Brian D. McLaren Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
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...
-
There is no way to peace, but rather peace itself is the way to life in God’s kingdom.
-
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.
-
I’ve come to see that just as the Doctrine of Discovery was used to justify white Christian supremacy and the exploitation of nonwhites and non-Christians, the “doctrine of dominion” (Genesis 1:28) is still being used to justify human supremacy and the exploitation of the earth and all its creatures. Aided and abetted by harmful doctrines about the future (especially “left behind” dispensationalist eschatology), industrial-era Christians have used toxic, industrial-strength beliefs to legitimize the plundering of the earth, without concern for future generations of humans, much less our fellow creatures. After all, if Jesus is coming back soon, and if God will soon destroy the earth and take righteous souls to heaven, who cares about the earth? What’s a little human domination in comparison to divine damnation?
-
This papal document—which has not yet been repudiated by the Catholic Church—was the basis for the Christian justification of colonialism and the building of competitive Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch, French, Belgian, German, and other Euro-Christian empires that spanned the world.13 It was the genocide card that was given to every white Christian nation.
-
When would-be reformers arise, they are rejected as heretics, turncoats, troublemakers, disturbers of the peace, traitors, and enemies.
-
We must never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God, whether in prose or in poetry. A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, narrow, or controlling orthodoxies of so much of Christian history, doesn't take itself too seriously. It is humble. It doesn't claim too much. It admits it walks with a limp.
-
Because if anything is clear in the aftermath of the Reformation, it has to be this: we human beings can interpret the Bible to say and mean an awful lot of different things. We can very easily confuse “The Bible says” with “I say the Bible says,” which we can then equate with “God says.
-
Love all of God’s creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire, universal love.
-
The life-and-death question for each of our churches and denominations may boil down to this: are we a club for the elite who pretend to have arrived or a school for disciples who are still on the way?
-
Confession: Imagine if love, not law, was the standard by which we learned to examine ourselves and confess our sins against God, neighbor, and the earth we share. Imagine if each week we were guided into the kind of self-examination that helped us name and turn from our unloving acts in recent days. And imagine if, along with confessing our sins, we confessed or named our hurts, the places where others have wounded us, so that we could process our pain and then respond in a way that doesn’t give in to resentment or revenge.
-
In case after case in the past, there is a kind of Bible-quoting intoxication under the influence of which we religious people lose the ability to distinguish between what God says and what we say God says.
-
The new dimensions of the message are examples of the Spirit of truth doing what Jesus promised he would do...
-
In other words, when the community of faith gathers, its purpose is to equip its members for a life of love and good deeds when the community scatters.
-
With Sir Isaac Newton's laws of physics, and God being seen as the powerful machine operator who perfectly controls the machine through these orderly laws, we end up with the opposite problem, the very opposite of the ancient situation. Now, instead of chaos reigning and us wondering if there's any order, order reigns supreme, and we wonder if there's any freedom.
-
At their best, religious and spiritual communities help us discover this pure and naked spiritual encounter. At their worst, they simply make us more ashamed, pressuring us to cover up more, pushing us to further enhance our image with the best designer labels and latest spiritual fads, weighing us down with layer upon layer of heavy, uncomfortable, pretentious, well-starched religiosity.
-
What if the Christian faith is supposed to exist in a variety of forms rather than just one imperial one? What if it is both more stable and more agile—more responsive to the Holy Spirit—when it exists in these many forms? And what if, instead of arguing about which form is correct and legitimate, we were to honor, appreciate, and validate one another and see ourselves as servants of one grander mission, apostles of one greater message, seekers on one ultimate quest?
-
A generous orthodoxy is like that. It acknowledges that we’re all a mess. It sees in our worst failures the possibility of our deepest repentance and God’s opening for our most profound healing. It remembers Jesus’ parable that wherever God sows good seed, “an enemy” will sow weed seeds. It realizes that you can’t pull up the bad without uprooting the good too, and so it refrains from judging. It just rejoices wherever good seed grows.
-
Accumulating orthodoxy makes it harder year-by-year to be a Christian than it was in Jesus day.
-
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.
-
If, for you, orthodox means finally “getting it right” or “getting it straight,” mine is a pretty disappointing, curvy orthodoxy. But if, for you, orthodoxy isn’t a list of correct doctrines, but rather the doxa in orthodoxy, which means “thinking” or “opinion,” then the lifelong pursuit of expanding thinking and deepening, broadening opinions about God sounds like a delight, a joy.
-
Isn’t the real scandal not that our religious leaders might be imagined walking across a road or talking as friends together in a bar, but rather that their followers are found speaking against one another as enemies, day after day in situation after situation?