Book Description
By celebrating strengths of many traditions in the church (and beyond), this book will seek to communicate a generous orthodoxy.

From the Back Cover
A confession and manifesto from a senior leader in the emerging church movement—A Generous Orthodoxy calls for a radical, Christ-centered orthodoxy of faith and practice in a missional, generous spirit. Brian McLaren argues for a post-liberal, post-conservative, post-protestant convergence, which will stimulate lively interest and global conversation among thoughtful Christians from all traditions. In a sweeping exploration of belief, author Brian McLaren takes us across the landscape of faith, envisioning an orthodoxy that aims for Jesus, is driven by love, and is defined by missional intent. A Generous Orthodoxy rediscovers the mysterious and compelling ways that Jesus can be embraced across the entire Christian horizon. Rather than establishing what is and is not "orthodox," McLaren walks through the many traditions of faith, bringing to the center a way of life that draws us closer to Christ and to each other. Whether you find yourself inside, outside, or somewhere on the fringe of Christianity, A Generous Orthodoxy draws you toward a way of living that looks beyond the "us/them" paradigm to the blessed and ancient paradox of "we."

About the Author
Brian D. McLaren (M.A. University of Maryland) is founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church, an innovative nondenominational church in the Baltimore-Washington region.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Generous Orthodoxy
Copyright © 2004 by Youth Specialties
Youth Specialties Books, 300 South Pierce Street, El Cajon, CA 92020, are published by
Zondervan, 5300 Patterson Avenue SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49530
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McLaren, Brian D., 1956-
A generous orthodoxy : why I am a missional, evangelical,
post/Protestant, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, biblical,
charismatic/contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist,
Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, incarnational,
depressed-yet-hopeful, emergent, unfinished Christian / by Brian
McLaren.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-310-25747-6 (hardcover)
1. Christianity--Essence, genius, nature. I. Title.
BT60.M37 2004
270.83--dc22
2004008614
Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible: New
International Version (North American Edition). Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International
Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan.
Some of the anecdotal illustrations in this book are true to life and are included with the
permission of the persons involved. All other illustrations are composites of real situations, and
any resemblance to people living or dead is coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or
any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the
publisher.
Web site addresses listed in this book were current at the time of publication. Please contact Youth
Specialties via e-mail (YS@YouthSpecialties.com) to report URLs that are no longer operational
and replacement URLs if available.
Editorial direction by Dave Urbanski
Art direction by Jay Howver
Editing by David Sanford
Proofreading by Kristi Robison & Janie Wilkerson
Cover design by Mark Arnold
Cover and jacket photography by Blair Anderson
Interior design by Holly Sharp
Interior photography by Ryan Sharp
Printed in the United States of America
02 03 04 05 06 07 / DC / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
I am a Christian because I have a sustained and sustaining confidence
in Jesus Christ. Ive lost and rediscovered that confidence a few
times, which is a long and messy story worth simplifying and
boiling down to manageable length in these first chapters.
I know my original attraction to Jesus came as a young
child. In my home and at Sunday school, I heard stories about
Jesus. I remember a childrens picture Bible that had a simple but
beautiful picture of Jesus, seated, in a blue and white robe, with
children of all races gathered around his knees. Some were leaning
on him. Some were seated at his feet. Some had their arms around
him. His arms were opened in an embrace that took them all in,
and his bearded face carried a gentle smile a boy could trust.
Looking back, I realize the illustration wasnt historically
accurate. It was influenced more by a popular Sunday school song
that I also loved (red and yellow, black and white, they are precious
in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world) than by
ancient Middle Eastern realities. But in a way the picture was
even truer than a historically accurate picture would have been; it
probably would have had no red, yellow, black, or white children at
all, but only brown Middle Eastern ones.
The picture Bible was augmented in my imagination by
flannel graph stories about Jesus. Flannel graph was a kind of
1950s high-tech precursor of overhead projectors, laptop video
projectors, videos, and DVDs. The teachers were always kind
women, sometimes even my own mother. Each would tell stories
with an easel behind her. On the easel would be a piece of flannel
cloth with a scene drawn on it with markersa countryside, a
storm at sea, a courtyard with marble columns, a home, a roadside
with big boulders beside it. As the story unfolded, cut-out figures
backed with felt would be stuck on the flannel background (felt and
flannel being a gentle precursor of Velcro)blind Bartimaeus,
Zacchaeus, a woman near a well, a nameless leper and his nine
friends, a Roman centurion, or a Syrophonecian woman with a
sick child. Through these stories, Jesus won my heart.
When I reached my teenage years, though, I lost that
Jesus as one loses a friend in a crushing, noisy, rushing crowd.
The crowd included arguments about evolution (which seemed
elegant, patient, logical, and actually quite wonderful to me, more
wonderful even than a literal six-day creation blitz), arguments
about the Vietnam War (which made no sense to meeven if
communism was as bad as everyone said, were people better off
bombed and napalmed to death?), arguments about ethical issues
like civil rights and desegregation and a hundred other things. I
wondered if women were really supposed to be submissive to men
and if rock n roll was really of the devil. Were Catholics really
going to burn in hell forever unless they revised their beliefs and
practices to be biblical like us?
After a short foray into doubt and a rather mild (all things
considered) youthful rebellion, my faith in Jesus was revitalized,
largely through the Jesus Movement. For those who were part
of it, especially in its early days, the Jesus Movement was a truly
wonderful thing. There was a simplicity, a childlikeness, a navet,
and a corresponding purity of motive that I have seldom seen since.
In fact, this book may simply be an attempt to articulate what many
of us felt and knew during those years.
But all too soon the Jesus Movement was co-opted. It was
to a different Jesus that I was gradually converted.14
The first new Jesus I met had a different face, a different
tone, a different function. Jesus was born to die, I was told
again and again, which meant his entire lifeincluding the red,
yellow, black, and white children around his kneesZacchaeus in
the sycamore tree (which gave me a lifelong love for sycamores)...
Bartimaeus by the roadthe one grateful leper returningthe
woman by the wellthe caring parents who begged him to heal
their childrenwas quite marginalized. Everything between
his birth and death was icing at most, assuredly not cake. This
marginalization was unintentional, but in my experience it was
very real. I was losing something but gaining something, too: the
conservative Protestant (or Evangelical) Jesus.
The Conservative Protestant Jesus
For conservative Protestants, the Good News centers on the
crucifixion of Jesus. Jesus saves us by dying on the cross. Jesus was
born to die, I heard again and again. By dying, Jesus mysteriously
absorbs the penalty of all human wrongdoing through all of history.
The cross becomes the focal point where human injusticepast,
present, and futuremeets the unconquerable compassion and
forgiveness of God.
Jesus, hanging in agony, says, Father, forgive
them, for they do not know what they are doing. We are given
confidence that at our worst moment, the moment at which we
humans behave as badly as is possible in this universe by torturing
and killing Gods ultimate messenger and representative to us, his
prayer is answered. His innocent self-sacrifice somehow cancels
out human guilt.
At the cross, the powerful horror of human evil and
the more powerful glory of Gods mercy meet, and human evil
is exhausted, but not Gods mercy. Exactly how this happens is
understood through various metaphors, with the following four
perhaps being most popular.
A legal metaphor: God is judge and humanity is guilty,
deserving the death penalty. Jesus, a perfect representative
of humanity, willingly takes the death penalty deserved by all
humanity. Justice is satisfied, and evildoers can be forgiven. In
this metaphor the forensic language of law, guilt, punishment,
penalty, and justification is all-important. Sometimes the cool,
impersonal guilt pronounced by the law is replaced by the hot
wrath erupting from the Judge, but both styles reflect the same
legal metaphor.
An economic metaphor: God is the good master, and we
are Gods servants, but we run away (or are lured away, perhaps
kidnapped) by the Evil One, who makes us his slaves. Jesus offers
himself to Satan as the representative of the human race: Take me
and let them go, Jesus says, offering himself as a kind of ransom
payment. Satan takes Jesus, and as a result, we are potentially set
free. (And Satan gets double-crossed in the end because after
killing Jesus and thinking he has triumphed, Jesus triumphs by
rising from the dead.) In this metaphor the business language of
selling, buying, price, and payment is paramount.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A confession and manifesto from a senior leader in the emerging church movement, A Generous Orthodoxy calls for a radical, Christ-centered orthodoxy of faith and practice in a missional, generous spirit. Brian McLaren argues for a post-liberal, post-conservative, post-protestant convergence, which will stimulate lively interest and global conversation among thoughtful Christians from all traditions.

In a sweeping exploration of belief, author Brian McLaren takes us across the landscape of faith, envisioning an orthodoxy that aims for Jesus, is driven by love, and is defined by missional intent. A Generous Orthodoxy rediscovers the mysterious and compelling ways that Jesus can be embraced across the entire Christian horizon. Rather than establishing what is and is not "orthodox," McLaren walks through the many traditions of faith, bringing to the center a way of life that draws us closer to Christ and to each other.