A New Kind of Christianity: Brian McLaren speaks at St Paul's Cathedral

first of all a very warm welcome to some polls this evening my name is Andrew Carwood and I'm the director of music here at the Cathedral and you are very welcome to this place which has been a center of debate for well learning for its entire history whether that's debating the rights and wrongs of the Bible in English or reform of the City of London I'm going to introduce our speaker in a moment but if you are new to this event may I just briefly explain what will happen in a moment Brian McLaren will talk to us about his vision for a new kind of Christianity if you have a question for him and this evening is as much about you it's certainly nothing to do with me if you have a question for him please write it on the back of your leaflet while he's speaking and hold it up to be collected we all have people circling the dome area who will come to you and collect your questions we'll collect questions until about 7:30 can I ask you to be brief in your descriptions of the question because that way we can get as many in as we possibly can we will end promptly at 8 o'clock and Brian's books will be for sale here under the dome after that and he will sign copies as well it is now a great pleasure for me to introduce to you Brian McLaren he is a writer a speaker and activist and one of the most important public theologians of our time he left a university teaching career to help form the Cedar Ridge Community Church an innovative non-denominational Church to which he was pastor for 20 years and he is now a leading figure in the emerging church movement in America reimagining church and Christianity for a new generation and a new century his many best-selling books include a generous orthodoxy naked spirituality and just published why did Jesus Moses the Buddha and Muhammad cross the road this evening he will be reflecting on his crucial book a new kind of Christianity in which he puts to us some of the essential questions which we need to ask about how we can follow Jesus in the 21st century he is a speaker who's hugely in demand he arrived in the UK 24 hours ago and we are very honored and delighted to have him with us here this evening so would you please now give a very warm welcome to Brian McLaren thanks well I should say that it is great honor for me to be here I think the sound system is working fine but you've probably picked up that I have an accent from the far western provinces of the kingdom I hope the accent won't be a problem the series that the Cathedral has sponsored under the title the case for God is certainly a worthwhile topic of debate and discussion at this time in our history every one of us wake up each day looking at the headlines whether on a mobile device or remember paper newspapers or on the television or on your computer and we wonder what has happened since we went to sleep in the name of God what building has been blown up what what threat has been made what explanation for a catastrophe has been attributed to God in what way and it's not a surprise that an awful lot of people observe the way God is used to justify the unjustifiable and they decide that the world would be better off if we could just dispense with the entire subject of divinity so when we open this question the case for God I think we have to talk about which version of God we're making a case for we might say something similar if we were to have a debate called the case for science if we were to only define science as science before Copernicus we would find it easy to say that that kind of science we've outgrown and although it is an interesting part of our history we're ready to move on to other things or if it were only Newtonian science that we wanted to make a case for well in the age of the the in the page of post Einstein in the age of MU ons and gluons and what some have called the god particle a Newtonian science we would say yes it's important it explains a lot but it doesn't explain everything so in today's world if we were to make a case for science one of the first things we would say is that science grows science has proven itself capable of growing and learning in fact the scientific method is a method of positing theories and then critiquing them and replacing them when a better theory comes into view and I think when we want to talk about God and Christianity and a case for God and a case for Christianity we have to ask ourselves is our faith equipped with the same capacity for growth and learning as Sciences and sadly often spokespeople for God and for religion and for faith demonstrate an amazing capacity for refusal to think and so when you ask me about whether I believe in God I would first have to say well which God are you talking about if you said well the Christian God I would also have to say well which version of the Christian God are you talking about it's interesting to me that the first Christians were persecuted for atheism they refused to believe in the gods of the Greek and Roman pantheon and because they rejected God as God was commonly defined or the gods as the gods were commonly defined all the people could think of to categorize them under was the term atheist they just don't believe in God as we understand God and I think the issue of which God were talking about which version we're talking about it becomes especially important in today's world a post-911 world a post 7 7 world my background was Christian fundamentalism I grew up on the far right branch on a far right little twig on the branch of Christian fundamentalism and I would have to say that so much of the God that I was taught about as a child I still find valuable and believable but much of what I was taught in my fundamentalist Christian upbringing if I were put up for the test in front of some of those folks they would certainly call me a heretic if not an atheist for my life this question of who God is and what God is about it's been a live question one that I have found I must have the capacity just as a scientist is ready to critique his theories I have to have the capacity to critique in question my own beliefs there's a beautiful poem by a Israeli poet you hood ami chai many of you I imagine know it from the place where we are right flowers will never bloom in the spring the place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard but doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole a plow and a whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once ironically every religion one of its greatest dangers comes in the places where it is certain it is right and when we're willing to let doubt and love dig up our world we find the possibility for our faith to be reborn and reconfigured from my upbringing as a as a fundamentalist I made the great mistake of becoming an English major in university and for many many points in my spiritual development I thought because of what I was reading what I was being exposed to I was one step away from leaving the Christian faith entirely along the way I stumbled into on two CS Lewis and CS Lewis made it possible for me through my college years to retain my Christian faith in graduate school I stumbled onto some other writers Walker Percy and some others who opened up even broader expanses for me to retain my Christian faith with intellectual honesty and so it turns out that being an English major and of course I just was introduced to John Donne in the back when you're introduced to that great tradition of literature and critical thinking in critical engagement with texts I I just realized that I would never again fit in a vision of Christianity that was a closed room no matter how beautiful the paintings and statues were on the walls I needed to be in a kind of Christian faith that had windows and doors that invited me to look out into something wider and greater that continued when I ended up leaving my first career as a College English teacher and I became a pastor and I was working along as a pastor for five or seven years and one by one people would begin attending my church and then they would make an appointment to come see me and they would bring all of their questions they would say listen I like listening to you on Sunday I was an agnostic when I came now I think I'm a theist or they say I was an atheist when I came now I'm an agnostic and I would say well these are all steps in a journey and then they would bring me their very best questions and I would give them my very best answers many of them I learned from CS Lewis and others sometimes they would leave my office and I would say I think your question was better than my answer and sometimes I would think I would feel disappointed if they were satisfied with my answer because after they left I wasn't satisfied with my answer and so all of those questions built up and that dissatisfaction built up and in the early 1990s I went through a kind of crisis in my own faith where I had to grapple with other people's questions now as my own questions and you know I've had a relatively easy life I've had a few challenges but I I will say one of the hardest things you can do is be a member of the clergy while you're going through a faith crisis of your own III wish it weren't the case I mean there's some sense that we ought to expect that anybody who's going to devote their life to to serving God and serving the church there are the people who are going to have to encounter the toughest questions and the toughest moral conundrums we we should expect that they would have rough times in their faith but very often we expect oh no their clergy this is all easy for them so as I went through my struggles and grappling with my questions I to make matters worse I would go to my friends and I would share my questions with them and they would be such a look of either horror or disappointment or just mystification they didn't know what I was talking about I realized if I kept bothering my friends with my questions I was actually harming them and so on top of having the questions was a great sense of aloneness and not even knowing who I could talk to about them but by the grace of God I stumbled upon some authors and stumbled upon some good conversation partners and eventually I started to feel that if I peeled away the surface with this question and I went a layer deeper with this question and I dug down a little deeper at this question I wondered if there'd be anything when I was finished left but I began to see maybe a new way of configuring my faith and I started writing a few books on the subject and then people started asking me to speak about the subject in some places quite surprising places and I discovered that people around the world in the Christian faith are asking amazingly similar questions whether it's with highly educated intellectual people and Europe for example or whether it's with people sitting under a tree in East Africa people who've never traveled outside of their country and have never had any opportunity to read half of the books that people like us have read still they're grappling with very very similar questions about God about faith about Christianity and so I wrote this book a couple of years ago called a new kind of Christianity where I tried to take all the questions I'd heard these other people asking correlate them with my own questions and I tried to present ten questions that I believe are transforming the faith and all I'd like to do in the next few moments is I'd like to tell you what those 10 questions are I'd like to spend a little bit of time talking about the first of those questions and then we'll open it up and you might want to explore any of the others in the time we'll have for discussion here are those 10 questions the first one is this it's what I call the narrative question what is the big story that the Christian faith is trying to tell what is the big skat this big scope of history what is the narrative arc that the Christian faith is trying to tell second the authority question where does the Christian faith derive its authority now everyone sooner or later will speak about the Bible and so this ends up being a question about the Bible and the Bible's Authority an especially problematic and important issue as we near the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation that re-emphasized the authority of the Bible you know for people my age and older when they hear the word Bible they think a source of morality people my age and younger hear the word Bible and they think a source of immorality because they think of how the Bible has been used to cause so much damage and harm that authority question is a critical one for the Christian faith in this century third is the God question especially because in today's world the question of whether we believe God is violent in some ways underlies every discussion we have about religion and public life how can we speak of God in relation to our ancient texts when so many of our texts Christian Jewish Muslim even Hindu our texts present images of the divine that are violent sometimes genocide 'el sometimes geo Seidel the fourth question for us as Christians if we look at the first three questions in a fresh way the fourth question is Jesus who is he why is he important if we answer those first four questions in a fresh way will be brought quickly to a fifth question the gospel what is the basic Christian gospel what really is that message six question obviously depending on how we answer the first five it will raise questions about the church what is the church what is it for we've had five centuries of argument about what is its form but now we have to ask what is it for because we know that the forms of church that we've inherited are under stress at every turn and we have to go deeper to ask the very purpose of the church whatever its form the seventh question is the sex question it's been brought to the fore especially because of the issue of homosexuality and the identity of gay people but it's also I here in England it's even being discussed in relation to women and how does gender and sexuality how does that relate to our vision of God and Christian faith in my opinion not only is this an important question but it's an interesting question to say why has it risen to the surface so much at this point in history why has it become such a defining issue now because I think this sex question is ultimately a question about humanity we're not only asking about sexuality we're asking what it means to be a human being in a body not only a body that is identified by gender but a body that's identified by brain chemistry and all of the complexities of medical advancement psychopharmacology our understandings of human evolution all of this is forcing us to grapple with what we might call theological anthropology in a profound way and the sex question in some ways is the tip of that whole iceberg eight is the future question the Christian faith has been famous through its history for making predictions about the future some of them maybe will go the way of the the Aztec predictions or Mayan predictions that people are talking about but what is the vision of the future does the Christian faith predict the end of the world and how does our understanding of the Christian faith vision of the future affect us in the present I'll just tell you I think it's different here in the UK but in my country we still have the the center of resistance against accepting the reality of human induced climate change the center of that resistance is still in the Christian faith and if there's going to be change in our action I'm speaking as an American whose country leads the way in producing greenhouse gases if there's going to be a change in our action in relation to global climate issues there is going to have to be a theological shift in our vision of the future I'm often told when I write or speak about this subject in my country don't worry about the climate the world's going to end soon anyway the ninth question is the one that my most recent book addresses the plural pluralism question is it possible for us to have a passionate faith and a passionate commitment to our faith and to live in peace and mutual respect with people who do not share that faith the is there a way for us to show love and respect for people of other faiths without watering down or losing the fervency of our own faith commitment that is obviously such an important subject that after writing a new kind of Christianity I wanted to to address it in a much deeper way in my more recent book and then the tenth of those questions is what I call the next step question that is how can we talk about the first nine questions without blowing each other up and how can we move forward in an ongoing conversation about those first nine very important questions now I just like to say something briefly about that first question the narrative question because it's the only one of the ten that I haven't actually had people articulate to me in exactly that way I haven't had people say what is the biblical narrative what is the biblical storyline but I've come to realize that that is a question that underlies so many of the questions that sincere Christians have about their own faith and the people outside the Christian faith have when they try to look in at it and I've got to use my my sort of virtual PowerPoint slide at this point and I'm going to ask you to help me create an imaginary scene here but you all know what a plot line looks like it's just a way to describe a story line I think the Christian story line that many of us inherited could be diagrammed like this I hope you're paying attention a straight line a descending line a low line here we might have this one a kind of squiggly line an ascending line and a straight line that's five one two three four five and then there's one more it goes from the bottom most point here straight down okay now I'm pretty sure that all of you who grew up either conservative Protestant or conservative Catholic would be able to fill in that six line plot diagram you'd be able to fill that in with no trouble if your Eastern Orthodox you would see this differently this is the plot line of Western Christianity primarily but the plot line would go like this a perfect creation in the Garden of Eden something called the fall we're living in the fallen world the end will come which will mean for some salvation and an eternal state in heaven and for everybody else the door opens downward to an eternal state of perdition in hell and for many people that is Christianity and that's the only way you can define Christianity that's the only way to tell that story well I had a problem because I was an English major I read Genesis as a work of literature and when I read the book of Genesis and I tried to read the whole Bible this way I realized that I would never have come up with that plotline simply from reading the biblical story myself and I began to wonder where did that story come from for someone like me who grew up in a very Bible oriented family every verse of the Bible I would read I would fit into one of those six lines it every verse was explainable in terms of that grand narrative I this is one of those things you could never prove it's more of a hunch than anything else not for that reason you know you can take it with a grain of salt but I remember when I began drawing that plotline on paper I just wondered maybe this isn't really the story of the Bible maybe this is really the story of Plato's cave from the Platonic ideal a fall into what we might call the Aristotelian real and salvation is getting us back to the Platonic ideal again and if it doesn't work out so well we could end up with Plato you well yes there we go I began to wonder maybe that story of Plato's cave an ideal world a fallen world a return to an ideal world and then I wondered maybe this is also the narrative of Roman politics that the world has fallen into barbarism and the only way to be to be saved is to go through the process of development and re-enter the empire once again and I wondered would it be possible to talk about the Christian faith with suspicions about that six-line narrative what might the biblical story look like if we were to do that well that required me to ask a question how would we read the Bible frontwards now when I say frontwards what I mean is this somebody today has interesting Christianity they asked one of you what about Christianity and you all of us have a sight line back to our founder we look back to our founder we might not even be aware of this but depending on our denomination if we're Catholic we might look back through Newman to Aquinas to Augusta Anselm to Agustin and so on back to Paul and Jesus if we're Protestant we might look back through John Calvin or we might look back through John Wesley or we might look back through Thomas Cranmer and we'll eventually get back to Martin Luther and Aquinas and Agustin and so on but we all come through our various sight lines and we read the Bible through those sight lines that we've inherited that's where that six line narrative came in somewhere in that history we've learned to read the Bible that way it raised the question for me could we this is a matter of interpretation this is not something easy in any way but could we try to go back and instead of understanding Jesus and the New Testament primarily through the sight line of their descendants could we go back and try to reconstruct the story of their ancestors and try to understand Jesus first and foremost coming into the story of his ancestors shouldn't that be a good starting place instead of talking about Billy Graham and so on all the way to Aquinas and Augusta and so on what if we were to say how could we understand Jesus coming to into the story of John the Baptist and how could we understand Jesus and John coming into the story of Amos and Micah and Isiah and how could we understand them coming into the story of David and them into the story of Moses and them into the story of Abraham and so on could we re situate Jesus and the early Christians in the narrative story into which they would have seen themselves coming well to do that as a Christian I have to go and consult my Jewish friends and if you ask the rabbi's they will tell you that the primary narrative into which Jesus would have come was the narrative of Exodus the narrative of God looking down in the world and seeing the Hebrew children suffering and groaning and crying under the oppression of slavery in Egypt now we don't think of this because the story is so familiar but in the ancient world what is shocking about that story is that in the ancient world everyone knew that the gods when they look down at the world they didn't pay attention to the slaves they paid attention to the slave owners God was on the side of Pharaoh not the slaves God was on the side of the nobles not the people at the bottom of the social pyramid and to say that the Creator cares about the people at the bottom it was a socially revolution a statement to make and it became the primary narrative that God cares about us when we're oppressed and the and that God is on the side of those of us who have been enslaved that liberation narrative was the primary narrative now that narrative though in some ways it's a little bit like Star Wars you need episode one to tell you how you got the into such a problem how did we get into slavery to begin with so then it turns out there is a prequel to that primary narrative we find it in the book of Genesis if this is if the exodus narrative is the narrative of liberation the Genesis narrative is the narrative of creation the creation of the world up into up until our ancestors being in slavery that's I think how we would understand that narrative creation leading to liberation but when you go to the end of the Exodus story you have the the children of Israel going through the wilderness that's like ending a movie with a big to be continued because they aren't home yet so you know there has to be a sequel to that narrative to now you would say well wouldn't the sequel be getting to the Promised Land and that would be a great sequel except for one thing as soon as the children Hebrew children made it out of the wilderness into the Promised Land the land of milk and honey they made a discovery and that is it's not so great to live in a land of milk and honey if everybody around you wants some of your milk and honey and then you start to realize that having a promised land is never enough when the people around you want your land and so in the aftermath of that Exodus story a new narrative emerges that's not merely the narrative of a promised land it's the narrative promised time a time when everyone will have his own vine and fig tree where everyone will be able to live with their basic needs met so that they won't be conquering and invading and occupying other lands and holding other people under the oppression that the Hebrew children remembered and so you might say we have a three-part narrative of creation liberation and then this vision it comes through through all the prophets but Isaiah I'll pick because Isaiah is the one quoted the most in the New Testament especially the second part of Isaiah and I'm going to call that the narrative of reconciliation when all of the nations of the world learn to beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks when they don't study war anymore and so now no one will have to be afraid now you could try to take that those three stories and create a master narrative but one of the things I noticed as I was grappling with this is that that's never done in the Bible a simple single master narrative is never given to us but rather many small narratives are given to us the story of Ruth the story of Jonah the story of of Samuel the story of David and I began to think somewhat playfully instead of thinking about a single two-dimensional storyline of whatever shape maybe what we're given in the scriptures is something far greater not a two-dimensional storyline but maybe we could say a three-dimensional story space if you want to think of it this way where creation is like length and where liberation is like height and where reconciliation is like depth and so we live in an expanding universe it's not an anything-goes universe there is as dr. King said a grain to the universe or a moral arc to the universe but it's universe that is intended to expand in greater creation greater liberation and greater reconciliation and into that story space comes Jesus and into that story space comes what we call the Christian faith and maybe in that narrative framework we can begin to imagine a new kind of Christianity and it makes us then investigate the case for God in a new way because now we begin by understanding God as the spirit behind creation the creator behind creation the liberator behind liberation the reconciler behind reconciliation and when we understand God in that way we open the way I think for a bona fide new kind or of Christianity a new chapter in Christian history all of this will come together in the coming weeks when once again we who are Christians enter the season of Advent and we will audaciously sing and proclaim truths that many of us fail to really grasp even as we sing the song that God's greatest revelation was not in a book or legal code was not through one race or nation was not even a religion but rather God's great self revelation was through a humble courageous nonviolent person a person characterized by creativity characterized by a desire to liberate all who were oppressed characterized by a spirit of reconciliation so that unexpected people were welcomed to the table whatever a new kind of Christian will be I think it will resent her on Jesus and understand Jesus through the sight line of his ancestors and will understand Jesus within this fresh image of God and something will happen to us if we allow that transformation to happen because a vision of God as creator Liberator and reconciler makes claims on all who say they believe and follow that God a new kind of Christianity would lead to a new kind of Christian identity and a new kind of Christian living and practice in our world and I'm quite certain it's in that hope that people like you would gather in this place tonight thank you very much thank you very much for that sir that thoughtful and thought-provoking speech this is your chance now to put questions to Brian can I just remind you of the process if you have a question to ask please write it on the back of your program hold it clearly in the air and they will be collected and by the miracle of modern technology they will appear in this screen in front of me and I will then be able to put them to Brian I we have some in already which is great but please don't be bashful if there is something you want to ask them please do so Brian I'm going to pay the chairman's and cards to start off with an ask just one question of my own and I promise I shall back out after that point but it seems to me one of the big difficulties for Christianity a little bit like analyzing literature is that people simply don't agree on what they read now there are various hot potatoes in the Church of England at the moment there are statements in the Bible which appear to be unequivocal so you must not know you must and people argue backwards and forwards and we are as a communion divided on what that should mean how do you address those difficulties yes well as so many of the 10 questions I talked about really do eventually trace back to that authority question what is the Bible what is the Bible for and how is it meant to be read and interpreted and applied if I could for a moment I'd like to speak just as an American uh and I think you all here in this room you know enough about our history that this will make sense to you you have your own issues that you could deal with in in your history but as you all know we took a long time to deal with the issue of slavery you you all outlawed slavery decades before we did and in those intervening decades the primary defense for slavery was the the literature the theological literature defending slavery is not well-known because thankfully nobody's interested in it but many people here for example would have heard of a book called Uncle Tom's Cabin it was a novel that was written by the wife of a Baptist preacher her name is Harriet Beecher Stowe and she wrote a novel about slaves about African slaves in the American South and the novel humanized the slaves it begins with a story of a child being ripped away from his mother because the child was the Masters property to be sold to someone else and when people read the story when white people read the story it humanized black slaves in a way that began to turn the tide away from support for slavery now what you don't know is a novel for example called Nellie Norton that was very popular in the south and it was a novel written to counteract Uncle Tom's Cabin and it used all kinds of biblical arguments to glorify slavery as a wonderful and biblical idea and here's the irony for me as an American in the 21st century over 150 years after the end of slavery there has been no serious discussion widespread discussion in the United States about how the Bible was used to defend slavery and how the Bible was used to oppose slavery and support abolition it would seem to me my country would have a moral obligation to go back and say however they use the Bible to defend slavery we should stop using the Bible that way and however the Bible is used on the side of abolition we should begin to use the Bible that way we could do the same with how the Bible is used to oppose Copernicus and Galileo we would have a moral obligation to rethink those that way of reading and interpreting the Bible and that simply hasn't happened on the grassroots level it's happened it's it's happening among theologians but it hasn't happened in a way that gets communicated to people at the grassroots and so my I think what we have to do is we've got to finally have that discussion it reminds me the importance of it came home to me a couple of years ago when I was involved in an important dialogue between Christians and Muslims it happened through the invitation of a group of Muslim scholars after after Pope Benedict made some unfortunate comments about the Prophet Mohammed and about Islam in Regensburg Germany some of you may remember those comments a group of Muslim scholars got together and they said listen if a Danish cartoonist can bring riots to the streets and more recently we would say some filmmakers if you want to call it a film in America they said look we've got to get religious leaders being more careful about the way we talk about one another's faiths and they sent a letter to the Vatican saying we're 40 some 30 some scholars could we engage in some serious dialogue together and as far as I know that letter was never answered it certainly wasn't answered within a year and that group of 30-some Muslim scholars invited a larger group so that the total group was over a hundred and thirty and they wrote a document that was called a common word between us and you and the basic idea of this document was this we Muslim scholars notice that Jesus said the great commandment is to love God with all your heart soul mind and strength love your neighbor as yourself we Muslim scholars have met and we agree that is the greatest commandment so based on the commandment of Jesus that you Christians call Lord we're asking you if we're supposed to love our neighbors that should begin with speaking with one another can we talk and I was honored to be among an initial group of people who wrote a response amount of Christian leaders to this document and we had a meeting and in that meeting I'll never forget a Muslim scholar who said does anyone in this room doubt that if human remains go up smokestacks in the century ahead as they did in the last century and if it happens in America or Europe it will be Muslim ashes going up the smokestack and so you know when you ask this question about how we read the Bible it certainly has a huge effect on gay people it certainly has huge effects on women and it and it not only has effects on who can serve in what capacities it has effects on whether people live or die so this issue of how we read the Bible is a phenomenally important moral issue and I didn't answer your question but I hope I that at least addresses the importance of it and maybe someone else will ask something I'll come back to that yeah pick up on my background yeah back on e that's that's a very good answer as far as I'm concerned because it allows me to move to a couple of questions that we've had from the floor I'm going to go straight in to the one which you're probably expecting in the light of the decision at Synod last week and it's a bold question and it says do you think women should be bishops and that it's followed by do you think anyone should be a dinner with those both questions asked by the same person I see him so it's on the same line so I think yes I just think isn't that a wonderful thing that someone would realize that beneath the question of should women be bishops as should anyone be bishops which raises deeper questions about our whole understanding of leadership well let me say every denomination obviously has to work through this on their own if I were voting I would have voted for women to be bishops and yet I understand that faith communities go through long arduous processes as do governments and clubs and any other kind of human organization they go through processes as does the scientific community in evaluating its standing current theories and sometimes abandoning those theories for new ones but they only do that when the new theory has made its case and so I'm sure that the recent vote on this issue shows that that alternative theory has made its case and has almost made its case to a majority but not quite yet and that that is an ongoing process so and there are a hundred questions that we have to grapple with in the same way but the deeper question about should there be bishops is especially interesting to me because I I suppose because of my writing I've had the amazing privilege of getting to know the heads of a lot of of communions especially in the United States but also in some other countries and I'll just tell you I'm deeply impressed by the caliber of spiritual leadership at the head of all the nearly all the denominations that I've had the chance to meet meet personally these are good and honest people the ones I've met I mean there might be some bad ones out there but I've sure met some wonderful people and here's what almost all of them know I don't think they knew this 15 years ago almost all of them so that the future of the Christian Church will be different than the present in the past in terms of structure the economic model of how churches work is less and less sustainable the so many dimensions of how the church is structured and how the church works they they've reached a point now where they're becoming counterproductive to the mission of the church in many cases so what I would say is this is a time when we need leadership more than ever but we need a kind of leadership that's willing to think in fresh ways about the church's future a quick story comes to mind that might illustrate this and then I know we have many other questions but I I have four wonderful children and one of my children was married recently and it got some notoriety because that's my gay son who got married and when my son came out as gay and other people heard about it I began to be approached by a lot of other parents of gay people and I'll never forget a woman who my wife and I have known since we were single and her son had come out about the same time my son came out and she was crying and crying and crying and she said here's my problem if I'm loyal to my son I will be causing a breach with my father who is at this point in his life incapable of rethinking his views on homosexuality if I'm loyal to my father I'll be disloyal to my son she said it's a terrible position to be in and some of you might if you've never been there you might not understand that but some of you may be do and this is one of the great challenges of adulthood and it's one of the great challenges of leadership maintaining loyalty to pass generations and assuming loyalty for future generations and this is one of the great challenges of any kind of leadership at especially spiritual leadership and it's especially hard in religious communities in the West because we've been obsessed with past generations and have thought far too little about future generations and this I think is one of the changes that we're going through now and I pick up on something else you were talking about dialog between Muslims and Christians a little earlier on then we had a question up here which says is it possible for Christians of liberal or radical views to dialogue on I like the use of that verb to dialogue with conservatives and evangelicals and if so how because this again seems to me is a crucial and dialogue is at the center of everything we do it really is and it's it's a great question it just by way of a quick tangent when I was at that first common word dialogue I'll never forget a group of Muslim scholars and I were sitting talking and I'd been introduced as an evangelical and some evangelicals are horrified when that happens but it's my background and they said you know we really prefer talking to Evan Jellico's much more than talking to liberal Christians which surprised me and I said well why is that they said well evangelicals tell us we're going to hell right away and of course we expect that but evangelicals have deep beliefs that they firmly hold and when they articulate their beliefs that they firmly hold we feel free to articulate our deep beliefs that we firmly hold but when we're around those liberals they're so polite they won't mention anything that they believe which makes us very feel very rude and impolite if we mention what we believe so we feel we're walking on eggshells and I thought to myself this is the you know that just expressed to me one of our challenges here's the way I articulated it in this book why did Jesus Moses the Buddha and Muhammad cross the road we know how to have a straw religious identity that's hostile toward other religious identities and we know how to have a weak religious identity that's tolerant toward other religious identities what we haven't learned is how to have a strong religious identity that is benevolent toward other religious identities so that the stronger I hold my Christian commitment is it possible to imagine the stronger I hold that commitment the more committed I am to being loving and respectful and honoring of other human beings whatever their religious commitment or lack thereof and part of what that involves is an ability to engage with difference respectfully and the fact is you can be a liberal who is extremely tolerant of all other liberals I think that's sinking in and one of our great challenges whether we're liberal or conservative is to realize that the real challenge is finding a basis within myself from my own moral framework to encounter the other and to treat the other with respect you know I heard a good term for this recently it was called moral empathy I'm sorry intellectual empathy the ability to try to enter into another person's perspective and see the world through their eyes I might not agree with it but unless I'm willing to try to enter into their shoes and see the world through their eyes then I'm not going to be able to really experience that dialogue and this to me is a a moral and spiritual quality that that I think it would be a great thing if we understood speaking as a Christian you're a better Christian when you when you develop this kind of intellectual empathy it's one dimension of being a loving and compassionate person who loves your neighbor as yourself and who wants to do for your neighbor what you wish your neighbor would do for you it's very difficult isn't it when you come against a force of argument which is presented not necessarily on in just within the Christian sphere which is presented as the Word of God the law of God how do you how do you have a dialogue yes oh I I can't say I've found the answer to that so let's go into the next question I mean sometimes what that means to be to tell the truth about this sometimes what that means is it means you are willing to enter into dialogue knowing you will not be listened to you will not be listened to you'll be insulted you'll be mistreated and going into the dialogue anyway if for no other reason to manifest in a burly presence to the other even knowing that that will not be reciprocated and of course it for people who know the teaching of Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount this is blessed are the peacemakers blessed are those who hunger for thirst and thirst for justice blessed are those who are persecuted for justice say this is I think so central to the teaching of Jesus and and sadly it hasn't been an important part of our moral curriculum but maybe we're going to realize that it should be it's so I've got a question here about some of other elements of Jesus teaching says some do you think that Jesus taught absolute non-violence and that we are called to follow him in that so it's a difficult question for us - yes ace in the 21st century and especially with both the United States and Britain active in the spheres that they are yes yes it is very very difficult and I I don't think I can answer it satisfactorily because for a couple of reasons I it's not because I'm afraid to be forthcoming it's because I think the word absolute is highly problematic so when I'm invited to be in a dialogue about absolute pacifism for example versus just were theory I just feel there it's a worthwhile discussion to have it's not the one it's not where I would like to insert myself because my understanding of the way God works with human beings is that God always begins with us where we are and helps us to take a step in the right direction and the question is what is the right direction and as soon as we talk about absolute non-violence I just think right away that puts us beyond where many of us are capable of taking a next step maybe I could use a quick example if global climate change is half as serious as all of our data is telling us 500 years from now our ancestors will look back on us as the generation that destroyed the planet and that created unimaginable suffering for future generations and what they would maybe come back in a time machine and they'd say are you absolutely against fossil fuels well the fact is even if we are against fossil fuels and we write about it on a computer that computer wouldn't have been produced by fossil fuels you see so we're so complicit in a world of what we might call dirty energy and so I'm against violence absolutely but I'm part of a dirty energy economy I'm part of an economy and a way of life where there's violence and so my desire is to take every possible step that we can toward non-violence the person who helped me on this subject more than any other he just died recently but it was Walter wink and Walter we said something like this he talked about Just War theory and the problem one of the problems with Just War theory is that we make it sound like there are two ideals that we can choose from one is the ideal of non-violence and the other is the ideal of Just War Theory upheld as two absolutes but what Walter Wang said is maybe we should rename it not just were theory as if war will be eternally desirable to God it's very hard to read the Bible and it's very hard to read the teachings of Jesus and say that war is eternally desirable although some people maybe in this room would say that but he said maybe we should call it preliminary violence reduction theory in other words can we say it this way a just war is better than war for any reason but maybe we should say but that's only one step up and we need to move to much better step if I could say this way for husband's to stop beating their wives is a very very good step but that doesn't mean it's fine for them to insult their wives as long as they don't beat their wives you see and and so we could talk about emphasizing reduction in domestic violence as a first step toward better marriages but the goal is never just ending the domestic violence the goal is beautiful harmonious fulfilled loving relationships and so that's why I find it hard to answer a question about absolutes but wouldn't it be wonderful if we could at least get all Christians to agree that there is something better than just war and that even if we will engage in her support and this or that war that our dream and goal is that we're moving one step closer to putting war behind us and what if more and more of us were to invest our lives and energies in to take a recent American president and put a slight twist on his words pre-emptive peacemaking this seems to me to be the real call of the Christian gospel it's too pre-emptive peacemaking and that's to me a very creative endeavor and maybe if we could get to the dialogue of which we've been talking yes maybe more these things would be more possible but it seems to me it's a long way off for some people I'm going to stick with the idea of life what we need yes to be Christian that's a very awkward phrase I don't it sound quite as heavy hand as that but I have a question here which uses that phrase is that do you think activism for justice is essential to being a Christian yes good yes I mean this is so tragic and I just say one tragic thing and the english-speaking world is that I don't know if this goes back to Wickliffe or Tyndale or King James and his crew or whatever but it's tragic to me that we created we took a when we translated the Bible into English there was a very sturdy and important Greek word called the word dick iOS and there's various forms dick I was soon a and we tended to translate that into the English word righteousness now I don't know what you think of when you hear the word righteousness but most people I think they hear the word righteousness and they think of moral or religious fastidiousness but interestingly if we spoke Spanish every time that word dick I was soon a would be in the Greek New Testament in Spanish we would read the word justicia if we spoke French with these you see Sephora time justicia it really changes the way you read the Bible try it when you read the New Testament when you see the word righteousness stick in the word justice and if you want to take it even a step further now this is an act of interpretation but I think it has real merit try sticking in the word restorative justice because even the word justice to many people in the english-speaking world means punitive justice I think you can make a case that in the Hebrew mind punitive justice was not ful fully God's justice God's justice was restorative as an example of this you could take a psalm for example Psalm 98 says rejoice though everybody in the world should rejoice because God is coming to judge the world now for most people the idea of God coming to judge the world means he's going to throw it into hell you know but no in the ancient Hebrew mind God is coming to judge the world meant the judge is coming to town and the judge is going to bring justice to the world and set things right so it's a restorative justice and oh my goodness so try these words from Jesus then from the Sermon on the Mount don't worry about all the things that people worry about what you should eat what you should drink what you should wear but seek first God's reign and God's justice if you do that everything else you need will be taken care of it's a remarkable thing to think of right now with the recent trouble in Gaza and Israel and to realize that you can't say you want peace unless you work for justice on all sides and so justice becomes really foundational it turns out I think Jesus was really right if all the other things we want require us to seek justice not just for ourselves but for our neighbor as well there's another question here which is that the last one I'll do on the Christian life for the moment unless any more come in which it says some do you think someone can live a Christian life without knowing it without knowing they have faith or without having faith but a center of that life another really wonderful question and I think there's a beautiful answer to this that actually is given to us in the New Testament in the book of Acts you get 10 chapters into the book of the Acts of the Apostles and there's this beautiful story about a man named Cornelius who is a Roman centurion this would be like today in Iraq telling a story about a British or American officer because the Romans were the occupiers of the Jews and and this fellow named Cornelius is a good man who gives to the poor who cares and an angel appears to him and says you're one of the good guys and you're going to have a meeting with somebody and however you want to interpret angels and so on just get the idea that Peter then has God this early follower of Jesus is going to end up having a meeting with this fellow Cornelius and the problem in the meeting is not a problem with Cornelius the problem is a prejudice and Peter against Cornelius and so the story is it's really worth reading if you haven't read it recently the encounter of Peter with Cornelius it has requires Peters prejudice against him for not being of the right religion for that prejudice to be overcome now interestingly someone might derive from that saying oh then it doesn't matter what you believe but that's that's not what I'm saying at all ah I think it really does matter what we believe if you believe that God is violent I would like to know about that if I'm going to live next to you I will live I will feel differently if I live next to you if I know that you believe God is violent or if no you believe God is nonviolent so I think our beliefs about God are very important but the idea that there are that God has the list of some of us who are on the inside and that puts us at this favored position and everybody else at the outside I think that's a real problematic idea so it is possible as long as the present is possible to live a Christian life without knowing it well again the word Christian becomes a problem because if you go to the Dalai Lama and say I think you're living a Christian life without knowing it you know what I'm saying it it's we don't realize how patronizing that might sound is if you're only good if you have our label see so I would rather say it this way that well here's how the Apostle Paul said it in Romans chapter 2 he said some people don't have the law in writing or on tablets or on paper but they have something of it in their hearts and you'd be better off to the following something that you don't have on paper in your heart then if you have it on paper and you're not following it the Dalai Lama would have a very good chuckle about that like that suspects yeah well you were here I've got some very short punchy questions okay so I'm just going to throw out you people taking me very literally which is good they're not easy so the first one is why Jesus Christ yes you know one of the most well known verses in the entire Bible is this for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son so that whoever would believe in him wouldn't perish but would have life eternal or a life of the ages and it's an interesting phrase because it's an interesting verse because it doesn't say that God loved Jews so much or God loved Christians so much or God loved Southern Baptists so much that you know he gave Jesus but that Jesus is a gift to the world will actually sing this in the Advent season joy to the world so one way to say this is to say that Jesus is a gift to the world and I am glad to be a witness to that fact one of the ways Jesus is a gift to the world is by telling us to love one another now you might say well a lot of other people said we ought to love one another too and thank God for them as well I think they're a gift to the world as well but Jesus fills a special role in history for one reason that he was born among the Jews those people who uniquely believed that God was on the side of the slaves not the slave masters and then managed to stand up to the Roman authorities the most powerful Imperial force of his day and imagined to and managed to embed in the Roman Empire a little movement of people we might say to be a little playful and provocative in today's world little cells that spread through the Roman Empire detonating explosive acts of kindness and planning and plotting reconciliation this movement that ended up promoting this remarkable message to not only love your brother and your friend and your neighbor but also your enemy and I I think that's a pretty wonderful thing about Jesus I think it's this is why I would much rather call myself an advocate for following Jesus than just as an advocate for any religion because I think just about everybody would agree that we've got a long way to go and actually learning to follow that path my second country question is all these the one from the floor is what counts as salvation I guess it depends who you ask for some some of my critics I whatever I am certainly doesn't count you know so people define Salvation differently when I talked about that narrative question before it really is very relevant to this word salvation because if you read back through the sight line of Christian history you read through the line of Martin Luther and Thomas Aquinas and st. Agustin and you define salvation through a tradition that says it's being saved from the consequences of original sin but of course that phrase original sin and even the concept original sin is popularly understood was the unfamiliar unnamed uninvented concept in the time of jesus and paul and so on that word salvation if we let it be defined by Jesus ancestors the word gets its meaning and the exodus narrative shaving is what God does for the slaves when he gets them out of slavery saving means liberating and this is my real problem many of you would be familiar with a good friend of mine Rob Bell who wrote a book called Love Wins that managed to get him and even as much trouble as I've gotten into maybe more with some folks but what people then often want to ask are you a universalist are you an exclusivist and inclusive estat those words depend on a definition of saving or salvation that involves getting people out of hell that's back to that six line narrative getting them off of this line and onto this line but if saving means liberating then I would have to say is God's desire for everyone to be liberated from all forms of human evil and all forms of degradation and all forms of of falling short of the glorious life that God intends for us none of us are fully liberated so all of us are in the process of experiencing liberation and and in that way salvation isn't you it's not like you know do you have the right salvation card in your pocket but salvation is much more whether we're participating in that creative liberating reconciling work in the world I've got two questions here which I'm going to put together they make they make a rather large subject but they're about transformation and one of them refers to liberation which we just touched on and the first one is could you say something about how you think the church needs to change or develop in order to embody liberation and reconciliation the second one which I back and put together wit is is surely the essence of Christianity is about transformation it's personally corporately and universally its it so that's a statement or a question and that is that well actually it is some it is a question surely the essence of much difference in the right transformation she's saved for me one more time then yeah the second one surely the essence of Christianity is about transformation yes personally corporately universally yes okay so this this these are very good questions and surely it is why that's why Jesus I think told all those stories about the good news being like a seed he gets planted or yeast that gets worked into the dough or a light that shines in the darkness just the very presence of the light brings change the presence of the yeast brings change the presence of the seed brings change so it is about it is about transformation how the church engages in this I think is extremely varied and this is one of the reasons why I see the diversity of denominations not as a problem but as a as an advantage an attitude of exclusivity and superiority and supremacy among denominations and competition that's terribly problematic but I think there's a way to see what's happened in the church not just as division but as diversification so if I can say it this way I'm not saying that any of these churches fulfill their potential in this regard but I'd like to be hopeful you know there are things that the Roman Catholic Church can do as an organized unit in a positive way to make a difference if they wanted to that they really could organize to do they could do things especially in Latin America for example that nobody else could do if they decided to do that these days Pentecostalism is growing so much in Africa Latin America parts of Asia if Pentecostalism wanted to make a difference in areas of social justice they really really could the quite the problem is because of our narrative assumptions not that many people actually would say surely the purpose of the church's transformation they would say surely the purpose of the church is warehousing souls until they can be sent to their final destination and so here is where these theological issues have a tremendous impact but if I could mention three ways that I think that how the church could be involved in liberation if I could just briefly mention three and I'm not saying these are the three most important there was it just the three that are coming to my sleep-deprived mind at this moment one is by something you brought up earlier it would be by teaching people not just telling people to love their neighbor but teaching them training them how to love their neighbor not just telling them they're morally obligated to love their enemy but actually helping them learn how to love someone who's different from them or how to work to reconcile with someone who's alienated from them you know there are ways to do that and it's kind of sad that we just make people feel guilty for not doing it without actually doing our best to train them to really do it it's tragic to think that this Sunday millions of people I guess billions of people will gather in church services around the world and relatively few of them will leave having been trained how to better love their neighbor stranger outcast or enemy so just training people and that could be a make a phenomenal difference a second example really the United Kingdom leads the world in this the whole area of Fairtrade I think is a huge area that's going to become more important in the in the decades ahead to distinguish it from international trade let me instead call it the power of ethical buying you know every one of us who has a cell phone in that cell phone is a mineral called coltan and a whole lot of that coltan of the majority that I think in the world comes from eastern Congo and while all the other headlines are going on a lot of people don't know that chaos is breaking out in eastern Congo once again somewhere between three and six million people have been killed in eastern Congo in the last 20 years and a lot of people don't know about it and one of the reasons for the unrest in coltan is militia supported by governments supported by major corporations are making a lot of money on coltan and they keep the unrest going so that they can keep making huge amounts of money through that trade and whether you have a iPhone or a Nokia or whatever you have wouldn't it be nice if we could know when we're buying a phone that the company made sure that it only got coltan from reputable sources that paid its workers well and didn't participate in in all kinds of injustice well that's what we mean by ethical buying and my hope is that just as we outlawed the obvious kind of slavery in your country over 200 years ago and in my country a little over 150 years ago wouldn't it be wonderful if we could dream that 50 or 100 years from now would be able to in a sense vote with every pound that we spend for companies that are doing a better job of preserving the environment caring for the poor and in contributing something beyond just profit to rich people's big accounts so that would be a way that we we could organize for the common good in a way that would really make a difference and one other way that we could do this involves clergy and it involves our clergy leading the way all clergy are busy I imagine there are some lazy ones but I've never met them I when I was a pastor I was around I was I worked incredibly hard and I was around incredibly hard-working people so we would have to find ways to relieve the duties of clergy to do this but what if we said to our clergy we don't want you to be the pastor of this church we want you to be the pastor from this church to the community we want you to lead us in a constructive engagement in the in the community that could really change the way that church has become agents of justice in our world I think I'm going time for one more question and if you wanted to use this as a as I sort of wind up in any way if there's anything you want to say that you haven't said this would be a good time to do it it so uses a quote of Simone vo it says that the tragedy of Christianity is that it came to see itself as replacing other religions instead of adding something to them all what you like to comment on that well first the the best thing to do would be just to have you read it again because Simone gay is saying something incredibly in Thea that the line is the tragedy of Christianity is that it came to see itself as replacing other religions instead of adding something to them all you know this is a very powerful statement and it connects to my own biography because my paternal grandfather was from Scotland he emigrated to Canada then and then became a missionary to Angola and so my father grew up in Angola and Zambia for part of his childhood and they were part of the missionary movement that was centered here in England and it was so deeply related to the British Empire and there was this assumption of superiority it was the superiority and supremacy of white people of European people of English people and so on and it casts Christianity as the Chaplaincy to an empire and the Chaplaincy to domination of other nations and cultures with their religion and it's so different from the image we're given of Jesus it just sounds a lot more like Caesar than it sounds like Jesus and so I think about I think about Paul's words in in Philippians that the amazing thing about Jesus is that Jesus didn't try to grasp at equality with God but rather which by the way is something all of us try to do I mean in some ways it's the reversal of the story of Adam grasping for the fruit as a way of saying I want to be able to be like a God and decide who's good and evil but rather or is himself out to be a servant to everyone and it's a fascinating thing to imagine a conversion of the Christian vision of mission to say our goal is not to convert everybody our goal is to serve everybody our goal is to give everybody every treasure they're willing to receive that we received and of course that wouldn't exclude also us being willing to receive treasures that others want to offer us and so this to me is a wonderful opportunity that a 10 Simone vezes quote reminds us then that it's not a bad thing after 2,000 years of our religion going to take a look back and say yeah we've done pretty well in this haven't done so well in that and to say what could the future be like if we opened our ears and open our hearts again in a fresh way to to our founder what would happen if Jesus actually got a hearing again in the Christian religion that is an exciting thought thanks that's a good place to end I think thank you very much well um I hope you agree with me that's been an absolutely fascinating evening first of all can I thank you all for your attention for being here tonight and for your excellent questions I'm sorry there are one or two which I didn't manage to get to there will be a film of this event available on our website and if you've missed any of the others in the series they are also available on the website for you to look at I have two tasks for you before you disappear the first is that this is the last in the case for God series and I wondered therefore if you would like to say huge thank you to Elizabeth Foy who is sitting just over there who's put this whole series together and has masterminded it and organized it thank you very much Elizabeth and your final task this evening is to say a huge thank you to Brian McLaren who's been wonderful to be done you

Channel: St Paul's Cathedral

Views: 42,660

Rating: 4.1188812 out of 5

Keywords: Brian McLaren, Christianity, Jesus, Christ, St Paul's Cathedral, St Paul's Forum, A Case for God, Religion, Education, Lecture, London

Id: nOK51FO0XoM

Length: 88min 38sec (5318 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 05 2012