Marcus speaks on a panel at Harvard Divinity School with Brian Mclaren an authority on postmodern thought and evangelicalism. Mclaren is the author of “A New Kind of Christian” 2001. Also on the panel is Diana Butler Bass is an expert in American Religion who holds her PhD in religious studies and is the author of “Christianity For The Rest of Us” 2006.
A New Emerging Christianity
Marcus speaks between minutes 29 and 45 in this video.
Marcus’s central theme is: a new form of Christianity is emerging in our time. A new way of being Christian is emerging in mainline denominations and also in a stream of evangelical denominations well represented by Brian Mclaren. This new way of being Christian is strong enough that it has sparked resistance and counter movements withing those mainline denominations. The tide seems to be moving in the direction of a more progressive Christianity within the mainline denominations.
- This new form of Christianity is more about centering in God than it is about believing, which was historically the main concern.
- It is more about our life in this world than the afterlife. Salvation is something for this life, not about determining one’s final resting place in the afterlife.
- It is more about a way or path of transformation than it is about sin, guilt or forgiveness. There is less focus on liturgies that contain a confession of sin and a request for forgiveness. Marcus sees this as a reduction of the human condition.
- It is more about the religious meaning of language than it is about the literal factual meaning of language. This new Christianity is moving beyond the literalism of both fundamentalism and mainline denominations. Literalism is believing that everything in the Bible is literally and factually true. The soft literalism of mainline denominations being that some things may not be true but that the big things are still factual. Literalism may have caused more people to leave the church than any other single factor.
- This emerging form of Christianity tends to be politically progressive rather than politically conservative or politically indifferent. Part of this is the recapturing the passion of the political vision another part is the shattering of some conventional Christian patterns through the feminist movement, through the movement for racial equality, through the movement against hetero-normativity. This political progressivity is also due to a disenchantment with American imperial policy and domestic economic policy whereas the story of the Bible is distinctly anti-imperialism.
Marcus closes by pondering what to call this new form of Christianity. Liberal Christianity is difficult because the word liberal has been used and politicized quite widely, so Progressive Christianity might be a better more widely used choice. Marcus is also tempted to call it Neo-traditional Christianity because it is both new and it is traditional in that it is a recovery of what is most central to being Christian before Christianity’s collision with modernity around 400 years ago. It is an exciting time to be a Christian and Marcus is grateful to be here for it.