Ebook The Last Word and the Word after That A Tale of Faith Doubt and a New Kind of Christianity Brian D McLaren 9781506454634 Books

Product details Paperback 310 pages Publisher Fortress Press (March 5, 2019) Language English ISBN-10 1506454631

The Last Word and the Word after That A Tale of Faith Doubt and a New Kind of Christianity Brian D McLaren 9781506454634 Books Reviews

• Brian D. McLaren (born 1956) is an American pastor (who founded the Cedar Ridge Community Church, which he left in 2006 to write/speak full-time), author, and activist, who is perhaps the leading figure in the Emerging Church movement. He was recognized in 2005 by Time Magazine as one of the “25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America.” in 2005. His best-known books are probably the trilogy, of which the other volumes are A New Kind of Christian, and The Story We Find Ourselves In, but he has also written books such as Reinventing Your Church,The Church on the Other Side,A Generous Orthodoxy,The Secret Message of Jesus,Everything Must Change,A New Kind of Christianity Ten Questions That are Transforming the Faith,The Great Spiritual Migration, etc. [NOTE page numbers below refer to the 206-page hardcover edition.]
  
  He wrote in the Introduction to this 2005 book, “Now if you believe everything is pretty much fine in the Christian church and its theology, if you only believe that small cosmetic or methodological tweaks are needed in a basically sound enterprise, then there’s no need to read this book. If, however, you believe that our common images and understandings of God are generally too small and even mean, then this book may help you---and us. On the surface, this book appears to be largely about hell… Those who read it and react to it as such will have missed the point… As I see it, more significant than any doctrine of hell itself is the view of God to which one’s doctrine of hell contributes… So this book is in the end more about our view of God than it is about our understandings of hell. What kind of God do we believe exists?... And how does the way we see and treat other people affect our view of God?” (Pg. xi-xii)
  
  He continues, “Is there a better alternative to either of these polarities a just God without mercy for all or a merciful God without justice for all? Could our views of hell… be the symptoms of a deeper set of problems---misunderstandings about what God’s justice is, misunderstandings about God’s purpose in creating the world, deep misunderstandings about what kind of person God is? Those are the kind of questions I’m pursuing in this book. No doubt, many readers will dislike the answers given by various characters in the book… I hope they’ll realize that a great many people do, in fact, need this conversation---very, very much.” (Pg. xiii)
  
  He acknowledges, “I can imagine some impassioned critic [saying]… ‘One cannot even tell for sure… whether McLaren is an inclusivist, conditionalist, or universalist. All one can say is that he is clearly not an orthodox exclusivist.’ … My intentional avoidance of this question does not spring from fear of saying what I really believe… Rather, I am more interested in generating conversation than argument… So this book is presented as a conversation, with multiple points of view, not as an argument pushing only mine.” (Pg. xv)
  
  The character Dan recounts a conversation with his daughter, who told him, “‘If Christianity it true, then all the people I love except for a few will burn in hell forever. But if Christianity is not true, then life does not seem to have much meaning or hope….’ My daughter’s question stabbed me more painfully than I can adequately explain. She had found the Achilles’ heel, so to speak, of my own theology…. I tried to help Jess … by telling her about ‘inclusivism’ … later that night … she said that she still wasn’t satisfied with inclusivism. It might get a few more people into heaven than exclusivism, but how did I deal with the fact that even one person could be tortured for an infinity of time for a finite number of sins? … Then I told her about ‘conditionalism,’ the idea that hell is temporary… which helped her a bit more, but only until the next morning.” (Pg. 5-6)
  
  Dan muses, “the subject of hell snowballed… into something close to an obsession…questions kept landing in my mind… Should the purpose of Christianity be reduced to this increase the population of heaven and decrease the crowdedness of hell? Was the message of Jesus … how to get your personal soul into heaven after you die?... Were billions really going to burn in endless torment because they didn’t believe in Jesus? What real purpose did that serve?... Did God, from the beginning, have two purposes in mind---one, to have some people eternally in torment, and two, to have others eternally in joy?... Or is it possible that God had only one end in mind... to banish and eradicate all that is evil and save all that can possibly be saved?” (Pg. 8-9)
  
  Neil (“Neo” in the first two books) explains, “A lot of modern people forget that our talk of God as judge is metaphorical… Modern Christians assume that the kinds of judges back in biblical times are equivalent to the kinds of judges there are in today’s world, but that’s a terribly mistaken assumption… modern judges… [are] really mid-level bureaucrats, accountable to mechanisms of the court. This is the only way modern conservative Christians can keep believing in both a loving God and horrific hell. God is a decent judge stuck in a rigid, heartless system…. You have to say that God doesn’t want people to go to hell, but he’s forced to do so against his will by… the requirements of some higher abstraction called justice…Of course, when you solve the hell problem that way, you have the new problem of creating a higher authority than God… to which God is subject… Where did those mechanisms come from[?]” (Pg. 40-41)
  
  After listening to Neil read Lincoln’s second inaugural address, and Neil commenting, “Could God’s response to sinners be any less magnanimous than Lincoln’s response to the South? Or will God say, at the end of all things, ‘with malice toward many and charity to a few”? Dan thinks, “No thought of God that you can ever have is too good. Nothing about God is too good to be true. You are safe when your thoughts of God grow greater. Don’t be afraid.” (Pg. 67-68)
  
  Neil comments about “millions of others… who have given up on Christianity because our way of talking about hell sounds absolutely wacky. ‘God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,’ we say, ‘and he’ll fry your butt in hell forever unless you do or believe the right thing.’” Dan comments, “But Neil, isn’t it that fire-and-brimstone version of Christianity that’s growing so quickly in Africa and Latin America?... Maybe some people need the language of hell, and deconstructing it would actually weaken the Christian faith for them.’… Neil [replied], ‘Ah, but here’s the problem if the message of Christianity really sinks in… it’s only a matter of time until---until the deconstruction begins.” (Pg. 75)
  
  Neil argues, “[Jesus] also speaks of being thrown into Gehenna, which was a garbage dump… Does that mean that people will very literally be deposited in that trash dump outside Jerusalem?... Do you believe in literal eternal worms? Why be literal in one place and not another? Besides, all these images can’t be taken literally at the same time---I mean, you can’t have literal fire and darkness, right? So don’t they all suggest waste, decay, regret, sorrow? Isn’t that what anyone would feel if he spent his whole life on accumulating possessions… but missed out on life to the full in the Kingdom of God?... Wouldn’t that make you weep and gnash your teeth?... What could be more serious than that? To have to face the real, eternal… naked truth about yourself, what you’ve done, what you’ve become?” (Pg. 78-79)
  
  After speaking to Shirley, whose father was a Holocaust survivor, Dan reflects, “Yes, judgment was needed… But hell as I had always seen it didn’t improve the equation it made it worse… How am I supposed to believe that after all Shirley’s suffered, he’s going to burn in hell forever, eternally tortured, because he didn’t believe in Jesus? What kind of God would add his own eternal torture to the obscenity of human torture her father suffered?” (Pg. 85)
  
  Called to explain his positions before his Church Council, Dan states, “Re exclusivism I believe that God in justice wants to exclude from creation all that is evil and wrong… Re inclusivism I believe that God wants to include everyone and everything redeemable by mercy and grace. Re universalism I believe that God’s love is universal… I also believe that Jesus is the universal Savior, meaning that he brings good news and hope to all people. Re conditionalism …. All evil will be judged and excluded, all good saved and included, universally. I respect and will continue to respect those who feel or think differently on all of these questions.” (Pg. 112)
  
  A man named Markus states, “It’s all by grace. I’m just advocating judgment by works… Salvation by grace, judgment by works. There’s nothing in the Bible clearer than those two realities… You thought that is you are saved, you’re not judged, right? Yep, I used to think that too. I didn’t realize that being judged isn’t the same as being condemned and that being saved means a lot more than not being judged… we’re judged by our works. But that’s not in contradiction to being saved by grace---if you define salvation in a broader way.” (Pg. 138-139)
  
  A woman named Ruth explains the term ‘Post-Protestant’ “Part of it is that we’re done protesting, saying the bad guys over there heave it wrong and we here in our little circle have it right. That rhetoric distracts us from spiritual formation, and besides that, it protects injustice… Whenever we locate evil ‘over there’ with ‘them’; we render ourselves innocent and proud… No one is more likely to commit injustice than those who think themselves incapable of doing so, those who are certain that God is on their side and vice versa.” (Pg. 142)
  
  This entire trilogy, as well as McLaren’s other books, are “must reading” for anyone concerned with the Emerging Church, or contemporary expressions of Christianity.