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).

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).