Brian McLaren could comfortably wear the moniker Granddaddy of the Emergent Church, and not just because of his grey whiskers and genial disposition. His books are seminal, pioneering works, kinda like when Thomas Midgley (d. 1944) pioneered adding lead to gasoline and later, putting CFCs into all things aerosol. It was a generation before anyone realized that one man had bequeathed two of history’s most devastating contributions to environmental calamity, namely perforating our Ozone layer, and poisoning a civilization. Thanks Tom.
Similarly, Brian McLaren is deconstructing orthodoxy with all the vigor and verve of a punctured canister of bug-spray. McLaren’s bailiwick is ambiguity, which makes him a poster boy for all Postmodernist emergent types. The emergencia’s unorthodox angle on orthodoxy is “articulated,” as clearly as a slippery tongue can, in A Generous Orthodoxy. Here’s a tidbit of the movement’s signature obfuscation: “I have gone out of my way to be provocative, mischievous, and unclear, reflecting my belief that clarity is sometimes overrated, and that shock, obscurity, playfulness, and intrigue (carefully articulated) often stimulate more thought than clarity” (p. 27).
Shakespeare’s winsome Puck was also known for being mischievous, playful, and unclear, but would you want Pastor Puck teaching you the word of God? MacLaren, any Dadaist, and I would all agree on this one point: the content of this book is “absurd,” (see p. 31).
The first taste of the labyrinthine logic of Generous Orthodoxy is crammed into the congested sub-title of the book: “Why I am an Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished CHRISTIAN.” This isn’t mere battology, I think McLaren really believes he can be Catholic and Protestant simultaneously. Maybe he should have been consulted for ECT and the peace talks in Northern Ireland. If only Bloody Mary would have been a bit more emergent. Oh well, raise your cocktail glass of vodka/tomato-juice for what might have been. (Fundamentalists, don’t let the alcohol put you off, just be more Incarnational).
This smorgasbord theology is appetizing only to those who enjoy glutting themselves on Postmodern deconstructionism. McLaren’s vocal disavowal of relativism should be ingested with a pinch of salt, coming from one who eschews the use of his own language.
There are genres of literature which should strive to avoid ambiguity. Medicine and Theology get my top votes. What makes McLaren’s penchant for the opaque as dangerous as surgery in the dark, is how it permits the author to be outright deceptive about his views, and then hide behind, “But I warned you it was absurd.” Would a judge let a gunman off the hook for murder if his plea was, “But I told him it was loaded before I pulled the trigger”?
Flouting precision is no virtue when souls lie in the balance. It is precisely this comfort with elusiveness and doublespeak which booby-traps every page. Exhibit A: on p. 32 the author avers, “This book…consistently, unequivocally, and unapologetically upholds and affirms the Apostle’s and Nicene Creeds.” But later—almost schizophrenically—McLaren takes the diametrically opposite approach: “I don’t hope all Buddhists will become (cultural) Christians, I do hope all who feel led will become Buddhist followers of Jesus” (p. 297, whatever that means). The Council of Nicaea put quill to parchment in an attempt to protect the Church’s orthodoxy from precisely the abhorrent “generosity”—or more accurately, elasticity—of truth which McLaren is proposing.
As I was reading I kept wondering, “How did he come up with this stuff?” Then I reached page 174, “My graduate training was in literature and language, which sensitized me to drama and conflict, to syntax and semantics and semiotics, to text and context, to prose and to poetry…It prepared me to see how a generous orthodoxy must be mystical and poetic.”
From what McLaren has produced, I conclude that training in language without training in theology can beget exceptionally well-crafted, artfully written nonsense.
A Generous Orthodoxy purports an insidious doctrine that is anything but “orthodox.” That’s as generous I can be without sacrificing the dictionary’s definition of the word.
As I said in my previous post, ortho means straight. I wouldn’t want my orthodontist to have a generous definition of straight, nor my orthopedic surgeon. Certainly not my pastor. Would you?
2 Tim 2:15 Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, cutting straight the word of truth.