a Generous Or+hodoxy: Part 2

Mclaren: Taking the rough with the smooth

I had never read Brian McLaren up until I read “a Generous Or+hodoxy”, therefore given that I found so much in the book echoing my own feelings and thinking (I filled it with underlinings) it is likely that there is some underlying commonality of philosophy, experience and temperament that has caused this concurrence. One commonality seems to be that McLaren has stepped back to look at the Christian scene as whole in all its historical and contemporary messy reality. Moreover, I suspect that McLaren, like me, has secretly asked himself the probing question that, when all is said and done in Christianity are we left with an authentic phenomenon? Towards the end of his book (see chapter 19) he defines the concept of Church Emergence as a process which like tree ring growth includes and embraces what his gone before: In other words McLaren is not one of those many disillusioned Christian sectarians who bin the past, clear the ground, and start rebuilding yet another bespoke realization of Christianity. And yet he is all too aware of the failings of both historical and contemporary Christianity; else why embark on such a deep reappraisal of the phenomenon?

McLaren says he is a post-foundationalist, (see P206) and by implication a postmodernist, and yet he is not a relativist (P324). I do not think of myself as either post-foundationalist or postmodern but nevertheless I think I can run with McLaren here because, as another emerging church leader once put it, his is the kind of postmodernism that equates to “epistemological humility” rather than relativism – and that I would want to applaud and encourage: No human expression of Truth, whether based on biblical interpretations or other is ever ultimately authoritative or constitutes an absolute foundation. All human understandings and expressions of the Truth are subject to critical scrutiny, further honing and/or possible revision. On page 316 McLaren succinctly describes the “stages of faith” by which one appropriates this important “postmodern” lesson: “simplicity, complexity, perplexity and humility”.

McLaren doesn’t assume that his or anyone else’s particular Christian cultural splinter has all the right answers, or for that matter all the wrong answers. This means that he doesn’t write off any particular cultural expression of Christianity as damned. But although he looks as though he is the sort of person who is able to negotiate with most Christian communities, I get the impression that for McLaren self-criticism is a non-negotiable feature of his Christianity and therefore for him healthy Christianity is in the business of constantly reappraising itself. He warms to the concept of “continuous reformation” (P213), an idea that is close to my concept of continuous rival.

At his own confession there is a streak of cynicism in McLaren. Like myself, therefore, he is suspicious of restorationism; that is, the claim by countless start-up denominations, sects and cults that they have cleared the ground to create a restored church untainted by human foibles and sinfulness. “Oh yeah?” has always been my response to this sort of thing and I think McLaren’s response would be similar (P140)

As I said in my previous post it is difficult to distill McLaren’s views down to simple formula; he is too intellectually mature for that. He knows that unlike the world of the physical sciences where much can be captured in simple formulae, the socio-religious world is a world that is necessarily rife with narrative intense metaphors. Thus, it is difficult to pin the label of heresy on McLaren just by quoting a few sentences on, say, his views of hell and other religions, because there are always qualifications further into the text.

EPC (evangelical, pentecostal, charismatics) sects often require one to swallow whole and digest slowly; that is they require you to eat in one sitting everything on the platter they serve; it won’t do to leave any of it to pick over later, let alone refuse to swallow something altogether. This is where I believe Mclaren wins outright over much of “modernist” EPC; for his twin methodology of acquiring historical perspective and his soft postmodern epistemological humility is scientific in as much as he only allows us to establish what we feel we can establish in our own good time.

Do I disagree with McLaren on anything? I think it is less a case of disagreeing with him than it is taking issue with him where I think he lacks an emphasis. In this connection I feel that he casts the mold too much in terms of dichotomies: modernism vs. postmodernism, mechanism vs. mystery, reductionism vs. intuition – basically similar expressions to the fundamental dichotomy of logos vs. mythos that I keep banging on about. In my view these dichotomies require synthesis and not polarization; or at least be kept in paradoxical tension. In the face of this lack of emphasis by McLaren, I am not surprised that the emerging churches I’m acquainted with tend to resolve the tension between Mythos and Logos in favour of mythos. For someone such as myself who is temperamentally wired up for analysis and articulation and reared in the enlightenment traditions I find such fellowships (which may be full of ex-charismatic refugees) far too touchy-feely for my taste. But I must stress the subjectiveness of my term “taste”; this is not say that those who engage in such fellowships don't do well in them. At least they are free of that “swallow whole and digest slowly” tyranny.

The Suffocating Trappings of Piety

A Christian journalist by the name of H. V. Morton visited the Holy Land between the wars and subsequently wrote a book entitled “In the Steps of The Master”. Here is his reflection after visiting the Mt Calvary of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher:

....Calvary, the holiest place on Earth. I looked round hoping to be able to detect some sign of its former aspect, but that has been obliterated for ever beneath the suffocating trappings of piety... I went away wishing that we might have known this place only in our hearts.

In summer of 1997 I was on business in Israel. During that visit I managed to squeeze in a “Jerusalem pilgrimage” and for a day I became a “pilgrim” doing the usual Holy sites. I too was left with my own reflection on “the suffocating trappings of piety”. Here is a short passage from the story of my visit

The religious mentality has something about it that renders it unselfconscious. Perhaps this is a consequence of devotion so intense that it becomes lost in itself. But whatever the cause, this context blindness means that this extreme devotion leads to an inability to stand back and examine itself. Thus in its obsession with devotional minutia it is unable to see the aggregate effect of its activity, and is thus unaware of the incoherent and implausible jumble its religion has become. One man's iconic elaborations are another man's blasphemy. And so there is a tendency for these elaborations to be repeatedly destroyed and remade as people wipe away the elaborations of their forerunners or contemporaries and start all over again with the construction of fantastic new cultural forms, forms often thought to represent a return to genuine and original simplicity. Thus, the ground is successively cleared and replanted and the net effect is that there springs up a thick undergrowth of diverse groups.


The generic concept here is summed up by the word “Restorationism”. Freedom permitting, Christians (and in fact religious people in general) are forever rebuilding their faith in reaction against the other believers around them, thus restoring or returning to what they believe to be the right way. This tendency is particularly marked in Protestantism where a power vacuum attracts self proclaimed authorities.

With this background behind me it was with a somewhat perturbed fascination that I recently noticed yet another form of Christian restorationism popping up on a Network Norwich & Norfolk thread (See here - this link no longer exists 20/2/10). This form of restorationism actually goes back a few decades and has its origins in the ministry of a Chinese Christian called “Witness Lee” whose views, in turn, are partly founded on the teachings of another Chinese Christian called “Watchman Nee”. Unlike the Christian house church restorationists of the late seventies the Lee sect doesn’t use the word “Restoration”, but a word like it: “Recovery”; it considers itself to be the Lord’s “recovered” church.

I have had a quick look at the teachings of Lee and Nee using links furnished by the NN&N thread (Especially the links provided by a correspondent called “The Terminator”). In order to assess a movement as quickly as I can, as a general rule I go straight to a sects publications dealing with leadership, authority and church. This is because the subject of church management will reveal any cult ethos, if it is to be found. In this case I focused on two publications called “Authority and Submission” and “Leadership in the New Testament”. To cut a long story short these publications suggested to me that we have here a group ethos with a very strong view of its spiritual authority. This was no surprise. Moreover, in the NN&N thread one of the sect members is caught in the act of trying to administer that authority online. Clearly annoyed by the obstinacy of The Terminator a sect member called “a believer in Norwich” does the equivalent of excommunicating The Terminator:

We are left with no other recourse but to follow our Lord’s directive to treat him/her, according to his /her own attitude, as those who are outside the realm of the people of God .

And this is carried out on the basis that The Terminator’s behavior:

reveals little care for the headship of Christ or the body of Christ

This online disfellowshipping is a rather a futile gesture as clearly “The Terminator” is not part of the Lee sect fellowship in the first place. What little gravitas this “excommunication” has comes about as a result of the sect’s view of spiritual demographics: The sect divides the world into three populations: the favoured “blended brothers” (sect members, it seems), the apostate church of “divided brothers” (all other sects and denominations of Christianity) and finally the pagans and atheists on the way to hell. It is to the latter group that the excommunicated Terminator has been consigned. The “headship of Christ or the body of Christ” referred to above is none other than the authority of the “recovered” church of Witness Lee: This much becomes clear when one reads the publications cited. It is this authority that has been exercised in excommunicating The Terminator. (I doubt the Terminator gives a damn). It was the basis of this authority that I expected to find and found when I started reading the sects literature; any sect/cult that maintains a strong sense of communal identity and belongingness requires an exalted notion of the group’s religious authority in order keep discipline. This notion of authority can be found in other sects/cults.

The Lee sect members who meet in a city call themselves the “Local Church”. This may seem a rather bland name, a name that is just about as uninformative as calling oneself a “church”; such terms are over allocated. Moreover the qualification “local” adds little distinction, since all churches, accept perhaps for web churches, are local. However, as is always the case with restorationist startups there is a hidden qualifier tacked on to the front of its prosaic and affectedly primitive self designation. In its view they are not merely “a local church” but “THE local church”.

All restorationist startups face one impossible logical conundrum. As an almost invariable rule they rail against the denominational divisions, but in a monumental and yet completely unself-conscious act of collective egotism they never see themselves as just another denominational start-up: They get round this by taking it for granted that unlike all those other corrupt and apostate churches they are THE church; church in its best and purist manifestation. They are, in their opinion, the church restored (or recovered) to what it should be; primitive and simple. This is ever the story one finds amongst JW’s, Mormons, house church restorationists and the like. They usually have novel elements found in no other contemporary or historic churches and thus they have little option but to explain themselves as a modern recovery of what should have been.

However, to talk of some of these restorationists as just another denominational start-up is to do great disservice to the average mainstream denominational church, because the restorationist churches usually have a much stronger sense of their identity and belonging than the average denomination. Moreover, that identity is maintained by the administration of authority, an authority wielded by a strong leadership. So in a sense restorationist sects are a form of deniminationalism++. But this takes us back to my introduction: Sect and cult members are utterly and genuinely unaware of themselves as just another division of Christianity and they too, in their elaboration of belief and practice, are tempted to bury the true Calvary under the suffocating trappings of piety, particularly the trappings of, submission, authority and control.

There is a story of tadpole that mocked frogs for their ill favoured looks and yet the tadpole himself grew up to be an ugly toad. This story is a fitting metaphor for the cult startups who forever criticize and denounce the denominations of the mainstream EPC (Evangelical, Pentecostal, Charismatic) community. But it is out of the EPC community from which many sects are spawned. The authoritarian parody of faith that we see in the cult-startups is often prefigured, albeit a less pronounced form, in EPC itself: Spiritual pride and elitism, anti-intellectualism, intense and affected spiritual expressions, haughty condemnations of sin etc. In some ways the restorationist sects are a mirror of EPC, a mirror that exaggerates its less desirable aspects. That mirror needs to be looked by into by the EPC community and the lessons learned. We currently have an opportunity to look into that mirror on the NN&N website.
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