I came across a curious paragraph in Tom Wright’s Simply Christian, in which he highlights a ‘mystery’ in the social organization of God’s ‘new world’. He argues that the end of all things is not the emigration of the righteous to heaven but the reintegration of heaven and earth, when God will remake the world and ‘raise all his people to new bodily life to live in it’. I have a bit of a problem with the way he characterizes resurrection as ‘life after life after death’, but the basic assertion that we are summoned ‘to live in the present as people called to that future’, in the light of the believed in renewal of creation, is surely a good one. He continues, however…

I have recently had a very interesting conversation by email with Jonas Lundström, who for a Swede writes remarkably good English, and Graham Old (Leaving Munster). It is partly about the substance of The Coming of the Son of Man and Re: Mission, and partly about the broader question of how the church in the West should respond to the collapse of Christendom – if, indeed, Christendom has collapsed. Jonas and Graham have given me permission to write up the conversation, with only some minor editing, as a post on Open Source Theology.

Everything Must Change (see the synopsis in the first part of this review) will be read by many as a challenge to the modern church to exchange an ineffectual and theologically suspect notion of what it means to be Christian for an ‘emerging’ understanding that offers a credible hope of global transformation. That is certainly part of McLaren’s intention. But the main aim of the book, it seems to me, is to challenge an unbelieving world to defect from the dominant system, to disbelieve in the destructive framing story, and to trust instead in the new framing story of Jesus. It is, as McLaren puts it, a ‘religious book, but in a worldly and unconventional and ultimately positive way’ (3); it aspires to change public opinion (269).

It’s three months now since Brian McLaren’s latest book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope was released, and in the frenzied, web-driven world of emerging theology, three months is a long time. For all I know it’s not even his latest book any more. It has been widely reviewed, blogged on, commented on, pod- and videocasted about, facebooked, eulogized, trashed on the web. But I found it a highly stimulating read for all sorts of reasons and I think it’s well worth reviewing even at this late stage in the cycle of fashionability. The review comes in two parts: first, in this post a synopsis of McLaren’s argument in the book; and secondly, at some time in the near future, a critical evaluation in which I want to consider in particular how the category of ‘kingdom of God’ fits into a vision of social transformation, which seems to me to be the central theological question posed by the book.

I am pleased to say that my book has just been published by Paternoster in their ‘Faith in an Emerging Culture’ series. The book builds on the argument of The Coming of the Son of Man but broadens the scope of its historical-realist narrative to embrace an understanding of ‘mission’ that arises out of the summons to Abraham to be the progenitor of a creational microcosm, a world-within-a-world, an authentic humanity.