I’m a Brian McLaren fan. Not quite a fan boy, but an eager reader and admirer. So I when I got his newest book A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions that are Transforming the Faith (site here) I read it hoping to lead a book group discussion in my congregation. Though I enjoyed the book and recommend it overall, it didn’t fit the small church book group niche. And the more I think about it, I’m not actually sure it really breaks much new ground for me. McLaren is eloquent as usual (though a bit verbose at times), and I appreciate his perspective. Perhaps this is a case of unfair expectations — Minnesotans might call it “Joe Mauer syndrome” — but while I enjoyed the work, I finished wanting more.

The book is in ten parts, or ten questions. A few examples: What is the overarching story line of the Bible? Is God violent? What do we do about the church? Can we find a way to address human sexuality? How can we translate our quest into action?

McLaren believes the Christian faith is in the midst of a major overhaul. Perhaps every generation believes this, but I agree with McLaren that we are in a particularly transformative time. McLaren approaches his ten questions with a mix of his own intense and impressive Biblical exegesis and a grounding in what I would call the mainline progressive Biblical scholars. McLaren is one of these great authors that defies easy description. He’s a scholar for sure, but also an anti-establishment guy, an Evangelical who is excoriated by the right, a teacher and a pastor. Mostly, though, I think of McLaren as a communicator. He’s skilled at cutting through the rhetoric and getting his point across.

For instance, his chapter on the questions of the overarching storyline of the Bible does a splendid job of describing the problems of reading the Bible through the eyes of the Roman Empire and overly-simplified protestant theology. McLaren discusses the “six-line narrative” of Eden, Fall, Condemnation, Heaven, Salvation or Hell/Damnation and blows it out of the water as a faithful way to read the Bible. Quite right. But, to be honest, McLaren’s next chapter basically on what’s next, could basically be described as what I took from a center left Presbyterian seminary — the challenge to read the Bible on its own terms, the challenge to appreciate the non-literal intent of many of the writers and take them even more seriously “because they distill time-tested, multilayered wisdom — though deep mythic language — about how our world came to be what it has become (48). McLaren does a great job of expanding the Biblical approach he took as a young man, but to be honest, I don’t read his current approach as anything hugely new. Perhaps that’s because I’m only 27, so what McLaren is writing about is just sort of the water I’ve always drank.

Here’s a good snippet of what McLaren’s about:

Although few of us today are tempted to freeze our understanding of God in graven images, we may too quickly freeze our understanding in printed images, rigid conceptual ideals not chiseled in wood or stone but printed on paper in books, housed not in temples but in seminaries and denominational headquarters, worshiped not through ancient ceremonies and rituals but through contemporary sermons and songs (111).

McLaren’s big metaphors for the Bible that he uses in the work are the Bible as not a constitution, set and rigid with one meaning, but the Bible as community library where the community gathers its wisdom, discusses its future, centers its soul. Though I think some lawyers would quibble with his understanding of the constitution, the point is taken. The Bible is not and never has been about rigidity and simple “yes” and “no” directives, but it’s a book of books around which we gather, in which we rest and play, from which we live and serve.

McLaren concludes the book with a call to a final quest, the “quest to heal what we have so disastrously broken, the quest to unify and liberate what we’ve tragically divided and conquered, the quest to rediscover a larger more beautiful whole rather than pit part against part in deadly conflict” (232). This is not a small ball work, but a big honking call for a new kind of Christianity, heck a new kind of living and being with one another in creation. I’m all for it. I hope McLaren keeps the conversation going, for its the conversation on-going for practically all of my young adult life.