Category: Authentically Emergent Posts

Last time, I posted that though Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Rob Bell, and Tony Jones maintain God is love and good, they cannot preserve God’s justice, for it ends up being arbitrary for them. Yet, to be truly good, a person must be not only truly loving, but also truly just. So, by separating God’s love from His justice, they end up with a God who is not truly good.

Love and justice are partners, for love protects what is good and cared for. If I find that someone is trying to lure my wife’s heart away from me, I will intervene with godly jealousy for hers and my sake, and ours together. God is like this, too; Scripture depicts God as jealous for His beloved, and He too will intervene to protect His children from seductions because they will harm and drive us from Him. God despises sin because it is an affront to His holiness, and also because it steals us away from loving Him. To illustrate God’s jealousy for His people, He had Hosea take a harlot as his wife, as a sign to Israel of God’s faithfulness, yet also of their apostasy.

God is absolutely good, so He cannot act in a way that separates His justice from His love. He cannot act in a way that is just and yet unloving, or loving and yet unjust. Justice requires that God repays each one according to his or her due, due to God’s own just character. When He acts in justice, He acts in proper proportion to the offense. If we use Aristotle’s virtue theory as a lens, we can see God always will act appropriately in justice, never going to an extreme of deficiency by shrinking back from proper punishment or discipline. Nor would God go to an extreme of excess, by exploding in boiling rage. No; God’s “work is perfect, for all His ways are just; a God of faithfulness and without injustice, righteous and upright is He” (Deut 32:4).

Yet, for McLaren and others, it seems they cannot tolerate the idea that God ever could act violently. Bell expresses this concern clearly; at death,

“A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormenter who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony.

“. . . If there was an actual human dad who was that volatile, we would contact child protection services immediately.

“If God can switch gears like that, switch entire modes of being that quickly, that raises a thousand questions about whether a being like this could ever be trusted, let alone be good.”[1]

Yet, in response and conclusion, I think Miroslav Volf expresses well the problems with this mindset:

“My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda of the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.”[2]


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[1] Bell, Love Wins, 174 (emphasis mine).

[2] Volf, Free of Charge, 139.

McLaren and others think many Christians read Scripture from the wrong standpoint, the “Greco-Roman narrative,” which they have received. That G-R narrative shapes them to read it wrongly, so that God is violent and blows up in rage over our imperfections due to our fall into sin. People need to be forgiven so God will love them, yet He still has determined to sort them into one of two destinies: heaven, or hell, where He will blow up in rage for eternity upon them.

Yet, for McLaren, Jesus’ story needs to be read in its Jewish context, in which sin should be treated more as our “coming of age.” Though we act foolishly with new opportunities and freedoms, God does not disown us because we are in His “family.” Instead, He gives us instruction and correction. God does not let our freedoms run wild, restricting what we can do sometimes by limiting our freedoms and letting natural consequences take their effect, so we learn and grow. However, He never works directly, only indirectly; for instance, God did not cause the water in the Nile to turn into blood, but it likely turned red from a red tide. 

When we develop socioeconomically and technologically faster than morally, we “fall” into sin, not just personally but also by social dynamics. Examples include how many in Germany became involved with the Nazis’ agenda, and how western nations built empires through colonization, for these oppress others and grieve God’s heart.

For McLaren, biblical depictions of God as wrathful stem from evolving interpretations of Him, but we find the mature view in Jesus. That view matches with the peaceable kingdom portrayed in McLaren’s understanding of the prophets’ main message, which he summarizes under the label “Isaiah.” God is good, which for McLaren means He is non-violent, loving, and just, yet His justice comes by His naming sins for what they are, getting us to agree with Him about them, and then His absorbing and forgetting them.

Now, surely he is right that God does not exhaustively determine the future. If He did, then God would be the author evil. Yet, that does not mean that his open theism wins by default; instead, McLaren should consider middle knowledge, a view on which God is sovereign and omniscient, yet we are free in a libertarian sense.

More so, is McLaren’s “Jewish” story a faithful, forward reading of the Bible, especially of the Old Testament? For various reasons, I don’t think so. Frequently, the biblical authors ascribe to God violent actions for judgment, e.g., the flood; the plagues upon Egypt and Pharaoh; death in conjunction with the Passover; the destruction of Egypt’s army in the Red Sea; the destruction of Israelites who worshipped the golden calf; the Levitical animal sacrifices; Jehu and God’s destruction of Ahab’s house; God’s sending Assyria and Babylon to conquer Israel and Judah, respectively; and many more. Even the prophets couch their message of a future, peaceable kingdom in terms of God’s judgment upon nations and His own people who sin.

So, what might seem to be a more faithful, forward reading of the Bible? I think the theme that Scripture develops, from Gen 1 through Rev 22, is that He is seeking a people for whom He will be their God,  they will be His people, and He will dwell in their midst. While God is love, He also is holy –purely, completely good, and even the standard of goodness, and utterly undefiled by any evil. Therefore, being His people cannot take place on any terms other than His. Throughout Scripture, God will not leave the guilty unpunished because He is purely holy and just, and to be purely good, God has to be truly holy. Otherwise, He could allow evil to be in his presence and go unaddressed.

Yet, we will see in the next blog more reasons to see that on their view, God is not truly good, and even One of whom to be afraid.

In previous posts, I had summarized the more mature views of these former “emergents,” as well as offered some assessments. Now, I will return to more assessments, starting with issues posed by their views of sin.

For them, inherited, original sin is a mistaken doctrine due to a few things, such as: 1) it presupposes that we have a body and a soul, which they have rejected for a physicalist view of humans; and 2) it presupposes that we are separated from God, but they have rejected that for a more panentheistic view of God. We already are “in” God (in relationship with Him), as is the rest of creation. If we are not dead to God due to sin, then our need is not for God to forgive us and for the Spirit to give us a new birth, in order to come alive to God. Instead, we need to work on our relationship with God, which primarily occurs through living out the way of Jesus with one another and creation.

If creation is physical, then sin must be redefined too. On traditional Christian orthodoxy, sin is a matter primarily of the heart that affects our whole being – not just body, but our heart, mind, and every aspect of us. For instance, Scripture says that the heart is more deceitful than all else (Jer 17:9). Moreover, Jesus tells us “the things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and those defile the man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders” (Matt 15:18-19, NASB). Therefore, not only do thoughts and lustful attitudes come from the heart, so also do behaviors and actions.

Yet, sin cannot be a soulish thing on their views, so it seems it must be behavioral, i.e., involving physical actions. Yet, if thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and our purposings are just physical, then, as I have argued previously, they do not have any intentionality (which is the ofness or aboutness of our thoughts, desires, beliefs, purposings, etc., things commonly called mental states). The same must hold for evil thoughts, etc. Yet, how can there be sin if there are no real thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and so on? So, by putting sin into a physicalist framework, it seems they undermine the nature of sin and evil.

Yet, we also must notice that if their panentheistic view is true, then sin is in God too. That is, it is present in Him. Therefore, God is not separated from sin, but He has evil in His being. That strongly indicates that their God is not truly holy, and if so, then their God is not purely good. Unfortunately, that result seems to leave us with a God who could do all sorts of monstrous things.

 However, perhaps they might reply that when Jesus lived on earth, He was not separated from being amongst sin or sinners. He hang out with sinners all the time and came to save them (1 Tim 1:15). While true, His “hanging out” with people and dealing with their sin did not entail he Himself would have sin be in His being. Hebrews 7:26 explains that as our High Priest, Jesus is separated from sinners, but this must mean that He Himself is not defiled by sin, not that He couldn’t hang out with sinners.

In my next blog, we will start to explore reasons why their God ends up not being truly good.

There are some key premises in their thought about God’s love and goodness: God essentially is both loving and good, and love is essential to good relationships. However, violence (e.g., with punishment of sin) is incompatible with these qualities of God and good relationships. So, how does God deal with injustice, and evil? It seems it is by His absorbing it into Himself, then forgiving and forgetting it.[1] God overcomes evil creatively by His goodness.

Now, McLaren and our other authors are deeply, and rightly, concerned about God’s goodness and justice being realized on earth as it is in heaven. They realize justice needs to be lived out now, and not just after we are with the Lord in heaven.

Yet, if God is truly good, just, and holy (i.e., utterly pure, righteous, and undefiled by sin), it seems He would hate evil and must exact punishment for it. This fits with God’s self-description in Exodus 34:6-7, where He discloses He is not only loving, compassionate, faithful, and more, but also that He will not leave the guilty unpunished. We can relate to this, for if a human judge did not punish evil actions, we would recognize that judge’s action to be unjust.

Nevertheless, this view is not an option for McLaren, or even Jones, for it treats His holiness as absolute, and it requires that God act retributively in justice. Evidently, then, on their views, God can choose not to punish sin. However, this implication leaves us with two disastrous results. First, God would be defective in terms of being truly holy, just, and even good because He would not necessarily be repulsed by evil.

Second, if God can choose not to punish sin, then He would punish it simply based upon His willing something to be wrong, and not due to His character of being just and holy. Yet, if so, then it seems God is arbitrary in His ethical requirements and even His character, the latter of which McLaren seems to presuppose is not arbitrary. This result makes McLaren’s view of God vulnerable to the Euthyphro objection, that whatever God wills is right, simply because He willed it. But that raises the prospects that on McLaren’s view, God could will all sorts of things we clearly know are immoral. Thus, if God can be arbitrary, He would not inspire “fear” in the sense of reverence, awe, and love, but instead deep terror. For on McLaren’s view of God, He could blow up in rage, the very kind of God McLaren and others reject as unacceptable. Even though McLaren wants to affirm God is good, and His character does not evolve (while our interpretations do), his view cannot sustain God’s goodness. For, to be truly good, a person must be not only truly loving, but also truly just. Yet, God’s justice is arbitrary on McLaren’s and others’ views, and therefore they cannot preserve God’s justice. Sadly, this leaves us with a God who is not truly good – and thus not worthy of worship.


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[1] E.g., see McLaren, The Story We Find Ourselves In (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2003), 153.

In a previous post about the nature of sin on the newer views of Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, Rob Bell, and Doug Pagitt, I observed that they have rejected the doctrine of original sin due in part to their embrace of physicalism. Yet, I also argued that sin is a soulish, not physical, kind of thing. For as Jesus explained, “the things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and those defile the man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders” (Matt 15:18-19, NASB). There I also contended that things like attitudes and thoughts are not physical things, and so their view deeply misses the nature and depths of our sin.

This observation helps explain why even ordinary humans are capable of the most evil acts. My colleague at Biola’s Christian Apologetics MA program, Dr. Clay Jones, has researched genocide for many years, culminating in his book, Why Does God Allow Evil? There he gives numerous examples of the murderous hatred involved in genocides. What is very revealing, however, is that genocides do not require super villains or insane people. Rather, researchers consistently have found ordinary people committed them.

For instance, “If one keeps at the Holocaust long enough, then sooner or later the ultimate truth begins to reveal itself: one knows, finally, that one might either do it, or be done to. If it could happen on such a massive scale elsewhere, then it can happen anywhere; it is all within the range of human possibility…”[1] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reaches a similar conclusion:

Where did this wolf-tribe {i.e., officials who torture and murder} appear from among our people? Does it really stem from our own roots? Our own blood? It is our own. And just so we don’t go around flaunting too proudly the white mantle of the just, let everyone ask himself: “If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?’” It is a dreadful question if one answers it honestly.[2]

And, Langdon Gilkey used to think that “nothing indicates so clearly the fixed belief in the innate goodness of humans as does this confidence that when the chips are down, and we are revealed for what we ‘really are,’ we will all be good to each other.”[3] Yet, after his time as a POW in a Japanese prison camp in China, he realized that “nothing could be so totally in error.”[4]

Yet, McLaren, Jones, Bell, and Pagitt reach a very different conclusion. For them, we do not need a Savior to atone for our sins by His penal, substitutionary death on the cross. Nor do we need a new heart, which is born of the Spirit. Rather, we mainly seem to need a conceptual and moral transformation, to see life in the light of the gospel story and live it out.

However, I am afraid this view seriously underestimates the depths of our sinfulness, which these quotes above help illustrate. Deep down, if we are honest with ourselves, I think we can see that our heart’s desire is to be autonomous from God. We thereby want to usurp God’s rightful place and define what is good and evil (cf. Gen 3:5 and the serpent’s claims to Eve). Moreover, as I noted above, if we are physical beings, then our sinfulness does not really make sense. Neither does evil, or even good for that matter. Physical stuff is something that can be described exhaustively. But, moral qualities are prescriptive. Therefore, by embracing a physical view of humans and creation, McLaren and others really have no basis for sin and evil, or even good. But that is an obviously and deeply mistaken conclusion.

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[1] George Kren and Leon Rappoport, Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), 126.

[2] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918–1956, Vol. 1 (Boulder: Westview, 1974), 160 (bracketed insert mine).

[3] Langdon Gilkey, Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1966), 92.

[4] Ibid. (emphasis mine).

In my last post, I explored how their views of humans as just physical beings undermines any hope of eternal life, including the resurrection from the dead. Nevertheless, there are more implications of their view, which will threaten our ability to have relationships with God or any other person.

What is needed to have interpersonal relationships? At the least, it seems we need to have things like experiences, thoughts, and beliefs of one another. For instance, when Debbie (my wife) and I were dating, we worked at communicating our wants and thoughts with one another. We tried to learn and respect each other’s wishes and desires. Over time, we could develop beliefs about what we each liked and what we didn’t.

These sorts of qualities (experiences used to observe, thoughts, interpretations, desires, intentions, and beliefs) traditionally have been called mental states, being qualities of minds, not brains, which instead are biological, chemical, and physical kinds of things. Notice something special about these states. They all seem to be of or about things. Typically, people have called this quality intentionality. Some even have suggested intentionality is the hallmark of the mental (versus physical).

However, if we were just physical beings, intentionality would have to be reducible to something physical. Can that work? There have been some suggestions. First is one by philosopher Michael Tye, who claims intentionality is just a matter of “causal covariation” under optimal conditions. For him, mental states are reducible to particular brain states, which we are describing in a certain way (e.g., using mentalistic terms). Such terms don’t change the underlying, physical reality, but they might help us to conceive of a brain state as being of or about something. So, for Tye, my thought of a ball is for that state to stand in a causal relation to that ball – the ball causes that state by light waves bouncing off the ball, impinging on my retina, traveling to my brain, and causing that state.

However, there are problems with this account. We can have thoughts about things that do not obtain; e.g., I can think of what would be the case if Hillary Clinton were president in 2019. However, there’s nothing in reality to cause that (brain) state. Moreover, between the ball and my thought is a potentially infinite series of causal states. It seems I cannot traverse this series and arrive at the originating source.

Second, Daniel Dennett suggests that mental states and intentionality aren’t real. There are just brains that process sensory inputs. Yet, he adopts a useful strategy, the intentional stance, to predict behavior of things that apparently have intentionality, including frogs, chess-playing computers, and humans. Suppose Star Trek’s Mr. Spock is playing 3-D chess with the computer. For Dennett, there are no real thoughts, beliefs, or desires about what moves each could make in order to checkmate the opponent, because natural selection is a completely blind process. Yet, we can attribute to the computer such “mental” states to predict its moves in light of Spock’s moves, and vice versa. We make interpretations based on behaviors.

These are the best options I know of for physicalists for intentionality. Yet, Tye’s won’t suffice, and Dennett presupposes we can make observations and interpretations to predict behavior. However, these very qualities seem to require the very intentionality he denies is real.

Therefore, it seems that on physicalism, there is no way to preserve intentionality. Yet, that has ripple effects – without it, there are no thoughts, beliefs, or experiences used to make observations, for these states must have intentionality (e.g., try having a thought that isn’t about anything). Yet, those states seem necessary for interpersonal communication. Without them, how can an interpersonal relationship occur?

In conclusion, I am very sympathetic with Doug Pagitt’s desire for a God who will be “down and in” with us, versus distant. Ironically, however, the physicalism he and other emergents have embraced will distance God and others from us, for we cannot be in interpersonal relationships.

Going further, if there’s no intentionality, there are no beliefs. However, having beliefs seem necessary for knowledge. Therefore, without beliefs, there will not be any knowledge …

In my last post, I began my assessment of some of their updated views. This time, I will begin to look at implications of their views of what is real.

McLaren and these “emergents” have rejected the view that we have souls; instead, we are physical beings. Not only have they rejected Descartes’ dualism of body and soul, they also have rejected all forms. I think Descartes’ view is untenable, for body and soul are so radically different, it is hard to see how they could interact. But Aristotle’s view was different. For him, the soul is the “form” of the body; all our capacities, including to form a human body, are rooted in the soul, which directs the body’s formation. His view is much more holistic in that there is a deep unity between body and soul.

Now, McLaren is concerned that souls are static, and so they would inhibit relationships. How could a story be told of someone who is static and cannot grow and develop? But, as I noted last time, Aristotle’s views provide for this ability; yet, we still remain the same person throughout. How?

Aristotle’s answer lies in two kinds of change: essential, and accidental (or, contingent). For him, the soul is our set of essential capacities and properties; without them, we would not be human. Moreover, if we lose something essential, we’d no longer exist.

But, Aristotle also distinguished contingent kinds of change, which depends upon various factors. While we all have capacities for (say) reasoning, not everyone will develop those qualities. For some, they may be blocked due to disease; for others, they may not want to apply themselves to keep developing in that way. Still others might develop quite advanced reasoning abilities, yet later they suffer a traumatic brain injury and lose that quality.

For me, I had a head full of brown hair at 19. But, now at 61, my hair is thinning out and is turning more and more gray. Additionally, at 26, I married my wife, and I graduated with my PhD when I was 42. At age 44, I became a father.

All these kinds of changes Aristotle would call accidental, or contingent – they are not essential changes, lest I cease to exist. For him, then, it is my essence, or what he calls my soul, that enables me to be literally the same, identical person through time and various [accidental] changes. Now, for two things to be identical, they have to have all their properties in common. If so, there are not really two separate things, but just one and the same thing. On Aristotle’s view, our personal identity through time and change is grounded in our essential set of properties, for they do not change, but our contingent ones can and do. That crucial distinction is what makes it possible for a story to be told about me as I grow and change.

But, what happens then if we do not have souls, as McLaren and these other emergents hold? Then it seems that we basically are identical to the set of properties that constitute “us” at any given time. But, if anything changes, the set of properties that is identical to me would no longer be the same. In that case, since there would not be any essential properties to me (since I do not have a soul on their view), I would cease to exist, and someone else would replace me.

So, consider again my example. Scott at age 18 “had” certain properties; but they were not the same as the set of properties that constituted “Scott” at age 26 (or 44, or 61). Instead of growing through time and change, I would exist at one time, but then I’d be replaced by someone else (still called “Scott”) at another time, who would be replaced once again when another property changes, etc. The implications of this finding are many, such as for the prospects of eternal life, which I’ll survey next time.

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.