A "New" Kind of Christianity

Firstly, I apologize for my lack of updates. I've been wrestling with a lot of things in my life, including things like proper exegetical technique and prayer - don't worry, I believe I am being guided well in these areas.

This morning, I met Tony Mlynarek (my college pastor and mentor) and Roseanne Sension (a Chemistry professor here at UofM) to discuss Brian McLaren's "A New Kind of Christianity."  Because of my previous class schedules and travel arrangements, I've never actually been able to attend one of these book discussions before, so I joined about halfway through the book.

I'd say that missing the first part of the book definitely affected my analysis of the chapters on Jesus, but reading a book like this, especially in the company of two intellectual heavyweights, has raised my value of critical reading tenfold.  It's not an issue of dismissing McLaren's book as "wrong," or buying in to his ideas, but it is a full understanding of the questions that he is answering and questioning the solutions he is presenting.  For example, in studying McLaren's three-fold Jewish solution to the (quite flawed) Greco-Roman six-line narrative that he presented earlier in the book, we decided that Jesus cannot be limited to simply prophet, priest, and King, as McLaren leads us to believe, but that Jesus must also be a servant and the Messiah, as prophesied in Isaiah.

Another wonderful trinket of information: before beginning our discussion, Roseanne showed us a chapter in Scot McKnight's "The Blue Parakeet" where McKnight discovered how, in a simple survey, many people's understanding of who Jesus is correlates very closely to who they think they themselves are.  In other words, you are likely to believe that Jesus has many of the same characteristics and personality traits as you do.  For example, Mark Driscoll believes Jesus has to be a tough guy, and Billy Graham thought that Jesus had to be very athletic. Kinda like the dinner-table prayer scene in Will Ferrell's "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby," strangely.