Brian McLaren

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Brian McLaren (front) and Tony Jones (back), Yale Theological Conversation, Yale Divinity School, February 2006; Photograph: Virgil Vaduva
Brian McLaren (front) and Tony Jones (back), Yale Theological Conversation, Yale Divinity School, February 2006; Photograph: Virgil Vaduva

Brian D. McLaren is a prominent, controversial voice in the Emerging Church movement. He was recognized as one of Time magazine's "25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America," and is the founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, Maryland.

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[edit] Biography

Born in 1956, Brian McLaren graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park with degrees in English (BA, summa cum laude, 1978, and MA, 1981). His academic interests include medieval drama, romantic poets, modern philosophical literature, and the novels of Dr. Walker Percy. He is also a musician and songwriter.

After several years of teaching English and consulting in higher education, he left academia in 1986 to become the founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church, a nondenominational church in the Baltimore-Washington region. The church has grown to involve several hundred people, many of whom were previously unchurched.[citation needed] In 2004 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity from the Carey Theological Seminary in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Many of the books that McLaren has authored, including the "A New Kind of Christian" trilogy, deal with Christianity in the context of the cultural shift towards postmodernism. McLaren is a proponent of the emerging church movement, which rejects what emerging Christians perceive to be the influence of modernism in the Evangelical church in favor of a postmodern epistemology which guides their faith and praxis. McLaren believes this epistemology enables him to approach faith from what he considers a more Jewish perspective which allows faith to exist without objective, propositional truth to believe. He also creates an antithesis between personal trust in God and belief in his propositions:

"I believe people are saved not by objective truth, but by Jesus. Their faith isn’t in their knowledge, but in God." -- Brian McLaren[1]

Applying this epistemology to his theology, McLaren suggests on pp.80-81 of More Ready Than You Realize, that new Christian converts should remain within their specific contexts.

I don’t believe making disciples must equal making adherents to the Christian religion. It may be advisable in many (not all!) circumstances to help people become followers of Jesus and remain within their Buddhist, Hindu or Jewish contexts … rather than resolving the paradox via pronouncements on the eternal destiny of people more convinced by or loyal to other religions than ours, we simply move on … To help Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and everyone else experience life to the full in the way of Jesus (while learning it better myself), I would gladly become one of them (whoever they are), to whatever degree I can, to embrace them, to join them, to enter into their world without judgment but with saving love as mine has been entered by the Lord (A Generous Orthodoxy, 260, 262, 264).

Often McLaren's postmodern approach to hermeneutics and Biblical understanding prompts him to take a less judgmental approach towards issues considered controversial by fundamentalists, such as homosexuality.

McLaren believes this more "humble," approach to such controversial issues enables him to dialog with others in a less judgmental way:

"Even if we are convinced that all homosexual behavior is always sinful, we still want to treat gay and lesbian people with more dignity, gentleness, and respect than our colleagues do.."[2]

Many participants in the emerging church "conversation" express respect and admiration for McLaren, and he enjoys close fellowship with many of its participants.

McLaren has been active in networking and mentoring church planters and pastors since the mid-1980's, and has assisted in the development of several new churches. In spite of the intense criticism leveled at McLaren by Evangelical leaders, he remains a popular speaker for campus groups and retreats as well as a frequent guest lecturer at seminaries and conferences, nationally and internationally. His public speaking covers a broad range of topics including postmodernism, Biblical studies, evangelism, apologetics, leadership, global mission, church growth, church planting, art and music, pastoral survival and burnout, inter-religious dialog, ecology, and social justice.

McLaren favors what he calls a "generous" approach to biblical hermeneutics. claiming that the foundational and objective hermeneutics of Evangelicals leads them to political conservatism. McLaren has been an outspoken advocate of issues such as social justice and peace.

Though McLaren is opposed to what he asserts are oppressive, Evangelical, biblical hermeneutics, his own hermeneutic is often called into question. Often McLaren's own view on interpreting the Bible seems to call for others to rethink the whole process of interpretation. In his book, A New Kind of Christian, McLaren writes (via his main character Neo),

"Our interpretations reveal less about God or the Bible than they do about ourselves. They reveal what we want to defend, what we want to attack, what we want to ignore, what we're unwilling to question..."[citation needed]

Quotes such as these reveal the influence Derrida and Foccault's postmodern philosophy of language has had on McLaren. For McLaren, the locus of meaning has shifted from the author or the text to the reader. As a postfoundationalist, he questions not only the evangelical claim to certainty in faith, but also the ability to interpret according to authorial intent.

McLaren is on the international steering team and board of directors for Emergent Village; a growing, generative friendship among missional Christian leaders, and serves as a board member for Sojourners and "Orientacion Cristiana". He formerly served as board chair of International Teams, an innovative mission organization with 15 nationally registered members including the United States office based in Chicago, and has served on several other boards, including Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle, and Off The Map.

McLaren is married and has four young adult children. He has traveled extensively in Europe, Latin America, and Africa, and his personal interests include ecology, fishing, hiking, kayaking, camping, songwriting, music, art, and literature.

[edit] Controversy

Brian McLaren's written and spoken words have come under scrutiny and subsequent criticism from figures both inside and out of the emerging church movement. Generally these criticisms note that McLaren's epistemology provides no basis for dogma and that without any basis, dogma is abandoned in favor of "generosity and "conversation." Conservative Emergents and Evangelicals have protested that McLaren's philosophical posture has led him to entertain and even embrace doctrinal positions that conservatives consider unorthodox.

From the conservative wing of the emerging church movement Mark Driscoll has complained about McLaren's calling God a "chick", his advocacy of open theism, his downplaying of substitutionary atonement, and his implicit denial of hell[3]. Evangelicals who have criticized McLaren include John MacArthur[4], Albert Mohler[5], Michael Horton[6], Millard Erickson, Douglas and Rebecca Groothuis, Norman Geisler, R. Scott Smith, and D.A. Carson[7]. Generally known to be an even-tempered and even-handed scholar, Carson has been particularly vocal in his criticism of McLaren's doctrinal views, saying "I have to say, as kindly but as forcefully as I can, that to my mind, if words mean anything, both McLaren and [Steve] Chalke have largely abandoned the gospel" (D.A. Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, (2005), p.186)

[edit] Bibliography

  • The Church on the Other Side (Zondervan, 1998)
  • Finding Faith (Zondervan, 1999)
  • A New Kind of Christian (Jossey-Bass, 2001)
  • More Ready Than You Realize: Evangelism as Dance in the Postmodern Matrix (Zondervan, 2002)
  • A Is for Abductive (Zondervan, 2002)
  • Adventures in Missing the Point (Emergent/YS, 2003)
  • Church in Emerging Culture: Five Perspectives (Zondervan Emergent/YS, 2003) Leonard Sweet (General Editor), with contributors Andy Crouch, Brian D. McLaren, Erwin Raphael McManus, Michael Horton, Frederica Matthewes-Green
  • The Story We Find Ourselves In (Jossey-Bass, 2003)
  • A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished CHRISTIAN (Zondervan, 2004)
  • The Last Word and the Word After That (Jossey-Bass, 2005)
  • The New Kind of Christian Trilogy - Limited Edition Boxed Set (A New Kind of Christian; The Story We Find Ourselves In; The Last Word and the Word After That) (Jossey-Bass, 2005)
  • The Secret Message of Jesus : Uncovering the Truth that Could Change Everything (W Publishing Group, April 2006)

[edit] External references and links

[edit] Critical References

[edit] Newspaper Articles

[edit] See also

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