McLaren found a receptive audience at the trendy D.C. venue "Busboys and Poets" in early December at a event organized by the recently-founded "D.C. Theology Pub," an emerging-Christian community headed by local minister and college instructor Glenn Zuber. The tightly packed crowd came to hear McLaren discuss his recently published book, A New Kind of Christianity, and to clarify what he considers the role of the emerging church to be in today's society as it relates to sin, poverty, religious plurality, and its conception of God.

Rather than a new denomination - or brand - McLaren characterizes the emerging movement as an expression of new life within the church.

Just as each ring of a tree represents a new season of growth, so the church expands organically across different sects, he said. "If you look at the outermost ring of all the sectors of the Christian faith, they're all responding to the same environmental circumstances... and stresses. And on that outermost ring, that's what's emerging."

If any word sums up McLaren's theology, it might be the word "organic". And the common abstraction of God as a judgmental, unmoving and unchanging force through history is one he intends to challenge.

One of the goals in McLaren's book, A New Kind of Christianity, was to "rescue" the Christian faith from its "Greco-Roman" casting he says was imposed on it by centuries of theology. The contemporary conception of God, he says, often more closely aligns with the platonic ideals of perfection - a god whom McLaren dubs "Theos" - that eternally rages at its less-than-perfect creation. He instead attempts to reframe scripture and the gospel in terms of its Jewish, story-driven roots in which the Bible is seen more as a "library" of spiritual guidance than a "constitution" that demands rigid adherence, and God is conceived as a benevolent, dynamic personality that constantly improves upon and works with its creation.

Plato's state of perfection precludes the possibility of change; and among McLaren's more controversial claims, in fact, is that God - along with creation - is a work in progress. He borrowed the imagery of God as "infinite progression" from Saint Gregory of Nyssa, a 4th century theologian best known for his help constructing the doctrine of the trinity, and for his views on universal salvation.

"What if the nature of God is such that when God creates something, it's never, ever, ever finished?" McLaren asked at the gathering. "Because anything that a dynamic God creates is dynamic, and always is spinning off more good, more beauty, more creativity, more possibilities, more options and all the rest. If that's the case, then you'd expect the biblical narrative to be a about the continual production of new forms of goodness."

McLaren said he rejects the doctrine of a fallen creation; rather, the earth and its sinful inhabitants are in a continual state of movement away from God's goodness, which throughout history God has been constantly trying to restore to himself. Thus the emergent nature of the church is the expression of God's continual creation and improvement - what McLaren characterized as the "quest"-like adventure of the Christian life of faith.

Conversely, a "refusal to grow" with this constant unfolding of creation is what McLaren defines as sin.

"When that opportunity comes and we refuse it; when we, instead of expanding we contract and instead of reaching we pull back; when we refuse to keep growing, that's when things start going south," McLaren said. The "moral arch" to our universe, he believes, is what leads to "justice, reconciliation, hope, humility, connection and mutual respect."

The liberation theology movement of South America was just such an emerging movement, he says, responding to the poverty and injustice of its time. And by McLaren's theology, the American church's response to its nation's culture and values hasn't appropriately followed suit. "Our country overwhelmingly favors the complete subversion of Mary's song that we preach and we sing and recall in the advent season: The sign of the coming of God's justice is, 'You fill the hungry with good things, and you send the rich away empty.'"

"And what are we doing?" he asked. "We're sending the poor away with less, and make sure we pour it on for the rich. This is a sick, sick system that we live in - that we've convinced people that the way forward is to pour more and more wealth and more and more benefits to the rich."

"But [in] the biblical theme of justice, the primary issue is poverty and how we respond to the last, the least, the lost, the outsider, outcast and so on." It's life on the fringes and outskirts that sees the renewing growth, he argued.

When asked at the gathering how he'd describe his own "model" of God, McLaren invoked the image of a "non-linear trinity" relationship in which the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (characterized by McLaren as female) exist in a perpetual, "dynamic, relational dance" in which there is "eternal movement... of honoring and movement of caring."

McLaren went further, expressing man's connection to God as a connection to the whole of the created order itself. "So to be connected to God necessarily involves being connected to your neighbor, and even to your enemy. And in our world we'd have to say to the created world: to the trees, and the coal, and the air and the arctic ice shelf, and the polar bears and everything else."

He concluded: "To me, if we start thinking about God in that way - of just this majestic, mysterious, profound dance of mutual love of honoring and respect, ultimate reality [as] this movement of love - that invites us into this unending quest and a beautiful way to live."

FOOTNOTE: I first heard McLaren at Lambeth 2008. He was invited by the Archbishop of Canterbury to address the bishops there. The press was also invited for the occasion. I was singularly unimpressed as he did not seem to have a handle on who is audience was - that is the vast majority of the bishops were from the Global South - and what he had to say was only relevant to the North American scene. At the time he came across as moderately conservative, more interested in trying to make church relevant to a growing audience of post-moderns sick and tired of playing church. Since then his messagehas regrettably deteriorated as the story you have just read indicates. I would urge priests NOT to invite him to speak. He will lead your people astray.

David W. Virtue DD
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