The end is near

While uploading the encounter podcast tonight – yeah I really got behind this week – I got back into “Everything Must Change” by Brian McLaren. I’ve been itching to read it lately but have set it aside while I wait for others in our book club to “catch up.”

Reading Chapter 10, McLaren talks about some of the differences between the conventional view of Jesus and the Gospel and the emerging view’s. He gives four comparisons and then suggests six unintended negative consequences of the conventional views of Christ.

Simply put, the conventional view of Jesus poses little or no significant challenge to the dominant framing story that currently directs our societal machinery in its suicidal trajectory. It only fails to confront and correct the current dysfunctions of our societal machinery, but energetically aids and abets its suicidal tendencies in at least six unintended but nevertheless harmful ways.

The conventional view:

• relegates Jesus to practical irrelevance in relation to human social problems in history; His message is about the soul, its guilt before God, and it’s afterlife and not about our world and its current crises
• offers relatively little hope for history but anticipates the complete destruction of the world; easily becomes an “opiate of the masses” pacifying people with dreams of a better afterlife rather than motivating and mobilizing them to transform the world here and now
• tends to be dualistic, with human souls and other “spiritual things” in one category and human bodies and other “secular” things in another; it tends to keep faith private and personal so believers are seen as “just passing through” and steering away from “worldly” social engagements beyond their personal, family and church-related concerns
• may view blessings as God’s blessings to an elect group and little or nothing else (except condemnation) to everyone else
• sees God’s essential attitude toward the world as one of wrath and believers are discouraged from seeing God as an ally in the world’s transformation
• by postponing the essence of salvation to the afterlife, and by assuming that God plans to destroy the earth, the conventional view leads us to assume that the world will get worse and worse and that this deterioration is in fact God’s will or plan. This assumption tends to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not only that, but in some versions of the conventional view, the worse the world gets, the better we should feel since salvation – meaning post-mortem salvation after the world is destroyed – is approaching.

McLaren suggests there are many lines between the conventional and emerging viewpoints that people may agree with or disagree with. Some may take the conventional view as their “contract” and portions of the emerging view as the fine print or vice versa.

But this really got me, when he suggest that our “framing story” in our modern Western culture has resulted in a “Gospel about Jesus” and not the “Gospel of Jesus.”

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