more palatable to some. I fully recognize that there are those among us who will require the Heimlich maneuver for anything not written by their denominational patron saint - Calvin, Luther, Wesley, Darby, Osteen - and I don’t expect to make many converts with them. But hopefully there are others who might benefit from McLaren if he is viewed from a profitable, maybe even biblical perspective.

Having said that, I do not believe that my view is the last word (or even the word after that) on McLaren. It is, however, my word and I think it has some merit, at least for me if no one else. I want to make two points in this post; perhaps, in another post, I’ll provide additional quotes from and comments about his latest book.

First, I think McLaren can be viewed as a prophet but not as a priest. I take my definitions from McLaren:

The best way I’ve found to understand Jewish prophets is to see them in dynamic tension with another important religious community in Judaism: the priests. Priests were responsible for the regular, ongoing, day-to-day and year-to-year, religious life of Judaism - the key words being regularity and its cousin regulations. The priests made sure the traditions and practices of regular religious life went on as they should with holidays and sacrifices, feasts and fasts, Scripture and tradition. In Jesus’ day, priests were closely allied with the scribes - religious scholars who studied and argued about what exactly the rules and regulations of Judaism should be. Together, they constituted what we might call the religious establishment . . .

“There were tensions between Aaron the priest and Moses the prophet, and tensions between priests and prophets continued through the centuries. Priests focused on regularity and tradition, but what happened when people began going through the motions with their bodies, while their hearts and minds were unengaged? . . . In those cases, a prophet would arise and tell the people that God is downright disgusted with external religious observance that rolls along without heartfelt sincerity and without commitment to social justice and practical compassion for the poor and week . . .

“As you’d expect, since their purpose was to disrupt the status quo, their life and rhetoric were necessarily unruly, disturbing, sometimes shocking.” - pp 20-22

I think McLaren has put his finger on something here, and it is - at the very least - himself: McLaren is a brilliant prophetic mind and an alluring prophetic voice in many, many ways. It is impossible for anyone paying attention to the cultural climate of current Christianity to not agree with many of the points he makes. He sees clearly; he knows the emperor is naked and is not hesitant to say so.

Consider, for example, McLaren’s statements about the conspiracy of religious and political leaders to crucify Jesus Christ, thus bringing His ministry to what appears to be a tragic, failed end:

This is the scandal of the message of Jesus. The kingdom of God does fail. It is weak. It is crushed. When its message of love, peace, justice, and truth meets the principalities and powers of government and religion armed with spears and swords and crosses, they unleash their hate, force, manipulation, and propaganda. Like those defenseless students standing before tanks and machine guns in Tiananmen Square, the resistance movement known as the kingdom of God is crushed.

“But what is the alternative? We really must consider this question. Could the kingdom of God come with bigger weapons, sharper swords, more clever political organizing? Could the kingdom of God be a matter of what is often called redemptive violence? Or would that methodology corrupt the kingdom of God so it would stop being ‘of God’ at all and instead become just another earthly (and perhaps in some sense demonic) principality or power? . . .

“What if the only way for the kingdom of God to come in its true form - as a kingdom ‘not of this world’ - is through weakness and vulnerability, sacrifice and love?” - p 69

Powerful and timely words, these are, and McLaren is speaking them at a point in American history when Christianity is becoming so politicized as to be rejected more for its politics than for its message of salvation.

On the other hand, and by his own admission, McLaren is not a priest, i.e., he is not one who is a biblical scholar or skilled in discerning what biblical teachings are timeless and those that are culturally influenced. As a result, he sometimes makes statements that are unnecessary and/or untenable. Touching on the matter of future things, he says,

Others - and I am among them, although I was born and thoroughly indoctrinated into the former approach - believe that neither the Bible nor the teachings of Jesus are intended to give us a timeline of the future. In our view, God intended to create our universe the way parents give birth to a child: the child is given limits and guidance, but she also has freedom to live her own life. That means that the future of the universe is not determined as if it were a movie that’s already been filmed and is just being shown to us. Nor is it completely left to chance like dice cast on a table. Rather, God’s creation is maturing with both freedom and limits under the watchful eye of a caring parent. So what we find in the Bible and the teachings of Jesus are not determining prognostications or schematic diagrams of the future but instead something far more valuable: warnings and promises.”

Certainly there is much truth in what he has said here, but there is also much that has been ignored or left unexplained. When McLaren attempts to turn theologian or exegete, he is out of his depth. He is more philosophical than theological, more esoteric than exegetic. This is not a character flaw or a reason to dismiss everything he says; it is a reason to read his writings with discernment, rejecting his misconceptions (not deceptions) and profiting from his legitimate exhortations.

Which leads to my second point and one which, unintentionally and unconsciously, McLaren makes himself. The second point is that McLaren is an old wineskin. He grew up in the church - a fundamentalist church, as he says - and was innoculated as a child to the variant strains of Christianity spreading like hearty viruses throughout the Christendom of his youth. As he grew older, however, the innoculation seemed to lose its effectiveness: he jettisoned the fundamentalist mentality and set off to find a new and better way.

Therein lies the problem: there is obviously a bad taste in McLaren’s mouth about his early, fundamentalist upbringing; he is so soured on the old that he too often unnecessarily and mistakenly rejects what is good and true. So strong is his dislike and distrust of anything remotely “fundamentalist” that he could be considered “fundaphobic” - if there were such a thing.

Though being an “old wineskin,” McLaren does not burst but he cannot help but distort the flavor of the fresh, new wine he seeks to serve to others. It does not seem possible for him to achieve a rapprochement between what fundamentalism had right and what he now rightly proclaims.

The fault is in his shortcomings as a priest - or, more accurately, as a scribe, a biblical scholar who is able to “rightly divide the word of truth.” He is a poor theologian at many points and exegetically completely dependent upon the expertise of others; the “expertise” of others is determined by whether or not they support and agree with his position. (He is hardly alone in that proclivity.)

It would not be a mistake, perhaps, to reject or ignore McLaren totally: the church is not dependent on any one individual for its continuance or health. But it would be, I think, unprofitable to reject or ignore him completely. It requires discernment and careful reading to gather his roses without being pricked by his thorns, but he is - in his prophetic role - a voice with much to say for those who have ears discerning ears to hear.


2 Cor 1.13