Radical Emergent Theology: An Evangelical Response by Raymond C. Hundley Ph.D

Author:Raymond C. Hundley, Ph.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-64559-216-7
Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
Published: 2019-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

The dilemma of the liberationists should sound a warning bell for all theologians. Those who substitute any political, sociological, or ideological system for biblical exegesis as the foundation for doing Christian theology are in danger of absolutizing that system and minimizing the Word of God. That is true whether we are speaking of radical liberation theology and its slavery to Marxism or extreme American prosperity theology and its love for the amenities of capitalism. McLaren’s radical emergent theology, as we will see below, is so strongly affected by his initial acceptance of certain ideological and sociopolitical premises that he sometimes forces Scripture to support them and he often ignores entire blocks of biblical teaching that contradict them. The “echo” has not been silenced in his hermeneutic. It may be helpful to see how McLaren treats certain biblical doctrines to reveal the effects of his hermeneutical methods in action.

B. McLAREN’S DOCTRINAL STATEMENTS ABOUT THE THREE PERSONS OF THE TRINITY

1. God

In his 1999 work, Finding Faith, McLaren tackles the question of people’s false concepts of God. He gives his own answers to four pertinent questions about God:

“Is God Personal or Impersonal?”

“Is God Relational or Nonrelational?”

“Is God Masculine or Feminine or???”

“Is God Subtle or Obvious?”304

He concludes that God is personal, relational, neither masculine nor feminine, and subtle.305 Having established that doctrinal framework, McLaren summarizes his position:

Having said all this, maybe we’re ready to continue with our quest. No, nobody’s asking you to think of God as an old man with a white beard. All we’re saying in our pursuit of the monotheist path is that there is one God behind the universe, and this God must be amazing to have created all that exists—amazing, and relational—and thus worth “knowing” or experiencing.306

Again, for someone who purportedly is not trained to read Scripture for doctrine, he seems to be very adept at not only finding doctrine in Scripture, but communicating it clearly and authoritatively as well.

Continuing this theme of false and true concepts of God, McLaren declares war against the concepts of God that he refers to as “reptilian and mammalian.”307 That is, he opposes the view he attributes to many traditional Christians that God is a God of “anger, hostility, intolerance, separatism, extreme idealism, and prejudicial fear.”308 He suggests that modern traditional Christianity is “driving around with a loaded gun in its glove compartment”:

It’s driving around with a license to kill, and that license is its Bible, read uncritically. Along with its loaded gun and license to kill, it’s driving around with a sense of entitlement derived from a set of beliefs with a long, ugly, and largely unacknowledged history…. [In his message to some seminarians, McLaren shared] So if you haven’t figured out what you’re going to do with passages like Deuteronomy 7 and 1 Samuel 15 and Psalms 137:9, you still have some important work to do. If you haven’t grappled with these passages and others like them, your Bible is like a loaded gun and your theology is like a license to kill.

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