A NEW KIND OF CHRISTIANITY - CH.5

A NEW KIND OF CHRISTIANITY
“The Narrative Question” (Chs.4-6)
McLaren addresses the first of his Ten Questions in this section: The Narrative Question. It focuses on the Bible and the ways we read it. In ch.4 he asks if there is a story line in the Bible itself that should guide our reading of it. Before getting to that biblical story line, McLaren deconstructs what he understands to the default story line western culture has bequeathed us for reading the Bible. He calls it the “Greco-Roman narrative.” Six elements make up this narrative – creation (static perfection), Fall into sin (plunge into the world of becoming, change), condemnation (living in a fallen world), salvation through Jesus which has two results for humanity: heaven or hell. We imbibe this six-stage story line, according to McLaren, from our western heritage as we read the Bible backwards through lens fashioned for us by the likes of Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, or Pope Benedict, Calvin, Wesley or Newton, Luther or Erasmus, Aquinas, Augustine, Paul, finally arriving at and Jesus as he appears through the accumulated perspective of these predecessors.. He proposes an alternative, reading forward from Adam to Abraham to Moses to David to the prophets to John the Baptist, to Jesus.
If we read backwards, as we usually do, we read through a perspective formed by Greek philosophy and various strands of the ethos of the Roman Empire. Chief among the values of such a perspective are dualism (dividing reality into two types – material and spiritual – and valuing the latter and devaluating the former), energy and confidence (belief that the superiority of the Greek-Roman approach gave access to the real truth on which to act), and social dualism and superiority (the Empire was the real mover and shaker in world affairs, thus if we were not an elite of that empire you were inferior and on the outside of the social, economic, political status system.).
The deity of this narrative McLaren names Theos (English transliteration of the Greek word for “God”). Dissimilar from the Biblical God n every way, Theos values “spirit, state, and being and hates matter, story, and becoming, since . . . the latter involve change, and the only way to change or move from perfection is downward into decay” (41).
The upshot of reading the Bible backwards through all these filters is that traditional Christian theological terms, like Creation, Fall, Sin, Salvation, have been transformed/corrupted by this Greco-Roman narrative into a fundamentally different story than that of the Bible!
McLaren posits his program of “reading the Bible forward” as an antidote to the above fatally flawed Greco-Roman narrative. This way of proceeding is fleshed out in ch 5.
What of all of this? There is no question that in general McLaren is right! Our Greco-Roman/western/North American heritage certainly inclines us to read the Bible through a variety of lenses which, if unrecognized and corrected for, distort the Biblical story. Dualism is clearly the chief culprit in all this. Nothing has done more damage to western Christianity and its reading of the Bible than the splitting up of reality into two separate, unequal spheres, the material of which is inferior, the spiritual of which is superior. The invisible, immaterial sphere was identified as “spiritual” with its material counterpart as “worldly.” Obviously, Christians then ought to be concerned with the “spiritual” and eschew contact as far as possible with the “worldly.” This is a Pandora’s box that, once opened by Plato and his followers, unleashed a plethora of conceptual, social, and political ills.
That said, I do not think that the “being (static perfection) – becoming (change, history, impermanence) is as important as McLaren does. Nor do I think the people he is writing for would be able or even care to identify what they think in these terms. They just “know” that the “spiritual” is more important than the “worldly” or the material and that God and the things of God are identified with the former. This is what Nietzsche contemptuously called the watered-down “Platonism of the masses” of his time, for which he too largely blamed Christianity. Thus, I do not think it is helpful to use all the philosophical names and terms for the purpose of explaining to our contemporaries why they read the Bible the way they do. I fear it only befuddles the uninitiated and is too general and in some ways misleading for those trained in philosophy. I have tried in my own work to address this matter which Brian has rightly and forcefully identified as central to our dilemma and will say more about that in my post on ch.5.
In sum, what McLaren has done in this chapter needs to be done! Even though he has hit on the major points such a critique needs to address, I am not sure he has done so in the clearest and most effective way. He has raised the matter of the ways we are conditioned to read and understand the Bible (or any other literature for that matter) though, and for that he is to be thanked. This discussion needs to be had!