Frame on McLaren

Peter J. Leithart, December 21, 2005

John Frame has a typically gracious though critical review of Brian McLaren's Generous Orthodoxy in the current issue of Reformation and Revival Journal. Frame appreciates a number of the concerns that animate McLaren (learning from other Christian traditions, the missional concept of the church, a hermeneutic of love, among other things). Though Frame agrees that theological controversy should be carried in a "winsome" manner, he wonders whether McLaren is willing to engage in theological controversy at all: "he seems to lack any understanding of what is required to 'contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints' (Jude 3). He tells us how not to do it, sometimes helpfully. But he doesn't tell us how to do it, except perhaps by the method of benign neglect. . . . he seems to say again and again that we should just forget about defending orthodoxy. I have to regard that attitude as naive."

Frame brings up a couple of quotations that perhaps support a suspicion I had while reading A New Kind of Christian (I haven't yet read Generous Orthodoxy). The suspicion was aroused by my sense that at several points McLaren came very close to the position of classic theological liberalism. Or, more broadly and more accurately, that McLaren has not been liberated from theology's voluntary imprisonment to modernity. Given the fictional format of A New Kind of Christian, it was hard to tell what opinions belonged to McLaren and which belonged merely to his fictional characters. The quotations in Frame's review express McLaren's own positions.

First, McLaren writes that orthodoxy is "a kind of internalized belief, tacit and personal, that becomes part of you to such a degree that once assimilated, you hardly need to think of it." McLaren has a point here: We want the truths of the faith to become embedded in our bones. Frame criticizes McLaren at this point for not recognizing that orthodoxy was achieved at the cost of long controversy. My complaint has to do with McLaren's location of orthodoxy, as an "internalized belief." The relocation of Christian faith and orthodoxy from the external creeds and practices of the church to the inner heart is one of the characteristic moves of modernized Christianity. In fairness, McLaren goes on in the book to talk about orthodoxy as an external "habitation": "We enter it, indwell it, live and love through it." But as a definition of orthodoxy, describing it as an "internalized belief" will not do. To the extent that McLaren internalizes faith, to that extent he's still laboring under the constraints of modernity.

Second, Frame quotes McLaren as saying that when the disciples were around Jesus, "they felt - no, more than that, they somehow knew - they were experiencing God." McLaren goes on in the book to say, "This experience found its way into the language of the early church documents," and he goes on to quote Colossians 1:15-20, Hebrews 1:1-3, and 2 Corinthians 4:6. He goes on: "This full, radiant, glorious experience of God in Jesus Christ eventually revolutionized the whole concept of God, so that the word God itself was reimagined through the experience of encountering Jesus, seeing him act, hearing him speak, watching him relate, and reflecting on his whole career." Again, this is the characteristic movement of modern Christianity since Schleiermacher - from experience of God toward external doctrinal formulations.

In spotting these apparent parallels with liberalism, I am not concluding that McLaren is a liberal. The same moves are quite evident in much evangelical theology (at least popularly) and certainly in evangelical piety. My point is that McLaren, despite his attention to postmodernism, appears to remain mired in the dead-ends of modernism that find expression in both liberalism and evangelicalism.