Some of you may remember my review of Primal by Mark Batterson a few months ago. I was not particularly impressed. It felt contrived and ambiguous while attempting to be motivational and revolutionary. I expected Radical by David Platt to be in the same vein – attempting to be revolutionary. I was genuinely surprised by how… Read More »
Read previous posts in this series: Introduction The Narrative Question The Authority Question The God Question The Jesus Question The Gospel Question Up to this point in A New Kind of Christianity, McLaren has tackled what we might consider abstract questions. He has questioned the underlying belief structure of what he considers to be a… Read More »
What is the gospel? This is a question that McLaren has been asking for as long as I have been reading his works. I will agree with McLaren that the gospel is not the bullet-pointed, systematic plan to get out of Hell that most evangelicals reduce it to. To McLaren, we need to figure out… Read More »
One of my favorite items at the library is the Portable Professor/Modern Scholar series of lectures from Recorded Books. Beside the fact that they are incredible material, they are also free when I get them from the library. I rip the CD’s to my computer and then sync them with my iPod. They give me… Read More »
You have to love it when someone starts speaking about others using abstract titles when everyone knows who they are talking about. In this section of A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren answers some accusations from two other well-known Christian writers – specifically Mark Driscoll and John MacArthur. To Driscoll, Jesus was a man’s… Read More »
Jonathan Acuff and I have a lot in common. We’re both preacher’s kids. We both have a satirical bend when it comes to commenting on Christians. We’re both on Twitter and Facebook. We both blog. Of course, there’s one huge difference. Jonathan Acuff has a published book. I can’t even focus on actually writing my… Read More »
Mclaren’s third chapter marked the first time I had a genuine disagreement with his questions. Mclaren’s attempts to argue that human beings were not able to handle God falls short (he actually uses an analogy where he refers to the ancients as 2nd graders). What if people who live in the second-grade world of polytheism… Read More »
Part 2 of Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity addresses how we should read the Bible. It presented a fairly decent contrast of what I refer to as the clerical and journey views of the Scriptures. Clerical View – the Scriptures need a professional caste of clerks who decipher the texts because the ‘laity’ couldn’t… Read More »
Has it really been ten years since John Eldredge’s book Wild at Heart was published? I guess so. This book was one of the first books to say, “Christian guys don’t need to be pansies” and for that, Eldredge deserves major props. I’ve blogged about this attitude previously, so I won’t rehash my comments here.… Read More »
What is the over-arching story of the Scriptures? In Western Christianity, it has long been contended that the story of the Scriptures is the story of redemption through Jesus. Brian McLaren taught this position for a long time. He generalizes the idea in a sort of diagram that I will not reproduce here, but essentially… Read More »
