Brian D. McLaren Quotes
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Our interpretations reveal less about God or the Bible than they do about ourselves. They reveal what we want to defend, what we want to attack, what we want to ignore, what we’re unwilling to question.
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We hate those times of weakness, but I can see why life would be engineered to bring us to them; without them, we might never learn what faith is at all. Someone has said that you never know if your faith is real until it is all you have left.
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But there is a more catholic understanding of the term apostolic: it means missional. The apostles were those called together to learn as disciples so they could be sent out on a mission which is what both the Greek root for apostle and the Latin root for mission mean. From this vantage point, disciples are apostles-in-training; Christian discipleship or spiritual formation is training for apostleship, training for mission. From this understanding we place less emphasis on whose lineage, rites, doctrines, structures, and terminology are right and more emphasis on whose actions, service, outreach, kindness, and effectiveness are good.
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The Church has little idea how unorthodox it is at any given moment. If a church can't yet be perfectly orthodox, it can, with the Holy Spirit's help and by the grace of God, be perpetually reformable.
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Through study we welcome the light of God into our minds.
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If elementary training in neighbor love focuses on family and friends, in secondary neighbor-love studies, we learn to see the outlier, the outsider, the outcast, the stranger, the alien, and even the enemy as neighbors too. Such an education can be deeply subversive, some might even say unpatriotic. After all, political figures, military leaders, and rising demagogues consistently consolidate power by scapegoating and dehumanizing an outsider, an outcast, or an enemy.
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Speaking of African Americans, the horrors of the African slave trade are more connected to the enslavement unleashed by Columbus than most people realize.26 The Portuguese began enslaving and exporting the native peoples of Labrador beginning in 1501. Early in colonial history, the British paid some tribes to capture members of other tribes; the British then sold these captives as slaves. Charleston, South Carolina, was a center for exporting indigenous American slaves before it became a center for importing African ones. Having developed a taste and skill for enslavement of the Tainos, Arawaks, and others in the New World, European colonizers quickly turned to Africa for additional “stock” for their slave market. Even Bartolomé de las Casas at one point recommended importing African slaves so that the indigenous peoples could be released, a recommendation he later regretted and repudiated.
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Speaking of African Americans, the horrors of the African slave trade are more connected to the enslavement unleashed by Columbus than most people realize. The Portuguese began enslaving and exporting the native peoples of Labrador beginning in 1501. Early in colonial history, the British paid some tribes to capture members of other tribes; the British then sold these captives as slaves. Charleston, South Carolina, was a center for exporting indigenous American slaves before it became a center for importing African ones. Having developed a taste and skill for enslavement of the Tainos, Arawaks, and others in the New World, European colonizers quickly turned to Africa for additional “stock” for their slave market. Even Bartolomé de las Casas at one point recommended importing African slaves so that the indigenous peoples could be released, a recommendation he later regretted and repudiated.
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There is a difference — subtle but very significant — between having faith in my faith i.e., faith in my intellectual concepts about God — another way of saying “leaning on my own understanding and having faith in God. There is a corresponding difference between doubting my faith and doubting God.
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MATTHEW, MARK, AND LUKE tell the story of Jesus in ways similar to one another which is why they’re often called the synoptic gospels—with a similar optic, or viewpoint. Many details differ and the differences are quite fascinating, but it’s clear the three compositions share common sources. The Fourth Gospel tells the story quite differently. These differences might disturb people who don’t understand that storytelling in the ancient world was driven less by a duty to convey true details accurately and more by a desire to proclaim true meaning powerfully. The ancient editors who put the New Testament together let the differences stand as they were, so each story can convey its intended meanings in its own unique ways.
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Here’s the papal proclamation of 1455 that empowered the Christian kings of Europe to enslave, plunder, and slaughter in the name of discovery: invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit.
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But in the end you cannot serve two masters, Theos and Elohim, the god of the Greco-Roman philosophers and Caesars and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the violent god of profit proclaimed by the empire and the compassionate God of justice proclaimed by the prophets. You can try to hybridize them and compromise them for centuries, but like oil and water they eventually separate and prove incompatible. They refuse to alloy. They produce irreconcilable narratives and create different worlds.
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Aliveness, he will teach, is a gift available to all by God's grace. It flows not from taking, but giving, not from fear but from faith, not from conflict but from reconciliation, not from domination but from service. It isn't found in the upper trappings of religion -rules and rituals, controversies and scruples, temples and traditions. No, it springs up from our innermost being like a fountain of living water. It intoxicates us lie the best wine ever and so turns life from disappointment into a banquet.
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Motivated thus by their beliefs in God and their lust for gold—as dangerous a cocktail today as then—the Spanish Christians ravaged Latin America, as did their Portuguese counterparts. Bartolomé concludes, “We can estimate very truly and truthfully that in the forty years that have passed, with the infernal actions of the Christians, there have been unjustly slain more than twelve million men, women, and children. In truth, I believe without trying to deceive myself that the number of the slain is more like fifteen million.
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Don’t we need some “secular” social space where diverse people of faith can encounter one another with some level of privacy and anonymity?
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Christianity, we might say, is driving around with a loaded gun in its glove compartment, and that loaded gun is its violent image of God. It’s driving around with a license to kill, and that license is its Bible, read uncritically. Along with its loaded gun and license to kill, it’s driving around with a sense of entitlement derived from a set of beliefs with a long, ugly, and largely unacknowledged history.
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Schoolchildren don’t normally learn this poem about Columbus’s second voyage to Hispaniola Haiti and the Dominican Republic today: “In fourteen hundred and ninety-five, sixteen hundred people he kidnapped alive.
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Spiritual practices are ways of becoming awake and staying awake to God.
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We might say that two thousand years ago, Jesus inserted into the human imagination a radical new vision of God—nondominating, nonviolent, supreme in service, and self-giving. That vision was so radically new and different that we have predictably spent our first two thousand years trying to reconcile it with the old visions of God that it challenged. Maybe only now, as we acknowledge Christianity to be, in light of our history, what the novelist Walker Percy called a “failed religion,” are we becoming ready to let Jesus’s radical new vision replace the old vision instead of being accommodated within it. Could some sectors of Christian faith finally be ready to worship and follow the God that Jesus was trying to show them?
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The scarily brilliant Romantic poet and visionary William Blake dared to say what many of us have perhaps thought but kept to ourselves: “A good local pub has much in common with a church, except that a pub is warmer, and there’s more conversation.
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Because I follow Jesus, then, I am bound to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, atheists, New Agers, everyone even religious broadcasters, I was just reminded by a still, small voice. Not only am I bound to them in love, but I am also actually called to, in some real sense (please don’t minimize this before you qualify it), become one of them, to enter their world and be with them in it.
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When theologians read the Bible through the lens of the Exodus narrative, they are called “liberation theologians,” but their counterparts who read it through the Greco-Roman narrative are never labeled “domination theologians” or “colonization theologians.” Similarly, we have “black theology” and “feminist theology,” but Greco-Roman orthodoxy is never called “white theology” or “male theology.
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Oppression theology and supremacist spirituality developed in the belief ecosystem of an angry God who needed appeasement in order to dispense grace, who favored some and disfavored others, and who welcomed the favored into religious institutions that accumulated and hoarded privilege and protected the status quo.
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In the story of the Good Samaritan, everybody knows the robber is bad--but doesn't Jesus also imply an indictment on the priest and Levite? . . . The priest and Levite are over here. They are 'righteous' in a superficial way. They don't rob anybody. They're not like that lousy criminal who is over here, on the bad end of the line. Do you see it? That's the line we modern Christians try to live on the right end of it . . . The Samaritan traveler lives on a higher level, altogether. The issue isn't who is wrong or righteous; that's obvious. The issue is who is truly good.