Reflections after Reading Brian McLaren's The Secret Message of Jesus

Originally written: November 19, 2006

I remember a conversation I had at the beginning of my time in Boston with Aaron from Azuza Pacific. At that time I laid out my expectation of greater doctrinal unity among Christians before Christ returns, and he questioned it, saying that action would come before we got everything figured out, if such a thing is even possible, or in God's will. And I argued back, quoting the passage about the Spirit guiding the Church into all truth, but now I think I see his point.

I sense that the next hundred years - if Christ does not return first - will be a time of necessary danger for our faith. Our foundations have already been shaken (since the 1700s, etc., etc.) Now I sense we're gathering for a countercharge, even as the world seems blackest. And I anticipate that the countercharge will make itself known in ethics and in Body life prior to any great doctrinal reconciliation. This movement will be from the bottom up, not the top down, and it'll be messy, even as the Reformation was. God willing, though, we live in a different age than the Reformers, and fellow Christians can dispute without bloodshed.

Perhaps Athanasius once again will save the world. I'm currently re-reading his On the Incarnation, and, as always, it's provoking me to rethink fundamentally how I understand the Faith.

I think his vision of reconciliation between God and humanity - his account of what Christ came to do - is deeper, broader, and richer than the typical account given in both Protestant and Catholic circles (and, I would guess, than the modern Orthodox account, despite their veneration of Athanasius as one of the chief saints. After all, all Christians claim to honor Jesus, yet we've done a fair amount to diminish the power of His teachings.)

Have we in the Church (all branches of it, though I speak mostly to Protestants, since I know them best, being one myself) unwittingly buried one of our greatest treasures - a reading of Paul's reading of what Christ came to accomplish that is more subtle and comprehensive in scope than the narrowly logical approach taken by Anselm? For Athanasius, like the Bible itself (as McLaren points out), deals mainly in images, but we Protestants have all too frequently thought with only one, and that one rationalized into a system of exchange.

I'm beginning to think that the judicial-economic metaphor Anselm developed, which has become nearly the only metaphor used by many Protestants today (such that many wouldn't even call it a metaphor, but rather the plain truth of what Christ did), is not the most important metaphor in the Bible, and not even the one on which the NT authors lay the most stress. Rather, I think the most important metaphor is the one expressed in such Pauline statements as "If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation." Behind justification lies union with Christ.

(Excursus: Union with Christ is unobservable, and is on the side of the 100% God - it is the outworking of regeneration, which God initiates. Justification comes with confession of sin and faith in Christ - the actions of the 100% man, which are inseparable from the 100% God. The two go together, even as do the natures of Christ or the divine/human character of Scripture - but, in all these areas, the divine element must be in the "first place" logically, even if chronologically and ontologically the two are simultaneous.)

What if the work of Christ is more importantly a work of renewal, restoration, reconciliation, and recreation than an abstracted quid pro quo?

Still, Anselm is not to be wholly rejected. His work is invaluable within its scope. It's just that our contemporary atonement theory was fleshed out largely within the polemic context of the Reformation, yet today the concerns and needs of the Church are different. We've won the battles of the Reformation, in a sense: yes, I know that the Catholics have never renounced Trent, but the Reformational confessions have been formulated and adopted by many Christians, and the ideas in them have even infiltrated Catholicism to a certain extent. (Thus, I have confidence that the Reformational solas can be preserved and can win the day even in the midst of the terminological rethinking that people like N.T. Wright - and the advent of Biblical theology - are forcing upon us. We can continue to articulate the truths of the Reformation, even if the language we have to do so in is different, and, as Wright would argue, truer to the language of the Bible, in its historical context.)

What the Reformers said was right and necessary in their day, but to preach the Gospel now exactly as they preached it then, is not to preach the Gospel in such a way that people now can hear it as "good news." In an age where people no longer have a conscious sense of God as a common cultural possession - much less a sense of God as righteous and terrible Judge - the burning question is not: "What must I do to be saved?" but rather "How do I find a love beyond myself?", or something similar. Our starting point with the modern pagans (those who have tried a form of Christianity, and found it wanting, and as such are the hardest to convert) must be much farther back than it was with the preachers of the 16-18^th centuries, the original "Evangelicals." A desire for reconciliation still exists, and will always exist, within the human heart, but the cultural conception of underlying reality having shifted, this reconciliation is no longer seen by most as a real possibility, and certainly is not viewed as being reconciliation with a personal God.

Even more so, the onus is not seen as being upon ourselves - that we have become aliens and strangers in the world because of our own selfishness and neglect of God. Rather, people seem to think that if the Divine exists, its obligation is to come to us at our beck-and-call. And since they think of Christ as having come for the very limited purpose (in their conception) of forgiving our sins (understood by them as our offenses against an arbitrary and outmoded moral code), they can't see Him as a manifestation of the Divine taking the first initiative and coming to us. Perhaps if they had read Athanasius, or the other Fathers, (or if we had done a better job of proclaiming the apostolic teaching) they would understand Christ's work more comprehensively as both the reconciliation of the world (a return to God's original purpose for creation) and a restoration of the Image of God in humanity (a return to His original purpose for us, as His delegated representatives in that creation).

"Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!"