pat loughery

Update: More discussion on this topic happening via Tallskinnykiwi, TheoCenTriC and Theologica.

I’ve blogged a few thoughts and quotes in the last few days about my current primary read, Brian McLaren’s “The Last Word and the Word After That”. It finishes the trilogy begun by “A New Kind of Christian” and continued in “The Story We Find Ourselves In”.

What I love about these books is the storytelling method: Dialogical, engaging, fictional, character-driven rather than thesis-driven. McLaren has described this form of literature as “creative nonfiction” or “fictional theological-philosophical dialogues”, which seems to capture their flavor. As such, the author is able to engage in some interplay and propose some theories that he doesn’t necessarily have to hold but which are helpful to consider.

The first book in the trilogy begins the story with Dan, a fictional pastor wrestling with teaching and living Christian life in the boundary between modern and postmodern worldviews. The second continues Dan’s story and examines the story of God in 7 episodes. The third book… well, let’s look a bit further here.

On first glance, this is a book about hell. Fun, huh? And no doubt certain to cause much controversy. Not just hell, though, but how did our doctrine of hell evolve, where might we be off-track, and what is hell useful for? But that’s really only a portion of the focus of the book, and we can be easily misled to believe that it’s the thesis. In the introduction to this book, McLaren makes several interesting statements.

As I see it, more significant than any doctrine of hell itself is the view of God to which one’s doctrine contributes. […] So this book is in the end more about our view of God than it is about our understandings of hell. What kind of God do we believe exists? What kind of life should we live in response? How does our view of God affect eh way we see and treat other people? And how does the way we see and treat other people affect our view of God?

[…]

At any rate, at heart this book is about the goodness of God and life with God. This means it is about the Gospel and about justice and mercy and a new way of understanding that relationship – suggesting that God’s justice is always merciful and God’s mercy is always just.

What this book does, in its unique way, is to deconstruct our contemporary doctrine of hell. I am glad that McLaren was ballsy^h^h^h^h^courageous enough to do so.

The issue with hell in this book isn’t so much our understanding of the doctrine, but it’s also why it’s so much of an emphasis in our understanding of the Gospel message. Is the Gospel message really that if we believe the right things about Jesus, we avoid eternal damnation in hell? As I read the gospel accounts in Scripture, I find a very different message being proclaimed: “The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and enter in.”

About deconstruction:

Deconstruction is not destruction; it is hope. It arises from the belief that sometimes, our constructed laws get in the way of unseen justice, our deconstructed words get in the way of communication, our institutions get in the way of the purposes for which they were constructed, our formulations get in the way of meaning, our curricula get in the way of learning. […] The love of what is hidden, as yet unseen, and hoped for gives one courage to deconstruct what is seen and familiar.

He goes on to say that anything which is a human construction can be deconstructed. God and God’s mysteries are beyond our human deconstruction, but anything human-made (including our human formulations and models of God and God’s mysteries) can and should be constantly re-examined.

And so McLaren’s characters work through our doctrines of hell: exclusivism, universalism, conditionalism, inclusivism, and variations on those themes. Various characters in the story take these positions. In the end what does McLaren espouse and point us toward? Perhaps none of the above, perhaps one of the above. Certainly he’s pointing out our need to examine the doctrine and consider its evolution, priority in our culture and implications. He puts it this way:

Asking me – as people often do – whether I’m an inclusivist or a universalist is like asking a vegetarian if she prefers steak, pork or venison. The question that yields these answers as options is a question I have no taste for asking.

Frankly I thought this book would really annoy me, but I thoroughly appreciated it. I found it to be the most Biblically responsible work that McLaren has done to date, though you’ll certainly read otherwise elsewhere. It is worth noting, however, that our deep affiliation with the current doctrine of hell should and must be considered against the Biblical texts themselves.

McLaren will be vilified by the same folks who have vilified him in the past. Some will point out errors in his thinking, over- and under-emphasized points, and I find myself disagreeing with several of the statements and implications that his characters make. But the overall goal is well done.

McLaren isn’t proposing a new doctrine of hell; he’s simply suggesting that we begin that process.

The book isn’t for everybody, but it’s certainly helpful for many. Myself included.