Book Review: The Secret Message of Jesus

I recently read Brian McLaren’s bold and challenging book: The Secret Message of Jesus, which was generously provided to me by the publisher in order that I might write about it on this blog.

Let’s start with points of agreement. We can affirm much of “the secret message” that McLaren “recovers” in this book. Okay… forget the hyped-up title for a moment (the title sounds more like something from the Gnostic Gospels, or a new Da Vinci Code). If you can get past the McLaren’s implicit claim to be just now, after 2000 years, recovering the original message of Jesus, you might just find a lot to agree with.

I appreciate the emphasis McLaren puts on the Kingdom of God as a central component to the gospel. This is missing in many evangelical presentations of the gospel, and its omission is glaring once we read the Gospels in their original context. McLaren is right to bring us back to the idea of God’s reign and Christ’s lordship as being central to the gospel.

I also affirm the aspects of the gospel that transform life on earth here and now. McLaren does a terrific job of reminding us that Christians should be working to see life here and now look more and more like life in the new heavens and new earth. He challenges us out of complacency to begin working to bring that future into the present. He rightly corrects several mechanistic views of “heaven” and shows how the biblical portrait of God’s presence is so much greater than what we have settled for.

But it’s here that McLaren swings the pendulum too far… way too far. McLaren’s passion for seeing the Kingdom at hand, in the here and now, leaves hardly any hope for the hereafter. You won’t find much here about hell or judgment or God’s wrath. Instead, you will find an agenda for social action to make our world a better place. Not to say that this advice is useless, but McLaren’s social agenda divorced from personal conversion through faith in Christ as the means of salvation leads us to the same cliff as last century’s social gospel liberalism.

McLaren frowns on the evangelistic mentality that focuses on ”saving souls from hell” because it conflicts with his embrace of inclusivism, which oozes out of this book at every point. Notice how many times he mentions Jesus’ “inclusiveness.” Not to say that he is altogether wrong when he speaks of Jesus’ building bridges to outsiders. Evangelicals can too easily build walls between us and the people we’re called to minister to. And in this sense, our exclusivist attitude is an affront to a loving God.

But if inclusiveness means embracing and accepting anyone (including Muslims, Hindus, and Jews) as part of God’s Kingdom, we are far from the biblical picture that demands allegiance to the King (Jesus).

McLaren is delightfully counter-cultural when it comes to our capitalistic, consumerist, Western-soaked mindset. He shows how our worldviews fall short of the biblical picture. That is why it is so frustrating to watch him then capitulate so quickly to postmodern culture by refusing to preach Jesus as the world’s True Lord and the only way to God. Where’s the counter-cultural claim that Jesus is Lord and that His lordship is exclusive? Where’s the counter-cultural biblical teaching on human sexuality? McLaren is counter-cultural in some ways and woefully culture-embracing in others.

Also troubling, he redefines repentance as “discovering you may be wrong.” Is that it?

I thoroughly enjoyed much of McLaren’s book, but I kept wanting him to say more, to be bolder in confronting our pluralistic, postmodern worldviews, not just the comfortable evangelical ghetto we inhabit.

That brings me to my final critique. The church and her role in salvation history is completely missing in this book. McLaren rightly condemns church abuses in the past and how Jesus’ followers have botched His message. But McLaren never comes around to speak of the importance of the local church for God’s Kingdom.  McLaren advocates small group discussions of his book. But nowhere does he direct his readers to the broken, fallen, but nevertheless divinely commissioned followers of Christ found in churches all across the world.

I come away from this book saddened. Does theology have to be “either-or” all the time? Is there anyone who can effectively bring together the present implications of Jesus’ message without neglecting its future implications? Is there anyone who can counter both evangelical culture’s love affair with modernist assumptions and our world’s blind leap into postmodernism’s arms?

written by Trevin Wax  © 2007 Kingdom People blog