Admittedly, that may well have happened a long time ago, but can we finally agree that the erstwhile emergent guru and Sojourners contributor has finally made a public declaration of heresy? He chose a really peculiar way to do so, too–a column in the “On Faith” section of the Washington Post addressed at the lunacy that is Harold Camping. McLaren wants to eliminate any and all possibility that anyone can know the time of the Second Coming, so he proceeds to throw out the baby with the dirty bath water:
Now I, like many others, have migrated to a very different understanding of the future. More and more of us are calling it a “participatory eschatology” or a “participatory view of the future.”
Instead of assuming that the future is predetermined, that the script is written, that the movie is already filmed in God’s mind and is only “showing” in the theatre of the now, we believe the future does not yet exist.
We believe that we are called to work together with God’s Spirit – with creativity, for justice and peace, nonviolently, and both passionately and patiently – to create the kind of future that fulfills what Desmond Tutu calls “the Dream of God.” Of course, we can’t presume to know what that world looks like: we can’t presume it’s communist or capitalist or works on some as-yet undreamed-of economic system.
But we work with this confidence: that when we show love, when we seek God’s justice for all, when we care for the vulnerable and forgotten, when we try to take the logs out of our own eyes before working on the splinters in the eyes of others, when we care for the birds of the air, flowers of the field, and fish of the sea, when we admit our wrongs rather than hide or deny them, when we give rather than hoard, when we seek reconciliation rather than revenge … we are nudging the world one small step forward in our journey towards that dream of blessing and peace.
So, in the interest of a statist “social justice” agenda that was old before I was young, McLaren takes apart the doctrine of God. He repudiates God’s omniscience, as well as His foreknowledge, and for good measure anything that might resemble His sovereignty. Oh, and though he doesn’t mention it, he also implicitly repudiates Scripture as God’s revelation of Himself and His plans for humanity, since all of its many promises and prophecies become nothing more than fond wishes and vague guesses in the face of a future that is as much a mystery to God as it is to us.
I don’t whether Brian McLaren is a Christian or not. It’s up to God alone to judge his heart. But I think that if it has not been before, it is now clear that no church that values the souls of its members, and no publication that values the souls of its readers, should give him a forum from which to preach what the Scriptures would call anathema. In particular, it is time for those evangelicals who continue to be enamored of McLaren to get over him, and give him over to the mainline theological wasteland for which he so obviously pines.
May 10, 2011 at 1:50 pm
I think tone, to some folks, is everything. I have a friend who recently began siding with Rob Bell, not having read his book, because she was so disgusted by John Piper’s tone towards him. I’ve met Brian McLaren and in person he comes off as nice, soft-spoken, and generally kind to those who oppose him. (In the class where I met him, one student took him on with fury, and McLaren was very generous…no pun intended.) I think a lot of McLaren’s detractors come off as harsh. But the truth is, I’d rather have harsh and Godly (as Jesus often was) than nice and hellish. And this “open future” that McLaren talks about puts “open theism” to shame. But wasn’t all this nonsense of his readily apparent in “A New Kind Of Christian”? It’s not like he hasn’t been hinting at heresy his entire career.
May 10, 2011 at 3:07 pm
McClaren never really liked the idea of God’s Sovereignty; he let his pacifism get the best of him. But by rejecting and thus demonizing certain doctrines, is he not contradicting his own pacifism?
As for his salvation, indeed God is the judge alone. I do liken McClaren to Simon found in Acts 8 in terms of salvation, though, IMO.
May 11, 2011 at 1:33 pm
You don’t have to believe that the future is predetermined in order to also believe in God’s soverignty. I think people’s choices matter, and that we do have free will. God is outside of time, that’s how I understand it. He created time, after all, so how could it bind Him?
May 11, 2011 at 4:14 pm
Kate: He’s saying that the future doesn’t exist, which means He can’t foresee, nor can He assure that His promises and plans will be fulfilled. God is above or outside of time, and that’s why He can see all that is in either direction. It is possible to affirm free will as well as God’s foreknowledge and omniscience, because free will is about causes.
May 13, 2011 at 2:39 pm
He joins the late Clark Pinnock and others in the Open Theism camp. Yet, they are all called evangelicals. Evangelicalism is a big tent, which includes lots of mutually exclusive ideas about Theology. I was more concerned about Mr. McLaren’s article in Sojourners where he essentially denied Christ’s death for sins (it was a cover story in February, I think – “Is God Violent”). Of course, Open Theism is heresy just as his ideas about the cross are heresy. Being a heretic doesn’t mean he isn’t a Christian, it just means he is wrong. It also means that I wouldn’t want him to speak at my church, and I wouldn’t go hear him speak. There was an interesting debate about Open Theism in the Christian Scholars Review a few years ago, where this whole idea is presented to preserve human freedom and autonomy. The whole question of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility (freedom, if you like) is addressed in J.I. Packer’s great little book: “Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God”. Unfortunately, we live in a world, even in Christian and sometimes even reformed circles, where anything goes. Standing for truth is not so popular anymore. Was it ever?