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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.

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.