The creator Brian McLaren has had a confused upbringing. According to his latest book, Life After Doom, he “had been taught that the aim and focus of Christianity was to assist people find yourself in place after they die”. If only he had been brought up a Presbyterian and learned that our “chief purpose is to glorify God and luxuriate in him eternally”, then he could have saved himself plenty of pain, and avoided the road he has taken in his recent book. And he would have spared us the teaching of his recent syncretistic, pagan religion.
McLaren admits that his latest book is barely for individuals who have already been converted to his recent religion – the cult of climate catastrophism. “Life After Doom shouldn’t be for you if you happen to think that problems like climate change, ecological overshoot, economic inequality, racial injustice and spiritual corruption are nothing but a hoax.” Personally, I don’t have any problem with believing in human sinfulness in these areas – and in lots of others. But Brian takes a shallow, limited view – it is absolutely the bad news without the Good News.
The doctrines of the brand new religion are quite explicit. Original sin shouldn’t be within the Bible; Heaven and Hell weren’t taught within the Old Testament. Whereas we used to live as if the world wouldn’t end, now we’re able where it’s going to. “The world that we so love is ending, dying, being murdered by ignorance, being killed for convenience and profit.”
This is all of the fault of evil capitalists, racists and climate change deniers.
“We have been inducted into a spiritual money cult, a civilisational death cult; we have now evolved into Homo theocapitus, individuals who worship the large bronze bull of Wall Street along with his shiny, pendulous testicles.”
Western civilisation is doomed – and so it must be: “To put it bluntly, our civilisation is colonialism, and colonialism is our civilisation. Our civilisation is supremacy (racial, religious, ideological, national or human), and supremacy is our civilisation. Capitalism, white supremacy, authoritarianism, and above all climate change are the key problems facing us.”
All who’re truly enlightened know that we’re in serious trouble. If you might be reading his book, you might be already a part of this enlightened community. However, you might need assistance and Brian offers you not Christ, but mental health professionals from the Climate Psychology Alliance.
But there may be hope. As indicated by a 14 per cent increase in electrical cars and batteries which might be 90 per cent cheaper. The biggest hope is “the resilience of each humanity and nature”.
And there may be hope in indigenous people, who before western civilisation got here along, lived in perfect bliss, in harmony with nature and one another. Did you recognize that when Jesus said that the meek will inherit the earth, he meant the indigenous people? We don’t need a private God. God is only a personification of indigenous stories about creation.
As for the Bible, you’ve got all been reading it wrongly. According to McLaren it’s “the collective diary of an indigenous individuals who saw what the coloniser mindset was doing to humanity, to the Earth and to her creatures.” Adam and Eve were just symbolic of 1 species and despite what we’re told in Genesis 1 and a couple of, there may be nothing special about them – God breathed his spirit into every species. The reason for the virgin birth is in order that Jesus may very well be born other than the “violent patriarchy of Earthly civilisation”.
If you think that this whole way of reading the Bible is ridiculous, then you’ll want to stop reading the Bible – until you’ll be able to read it through the anti-capitalist, climate catastrophist, CRT lenses of American progressivism. You have to take heed to “indigenous, womanist, Black, liberation, ecofeminist and queer theologians and biblical scholars”, with a view to have the ability to know the Bible properly.
And you furthermore mght have to take seriously apocalyptic novels and films − works that imagine the tip of the world. Forget the Bible – go to Planet of the Apes, The Road, Don’t Look Up, and other works of apocalyptic fiction to get up complacent people. The capitalist Hollywood is the prophetic voice of today.
But Brian’s ‘excellent news’ shouldn’t be finished yet. He questions whether it could be thing if there have been such a disaster that humans were wiped from the earth? We have to learn to see death pretty much as good – it’s “a final act of generosity” – giving up your space and resources for others. No life everlasting here. Just an everlasting planet. “Dear Sister Death. She shouldn’t be a failure or flaw within the universe. She is a feature of it, a part of the sweetness that can survive so long as this universe itself.”
Why didn’t Jesus see this on the grave of Lazarus? Why did he weep with rage within the presence of Sister Death? Didn’t he recognise her beauty? As for Paul telling the Corinthians that death was the last enemy (1 Corinthians 15), he clearly lacked the indigenous insight of Brian!
Elsewhere, Brian declares that climate sceptics make his “skin crawl”. Everyone who disagrees with him is guilty of propagating or believing ‘misinformation’. If only we could invite the wisdom of indigenous people, the wisdom of St Francis and St Clare and the Buddha and Jesus, the wisdom of climate scientists and ecologists and spiritual visionaries from all faiths into our hearts.
When Jesus said he was ‘the sunshine of the world’ he meant “you’ll want to be your individual light”. And after all, follow the sunshine from Brian’s book. He even invites you to evangelise some sermons and lectures from the book – in addition to give attention to what comes from your individual heart. That is what the church will want, not the Word of God, not the conviction of the Spirit. Not the teaching of Christ. Just Life After Doom and your inner light.
It is gloomy enough to see a former Christian preacher go down this pagan route. But I discovered it even sadder to listen to Brian being interviewed on a UK Christian programme where all of his anti- Gospel statements were left unchallenged.
As well as repeating many of the heresies within the book, he also declared that those that didn’t agree with him did so because they were enslaved to the tradition that they had inherited, and didn’t really need to face reality.
What astonished me was that the interviewer stated that Brian’s book was not abandoning the Gospel or being syncretistic. Even with probably the most generous, post-modern interpretation of Life After Doom, it’s inconceivable to come back to that conclusion. The same interviewer stated that “within the UK you’ll be able to be evangelical and hold to liberal theology without being handed over to Satan”. I suppose each Paul and Jesus got it mistaken!
The interview appeared to work on the presupposition that the selection was between activism or saying the Sinner’s Prayer. Like much of McLaren’s dishonest caricature of evangelicalism, it’s a false dichotomy. Believing the evangel makes you more of an activist. The more heavenly minded you might be, the more earthly use you might be. On the opposite hand, if you happen to buy into McLaren’s syncretistic mixture of Christianity, paganism, climate catastrophism, anti-capitalism, indigenous spirituality, and Woke progressivism, you’ll find yourself with the Doom. No hope. No Christ. No Life. Only the cult of Death.
I prefer the actual Gospel – which tells us that if we come to Christ, we get life everlasting, joy, hope, peace, forgiveness, love and wonder. You get a God who’s on top of things. You will get a renewed heavens and earth. I do know which ‘gospel’ I prefer!
David Robertson is the minister of Scots Kirk Presbyterian Church in Newcastle, New South Wales. He blogs at The Wee Flea.
