By Becky Garrison

He's controversial. He's heralded by some and accused of being apostate by others. Brian McLaren is unapologetic. He says he believes in the life, death on the Cross, and triumphant resurrection of Jesus Christ. Meanwhile, this pastor, author, speaker, and networker is listed as one of America's 25 most influential evangelicals by Time magazine. McLaren got there primarily on the strength of more than a dozen challenging (some would say danged near heretical) books that have resonated with millions of readers, including The Secret Message of Jesus: Uncovering the Truth That Could Change Everything; A Generous Orthodoxy, The Last Word and the Word After That: Faith Doubt and a New Kind of Christianity; A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey; A Search for What is Real: Finding Faith and others.
      Sinner, seeker, saint? One interview won't decide it. But here are Brian's words. From here, it's up to you. (Log on to www.brianmclaren.net for all things Brian.)

WITTENBURG DOOR: First off, how would you respond to those who say that you're a proponent of a theology that has abandoned the cross?

BRIAN MCLAREN: I can't imagine why anyone would say I have abandoned the cross!

DOOR: Some do ...

MCLAREN: Sheesh. I guess this kind of thing would be coming from people who claim that the gospel can be reduced to one theory of atonement. I have consistently affirmed that there are a whole range of classical theories of atonement, and have resisted pressures to reduce the mysterious and majestic power of the cross to a flat, one-dimensional explanation. I have also sought to explore the biblical understanding of the cross in its social dimensions and what it says about reconciliation both with God and among humanity, including those who criticize, persecute or posture themselves as enemies. On a practical and personal level, my understanding of the cross is teaching me to listen, to critique humbly, to learn all I can from it, and to trust in God's power to bring resurrection from my own failures and weaknesses.

DOOR: Elaborate, por favor.

MCLAREN: I'm saying that far from abandoning the cross, I want to experience what Paul spoke of when he said he was crucified with Christ and yet lived. Like many of our best contemporary theologians and missiologists, I see the cross as having many dimensions, not just one. I'm not for limiting our understanding of the cross and the gospel to forensic categories. Obviously, the New Testament writers employ legal metaphors to describe the work of Christ, but they use many other metaphors, too—disease metaphors, kingdom metaphors, and so on. I think a fair reading of my works will show that I'm simply trying to affirm a multi-dimensional gospel, not a flattened one.

DOOR: Some of your critics go beyond critiquing your work to hurling nasty epithets.

MCLAREN: Part of the thing that has been so great about The Wittenburg Door through the years is that you guys don't stand on one side attacking the other but rather you puncture the bubble on both sides.
      But dealing with my enemies is challenging. My critics consistently force me to grow as a follower of Christ. I certainly try to listen to see where they might be right and, as the Quakers say, hold that up to the light. But at the end of the day, I can't please everybody. I have to be able to live with myself, and be honest before God, even if that means stepping into a falling rocks zone at times.

DOOR: Fair enough—we'll use that as a baseline. So, what do you believe is the real scandal of Jesus' message that you explore in The Secret Message of Jesus?

MCLAREN: It's that He isn't talking about just going or not going to hell after you die. He's talking about a radically different way of living. He's talking about changing the world and living in a subversive and radical way in this world. That's what His pregnant phrase "kingdom of God" involves.

DOOR: As you finished The Secret Message of Jesus, what was the most significant insight for you?

MCLAREN: I began the book with the hypothesis that the message of the kingdom was at the center of what Jesus taught. By the time I was done, I was convinced it was in the center of not only what He said but also what He did. Obviously, parables are short, fictional ways of describing the kingdom, but as I wrote the book I came to understand the miracles as signs of wonders of the kingdom, and I understood the crucifixion and resurrection as a prophetic dramatization of the kingdom. The pervasiveness of it really hit me. I ended the book with more questions than I began with regarding how the message of the kingdom relates to eschatology. I'm still thinking that area through.

DOOR: Tell us about the upcoming Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope.

MCLAREN: What I want to do is take the idea of the kingdom, which I tried to make as clear as I could in The Secret Message of Jesus, and then I want to try to apply that message to our contemporary global crises. I'm going to talk about different ways that our civilization is set up in terms of ecological suicide, religious suicide, political suicide, and economic suicide.

DOOR: Speaking of contemporary situations, let's talk about the challenges you see as the church moves from modernity to post-modernity.

MCLAREN: There is so much argument about the term postmodern that the first thing I say is that people should be careful about reducing a very complex subject to a one-dimensional kind of binary opposition where you throw everything into a blue modern bin or a green postmodern bin. I've always said that life is much more complex than that. Besides, in the last couple years, I have become more convinced that a better word than post-modern is post-colonial.

DOOR: Post-colonial? Um, you're not veering into Liberation Theology or something, are you?

MCLAREN: As soon as you start talking about postmodernism, people want to argue about theories of knowledge and certainty—a field called epistemology. You end up with layers and layers of thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking. That's not unimportant, but it's certainly not the whole story. The other side of the coin is to talk about the ways that claims about knowledge and certainty are used to fight or perpetuate injustice. And that's the postcolonial discussion: looking back on 500 years of colonization by so-called "Christian" nations—and asking, "What were we thinking? How did we justify the terrible things that were done? How can we be sure we don't do that sort of thing again in the future?"
      The real issue, in my mind, is not simply an argument about truth; it's the need for repentance about the abuse of power—especially by white Christians who used the Bible to justify some pretty horrific things, whether we're talking about the genocide of native peoples, the African slave trade, the holocaust, apartheid, or whatever. While we claim a high level of certainty in regards to matters of truth, we have shown ourselves to be relatively clueless about matters of justice. I'm not advocating uncertainty at all; I'm all for having a proper confidence, but I also want us to think about how we can be more gentle and humane in the way we treat other people, especially people whom we feel don't see the truth as we do.

DOOR: So, where does "emerging church" figure into all of this?

MCLAREN: There's so much going on, and people are at all different places. I mean, I started asking certain questions 15 years ago, and one question led to another and another, and here I am now. Other people are just asking the first set of questions now, or they're asking the questions in a different order. But what all of us have in common, I think, is this sense that we're trying to be faithful to God in the aftermath of modernity and colonialism and all that they entail.

DOOR: How do you reconcile the need to affirm orthodoxy without becoming exclusionary snobs?

MCLAREN: I think we begin by deciding that we need a third alternative that rejects being careless about truth on the one hand, but that also rejects being exclusionary snobs on the other. I think a part of what's going on in these conversations requires us to look at the Bible in some fresh ways. We're not paying less attention to the Bible but we're realizing that we also need to pay attention to the ways we read or interpret the Bible. We need to go back and uncover our assumptions about how we think the Bible is supposed to function in the Christian community. For example, even though no Christian scholars that I know of support the dictation theory of inspiration—you know, that God dictated the Bible to the Biblical writers the way Muslims believe God dictated the Koran to Mohammed—I'd have to say that an awful lot of the preaching I hear sounds like it assumes the dictation theory. It's a lot more Koranic than incarnational, at least to my ears. And many of us assume that the Biblical writers must have written like reporters for The Wall Street Journal or Business Week. But maybe they were writing more like Annie Lamott writes one of her confessional books, or more like Mary Oliver writes a poem. So maybe we're learning to take the Bible literarily, not just literally, and to respect divine inspiration as an artistic reality more than a journalistic process.

DOOR: How come so many liberal clergy never talk about Jesus? It's like they're afraid to say His name.

MCLAREN: I think a lot of them are reacting to fundamentalism and the Religious Right. Enough angry folks have hurled the word "Jesus" around like an insult that other folks don't want to say His name at all. It almost feels to them like a racist or a hate crime statement sometimes because "Jesus" is used to legitimize all kinds of fear and intimidation. Another reason goes back farther in history of liberalism where I think people were seeking to speak in more theistic, deistic, universal, non-particular, nonspecific ways. They had reasons for this in the 17th and 18th centuries, with all the religious wars in Europe, but I think that tide is going to change because of the work of people like N. T. Wright and Steve Chalke, who are helping us get a new vision of what the message of Jesus is. I think if we could get that back, people are going to be very excited to talk about Jesus again.

DOOR: How does the church deal with complicated issues like homosexuality?

MCLAREN: I think a big part of our challenge is to realize what other issues are being grappled with under the cover of our arguments about homosexuality. For example, I think many people see homosexuality as the front line in a battle between Democrats and Republicans, or socialists and capitalists, or whatever. They're talking "homosexuality" but they're thinking "free enterprise" or "small government." Or they might be arguing about how to interpret the Bible, as I was mentioning a minute ago. Or they might be arguing for a re-emphasis on personal sexual morality, which is a tremendously important issue.
      But so far, I haven't seen many people change their views on homosexuality through arguments, one way or the other. What changes their views is when they meet people—really get to know them—who are different. For example, when a "liberal" Christian meets a compassionate person who believes homosexuality is a sin, or when a "conservative" person discovers his daughter or nephew or best friend is gay, that tends to notch the rhetoric up to a higher level, a more human level.

DOOR: Abortion is another topic that tends to devolve into an either/or type of debate.

MCLAREN: A huge challenge for us is to learn how to reject badly framed arguments, and frame better ones. In my opinion, if you frame the question as, "Are you for or against overturning Roe versus Wade?" you don't get very far. You quickly get paralyzed in disagreement and there's nothing to say except repeat yourself louder and louder. We need to reframe the issue, maybe by acknowledging that in my experience at least, there are relatively few people who are actually for abortion. A better-framed question, in my mind, would be, "What are the best ways people who are against abortion can help reduce the number of abortions?" And another important framing question would be, "What are the underlying values or beliefs in our society that make abortion popular?" If we fight abortion legally without dealing with the underlying belief structures, I don't think we'll get very far. Those are two very legitimate discussions that almost never are had, because we immediately click into legal frameworks, constitutional debates, us-them polarizations, and so on. When you look over the last 30 years, if we had framed the discussion differently, more wisely, we might be in a very different place right now.

DOOR: While we're on a roll here with controversial topics, let's talk megachurch. So, how do you measure success as a pastor in a world filled with megachurch ministers?

MCLAREN: That is so worth talking about. One of the unintended negative consequences of the megachurch movement in the last 30 years is that there are a thousand people my age who have been fantastic heroic pastors of churches of anywhere between 50 to 350 people and they feel like dirt because they didn't have 5,000 people. There is this pervasive assumption that significance is only related to size. So many pastors are doing wonderful things, but unless the numbers are big, they are made to feel—or allow themselves to feel—basically worthless. You can have a big church, thousands of people, and still miss the point.

DOOR: Which is?

MCLAREN: There is this poem that I read to myself every couple months by Oscar Romero. I think it's called "A Future Not Our Own." Basically the idea of the poem is that the work of God's kingdom always goes beyond one lifetime. So we never see the full results of what we do. We make this contribution to something that we can't fully grasp, and the harvest of the seeds we plant is always beyond us. Ministry in this light becomes less an act of strategy and more an act of faith. There is something humbling to that.

DOOR: Could you elaborate on the spiritual breakdown you had in the early '90s, which led to the A New Kind of Christian trilogy?

MCLAREN: In the early and mid-'90s, I starting doubting the systematic theologies I'd inherited. I didn't know you were allowed to believe in God outside of a prescribed systematic theology. So, I had to go through kind of a deconstruction and reconstruction. The process was really scary, because I had no guarantees. I remember reaching a very low point and thinking, "I'm either going to have to be dishonest and pretend that I still believe in a theological system that doesn't work for me anymore or I'm going to be honest about my doubts and questions." I kept thinking, "I might lose my whole faith," but I couldn't squelch the honest questions that kept arising. I think this is one of the agonies of these things, you don't know how they're going to turn out. It's a very high-risk thing but you don't have any choice if you're trying to be honest. I think you have to do it—doubting and questioning as an act of faith, as strange as that may seem.

DOOR: How did you get through this?

MCLAREN: It sounds trite, but I kept praying. I stayed close to God. I didn't let my doubts about ideas pertaining to God drive me away from the God who was always far above and beyond my best ideas of God, not to mention my worst ones.

DOOR: Finally, how do we reclaim the term "Christian evangelical" so it can have a positive connotation again?

MCLAREN: I think we need to go back to what Jesus said, "Let your light shine before humanity and they'll see your good works and glorify God the Father." We need to invest more of our energy in the doing of good works and less in this "culture wars" rhetoric because our world is in crisis, and we need a whole lot more good works about now, and a whole lot less talk.