Interview with Brian McLaren

Somewhere in his itinerary between speaking in Africa and touring England, Brian McLaren found time to sit down and answer an email interview from me. This was made all the more remarkable considering he admitted in his new book how much he detested having to answer emails all the time (see page 187). I was honored to give him yet another opportunity to employ the ancient spiritual practices to get through his inbox, if just for one more day. :)

You can read the entire interview here.

But considering how much I send my own site traffic to Jesus Manifesto, I thought I would give the readers of Recliner Ramblings something of their own from the interview. In the midst of writing up my questions, it struck me: I can ask Brian McLaren anything I want. ANYTHING! Of course he didn't have to respond, but maybe he would. So I took the opportunity to ask Brian about his connection to the Holiness Movement (something he briefly mentions in Finding Our Way Again). So many people in my own denomination are nervous about McLaren's beliefs and teachings and I have found hardly anyone willing to admit when he writes something that actually sounds a lot like John Wesley and the movement Welsey helped spark (I mentioned in my review how close McLaren comes to Wesley's view of the "means of grace.") So why not ask Brian straight up how the Holiness Movement has influenced him? Why not indeed...
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Q: As a member of the Wesleyan Church, could you tell me (and my skeptical holiness brothers and sisters) more about how the Holiness Movement has shaped your own spiritual quest? (page 53) Do you see any theological or philosophical connection points between the Holiness Movement and the emerging conversation?

This is a really big question, and really important. To be brief, let me address both questions with three responses.

First, Methodism reflected, among other things, a dissatisfaction two kinds of Protestantism. First there was a doctrinaire Protestantism that would fight, defame, exclude and even kill for so-called Orthodoxy, but didn’t produce true personal and social holiness. And second was a comfortable, complacent, institutional, apathetic, lukewarm institutionalism that betrayed Jesus in equally distasteful ways. Wesley and others sought methods by which followers of Christ could actually become more Christ-like. They knew that simply assenting to the right doctrines didn’t necessarily produce right relationships with God, self, others, enemies, and creation, and so they sought to create a widely-doable method for pursuing holiness and wholeness. I think whatever this emerging thing today is, it is a desire for Christians to become more like Jesus, and for what passes for Christianity to become less of an embarrassment to its presumed founder.

Second, the Holiness Movement in its deepest forms has asserted that holiness is always personal, but it is never merely personal. Holiness is always communal or social – it’s pursued in band, class, society, church, nation, and world. Similarly, this emerging phenomenon refuses to reduce the way of Jesus to a private lifestyle, no matter how pious. We’ve got to live the way of Jesus in relation to our world’s greatest crises today – which, as I explained in Everything Must Change, include the growing gap between rich and poor, the dramatic increase in dangerous weapons and violence, and our exploitation of God’s beautiful creation.

Third, the Holiness Movement is a religion of the heart. That doesn’t mean it’s an approach to faith that minimizes intellect – after all, Wesley was a quadrilateral guy more than a sola- guy – he saw the intellect as truly important. But he knew we needed emotional intelligence along with rational intelligence. He believed in an integrated humanity that integrated imagination, aesthetics, “affections” and “enthusiasm” with deep and rigorous thought.

There’s a lot more I could add – for example, Wesley apparently had a real interest in elements of the faith that Eastern Christians held but Western Christians had lost. And then there’s the theme of daring innovation and old-fashioned courage shown by the circuit riders and pioneer preachers. And then there are heroes like Phineas Bresee, founder of the Nazarenes, who refused to let the way of Jesus become a middle class set of “family values” that shut off the church from the desperate poor in the inner city. And then there’s the refusal to submit to a deterministic view of God and the Bible.