OK, so I’ve finally cracked Brian McLaren’s newest book, A New Kind of Christianity – Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith. I’ve had the pleasure of reading about half a dozen of his previous works and expect that his latest entry will cause me to think, as his others have. Off hand I can remember reading A New Kind of Christian, which encouraged me to look at the larger picture and also gave me a great picture of what a healthy mentoring relationship can look like. The Story We Find Ourselves In helped me to look at the whole story of scripture- I found it very encouraging. The Last Word and the Word After That caused me to think in ways that I have never done so before. After reading A Generous Orthodoxy I found myself not so critical of those who believe and practice their faith a little bit differently than I did. I read The Church on the Other Side about seven or eight years after it was published (1998), so nothing said was really new to me (no fault of the author’s).
Yes, McLaren has more than his share of critics; I saw a Facebook post last week from a critic calling the book “an old kind of heresy”-but that discussion is for another day. My theological training (Southern Baptist) is conservative, but my bent is to be a “doer” first and a to spend hours in deep study second-so I will try to read and report the text carefully and not “be driven by every wind of doctrine…”
The ten questions that McLaren claims are transforming the faith are ones that keep coming up in his conversations with leaders across denominations and around the world. They are:
1. The narrative question: What is the overarching story of the Bible?
2. The authority question: How should the Bible be understood?
3. The God question: Is God violent?
4. The Jesus question: Who is Jesus and why is he important?
5. The gospel question: What is the gospel?
6. The church question: What do we do about the church?
7. The sex question: Can we find a way to address human sexuality without fighting about it?
8. The future question: Can we find a better way of viewing the future?
9. The pluralism question: How should followers of Jesus relate to people of other religions?
10. The what-do-we-do-now question: How can we translate our questions into action?
These are all good questions. I’m looking forward to see how McLaren responds to them.
