May 3rd, 2020 - PRISM: Interview with Brian McLaren // Week 1

well now we're at the point in the service where we would normally move into a sermon a couple of years ago however mission gathering in May did a series called prism faith through other's eyes where we pause sermons as usual and instead did interviews with faith leaders from various traditions here in San Diego that series is one of my favorite memories of my time here at mission gathering thus far it was such an enriching time to hear from other faith leaders perspectives to learn how we could be better neighbors as Christians to our siblings of other traditions and so we're doing that series again but because of the virtual methods that we're able to use we can connect with people that aren't just here in San Diego but around the country over the course of this series you're going to hear from Jewish traditions Buddhist traditions Hindu traditions Mormon traditions and in order to start off the series we wanted to do an interview with a friend of mission gathering somebody who shaped our faith in a profound way here as a community over our existence for the past decade his name is Brian McLaren Brian's been a mentor and a friend of mine for years has been a kind of founding patron saints of the mission gathering movement from our inception twelve years ago and Brian is an incredible author thinker former pastor who writes at this intersection of how to be a good neighbor and how to be a better Christian one of Brian's books that influenced me most was called how how did Jesus Buddha Moses and Muhammad crossed the road it's a complicated title but that book was about how to engage as Christians in an interfaith pluralistic world and Brian really opened my eyes and enabled me to see God in all the places I didn't expect God to be and so as we move into today's conversation pastor and Wendy and I got the chance to sit down with Brian and ask him about what it means to be a Christian in a pluralistic world and how we can in fact show love to our neighbors while holding firm to the beliefs that are core to our faith the reason we did this interview to start this series is because we really believe it's important that if we're going to engage with those of other beliefs and others perspectives and if we're going to genuinely be able to love and support them then we are going to need to be able to name our own privilege as Christians and know about the cultural position that we get to hold as power brokers in the society Brian talks about a lot of these concepts and I expect that they're going to make many of us uncomfortable they made me uncomfortable the first time I kind of stumbled on to these questions but that discomfort I want to encourage you to lean into because as we engage over the next month with these different faith leaders and perspectives it's my hope that it's not just educational but that we can truly listen and learn and listen for how God might be speaking through other traditions and voices where we wouldn't expect to find God based on our theology this is going to be a time I believe of expanding our faith expanding our mind and truly helping us learn how big and beautiful and diverse our God is so with all of that said I'm really excited to bring you this interview between Brian McClair and pastor Wendy and I as we dig into what it means to be a follower of Jesus in a pluralistic interfaith world let's listen in to this conversation with Brian McLaren we're entering into this series that we do every May where we interview faith leaders from different traditions and I wanted to have me and let me get a chance to dialogue with you about your journey towards kind of being opened up to a more pluralistic way of embracing Christianity that's great well I'm so glad you're doing this topic it's important and in fact I'm working I've spent the whole the last six hours at my computer working on an upcoming book grappling with these issues again in a deeper way I'm excited yeah you have two more coming out right that's right well it's yeah it's a little crazy faith after dad is the next one and then do I stay Christian is the one I'm working on this morning I love that I love that you're working on that this morning because I think the first question that I want to ask you is why are you still a Christian why after all of your journey of being an evangelical pastor back in Maryland so where you're at now how has that journey evolved and why do you stick around with Jesus so those are two different questions aren't they why do you stick around with Jesus and why do you stay Christian I think one I think those two questions are in such interesting dynamic tension I could imagine a person saying because I love Jesus I want to follow Jesus I don't feel comfortable in the Christian religion I can totally in in many many settings imagine that to be true and I can imagine I can imagine you know the reverse being true as well when a person says because I love Jesus that's why I'm going to stay Christian so but the first thing I'd say is although I've probably experienced almost all the kinds of disillusionment anyone can experience about the Christian religion I my love for Jesus is as deep as ever and deeper than ever in many ways and even though it's different it's still deep and compelling and it really is it's just an accurate statement that you know Jesus is kind of the Northstar that I stare by and he you know it's just central to Who I am but interestingly and of course I'm going to take 60 to 80 thousand words to answer this question in this book one of the things I would say is if I were to disassociate from Christianity and say I'm I'm too good for that religion or I don't want to endorse that religion I've got the problem of what other religion I endorse and I say well I don't want to endorse any religion I just want to be a human being without labels that would probably that has a certain appeal to me but here's the problem everything horrible I can say about Christianity I can also say about humanity in other words our problem isn't just with Christianity our problem is intractable issues in the human species and so I realized that if I'm going to stay human maybe identifying as a Christian and working in that setting is the way I'm called to live out my humanity so that would be I would be a one way to answer it oh I really resonate with that connection to Jesus and I spent just a little bit of background the first 15 or 20 years of my active Christianity as a young adult feeling like I was the anomaly and the apostate and spiritually deceived and and it was it was your work and Tony Campolo and Jim Wallace like after after really feeling like I was the only liberal Christian in existence in the country realizing that there were more of us how do we first of all it seems like I think we get isolated in in our societies and feel like oK we've arrived we're doing better so when we look at the world it seems like we're not my question with that is are we how do we navigate that and are we better now at making people aware of what the true call of Christianity is or are we ten steps back yeah yeah well that's actually that's exactly the language has a but to use that language of a few steps forward and many steps back um and you know obviously it's so hard to make generalizations about history but that doesn't seem to be the way we go in history we take a few steps forward and then there's a counter-revolution and we take some steps back but often that then sets the stage for more steps forward in fact one way to understand a conservative and a liberal or progressive is to say what one calls the step forward the other causes step back so they're in this constant constant stress and constant struggle and you might say that it there there are certain positive elements of the struggle if progressives didn't have conservatives on their heel they might take some risks that and make some changes that are ill-advised for if conservatives only hunker down all the time they would be you know stuck where they are in fact one where I sometimes define a conservative as a conservative is a person who tries to conserve the gains made by three generations ago have their progresses so I mean part of this is just inevitable um and but I think one of the myths that all of us who identifies progressive or print who is yeah that progress is inevitable and the progress is incremental and I just don't think it's that way I think progress has fits and starts sometimes its gradual sometimes it jumps sometimes there are setbacks and that unpredictability when you put things in a big timeframe that unpredictability what it does to me is it makes me not be able to be complacent um if I think Oh everything's gonna get better in a sense that takes me off the hook or if I think Oh everything's hopeless it takes me off the hook but to know that my life matters with how these things turn out that keeps me in the game totally I love that and I think it's a good wake-up call also I mean because you're right we are prone to just think is we have our own versions of our own fundamentalism right where we just think that we're leading the way and we're gonna keep progressing forward yeah and there's stuff to be learned from people in all the different levels of development and perspectives and kind of with that a couple years ago when we first did this series of mission gathering if I was in the audience watching this happen in a Christian Church a pastor bring in a Muslim Imam or a Buddhist nun I would have been terrified I would have thought that this was and I actually got some emails back then I'm saying you're bringing in false prophets into the house of God yeah how do you speak to people who are fearful of people of other religious perspectives and how do you overcome that fear yeah okay those are two great questions how did I speak to people like that the first thing I would say to them is I would say something like this knowing that it wouldn't work it wouldn't help but I think it still may be the most helpful thing I could say is I'd say look as someone who follows Jesus I'm called to love my neighbor as myself and Jesus makes it clear without any question that my neighbor includes the outside or the other the outlier the outcast even the enemy and if I love my enemy it's probably a good idea for me to converse with my enemy and converse means talking and listening and so if I had been in if I were in your shoes when this comes out and people feel upset about this I might say I'm helping you to love your neighbor by giving you a chance to listen to your neighbor in a loving way the way you would want to be listened to I'm not bringing this neighbor in to say let's believe everything that neighbor believes but I'm bringing this neighbor and for us to be hospitable to practice Christian love especially in a context where if I bring in my Muslim neighbor there are many Christians who are persecuting Muslims right now if I bring in my Jewish neighbor every Jewish mother in America wakes up knowing that there are white Christian nationalists who will make her child's light put her child's life in freedom and well-being at risk so as an act of love if I don't listen what's wrong with me so that that would be the place I would start I know that that wouldn't solve all the problems and and if we were to get to what the deeper problems are Wendy and Brandon I think the deeper problems are a problem in Christian theology and here's the way I would say it Christian theology long ago embraced an idea that I think is anti-christian it's Antichrist it is Christian in the sense that Christians have held it for half of our history at least but it's the idea it's what I would call Christians premise II we all know about white supremacy well in some ways it's hard to tell which is the chicken and which is the egg white supremacy and Christian supremacy are very very deeply fused because they both have their origin in Europe but what I realize in fact as I was writing this book on doubt I I got into the book and I had an aha moment and I didn't even mention this till the end of the book because I didn't want to go back and sort of spoil the surprise but as I finished the book I realized my path of doubt was trying to get me to the point where I doubted supremacy the I doubted the idea of supremacy and when I think of all the pain that I've gone through in that doubt process and all that I've lost the gain of losing supremacy is the greatest gain of all I would never want to hold supremacy anymore it's just not something I want and of course as soon as I say that I think of Philippians to that whole message about Jesus imaging God not by grasping at supremacy but by pouring out supremacy in loving service so I think that's our deeper problem it's this sense that Christianity and supremacy have been fused together and that is deeply deeply dangerous and so damn I'd like to go in 10 different directions with questions I had connected to that that fear that that perpetrates and how damaging this is to especially people in our community I mean we are always countering this rhetoric of you're not good enough God deserves you God doesn't love you and the damage that there's so many people that we know are still living with even in that moment like you said of realizing the grace that we experience through Jesus yes that we still can't internalize that so kind of connected to that in your in your book that Brandon was talking about like white of the prophets cross the road you were talking about your exposure growing up to revisionist history yes and we are seeing that more than ever right now I've kind of done some homeschool co-op in with my kids who are now older teenagers and realizing that not just Christian curriculum but in red states the way that we are intentionally perpetrating that that fear and that religion history through textbooks and this comes from Christianity this comes from that white supremacist Christianity that puts so many people in danger do we try and just counter propaganda or do we engage in activism to shut us down what does that look like yeah so this is really it's so funny you say this Wendy because I'm not proud of this I in fact that I'm a little embarrassed but it's the truth in all the years my kids were little I never went to a school board meeting I was just too busy I guess when you're a parent you're busy plus I was a pastor I wish I had gone to school board meetings but I never did but then twelve eleven to go I move down here to Florida and the local school board was throwing out a textbook because they felt it was unfair to the Texas Rangers now if you know the history of the Texas Rangers you know they were you could describe some of their activities as white terrorist activities against Brown Mexicans and so I decided I've got to show up and I joined a protest and it was also you know protesting science and stuff like that I mean the these textbooks that the school board was being asked to throw out textbooks that just said had good science in them you know so good history and good science we've got to throw that out and so this is the struggle but here's the interesting thing that because of our Christian background we know at the end of the day the world changes when beliefs change so struggles over beliefs when we're struggling to challenge beliefs it's not just an esoteric waste of time it actually is where a change happens and let me maybe give two examples one positive and one negative when I was a boy I grew up during the civil rights era and in the 1960s progressives in this country led by dr. King and other black leaders succeeded in changing the laws but we didn't change the beliefs of an awful lot of white people and so as a result even though we changed the laws the beliefs have gone unchallenged now I still think we did the right thing to change the law as if we could go back in time what and then what we now know what should have happened is the churches of America should have gotten together and say let's get the whites right Baptists and the black Baptists have dinner in each other's homes on let's get the white Presbyterians of the black but we could have used our religious traditions to help build relationships to break down those false beliefs because false beliefs prejudice beliefs only remain when you don't have actual personal contact right so there's an example where I think we missed the boat and we still have that work to do and thank God were still involved with it we're still fighting that fight a plight but what's interesting to me is in the LGBTQ issue that battle happened and the laws were changed about marriage for example and in many places for discrimination but simultaneously a really effective campaign went on through the media through the arts through a coming-out you know a whole sort of protocol for coming out we're now almost any American who has had at least one friend or family member come out to them their beliefs begin to change over time and by the time it's 2 or 3 or 7 you can almost get their beliefs will will start to change and and this is our challenge and this is so what I would say is the political battles you have with a they're important I don't think it's one comes before the other it's system change and system change requires both kind of the public struggle and the relational struggle does that does that make sense and what applies to prejudice against Muslims prejudice against Jews atheists Hindus Wiccans whatever it might be totally yeah I think that's super helpful and I think I'm grateful for communities like the communities that mission gatherings associated with that are working in very real ways to try to figure out how to actually defend truth which sounds so weird to say from it's not typical language we might use from a progressive perspective but to help people see beyond our biases and stereotypes is I think one of our fundamental Christian calls I mean it is what you are talking about loving our neighbor as ourselves yes and one of the things so I feel like every conversation with you is for me going back to memories of places where you've intersected with my faith journey and a few years ago while I was still at Moody I came out and saw you in a blue Patel at Catholic theological Society giving a talk it was my first time really having an interface experience if that makes sense and one of the things that was brought up in that conversation was among progressives there's this idea of kind of being cafeteria like with our spirituality going around and saying I like a little of this Buddhist I like a little of this Jewish tradition I like a little of this Christianity and for the first time in that conversation there was attention elevated about whether that's actually a good or negative thing - yeah so the question I'd ask is one is that good or negative when we go around and take from other traditions and create our own spirituality and to how is your own Christian faith been influenced by other religious traditions oh man okay so what good questions so the first thing I'd say that that first question is so interesting and so complex the fact is no matter what we say religions are always interacting and borrowing things from each other I remember I wrote a book one of my least read books but maybe I have a special place in my heart for it for that reason kind of like your kid that gets bullied on the playground but I wrote a book called the last word in the word after that which is about about Hell and I remember what a shock it was to me as a preacher when I realized that nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures do you find it hell that what we think is the biblical concept of Hell and then in fact in most of Ebru scriptures in fact I would say in all of the prescriptions which there is no substantial afterlife like a heaven and hell up kind of afterlife and so where did that come from well the Jews got it from other sources most likely although we can't know for sure they got it from Zoroastrianism through the Persians in fact there's even one theory that says the word Pharisee is actually the word Parsi which means the word Farsi or Persian and that these were Jews who were influenced by Persian ideas now there's another theory of the meaning of that word too but or maybe the Jews got that idea of hell from the Egyptian Book of the Dead that obviously had association with the Egyptians but the point is they resisted that belief even though all their neighbors believed in an afterlife they resisted it for centuries and most Jews today still do not believe necessarily in an afterlife so religions are always exchanging ideas the Christian idea of the Trinity III believe in the Trinity I love the journey I think it's a beautiful teaching properly understood even though it's been used it's super harmful ways um but you know when the Trinity is defined people use words like hypostatic Union and persons well in a very technical sense and what they're doing is they're borrowing categories from Greek philosophy that were big debates in the early church in the fourth and fifth centuries so we're always interacting we're always permeable that's just a historical fact um but here's here is a problem it's not a problem that counteracts the first thing but it's just something we have to hold a both and in dynamic tension I the the great theologian John Cobb Methodist presses theologian I just love John Cobb and John Cobb is one of the world's greatest Christian scholars on Buddhism and John makes this statement he says the rule the major world religions are in commensurable and literally means they aren't saying the same thing about the same thing and they aren't saying different things about the same thing they're saying different things about different things in other words like they're they're like different research projects and they interact with each other they have a lot of interesting things to talk about but you know psychology and physics have things in common but they're looking at different challenges right and and I think if we can understand our world religions in that way I think we're praying paying them proper respect each and their history they have arisen out of a different set of problems a different set of challenges and and to appreciate them we need to understand them as their own entities in their own context but here we are now and just because I'm a physicist doesn't mean I'm not interested in what I can learn from a psychologist and if I'm a psychologist there's a lot I can gain from a physicist and that's how I feel we are in this moment that we have a lot to learn from each other the Dalai Lama I think and I think he captures this well when he basically says look whatever you are be the best version of that that you can be and one dimension of the best version of that is that you learn from other traditions as well and that I think is pretty simple and good and wise advice oh I realize you have written entire books on this what I'm about to ask but given all of that the freedom to incorporate different faith systems and just how God works and in our universe what is your own personal faith look like right now I think that's so important it kind of gives us all permission to define who we are personally all have individual relationships with God so from the perspective of original sin and election and eternity and yeah so so let me say first that I have you know I have deconstructed the doctrines I inherited and I haven't done that as an act of malice I've done that as an act of love I've really wanted to understand these doctrines what do they mean how did they arise how did they develop what uses were they put to and so each of them I've had to in a sense take apart and then to it to the degree that ivory appropriated them ivory appropriated them in a way that I don't feel is harmful that I hope is helpful and healing and true and good so maybe let me give an example of a Christian doctrine that I've radically rethought and then maybe I could give an example because I don't think Brandon I answered this part of Brandon's question what's an idea from another religion that has been helpful to me as a Christian so let me take the doctrine of the Trinity which is not you know in the Bible although people use the Bible to defend it it's doctrine that arises in christian history for very understandable reasons Jesus constantly talks about the Father and Jesus says that he and the father are one and and Jesus talks about the spirit so we have these three names how do we talk about their their relationship and what I've come to see in in the fourth and fifth centuries is that the early church was trying to be faithful to Jesus teaching in the context of Greek philosophical categories and with the Roman Empire breathing down its throat because they the bishops had made a deal with the Roman Empire and and and I think especially there's a group called the cab Edition fathers they preserve something that I think is truly revolutionary and and here's how I would sum it up and this is very similar that gets identical to what Richard Rohr says in his book on the Trinity called the divine dance but I love the doctrine of the Trinity because I don't hold it in a way to say if you're Jewish and you don't believe the Trinity you're going to hell tell me that's ridiculous right yeah I I don't even think in those terms anymore but the reason I cherish and meditate on and love the doctrine of the Trinity is because first of all it takes the idea of an absolute monarch and it deconstructs that idea um so many people want to see the universe as a pyramid with one it's like on the dollar bill as seeing I on top who controls everyone else and it's sort of the where our economic structure is is designed with a 1% of top and you know in the 90s 90% 99% with crappy health care and you know fewer rights and and no this says no that monarchical view of the universe isn't right the essence of God is not domination of one over others father son spirit is a relationship it's not domination its relation not only that but what's to me just powerfully subversive that the early church fathers and they talked about doctrine of the Trinity they said the father doesn't dominate over the son that there's no more dominant relationship and a patriarchy than father over son but father and son are co-equal I mean that's a remarkable statement that everybody learns about the Trinity learns but we don't realize how revolutionary it is this is this is getting rid of domination so it's not like chain of command the father and the son tell the spirit what to do no father son spirit says that God is dynamic God is relational God is non patriarchal ironically non hierarchical and and that to me is a beautiful Madonn to what a lot of people call process theology that that that there's actually a life of God and and so that to me is very powerful let me give one quick example of a doctrine let me take one from Buddhism and first I can tell you like right now as we have this conversation we're at the beginning of the season of Ramadan a Muslim a season of reflection and prayer and fasting and some years ago I'm not going to the whole story here but I have some Muslim friends and I felt moved in my heart that I would try to participate in the Muslim fest month of Ramadan so that means you don't eat between sunrise and sunset well I have to admit I was a little fuzzy on sunrise and sunset but I for that month joined in that process and it was a deeply meaningful process just as a spiritual practice and I'm thankful and in fact every Ramadan that comes I feel a little sorry that I'm not doing it again and maybe someday I will but there's a Buddhist idea it's called the law the principle of no independent origination and the basic idea of this Buddhist principle is that when the conditions are right something can happen and when we can missions are not right something can not happen that that everything that happens is connected to every other thing because we're all in this web of events and connections well that idea I was introduced to as a terrible idea because it said that miracles aren't possible and because in the framework of Christian under saying that I inherited miracles involved something happening with no cause and now I came to see you know what that doesn't I don't have to define miracle that way and and in fact this principle for Buddhism has helped me and in many ways it's the essence of what we now call systems theory or systems thinking and I'm so grateful for the insight that came to me as I grappled with a tension between a Christian and Buddhist idea and some some light flashed for me about from the Buddhist idea totally Wow so much there but I'm grateful for it all and kind of as we come to land the plane I think one question that is interesting but I'm thinking about as you speak as I know that currently you're involved both obviously still writing about faith and of course a truck drives by right now but it's a so you're involved in this faith world you've been involved in this faith world but you're also starting to engage politically not you've been engaged politically but now vote calm and good and this is a critical moment for all of us to be engaged as people of faith in this political process I wonder how from an interfaith perspective what is the importance of the average Christian in our congregation care admission gathering engaging in the political process on behalf of our interfaith neighbors if that question makes sense that's almost what is the utility there yeah so let's flip it around for a minute let's imagine that we were Jews in Israel and we were occupying Palestine at that moment to be a good Jew would be you would vote not only for yourself but for the interest of your neighbor so you would be an Israeli citizen who voted with a concern for the well-being of your Palestinian fellow citizens or neighbors you can imagine yourself being in Burma or Myanmar Buddhist majority Muslim minority to be a good Buddhist would mean you would vote with the concerns of your Muslim there were India people as a concern that you shared you wouldn't want your vote to hurt a religious minority well come back to the United States if you're a Christian especially if you're a white Christian and you only vote for what makes sense to you as a white Christian I can pretty much guarantee that you're a bad Christian because a good Christian would not vote for his self-interest but would also be concerned with the with the interests of others that's what it says in Philippians chapter 2 if you want a Bible verse for it it's really worth reading so that means that in fact I just yesterday was on a phone call with a rabbi and a Jewish activists who are basically saying what can we do to get a message through to evangelicals that if they vote for white nationalists they're putting us and our children at great risk they think they buy this propaganda that if they that they support certain candidates they're supporting the State of Israel but they don't realize those people are using the State of Israel to BER to boost a white Christian nationalism that's it that is right under the paint is anti-semitic as they come so this is where again if we never listen to our neighbors if we only encounter them to preach at them well if we avoid them we never listen to them we don't know what their interests are we don't hear their fears and we cannot be good Christians if we don't listen from our hearts to the hearts of our neighbors of other faiths so powerful and I do hope for our community watching this right now that's the call that I feel like we're being called into in this series in particular to listen to learn and then to not just allow this to be for our own spiritual nourishment although it is but to actually take this good news this pluralism this bigger way of seeing the world and creating justice to our neighbors so Brian I want to thank you so much for taking time to be with us this morning and as always so inspiring so helpful and we're just grateful I want to say it was all I could do not to give you a standing ovation that's so important I also want to say thank you for the permission to engage other faith practices that's such a beautiful and unifying thing and I can't believe that we're not racist yeah you know I didn't get to mention that there's that one of the other problems especially for white people is that we're famous for something called appropriation and and we don't want to appropriate in ways that that's why I think anything that we embrace we should first it whenever possible do it in consultation with our neighbors of that other faith and we should understand it deeply enough that we're not just appropriating it and and and of course that's what we would want as doing that to others as we would want them to do for us I want to share every treasure I can of my faith with other people but I don't want them to just sort of put their brand on it I want there to be a real meaningful exchange and and kind of just say thanks to you guys and God bless mission gathering for for doing a series like this it can make people uncomfortable but a whole lot depends on it a whole lot depends on that so keep up the good work thank you and go enjoyed that Florida weather as we're doing here in San Diego so with you Brian

Channel: Missiongathering Christian Church San Diego

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Length: 39min 17sec (2357 seconds)

Published: Sun May 03 2020