Can the church be reinvented?
A few months ago I picked up Brian McLaren's most recent work, A New Kind of Christianity—which speaks for the emergent church movement—and began reading. Quite providentially, at nearly the same time, I also brought home the 2008 book by Tim Keller, The Reason for God, and the magisterial new biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas. I read the three in that order.
I will be quite frank to say that I put down McLaren's book with a profound sense of disquiet. While I have no difficulty understanding the issues he raises, the solutions and arguments he offers create far more questions than answers for me. It is interesting that both Keller and McLaren take us into their spiritual journeys. In McLaren's case it left him, as he puts it, with a belief system in "shambles," while in Keller's case, his Christian faith came to rest in a thoroughly robust, orthodox Christianity in which Jesus Christ as God among us is the way of salvation, and the Bible a fully reliable guide.
In part I found McLaren troubling because he appears to dismiss so much of what the church over its history has represented (though he has a tendency to qualify some of his more extreme statements in footnotes). He speaks of "Christianities" as though the traditions of the Church share few commonalities; he quotes favourably Harvey Cox's divisions of church history (ages of faith, of belief and of the Spirit) and takes from it a kind of Greco-Romanization of Christianity which in his view had almost only negative consequences for the belief and practice of the church; he piles up illustrations to prove points he wishes to make (for example, regarding the church's support for slavery) with scarcely a nod to contrary examples.
At every point he wants to make the Christian faith relevant within the culture, but if it is to be through the Church, one is hard-pressed to figure out what kind of church it will be. Or how Christ is to truly live within that Church. If one doesn't agree with McLaren in his analysis and answers, he has a name for their use of the Bible to argue with him: they are reading it as a "legal constitution."
Even though Keller's book was published prior to McLaren's A New Kind of Christianity, I laid it down with a sense that it was exactly the response that McLaren's work needed. Keller, to those unfamiliar with him, is a Manhattan pastor who began a church in the heart of New York nearly a quarter century ago—a place, as people told him, of "skeptics, critics and cynics." He says many people were incredulous when he told them "the beliefs of the church would be the orthodox, historic tenets of the Church—the infallibility of the Bible, the deity of Christ, the necessity of spiritual regeneration (the new birth)—all doctrines considered hopelessly outdated by the majority of New Yorkers." The church has not only survived, it has flourished (thousands attend) and spawned dozens of other churches.
I'm not doing justice to Keller's book. For instance, he readily acknowledges the failures of Christians and the Church. Non-believers may often be nicer and kinder than Christian believers. He encourages doubt—though he wants those who argue for unbelief to question their assumptions as much as Christians should. He is especially good in explaining the nature of sin and our need for God. The gospel is not a self-salvation project, it is accepting that Jesus is the way of salvation.
I mentioned at the outset that after reading McLaren and Keller, I read Eric Metaxas's biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian executed by the Nazis in the dying days of the Second World War for his part in a plot against the life of Adolf Hitler. I found two elements of Bonhoeffer's faith especially striking. One was his reiteration of the centrality of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for the faith and life of the Christian community.
The second was the simple yet profound way he took the words of Scripture to be God speaking to him. His strength in that very difficult moment in history rested on confidence in the person of Jesus Christ known to us through the Scriptures. He did not try to invent something new. He would have said it was the Christ confessed by the Church throughout its history who was with him and the Church in their hour of trial. It seems to me this should be our way too.
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