Orland Evangelical Free Church | Brian McLaren Defines Orthodoxy

A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren is considered a kind of manifesto for emergent Christianity. In the next several weekly articles, I will examine what I take to be the book's salient points.

McLaren has identified an attitude among evangelicals that is a hindrance to everything from effective persuasion to loving fellowship. The attitude is the us v. them, chip-on-the-shoulder, we're-right-they're-wrong impatience with which evangelicals tend to deal with the wide surrounding world. One gathers that McLaren has had enough.

The problem with evangelical pomposity is that it has preempted learning. If we're right and they're wrong, then all we have to do is stay right. Tell the unbelievers one more time why their views on abortion, education, government, and values are heinous. Fidelity to the truth can reduce to the repetition of talking points-say it again, this time with feeling! That tactic of communication shuts out feedback and relationships degrade from the exchange of ideas to the exchange of rhetorical bullets.

McLaren wants to change this attitude, and he is right. Our information about where and how to apply truth is stagnant.

Which brings us to the term in his title, orthodoxy. He modifies it with generous, seeming to suggest that orthodoxy by itself is petty. When he comes to defining what orthodoxy is, McLaren starts this way (p 28): "For most people, orthodoxy means right thinking or right opinions, or in other words, ‘what we think,' as opposed to ‘what they think.'" For McLaren, orthodoxy tends to be petty because most people view it in adversarial terms.

The sentence is an early bit of slippage. I know many self-satisfied Christians, who like few things better than to hear the us v. them story again and call it Christianity. There are teachers of the Church who view orthodoxy as a front-line trench. But their pettiness does not determine what orthodoxy is. McLaren is building up to a redefinition, and so implies a choice between orthodoxy alone (petty) and orthodoxy plus generosity (loving).

His alternative definition comes in the next sentence. "In contrast, orthodoxy in this book may mean something like ‘what God knows, some of which we believe a little, some of which they believe a little, and about which we all have a whole lot to learn.'" The truth is beyond our reach, in God's mind, and the various factions of human spirituality each have pieces of it. To follow orthodoxy, according to this definition, is to be generous to the other factions and to learn from them.

Orthodoxy may mean that. It may mean something like that. In this book.

The care with which McLaren poses as tentative and playful is necessary to disguise the enormity of what he puts over in that definition. Orthodoxy is inaccessible. It's "in God's mind." This is a romanticist punt, even transcendentalist. Emerson could've written it, irony and all. Christian orthodoxy teaches that God himself is incomprehensible, but that he has given us a revelation of his nature and will by which he is knowable.

Orthodoxy is not in God's mind. It's in his Word, both written and incarnate. It's accessible.

But I just ran smack into another sentence closing McLaren's paragraph on orthodoxy. McLaren says, "Most people are too serious, knowledgeable, and busy for such an unorthodox definition of orthodoxy." So he will make an intriguing definition tentatively and then bluff his way out of being examined.

The definition we have analyzed comes in a chapter titled, "For Mature Audiences Only." How would he define mature? "For most people, maturity means being accountable for what you say. In contrast, maturity in this book may mean something like . . ."

I hope we can learn and grow as human beings without so much ironic game-playing.