I have long observed the audaciousness of the American religion as a phenomenon unique to Christianity. The so called "Emergent Church" could be a belated manifestation of what Nietzsche called our Will to power, or the surprisingly sophisticated theology of E.Y. Mullins, the Southern Baptist theologian who in the early 20th century, coined the phrase "Soul Competency;" every soul was determined competent to have an un-mediated Christian experience with the Bible. Soul Competency describes perfectly what liberal Christianity seeks, in a rejection of traditional creedal authority. Yet Mullins was perhaps too confident of his theological footing for liberals like Mclaren, who are embattled with evangelical fundamentalists who exude certainty and knowledge.
Though I am primarily a humanistic secularist, I side with Harrold Bloom, and others who find Liberal Christianity to be an imaginative triumph for the American experience, combining what is best in our poetic/religious past, John Milton, Emerson, Walt Whitman, with the pragmatism found in William James. Mclaren is both poetic and pragmatic in his faith that echos the great revivalist pastor, Henry Beecher who wrote "Charity before clarity." He wades in deep waters, and he is often unsure of his footing. One strives without success to find dogma in Mclaren.
I don’t believe making disciples must equal making adherents to the Christian religion. It may be advisable in many (not all!) circumstances to help people become followers of Jesus and remain within their Buddhist, Hindu or Jewish contexts … rather than resolving the paradox via pronouncements on the eternal destiny of people more convinced by or loyal to other religions than ours, we simply move on … To help Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and everyone else experience life to the full in the way of Jesus (while learning it better myself), I would gladly become one of them (whoever they are), to whatever degree I can, to embrace them, to join them, to enter into their world without judgment but with saving love as mine has been entered by the Lord (Pages 260-264)
This impassioned plea for love is also a tantamount rejection of Church authority. Like John Milton, Emergents are each "a sect of one," Mclaren being a prime example. Both Catholicism and traditional Protestantisms form a kind of social order--a people--through various practices and sacraments. Mclaren embraces what he deems the positive aspects of each branch of Christianity, while rejecting the over-arching authority of them, to find a new authentic love of Jesus. Somehow he succeeds in turning orthodoxy and its claims to authenticity on its head. The role of the Church in this scheme is difficult for me to decipher, since Liberal Christians from Roger Williams, E.Y. Mullins to Brian Mclaren have undermined traditional European Church Authority to the extent that any one person can become his own church. This leads me to my conclusion that American Christianity is boundless in its audacious claims to an un-mediated experience, of which Ralph Waldo Emerson is our immediate spiritual predecessor.
A dispassionate observer gets the sense that this is the eventual fate of protestantism in general, as it continues to evolve closer to the American experience, and it fades in Europe. Jesus is now non-denominational, and it is interesting to watch what he may emerge into. The best guide to Protestantism and its propensity toward this boundless freedom from Church authority is Ronald Knox, a Catholic who writes of the revivalists:
Religion became identified in the popular mind with a series of moods, in which the worshipper, disposed thereto by all the arts of the revivalist, reached the flavors of spiritual peace. You needed neither a theology nor a liturgy; you did not take the strain of intellectual inquiry, nor associate yourself whole-heartedly with any historic tradition of worship. You floated, safely enough, on the little raft of your own faith, eagerly throwing out the lifeline to such drowning neighbours as were ready to catch it; meanwhile the ship was floundering.
One reads this with pleasure! Emergents are not exactly revivalists (although they could be), but I can't help but think of Mclaren here, who's little raft is emergence while the ship is orthodoxy. One can ask are Mclaren's formulations dialectical or simply self-contradictory? The same could be asked of Mullins and Roger Williams. Liberal Christianity perhaps finds in itself the boundless ability to defy its own reason, leaving us a new kind of spiritual poetry, and I am not unmoved by it. Will his generous orthodoxy breed a new kind of dogma? I'm nearly certain of it. The shape of it may even look something like the Fundamentalism it so anxiously wants to break with. I recommend this book to anyone wanting to contemplate the Liberal Christian mindset.
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