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Faith as Quest, not Bastion (part 4)

Posted Mar 16, 07:25 AM | 0 comments | by Amy Moffitt | Link

An Interview with Brian McLaren
by Melvin Bray

This is the fourth of 4 posts containing the full text of Melvin’s interview with Brian.

Melvin: If readers walk with you, I think they will see that the book has a definite logical progression. Just as I neared chapter 18 “Can we find a better way of viewing the future?” I started to feel that the ability to quest with you hinged on a particular presupposition: whether or not one sees herself participating with God or waiting on him. Another way of putting it would be whether one sees the biblical narrative as closed or open for further submissions. And that is exactly what you end up talking about at that point, which hearkens back to the “what is the gospel?” question. How important is the matter of participation to the quest you advocate?

Brian: There are so many levels to your question. Let me just address one. The modern mindset is deeply formed by Sir Isaac Newton and the idea of laws or mechanisms of nature. In that model, the universe is a machine, and everything is determined by mechanistic processes. For modern Christians, God is the great engineer, the designer and machine operator who makes the machine and pulls levers and turns switches to make things happen. Even in psychology and sociology, whether it’s Freud or Skinner or Marx, human beings are to some degree part of a mechanism and their behavior is more or less determined by impersonal mechanisms.

But that model of the universe has been fading for a hundred years. It’s as if our theology is still Newtonian, and we haven’t begun to learn from Einstein and Heisenberg and Hubble, not to mention Kuhn and Polanyi and Ricouer and others. In this post-Newtonian world, we are participants, subjects, agents, creative partners … not objective observers or passive objects. It’s no surprise that in a Newtonian framework, we saw the Bible and God and the future in a deterministic way, but now, I think, we need to be liberated from those constraints and see a fuller range of understandings in Scripture, and in life.

Melvin: What makes these various positions you take in the book different than what one might label a “post-modern creed”?

Brian: Thanks so much for asking this, because it’s really important. First and foremost, I’m not offering the positions in the book in that way at all. In most cases, I’m simply reporting on what’s already happening, what’s already being said among those who are on a quest for a new kind of Christianity. In a few cases, I may be offering something with some fresh elements to it, but when I do so, I’m offering it like an opening volley in tennis – not as a slam to win the game, but simply as my contribution to an ongoing conversation.

It’s interesting that the Bible itself doesn’t give us creeds. It gives us stories and poetry and letters and other forms of literature, from which people constructed creeds for various reasons at various times. Perhaps there are postmodern creeds to be written; I’m not sure. In some ways, the very idea seems oxymoronic. At any rate, my focus in this book is on raising worthwhile questions that will promote constructive conversations that will in turn foster friendships as we move forward on the quest or journey of faith. That may be a quest that never ends. After all, what limit could there be to God’s unfolding creativity and goodness? Will we ever be able to say we have fully explored it?


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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