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The Secret Message of Jesus, by Brian McLaren
- by: Ray Ciervo 21/05/2008
The Secret Message of Jesus: Uncovering The Truth That Could Change Everything, by Brian D. McLaren, (Nashville, TN, W Publishing Group, a Division of Thomas Nelson) 2006
There are a couple of things that will get me to buy a book. Well, there are more than a couple. I need little excuse to buy books, as I find reading more than a pastime. When I bought The Secret Message of Jesus, I’d heard it was about the Kingdom of God. This will always cause me to take a serious look at a book, as I find the subject matter of extreme importance. I haven’t been a McLaren “fan” after reading his other books about church and the Christian life. Sadly, this latest work hasn’t made me a McLaren fan, either.
McLaren admits to discovering this “secret” message of Jesus after spending much time reading, studying, and contemplating the words of Jesus in the “accepted” gospels. He does make reference to the Gnostic gospels, but admits they aren’t consistent with the words of Jesus. You have to guess what McLaren’s position on the Scripture is, as he presents the idea that perhaps there is more to God’s word than the Bible. At least, that’s my impression.
The premise of Brian McLaren’s latest book is that the message of Jesus has been hidden until now, resulting in Christianity’s misapplied doctrine. However, as McLaren states in the last chapter of Appendix I, entitled Why Didn’t We Get It Sooner?, he’s not the only one who has now “seen” it. Theologians and biblical scholars like Dallas Willard, N.T. Wright, John Howard, and Walter Brueggeman “stimulated” his thinking. Notice I didn’t say that scholars like N.T. Wright agree with his findings. McLaren is careful not to say people like Wright agree with his findings, but simply stimulated his thinking.
He mentions “many” others who have also helped him find this conclusion. What he does do, then, is state that all these writers are contemporary, leading the reader to believe that this “secret” is only now being uncovered. After positing that his interpretation of the “secret” could be reckoned as “something read into the text” (p. 210), he counters that this is a good reading because “a good reading accounts for more of the details included in the text than a bad reading.” But, does McLaren account for more details included in the text? And, is this a good explanation of what makes a good interpretation?
To be fair to McLaren, I looked up his source for the above quote about a “good reading.” There isn’t any indication of who this person is except: “Thanks to Jo-ann Bradley for this insight . . .” Unfortunately, we’re looking for a good interpretation, not a good reading. Even if this is what McLaren means, this is not what makes a good interpretation. Certainly, accounting for all the details is part of a good interpretation. (By “good,” I mean “correct” interpretation.) The process of interpretation is only part of hermeneutics, the discovery of meaning in a text. “Sacred” hermeneutics is discovering the meaning in what are considered sacred texts, like the Bible or the Qu’ran. Accounting for the details is known as observation, and then come questions that lead to interpretation. Application and correlation are the last two steps of discovering meaning in a text. The last step is usually the one overlooked. You must ask the question, “Does this interpretation correlate with the overall meaning of the Scripture?”
McLaren is opposed to, or at least disdains systematic theology. However, he is inadvertently relying on a systematic approach to the Scripture, which is what systematic theology is. He also relies on a theology that has been around for a long time, one not favored by the majority of the Christian Church, namely a liberal systematic theology.
In The Secret Message of Jesus, McLaren does make an about-face _ or something of the sort. He says:
“But seeking to believe what is true – seeking to see things as closely as possible to the way they really are, seeking to be faithful to what is and was and will be – puts you increasingly in touch with reality and helps you become a wise and good person. It can also make life a lot more meaningful, and enjoyable.” (p. 6)
He also mentioned that in a “previous” book he said that clarity is sometimes “overrated,” and intrigue is correspondingly “undervalued.” That’s almost an about-face for McLaren. (p. 7) His strongest statement (also on p. 7): “Having truer beliefs – beliefs more aligned with reality – makes all the difference” is not like him at all. This is the closest McLaren has ever come to acknowledging an “objective” reality and the ability to know it. Surely, someone he has read brought this to him. However, he doesn’t acknowledge it as such.
So, has McLaren really changed his view of God, Scripture and the Church? Well, no.
In every other place in Secret, McLaren’s postmodernist bent comes across. His handling of Scripture is loose; “sloppy” may be a better term. His politics are easily recognizable, and he calls for the church to politicize its faith, something I strongly object to. It may be he’s responding to the other extreme of a politicized faith, that being a more conservative one. In any event, there’s no “new” ground here. If you’ve read any of Jim Wallis’ books, Tom Sine’s books, Walter Wink’s books, you’ve read this book. Yet, the theme of the book is this “secret message of Jesus” and you don’t get it. But wait, I’m going to tell you what it is.
What was most frustrating about this book is that the “secret” is a letdown. Not that the Kingdom of God is a letdown, but McLaren’s interpretation of it is. The one point I could agree on is that the kingdom is supposed to affect every area of our lives. No argument here. How it is to affect our lives is what is in contention.
For McLaren, adhering to Jesus’ “peace teachings” is getting into the kingdom. I believe he would have liked to write an entire book on this subject. The one point I always take up with pacifists is that their “peace teachings” are an imposed category. Christian pacifists believe you must extend this teaching to national armies. They can’t seem to make the separation between the war in heaven and the wars on earth. What he is asserting is that Christians must change the social order through peaceful means. This is the only difference I can see between Christian pacifism and Reconstruction theology – they’re both after the same thing: a government run by Christians. Actually, it would be more extreme. It would be a country run on Christian principles – a theocracy – without godly people actually running the government. For McLaren, violence is the most sinful thing in existence. If only people would be more like Jesus, the world would be a better place. Unfortunately, McLaren does not choose to explain how one just becomes like Jesus through His shed blood and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. In fact, McLaren seems to avoid any mentioning of the work of the cross and how that is the purpose of Jesus’ coming. He employs another strawman, saying that Christians have been preaching of getting to heaven as the message of the gospels. I keep asking myself, “Where has this guy been?”
His treatment of the “just war” theory is unfair, as he leaves out the most important element of the theory – the protection of the innocent. Although he lists what most pacifists have as a shopping list for “just war,” the elimination of protecting the innocent makes it look like a rule book. Protecting the innocent, people who are murdered for their ethnicity, race, or economic standing, is where the just war theory comes in most strongly. It is the essence of just war theory.
In true pacifist fashion, he mentions people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. The latter certainly took a page from Gandhi’s notebook. What most pacifists fail to recognize is the essence of Gandhi’s success. He was up against a nation with a conscience. Secondly, let’s look at his success. The mantra of pacifists is “Violence breeds violence.” Yes, Gandhi got the Brits to capitulate and award independence to India; so what did it breed? The Hindus and Muslims then fought for power and finally separated India into three nations: India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. What’s been the result of Gandhi’s peaceful initiative? War on all borders, nuclear proliferation. Let’s be mean now and talk about the end of WWII in the Pacific, where the US dropped the first atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, inhabited by civilians for the most part. What’s the outcome? Japan surrendered, was occupied, and wrote into their constitution never to develop a nuclear weapon, never to take an offensive action against another country. Sounds pretty good to me if we’re looking for the results of actions. The pragmatist argument for the pacifist “Violence breeds violence” doesn’t hold up. I could write much more on this, but for time and space I must move on.
Geerhardus Vos is the person I can cite for the definition I would use for the kingdom of God. These are my words, but I believe they accurately represent what Vos has posited. “The kingdom of God is where God is working out His purposes against His enemies and bringing man to a willing recognition of the same.” Upon deciding what the enemies of God are, one can then see where God is acting. McLaren never comes to this place, but skirts it a couple of times. He never once recognizes “sin” as God’s enemy, or sickness, or demon possession. Rather than assaulting an unjust occupying Roman army, Jesus was busy affirming people’s sins were forgiven, healing diseases, and casting out demons.
McLaren’s message is distinctly left of center, biblically and politically. There’s no question where he stands on these issues. That doesn’t make it a bad book. What makes it a book that has serious problems is his approach to Scripture and his interpretations.
Lastly, McLaren states that the reason the church has gotten it wrong for the past 2000 years is that this message was hidden and has now become evident through recent discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls. He also uses Dan Brown’s argument about the “early church” losing its Jewish roots and having a “love affair” with Greek philosophy. Constantine’s making Christianity the official religion of the empire – here’s another straw man for him to knock down. It’s interesting to think that God intended the church to continue to be Jewish, seeing he allowed the Romans to destroy the heart of Judaism in 70AD with the destruction of the temple. The world the church was born into was in the fullness of time, as some had put it. But this goes unnoticed or aches for deconstruction to reconstruct a postmodern view of history. Some of us actually believe that the church needed the Greek mindset to deal with heresies that would attack the “message of Jesus.” Of course, God can work through any culture – He simply chooses the best to accomplish His purposes.
This is the kind of sloppiness that needs scholarly editing. McLaren’s biblical skills are like gas station pizza. Gas station pizza may have all the elements that seem to make pizza, but when you’ve had real pizza, you know this doesn’t cut it. For coffee lovers, gas station coffee makes the same point. Once you’ve had real coffee, the gas station kind isn’t much appreciated. This is McLaren’s approach to the Bible, God, and Scripture.
Here’s my assessment. McLaren is an English teacher (no offense to my other teaching friends). Where most people could have identified the postmodern effects on education and seen them for what they are, especially in the humanities, languages, and social sciences, McLaren embraces them. He then becomes a “pastor” with these postmodern axes to grind. He is not rooted in biblical history, study, or education. His postmodern, left-leaning, college professor characteristics are evident in his biblical exposition. Anyone familiar with “liberal theology” from the beginning of the 20th century will recognize much of this message.
McLaren’s misinterpretation of John 3 and 4 are evidence for this. He misinterprets Jesus’ meeting with Nicodemus and Jesus’ reference to Ezekiel 36 about receiving a “heart of flesh and a new spirit,” and “being washed with water by God.” He doesn’t even recognize the two distinct verbs Jesus used about “seeing” the kingdom and “entering” it.
His interpretation of the meeting Jesus had with the Samaritan woman is again missing the point. He doesn’t see the theological argument the woman was making with Jesus about “Jacob our father.” But this is what McLaren does almost throughout the whole book.
His idea that preaching is “solemn sermons delivered in sacred buildings” is a straw man for postmodern Christians. Where has he been for thirty years? Is he aware of the charismatic renewal? Just who is his audience? Well, he must have this straw man to attack to say what he wants to say. This is a vivid imagination working on the unobservant.
This book is not about the kingdom of God from the Bible. This is a deconstructed view of the God’s kingdom, reconstructed from the liberal postmodern playbook.
