I like this provocative and nicely weighted take on Christian imperialism, ancient and modern, by Mark Van Steenwyk at The Jesus Manifesto. He makes the point that the Christianity we have inherited – even if we regard ourselves as dissenters – is the product of imperialism in one form or another, whether American, British or Roman, and that this may have rather profound and difficult implications for how we regard the essential legitimacy of Christianity.

In a sermon given at a recent ‘Together for the Gospel Conference’ John Piper asks the question, ‘Did Jesus Preach the Gospel of Evangelicalism?’ – by which he means, in effect, ‘Did Jesus Preach Paul’s Gospel?’ His expressed concern is with the argument of critical scholarship ‘that Jesus’ message and work was one thing, and what the early church made of it was another. Jesus brought the kingdom; it aborted; and the apostles substituted an institution, the church.’ The concern is a valid one. I agree with Piper that it is possible to derive an understanding of Jesus that is historically and theologically coherent from the Gospels as they stand. But the problem will not be addressed by yielding to dogmatic pressure and assimilating the Gospel narratives to a Reformed misunderstanding of Paul.

Reading through the London School of Theology’s Open Learning module on Hermeneutics, I came across a good quotation from Richard Bauckham regarding the potential that time-honoured interpretive traditions have for creating an illusion of permanence and absoluteness:

The sheer length and continuity of the Western Christian tradition – which actually results from contextualization in a long series of more or less overlapping contexts – can create the illusion that long-standing features of it are so because they are appropriate to the human condition as such and so can be transferred to any context. Of course, the arrogance of European cultural imperialism since the nineteenth century has aided and abetted this, and the discovery of the relativity of the Western Christian tradition has been somewhat painfully combined with the need to repent of the colonial mentality.

In Brian McLaren’s better future Christianity is a force not for distrust, hatred and conflict between the world’s religions but for peace, tolerance and understanding. For most of Christian history the underlying Greco-Roman imperial mindset has generated 1) anxiety, 2) paranoia, 3) a future hope that excludes the ‘other’, and 4) a worldview that justifies continuing conflict. The result has been a deeply depressing catalogue of abuses as Christendom has used its political, cultural and military power to impose itself on the world.

I can recommend an astute essay on the current state of the atonement debate by Jason Hood, who is scholar in residence at Christ UMC in Memphis. He makes two general points.

The first – a matter of systematic theology – is that despite the sustained scholarly and sub-scholarly onslaught against the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement in recent years the idea remains intact. This is largely because it can be shown to be solidly underpinned by the redemptive-historical narrative on which the New Testament relies:

The background of covenant disobedience and curses within the narrative of covenant, exile and judgment, and redemption suggests that an emphasis on covenant and Israel’s story buttresses rather than repudiates penal substitution. (283)

It comes as no surprise that when McLaren comes to address the question of how a new kind of Christianity might view the future, he starts by describing a nightmarish populist account of the end-times deeply influenced by the Greco-Roman narrative. The dangers of a dispensationalist eschatology are egregious and manifold: it promotes idiotic and alarmist speculation; it discourages concern for the environment; it has prejudiced American attitudes towards the problem of Palestine; it undercuts peacemaking, diplomacy, and interreligious dialogue; and it once left an eight year old Brian McLaren sitting in mounting panic on the porch of his locked and empty home wondering whether the rapture had happened and he had been left behind (192-193).

The chapter in which Brian McLaren tackles the ‘sex question’ reaches the conclusion that a new kind of Christianity must get beyond the impasse of the modern church’s preoccupation with homosexuality and ‘begin to construct not just a more humane sexual ethic in particular, but a more honest and robust Christian anthropology in general’ (190). That is an excellent end-point to arrive at, but we are going to have to ride a couple of galloping, untamed analogies in order to get there and we may have trouble hanging on.

The second part of A New Kind of Christianity is called ‘Emerging and Exploring’: a number of mental doors have been opened in the first part of the book; now it is time to pass through and see what is on the other side. The sixth question is ‘What Do We Do About the Church?’

Most of our churches, McLaren argues, are adapted to support the five paradigms that have so far been brought into question: ‘the Greco-Roman narrative, the constitutional approach to the Bible, a vision of a tribal and violent God, a rather flattened view of Jesus, and a domesticated understanding of the gospel’ (161). Not being American, I can see how that works for four out of five of these paradigms, but I don’t think I have yet come across a church, no matter how ‘modern’ in its theology and practice, that could be said to be ‘perfectly designed and well equipped to promote and support… a vision of a tribal and violent God’.

Brian McLaren thinks that traditional Protestantism has got the answer to the question ‘What is the Gospel?’ seriously wrong, and I agree with him. Clearly the gospel has something to do with things like atonement and justification and perhaps ‘penal substitution’, but they have been misleadingly framed in a claustrophobic narrative of personal salvation. I’m not sure that McLaren constructs the alternative narrative with sufficient precision – he has taken too many short-cuts for my liking (McLaren is a pastor and communicator, not a theologian) and still exhibits an annoying tendency to obscure the place and calling of the covenantal people of God in the discussion of Jesus’ significance. But I think he is broadly on the right lines when the says that the gospel is the announcement that ‘God’s benevolent society is already among us’ (138, italics removed), a ‘summons to rethink everything and enter a life of retraining as disciples or learners of a new way of life, citizens of a new kingdom’ (139), or the fulfilment of the three-dimensional biblical narrative of creation, liberation, and the hope of a peaceable kingdom (140).