why does this bother me ...

My friend Randy Noblog prompted me to read David Roach's Baptist Press report on Brian McLaren's comments at Willow Creek last month and in Everything Must Change. I don't know how accurately Roach reflects McLaren's views but this seems consistent with what I've seen elsewhere and among those that read McLaren more than I do ... and it bothers me. It just doesn't seem "Biblical". It seems more pragmatic ... i.e., almost as if McLaren is trying to reason out a way for God to accomplish His goals rather than going with what Scripture seems to say.

My problem is that it has been a long, long time since I studied eschatology and even then I was more than a little unsure of my position. However, I don't remember concluding anything like McLaren seems to be saying and I certainly do not agree with the implications of some of his "accusations".

Roach understands McLaren as arguing that people who believe in hell may be inclined to dominate and take advantage of other people, rather than help them. This comes from the following statement by McLaren:

Many of us have been increasingly critical in recent years of popular American eschatology in general, and conventional views of hell in particular," he wrote. "Simply put, if we believe that God will ultimately enforce his will by forceful domination, and will eternally torture all who resist that domination, then torture and domination become not only permissible but in some way godly.

I don't see McLaren's leap. And even if it were true, I'm not clear how that gives him license to rewrite God's plan. Roach quotes him again:

This eschatological understanding of a violent second coming leads us to believe (as we've said before) that in the end, even God finds it impossible to fix the world apart from violence and coercion; no one should be surprised when those shaped by this theology behave accordingly.

Hmmm ... same point. I don't see it and I don't follow the rewrite which leads to this faulty and what appears to be humanistic conclusion.

The book of Revelation does not actually teach that there will be a new heaven and a new earth, he wrote, but that a new way of living is possible within this universe if humans will follow Jesus' example.

By going to the cross, McLaren argued in his book, Jesus committed an act similar to the Chinese student at Tiananmen Square in the late 1980s -- he placed himself in harm's way to demonstrate the injustice of a society that would harm a peaceful and godly man.

I find this all very sad. While I violently disagree with McLaren on this, he tangles the above with the truth that repentance is not for some future goal but also a change of life today - that the Kingdom of God is at hand and that we are to have a new way of living now. Many of my Evangelical friends miss this great truth because they lump it with the other teaching/thinking from folks like McLaren.

That aside, Roach does a nice job in his subsequent article refuting McLaren's specific errors.

• “The apostle Paul tells us not to avenge ourselves. Why? Because, he writes, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord’ (Romans 12:18-20).
• “As for domination, the Bible tells us not to dominate one another, precisely because ‘we will all stand before the judgment seat of God’ (Romans 12:10).”
• Even though McLaren claims to want world peace, his own view is actually the one that leads to violence, Moore said.
• “When a Christian understands that he does not fight for his own honor, but that justice will be done by God, either through union with Christ and His cross or at the judgment itself, the Christian is freed then to trust God, not his sword or his gun or his fists or his tongue,” he said. “It is McLaren’s vision of a life that consists only of the justice achieved in this era that leads to violence and Darwinian struggle to see that a pound of flesh is exacted.”