A Penny For Your Thoughts: Everything Must Change

I have just finished the book “Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crisis, and a Revolution of Hope” by Brian McLaren. I wish to hear thoughts from those of you who have read the book, but mostly challenges and critiques. However, before I do that, I want to state as honestly as I can the assumptions and biases from which I speak.

I do not function from a position of a socially conservative Evangelical. I fully affirm the ancient creeds about the Trinity, the work of Christ, and hold Scripture to be the word of God. However, I am unapologetically affected by post-modernity and its critiques of old dominating meta-narratives and its recognition of modernist arrogance. In the same vein, I hold loosely the exclusivity and absolutism of the specific strain of Protestantism of which I am a part. I want to recognize the development of theology and thinking in light of a given historical context. As cultural creations, I do not believe that people can view truth objectively, even though Truth exists in the person of Jesus Christ. We look through a glass darkly and await the day we will see clearly, face to face. Given such assumptions, I desire to view my own tradition with humility, knowing that it was not shaped in a vacuum nor bestowed in a pure untainted form from on high. In the same breath, I seek to listen to the voices of those from other Christian traditions with the belief that God is not a tribal God. I am inclined to give a hearing to women and non-Western traditions, because God is not a white Protestant male. I desire to listen to the voices of the poor and oppressed, to see how the Gospel manifests itself among those who do not have money and power behind their words, because these are people God favors. I believe that left unchecked, our cultural waters have and will continue to inform our understanding of our faith more than our faith will change us. I believe in listening to those of different faiths or non-faiths, because God can use whomever he chooses to give a clearer perspective of his realities.

With that said, “Everything Must Change” is built upon the work of post-modernity’s understanding of dominating meta-narratives, a la Foucault. McLaren first establishes and names the narratives that our culture lives by, and then proceeds to discuss why such narratives are fundamentally dysfunctional, referring to people as disparate as Rene Padilla, Jim Wallis, Philip Jenkins, Wendell Berry, Cornel West and our own Dr. Bruce Benson. He then appeals to the scholarship of people like N.T. Wright and Dominic Crossan in the understanding of a Historical Jesus and how the historical Jesus spoke to the dominant (and equally corrupt) narratives of his day. McLaren draws a parallel between what Jesus said and did in the 1st century and what we he says to our global context today. He uses people like MLK, Pope John Paul II, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela to illustrate the true power of what happens when Christians undermine faulty narratives with the [reconstructed] Christian one. He doesn’t hesitate to critique the religious structures in their perpetuation of the fallen narratives, and challenges the church to reform itself according to Jesus’ narrative, one that truly subverts the massive powers and principalities at work in the world.

I appreciate McLaren’s willingness to listen to many different voices. Undoubtedly, his association with liberation theologians, left-leaning Evangelicals, economists critical of globalization, Christian pacifists/tree hugging poets and the simple mention of "post-modernity" will turn off a more conservative reader. However, as I’ve stated from the outset, such things do not count against him in my eyes.

I ask for a critique because I am predisposed to accepting what McLaren says. This book was referred to me by a man I respect, its contents contain authors, theologians and philosophers that I tend to agree with, and even the book’s specific contents aren’t so much an exposure to new ideas as it is a clarification, connection, or reframing of certain ideas I’m already open to. I appreciate a good deconstruction and am interested to hear if anyone has other thoughts.