How I Got Here

 

I grew up in the fundamentalist Christian sect that gave the world the Rapture, the Left Behind industry of movies and books (and bad politics), and a school of biblical interpretation called Dispensationalism. Like any heritage, my Plymouth Brethren upbringing gave me many gifts: deep interest in the Bible, a passionate desire to do what is good and right, a willingness to challenge convention, and a yearning to live for a cause greater than myself.

But it also faced me at an early age with an inconvenient and uncomfortable truth: religious people (like all people) can be unquestionably certain of things that are highly questionable as soon as you step outside their bubble. My tribe was certain that they possessed the only legitimate interpretation of the Bible: no pastors (male or female) – only a plurality of elders, no women allowed to speak in church meetings; all women wearing “head coverings” in obedience to the literal commands of 1 Corinthians 11; a weekly “Spirit-led” communion service without any written liturgy (although the unwritten liturgy was quite rigid); no denominational name (we gathered “unto Christ alone,” which, in a heartbreaking irony, made us better than everyone else!), and so on. Our self-assured superiority faced us with a real problem: if we weren’t right, nobody was, and any step out of our elite circle was a step down into darkness, compromise, and error.

If this sounds like a seventeenth-century mindset, it may be, but based on my inbox, in the current century it is still surprisingly common in a variety of groups, from Pentecostal to Restorationist to hyper-Calvinist to Independent Fundamental/Baptist.

As a young teenager, I remember thinking that I was probably on my way out of Christianity altogether, but my escape plan was thwarted by a powerful spiritual experience combined with a mentor who started giving me books by Francis Schaeffer and C. S. Lewis. Both figures are complex and fascinating, and both defied fundamentalism before they came to define it, but they are now among Evangelical/Fundamentalist patron saints. 

For me, as a curious Brethren boy of sixteen or seventeen, Schaeffer and Lewis were gateway drugs into greener pastures. They were thoughtful, intelligent, well-read. They appreciated great art, great literature, history, philosophy, and even science. (They also drank alcohol, a strict taboo for my tribe back in those days.) Of special importance for me, Schaffer was concerned about the environment, and C. S. Lewis saw literary imagination as an organ of faith.

By the time I got my BA, my career plan was to go on to graduate school to become a college English teacher, like C. S. Lewis himself, and to open my home to spiritual seekers, as Francis and Edith Schaeffer had done. 

But I began to hit some road bumps in graduate school. An afternoon seminar on theories of literary criticism became a turning point for me. We had just read Stanley Fish’s Self-Consuming Artifacts, which led to a discussion of new schools of literary criticism that included “reader-response,” “post-structuralist” and “postmodern,” and as that conversation unfolded, I had a moment of insight that took the form of a metaphor of almost visionary quality. 

First, I pictured the great minds of modernity, each climbing up to stand on his chair (the male pronoun fit in those days) so he could look down upon his peers. Whether it was Darwin, Freud, Hume, Bentham, Skinner, or Marx, each used every tool of critical thinking at his disposal to cut the legs out from under the chairs of every rival theorist. A Freudian, for example, could show how other theorists reached their conclusions due to the dynamics of their Oedipal or Electra complexes. Marx could show how others were simply working out their class conflict. Bentham or Skinner could explain away the beliefs and positions of others based on a theory of “felicific calculus” or stimulus-response programming. 

Each theorist reduced every other theory to a phenomenon that it could explain and therefore explain away. But each theorist made one small exemption in applying its critical, reductionistic gaze. Each theorist cut the legs out from under every rival theory but never applied his own theory to undercut himself. Freudians never said that Freud’s theory was nothing more than the product of Freud’s psycho-sexual aggression, and therefore wasn’t necessarily true; they actually seemed to believe Freudianism. Darwinians acted as if the human brain evolved to enhance survival, not necessarily to discern truth, and they could apply their theory to every case except the development of their own theory, which they saw as a pristine, objective pursuit of truth. Marxists never said that Marxism was nothing more than a tool for class conflict; they actually seemed to believe it was true, and its truth lent a moral quality to their project. Their own theory-making work was exempted from their critique of other theories. That struck me as supremely unfair, even dangerous: an act of reductionistic aggression that could justify great harm. 

Suddenly, I saw in a new light the violence of the modern era, from colonialism to Stalinism to Nazism to nuclear war to the environmental crisis. Smart people, armed with excessive and un-self-critical confidence derived from their absolutized ideologies, could commit unspeakable atrocities without having second thoughts.

I saw in the few hours of that graduate school seminar something I have not been able to un-see ever since: the danger of excessive confidence and of critical thinking that exclusively critiques others but not oneself or one’s own group.

What was happening in this “postmodern turn,” I realized, was that the scholar standing on the chair was taking out his conceptual sword and, in an act of “doing unto oneself as one has done to others,” was cutting out the legs from under his own chair. This self-critical act, it seemed to me, had a profoundly moral motive: it aimed to disarm ideologies that claimed superiority and supremacy and put us all back on the same level ground as frail and fallible human beings.

But that moment of insight quickly turned into a moment of terror: weren’t C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, along with other Christian apologists I admired, acting just like typical modernist thinkers? Weren’t they simply climbing up on their chairs and using their Anglicanism or Calvinism or Thomism or other forms of Christianity to cut the logical legs from beneath all their rivals, thus proclaiming their own superiority and supremacy?

I distinctly remember thinking, “If this postmodern way of thinking ever catches on, the Christian religion is in a heap of trouble,” which was followed by a thought I’m not terribly proud of: “I hope this postmodern thing doesn’t catch on!”

But of course it did. And even if it hadn’t caught on, the seed was already sewn in my own thinking. Modernist Christian absolutism, whether in its Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, or Charismatic forms, had lost its luster for me, and I was launched on a quest for a different way to be Christian, and human.

That’s one reason why, later in my graduate studies, I was so attracted to Catholic novelist Walker Percy. He was the first Christian thinker I had ever encountered who seemed to understand this postmodern turn. (He wrote about it in a brilliant essays like “The Message in the Bottle” and “The Man on the Train.”) Following Kierkegaard, he proposed that there were two different kinds of communication: the so-called objective communication of the academic or scientist, and the predicamental communication of the living human being who knows that he or she will die, and who speaks out of his or her existential crisis. (Later, I would discover that Michael Polanyi made a similar distinction, between impersonal and personal knowledge.)

This thought process continued to unfold as I finished graduate school, became a college English teacher, helped start a congregation, and then left teaching to become a pastor. 

Preparing sermons and leading Bible studies each week actually got me reading the Bible more than I ever had, not just a famous verse here or there, but all the verses in between. It became increasingly clear to me that the theological framework I’d inherited didn’t fit the actual data. Meanwhile, our congregation had an influx of people who didn’t grow up in the church, and they came with their questions, which I often found superior to the set of answers I had been taught by Lewis, Schaeffer, and others. More forward-leaning authors like Leonard Sweet and Dallas Willard helped me gradually break free from some of my remaining fundamentalist grave-clothes.

These experiences prepared me for the brilliance of Walter Brueggemann, even though my conservative background prejudiced me against him because he was seen as a “liberal.” Brueggemann saw tensions and differences among biblical writers not merely as “contradictions” to explain away (as fundamentalists did) or to expose (as other critical scholars often did), but rather as arguments. These seminal arguments presented faith as an ongoing conversation and quest for understanding rather than a fixed and fluid systematic theology or bombproof ideology. In a sense, Brueggemann gave me back the Bible, and helped me see that a fixed “Christian worldview” was neither biblical nor wise. What we need instead of a fixed worldview or doctrinal system is an ongoing Christian conversation that welcomes diverse viewpoints and expects everyone to keep learning, never forgetting what has gone before, but not being imprisoned by it either.

The need for diverse viewpoints prompted me to listen to more non-white, non-straight, and non-male voices, including gay theologians like Dale Martin; feminist, eco-feminist, and womynist theologians like Sally McFague, Ilia Delio, JoAnn Badley, and Wil Gafney; Latin American liberation theologians like Rene Padilla, Jon Sobrino, Gustavo Gutierrez, and Leonardo Boff; Black theologians like Dr. King, James Cone, and Howard Thurman; African theologians like Kwame Bediako, Mabiala Kenzo, and Allan Boesak; and indigenous theologians like Richard Twiss, Randy Woodley, Randy Aldred, and Mark Charles.

When I first encountered the early Jesus Seminar, it jangled all my remaining fundamentalist nerve endings, and it also alarmed the emerging post-modern part of me because I felt it had a modernist, reductionistic tone. But that began to change when I read The Meaning of Jesus (HarperOne, 1998) in which N. T. Wright and Marcus Borg engaged in civil but real debate. Of course, I was predisposed to prefer Dr. Wright because he had an Evangelical reputation, and Wright’s book The Challenge of Jesus (HarperOne, 1999) was profoundly important in my own theological growth. 

But I was also attracted to Marcus Borg’s gracious tone, and when I met Marcus in person, I saw that gracious tone embodied. The same was true with Dominic Crossan, and I began to read more of their joint work. They engaged with Scripture with far more depth and attention to detail than any of my conservative scholars had, and, it seemed to me, as time progressed they went beyond modernist critique and even postmodern deconstruction and attempted a more constructive re-envisioning of the Christian message and story in light of their research. I sensed the same movement in Jack Spong’s later work. Borg and Crossan also took the theme of empire and imperial violence seriously, and in that way, they, along with Richard Horsley and others, forever enriched the way I read the four Gospels, and forever changed the way I saw my own Christian tradition’s history.

Along the way, I was helped greatly by the work of Nancey Murphy, Stanley Grenz, John Franke, Jack Caputo, and Richard Kearney as they put theology in conversation with postmodernism. John Haught’s “theology of evolution” work was also deeply liberating for me, as was Philip Clayton’s multi-faceted scholarship, and both prepared me for deeper engagement with John Cobb and other process theologians, not to mention Tiehlhard de Chardin. I was also helped along by readings in poetry and fiction (especially Nancy Oliver and Wendell Berry), spirituality and mysticism (especially Richard Rohr and Cynthia Bourgeault), social history and “big history” (especially Jared Diamond and Ken Wilber), and anthropology (especially Rene Girard).

As a result of all these influences (and so many others), I felt increasingly free and increasingly curious to engage with thinkers and activists from other religious traditions. As I did, I came to appreciate what John Cobb called “the incommensurability” of the world’s religions, and simultaneously, the potential for their diverse resources to be brought to the table for a multi-faith, multi-sector conversation among the whole human community as we face our current quadruple crisis: 1. the life-and-death challenges of climate change and ecological collapse, 2. unsustainable and growing economic inequality and exploitation, 3. the ever-present danger of catastrophic war, and 4. the failure of our world’s religions to provide an inspiring and visionary way forward.

One constant and stabilizing influence on me through all these changes has been the outdoors. Whether hiking trails, naming trees, listening for bird-songs, fly-casting for tarpon, keeping tortoises, tending gardens, planting mango trees, observing stars, or studying dragonflies, I’ve always felt that the book of nature has been my most profound and delightful teacher, and has turned me into an incurable contemplative.

That’s how, in case you wondered, a fundamentalist boy could grow into a sixty-something man honored to be a progressive Christian voice in a global, multi-faith conversation. If you want to know more about my journey, of course, you can read my books, which are like crumbs dropped along the way, and check out my website, brianmclaren.net.

 

~ Brian McLaren

above image: Alan S. Maltz