QUOTING: "A New Kind of Christian"

Quoting: "A New Kind of Christian" by Brian McLaren:

p.6 - "My faith has plenty of room for science, and my science only strengthens my faith..."

p.16 - "To be postmodern means to have experienced the modern world & to have been changed by the experience ~ changed to such a degree that one is no longer modern."

Modernerity is an age of....

* conquest & control
* machines
* analysis
* secular science
p.17 - "It's no wonder that religion went scurrying in retreat in the modern era, fleeing the exterminating gas of modern science and secularism... Perhaps religion could survive in the hidden corners of the private sector, but in the public sector it was seen by the scientific establishment as a dirty embarassment, unsanitary, unwelcome..."
* aspiring to objectivity
"...assumed was the highest faith in human reason to replace all mysteries with comprehension... subjective religious faith with objective truth."
* a critical age
-- must debunk anyone who sees differently from you
* the modern nation-state & organization
* individualism
* Protestantism & institutional religion
* consumerism

p.18 - "Can you imagine what happens to the church, to the whole Christian enterprise, when it has so thoroughly accomodated to modernity ~ so much so that it has no idea of any way Christianity could exist other than a modern way?"

p.17: mentions Peter Senge and "The Fifth Discipline":
"Great book. He says that discussion, as opposed to dialogue or conversation, suggests a more aggressive, win-lose style of communication...As a result, the views of the others must be critically relativized, debunked & reduced by one's own views."

* Postmodernity - the broad culture defined by its having moved beyond modernity.
* Postmodernism - a philosophy

p.19 - "...in a new philosophy's early stages, it tends to be negative ~ to focus on what's wrong with the prevailing school of thought. It takes some time for the phase that deconstructs the prevailing view to give way to a phase where the new view is articulated, a new vision proposed."

p.22 - "I think of Paul in 1 Corinthians 9, saying that he'll become whatever he has to ~ Jewish or Gentile, educated or simple ~ in order to effectively convey the Good News."

p.24 - "It strikes me how rare these kinds of words, outlines, and dissective ways of thinking are in the Bible, which preoccupies itself with earthy stories rather than airy abstractions, wild poetry rather than tidy systems, personal & contextual letters rather than timeless, absolute pronouncements or propositions."

p.24-25 - "To Christians steeped in modernity, to move toward postmodernity can only look like 'worldliness', declension, decline, sliding away from the truth as they know it. If people start accepting this new way of thinking, I wonder if they'll be tried as heretics by the existing Christian institutions..."

p.25 - "[God], ...if I hold back from honestly pursuing the truth, wouldn't that be pulling away from You ~ even worse? If I let go of or loosen my grip on some things I've never before doubted, will I fall away from You? Or could I actually find myself falling into You? ...Jesus said you will guide us into all truth."

p.25 - "...the spiritual resurgence I see brewing is unconventional & even irreverant at times, largely developing outside the boundaries of our institutional religions. But that to me says more about the rigidity of our institutions than the darkness of the current spiritual resurgence..."

p.40 - "You young men & women happen to have been born at a time of transition. If you keep doing the same old things with the same old tools ~ the tools you have inherited from my generation... ~ you'll make a mess of things."

p.41 - "Don't put your confidence in the institution of the church, put your confidence in God."

p.44 - "If you were a missionary going to Spain, you'd have to learn to think and speak Spanish. If you are a missionary going to any educated culture on earth today, I think you need to learn to think and speak postmodern."

p.47 - "...the need to put everything into nice, neat categories is part of the problem. Modern people believed that they could create a nice framework that would pigeonhole everything... if you succeed in creating a postmodern framework, I think you've just sabotaged it."

p.50 - "...if you have an infallible text, but all your interpretations of it are admittedly fallible, then you at least have to always be open to being corrected about your interpretations... the real authority does not lie in the text itself, in the ink-on-paper, which is always open to misinterpretation... the real authority lies in God, who is there behind the text or beyond it or above it... in other words, the authority is not in what I say the text says but in what God says the text says."

p.52 - "[passage in 2 Timothy] "It says that Scripture is inspired & useful ~ useful to teach, rebuke, correct, instruct us to live justly, and equip us for our mission as the people of God. That's a very different job description than we moderns want to give it. We want it to be God's encyclopedia, God's rule book, God's answer book, God's scientific text, God's easy-steps instruction book, God's little book of morals for all occasions. The only people in Jesus' day who would have had anything close to these expectations of the Bible would have been the scribes and Pharisees...
...I think that when you let go of teh Bible as God's answer book, you get it back as something much better."

p.52 - "[The Bible]...becomes the family story... it tells...the story of the people who have been called by the one true God to be His agents in the world, to be His servants to the rest of the world. It's absolutely essential ~ to give the family a sense of identity, so we know who we are and why we're here and where we're going. And not only that, it's wonderfully honest about our weaknesses & mistakes...there's no mistaking who's the hero in this story ~ it's certainly not any of us humans!"

p.53 - [re: the Bible] "Think of it as a math book... Is it valuable because it has the answers in the back? No, it's valuable because by working through it, by doing the problems, by struggling with it, you become a wiser person, a person capable of solving problems and building bridges... The whole answer-book approach is what modern people want the Bible to be, but it's not necessarily what the Bible really is... it's a book that calls together and helps create a community...that is the catalyst for God's work in our world."

p.65 - "...it's pathetic for some ignorant preacher to mock Buddha and Muhammad -- neither of whom he has ever seriously studied, much less understood -- as if he's smarter, wiser, & better just because he believes in Jesus. He might be blessed for believing in Jesus, but that doesn't make him smart."

p.66 - "I believe Jesus is the Savior, not Christianity."

p.73 - "I think what people really mean when then say they are against organized religion is that they're against hypocritical religion, misguided religion, blind or unthinking religion, religion of rules and laws rather than love, religion that comes diced and preprocessed and shrink-wrapped like ground beef."

p.75 - "Jesus came not to drive the culture from the people but the sin from the culture."

p.76 - "Syncretism...like adulterating pure Christianity with pagan elements... He said we shouldn't mix worship of the One True God with elements from other religions."

p.78-79 - "...we must always come back to the Bible and doing our best to let it form and unsettle us when necessary... the parts of the Bible that bother you most are the ones that have the most to teach you... instead of minimizing your discomfort and trying to explain those parts away, you should bear down on those passages and maximize how different they are, really wrestle with those parts."

p.79 - "If we've sincerely and honestly wrestled with Scripture ~ not just as individuals but as a community ~ and if we're really listening to one another (especially the minority voices, the ones we might try to marginalize and ignore) we have to believe that we'll be better off, more in tune with God's plans for us, less beguiled by our own culture and its subtle ways of tricking us into reinterpreting the faith ~ exaggerating some things, mimimizing others, and totally missing still others."

p.79 - "...at the end of the day, we have to trust that the Holy Spirit will guide us."

p.82-83 - "If we pitch the whole story as 'Do you want to go to heaven or hell?', we run the risk of attracting people who want salvation from hell without necessarily wanting salvation from sin...
Second, in a postmodern context, he said, the individualism of this approach sounded downright evil, like using insider trading information to gain an unfair advantage over others in the stock market. A good-hearted person might respond, 'I love my neighbors, and if you're offering me something that my neighbors can't have, then I don't want it.' However, if it were put in the service context, so that we are chosen by God not for priviledge but for service, the reverse would be true: 'I love my neighbors, and if receiving God's salvation will help me help them, then I want it!'"

p.106 - "Postmodern theology has to reincarnate; we have to get back to the flesh & blood & sweat & dirt of the setting, because..all truth is contextual."

p.112 - "...generosity is one of the most important spiritual disciplines, and greed is one of the soul's worst poisons."

p.117 - "Journaling and all other spiritual disciplines done 'in secret' seem to me to be essential."

p.122 - "The more intense and less routine the educational experience, the greater the impact."