Question number four is ‘The Jesus Question’. The previous section had concluded with the slightly illogical assertion that our evolving understanding of God must terminate in Jesus as the Word of God. But McLaren recognizes that we still have to make it clear which Jesus we are talking about: ‘We must face the fact that many different saviors can be smuggled in under the name “Jesus,” just as many different deities can be disguised under the term “God” and vastly different ways of living can be promoted under the name “Christianity”’ (119).

Brian McLaren asks, thirdly, ‘Is God Violent?’ We can eliminate the effects of the Greco-Roman distortion of the biblical narrative, we can read the Bible as a library rather than as a constitution, we can bring into the focus the stories of God as good creator, passionate liberator, and reconciling king, but we are still left with the fact that there are some much less palatable images of God to be found in scripture – ‘violent images, cruel images, un-Christlike images’ (98). We do not see anything as frightening as the Greco-Roman Theos-Zeus-Jupiter ‘god’, who sponsors religious totalitarianism and consigns the greater part of humanity to ‘eternal conscious torment’. But the problem is real enough.

McLaren’s second question is ‘How Should the Bible Be Understood?’ He lists three broad reasons why we need a ‘new approach to the Bible’. First, fundamentalism in its various varieties has, to our repeated embarrassment, made the Bible an enemy of science; secondly, we do not have constructive ways to allow the Bible to speak into modern ethical issues; and thirdly, the Bible has too often been used to support policies of violence (68-70). He then illustrates at some length how in the US the Bible was used to defend the practice of slavery (70-76). He concludes that ‘very few Christians today, in my experience anyway, have given a second thought to – much less repented of – this habitual, conventional way of reading and interpreting the Bible that allowed slavery, anti-Semitism, apartheid, chauvinism, environmental plundering, prejudice against gay people, and other injustices to be legitimized and defended for so long’ (76).

The first question has to do with the overarching storyline of the Bible by which, consciously or otherwise, we make sense of Christian existence (33-45). The traditional plot, McLaren argues, has six elements: 1) humanity begins in the perfect condition of Eden; 2) we have fallen from that perfection into 3) a state of condemnation; 4) salvation provides an escape from condemnation to 5) eternal life; 6) but many, if not most, will experience ‘eternal conscious torment’ in hell. McLaren maintains that this theological schema is not itself biblical: it is the product of an accommodation of the Jewish narrative to an essentially Platonic system of thought, according to which humanity 1) begins in an ideal state of Platonic changelessness, 2) falls into the cave of illusion, which is 3) a condition of ‘Aristotelian becoming’, from which 4) we may either be saved and restored to 5) the Platonic ideal or 6) be consigned to Hades.

Brian McLaren’s new book A New Kind of Christianity addresses ten critical questions that he believes are transforming the faith. Christianity is in crisis – perhaps on the scale of the Reformation or the Great Schism between East and West (cf. Phyllis Tickle), perhaps at the end of a much longer historical period that began with the conversion of the Roman empire (cf. Harvey Cox). The only way to come through this crisis, McLaren believes, is to ask these hard questions and allow them to shake our conventional paradigms. This will launch us on a ‘quest for new ways to believe and new ways to live and serve faithfully in the way of Jesus, a quest for a new kind of Christian faith’ (18).

The project is no less presumptuous than McLaren’s earlier work and certainly no less controversial. It is not difficult to ask hard questions. It is not difficult to imagine new – or at least newish – kinds of Christian faith. Indeed, much of the criticism levelled against the book will be along the lines that it is really just an old kind of heresy. So if we are prepared to accept the premise that Christianity is in crisis and that something new has to emerge (I am, but many are not), the really important question will be whether the book is able to define a passageway into the future that genuinely takes us beyond the modern conservative-liberal battleground without losing sight of its origins in the biblical narrative. That demands from the reader a willingness both to re-imagine boldly and to think critically – a willingness both to ride the magic carpet of McLaren’s visionary rhetoric and to ask whether magic carpets really exist. It’s not an easy trick to pull off, and we are unlikely to do either McLaren or scripture justice, but I want at least to give the first question a shot and then see where we might go from there.

I wonder if we’re right to be quite so leery of the punishment aspect of the cross. I guess a lot of it has to do with not wanting to attribute vindictiveness, cruelty to God. Jesus’ death was an anticipation of the punishment of Israel – I suggest in my book on Romans that in Romans 8:3, when Paul speaks of the Jesus coming in the ‘likeness of sinful flesh’, he means that Jesus appeared to be a rebel, he appeared to be part of the problem, in the eyes of people, and received the punishment for rebellion. He appeared to have defied Rome just as Israel would later actually defy Rome and so was ‘punished’ by Rome as an instrument of the wrath of God when in fact he was innocent. That all seems to me to work rather well narratively. Within the narrative about Israel his death could be seen both as an atonement and as a punishment – these are distinct ideas.

There is a classic image of Jesus that has predominated in Christian artistic traditions – a tall figure with long wavy, almost effeminate hair (because he’s worth it!) and beard, sorrowful eyes, white robe, and the original Jesus sandals. We do not imagine that this representation amounts to a real likeness: it is no less an icon, and only marginally more human, than the stylized productions of the Orthodox churches.

The rambling Anglican Ordinand Jon Swales has drawn attention to a Themelios review of N.T. Wright’s Justification: Paul’s Vision and God’s Plan, which was Wright’s response to John Piper’s critique of his attack on the Reformed understanding of justification. It gets more convoluted. The review is written by David Mathis, who turns out to be the Executive Pastoral Assistant to Piper at Bethlehem Baptist Church. The fact that this is a less than impartial review is not a problem in itself, but I’m surprised that Mathis’ relation to Piper was not more clearly signalled. Unfortunately, the American edition of Wright’s book appears to be paginated differently to the British edition, which makes it difficult to evaluate his imprecise criticisms. Nevertheless, Mathis’ argument that Wright makes too much of Abraham in his exposition of the ‘righteousness of God’ struck me as curious, so I thought I would take an opportunistic stroll down this incidental path through the forest of the justification debate.