Everything Must Change: What's Wrong? p.2

I want to go back to McLaren's discussion of the major crises that face us globally at the dawn of the twenty first century. I was rather critical of him in my last post, and while I don't necessarily want to temper that criticism, I do want to pick up on the direction in which he's headed (instead of continuing to discuss the direction that I wish he had taken). McLaren identifies four crises, and spends most of the book discussing the first three (quotes from p. 5):

• The Prosperity Crisis - "Environmental breakdown caused by our unsustainable global economy, an economy that fails to respect environmental limits even as it succeeds in producing great wealth for about one-third of the world's population."
• The Equity Crisis - "The growing gap between the ultra-rich and the extremely poor, which prompts the poor majority to envy, resent, and even hate the rich minority - which in turn elicits fear and anger in the rich."
• The Security Crisis - "The danger of cataclysmic war arising from the intensifying resentment and fear among various groups at opposite ends of the economic spectrum.
• The Spirituality Crisis - "The failure of the world's religions, especially its two largest religions, to provide a framing story capable of healing or reducing the three previous crises."

I mentioned in my last post that I think his discussion of the fourth crisis, the spirituality crisis, is inadequate. In fact, I'm not sure that he really discusses it explicitly - I think instead that the book represents his attempt to answer the fourth crisis by providing a framing story that can address the first three, so I suppose one could say that the whole book is an implicit critique of and response to the spirituality crisis as well. Regardless, I want to go back to the first three crises, as they serve as the roadmap for the remainder of the book.

I was about to say that I think McLaren hits it out of the park in this area, that he's done a great job of identifying the major crises that face us and doing so in a way that is engaging and comprehensible. But something caused me to pause, and now I have a nagging thought that I think bears pondering: What of the woman in the Sudan who faces imprisonment for a misnamed teddy bear in the name of religion? And what about the continued oppression that we see in places like Iran, where people who have the courage to stand up to a repressive authority are imprisoned or worse? What about the same in Saudi Arabia, where a woman can get 200 lashes for speaking out about injustice in the judicial system? And what about our own dirty laundry in the United States - what can we say about the psychotic filth perpetrated by the likes of Westboro Baptist Church or the criminal actions of Eric Rudolph, both fueled by a twisted exegesis of the Christian scriptures (to cite merely two relatively recent examples)?

Well, that just undercut a large part of the appreciation that I have for the book, and I haven't had time to weigh its implications as it literally occurred to me in the middle of writing the post. Here is now the new challenge that I need to think through: I think it's fair to say that McLaren is viewing the global crises through an economic lens. And to be sure that approach can bear much fruit - I think that the crises that he identifies are real and pressing and in need of being addressed. But I think that they are also connected to other crises that are not so much economic - they are ethnic and nationalistic and religious and gender-related. To borrow from his own analogy - can we still power the suicide machine if everyone is well-fed? I think the answer is, unfortunately, yes.

I really didn't intend for this to be a critical post - I was hoping to offer some appreciative thoughts this time around. Unfortunately I keep finding gaps in his approach, and I think those gaps are going to limit his effectiveness in answering his own questions.

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Everything Must Change: What's Wrong?

I want to begin discussion of McLaren's Everything Must Change in the same place where he begins and assess the trajectory of the book in that light. I mentioned previously that I found myself underwhelmed with the book; upon further reflection, I think the problem that I have with it begins at the beginning and never fully resolves. McLaren asks two questions, which the rest of the book attempts to answer: What are the biggest problems in the world? and What does Jesus have to say about these global problems? In and of themselves, these are good questions, even if I have a bit of a quibble with the second that I'll discuss in a later post. I'm not convinced of his answers, however.

McLaren discusses four primary crises which he believes answer the first question (all quotes from p. 5):

• The Prosperity Crisis - "Environmental breakdown caused by our unsustainable global economy, an economy that fails to respect environmental limits even as it succeeds in producing great wealth for about one-third of the world's population."
• The Equity Crisis - "The growing gap between the ultra-rich and the extremely poor, which prompts the poor majority to envy, resent, and even hate the rich minority - which in turn elicits fear and anger in the rich."
• The Security Crisis - "The danger of cataclysmic war arising from the intensifying resentment and fear among various groups at opposite ends of the economic spectrum.
• The Spirituality Crisis - "The failure of the world's religions, especially its two largest religions, to provide a framing story capable of healing or reducing the three previous crises."

At this point, I'm somewhat torn. I think there's a lot to what he's saying here. I think he's done a fair job of summarizing a lot of complex dynamics that I think most of us would agree threaten our global civilization at the beginning of the twenty first century.

But I'm wrestling with this set of crises primarily because of the way that he's defined the last one, the spirituality crisis. I don't think that what he's saying is untrue - in fact, I think it's a great way to discuss some of the reasons that the American flavor of Christianity has been so ineffective in responding to social issues in the past century. But I don't think it's big enough. My problem is that he leaves out a fairly significant piece of the puzzle here, and without it the rest of the book feels like a chair with one leg too short - in other words, rather unstable and with a distracting tendency to lean to the side instead of remaining centered.

Let me take a step back and state what I think scripture presents as the answer to the first question. I think, if I were going to summarize the whole of scripture and give a concise way of talking about what's wrong, I'd say two things: idolatry and injustice. I've never attempted to do this, but I think it would be fascinating to walk through Leviticus or Deuteronomy and categorize each prescription in terms of these two headers, sort of a scriptural version of tags. (Side note - that's a damn fine idea. Someone who's smarter than me should put a tagging system together for the biblical text, sort of like a scripture wiki, and open it up for folks to tag texts in ways that they find meaningful. Wouldn't that be fascinating? There's a dissertation in there somewhere.) Anyway - I'm willing to bet that you won't find a part of the Law that doesn't fit in one of those two categories. Throughout the OT, the two seem to be linked, particularly so in the prophets. Zechariah, for example, says this:

Then the word of the LORD Almighty came to me: "Ask all the people of the land and the priests, 'When you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months for the past seventy years, was it really for me that you fasted? And when you were eating and drinking, were you not just feasting for yourselves? Are these not the words the LORD proclaimed through the earlier prophets when Jerusalem and its surrounding towns were at rest and prosperous, and the Negev and the western foothills were settled?'" And the word of the LORD came again to Zechariah: "This is what the LORD Almighty says: 'Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor. In your hearts do not think evil of each other.'" (Zech. 7:4-10)

I think that Jesus was thinking along these lines when he stated that the two greatest commands were love of God and love of one's neighbor - aren't those really just the opposite of idolatry and injustice?

The primary problem that I have with the book, and one of the reasons that I find it ultimately unsatisfying, is that it fails to identify idolatry as a significant part of the problem. That is what is at the root of the spirituality crisis, and it explains nicely why it is that American Christianity has been so remarkably silent on a number of these issues. I agree that the problem is one of framing stories, but what is needed is a framing story that is rooted in the worship of the One True God. Absent that, all of our attempts at solving the other crises will only perpetuate injustice - not correct it.

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Everything Must Change

I've run into another snag on my series about New Creation. It's conceptual more than anything - I know where I want to go but I want to make sure that I'm getting there in an honest way. I've been doing a bit of reading in the prophets, and I've decided that I don't think it's coincidence that we in American Christianity read so little of the prophets and also think so little about new creation. The prophets are rich with this theme, which makes it imperative that their voices are incorporated into my current project in the right way. So I'm doing more thinking right now, and its mostly along the lines of what role exile plays in the OT's theology of new creation (exile being the condition to which most of the prophets were speaking). Exile from the garden and exile from the land are parallels, I think, and I'm not quite sure how that changes my approach. And NT Wright's insights along these lines are helpful as well - if he's correct in asserting that Jesus' understanding of his own mission was to bring the exile to an end, then this is something that needs to be incorporated. In short - I have no shortage of data and what I think are some good categories, but it's a bit of work matching them up.

In the meantime, I recently received a review copy of McLaren's new book Everything Must Change that I've been working my way through. I have to confess that I'm having mixed feelings about it. I'm about two thirds of the way through it, and I think he's missing some significant pieces. I mention this here because I think those missing pieces would be filled quite nicely by a robust view of new creation, but I'm just not sure it's there. As a result, I'm not really finding the "third way" that this book is supposed to represent (as defined against the traditional conservative and liberal approaches). Don't get me wrong; there's a lot of good stuff in the book. But it's mixed with some not-so-good stuff, and it feels incomplete.

I'm also finding that I have a hard time taking some of his points seriously when he's attempting to argue from scripture. I don't really think (for example) that the feeding of the five thousand is a prophetic denunciation of consumerism, or that the parable of the landowner in Matt 20 is really about distributing wealth. It seems as though the farther I get into the book, the more the arguments sound canned and scripture interpreted to fit the arguments - a practice that he rightly critiques earlier in the book. I put the book down after lunch today and my most immediate thought was that Brian would benefit from teaming up with a really good biblical scholar, someone who knows how to exegete well. And I think this is particularly unfortunate given his context; he already knows that he's going to be critiqued, so why not do as much as possible to put his arguments in the most credible light? I think there are a lot of folks who will read this book looking for something to criticize, and those folks will be all over sloppy exegesis. That those folks are, generally speaking, often the ones who need to hear what he has to say makes it worse. He really doesn't say much that I find objectionable - I'd happily agree with many of the arguments that he advances, if he were more cautious about how he makes them and, specifically, what he does with scripture in order to get there.

To get things moving on the blog again, I'm going to attempt two posts a week - one from EMC, and one that continues my reflections on a theology of new creation. I'd like to take a shot at rearguing some of McLaren's thoughts in what I consider a way that's more true to the text, and I think that along the way we'll find that many of the holes can be filled by incorporating this theology into McLaren's arguments.

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