Brian D. McLaren (born 1956) is an American author, speaker, activist, and public theologian who has been a leading figure in the emerging church movement and is associated with postmodern Christianity. Raised in Rockville, Maryland, within the conservative Open Brethren tradition, he became involved with the countercultural Jesus Movement in the 1970s. He earned a B.A. (1978) and M.A. (1981) in English from the University of Maryland, with academic interests in Medieval drama, Romantic poets, modern philosophical literature, and the works of Dr. Walker Percy. From 1978 to 1986, he taught college English before helping to found Cedar Ridge Community Church, a non-denominational congregation in Spencerville, Maryland, in 1982. He served as the church’s founding pastor until 2006.
McLaren is known for advocating a “new kind of Christianity” that is just, generous, and inclusive, working with people of all faiths for the common good. He is a faculty member and Dean of Faculty at the Center for Action and Contemplation, where he teaches on reconnecting with the message of unconditional love central to Jesus’ life and teachings. He is also a co-host of the Southern Lights podcast and a podcaster with the CAC’s Learning How to See. He has been active in mentoring church planters and pastors since the mid-1980s and has assisted in developing several new churches.
McLaren has received honorary doctorates from Carey Theological Seminary (2004) and Virginia Theological Seminary (2010). He is a senior fellow at Auburn Seminary, a contributor to We Stand With Love, and a leader in the Convergence Network, which supports innovative training and mentoring for pastors and church planters. He has spoken at conferences and leadership gatherings across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, covering topics such as postmodern thought, inter-religious dialogue, ecology, social justice, and spiritual formation. His work has been featured in Time, the New York Times, Christianity Today, and other major media outlets.
False Teaching
As McLaren’s theology has matured and taken shape over time and through his books, he has stepped forward as a leader in a new and revived form of theological liberalism. This displays itself most clearly in his view of Scripture.
In A New Kind of Christianity he insists that Christians have long been reading the Bible through the distorted lens of a Greco-Roman narrative. This narrative produced many false dualisms, an air of superiority, and a false distinction between those who were “in” and those who were “out.” These three marks of false narrative have so impacted our faith that we can hardly see past them. His book attempts to do that, and to reconstruct the Christian faith as it is meant to be.
Leading the way is his view of the Bible. He does not see the Bible as God’s inspired, inerrant, infallible, authoritative Word. He displays this, for example, in his interpretation of the account of Noah by saying, “a god who mandates an intentional supernatural disaster leading to unparalleled genocide is hardly worthy of belief, much less worship” (A New Kind of Christianity).
He goes on to say, “I’m recommending we read the Bible as an inspired library. This inspired library preserves, presents, and inspires an ongoing vigorous conversation with and about God, a living and vital civil argument into which we are all invited and through which God is revealed” (New Kind). After all, “revelation doesn’t simply happen in statements. It happens in conversations and arguments that take place within and among communities of people who share the same essential questions across generations. Revelation accumulates in the relationships, interactions, and interplay between statements.” He understands the Bible to be a slowly-evolving human understanding of God. “Scripture faithfully reveals the evolution of our ancestors’ best attempts to communicate their successive best understandings of God. As human capacity grows to conceive of a higher and wiser view of God, each new vision is faithfully preserved in Scripture like fossils in layers of sediment.”
This is nothing less than theological liberalism in twenty-first century, post-modern clothing (which is why Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism offers a rebuttal, though it was written 90 years earlier). Like Fosdick and other liberals before him, McLaren has assumed authority over the Bible instead of placing himself under its authority. His understanding of Scripture frees him to see Christian doctrine as evolving, and himself as an instrument of this evolution. In this way he revisits and reinterprets whatever does not accord with modern sensibilities. He has denied the literal nature of hell along with its eternality; he has denied the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ; he has denied Jesus Christ as the only way to the Father; he has affirmed homosexuality as good and pleasing to God. And he continues to think and to write, meaning that his theological development is not yet complete.
Followers and Adherents
McLaren has long been a leader in the Emerging Church, and almost all of those who “emerged” with him have known his influence. So too have many of his fellow progressive Christians. He continues to have a broad speaking platform and to write popular books.
What the Bible Says
The Bible insists that it is the living and active Word of God, breathed out by God himself. It is not a man-made document subject to error, evolution, antiquation, or reinterpretation. Jesus himself spoke clearly about the authority and relevance of Scripture, and showed no hesitation in unfolding its meaning and faulting others for misunderstanding it. In Mark 12:24, “Jesus said to them, ‘Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God?’” He declared, “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35).
Where McLaren casts doubt on the idea that we can ever really confidently know and understand the Bible, Christians have long held that God spoke and inspired his prophets and apostles to write because he actually intended to be heard as saying something, and that the message would be carried on and be understood forever after (see 2 Peter 1:16-21). This is why Jude calls it “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), and why Paul is so emphatic with Timothy that he “guard the good deposit entrusted to [him]” (2 Timothy 1:14). Kevin DeYoung says it well in Taking God at His Word: “The Bible is an utterly reliable book, an unerring book, a holy book, a divine book. … There is no more authoritative declaration than what we find in the word of God, no firmer ground to stand on, no ‘more final’ argument that can be spoken after Scripture has spoken.”
