I honestly don't see how some of this guy's opinions fly with the actual text of scripture. It flat-out contradics several bits of very clearly stated dogma in the New testament itself, and conflicts with the Old Testament god as well.
Some of what he's saying rings true:
quote:
"God revealed in Christ crucified shows us a vision of God that identifies with the victim rather than the perpetrator, identifies with the one suffering rather than the one inflicting suffering," he says.
McLaren says modern evangelicalism underplays that Jesus who spent most of his time with the poor, the sick and the sinners saved his wrath primarily for hard-core religious leaders.
That certainly meshes with Jesus words in the Bible. Jesus' primary human adversaries were the Pharisees, the established Jewish religious leaders, because his teachings ran afoul of their rules. He very obviously identified more with "victims," the weak, the poor, the sick..."What you do to the least of these, you do to me," and all that. It would certainly be nice if more of the evangelicals would remember those bits.
But it's very clear that only those who believe in Jesus as the Messiah get to go to Heaven. You can't accept the Bible (at least the modern canon) as authoritative on the matter of salvation and simultaneously believe that anyone is going to Heaven without believing in Jesus.
The only way to make all of that work would be to take the Bible as a fallible work written by men, one that is useful as a teaching aid for morality, but that not every word of the text is literally true. A liberal Christian who already takes the more fanciful bits (Genesis, Exodus, etc) as metaphor (or at least highly modified and exaggerated myth
based on vaguely similar historical fact) and not literal historical truth might be able to get away with this.
Anyone who takes the Bible as even remotely literally true with not like this one bit. The Gospels specifically state that none will enter the Kingdom of God except through Jesus. That's hard to take as other than "Only Christians may enter."
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