In “A New Kind of Christianity” Brian McLaren urges Christians/Churches to wrestle with 10 questions in order to “dis embed” themselves from their Modern assumptions and incarnate the gospel afresh in a Postmodern world.
Question #1 – The Narrative Question: What is the Overarching Story Line of the Bible.
McLaren argues that we have tended to “read the Bible forward,” allowing our understanding of the story line of the Bible to be heavily influenced by what came after Jesus (Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, etc.). Specifically, we have tended to read Scripture through the Premodern/Modern lens of the “Greco-Roman narrative” which leads to a Bible storyline that is characterized by 1) philosophical dualism (e.g., “a profane physical world of matter, stuff, and change…and the sacred metaphysical world of ideals, ideas, spirit, and changelessness…”), 2) intellectual superiority (through physical and social sciences we can objectively accomplish anything), and 3) social dualism/superiority (e.g., and “us” versus “them” mentality which always paints “us” in a better light).
This, in turn, led us to adopt a story line for the Bible which elevates a false view of God (this false God McLaren calls “Theos”) and a false view of life.
I appreciate McLaren’s attempt to show how we’ve adopted a view of the Bible’s story line which is heavily influnced by Greco-Roman philosophy. In his attempt to summarize this, however, he ends up overstating his case (the exact story line he believes we Christians have bought into is not exactly one I’ve ever heard taught/preached) and he suggests that Paul himself is not an adequate “lens” through which to read Jesus (a stand I’m unwilling to take). A much more comprehensive and nuanced presentation of the way in which Greco-Roman worldviews (and other worldviews) have affected our reading of the Bible’s story line can be found in Goheen’s and Bartholomew’s “Living at the Crossroads: An Introduction to Christian Worldview.”
Rather than “reading backward” through the lens of the Greco-Roman narrative, McLaren urges us to “read forward” through the lens of the Genesis-Exodus-Isaiah narrative. Genesis presents God (whom McLaren calls “Elohim”) as “creator and faithful reconciler.” Exodus presents God as “liberator from external and internal oppression.” Isaiah presents “the sacred dream of the peaceable kingdom.” This “sacred dream” is the vision of the ideal life which God is working toward even today and which God’s people are to work toward. It is this narrative which is more consistent with the person of Jesus and which speaks more to a Postmodern context.
McLaren is at his strongest here, revealing how the oft-forgotten narrative of these three fundamental books set the stage for Jesus and the rest of the New Testament.
See the “Story” tab on this website to read more proposals for understanding the story line of the Bible.
How about you? How would you summarize the Bible’s narrative? What’s rightly/wrongly influenced our view of the Bible’s narrative? What parts of the Bible’s story speak most strongly to a postmodern culture?
I would imagine that churches that derive directly from the Reformation (and it is a church like this from which McLaren has come) are much more guilty of McLaren’s accusation of “reading forward.” The CofCs love affair with Paul has been for very different reasons than those McLaren cites. Epistolary literature just made the command–example–inference hermeneutic of the CofC of yesteryear a whole lot easier. I would call that kind of thinking Enlightenment thinking, not Greco-Roman, though of course there are many affinities. I am so thankful that in the past decade and a half due to teachers like John Mark Hicks and Phil McMillion and John Fortner and writers like Walter Brueggemann, Terence Fretheim, N.T. Wright and so many others I have been fed a steady diet of creation/kingdom theology, or as McLaren calls it the Genesis–Exodus–Isaiah narrative (though what about the fallenness of Genesis 3-11 or Judges or the slow disintegration of Israel’s monarchic experiment? He is being a bit too selective. But then McLaren doesn’t want to make a big deal out of sin, does he?).
The great strong point of the creation/kingdom approach, and what makes it so “post-modern friendly” seems to be the highly relational emphasis it places on the Bible. I certainly hear my high school seniors saying that. As you have written about in other posts, the emphasis on a God as Parent is very attractive. Of course, this emphasis is not without cause: we are a relationally-challenged people who, try as we might with our closed off lives, cannot suppress our need for connection. We need to know we are loved, that we are lovable, and that we can love.
Comments are closed.