Editor's Note: Brian McLaren, senior pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church near Baltimore, Maryland, is a leading voice of the Emergent movement. He was recently featured in TIME magazine, was a guest on Larry King Live, and is a frequent contributor to evangelical publications. Our conversation with McLaren occurred this past February when he was in San Diego, California, for an Emergent conference. We want to thank McLaren for spending a few moments with us and charitably entering into conversation about his own theology, the Emergent movement, and the future of Evangelicalism.
MR: What is orthodoxy and who gets to define it?
BM: That's a great question. One of the great insights of postmodern philosophy is to pay attention to the power relationships that are involved in all discourse. If we say, "In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue," there's a power dimension to that. Because if you're a Native American, you'd say in 1492 the invasion and genocide of lands and people began. So there are power dimensions to everything we say. And this is the great challenge: to follow a master who demonstrated power by washing the feet of his disciples, and demonstrated a conquering power by being crucified by the most powerful force in the world, politically speaking. So we follow a path that has this paradoxical relationship to power. And unfortunately the word "orthodoxy" has so often been related to who has the power to tell other people what to do. Now, there's no easy solution to that.
Actually, there is a solution. It's virtue, and it's Christ-likeness. One of the things I try to suggest in my book, A Generous Orthodoxy, is that orthodoxy itself is a practice. I got this idea from Jim McClendon in his three-volume systematic theology. Volume one in that set is about ethics, because he's saying, before we can even do theology we have to be a community, and before we can be a community we need virtue, because it takes virtue to forgive and accept and to deal with power, and so forth. So ethics comes first, then doctrine comes second, and witness flows out of that. And he goes on to describe doctrine as a practice of the church seeking truth.
MR: But if orthodoxy gets defined as Christ-likeness, does the word "heresy" have any meaning or validity anymore?
BM: Well, first of all, because I'm narrative in my approach I believe we look at the history of the Christian church and we see two things. First, that there is a Christian tradition, and second, that it's a living tradition. And that's why I'm not in a hurry to have all these problems solved. I think the tradition shifts. You know, how many years did we spend grappling with the issue of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ? You could probably say it was a three-hundred-year discussion. And so, I think the Eastern Orthodox have a great sense of patience in this, because these things take time.
I definitely do believe in heresy, but I also think that heresy is not just having bad ideas; it is seeking to divide the church with bad ideas. And divisiveness is a really horrible thing. And so this is where the generosity and the orthodoxy aren't two separate things you're trying to put together. You need both of them: enough generosity to keep room for the tradition to stay living, and enough orthodoxy to keep the tradition from losing its identity and its way.
MR: How generous is your orthodoxy? For example, are you willing to allow in Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, or someone with a legalistic theology close to that of the Judaizers of Paul's day?
BM: That's a great question. This is why I think there are legitimate spheres of authority. So the leaders of a local church have to decide who they're going to let in and for what purposes. So at our church, we let anybody in our doors unless they're going to disrupt or harm the community, but we don't let just anybody into membership. We let people into membership who are in sync with our vision, mission, and values as well as our understanding of the gospel. And we have a good bit of latitude in that, but a Mormon won't want to be part of our church as a member. But that's where I just think for this to all work we have to respect that different communities have standards. And though they have different standards, that might be good. I sometimes think that God's sovereignty leads people to have different sets of strengths. And this is where the infatuation with what's relevant and successful now I think can be harmful, because there may be denominations right now that are not very effective, but they're preserving something that three hundred years from now we're all going to desperately need. And that's one of the reasons I hope we can be generous and respectful of one another. We might have different jobs to do, but as Paul said "I shouldn't judge the servant of another."
MR: Part of the movement's energy and vibrancy seems to come from reading more widely within and beyond the Christian tradition for resources. But is there a danger here of skimming various traditions as tourists without really knowing any of them well?
BM: You're absolutely right, that's a great danger. It's one of the reasons why a lot of people are anti-denominational. I actually hope all our denominations survive and thrive, because, to preserve an Anabaptist value of peace, it takes a lifetime of being raised in a certain kind of community. To retain and preserve a Reformed understanding of all that is captured in the word "sovereignty," you can't just get that in a five minute perusal of a book. That's something that goes so deep in a person's roots from being in a tradition. When Lutherans use the phrase, "the Word of God," they mean more by that phrase than anybody that I'm ever around. And this is one of the values of communities, but when a Lutheran who has that so deep in him, he can convey it to me when we sit down together, and I can then benefit by it, and this is the way I hope we move ahead. It's not just taking all our traditions and throwing them in a blender. No, we should keep the distinctiveness but share our treasures with each other.
MR: Some might argue that the Emergent movement is attempting to translate the faith into the language of the postmodern age. William Willimon has written that perhaps we shouldn't attempt to squeeze the gospel and translate it into the vernacular of the current generation but that we should think of it as a foreign language others need to learn. What are your thoughts on this?
BM: That's a really healthy dynamic tension. Here's what I would say has happened to me. Because I'm an evangelical (at least I think I am … maybe some other people don't), I want to help people find Christ, and to do that I started in that mode of wanting to translate so they can understand. Well, once I got into conversation with a lot of postmodern people, I started understanding their questions. When I understood their questions, I realized that some of them were not about the content of the gospel but were about the methodology of modernity, and they were turned off by this methodology. So I have become increasingly interested not in the question how do we translate the gospel into postmodern culture, but how have we already syncretized and domesticated the gospel in modern culture? Now, to take a domesticated gospel and just domesticate it under another rubric I don't think is a step forward, and this is the dynamic tension that I think we always live with. The gospel must engage with culture. If you're going to use language, language exists as a part of culture. Leslie Newbigin said there's no such thing as a pure gospel, if by that you mean a gospel that's not expressed in terms of a culture. But if it becomes domesticated by any culture, then we are just parrots. And of course this is part of our crisis right now. I think the religious right in America ends up domesticating the gospel into a Republican agenda, and vice versa.
MR: There is a lot of talk in Emergent circles about "my experience of God," "my testimony," "my practice of the faith," "where am I in this text?", and so on. Could this perhaps be criticized for being too "me-centered," especially when compared with Paul's goal to know nothing but Christ and him crucified?
BM: First of all, the danger of me-ism is so great, and I think that's a serious problem in this Emergent conversation, but I think this is a serious problem across Evangelicalism. In fact, one of the most controversial things in my most recent book is that I'm raising the question whether the salvation of individual souls to go to heaven after they die is the point of the gospel. And I think just about all evangelicals of every stripe are working under that assumption. When that is the ultimate question, I think there is always a gravity toward individualism, and I don't think the Bible thinks that way. I think the biblical mindset is more on creation and the people of God as a community. And that actually is a very strong value in secular postmodern philosophy, as found in the writings of Alistair McIntyre, Michael Polanyi, and others.
So that danger of me-ism is really there. But I don't think the solution is just to say I'll know nothing but Christ and him crucified because, though it's a quote from the Apostle Paul and legitimate, I also think of Ephesians 3, that we will know the love of God with all the saints. So it's not just individual, it's communal. Something, I think, bad happens when we say it's all about me and God. We miss the community and we miss the world, and I don't think we can have an authentic Christian faith that's about me and Jesus.
MR: Is there a hint of Marxist categories in your continual emphasis on community and concern about power structures?
BM: You know Leslie Newbigin considered Marxism a Christian heresy, because the Christianity of mid-nineteenth-century England that Marx was exposed to was focused on me and Jesus. It was the era of the Victorian parlor hymn and it was the era of a very personalized and pious faith that didn't seem to care that little boys were being dropped down chimneys to get black lung, and that workers were coming out of the mines incredibly abused. It's not so much that it's Marxist, but a lot of people are paying attention to the gospel of the Kingdom of God. And when you pay attention to the Kingdom of God, you see that it's closely related with justice and also with community, because "Kingdom" is a communal word. And all the talk about candles and musical styles I just think is a huge distraction. To me the real question is what do we make of the gospel of the Kingdom?
MR: In Emergent circles, there seems to be a big emphasis on "right now," this present moment. Does this attitude reflect a distinctively modern preoccupation over immediate relevance?
BM: If that's your impression, or what you're hearing, I certainly wouldn't argue against that. The interesting thing to me is that I hear in this setting a lot more of the discussion of the term Robert Webber and Leonard Sweet use: ancient-future. An interest in where we're going in the future, but a greater degree of looking for resources in the past. It's instinctive for me to bring up a prayer from Origen or Thomas Kempis, in order to be more enriched and rooted in tradition. In some circles I hear an awful lot of that, you know, where everything is what's the latest hot new trick. But I actually hear that less around here than I do in a lot of other evangelical circles.
MR: According to the latest research, most teens growing up, even in conservative Christian circles, know very little about the content and teaching of the Bible, and their values and practices don't really differ from their non-Christian counterparts. How is Emergent going to address this phenomenon?
BM: Oh this is a huge problem, and the complexities of this are so great. The best research I'm aware of now is telling us what we probably should have known intuitively, and that is for children to end up with a coherent faith as adults, while they are children they need to be exposed to adults who have a vibrant, vital faith and talk about it. It goes back to Deuteronomy 6, teaching our children, training them while we're walking down the way, and so on. So I think this is going to call for a radical rethinking of what we have called Christian education, which itself is a modern model. It's put people in modern industrial-style classrooms, and through modern age-graded curricula, and all the rest. Not to say there's no value in all of that but when we segregate children and only keep them by themselves, we then make it impossible for them to be around adults who could become those kinds of older mentors and guides and examples.
MR: Is it also a loss of parents passing on the faith to the next generation?
BM: I think parents might pass on their beliefs, but I think the power is in passing on their stories. Obviously their beliefs need to be passed on, too, but the stories embody their beliefs. In some ways it's the old evangelical word "testimony," but it's not just the testimony of how I was saved at one point thirty years ago. It's how God was real in the crisis I had at work last week, how God helped us in our family argument the other day, and for people to talk about a living relationship with a living God.
MR: Which in your opinion is worse, liberalism or fundamentalism?
BM: Well, whoever has the most power and weapons is the most dangerous. And right now, the liberals have an awful lot of power in Hollywood, and the conservatives have an awful lot of power in Washington. So, that to me is like choosing between lung cancer and leukemia.
MR: You mentioned in one of your talks that you thought fundamentalist Christians were more dangerous than fundamentalist Muslims. Could you unpack that?
BM: Well it's not because I think they're more wrong, but that they have more power. And so when you have a lot of power, you can do more damage. So as an example, if a person thinks there is some level of validity to the whole issue of global warming, as I do, and if Christians in the United States don't get the government to care about global warming, then the entire effort of the rest of the world would be reduced by thirty percent (because we produce about thirty percent of the greenhouse gases in the world). And conservative Christians who right now have the ear of the administration in a sense are the ones who you have to hold accountable for that. And if conservative Christians become very pro-war and are willing to legitimize an imperial stance . . . you know Muslims can do some damage with terrorism if they have biological and chemical weapons, it can be terrible damage. But first of all, we have the most biological and chemical weapons and we have the most nuclear weapons. So if we aren't really in sync with the Spirit on these things, we can do a lot of harm.
MR: What would you like to see as the fruit of your labors ten years down the road?
BM: Oh, I'm embarrassed to answer that because it will sound so grandiose, but here's the way I would say it. The Christian religion is the biggest religion in the world. And if Christians have a healthy view of God, a healthy view of the gospel, a healthy view of their neighbor, a healthy view of God's purposes for this world, then the world will be a way better place. But if they don't, if they only see the gospel as another personal enhancement, if they only see the gospel as some way to gain power over other people, the world is going to be in deep trouble, especially in our encounter with Islam. And so, what I hope I can be some very tiny part of is helping Christians become more in sync with Jesus so that our role in the world will be more redemptive.
MR: What's the subject of your most recent book?
BM: My latest book, The Last Word, and the Word After That, struggles with the issues of judgment and justice and how they work out in this life and beyond.
