Kate and Brian McLaren

So recently talking to my ex I realized how much her and Brian McLaren are alike...Not identical for sure but very similar.

The way they talk and "converse" or "post". My ex was born to be emergent. She has no personal centrality of truth, has mentioned in the past on numerous occasions how she doesn't believe in a literal hell or believe in scripture as "correctly interpreted" but sides with deconstructionism. She embraces most postmodern precepts and its reaction to modernity with little reservation. All of these things I don't agree with. Does that make me better or superior - not remotely.

My ex and I think differently. She is a rocking person and will accomplish something I believe at some point significant for the kingdom.

To her and Brian's (def not to be confused of me) credit they are very Christ like in social issues namely the poor and the oppressed. But that is the only doctrine they seem to stand on.

The controversial, offensive and definitive-truth-Christ, is absent in their paradigm. The mentality of Jesus being harsh or telling somone that they are going to hell is either omitted from their Bible or inconsequential to them. Calling them dogs, mocking them (yes, Jesus used sarcasm) would never come from the pulpit of Brian McLaren, yet Kate is a pretty clever wielder of sarcasm.

Now my ex I think would get around this by saying that Christ relates in a 'more hippy" way to her than I. Well If there is a Christian standard outside of the Bible I am jealous that she has discovered it and not I. People love to justify thinking and the judgments that they make even when they clearly contradict the Bible.

I am a liberal when it comes to love and people and conservative when it comes to the Bible and its doctrine being the final authority on faith and practice for my life.

I love to live in the tension because my God is bigger than ideologies. I see him more clearly when I stop trying to align with segmented streams of thought and read the Bible and live it for what it teaches.

I am not making an active attempt to be a rebel or seeking to conform.

That being said when those around me McLaren or my ex or Pagitt or whoever refuses to follow all or accept all of Jesus' teachings AND call themselves BIBLE BELIEVING CHRISTIANS then THEY self-label themselves heretics.

It is very difficult for me to embrace some of God's very offensive teachings in the Bible such as God hating Esau from before he was born or letting lepers die or Lazarus die, but I must accept it as truth through faith or the Bible loses credibility and we are put as believers in the midst of an argument of subjective beliefs for which we have no standard.