Brian D. McLaren Quotes
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He encouraged them to explore their doubts, ask their questions, and express themselves honestly. Many people crave certainty. They don’t want to have to think, agonize, or grapple with life’s difficult questions for themselves. Instead they want dogma. They want guaranteed answers.
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The people of Hispaniola had their lives unjustly and savagely taken by professed Jesus followers, and they were not, as we all know, the only ones to meet such a fate. Millions of their Indigenous sisters and brothers on Turtle Island were killed at the hands of other Europeans, as nation after imperial nation, bearing Christ on their lips and crosses on their military standards, followed suit.
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The wise preacher of Ecclesiastes might say, “There is a time for everything—a time to be laid-back and a time to be outraged; a time to be tolerant and a time to stand up and say, ‘I’m not going to take this anymore.’” The challenge for all fighters, of course, is to be sure they find out what is now truly worth fighting against, and then to be sure they have something that is truly worth fighting for.
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Jesus faithfully and courageously represented the nonviolent and loving heart of God. Jesus and his way of nonviolent, self-giving love, the text suggests, will earn the trust of all humanity. We will ultimately migrate, in other words, toward the way of Jesus.
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The popular and domesticated Jesus, who has become little more than a chrome-plated hood ornament on the guzzling Hummer of Western civilization, can thus be replaced with a more radical, saving, and, I believe, real Jesus.
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Imagine if organized religion organized billions of people and trillions of dollars to tackle the challenges that our economic and political systems are afraid or unwilling to tackle—a planet ravaged by unsustainable human behavior and an out-of-control consumptive economy, the growing gap between the rich minority and the poor majority, and the proliferation of weapons of all kinds—including weapons of mass destruction. “Wow,” people frequently say when I propose these possibilities. “If they did that, I might become religious again.” Some quickly add, “But I won’t hold my breath. It’ll never happen.
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Can you imagine Jesus saying, “Believe that I am the only way. Why? Because I said so, that’s why! And if you don’t believe, then you’re going straight to hell!” But isn’t that how we present him through our slogans?
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When physical genocide ran its course, cultural genocide followed, reflected in the “compassionate” counsel of Captain Richard Henry Pratt: “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.
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I so wish people had seen it your way, but I think too many of us have read the story to say it gives European white males carte blanche to play God over creation; so `having dominion' gives them a license to pollute and exploit.
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I have no doubt that Jesus would actually practice the neighborliness he preached rather than following our example of religious supremacy, hostility, fear, isolation, misinformation, exclusion, or demonization.
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Too often we put the gospel of Jesus through the strainer of consumerist-capitalism and retain only the thin broth that this modern-day Caesar lets pass through.
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Being able to know and feel what Karl knows and feels… that no matter what, I am God’s, and God is mine… that we have a connection; we have a relationship. Faith in your life brings God in your life.
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Even though Pope Urban VIII reversed the pronouncements of his predecessors by declaring slavery unacceptable in the mid-seventeenth century, the vast majority of Protestant Christians in America considered slavery and white supremacy to be absolutely consistent with “biblical” Christianity. It would take American Protestants over a hundred years to make slavery history. Even then, they would find ways to cleverly camouflage the old Doctrine of Discovery and its white supremacist scaffolding under distinctly American terms like Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism, terms still celebrated in many sectors of US society today.
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I am convinced that Jesus didn’t come to start a new religion; he came to proclaim a new kingdom.
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Community has become a buzzword in the church in recent years. Overbusy individuals hope they can cram it into their overstuffed schedules like their membership to a health and fitness club which they never have time to use. Churches hope they can conjure it with candles, programs, or training videos. Anabaptists know that community is far more costly than that: one cannot add it to anything, rather one must begin with it in order to enter it, practice it, and preserve it. They realize that community involves proximity, and that proximity involves land, and that our ties to one another can never be separated from our ties to the land, the watershed, the local economy in which we live. They have an instinct about the deep ties between community and sexuality, community and freedom, community and economics. I suspect that Anabaptists know more than they know that they know in this regard, and I hope we all can learn from them before they forget.
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Cause-effect looks back and asks, “What caused this?” Purpose looks up or ahead, and asks, “And why was it caused? For what purpose? For what end?” Cause-effect looks for a force pushing events from behind. Purpose looks for a pattern or design or intention or meaning pulling events from ahead, guiding them from above, enriching them from within.
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So we must realize this: the suicidal framing story that dominates our world today has no power except the power we give it by believing it. Similarly, believing an alternative and transforming framing story may turn out to be the most radical thing any of us can ever do.
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He creates a new kind of hero: not warriors, corporate executives, or politicians, but brave and determined activists for preemptive peace, willing to suffer with Him in the prophetic tradition of justice.
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We must not define Jesus and his kingdom by fitting them within conventional understandings of kings and kingdoms. Rather, we must judge and deconstruct those conventional definitions in light of Jesus and his example.
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If you love someone, you will want to understand them and accept them as they grow and change; similarly, loving yourself involves a never-ending process of self-understanding and self-acceptance through life's ups and downs...we are finally coming to understand that love for neighbor and love for self naturally lead to love for the earth...if you love your neighbor as yourself, you want both them and you to be able to breathe, so you need to love clean fresh air...you want them and you to be able to drink, so you need to love pure water in all its forms...you want them and you to be be able to eat, so you need to care about the climate....
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Politicians compete for the highest offices. Business tycoons scramble for a bigger and bigger piece of the pie. Armies march and scientists study and philosophers philosophise and preachers preach and labourers sweat. But in that silent baby, lying in that humble manger, there pulses more potential power and wisdom and grace and aliveness than all the rest of us can imagine.
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Such a possibility raises a question: if one dares to let one’s traditional and inherited Christian understanding of God be converted under the influence of Jesus, can one still be considered a Christian? Or, conversely, if one refuses to let one’s traditional understanding be converted under the influence of Jesus, can one still be considered a Christian? Be that as it may, growing numbers of us are coming to realize this simple truth: for the world to migrate away from violence, our God must migrate away from violence.
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That is what mature faith requires — not pride over how much one sees and understands, but humility, the feeling that one is still a child, certain of so little, still so dependent on God and others, with so much still to learn — including so much more to learn about humility.
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I don’t think we should give up on ritual. I don’t think we should give up on any possible means of experiencing God.