Orland Evangelical Free Church | Brian McLaren On Saving Buddhism

A Generous Orthodoxy targets many crying needs. One of them is for evangelicals to make peace with pluralism.

Evangelicals bemoan the loss of their dominance over mainstream American culture -regardless of whether they ever had such a dominance. They perceive the now-prevailing secularism as a usurpation of their godly heritage. Therefore, they tend to reject the claims of pluralism that all religions and moral traditions deserve respect. "We don't have to respect what the Bible denounces."

This intransigence fails to see the distinction between the kingdom of God, our true godly heritage, and the United States of America, the worldly polity God has blessed. The Church in the 1^st century sought to live at peace in a pluralistic society, and saw the open competition between Christ and idols as a tremendous opportunity (1 Timothy 2.1-7). Peace requires meekness and regard for the honor we owe to others. We are nowhere told in Scripture to aspire to such throne and altar alliances as have plagued Christianity in the modern age.

Brian McLaren dwells on the teachings that we should love, interact with, and seek to bless those of other religions in his book's longest chapter ("Why I Am Incarnational"). But in dwelling on these teachings, he blurs basic distinctions further and further.

Here is an important marker: McLaren does not say that all religions basically teach the same truths. On p 249 he states, "I am not saying all religions are the same, it doesn't matter what you believe, truth is relative, blah, blah, blah." He makes the same denial on p 251. We should take these statements as sincere.

But when he makes the denial again on p 255, he adds a significant qualification.

Different religions "are often talking about different subjects entirely. Zen Buddhism, for example, says little about cosmic history and purpose as do Judaism and Christianity (and Theravada Buddhism). Western Christianity has (for the last few centuries anyway) said relatively little about mindfulness and meditative practices, about which Zen Buddhism has said much." And then, the loophole by which we might possibly attain the coveted Both-And with other religions: "To talk about different things is not to contradict one another; it is, rather, to have much to offer one another, on occasion at least."

The logical point may be solid enough, but the theological one is vapor. Different religions talk about the "subjects" they deem vital to human destiny. The selection of "subjects" each religion makes is precisely the issue of contention. There's a reason the Bible selects the "subject" of blood sacrifice and Zen Buddhism does not.

McLaren says (p 264), "Ultimately, I hope that Jesus will save Buddhism, Islam, and every other religion, including the Christian religion, which often seems to need saving as much as any other religion does." He means that there are real insights in all these systems that could be redeemed by the one who finally knows the truth, Jesus.

This is where we end up if orthodoxy is not reliably transmitted from God to us. Everybody has a little bit of it, and everybody needs to pool their insights.

In fact, the Bible reveals that Christ regards all systems besides his own as fortresses resisting his advance (2 Corinthians 10.3-6). We are not to embrace pluralism as an opportunity to refine our orthodoxy, but as an opportunity for the resurrected Christ to free souls from the jails of human speculation.

McLaren seems at pains to avoid the generalizations of liberal relativism. Well and good. But what he offers us on yet another pressing issue is not the refinement of orthodoxy, but the well-trodden path of its degradation.