Confused? Read on.
I'm not sure with whom I disagree more - Brian McLaren or Bob Dewaay. As is common to so many of these types of critiques, the author dances around ever saying anything authoritative from scripture while insisting again and again that it is the ultimate authority. He takes many shots at McLaren for his patchwork faith, and that is certainly what it is, without ever saying what the "right" choices are. Does he believe that it is better to choose the one you believe is the most true? Or is his faith a patchwork as well, but from must better sources? He scoffs at McLaren for "gleaning the parts he likes from many sources", but is there any other way unless you are willing to commit to one exclusively?
It is wonderful to quote Francis Schaeffer and other stalwart Protestant thinkers, but what are they even saying exactly? Tell me things that all good Protestants believe, or at least accept on authority, to combat McLaren's patchwork. Otherwise we are all doing the same as he is but to a lesser degree. We all take parts of various confessions and adopt portions of them personally. The fact that very few Protestants will firmly stand on one set alone, to the exclusion of all others proves that they believe much like McLaren does: that knowledge about God is complicated and cannot be contained in a single, unified system.
DeWaay writes "So if I say that 'Orthodox means that which is in keeping with the clearly revealed truth that God has given us in the inspired Scriptures', the deconstructionist tells me that this is just code for my arrogant belief that I am right and others are wrong." Well, isn't that that exactly what he IS saying? Although it is out of necessity and not arrogance, to constantly make this claim while simultaneously supporting the idea of scripture plus individual conscience is to claim no less in every area of thought in which you disagree with other believers claiming the same orthodoxy. DeWaay implicitly denies his own professed affinity for Schaeffer's truth logic: "A is not non-A" when he claims that he, as an individual has some sort of superior insight into "clearly revealed truth that God has given". But again, in the context of this critique, he doesn't tell those of us who are, presumably, not as enlightened as he is what these clear truths are, only that McLaren obviously doesn't know anything about them, and by extension neither do the rest of us who do not believe exactly as he does.
The essence of this critique reminds me of the manner in which the political left lobs criticisms at political conservatives: they are all too willing to point out that we should not be in Iraq, should not be at war, should not have responded to 9/11 the way we did... but they don't say "Here's what we should have done..." The author employs the same strategy here; McLaren is wrong about a great number of things, but the DeWaay isn't saying what the correct choices of thought are. He simply says time and time again that the Bible is clearly not saying what Brian McLaren thinks it is. Well for goodness sake, please tell me authoritatively what he IS saying then!
This is not to say that I think McLaren is any more correct for his mosaic approach to personal theology, although to be fair I have not read much of his book so I can only make an incomplete judgment based on DeWaay's critique. The essence of this critique is that McLaren makes his quilt of too many and varying swatches of theological fabric where DeWaay draws his from more traditional Protestant sources. Because McLaren draws from Christian thinkers seen by traditional Protestants as theologically ambiguous, the validity of his beliefs are discounted.
The subtle criticism Thomas Merton is especially interesting, as it usually is from those who, rather than read his writings, are content to use third-hand conjecture about his investigation of Buddhist meditation to dismiss his entire body of work. DeWaay here lists Merton as a "key proponent of mysticism" and then defines mysticism as a way of "having a religious experience that does not require the theological distinctions and definitions" - those same distinctions and definitions that McLaren disparages.
"I do not at all regard mystical experience as an illusion." CS Lewis says in his book "Prayer: Letters to Malcolm", "I think it shows that there is a way to go, before death, out of what may be called 'this world' - out of the stage set." But then he asks and answers an important question: "Out of this; but into what? The lawfulness, safety, and utility of the mystical voyage depends not at all on its being mystical - that is, on its being a departure - but on motives, skill, and constancy of the voyager, and on the grace of God."
Mystical experience, from a Christian view, is not the search for nothingness but for a place of nothing but God's presence. "Departures are all alike;" Lewis continues, "it is the landfall that crowns the journey. The saint, by being a saint, proves that his mysticism led him aright." Surely DeWaay will not claim to know everything about God or even that everything about God CAN be known by solely intellectual means. The search beyond intellect is mysticism. Notice as usual the finer points of Lewis' predictably balanced perspective - anyone CAN be a mystic; that is not the difficult part. It is the preparation for the journey and its eventual destination that determines the validity of one's mysticism.
Similarly, Merton believed that there is a time for meditation and an emptying of the mind, but only for the purpose of filling it with truths that cannot be known intellectually. "Mystical prayer," Merton says in "The Ascent to Truth", "rises above the natural operation if the intelligence, yet it is always essentially intelligent."
This is a no less valid method of seeking Schaeffer's "true truth" than are intellectual pursuits. DeWaay and thinkers like him are so enamored with what can be known intellectually that they unknowingly disqualify themselves from the enrichment offered by non-intellectual means of finding truth. He seems to hold up, almost as an idol, what can be known about God - as if God could be limited by the feebleness of our minds in comparison to the full knowledge of him. Thus, we must clear out what we KNOW, especially those of us who - in both good ways and bad - know too much. Our minds are limited, so if our faith is based on what we can know, firstly it elevates those who have the intellectual capacity to know more, and secondly, because our minds are limited, so will our faith be.
Again, not having read McLaren's book in its entirety, I think one of the things that DeWaay is objecting to is mysticism as a starting point and on that point I would concur. Mystical experience can indeed be dangerous if one sets off on a journey without a map or the means to survive in the desert between "here" and "there".
The discussion ends up being one I have been spending a lot of time thinking about lately: does one need to choose a single entire system of belief or did God intend for each of us to be responsible to hammer out our own personal system? And what is the impetus either way? In that regard, the debate posed in this critique is one of degrees rather that opposites. DeWaay does not claim a single source for his belief system, so why should McLaren? To that, some will reply that DeWaay does claim a single source for his beliefs and that it is scripture. If there is one thing that frustrates me most, it is that Protestants are constantly agreeing that the Bible is their only, ultimate, and supremely authoritative source but they often can't seem to agree about what exactly it is saying. And what's worse is that few are willing to stand up and say "I am right and you are wrong!", and so divergent and opposing beliefs are allowed to sully the waters on which the adherents of each divergent theology attempt to sustain themselves.
In the Catholic mode of thinking, one's cup is never waiting to be filled with truth, but is rather awaiting clarification of truths already known and stated. A Catholic is not concerned with knowing truth, but is rather concerned with deepening his understanding of truths already known. Thus the burden of the perceived responsibility to know as much as one can is relieved by the fact that he trusts that what can be known, is already known, guarded, and passed on through the Church. (Again, it is worth noting that this is my understanding and not a belief to which I am yet committed).
Can you honestly say that you would rather base your faith on what you personally can know in a human lifetime rather than on decades, centuries, and millennia of those like you who have already pondered what you ponder, discussed what you discuss, and made decisions about things you are trying decide? Conversely, would you want future generations to cast aside truths that you have discovered in a lifetime of searching, study, and prayer out of some obligatory aversion to tradition? Should each subsequent generation "start from scratch" in order to avoid the error of relying on a tradition of belief?
Quite fundamentally, McLaren's philosophy of belief is just an amplification of DeWaay's. McLaren uses 30 patches to make his quilt while DeWaay uses only three. Is DeWaay's way better because his beliefs are informed by fewer sources?
It is interesting that DeWaay quotes Schaeffer's much used and clear, simple example of ultimate truth: "If some thing is A, it cannot be non-A". Indeed, if there was only one thing (and there are many more) I had learned from reading Schaeffer that would be the most significant. Ironically, as I have applied that thinking in my studies it has turned far more often against Protestantism as a whole than it has against Catholicism. Where Protestantism as a whole seems willing to tolerate a wide variety of both grossly divergent and slightly varying theologies, Catholicism at least has a recognized authority structure that says "This is right and that is wrong." What I have not yet decided is whether what they call right truly is right, and whether or not they truly have the authority to make and enforce those designations.
So what we are really talking about is a competition of premises. McLaren contends that we should take the best parts of everybody's theology to create our own unique theology. This seems to be what is being called "emergent". DeWaay's premise is that we should base our theologies, both corporate and personal, on scripture alone. What he is loathe to explain however is which specific systematic theology is based most truthfully on scripture, which one he endorses and why.
The Protestant problem is clear: the Bible tells us many things that are true about God, but it does not contain exhaustive truth. It guides us explicitly in many areas, but in others it speaks only in principles, and where there are principles, there must be interpretation. Unlike the constitutions of our North American countries, the Bible is a divine constitution and infallible. Its interpretation, however, should, like the interpretation of those great human constitutions, be left in the hands of those among us who know it best because they have spent a lifetime committed to its study
And so it is all about authority, as we've discussed before.
