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Another substantive contribution I think these emergents make is that they realize the relative lack of good father figures as shepherds in too many evangelical churches. I think many believers in evangelical circles can feel they can’t ask their pastors and teachers their questions or express their doubts.

I remember a sad story from a church class, in which a woman pulled the teacher aside and asked if she could ask questions. Apparently, she had not been given that permission before, or had been denied it, so she needed to see if it was okay (safe?) for her to do that in this class. I know of another person in another church who raised what sounded like good questions to me, only to be rebuffed by her teacher (who also was an elder) that he would not even consider her questions. McLaren and Pagitt both recognize this problem. As a major heading on the back cover of A New Kind of Christianity asks, “What would Christianity look like if we weren’t afraid to ask questions?”

But, if we preach and teach with tones of self-assurance, then someone who is struggling in his or her walk with God could feel embarrassed, and even intimidated, to ask questions or admit doubts. We also can communicate that people should just take “the” biblical teaching (which, on some topics, might just be our strong opinions) at face value. It also can convey that Christianity doesn’t really have answers to hard questions. So, we have to just accept the Bible’s teachings on faith, without further evidence. But biblical faith is not a blind leap; it involves knowledge that God has spoken and can be trusted.

Moreover, this approach can create suspicion in listeners, and even a condescending attitude: “Who are you to question me?” as though we are high and lifted up. But if we have puffed up hearts, our youth and postmodern-influenced people will sense that immediately. Yet, even if we unconsciously and subtly live from our own minds and resources (and not God’s), and not in vital union with both His heart and mind, then to that extent we will be living out of the flesh, which will include arrogance. But that is the factor so many are sensing in all-too-many evangelicals today.

Similarly, I am afraid that evangelicals subtly can yield to a temptation to live as though what they need to do is rely on information (such as what is found in the Bible), themselves, and even the (good) grammatical-historical method of interpretation, but not really on God Himself. McLaren puts it this way, when he restates Jesus’ words to Thomas (John 14:6–7) “You simply need to trust me. . . . I’m not trying to give you information or instructions so you no longer need me. . . .”[1] But, to the extent that we do rely on our own understanding and information, we actually are not fully depending upon Him (Prov 3:5) – for apart from Him, we can do nothing (John 15:5).

Shutting down Christians’ questions can come from an insecurity because we may want to appear to have it all together. So, we may not allow questions because we may not know all the answers. But, we don’t have to. We are not the saving grace.

We also need to remember that good-hearted evangelicals are not incapable of being overtaken by evil. We too can elevate our thoughts above the Lord’s and live out of our hearts’ default, fleshly condition, and to that extent become arrogant and (perhaps subtly) worship our own minds. We all need to humble ourselves before the Lord and submit all our thoughts, ways, and hearts to Him. He needs to assess our ideas, especially before proclaiming them as truth. If we don’t do that, we set ourselves up for being influenced by our flesh and even by demonic forces, perhaps by speaking “truth” as if we created it, and in authoritative tones that put others to submission. Just as much as anyone else, we evangelicals can become arrogant, perhaps by proclaiming that our place to stand is without question.

[1] McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, 221 (emphasis mine).

In previous posts, I tried to describe several aspects of the more recent views of Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt, and Rob Bell. Now, I will survey (all too briefly) various contributions they have made.

Here are some initial contributions. First, McLaren rightly stresses the need for being Jesus’ disciple now and live to impact the kingdom. He’s right that an emphasis upon “going” to heaven when we die, in order to avoid hell, is misguided. He’s not alone in this; Dallas Willard describes this as a “gospel” of sin management; we focus primarily on keeping sin under control, rather than living for Christ now.[1] Moreover, God’s character hasn’t changed, so since He cared deeply about justice in the Old Testament, He still cares about it now.

Second, he’s right that many evangelicals haven’t given due attention to environmental protection. Third, McLaren is right that systems and groups (even of Christians) can perpetuate and foster injustice. Evangelicals can easily focus on individuals’ sins and not carefully examine and expose injustices that systems can foster.

Now I will mention a more substantive contribution. These authors are very concerned that God on what they might call the received, “Greco-Roman” view can be coercive and violent. McLaren has identified how some evangelicals can act coercively or manipulatively.[2] For example, in evangelism, if we even give the impression that our aim is to win a debate with someone, we convey (even if unintentionally) that we don’t really care about the person him- or herself. Yet, Jesus showed loving care for those He talked with, such as the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4).

Along these lines, many evangelicals have given scathing responses against McLaren. John Franke has picked this up too: “one of the lessons evangelicals could and should learn from Brian McLaren is the value of a generous and charitable spirit…. In my opinion, evangelicals lose support where they might not have because of their lack of graciousness and generosity. Even Hannibal Lector despised rudeness!”[3]

Moreover, some leaders of evangelical institutions can adopt controlling leadership styles, whether subtle (“light”) or overt (“heavy”). I have experienced situations where employees were expected to submit to their leadership like unto Christ (i.e., as the One who placed them in leadership). Yet, it hasn’t always been God’s will to do what some leaders believed and pushed for. In those cases, the expectation to submit to leaders can become manipulative and controlling.

I also think some evangelicals can manipulate (even unintentionally) and harm fellow Christians by stressing that they live out of their “heads,” through an imbalanced stress upon the intellect at the expense of the heart (especially the will and the feelings). I think this can happen unintentionally through well-meaning teachings that we should put our trust in the truths in Scripture, and then the feelings follow. We are told to not live by our feelings, for they aren’t reliable guides to truth. Instead, we are to live by faith in Christ, which comes primarily through scriptural knowledge and our assent.

Now, it is vital that we know and live by Scripture. Yet, the Christian life is about loving God with our entire being – being deeply united with His heart and mind. So, while our minds need to know, our hearts also must bow before Him. And that includes our wills and our feelings. If we tend to ignore or suppress our feelings, rather than be aware of them and what is going on in our souls, we can become “shut down” and not live in a deep unity within ourselves, others, or even the Lord. This is something I have learned from experience, and God met me deeply through counseling to help bring much healing.

In the next blog, I will look at another more substantive contribution I think they make, before moving on to problems with their views.

[1] For instance, see his Divine Conspiracy, ch. 2

[2] And I write as an evangelical.

[3] John Franke’s e-mail to Burson, cited in Burson’s Brian McLaren in Focus (Abilene Christian University Press, 2016), 268.

In my last post, I surveyed several of the newer views of the “emergent” writers Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt, and Rob Bell. Now, I’ll continue that survey.

For them, the Bible is not an encyclopedia of facts. Rather, it contains evolving interpretations of peoples’ experiences of, and encounters with, God. It is not that God’s character itself changes, but our views of God do. And, we encounter the mature view in Jesus. Since we understand passages through the lens of our experience, the Bible is not a catalog of timeless, universal, and inerrant truths that we can know as such.

What is God like? McLaren stresses that God is compassionate and gentle, not violent or cruel; just and fair to all, not biased. God is not tribal, imperial, or dictatorial. For Jones, God’s essence (and not just an attribute) is love. Bell explains that on the received view of (evangelical) Christianity, if people don’t believe the right things in the right ways, they’ll go to hell (Love Wins, 173). But to Bell, such a God is fundamentally unlike the One whose essence is love. God would be like “a loving father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them [yet] would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormenter. . . .” (Love Wins, 173-74).

For McLaren, the God of fundamentalists is jealous of rivals, exclusive, controlling, and even racist. McLaren thinks Calvinism leads to an “us-versus-them” mentality. If God can play favorites, can’t we too? Bell thinks such a God is schizophrenic; He loves us, yet can be cruel and terrifying. For Pagitt, this God is “up and out,” distant and removed from us, utterly determining all events. For this God, we have to be perfect, but that won’t happen until the after-life, leaving us without much of a focus for now. Indeed, for them, the goal of the received version of the gospel is to go to heaven when we die, leaving us just with “sin management” now.

Those of other religions can be part of God’s peaceable kingdom. Since everyone is already “in” God (on their panentheistic views), sin does not separate us from Him. Indeed, for McLaren, all people encounter the Holy Spirit, and like John Hick, all human religions are imperfect responses to God because no one has direct access to how things really are. Everything is interpretation. Moreover, the goal of all religions is a moral makeover.

So, what are the sources of evil? They largely focus on sin in terms of systemic sources, not the depravity of individuals’ hearts or the reality of demons. For instance, Jones denies the reality of a real, fallen angel known as Satan. Nor is the fall of Adam and Eve historical. Moreover, if everything is integrated in God, it just wouldn’t make sense for there to exist literal demons, for then evil would be in God.

Given these views that God is nonviolent, that we already are “in” Him, and we don’t have souls (for we are physical beings), the penal substitution theory of the atonement doesn’t make much sense. There would not be punishment for sin or a need for hell.

They do, however, affirm life after death. What then makes it possible for someone to be resurrected and still be the same person? For if we do not have souls, but are just bodies, and our bodies constantly are changing, how can we be the same person now as the one who will live after our bodies’ death? Their answer is that God will “re-member” us; God will remember our story and reconstitute us.

How does God’s kingdom advance? It surely is not by violence or coercion. Rather, it comes by nonviolent resistance and love. For McLaren, the kingdom will come to earth as we live the way of Jesus now. Jesus will return, but not in violence to conquer His foes. For McLaren, that would be a jihadist, imperialist Jesus of the received version of the gospel story.

In the next post, I will begin to assess various aspects of their newer views.

For Brian McLaren, the point of orthodoxy is orthopraxis. So, he wants to know why it was easy for many modern-era Christians to participate in a host of unethical activities and mindsets, such as racism, colonialism, environmental irresponsibility, mistreatment of women, carelessness toward the poor, etc. To him, we have inherited a version of the gospel story that has been filtered through the lens of a different framing story, one that predates and helped shape modernity’s own overarching story and subplots.

In this inherited version, first, there is a shift from a view of creation as good to its being a perfect, unchanging, Platonic ideal, or state. Second, the fall is not merely about disobedience. Rather, it’s a change from Platonic perfection to Aristotelian change and becoming.

Third, God’s character is like a perfect, Platonic god, who loves spirit and perfection, but hates matter and becoming, which is imperfect. As such, God wants to destroy creation. Fourth, original sin implies God is hostile toward us. He must “punish all imperfect beings with eternal conscious torment in hell…. God’s response to anything that is less than absolutely perfect must be absolute and infinite hostility” (McLaren, Why Did Jesus … Cross the Road? 106).

Fifth, salvation means being forgiven. Souls are restored to perfection, so that there is no more “becoming” or stories. Thus, God can love them again. But, sixth, hell also is an ongoing state. Taken together, McLaren sarcastically describes this story as the “good news” taught by much of western Christianity (A New Kind of Christianity, 41–44). And, he is not alone; Doug Pagitt sees a similar influence from Greek and Roman sources.

This “version” of the gospel includes many dualisms, such as God and creation, heaven and hell, body and soul, and natural and supernatural. Instead of embracing such dualisms, McLaren embraces a holistic approach, in which there is a deep interrelationship between God, matter, and life. Sin involves disintegration and disharmony in this interrelatedness, but not separation, for as Pagitt says, we are “In God” (see his Flipped). Moreover, Pagitt thinks we are made of matter (i.e., energy packets). Rob Bell also picks up this theme of holistic integration, describing God as energy and creation as energy and made of matter. For Tony Jones, too, we are not embodied souls; rather, we are physical beings. It seems all four authors have embraced a kind of physicalism about humans and creation.

These holist views suggest they have moved away from theism to panentheism, in which creation is embedded in God (and not pantheism, in which all is God). As such, we are not separated from God; rather, we already are in relationship with Him. But sin has disrupted that relationship, and human ones too. Since we are not separated from Him due to our sin, we need to work on practical, ethical living in these relationships.

Thus, we do not need a penal, substitutionary, atoning sacrifice for our sins. Jesus’ death on the cross, therefore, was not to atone for our sins. Rather, His work can be described in terms of imitation, such as on René Girard’s mimetic, scapegoat theory, or perhaps as a moral example for us to follow.

Pagitt describes the received view of God as removed, distant, and not intimate with us; loving us conditionally; and unmovable. We have to be perfect for this God. But, that will not happen until after our deaths, which leaves us with a faith that focuses on the afterlife, and not living for Christ now.

In contrast, as a bedrock assumption, McLaren holds that God is good and just, yet He cannot be violent. God works to liberate us from oppression, but He never acts directly to do that. God is not a dictator, as would be the case, McLaren thinks, if God exhaustively determines the future. McLaren is an open theist, so history is unscripted. Bell also claims that while God judges, it always is to restore people to relationship with Him. In the end, God’s love will win.

In the next post, I will explore more aspects of McLaren’s, Pagitt’s, Bell’s, and Jones’s newer views.

For many evangelicals, the views of emergents, like Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, Rob Bell, and Doug Pagitt, have been written off as heretical. Evangelicals have identified and classified them as “yesterday’s news,” as opposed to when the “emerging church” was making a “splash” in the late 90s until about 2010. So, they have been off many evangelicals’ “radar screens.”

Yet, I have found that their influences have morphed and actually increased over time. Now writing as “progressives,” they have developed a full-orbed theology. They also are raising questions that are on lots of younger Christians’ minds these days, ones who are prone to leaving church and maybe the faith altogether. And, they are giving answers that are attractive to many such people. These kinds of questions are ones Barna (and David Kinnaman) has reported on in You Lost Me; e.g.,

1. How could a loving God send people to hell? How could the God of the Old Testament (apparently) commit genocide?
2. How could a loving God blow up in rage and violently kill His Son? How can we trust such a God?
3. How can we not be imperialistic and colonialist as Christians (including with the good news)? Is the good news mainly about going to heaven when we die?
4. How could good Christians be so concerned about salvation of peoples’ souls, and yet seem to not really care about crucial issues of extreme, widespread poverty, oppression, colonialism, racism, sexism, global warming, and more – social justice and ethical issues?
5. How can we condemn people in other religions for not believing as we do?
6. So, are Christians, and Christianity, really good, or do they actually foster a lot of evil?
7. How can we be wise and learn from science, rather than have a default mindset of skepticism and antagonism?

I wonder if the choice to ignore their more updated views has led to an unexpected result. That is, I think their voices are giving a “Christian” lens to many such issues at work in broader society. Moreover, along with the influence of professors at Christian colleges and universities, who were trained in secular PhD programs, I think they are influencing many students with their progressive ideas about diversity, social justice, etc., on conservative Christian colleges. The emergents also are deepening their criticisms of conservative, evangelicals and their churches, and they were more on target with them in 2005 than I realized when I wrote Truth and the New Kind of Christian.

So, what should we think of their updated, newer views? Like in Truth, I try to be irenic, gracious, listen to them, and carefully describe their views. Then, I try to assess their views, looking at both strengths and concerns, whether that be ethically, philosophically, or theologically.

Importantly, I think they miss the mark in two subtle, yet deeply important ways: first, I think they do not realize a root problem in all too many conservative churches. I think that these churches have been unwittingly, yet deeply, shaped by naturalism, in the sense that, practically, God has become irrelevant for their lives in various ways and to various, yet significant, extents. That means that in those regards, they live in the “flesh” – their own sinful propensities. This can be described as a practical atheism.

So, one thing I do is show how many historical, cultural, philosophical, scientific, and other factors have shaped Christians in the west, and the US In particular, so that in various ways many Christians don’t really expect God to show up in their lives – in many ways, such faith has been de-supernaturalized. But, second, and ironically, I think that McLaren, et al. don’t realize that they are advocating a kind of Christianity that also has been deeply naturalized.

Instead, I argue that that the real solution both groups need is to embrace the fullness of Christ, in fullness of Spirit and truth, as Paul describes in Ephesians. That way, Jesus Himself can be powerfully manifested in Christians’ lives, which is so desperately needed today.

Next, I will survey some of the emergents’ newer views.

In 2005, Crossway published my book, Truth and the New Kind of Christian: The Emerging Effects of Postmodernism in the Church. It was the second book on the emerging church, and it was specifically on Brian McLaren’s and Tony Jones’s views. There was a surging interest in the emerging church & Emergent then. There was lots of discussion, and Zondervan was publishing many such books.

While strong criticisms were developing, around 2010, McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity came out, and things changed significantly. Evangelical academics and publishers at places like the Evangelical Theological Society national meetings saw the emerging church as “yesterday’s news.”[1] I noticed a marked decrease in willingness to really listen to and carefully assess their views. Like someone at one of my presentations blurted out (paraphrasing), “Can’t we just call them heretics and move on?!”

Even emergentvillage.com ceased to exist. But, that did not mean the end of the conversations that had been generated. Contrary to the attitude I observed amongst many evangelicals, I began to observe that the influence of McLaren, Jones, and others, such as Doug Pagitt and Rob Bell, had morphed and actually increased. Instead of publishing with companies like Zondervan, now they write for some of the largest presses, such as HarperCollins and Random House. They have their own ministries, which for Pagitt and Jones host training conferences, and Jones earned his PhD in practical theology and teaches as a professor. Bell and his views have become widely publicized, now extended through his podcast, an e-course available through Oprah.com, and a television show on her network. And McLaren writes prolifically. Moreover, they now write under the broader umbrella of “progressive” Christianity.

When I wrote Truth, I tried to balance some criticism with some important things they had to say to evangelicals. Then, in fall 2006, I taught a class at Biola for our MA Christian Apologetics program. I was learning more, and Jones offered to do an interview by phone.

I had asked the Lord if there was something specific he wanted me to ask Tony, and I believe He gave me a specific answer, yet which seemed unusual. It wasn’t about anything that as of then I had written or studied. I am glad I asked Tony. I was blown away by what I learned. I realized there was much more I needed to research and study.

So, I started to read more broadly, including works of Pagitt, Bell, Stan Grenz, John Franke, and more. I started to see more connections than their epistemological concerns, which was my focus in Truth. There also were ethical ones about patterns they noticed amongst evangelicals. They also were making shifts regarding the nature of humans and the relationship of creation with God.

At the same time, I too started to become aware of some patterns amongst evangelicals, ones that seemed to explain why I think, all too often, we are not seeing the biblically-promised power and presence of the Lord. As I investigated this, I came to realize that McLaren, Jones, Pagitt, and Bell actually were much more on target about what has gone wrong with the church than I understood when I wrote Truth.

So, in my new book, Authentically Emergent: In Search of a Truly Progressive Christianity, I reconsider my earlier work, as well as carefully assess, pro and con, their updated thoughts. Yet, I think there is a much deeper set of factors at work in both these emergents’ more recent views and amongst all too many evangelicals. In summary, I think both have been deeply deeply influenced by naturalism. I hope to offer a compelling analysis and a better way forward for both groups, one that will be truly “progressive” and “emergent” in the biblical sense that we will see the fullness of the power and presence of the Lord manifested in our midst, which we desperately need.

I am writing to both evangelicals, my emergent friends, and those influenced by them. So, why read this? There are many reasons, and I will look at some of them in my next post.

[1] Scott Burson explains several reasons in his fine book, Brian McLaren in Focus (Abilene Christian University Press, 2016), 164.