Brian McLaren

I read an article about “Emergence” on Christianity Today Online this morning. The article was made for me, and my self-conscious reading of it comprised one of those instances in which I could see very clearly how every moment of my life is a meaningful gift from Christ. (I cannot always see this, but I have better weeks than others. I use the word “gift” because I would like to emphasize, both to you and to myself, that no future moment is more important than this moment. That every particle of time-space exists for its own sake.)
I have not read any of your books. I didn’t even know about them until this morning. I am a doctoral student… at Harvard University. … I was “born again,” under the loose auspices of Campus Crusade, while in college. After a few years, I became disillusioned with evangelical Christianity (with its form – not its most basic doctrinal content), and began searching for some richer expression of the Christian revelation. Undoubtedly, my God-given life-long attraction to great art and literature has had something to do with this dissatisfaction.
There is a great deal I could say about the ideas implied in the article CT wrote about “Emergence.” But I wanted to first address what I infer to be your (or at least some of your fellows') understanding of “postmodernism.”
First, for what it’s worth, I’d like to problematize the word “postmodern.” It really has no content, besides the implication of temporal belatedness. And as you, I think, have pointed out, it can be extremely misleading, especially when it is associated with a kind of ironic avant-gardeism that is really just modernism in disguise.

…What you are striving for, I submit, is condition number 1, in which immanent meaning and identity is rampant. In which everything is valorized, mystified, exalted, because Christ redeemed it. In which everything and every moment exists simultaneously for its own sake, for others’ enjoyment, and above all, for the enjoyment and glorification of God himself. Incidentally, this condition is inimical to the forensic (legal) model of justification espoused by almost all Protestant communities. The forensic model, as we have seen, is merely “modern,” in the sense that it proposes deferred (eschatological) participation in a fixed archetype whose lineaments were conceived, and continue to be reconceived, by authority figures unconsciously in step with their times.

Maybe all of this is in your first book. But if so, why have you not become a Roman Catholic?

And this really comes down to why I’ve written you, Mr. McLaren, because condition 1 is just Catholicism. I’m really struggling with this right now, because I have a lot of loyalty to American evangelicalism, but at the same time, it seems obvious to me that Catholics are correct. The Catholic model of justification is ontological. It redeems every individual here and now through the gracious gift of participation in a lifestyle of sacrifice. And what is this lifestyle of sacrifice? Simply obedience to Christ every moment, enabled through Christ’s constant presence in his Holy Spirit (so that we know what form our obedience should take). When Christ ascended bodily, he pulled the entire created order with him. He made it so that He would be with us to the end of the world. Thus we don’t need legal declarations to assure us of our place in heaven. We don’t need to fret about our “eternal security.” Eternity is now, and Christ is with us now. EVERY MOMENT WE LIVE IN OBEDIENCE TO HIM IS A MOMENT REDEEMED. The central fact of Christ’s life on earth was sacrifice – in this, Protestants are correct. But sacrifice, in a world fulfilled by Christ, is not a legally mandated procedure. It is obedience – willed assent to a higher will! Thus we need not hang back like cowards, as if a greater will performed a sacrifice we cannot perform, or hope to perform. In fact, Christ’s sacrifice enabled our sacrifice. Because he submitted to death, we can also submit to death. Because he walked with God, we also can walk with God. And God will not give us yokes heavier than we can bear.

When Martin Luther demanded forensic justification, he declared that he could not obey God. But he did not see that obedience does not consist in conformity to an archetype. It consists, instead, in walking along the unique paths God has laid out for each one of us.

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I was moved to write this when I saw that you were doing a lot of ecumenical work. In your exposure to Roman Catholic thinkers, have you been tempted to convert?