Thesis | Brian McLaren and Emergent Soteriology: From Cultural Accommodation to the Kingdom of God - Chapter 4.1b

CHAPTER 4.1b
THE EROSION OF BIBLIOLOGY

The Erosion of Bibliology - Part 1


Perhaps the best survey of Emergent beliefs regarding homosexuality comes from Tony Campolo in  Adventures in Missing the Point co-written with McLaren,.  Campolo makes the distinction between homosexual orientation and homosexual behavior.  The distinction regards  whether one chooses to be a homosexual or not.  Campolo believes some are born gay and do not choose their sexual orientation, and therefore, cannot choose to abandon their biological identity.         

Campolo’s proof is foggy.  He begins by pointing to science arguing that some scientific evidence suggests that “homosexual orientation is not a choice.”  Some of the research points to the Xq28 gene as the “gay gene.”  Campolo admits, however, that some of the evidence is “inconclusive” and “too new” to know for sure.[1]
       
Genetics is not the only argument Campolo uses for homosexual orientation.  He also points to physiology which argues that sexual orientation is “controlled by hormones.”  While the fetus is developing in the mother’s womb, “disruptions” can alter sexual orientation which are caused by “intense nervous tension” or by a “pregnant mother’s trauma.”  The research, Campolo argues, suggests that the normal orientation of men is the result of “imprinting” the brain with testosterone resulting in homosexuality.  But like the genetic argument, this theory also has its problems.  This theory, Campolo admits, does not explain lesbianism.  However, Campolo sites the theories that lesbians seems to “spring more from psychosocial influences”[2]
       
Despite the theories Campolo admits that no one knows what causes sexual orientation.  However, one thing is certain to Campolo:  “homosexual orientation is not chosen.”[3]  His argument, though far from conclusive, drives the point that homosexuals should not be despised.  He argues that Christians that “despise homosexuals are ignorant not only in science but of the Bible’s teachings on the subject.”  He then precedes to provide the reader with a number of biblical texts “often cited that homosexuality is a sinful choice,” and gives interpretations “that are not accepted by many evangelicals, but at least deserve serious consideration.”[4]
       
Some of Campolo’s interpretations of these texts are significant.  For example, Campolo points out that nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus ever mention or condemn homosexuality.  He argues, “Homosexuality just isn’t on [Jesus’] Top Ten list of sins.  What is number one on that list, however, is judgmental religious people who look for sin in the lives of others without dealing with the sin in their own lives (Matthew 23).”[5]
       
The most insightful “conversation” Campolo puts forth deals with Romans 1:26-27.  After surveying common interpretations of Paul’s meaning and admitting that for two thousand years, Christians have interpreted Paul as condemning homosexuality, Campolo concludes:
       
Yet, point out others, if we yielded to church tradition on all points, women would not be allowed to teach Sunday school or serve as missionaries.  Furthermore, most of the references in the writings of the church fathers to homosexual behavior condemn the exploitation of boys rather than homosexual orientation or committed, loving homosexual marriages.  Finally, some point out, what we hear from the early centuries of the church is from only the church fathers, because the church mothers had to keep their mouths shut.[6]

Campolo takes the argument back to Tickle who argued that Scriptural erosion begins with cultural and social issues such as slavery, women, and divorce.  Campolo defends “evangelical homosexuals”[7] because his belief in Sola Scriptura has been shaped by the culture and its evolution.  Like the culture, since Scripture’s forbidding of women in ministry is outdated, so, Campolo concludes, Scripture’s teaching on homosexuality is also outdated.  Campolo, in a book co-written with McLaren, then, proves Tickle’s argument to be valid: cultural accommodation leads to the erosion of Sola Scriptura.
       
Sola Scriptura is eroding fast among Emergents.  An article published on the leading Emerging Church website, the Emergent Village, which was started by McLaren, questions Sola Scriptura.  The author, Nic Paton, offers a number of reasons why postmodern Christians should abandon the Reformed doctrine yet still have a high regard for Scripture.  Paton summarizes his criticism of Sola Scriptura as being
       
A closed canon, a rejection (or fear) of contradiction, a literate culture where the oral and non-written is set against and over what is printed, and the static and deterministic worldview of modernism has caused us to close down and defend the bible.  When Jesus said, ‘You have heard it written . . . but I say to you . . .” (Mt. 5:39) he might have been addressing us. We still fail to see revelation as evolving, despite the fact that Jesus and his ministry was founded upon a progressive revelation of God.[8]

McLaren, likewise, has lost faith in Sola Scriptura.  After asking, what is the relationship between faith and knowledge? McLaren wrote:
       
Some of my believing friends feel they have solved the problem.  The Bible, . . . they say, provides direct revelation from God.  Therefore, it is absolutely true and trustworthy, providing a sure foundation upon which all knowledge can be built.  The Bible thus yields more than faith: It yields certainty, knowledge.  Now you should know that I have great faith in the Bible, and have found it to have an importance and value for me above all other books, and I in fact used to be among those who thought the Bible solved the whole epistemological problem simply and cleanly, as many of my friends still think.  But I can’t follow that logic anymore.  My own spiritual journey has presented me with questions that have reshaped (and continue to reshape) how I think about the Bible.[9]

Such questions include, “How do I know with absolute certainty that the Bible is the direct revelation of God?”  What about textual errors?[10]  Though McLaren doubts the doctrine of Sola Scriptura, he is emphatic that he believes that the Bible is unique and immensely valuable and claims to have great respect for it.  However, “promising absolute, unassailable certainty, even with the benefit of the Bible, . . . seems to be an exaggerated claim.”[11]
       
The postmodern influence is clear in McLaren’s understanding of Scriptural authority.  McLaren’s uncertainty of the relationship between faith and knowledge and the role of the Bible leads him to emphasize mystery and narrative.  McLaren believes that “faith has too often become for us a set of easy answers and cardboard explanations instead of a window into unfathomable mystery and a pathway into an awesome adventure.”[12]  Similarly, the church needs to “design a new apologetic” by offering mysteries instead of answers.  The old apologetic gave easy answers to big questions (or, “shallow answers to deep questions”), but the new apologetic will allow one to “explore the mysteries that underlie these questions.”  McLaren invites churches to guide its members where to go for answers rather than giving direct answers.
       
The seeking mind thinks that behind the superficial problems and apparent paradoxes, life is at heart a mystery to be explored, using faith.  In the twenty-first century the new church will feed the seeking mind with the savory mysteries of Creation, Incarnation, Trinity, Atonement, transformation, and unity.[13]      

To the Reformers, on the grounds of Sola Scriptura, creation, the Trinity, and the atonement were unnegotiable because they were clearly defined in Scripture.  But in the Emergent re-formation,[14] such foundations are not to be believed outright, but explored through the ongoing conversation within the community.[15]


[1]  Brian McLaren and Tony Campolo, Adventures in Missing the Point, 202.
[2]  Ibid.
[3]  Ibid., 203.
[4]  Ibid., 203-204. 
[5]  Ibid, 204-25.  Campolo further adds the point that Jesus does condemn divorce and remarriage in the Gospels even those “most modern Christians” accept it.
[6]  Ibid., 207.
[7]  Ibid., 208.  Campolo adds that these evangelical homosexuals, “are torn not only between their sexual orientations and traditional biblical interpretations, but also between the homosexual community - which offers acceptance and companionship - and the straight church, which usually means estrangement and loneliness.  Their anguish is seldom appreciated by heterosexuals.”
[8]  Nic Paton, So Long, Sola?, Internet.  Paton goes on to argue that Sola Scriptura is too narrow minded and unscriptural.
[9]  Brian McLaren, A Search For What Makes Sense: Finding Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), 63.
[10]  Ibid., 64-65.
[11]  Ibid., 65.
[12]  Brian McLaren, More Ready Than You Realize: Evangelism As Dance In the Postmodern Matrix (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 42.
[13]  Brian McLaren, The Church On The Other Side: Doing Ministry In A Postmodern Matrix (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003) 78-79.  Later McLaren argues we must not only have a new apologetic, but also a new rhetoric which must be wrapped in mystery.  He writes, “Our words will seek to be servants of mystery, not removers of it as they were in the old world.  They will convey a message that is clear yet mysterious, simple yet mysterious, substantial yet mysterious.  My faith developed in the old world of many words, in a naive confidence in the power of many words, as if the mysteries of faith could be captured like fine-print conditions in a legal document and reduced to safe equations.  Mysteries, however, can not be captured so precisely.  Freeze-dried coffee, butterflies on pins, and frogs in formaldehyde all lose something in our attempts at capturing, defining, preserving, and rendering them less jump, flighty, or fluid.  In the new world, we will understand this a little better,” in Ibid., 89.
[14]  The use of the words Reformation and re-formation are purposeful.  Phyllis Tickle describes Brian McLaren as the Luther of the twenty-first century.  She also compares his book A Generous Orthodoxy to Luther’s 95 Theses in McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy, 12.
[15]  Tickle argues that the answer to the question, ‘where now is the authority?’ in the Great Emergence is both Scripture and community.  Since Sola Scriptura is no longer valid, but still insightful, the community plays a vital role in spiritual truth and growth in Tickle, The Great Emergence, 151.


Thesis | Brian McLaren and Emergent Soteriology:  From Cultural Accomodation to the Kindgom of God - Chapter 1
Thesis | Brian McLaren and Emergent Soteriology:  From Cultural Accommodation to the Kingdom of God - Chapter 2.1
Thesis| Brian McLaren and Emergent Soteriology:  From Cultural Accommodation to the Kingdom of God - Chapter 2.2
Thesis | Brian McLaren and Emergent Soteriology:  From Cultural Accommodation to the Kingdom of God - Chapter 2.3
Thesis | Brian McLaren and Emergent Soteriology:  From Cultural Accommodation to the Kingdom of God - Chapter 3.1
Thesis | Brian McLaren and Emergent Soteriology:  From Cultural Accommodation to the Kingdom of God - Chapter 3.2   
Thesis | Brian McLaren and Emergent Soteriology:  From Cultural Accommodation to the Kingdom of God - Chapter 4.1a 


For more:
Theology/Reviews - "A New Kind of Christianity" - A 11 part review and critique of McLaren's book
Reviews - McLaren - A Generous Orthodoxy
Reviews - McLaren - A New Kind of Christian 
Reviews -McLaren - A Search For What Makes Sense: Finding Faith 
Reviews -McLaren - Adventures In Missing The Point 
Reviews - McLaren - Church On The Other Side 
Reviews -McLaren - Everything Must Change 
Reviews -McLaren - Finding Faith 
Reviews -McLaren - More Ready Than You Realize 
Reviews - McLaren - The Justice Project 
Reviews - McLaren - The Secret Message of Jesus 
Reviews -McLaren - The Voice of Luke  
Theology - Revelation and the Ambiguity of Justification: McLaren Adds to the Confusion 
Theology -  Does McLaren Reject Penal Substitution?: A Review of the Evidence
Theology -   Hamilton: McLaren and Whole Foods Stores
Theology -   SBTS and McLaren: A Response to SBTS Panel Discussion
Theology -   The Evolving God: McKnight's Critique of McLaren
Theology -   The Future of the Emergent Church: McLaren Weighs In
Theology -   The Immutability of God: Its Truth and Relevancy - Introduction
Theology -   The Postmodern Social Gospel: Brian McLaren Proves My Point
Theology -   Where to Begin?: 10 Emergent Must Reads
Theology -   Who Isn't One?: Brian McLaren and Social Christians
Theology -  A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Narrative Question - Part 1
Theology - A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Authority Question - Part 2 
Theology -  A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The God Question - Part 3 
Theology -  A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Jesus Question - Part 4
Theology - A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Gospel Question - Part 5 
Theology -  A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Church Question - Part 6
Theology - A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Sex Question - Part 7
Theology -  A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Future Question - Part 8 
Theology -  A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: The Pluralism Question - Part 9 
Theology -  A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: Where Do We Go From Here - Part 10
Theology -  A New Kind of Christianity . . . Indeed: Some Final Thoughts - Part 11
Theology - The Clarity of Ambiguity: The Erosion of the Perspicuity of Scripture in the Emergent Church - Part 1
Theology -  The Clarity of Ambiguity:  The Erosion of the Perspicuity of Scripture in the Emergent Church - Part 2
Theology - The Clarity of Ambiguity:  The Erosion of the Perspicuity of Scripture in the Emergent Church - Part 3
Theology - The Clarity of Ambiguity:  The Erosion of the Perspicuity of Scripture in the Emergent Church - Part 4
Theology -  The Clarity of Ambiguity:  The Erosion of the Perspicuity of Scripture in the emergent Church - Part 5