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But let me say it very bluntly: if by liberal, someone means naturalistic, rejecting the possibility of the mystical or miraculous, denying the authority of the Scriptures, denying the resurrection, blah, blah, blah - I’m not a liberal. If by liberal, someone means free to think, free to ask questions, free to seek truth and God, then I would hope all of us could be liberals. If by conservative, someone means unwilling to think or ask questions because one already has the truth nailed down in a pristine form, then I’m not a conservative. But if a conservative is someone who wants to learn from the past, someone who loves the Scriptures and respects the creeds and most importantly loves Jesus, then I would hope everyone could be conservative. But this is where I think “a new kind of Christianity” comes into play, because a lot of us don’t want to have to stay in the old dualism. Brian McLaren ☀

It’s interesting that the Bible itself doesn’t give us creeds. It gives us stories and poetry and letters and other forms of literature, from which people constructed creeds for various reasons at various times. Perhaps there are postmodern creeds to be written; I’m not sure. In some ways, the very idea seems oxymoronic. At any rate, my focus in this book is on raising worthwhile questions that will promote constructive conversations that will in turn foster friendships as we move forward on the quest or journey of faith. That may be a quest that never ends. After all, what limit could there be to God’s unfolding creativity and goodness? Will we ever be able to say we have fully explored it? Brian McLaren ☀

…before the Enlightenment, authority resided not in books, but in divinely ordained people. Authority figures taught with a kind of divine right parallel to the divine right by which kings were thought to rule. My hunch is that as we dispensed with the divine right of kings, we moved toward the divine right of individuals, enshrined in a statement like “all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” We articulated and defended those human rights through constitutions. I think we did something similar in the ecclesial realm: Protestants, at least, dispensed with the divine right of popes and cardinals, and we shifted our authority to constitutions — doctrinal statements and systematic theologies — which we claimed were derived from and legitimized by the Bible. Brian McLaren ☀

There is a level of cognitive dissonance in a writer who offers his book as the answer to all that ails Christianity and then also wants to frame how we engage with that book. And the dissonance is deeper in that said writer chooses to label those who disagree with him as close-minded Fundamentalists. Perhaps it’s time to read the 99 Theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto, Mr. [Brian] McLaren. You sound like the companies they attempt to educate. I’m sure it’s rather unfortunate for you, but you don’t get to decide how the rest of us engage with your book. Let me be blunt, your approach is reminiscent of the divisive politics perfected in the nation you call home. Where people who disagree with your president are labeled as racists - or those who agree are socialists. Of course, you showed some of that tendency yourself here, so perhaps I should not really be surprised. kinnon.tv ☀

We’ve gotten ourselves into a mess with the Bible. First, we are in a scientific mess. Fundamentalism again and again paints itself into a corner by requiring that the Bible be treated as a divinely dictated science textbook providing us true information in all areas of life, including when and how the earth was created, what the shape of the earth is, what revolves around what in space, and so on. Brian McLaren ☀

The wild, passionate, creative, liberating, hope-inspiring God whose image emerges in these three sacred narratives is not the dread cosmic dictator of the six-line Greco-Roman framework. No, that deity, we must conclude, is an idol, a damnable idol. Yes, that idol is popular, perhaps even predominant, and defended by many a well-meaning but misguided scholar and fire-breathing preacher. But in the end, you cannot serve two masters, Theos and Elohim, the god of the Greco-Roman philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the violent god of profit proclaimed by empire and the compassionate God of justice proclaimed by the prophets. Brian McLaren ☀

But imagine what it would be like to live in this deep 3-D universe while thinking you were still living in the flat 6-line universe. That, I believe, is the condition many of us find ourselves in, and it explains why many of us find our religion limiting, cramped, and unlivable. We feel our religion asks us to live a flat life in a deep world. Many of us think we’re constrained by the Bible, when we’re actually constrained by the Greco-Roman framing of the Bible. Why would people keep living in a flat, determined world? Primarily, I think, because their authority figures, especially in their religious communities, have taught them to. Why would their authority figures keep them in a flat, determined world? First and consciously, because they themselves believe that this is the universe that the Bible mandates for believers to inhabit through faith; they’ve bought into the Greco-Roman fusion as a pre-critical assumption. But I think there is a second reason, more subconscious: when you’re an authority figure seeking to keep people “in line,” it helps to keep them in lines. Brian McLaren ☀

Revelation [19:11-16] is not portraying Jesus returning to earth in the future, having repented of his naive gospel ways and having converted to Caesar’s “realistic” Greco-Roman methods instead. He hasn’t gotten discouraged about Caesar seeming to get the upper hand after his resurrection and on that basis concluded it’s best to live by the sword after all. Jesus hasn’t abandoned the way of peace and concluded the way of Pilate is better, mandating that his disciples should fight after all. He hasn’t had second thoughts about all that talk about forgiveness and concluded that on the 78th offense, you should pull out your sword and hack off your offender’s head rather than turn the other cheek… He hasn’t sold the humble donkey on eBay and purchased chariots, warhorses, tanks, landmines, and B-1s instead. Brian McLaren ☀

We might say that Christians are people who have entered a certain sedentary membership or arrived at a status validated by some group or institution, while disciples are learners (and unlearners) who have started on a rigorous and unending journey or quest in relation to Jesus Christ. It’s worth noting in this regard that the word “Christian” occurs in the New Testament exactly three times and the word “Christianity” exactly zero. The word “disciple,” however, is found some 263 times. Brian McLaren ☀

Few people would say, “Yes, we want a culture of death!” But many would freely admit that money, power, and sex drive their daily lives. And especially when it comes to money and power, we could say that our whole economic and political systems run on these fuel sources. Perhaps in seeking to address these deeper driving forces as the disease rather than arguing about which symptoms are most important, we can find more productive and truly spiritual ways of bringing about needed social change in the years ahead, as we seek the common good of peace, justice, and joy. Brian McLaren ☀

This is the time, I believe, for Christians and non-Christians in both parties to become truly progressive — to move on from old and tired fights and litmus tests that polarize, paralyze, and never lead anywhere productive. We need to realize this inconvenient but urgently needed truth: it’s not the 1980s anymore. If we keep asking the same old poorly framed or unproductive questions — What is your position on abortion? What’s your position on gay marriage? Are you religious or secular? Are you for or against big government?– whatever our answers are, we remain stuck in a past moment and can’t get out of it. We don’t just need new answers to the same old questions; we need to raise new questions entirely, and in that way, change the conversation in both parties in a truly progressive way. Brian McLaren ☀

Where does this bizarre behavior come from? True, there’s a strain of extremism that runs through American politics on the left and right, and the Internet, late-night radio, and cable TV help keep it alive. But there’s more to this, I think. I’m convinced that there is some degree of white fear and resentment behind at least some of this reaction: fear and resentment of an African-American president, mingled with xenophobia regarding brown-skinned immigrants, undergirded by fear of a future where there is no more racial majority status for white people. There is also, I suspect, a good amount of modernist fear of postmodernity mixed in. And where Christianity becomes a tribal religion rather than a reconciling faith — the exclusive and combative religion of rural non-coastal folks, for example, or Southern folks, or socially conservative folks, or folks who hold a certain economic ideology — there is probably some old-fashioned religious supremacy at play too: the “Our God is better than your god, so we should be in power” syndrome. I keep wondering — don’t more Republicans themselves see the danger of an increasingly reactionary Republican party becoming in the 21st century what anti-civil-rights/pro-segregationists and McCarthyites were in the 20th, or what the pro-slavery/anti-abolition movements were in the 19th — conserving an unjust status quo that deserved to be left behind? Out of love for their party and the good things it could potentially stand for in 2012 and beyond, don’t they want to step forward now and be counted? Brian McLaren ☀

The way taught by Jesus’ gospel sends us into the world with an otherly attitude, not “us versus them,” but “us for all of us.” As apprentices who look to Jesus for leadership, we learn to listen to the Syrophonecian woman, and to stop ignoring her or calling her an outsider “dog.” We join Jesus in seeing her great faith. We similarly encounter the Samaritan woman, the Roman centurion, the Ethiopian eunuch, the Philippian slave girl and jailer, and so on … not seeing them suspiciously as outsiders to our in-group, but as people who are already loved, already welcome, already known, already wanted in God’s “come-on-in-group. Brian McLaren ☀

When people tell me that we are or have been a Christian nation, I want to ask, “When?” Was it in the colonial era or during westward expansion, when we began stealing the lands of the Native Americans, making and breaking treaties, killing wantonly, and justifying our actions by the Bible? Was it in the era of slavery or segregation, when again, we used the Bible to justify the unjustifiable? Was it in more recent history, when we dropped the first nuclear bomb and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, when we overthrew democratically elected governments in the Cold War era, when we plundered the environment without concern for the birds of the air or flowers of the field, or when we sanctioned or turned a blind eye to torture earlier this decade? Was it earlier this week, when I turned on the TV or radio and heard people scapegoating immigrants and gay people and Muslims? Brian D. McLaren ☀