More McLaren -- On the Bible as Narrative

"The Bible is a story, and just because it recounts (by standards of accuracy acceptable to its original audience) what happened that doesn't mean it tells what should always happen or even what should have happened." (167, A Generous Orthodoxy)

Sometimes it's easy to see God in the Old Testament as doing some pretty scary things. But McLaren says "if God is going to enter into a relationship with people, then God has to work with them as they are in their individual and cultural moral development." (167)

He provides to good analogies that need to be considered before we write off the Hebrew God:

The first describes the origin of America -- land theft, broken treaties, ethnic cleansing, etc. And he asks the question whether God should forsake generations of Americans because of "the original American holocaust?... Wouldn't God's blessing of a nation so conceived imply an endorsement of the atrocities that were and are committed?" (168)

Now think about his second analogy for a minute:

"Consider our civilization today. Imagine (it's not hard) that a thousand years from now, in a world ravaged by side effects of the industrial revolution (global warming from fossil fuels, extinction of species, destruction of rain forests, pollution of water and air, nuclear contamination or catastrophe, etc.), our descendents look back on our era as the most destructive in human history. "How could God ever have blessed people who drove automobile, who heated their homes with energy derived from fossil fuels or nuclear energy, who through their taxes funded the creation of horrific weapons?" they'll ask. "Wasn't God's blessing of them a sign of approval of their destructive ways?" We would protest: But we didn't know! We didn't know how much damage we were doing. We were just trying to survive. It's how people lived in our day. And perhaps God would protest as well, "I didn't approve of all they did, but I loved them, and I wanted them to survive so that you could survive now, a thousand years later." (169)

My ever-wise brother-in-law, Andrew, said something in my May 20th post that somewhat links to what I'm talking about here:

"As far as "ideal" Christianity, I'm not sure "Christianity" as an ideal or an intellectual system is of any value at all. Apart from embodied and lived reality of the Church, Christianity is just another ideology among many. Christians have traditionally held after all that real truth is not an intellectual event or ethereal platonic ideal, but the person of Jesus--really, quite a profound notion."

McLaren says at the end of the chapter, "And it challenges us: to be truly biblical does not mean being preoccupied with some golden age in the ancient world and God's word to people back then. It means learning from the past to let God's story, God's will, and God's dream continue to come true in us and our children."

If you look at the Bible as narrative, you can see the grace (Jesus) aspect of God working the whole way through, blessing us in spite of ourselves, and trying to help us get to where we should be -- like Andrew said, not to some platonic ideal but to the living out of Jesus in this world.