When Bill Cosby first introduced Fat Albert in his standup
routines, he told a story about scaring him with a big statue and how Fat
Albert crushed his friend when he panicked. He got a big laugh. Then he said,
“I told you that story so I could tell you this one”, and told another Fat
Albert story. I did last week’s blog so I could do this one.
Before I started this blog, not just this post, the whole thing, I discovered something called the
“Emergent Church” or some say the “Emerging Church”. Phyllis Tickle gives a
great explanation of it here.
I eventually came across the guy who everybody points to as
getting the idea started. His name is Brian McLaren. He became an Evangelical
pastor a little later in life and figured if he was going to be serious about
it, he should go meet some of these poor people he was preaching about. He has since
visited a variety of cultures and gained a deep understanding of what it is to
be poor. He has sat through meetings where people who are on the ground, with
their elbows deep in helping oppressed people have challenged religious leaders
to do more than just pray for those people. He has seen people shift their
thinking from other worldly thoughts to a hands-on focus of what needs to be
done to make this earth heavenly. So, I was kinda excited about reading one of
the books central to his message, Everything
Must Change.
I was disappointed.
He starts with his personal story then asks, what do we do
now? He looks at the global priorities of a few global organizations. Okay.
Then he makes up an oversimplified model of the gears of society as they
currently turn. Next he talks about how we should frame our discussion and our
work and attempts to use Biblical stories to do it. I agree strongly with the
problems he points out with the framing stories that were used to subjugate the
peasants of Europe and build the not-so-holy Roman Catholic Empire, but I
cringe when he tries to create a new framing story.
He seems to be familiar with the type of analysis I found in
Parables as Subversive Speech, but I
read every footnote and it ain’t in there. It’s as if he wants to use some of
that history, but not all of it, only the parts that fit his preconceived
ideas. Basically the same sort of cherry picking that every theologian
throughout history has done. But I don’t know if he has read Parables as Subversive Speech or not, so
it may be that his view of history is incomplete, or just different from mine.
When he talks about parables with stewards in them, he comes
very close to describing the world described by the historian Lenski. But when
he analyzes the Parable of the Unjust Steward, he selects a theology that
involves gathering up points for heaven instead of viewing the steward as
someone who is a cog in a corrupt system, who does what he can with the tools
he has. He praises the steward for “switching sides”. Since the steward would
be switching to the side of the peasants, McLaren doesn’t have an explanation
for his boss praising his actions. He leaves you dangling with an incomplete
interpretation, making you figure it out. Maybe that confusing line was Jesus
adding a tag line to the parable. What does Brian think? Who knows?
McLaren has a huge heart, a sharp mind and I hope his hands
continue to do good work. He has no reason to care about what I have said here.
He is having success turning eyes away from invisible things in the clouds down
to the not so pretty problems with creation. We need that. The question is, if
we maintain a view that still includes focusing on invisible things, will we be able to
fix those problems or just be faced with different ones later?
Is his framing story different enough to make a difference?
I’m wondering if it is different at all. After discussing some parables and
providing some translations from the Greek and pointing out some Bible passages
that could be said to contradict the idea of a Jesus that came to support a
right-wing political agenda of rules about what people do in the bedroom or how
they should treat their slaves, he starts listing what he thinks are the right
things to do. Personally, I find these things non-controversial, like caring
for people who have less than me, looking for peaceful resolutions to
conflicts, paying people what they are worth, stuff like that.
The rest of the book is lists of ideas like this,
interspersed with data about how those things are not happening now; like how
many people live on less than a dollar day, or don’t have access to clean
water. If you don’t know about those things and you think God is doing a good
job, buy this book, otherwise don’t bother.
When he says “Everything Must Change”, by “Everything” he
means the ancient framing story that got us into this mess. If you believe in
that story, he is only asking you to change a little bit. At the end of one of
those lists of what he thinks you should be doing, he says, we can accomplish
them by “following a weaponless prophet in Galilee”. He doesn't explain that, he just makes up what
Jesus might do if he were incarnate today.
So, really, you get to leave quite a bit unchanged. For that
reason, I believe this framing story will fail in basically the same way the
current one is failing. By loosely connecting the list of good ideas to an
interpretation of some scripture, the door is wide open to altering the
interpretation and picking different scripture to justify a different list. I
really don’t know if McLaren’s reading of Greek is accurate or not. Since he
knows I could check up on him, I hope he is honest, but very few people will do
that work or even care to. And we don’t know if the future will continue to
bring us the amazingly easy access to information that we have been given in
the last few decades. Very small changes could put us back in the Dark Ages
when a few people told everybody else what the Bible meant.
There are other framing stories. Just because I don’t offer
an alternative in this week’s blog doesn’t mean they aren’t there or they are
not valid. McLaren is on a parallel track with some of those stories, but his
track is going to run out. I’m not worried about him causing a train wreck and
hope to meet up with him further on down the line.
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