A Book You Don't Need

Here is a book readers of this blog will probably never read. In fact, its one you hardly need to waste time on. I read it simply because it represents what most of evangelicalism is reading. Its what most Christians think represents cutting edge truth. It demonstrates the sad state of “Christianity today.” When it finally appeared at my local “discount” bookstore, I paid the three bucks to read it. Like automobiles, I hardly ever buy “new!”

Brian McLaren’s book A New Kind of Christian: a Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey won a Christianity Today Award of Merit in 2002 and has found a wide and approving audience in “evangelical” circles.

McLaren is one of the most prominent leaders of the so-called emerging church, and represents the philosophy of that movement. He claims that truth is a shifting thing, exalts doubt as high as faith, and rejects the infallible inspiration of Scripture, the substitutionary atonement of Christ, and the eternal punishment of hell fire.


A New Kind of Christian presents theological liberalism in the guise of a wiser, kinder, and gentler type of Christianity called “Postmodern.” The semi-fictional account is about an evangelical pastor who has a crisis of faith and recounts his journey from a position of faith in the Bible as the absolute standard for truth and in which doctrine is either right or wrong, scriptural or unscriptural, to a pliable position in which “faith is more about a way of life than a system of belief, where being authentically good is more important than being doctrinally right” (from the back cover).

Gary E. Gilly hit the nail on the head in his review of A New Kind of Christian by observing: “More specifically, McLaren rejects absolute truth, authority, theology, objectivity, certainty and clarity. He embraces relativism, inclusivism, deconstructionism, stories (to replace truth), creative interpretation of Scripture, neo-orthodoxy, and tolerance.”


As the evangelical pastor in A New Kind of Christian begins his sad journey into theological liberalism (which he wants to call “postmodern”) he describes himself in these words: “I feel like a fundamentalist who’s losing his grip—whose fundamentals are cracking and fraying and falling apart and slipping through my fingers. It’s like I thought I was building my house on rock, but it turned out to be ice, and now global warming has hit, and the ice is melting and everything is crumbling” (p. 22).

Instead of opening his Bible and finding out what God has to say in His Word and re-orienting himself to the eternal Word of God, instead of confiding in a man of God who believes the Bible, this evangelical pastor turns, in his hour of doubt, to a clever unbeliever and is led into the deepest error.


This is exactly what is happening to men and women throughout the evangelical world, because they have been brainwashed not to separate from false doctrine, have been brainwashed to think that a “positive, non-judgmental” approach to Christianity is preferable to absolutism and separation, and as a consequence evangelicalism, over the past 50 years, has been infiltrated with every sort of heresy.

This is a dangerous book that ridicules a staunchly Biblical, fundamentalist position on every hand. It labels such a position as Phariseeism and likens it to medieval Roman Catholicism. In the very beginning of the book, the Postmodern guide to whom this evangelical pastor has turned, says: “I don’t dislike fundamentalists, taken individually—they tend to be pretty nice folks. Get them together in a group though, and I get nervous. I start to twitch and break out in a rash” (p. 9). That is the best thing the book has to say about those who hold a strict Biblical stance, but liberals and Romanists are depicted in a much more sympathetic light.


Though purporting to represent a more intellectual approach to Christianity, the book is filled with straw man arguments, shallow reasoning, and Scripture taken wildly out of context. But it won an Award of Merit from Christianity Today!

Marantha!