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Faith as Quest, not Bastion (part 2)

Posted Mar 12, 07:52 AM | 0 comments | by Amy Moffitt | Link

An Interview with Brian McLaren
by Melvin Bray

This is the second 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.

Melvin: Speaking of the first two or three questions, you seem to have finally embraced as your own the evolutionary reading of Genesis espoused by your character Neil Oliver in The Story We Find Ourselves In. In the preface of the former book you seemed to hedge by characterizing the ideas of the book as one possible approach. What changed? What made this the time to hinge the credibility of the emergent quest on a scriptural reconciliation of creationism and evolution?

Brian: Although I do believe this book makes an important contribution, I hope the credibility of the emergent quest won’t hang on me alone, and certainly not on this single proposal! But I can see why you would point this out as being important, because the traditional reading of Genesis that I was taught as a child, and which is still faithfully followed by many good people of a conservative bent, requires us to see a world created in perfect stasis that has fallen into evolution and change. But that goes against everything we observe in real life. Whether we’re talking about astronomy, physics, geology, biology, paleontology, ecology, or anthropology, we don’t see stasis anywhere, now or in the past. What we see is a pattern of unfolding, expansion, growth, diversification, novelty.

I feel like James in Acts 15: it makes no sense to put a conceptual stumbling-block in the way of people who are seeking God, to say, “You can’t follow Jesus unless you subscribe to an outmoded way of looking at the cosmos.” To do so would be like requiring people to believe in an earth-centered universe or a flat earth simply because that’s how our ancestors understood things. Thank God, we are given not only permission but encouragement in the Scriptures to seek wisdom, and that includes wisdom about how the universe works. Evolution and emergence seem to be integral to God’s creative genius, and that fills me with a sense of wonder and worship.

It’s interesting you asked what changed, because a few friends have said that the tone or voice of this book seems different – maybe more confident, less tentative. Part of that, I suppose, is simply that I’m ten years older now than when I wrote my first book. And part of it is a gift from my critics during those ten years. When I wrote The Story We Find Ourselves In, I was proposing a number of important things, including a less literalistic way of reading Genesis. If that seems like I was hedging – well, for me, it was being appropriately tentative, in the proposal mode rather than the polemical mode. Then I waited and listened to see how people – including critics – would respond. If I’m wrong about something, I certainly don’t want to be the last to know, so I listen to serious critique of my work – by serious, I mean charitable as opposed to mean-spirited and intelligent as opposed to reactionary. The mix of critical and constructive responses served to increase rather than reduce my confidence.

At heart, what’s at issue is this: do we bring to the Bible the assumption that it describes a changeless, timeless system, more like the Platonic ideal, or do we bring to the Bible the assumption that it describes a story, a narrative. Most of us were given a pre-critical bias in the system direction, but now, whether it’s through the influence of postliberals like Hans Frei, or postconservative Baptists like Jim McClendon, or postmodern philosophers like Paul Ricouer, we’re seeing that the Bible works a lot better when read as a narrative rather than a system.

Melvin: You do a lot of teaching in the book about church history, geopolitics, philosophy, theology, anthropology. Is there a conscious reason you avoid explicitly acknowledging your use of literary analysis to arrive at many of your interpretations? I kept wondering if readers without your and my language arts background or interest would recognize why the interpretations you posit might be more credible than others. You seem to rely most heavily on your audience’s ability to follow your overall train of thought, rather than teaching what figures of speech, symbols, themes, allusions etc. are and how they function in any great piece of literature.

Brian: Well, perhaps my approach will turn out to be a mistake, but I generally try to understate the scholarly underpinnings for my work. You’ve heard the saying that some good ideas experience “death by a thousand qualifications,” and the same can be said for “death by a thousand footnotes.” My background, as you know, was literature, so I could talk about structuralism and post-structuralism, about phenomenology and logical positivism and the linguistic turn and language games, about reader-response theory and speech-act theory and the second naivete and aporias and so on, all of which I find fascinating. But I tried to let all that be like the submerged part of the iceberg, in hopes that the visible part would float for the average reader who doesn’t have time to do all the reading I’ve done before I write – just as I don’t have time to do all the reading the various specialists and scholars whom I respect have done before they write.


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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