Libertarians and Socialists Talking About Dubya

Because I have no impulse control and Mike Morrell was kind enough to link to yesterday’s post on his Facebook, I decided to get started on A New Kind of Christianity a bit sooner than I had planned. So I’m currently sitting at Barnes & Noble with a store copy of the book, leeching their internet because I refuse to buy a book from a nation-wide book store when Lincoln has such magnificent local alternatives. (Unfortunately, said alternatives have not yet received said book, but Indigo will hopefully be getting it soon. Anyway.)

So here’s my initial response to the opening of Brian’s new book.I feel like I’m a libertarian who just got done talking to a socialist about what’s wrong with George W. Bush. Within moments I’d go from “Amen!” to “Wait… what?” It’s not that I’m trying to make these reviews simply an extended controversy or polemic, but after reading the preface and the opening chapters, that’s been my thought.

Like many reformed evangelicals, I’m in total agreement with Brian’s condemnation of what’s wrong with the church. It’s become captive to a consumerist, industrialized, modern, western, colonial mindset. Amen to that. Where I’m struggling to understand Brian’s thought is in his proposed response that seems to completely exclude the possibility of Christians like me and churches like the one I’ve called home for three years..

I go to a missonal church. We have been working with pastors in Haiti for seven years in a holistic mission seeking to help our brothers and sisters in every area of life and to be helped by them as well. Our congregation is 50% college students and probably 80% young adults in the 18-35 age range. Our former youth pastor voted for Barack Obama. None of our pastors are young-earth creationists. The lead pastor has books about beer on his office bookshelves. We have a cinema room and routinely have a Sunday morning class on cinema and film. Our book table features books by Donald Miller and Pete Scazerro’s The Emotionally-Healthy Church. In short, we are not the type of church McLaren rightly condemns on page 8 as trapped in the modern world of colonialism, capitalism, nationalism and the Enlightenment (a period I’m fond of referring to as The Dark Ages).

And yet.

My pastors believe in predestination. We believe that God in the Old Testament told his people to make war on the Canaanites. We believe the same God we celebrate on Sundays killed Egypt’s first-born in the tenth plague. We believe in the inerrancy of Scripture and the practice of church discipline. We’re complementarian, though it’s a more chill Tim-Keller-style complementarian (as opposed to certain batshit crazy complementarians who will go unnamed). We affirm the exclusivity of Christ and the virgin birth.

So when I read McLaren’s book, my first thought is that his critique needs some fine-tuning. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s mistaking the fringe Plymouth Brethren he grew up with for broadly evangelical Christians. I understand the tendency because I grew up with a church that broke off from the Brethren. (You know you’re in a divisive church when they break off from the Plymouth Brethren.) But what I’ve learned since I left the church of my youth is that evangelicalism is a much bigger tent than the leader (pastor is a shepherding term so I refuse to use it for him, even “leader” is probably being generous) at my old church painted it to be. So I can reject everything about my old church that deviates from the larger Christian tradition, and there’s still a hell of a lot left over to embrace. This has been a frustration of mine with Brian since very early in my reading of him – his critique of evangelicalism is overly-simplistic. He doesn’t seem to understand the huge gap between people grounded in the historical evangelical faith of Schaeffer, Graham and Henry and fundamentalist wackjobs. As a result, there’s no room for a church like Grace Chapel in his taxonomy. By his categorization, we shouldn’t even exist.

But we do. And so do a lot of other churches like us, including a good chunk of PCA churches as well as most of the Acts 29 network.

So I guess my main question so far is this: How does Brian account for churches like mine? If he acknowledges us as brothers and sisters, then he has to admit that it’s possible to be all the good things he and others like him affirm – hopeful, safe, gracious, open-armed, accepting, inclusive – and still affirm the so-called “modern” distinctives I listed above like the exclusivity of Christ, the wrath of God, and predestination.

The other option seems to be to throw us in with the other captives of Newton and modernity that he dismisses so glibly on page 8. But if he does that, isn’t he undermining the inclusivism he values so much?

To be fair, I may be proposing a false dichotomy here, and if I am I want to be called on it. But so far I’m feeling like there’s no place at Brian’s table for a Christian like me – a Calvinist, inerrantist, complementarian, leaky-exclusivist who values diversity, openness, questions, and inclusive communities. It seems like his only labels for Christians are the old-fashioned, backwards colonialists and the enlightened new-wave emergents.

But I’m neither.

So how can we continue a conversation when from the beginning Christians like me are left out? Thoughts?