Brian D. McLaren Quotes
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Enter faith, and a whole new factor enters the equation. Words like “impossible” seem out of place. Despair and cynicism feel like insults to God. Hope grows, and love, and therefore motivation to care, to give, to act, to try, to dream, to risk.
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God unleashes history in the beginning. God helps the baby to stand in the beginning. But God is also out ahead, calling history homeward across the field or across the room. God doesn't force it. Sometimes history responds, or some parts of history respond, but others resist or rebel. But God keeps calling.
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Growing numbers of us are acknowledging with grief that many forms of supremacy—Christian, white, male, heterosexual, and human—are deeply embedded not just in Christian history but also in Christian theology. We are coming to see that in hallowed words like almighty, sovereignty, kingdom, dominion, supreme, elect, chosen, clean, remnant, sacrifice, lord, and even God, dangerous viruses often lie hidden, malware that must be identified and purged from our software if we want our future to be different from our past. We are realizing that our ancestors didn’t merely misinterpret a few Scriptures in their day; rather, they consistently practiced a dangerous form of interpretation that deserves to be discredited, rejected, and replaced by a morally wiser form of interpretation today.
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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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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.
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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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Columbus wrote this of his dehumanized “cargo”: “It is possible, with the name of the Holy Trinity, to sell all the slaves which it is possible to sell….Here there are so many of these slaves…although they are living things they are as good as gold.” Columbus gave permission to his crew who remained in Hispaniola to enslave the native Taino people “in the amount desired.” Columbus awarded a teenage Taino girl to one of his crew, Miguel Cuneo, for use as his sex slave. Cuneo bragged that when she “resisted with all her strength,” he “thrashed her mercilessly and raped her.” Columbus bestowed this kind of “employee benefit” on many of his men, writing to a friend about large numbers of “dealers” who specialized in supplying young girls to the so-called Christians, adding, “those from nine to ten [years old] are now in demand.
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He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou… (“Footnote to All Prayers”) Lewis proceeds to acknowledge that when he says the Name of God, his best thoughts are mere fancies and symbols, which he knows “cannot be the thing thou art.” Then with postmodern sensitivity, Lewis ponders the inadequacy of human language and perspective: And all men are idolators, crying unheard To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word. Even as we pray, then, we must count on God to take our misguided arrows and magnetize them toward their goal. He concludes: Take not, oh Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in Thy great, Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.
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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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So if God is forgotten, we want to join God in being forgotten. So if God is rejected and opposed and misunderstood and misrepresented, we want to suffer each indignity and sorrow with God.
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The statement serves as the basis for what is commonly called the Doctrine of Discovery, the teaching that whatever Christians “discover,” they can take and use as they wish. It is breathtaking in its theological horror. Muslims then called Saracens and all other non-Christians are reduced to “enemies of Christ.” Christians, even as they plunder, enslave, and kill, count themselves friends of Christ by contrast. Christian global mission is defined as to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue” non-Christians around the world, and to steal “all movable and immovable goods” and to “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery”—and not only them, but their descendants. And notice the stunning use of the word convert: “to convert them to his and their use and profit.
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It turns out that the famous dictum, associated with Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, can run both ways: yes, without God everything is theoretically permissible... but believers can find ways to use God to justify just about anything as well.
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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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With my own eyes I saw Spaniards cut off the nose, hands, and ears of Indians, male and female, without provocation, merely because it pleased them to do it….Likewise, I saw how they summoned the caciques and the chief rulers to come, assuring them safety, and when they peacefully came, they were taken captive and burned….They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike….They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house.
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The cross calls humanity to stop trying to make God's kingdom happen through coercion and force, which are always self-defeating in the end, and instead, to welcome it through self-sacrifice and vulnerability.
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Oddly, I’ve never heard of a church or denomination that asked people to affirm a doctrinal statement like this: The purpose of Scripture is to equip God’s people for good works. Shouldn’t a simple statement like this be far more important than statements with words foreign to the Bible’s vocabulary about itself (inerrant, authoritative, literal, revelatory, objective, absolute, propositional, etc.)?
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In Christ, God is supreme, but not in the old discredited paradigm of supremacy: God is the supreme healer, the supreme friend, the supreme lover, the supreme life-giver who self-empties in gracious love for all. The king of kings and lord of lords is the servant of all and the friend of sinners. The so-called weakness and foolishness of God are greater than the so-called power and wisdom of human regimes.
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There’s a lot of dirty theology out there, the religious counterpart to dirty politics and dirty business, I suppose. You might call it spiritual pornography—a kind of for-profit exploitative nakedness. It’s found in many of the same places as physical pornography (the Internet and cable TV for starters), and it promises similar things: instant intimacy, fantasy and make-believe, private voyeurism and vicarious experience, communion without commitment. That’s certainly not what we’re after in these pages. No, we’re after a lost treasure as old as the story of the Garden of Eden: the...
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Americans until 1924. States like Arizona and New Mexico found ways to continue restricting voting rights until 1948, just as several southern states continue to do in this century to African Americans.
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I do know this about pride: pride is tiring, a cruel task-master, a complicator, a destroyer. Humility, in contrast, relaxes, refreshes, relieves, simplifies, renews. To the degree that becoming childlike includes becoming humble, humility releases childlike play, laughter, sleep, smiles, fun. Our pride forces us to take ourselves so seriously, which leads us to take others less seriously and God less seriously still.
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Spiritual practices are ways of becoming awake and staying awake to God.
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In the aftermath of Jesus and his cross, we should never again define God’s sovereignty or supremacy by analogy to the kings of this world who dominate, oppress, subordinate, exploit, scapegoat and marginalize. Instead, we have migrated to an entirely new universe, or, as Paul says, “a new creation” Corinthians 5:17 in which old ideas of supremacy are subverted. If this is true, to follow Jesus is to change one’s understanding of God. To accept Jesus and to accept the God Jesus loved is to become an atheist in relation to the Supreme Being of violent and dominating power. We are not demoting God to a lower, weaker level; we are rising to a higher and deeper understanding of God as pure light, with no shadow of violence, conquest, exclusion, hostility, or hate at all.
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Instead, it was a Christianity engaged with modernity and postmodernity — grappling with its issues, sensitive to its questions and concerns, aware of its spiritual vacuum, in vital dialogue with its artistic and intellectual leaders. It was a “third-way” faith seeking to steer a course that would avoid defensive retreat and isolation on the one hand and capitulation and sellout on the other.
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If you don't want to worship a guy you can beat up, then I might humbly suggest you reconsider Caesar and the Greco-Roman narrative. It sounds like 'Christ and him crucified' is not for you. At least not yet.