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TechnoratiThe Christian faith must be born again, says one prominent pastor.
And to be born again, Christians must be unlocked from "a prison" of long-held assumptions and have the freedom to ask honest questions, Brian McLaren indicates in his newest book, A New Kind of Christianity.
He's not advocating for a new set of beliefs, he says, but rather a "new way of believing."
The proposal doesn't seem like anything new for those familiar with McLaren, who presented A New Kind of Christian nine years ago. But some say his latest book paints a more vivid picture of the emergent church pastor and his beliefs.
"This new book is easily the clearest presentation of McLaren's theology to date," Reformed pastor Kevin DeYoung recently wrote in his blog.
McLaren grew up in a conservative evangelical home and became a committed disciple in his teen years. He considered going into the Episcopal ministry but became an English teacher instead, determined that he could "do more good for the spiritual cause outside the institutional church than inside of it." Without having planned it, he later became a full-time pastor, leading a group of people that had been meeting at his home every week.
Today, after serving as a pastor for more than 30 years, he often sees picketers and leaflets labeling him as "dangerous," "controversial" and "unbiblical" when he visits churches around the world to speak. He wonders, "How did a mild-mannered guy like me get into so much trouble?"
He feels it may partly be because he's asking questions – theological ones that are "by and large answered" for most evangelical Christian leaders.
"They're very satisfied with their theology as it is," McLaren told The Christian Post. But he's not. Hence, the quest for a new kind of Christianity.
"Some people seem to believe that all of those [theological] interpretations are easy and clear, that their church or denomination has nailed them down or figured them out. And I just don’t think it’s that simple," McLaren said. "I think we’re in a constant struggle to understand the truths more deeply and we have to be involved in ongoing, unending repentance where we are willing to say the things that we felt were true maybe were only partially so, so we have more to learn. That to me is part of what being a disciple is."
McLaren once read the Bible through a traditional pair of lens but when he began struggling with questions, he started to view the Scriptures with "fresh eyes."
But he insists he hasn't moved away from certain Christian truths such as the deity of Christ and the authority of Scripture. But he does have some qualms over the "inerrancy" of Scripture.
"The word 'inerrancy' never occurs in Scripture and my concern with inerrancy is that it brings into our discussion about the Bible a set of philosophical assumptions that aren’t really necessary and actually can be unhelpful and counterproductive," he commented to The Christian Post.
He believes a lot of Christians read the Bible as a legal constitution.
"[I]n many religious settings, there are no checks and balances, and challenging an authority figure's interpretation can lead to excommunication," he writes in his book. "At least good constitutions can be amended."
The Bible, he argues, is more like an inspired library, one that "preserves, presents, and inspires an ongoing vigorous conversation with and about God, a living and vital civil argument into which we are all invited and through which God is revealed."Continue »
