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Generous Orthodoxy
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$ 11.09
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19102 |
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Item Description...
Overview
Argues for a radical, Christ-centered orthodoxy of faith and practice in a missional, generous spirit to stimulate lively interest and global conversation among thoughtful Christians from all traditions. Original. 15,000 first printing.
Publishers Description
Why I am a missional, evangelical, post/protestant, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, biblical, charismatic/contemplative, fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, catholic, green, incarnational, depressed- yet hopeful, emergent, unfinished Christian. A confession and manifesto from a senior leader in the emerging church movement. A Generous Orthodoxycalls for a radical, Christ-centered orthodoxy of faith and practice in a missional, generous spirit. Brian McLaren argues for a post-liberal, post-conservative, post-protestant convergence, which will stimulate lively interest and global conversation among thoughtful Christians from all traditions.In a sweeping exploration of belief, author Brian McLaren takes us across the landscape of faith, envisioning an orthodoxy that aims for Jesus, is driven by love, and is defined by missional intent. A Generous Orthodoxy rediscovers the mysterious and compelling ways that Jesus can be embraced across the entire Christian horizon. Rather than establishing what is and is not 'orthodox, ' McLaren walks through the many traditions of faith, bringing to the center a way of life that draws us closer to Christ and to each other. Whether you find yourself inside, outside, or somewhere on the fringe of Christianity, A Generous Orthodoxy draws you toward a way of living that looks beyond the 'us/them' paradigm to the blessed and ancient paradox of 'we.'Also available on abridged audio CD, read by the author.
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Item Specifications...
Pages 348
Dimensions: Length: 1" Width: 5.5" Height: 8"
Weight: 0.85 lbs.
Binding Softcover
Release Date Feb 1, 2006
Publisher Zondervan Publishing
ISBN 0310258030
EAN 9780310258032
UPC 025986258030
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Availability 45 units.
Availability accurate as of May 26, 2012 04:21.
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Reviews - What do our customers think?
 | Good for everyone Mar 29, 2007 |
| a Generous Orthodoxy is generous indeed. This book is a great selection for those who would like to learn about a spiritual journey through someone else's breadth of experience. The book is rather confessional, and witty to offset the serious strain throughout. I think this book is a wonderful subject for any Bible study or book club...much to ponder and much to uncover. The one thing the book tries to do is welcome everyone back to the table, grumbling or not, to partake of the bread of life in communion with one another. Radical and refreshing. | | |  | A Generous Orthodoxy - B.D. McLaren Jan 24, 2007 |
| We are using this as a group study, and find McLaren's work a great discussion starter. His open style and challenging ideas have made for an intriguing look at the future of the church in the 21st century. | | | | A Good Collection of Talking Points Jan 14, 2007 |
I have to admit that I'm something of a "Johnny-come-lately" to this book. I'd been avoiding it for a while because of the firestorm of controversy it set off when first published even though I was interested in considering McLaren's ideas. Finally, just before Christmas I got the new edition of the book and read it slowly, a chapter at a time, building in time to consider what McLaren had said. Now that I've finished the book I have to say that I really liked it but not for the reasons you might think.
The book, at least to me, is a collection of talking points that begin with McLaren's perspective on a dozen or so positions of interest within both the emerging conversation and the larger body of Christianity. This is not a set of didactic propositions that the author says you have to accept. With this in mind I found that each chapter brought forth points and positions that challenged me to enter into a inner dialogue with the material in the book.
For me, the section on McLaren's different views of Jesus was, in some ways, similar to my own except that McLaren has taken a lot more time to think about the effect that each consideration of the ministry of Christ has had on his faith. The most enlightening thing about this early section of the book was the idea of perichoresis. Another is the idea of thinking of our planet and it's environment as a co-created entity more like "Sister Earth" rather than as a part of a broken, fallen creation or as some deified "Mother Earth".
To me the strength of this book is in it's ability to stimulate the exploration of one's faith. Those unwilling or unable to enter into such a dialogue with the author's ideas will likely find the book somewhat offensive and deeply confusing. Those who are willing to do so will find much they agree with, much they will disagree with and much they may not have even considered before. To be honest, as one who leads an interdenominational campus ministry, I find a lot here that would be great for college students to read and discuss critically. As a college professor, this is the sort of book I love to use in my classes to get my students to do more than just accept information as fact.
The one drawback I saw was that I felt the book got a little too preachy near the end. I got the impression that the in first 2/3's of the book, McLaren had really worked through any animus he had about the topics and could be generous about differing ideas but once we reached the last couple of talking points we had gotten the places and ideas where McLaren still felt very passionately about certain issues and his generosity was a good bit thinner. This doesn't affect the main strength of the book but it did make reading his views more difficult.
My only other concern about the book is not with the book itself but with how it may be perceived. Even with the author's repeated pleas to not take this book for more than what it is, I fear that it will be used as some sort of basis for an emergent theology rather than a personal expression of one individual's faith. McLaren clearly states that this is not what the book is written to be and that it should not be used for such purposes. For those seeking more solid theology, McLaren provides numerous footnotes to help the reader find such works.
To me, this book does what any good piece of writing should do: not tell me what to think but rather give me some well-articulated ideas and challenge me to engage them. In this regard, I found "A Generous Orthodoxy" a wonderful book and would recommend it to anyone seeking writing to help them on their way. For those seeking to be told exactly what to believe and why, it would be best to heed McLaren's warnings at the beginning of the book and search elsewhere; this really isn't the book for you. | | | | Beautiful, but potentially dangerous as well Jan 5, 2007 |
McLaren's work here is highly credible. Basically, he takes all sorts of different strands of Christian doctrines, Protestant denominations, and different "popular" issues (environmental stewardship, for example) and states his views on each's strengths and weaknesses.
While all I do not agree with everything McLaren writes, although much of it is very appealing to me, I highly enjoyed this book because he was eager to state that he did not have everything figured out and, could quite possibly, be wrong on a number of his points. McLaren is a breath fresh air to me, as a 19-year-old Christian raised in an American Baptist Church, because he does not judge other Christians or people subscribing to a different religion: he is fully aware that human beings cannot put God in a box, and to say we have Him all figured out puts us in God's place. As another one of my favorite modern Christian thinkers, Rob Bell, states "God has spoken and the rest is just commentary".
New Christians or non-Christians need to be very wary of McLaren and other emergent figures, however. People do not have to be perfect or have God "all figured out" to embrace and become a part of Christianity, but there has to be some striving to draw closer to God, which involves drawing away from things that are not reflecting of God - whether this be jealousy, greed, lust, hatred, you name it. McLaren's book is aimed at Christians who are building on an established foundation. Someone who is not already a believer or a follower of Jesus may misinterpret his writing to mean that all faiths are the same, truth is relative, etc. McLaren outright condemns this line of thinking somewhere in the last third of the book, I can't remember exactly where because the book isn't right in front of me, but that does not mean some people could stretch his logic.
It's important to remember that all human beings writing any sort of Christian literature are going to make mistakes. Humans are not God, they are not perfect, therefore some strains of thought they put on paper or express verbally are going to be mistaken. It is vital to take a book like this, digest it, and read it critically. Take what is good, sound and apply it to your life. Put the rest on the back burner. | | |  | A Perplexing Generosity from an Ecumenical/Sectarian Christian Dec 12, 2006 |
"A Generous Orthodoxy" is, to tell the truth, a bit of a puzzle. Brian McLaren exmaines many of the "orthodoxies" currently regnant in the Christian landscape, and gives us a run down of what he likes and dislikes about each of them, and what parts of them he thinks can be integrated into a more "generous" orthodoxy. After reading the book, I am not so sure that I agree that McLaren's orthodoxy is all that generous.
McLaren begins his book with an ironic introduction, saying, "You are about to begin an absurd and ridiculous book." One of the absurdities he warns us about is the juxtaposition of generosity and orthodoxy: "This book plays with those typical definitions [of orthodoxy and generosity] ... and expresses the naive hope that generosity and orthodoxy actually ... can and sould go together." But, McLaren says, this is the opposite of what many people expect: "For most people, orthodoxy means .... what *we* think as opposed to what *they* think." After examining several "orthodoxies" of the currentChristian landscape, McLaren gives his clearest answer, I think, to how the two can come together in one of his last chapters, "Why I am Emergent." He uses the analogy of the rings of a growing tree: "Each ring represents not a replacement of the previous rings, not a rejection of them, but an embracing of them, ... an inclusion of them into something bigger." I think this does sum up how he sees his own emergent orthodoxy, but I can't see it the same way.
A few examples: In his chapter, "Why I am evangelical", he says he doesn't "understand so much anymore" the Evangelical movement, and takes great pains to classify himself as an "evangelical", not an "Evangelical". He doesn't like the right-wing politics of the movement. In other chapters, he implicitly criticizes Evangelicals for being too inward looking (which is a little odd, in view of his distate toward thier political involvement). He doesn't particularly care for the doctrine of hell or the judicial model of Jesus's atonement for our sins, doctrines that most evangelicals consider essential to being Biblically faithful. What he does like about evangelicals, and what he thinks can be carried into his more generous orthodoxy is their passion. But this is a problem for Evangelicals, because Evangelicals aren't particularly passionate about their passion. They tend to be passionate about God, about their theology which they think "describes" God, and about reaching the world with the message that Jesus has redeemed us from our sins. An Evangelical is likely to hear McLaren saying, "Come on in, but leave your heart at the door, please." SO McLaren thinks he is being generous, but how generous does he seem to the evangelical who is the supposed recipient of his generosity?
Take Calvinism for another example. In the interests of space, I'm going to be a little unfair and just point out the issue one issue that I think will most annoy Calvinists: McLaren actually likes the "TULIP" acronym. He thinks it can be integrated into his more generous orthodoxy. The problem is that he wants to change what all the letters stand for. "L" for example, "Limited Atonement", has been defended by Calvinists for generations, and they have taken no end of grief over it. But McLaren wants to change it to "Limitless Reconciliation." McLaren seems to think he is generous because he is willing to give the Calvinists their acronym, as long as they are willing to modify the ideas, or at least the emphases, of their theology. How generous does this seem to a Calvinist?
What is really new with McLaren's "generosity"? Yes, he is willing to say that he sees good things in other "orthodoxies". Well, OK, but haven't all "orthodoxies" that are Christian in any sense of the word always had important points of commonality? And haven't they always had their own distinctives? And haven't they had their points of contention with each other? And doesn't McLaren's orthodoxy bring with it its own new points of contention?
It almost seems that McLaren is dying to say what he can't: "The emergent orthodoxy is better than other orthodoxies because other orthodoxies claim to be better than other orthodoxies but the emergent orthodoxy doesn't." Well, I may have put things a little extreme there. Nevertheless, it seems that McLaren has set himself the task of walking a tightrope: If he falls off of one side, he has to say that he is proposing an orthodoxy that is simply better than the other available contemporary alternatives, and then can't fault the other orthodoxies for saying the exact same thing about themselves. But if he falls off on the other side, then he can't claim any special position for his orthodoxy, and then he can't give any reason compeling reason for the reader to embrace emergent orthodxy instead of any other.
There's really no way around it: McLaren's "generous orthodoxy" cannot be seen merely a call to open mindedness. It has its own distinctives -- left of center, evironmentally informed politics, a de-emphasis on the doctrine of hell, a model of Christ's work on the cross that dosen't talk too much about substitutional atonement or "satisfying God's justice" as it is often put, and several other things -- that simply exclude Christians who can't accept them. McLaren, to be fair, is actually aware of this problem and discusses it briefly in his opening ironic introduction. But, honestly, to misquote scripture, an ironic self awareness covers very few sins.
The tree ring analogy is really not ultimately of much help here. Even if McLaren's emergent theology is the latest ring on the ecclesiastical tree, either he has to say it is *the* latest ring -- the normative orthodoxy that properly includes and "upgrades" the ones that have come before. Or else he has to say it is not, that there are other alternatives. But them he shouldn't excoriate (Yes, I do think that is the appropriate word.) evangelicalism, Calvinism, Catholicism, and so forth. The tree ring analogy brings me to one other problem with the book that I will mention only briefly: McLaren seems to think that emergent orthodoxy is "the tree ring" for the post-modern age in which we live. (I think he would probably try to say that, no, he tries to stay open minded about that, but, that sends us back to the problems I have mentioned above.) The fundamental problem here is that he is just simply assuming without argument that "modernism" has passed and we are now in the "post-modern" age and it's time to retro-fit our ideas to this new reality. I will assert without argument that, though I know this is what we are all "supposed" to believe, I find it all, well, a bit silly.
I will actually give "A Generous Orthodoxy" three stars. I find many of McLaren's proposals confusing, and where I think I understand him I generally disagree with him. But the fact is that alot of us who have cut our teeth in the evangelical movement over the years have become genuinely and justifiably disaffected with it. And if evangelicalism is to remain a force in the church for another generation, I think it will have to address many of the complaints the McLaren raises. I don't see where McLren gives many good answers, but he does raise questions that we have ignored for too long.
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