Thursday, August 26, 2010

In an interview with ‘Greater Than magazine’, Brian McLaren talks about ‘Making God’s Dreams come true’. I feel this is a frightening insight to Brian’s real view of the Gospel and the Bible. I will let it speak for itself.

Brian McLarens view is that the Bible is to be viewed as Library rather than a Constitution

“I grew up in an evangelical home. The church background I come from would be on the fundamentalist side of evangelicalism. We loved the Bible and we studied the Bible and I made a personal, deep commitment to Christ in my teenage years and so the Bible has been such a deep part of my life ever since. I noticed that, on a lot of the issues, the Bible presented multiple viewpoints. It wasn’t contradictions: we were always told to be careful about saying “the Bible has contradictions.” I just saw the multiple viewpoints. For example, if you ask a question like “What is the attitude of the Old Testament toward the monarchy?” Meaning, the period of Jewish history when they had a king. You can pick out a whole set of verses that would say the monarchy was a terrible thing. For example, I believe it’s Samuel, God says through Samuel, “Israel has rejected me because they wanted a king. “So, there is a very negative view of having a king. But, there are other Scriptures that really see “the king” as a great thing. For example, at the end of the book of Judges, it says, “in those days, everyone did what was right in his own eyes because there was no king in Israel.” There are places where the king is seen as a great gift from God. So, what that started helping me realize is that the Bible is not a univocal book. It was not a book dictated by God that was only giving one perspective. The bible itself is giving us multiple perspectives. That, actually, is a better thing than something univocal because, if you were to think today what our attitude toward government should be. Well, I think there is a sense that government is a gift from God, we should appreciate it. But there is another sense that government can become an idol and we can have a misplaced trust in it. So, when you live with that kind of tension, when the bible itself gives you multiple perspectives that put you in tension, I think is actually a richer gift than to have a black and white, one-sided answer."

What is the Gospel then?

Again Briam says: "The gospel is the good news that the kingdom of God is available, it’s at hand, it’s in breaking, it’s oncoming, and we can be part of it. If we wanted to understand what “kingdom of god” means, I would say: God has a dream for creation and we don’t have to be part of turning that dream into a nightmare. We can actually join God in creating something beautiful and good that makes God’s dream come true."

I don’t know about you but, it seems that the Bible, in it’s univocal, uniform and Spirit inspired teaching doesn’t speak of God as a dreamer but rather as the Sovereign God who is in control.

God Bless you, Tim

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