(Ir)religiosity

Contrary to the plethora of blog reviews I’ve read, I don’t think Brian McLaren goes too far in his newest book.  I think he doesn’t go far enough.  I’ll explain.

One of McLaren’s major claims in the book — in fact, the claim on which the entire book rests — is that traditional biblical hermeneutics have been limited to what he calls the “six-line Greco-Roman narrative” which constructs the rigid dualisms and binaries with which we are all familiar: spirit/body, heaven/earth, form/substance, good/evil, etc.  When applied to Scripture, this interpretive lens results in the following trajectory that has prevailed in traditional, conventional Christianity for quite some time: (1) perfection in creation, (2) fall into sin, (3) condemnation, (4) the possibility of salvation, and either (5) eternal damnation or (6) a return to perfection in heaven.  The picture below gives you sense of the movement of the lines.

McLaren maintains that this Greco-Roman narrative has been transposed over Scripture as a narrative overlay.  As such it guides interpretation of the text and, in turn, the trajectory of theology.  For McLaren, this is the dominant way of reading and interpreting Scripture, it is, quite literally, the water in which every Christian swims.  The deeper question, though, is whether Scripture is being circumscribed and restricted by this narrative overlay.  That is, whether the arc of the Greco-Roman narrative is actually indicative of Scripture itself or whether it has been imported to the text.  McLaren thinks it has.  And he spends a good deal of time drawing comparisons between the six-line interpretation of Scripture and Platonism.  I’ll spare you that piece and simply throw up another picture that does the trick. Read the rest of this entry »

This time tomorrow I’ll be in Chicago for the much anticipated Moltmann Conversation.  I’m pretty stoked.  Not only will I get to see one of the world’s foremost living theologians, I’ll also get to finally meet some really cool people I’ve been following online for a while now (wow, that sounded really stalkerish).

I doubt that I will liveblog much, unless I change my mind.  Tweeting should be much easier and I’d rather contribute to the larger conversation that will be going on the Twub, rather than make up my own.  That being said, if you follow me on Facebook it will be easier to keep up with everything if you follow me on Twitter.  I’m not going to feed all my tweets into Facebook because I don’t want to spam a bunch of people.  I’ll double up on some things but not all.  If you follow me on Twitter and aren’t interested in any of this, well, I apologize.

To make things super easy, I’ve embedded the Twub below so you can keep up with everything that is going on from here if you like.

Hopefully sometime over the weekend, or maybe early one next week, I’ll post my final thoughts on the whole experience.