A New Kind of Christian by Brian D. McLaren

First published: San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001

Genre(s): Novella

Subgenre(s): Essays; journal or diary

Core issue(s): Church; discipleship; evangelization; friendship; Protestants and Protestantism

Principal characters

• Dan Poole, the narrator
• Dr. N. E. “Neo” Oliver, Dan’s friend

Overview

A New Kind of Christian begins when Dan Poole, pastor of Potomac Community Church in suburban Maryland, meets his daughter’s science teacher, Dr. N. E. Oliver (“Neo” to his friends), on a day when he is considering abandoning the pastorate. Dan can no longer live in harmony with a church culture that he now sees as stagnant and self-satisfied, and he is suffering in his faith because the kind of Christian he feels unable to serve is the only kind of Christian he knows how to be. Neo takes a generous interest in Dan’s plight, and Dan quickly discovers a thoughtful Christian in the erudite, personable, Jamaican-born science teacher; he is struck by Neo’s ability to abandon evangelical myopia without at the same time falling into liberalism or vacuousness, and he decides to cultivate the friendship.

From their first, extended conversation over coffee and bagels, it becomes apparent that Neo, a former pastor, has long pondered the kinds of Church problems that are on Dan’s mind and has developed a theory to illuminate them. To Neo, Dan’s apprehensions are symptoms of a larger cultural paradigm shift. Though culture is always evolving, Western society is currently experiencing its deepest mental reconfiguration since medieval culture began to give way to “modernity” in the 1500’s under the combined pressures of modern science and Protestant Christianity. In Neo’s estimation, the modern culture that thus arose fixed its sights on values such as objectivity, proof, argument, mechanization, institutionalization, secularization, individualism, and consumerism. While this cultural focus yielded various great achievements (many important technologies, for example), it also was based on a view of the human person that now appears incomplete, resulting in a single-minded pursuit of progress and control that marginalizes the aesthetic, spiritual, and interpersonal needs of human life. The cultural shift to postmodern thinking thus involves a general recognition that the modernistic mentality must be transformed into something more open, comprehensive, and humane. In Neo’s view, Dan is experiencing cognitive dissonance as a result of the ways Western Christianity has assimilated itself into its modernistic cultural environment; modern Christianity is embattled because modernity in general, not necessarily Christianity as such, is being radically challenged by an increasingly postmodern culture.

Dan finds Neo’s ideas to be a source of insight, hope, and challenge. Over several months, the two continue to converse about the problems and opportunities that emerge when modern-style Protestant Christians are confronted with postmodernity. Neo typically attempts to transcend the customary options in many modern Christian quandaries, holding that “people are often against something worth being against but in the process find themselves for some things that aren’t worth being for.” Together, he and Dan discuss contemporary attitudes about heaven and hell and who goes where; the role and interpretation of the Bible in the Church; faith and finances; the trivializations caused by law-centered and individual-centered morality; inadequate conceptions of Christian truth; patterns of theological smugness and vitriol; the pervasiveness of hollow or self-absorbed spirituality and of “numbers-oriented” evangelism.

Neo is suddenly called upon to move to Seattle to bury his father and care for his ailing mother. In the few months before Neo’s mother dies, he and Dan continue their friendship, exchanging insights and support via e-mail and telephone. With the passing of his mother and the sale of his parents’ house, Neo receives a large inheritance and is inspired to spend a year of self-renewal traveling the globe. He tells Dan that he has also resolved to reenter the pastorate after his return, devoting his remaining years to facilitating the emergence of a postmodern Christianity.

During Neo’s travels, Dan, himself recommitted to the pastorate, gets in touch with one of Neo’s friends from church, who shares with Dan a group of e-mails from Neo containing some positive conjectures about postmodern ministry. Seminaries will need to embrace a more holistic view of Christian leadership, becoming less like theology schools and more like the Catholic religious orders. Churches must refuse to be nostalgic ghettos or marketers of a commodity and instead must claim the freedom needed to empower Christians to live God’s love for the real world. Because the problem is with the modern worldview itself, incrementally added “techniques” miss the point; a comprehensive paradigm shift is necessary. As Dan concludes his memoir of their friendship thus far, he is still awaiting news of Neo’s return.

Christian Themes

In his introduction, Brian McLaren explains that A New Kind of Christian began as a work of nonfiction, born of his own crises and conversations as pastor of an evangelical church attempting the leap into postmodernity. His lively insights and genial style struck a nerve at the beginning at the twenty-first century, and A New Kind of Christian generated two sequels, The Story We Find Ourselves In (2003) and The Last Word and the Word After That (2005), establishing McLaren as the figurehead of an adventurous movement calling itself Postmodern Christianity, or the Emergent Church.

McLaren’s musings fit well into the venerable tradition of Christian reform, calling the faithful back to the centrality of Christ’s charity and denouncing false accretions that have pushed it to the margins of Christian life. He is preceded in his critique of unreflectively modernized Christianity by a number of major theological thinkers, including Blaise Pascal, John Henry Newman, Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevski, and Romano Guardini. The “postmodern Christian” critique is fully new, however, insofar as it adds particular concern for current tendencies in secular philosophy and popular culture. It also gains a very distinctive flavor from its immediate context, a local conversation probing the thought patterns of American free-church Protestants as well as, less directly, liberal mainline Protestantism.

Its concreteness is one of the book’s chief characteristics. Though the book is highly idea-driven, the incarnation of those ideas in dialogue and narrative is no coincidence. The context of talk among Christian friends encourages a sympathetic reading and, more important, suits the book’s concern with exploring worldviews, not abstract systems. This holistic approach to faith and thought also contributes to the appreciation of vital traditions, rather than mere “correct ideas,” as a locus of insight in premodern, Catholic, and Eastern Christianity, and as a core priority for the postmodern church. Even the adventurous and iconoclastic urgency of Neo’s views about the need to free American churches to move beyond their successes in modern terms—mighty accomplishments such as pristine systematic theologies and robust church attendance—is ultimately subordinated to a holistic approach, insofar as it expresses the desire to restore to its proper centrality the model of Christian life as a pilgrimage of faith.

In complement to the enthusiasm McLaren’s book has expressed and garnered, there has been no shortage of theological counter-critiques. Nevertheless, because of the book’s approach, perhaps the most direct concerns regard not the book’s orthodoxy but the wisdom of its general outlook. For example, if Postmodern Christianity is fundamentally suspicious of real intellectual and churchly authority, what will guide its freedom to rise above the level of whimsy and fragmentation? More compelling still is the question of whether such a movement’s Christian spirituality will be profound enough to keep it from degenerating into just another activist modern ideology? The sheer diversity of the values that Dan and Neo espouse (values such as spirituality, activism, anti-individualism, and anti-institutionalism) makes such questions a principal undertone of the book for many Christian readers.

Sources for Further Study

Benedict XVI. God Is Love; Deus Caritas Est. Washington, D.C.: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2006. Seminal papal letter pondering Christianity’s heart and the fountainhead of all Christian renewal. Classical vision complements and contrasts with postmodern critique.

Brueggeman, Walter. Texts Under Negotiation: The Bible and Postmodern Imagination. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1993. A biblical scholar presents ways that postmodern perspective can enable more fruitful reading of the Bible’s story.

Groeschel, Benedict, et al. A Drama of Reform. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005. A Catholic perspective on street-level church renewal; the story of a Franciscan reform coming out of the South Bronx. Beautifully photographed.

Guder, Darrell, et al. Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998. A postmodern-style ecclesiology, envisioning the whole Church as God’s agent commissioned for bringing about his reign in the world.