Reading Brian McLaren makes me feel a little like Hilary Clinton listening to President Bush’s State of the Union speech in 2001: thrilled that the administration is advocating a prescription drug program for seniors, but wondering-as the bandwagon rolls by-“Hey, wasn’t that my issue!” Like Clinton must have felt, I am grateful that McLaren is advocating issues I care about, but concerned that what he will end up with may make matters worse.
In The Story We Find Ourselves In, Brian McLaren picks up the fictional story of Neil Edward Oliver (Neo) and Daniel Poole where it left off in A New Kind of Christian (Jossey-Bass, 2001). Here Neo and Dan continue to struggle with issues of faith and postmodernity in suburban Washington, D.C., and the Galapagos Islands. The heart of the book is the “love story” between Neo (a former pastor turned high school science teacher) and Kerry Ellison (an agnostic Australian biologist). Neo and Kerry’s friendship grows as Neo tells Kerry the Christian story and helps her understand how her own life relates to the grand narrative of God as Creator and Redeemer.
McLaren and his characters are at their best when engaging non-Christians in talks about God and this world. Especially effective is the way Neo tells the Bible’s story to Kerry. It is simple but also complex. It is too much for a brief “evangelistic” encounter. Neo tells the story to Kerry (and later to Dan Poole and his family) as it is meant to be told: in the context of friendship and trust, with the purpose of incorporating the individual into the Bible’s own story of creation, crisis, calling, communication, Christ, community, and consummation.
While this puts McLaren apparently “on the side of the angels” in this endeavor, threads of the novel also seem to deny or ignore important aspects of the story the characters tell-the parts that make the story “Christian.” One of the most tragic examples of this tendency is seen when Dan Poole casts the ashes of a loved one over the water near the Galapagos Islands. As he does so, he remarks that the character “doesn’t need these ashes anymore.” Her identity, her personhood had been “uploaded like software, from the medium of molecules to a new medium.” She had been “preserved, saved and cherished in the mind of God.” For all the wonderful discussion about the importance of creation itself in God’s story of redemption, the novel ends on a strange Gnostic note with no conception of or need for a bodily resurrection.
In another scene, Neo explains what “judgment” means. Despite his earlier insistence that forgiveness is a gift “by grace, through faith” he bases God’s final judgment not on Christ’s own works of active and passive obedience, but on how individuals have lived up to God’s “hopes and dreams for our world and my life in it.” Only those who have done well and become someone good will hear God’s positive assessment and invitation to enter into the joy of the new creation. Is this really good news?
While this and other aberrant theological elements of the novel are troubling-for example, the positive assessment of Process Theology; the scene in which all the main characters share in a private administration of the Sacraments, including rebaptizing one character-this book still offers much to careful and discerning readers. Take seriously the author’s invitation to use your dissatisfaction with the characters’ questions and answers by constructively articulating better answers to questions pressed upon the church by a world that finds itself at odds with the Bible’s story of creation and redemption.
