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Faith as Quest, not Bastion

Posted Mar 11, 06:23 AM | 0 comments | by Amy Moffitt | Link

An Interview with Brian McLaren
by Melvin Bray

This is the first of 4 posts that will contain the full text of Melvin’s interview with Brian. Check back soon to read the rest of the interview.

It would be disingenuous of me not to confess up front that my appreciation of Brian McLaren extends beyond his merits as an author to include his contributions of friendship as a conversation partner, a connector of fellow sojourners and a faithful dreamer. However, if one were to assume that friendship in any way inhibits me from critically engaging his newest book with the requisite skepticism paradigmatic upheavals deserve, one would be grossly mistaken. For me, and I imagine for many in the Emergent conversation, friendship is a full contact sport. I tend to delve deep fast with questions that can disquiet, disrupt and often unearth that which one might rather have kept hidden—questions that could be considered invasive. Still, Brian was gracious enough to talk to me.

Brian’s A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith (HarperOne)—now in your local bookstore and online—proves to be an incisive and provocative contribution to the public conversation on the future of faith. Incisive in that it clearly discerns the scriptural fault lines and historical inconsistencies upon which modern Christian hegemony has been built. Provocative in that it posits fresh and forward-looking ways of being in the world that simultaneously deconstruct faithless assumptions of the past while making an ever more faithful connection to the best intuitions of the past. The book’s basic premise is that there are pressing questions about God, faith and life, that can no longer be ignored, to which Christianity as it has been commonly practiced throughout modernity offers insufficiently useful responses. Rather than intuitively hunker down in a defensive posture or go on the attack, as our dominant religious metaphors might incline us to do, McLaren proposes Christians reach for a new metaphor, that of quest. A quest is a search for something worth having, in this case a search for a faith increasingly more worthy of Jesus, our Lord.

Not everyone has had as affirmative an encountered with the book. Scot McKnight, a friend of both Brian and the Emergent conversation, has written what seems to be for the Christianity Today audience an ‘about time’ critique of “Brian’s new kind of Christianity.” With his review McKnight casts himself as the Puddleglum of an often Marshwigglesque Evangelicalism. For those who immediately understand that metaphor, they will know that it is not meant to disparage, for Puddleglum is one of the hero’s in the Narnia tale The Silver Chair, even as McKnight has been a cherished champion of the value of orthodoxy within Emergent Village. Nonetheless, McKnight’s essentially one note mantra does not seem to adequately apprehend the complexities and in some cases unprecedented challenges of the present. Don’t get me wrong: to dismiss McKnight’s warrants would, in my opinion, prove a grave misjudgment. However, if after all this time McKnight’s singular concern remains the lack of apparent orthodoxy in Brian’s proposals, I am forced to wonder aloud: Discretion may be the better part of valor, but who decreed that orthodoxy is the better part of faith?

This interview was conducted before McKnight’s review was published, but it does address some of the McKnight’s misgivings. I tried to pose questions that reflect my own ambivalence about faith as quest as well as questions that give voice to the deep reservations and doubts of my more fundamentalist friends and family who remain fully committed to faith as bastion. However, I must say that at the end of my questioning I find this quest of faith (humble confidence) toward a God whose hopes, dreams and desires are for the good of all creation far more compelling than what was my former belief (uncritical certitude) in the God of a triumphal few.

The first and last questions of this interview include content originally published at God’s Politics blog.

Melvin: Brian, it seems to me that the crux of the book is the “What is the Gospel?” chapter and that the most challenging declarations are made between pages 138 and 140. Was this true in the writing of the text? Of all the questions, what do you think makes the gospel question such a challenging conversation for so many to have? I know for myself, it’s the very conversation I’ve sought to avoid with anyone within the denominational tradition I call home who seems uncritically committed to doctrinal orthodoxy.

Brian: So much depends, of course, on what you and they mean by “doctrinal orthodoxy.” I am deeply committed to doctrinal orthodoxy, meaning I want to be faithful to the truth and to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, even if that puts me at odds at certain points with what this or that group has determined as doctrinal orthodoxy. For example, my Calvinist friends who claim orthodoxy need to remember that to the Eastern Orthodox, Calvinists are heterodox from the get-go, because they’re not submitted to the patriarchs and bishops of the One True Church. And my many Wesleyan and Quaker and Anabaptist friends who consider themselves doctrinally orthodox are only questionably so from the perspective of some of my Calvinist friends. And my Dispensationalist friends often speak of “historic orthodoxy” without noticing the irony that before 1835, their approach to the faith had never even been dreamed of. The same could be said in slightly altered ways for Adventists and Pentecostals.

You might be right that the fifth question is the crucial one, although I think the first two or three questions are probably the most radical, in that they open up space to ask the other seven or eight. I tell the story in the book of how shocked I was when an Evangelical theologian once proposed to me that most Evangelicals – including me – didn’t have “the foggiest notion” of what the gospel really was. So perhaps this question will seem like a shock to folks, but I can’t put into words how liberating it is to rediscover Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom of God, and to see that Paul and Jesus have the same gospel, not different ones.


Melvin Bray is chief bbq taster on the Emergent Village green and the coordinating author of The Stories in Which We Find Ourselves: A Bible Story Project to write/collect re-tellings of the biblical narrative that resonate with emerging, missional and/or ‘post-ism’ sensibilities.

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