Does Brian McLaren Believe that the Protestant Bible Communicates Truth About God?

Traditionally and biblically since the Reformation, salvation has been found through God's grace alone. The Reformers understood the Scriptures to reveal inerrant truth about God in their original writings.[1] They understood the Scriptures literally; although, they sometimes spiritualized the text as well. Overall though, the Protestant church has had a high view of God, believing that God's holiness and justice demand the punishment of sinners or the punishment of Jesus on their behalf. McLaren however approaches the Scriptures, not as an exegete, but as authoritative autonomous interpreter. For lack of a better word to describe his audacious hermeneutics, his arrogance is astounding. Concerning the global flood found in Genesis 6-9, McLaren writes,

"In this light, a god who mandates an intentional supernatural disaster leading to unparalleled genocide is hardly worthy of belief, much less worship. How can you ask your children-or nonchurch colleagues and neighbors-to honor a deity so uncreative, overreactive, and utterly capricious regarding life? To make matters worse, the global holocaust strategy didn't even work. Soon the "good guy" Noah gets drunk, and soon after that his sons are up to no good, and soon after that we're right back to the antediluvian violence and crime levels. Genocide, it turns out, doesn't really solve anything in Genesis, even if a character named "God" does it. (Could that be a more worthy lesson to draw from the text?)[2]"

Respect toward McLaren is difficult to achieve for anyone with a high view of the Protestant Christian God because of statements like this about the God of the Bible. Instead of taking the flood as it is written, instead of exegeting the text, McLaren changes what he does not like about God, choosing instead to create a god of his own making.[3] His arrogance does not stop here, for his newest book A New Kind of Christianity is full of such references:

"In previous chapters, we saw God as the good creator in Genesis, as the compassionate liberator in Exodus, and as the reconciling king, lover, and father of all people in the prophets. But as a serious reader of the Bible, I'm still a little uneasy, because I know about some of the other images of God that are also found in the Bible-violent images, cruel images, un-Christlike images.[4]"

McLaren clearly calls God, the only God that exists, his Creator, un-Christlike. He simply does not like the images accredited to God in the Hebrew Scriptures; and he will either try to explain them away, or he will try to accredit the "un-Christlike" images to a Greco-Roman Platonic view of God instead of his purported Aristotelian view:

"Now the god of this Greco-Roman version of the biblical story bears a strange similarity in many ways to Zeus (Jupiter for the Romans), but we will name him Theos. The Greco-Roman god Theos, I suggest, is a far different deity from the Jewish Elohim of Genesis 1, or Lord (referring to the unspeakable name of the Creator) of Genesis 2 and 12, not to mention the Abba to whom Jesus prayed. As a good-no, make that perfect-Platonic god, Theos loves spirit, state, and being and hates matter, story, and becoming, since, once again, the latter involve change, and the only way to change or move from perfection is downward into decay. In fact, as soon as something drops out of the state of perfection, Theos is possessed by a pure and irresistible urge to destroy it (or make it suffer).[5]"

Once again, McLaren simply picks and chooses what he likes about God, and discards the rest. The staggering reality is how he argues against the Reformers' view, and the historically overarching Jewish and Christian view of God. He blasphemes God by first associating Him with evil, and second, by creating an idol named Theos to take credit for the evil that he associates with God. He also wrongly gives his Christian god only credit for things that he believes are worthy of praise. Furthermore, instead of the God-centered approach encouraged by the Reformers, where Christians take, believe, and live in response to what the Scriptures reveal about God, [6] McLaren allows himself and his audience to dictate what they like to think about God. His doctrines therefore speak more about anthropology than they do about theology.

[1] John Calvin, 2 Corinthians and Timothy, Titus, & Philemon, Calvin's New Testament Commentaries Series, no. 10 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1996), 330. Calvin says, "... we owe to the Scripture the same reverence as we owe to God since it has its only source in Him and has nothing of human origin mixed with it." Also see, Nichols, The Reformation: How a Monk and a Mallet Changed the World, 18, for a brief argument that the Reformers gave the Protestant Church the doctrine of sola scriptura.

[2] McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, 109.

[3] This writer is amazed that Mark Driscoll is included in the same movement with Brian McLaren. This writer suggests that the gospel should be the defining mark of any movement associated with the church. Driscoll and those postmodern thinkers who affirm that salvation is by God's grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone should be part of the Emergent Church Movement while every other postmodern thinker that does not affirm the gospel should be associated with another movement called the Emergent Cult Movement.

[4] McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, 98.

[5] Ibid., 42.

[6] See Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, 216-223, for a brief description of Zwingli's, Luther's, and Calvin's Christ-Centered theologies.