About ten years ago now, I was impressed by a “seeker-sensitive” worship service at Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago. That morning’s service featured an “open mic” question and answer opportunity for those gathered to direct queries at a panel of pastors and church leaders. I will never forget being surprised that the questions were not at all representative of the kind of stereotype many had of the congregants there at Willow Creek. They were not asking about superficial “life principles,” but instead were asking real and pressing questions about theology and discipleship.
One question, particularly, weighed on my mind. I don’t know if the questioner was a believer or a seeker, but she asked about the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden. “If God knew that Eve would be deceived,” she asked, “then why did he let the Serpent into the Garden?” The panelists responded with an appeal to the free will of Adam and Eve and God’s refusal to coerce them into obedience.
The woman clarified her question to make clear that she wasn’t questioning the free will of Adam and Eve. Why though, she wanted to know, did God allow the snake to go in to the Garden, if God knew what would result? I remember thinking that her question was perceptive and sophisticated. After all, it would not violate the man and the woman’s freedom for God to place a “force field” around the Garden, preventing the old Dragon from ever offering them the tree. Isn’t that what we pray: “Lead us not into temptation; deliver us from the Evil One”?
I thought about that lady, and her question, this week. Willow Creek hosted a conference on youth ministry, and featured author Brian McLaren as a speaker. At the conference, McLaren called on his hearers to rethink some doctrines of the faith, to decrease their focus on eternity in favor of social justice in the here and now.
First of all, we are now well past the time when Christians can claim ignorance of the agenda of Brian McLaren. He has made repeatedly clear his hostility to the most basic aspects of the gospel message. McLaren’s comments at Willow Creek are not themselves surprising. What is surprising is that a Christian conference, especially one growing out of a movement designed to reach “seekers” for Christ, would invite him to speak.
When McLaren questions the existence of hell and the hope of the Second Coming, he is not a “new kind of Christian.” Such things are neither new nor Christian. They are instead a repetition of the voice of a snake in a long-ago Garden: “Has God said?” and “You shall not surely die.” It is tragic that one of the world’s most renowned evangelical churches would highlight this kind of Serpent-sensitive worship.
Second, McLaren’s comments about the biblical doctrines of hell and the Second Coming leading to violence and domination are particularly unfortunate, indeed absurd. It is these doctrines, in fact, that actually keep Christians away from such violence and domination.
When the apostle Peter takes up the sword to defend Jesus, he is rebuked precisely because Jesus says he can call “more than twelve legions of angels” to defend him (Matt 26:53), but his time is not yet. The apostle Paul tells us not to avenge ourselves. Why? Because, he writes, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord” (Rom 12:18-20).
As for domination, the Bible tells us not to dominate one another, precisely because “we will all stand before the judgment seat of God” (Rom 12:10).
When a Christian understands that he does not fight for his own honor, but that justice will be done by God, either through union with Christ and his cross or at the judgment itself, the Christian is freed then to trust God, not his sword or his gun or his fists or his tongue. It is McLaren’s vision of a life that consists only of the justice achieved in this era that leads to violence and Darwinian struggle to see that a pound of flesh is exacted.
It is the kind of world that McLaren envisions, without a messianic hope of a second coming, that leads to the bloody utopian experiments we have seen throughout the twentieth-century. If human beings do not expect a Messiah in the skies, they will expect to elect one, or anoint one, or biochemically engineer one. And, do not be deceived, such pseudo-Messiahs always eventually have a sword.
Southern Baptist Ed Stetzer and others have demonstrated that “emerging church” is itself an awfully elastic term. It is probably too elastic, in fact, to put in the same category gospel-affirming pastors and churches right along with those, like McLaren, who repeat the message of long-discarded Protestant liberals on the evangelical conference circuit.
That was seen even at this meeting. Dan Kimball, pastor of Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, California, challenged McLaren’s call to lessen our emphasis on eternity and judgment. Dan Kimball’s comments were courageous and correct. An evangelicalism without the gospel is no advance for the church.
Brian McLaren is easy to see through by discerning eyes. But I wonder about that question from years ago, and I ask it myself. Now I have a theology that can answer (as much as we can answer) the question of God’s purposes in permitting the snake to enter the Garden. Even when we don’t understand such things, we know our God is always wise and his purposes always culminate in Christ.
What I don’t understand is Willow Creek. If you knew he was going to deceive, then why did you invite him in?
