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Faith as Quest, not Bastion (part 3)

Posted Mar 13, 09:30 AM | 0 comments | by Amy Moffitt | Link

An Interview with Brian McLaren
by Melvin Bray

This is the third 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: There is a point in the book where you actually recommend that certain people put the book down for a while, if they are unprepared to deal with the psychic or relational dissonance that quest would undoubtedly cause. You have a remarkable ability for remembering and accommodating what it was like on the other side of quest. A mutual friend, author Will Samson (Enough: Contentment in an Age of Excess) recently suggested that this is because you are at heart an evangelist, but has evangelism not historically involved a crucial sense of urgency? Is there not a sense of urgency or imperative in the questions around which the book is organized? Is there some theological or other rationale for your less intense—if that’s the right phrase—approach to faith?

Brian: You’re right. There is a real sense of urgency. I was in Palestine recently. You can see there how Christian Zionism in the US, which is based on nearly everything I’m trying to counter in the book, could easily increase terrorism and help plunge the whole world into nuclear war – which could too easily dominate and take the lives of our own kids and grandkids. Its adherents don’t intend this, I hope! But they don’t seem to realize how easy it is for their Armageddon prophecies to become self-fulfilling. They don’t realize the unintended consequences when they focus on texts promising land to Israel without noticing all the other texts that demand ethical accountability for how Jewish people treat non-Jews. In so doing, their approach does to Palestinians what the colonists and cowboys did to Native Peoples, what Apartheid did to South Africans, what anti-Semitism did to the Jews in Europe throughout Christian history, what whites did to non-whites before Civil Rights – and sadly, since. Those are serious things, and I feel great urgency on behalf of the people who will suffer because of entrenchment in an old kind of Christianity.

Not only that, but many Western Christians, by failing to take the questions I’m writing about seriously, too often are unintentionally driving their kids and neighbors away from the faith. By doing so, their churches are shrinking and wrinkling, as I say in the book, and there’s real anxiety about the viability of many of our churches as a result. But even more, think about where their entrenchment leaves their kids and grandkids and alienated neighbors and friends. These people who feel squeezed out of the church are ones I feel especially called to help, and so I feel intense urgency about this.

But here’s the thing for people like me who feel so much urgency. If we go around grabbing people by the lapels and screaming, we’ll elicit reaction rather than reflection, and we’ll sabotage the very kind of rethinking we want to encourage. So we need to distill our urgency into gentleness and patience. That’s not easy!

On a more personal level, here I am, fifty-three years old, and I have spent part or most of every single day of my adult life – I don’t think this is an overstatement – grappling with what it means to be a faithful follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s an obsession of sorts. If it’s taken me decades to have the courage to break out of certain boxes and grapple with these questions and perhaps get a few small glimpses of insight, how can I be so uncharitable as to expect others to get on board right away? That’s why I spend the last couple chapters of the book urging people to be careful and patient and wise in the ways we try to stimulate rethinking and conversation in this quest.

Melvin: I imagine the following in the “Can we find a way to address human sexuality without fighting about it?” chapter will be the cause of some consternation. “By coming out of the closet regarding their homosexuality, gay folks may help the rest of us come out of the closet regarding our sexuality…. As in so many areas, we must blaze a new trail into that terra nova beyond the binary and reactionary ideals of sexually repressive fundasexuality on the one hand, and sexually unrestrained hedonism, on the other.” When you came out on the sexuality question, you came ALL THE WAY OUT, didn’t you? Why put so much on the table (as if to say “this issue is way more complex than we want to make it”)? Yet after unpacking a boatload, you don’t actually answer the question of the chapter (at least not to the degree to which you respond to the other questions of the book). Do you at this point have any inkling of a way forward? If so, why not print it yet?

Brian: Well, I’m sorry you didn’t think that I answered the question, but I can see why you might see it that way. I ask, “How can we address divisive issues of sexuality without fighting and dividing,” and instead of offering a “how to” kind of answer – I do something more like that in response to the tenth question, actually – I tried to do two other things. First, I tried to show how the standard “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” approach isn’t as faithful as it sounds. I did a close reading of the second half of Acts 8 to show that there is another line of data in the Bible in conversation with the six Bible passages normally cited on homosexuality. In other words, to answer “How can we address sexuality without fighting and dividing,” my first answer is by getting beyond a proof-texting approach.

Second, I tried to show how even if one takes an absolute, irrevocable stand for or against homosexuality, one isn’t out of the woods, because we have a lot of other sexual issues confronting us. Either we’re going to grind ourselves into the dust with one sex-fight after the other – biting and devouring one another, as Paul said in Galatians – or we’re going to have to calm down and realize that we’ve got a major, complex, and ongoing challenge on our hands, a challenge that will require us to do a lot more than choose sides on issue after issue.

Actually, there’s a third thing I tried to do in this chapter. I folded in another question I believe would make the top twenty if not the top ten: the question of anthropology. Issues of sexual identity pile a load of bricks on the straw-laden camel of our traditional view of the human being as a ghost in a machine. So I’m suggesting we can’t really resolve the sexuality issues until we reopen our understanding of the human being, who we are, what we’re about, what constitutes us. And our answer is going to have to go a lot deeper than the dualistic ghost/soul/spirit in machine/animal/body model that we inherited.


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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