A New Kind of Christianity. Brian D. McLaren. 2010.

I don't go to church. I've been to various Christian churches a handful of times, but can't really claim to be either Christian or religious. I believe in God, but wasn't raised with any specific dogma. Despite all these things, I really loved this book. Before I get into the content, let me first try to describe why.

While I can't claim to be a member of the Christian Church, I do consider myself to be an interested observer. The story of Jesus is fascinating and beautiful, even if you ignore the supernatural elements or replace them with natural, metaphorical equivalents. I think Christians have had a profoundly positive impact on humanity over the last two thousand years. I think certain elements of the philosophy of Christianity are true, regardless of any supernatural or religious backing they may have.

For example, forgiveness is superior to vengeance even if it isn't rewarded with a blissful afterlife. This isn't because people who do wrong deserve forgiveness, in many cases they clearly don't. It is because vengeance makes the situation worse. Forgiveness is the only thing that prevents this from happening. Vengeance multiplies wrong-doing. Forgiveness subtracts. Vengeance breeds more vengeance. Forgiveness allows something else to be bred.

In treating his enemies with forgiveness, Jesus lead his followers with an example that may have prevented a popular uprising that would have taken many lives. The story was remembered, retold and undoubtedly lead to countless acts of forgiveness over the last two thousand years. It is of course impossible to say what the world would be like today if all of these people had taken revenge. In my mind, all of that revenge would have undoubtedly made our world much worse than it is today.

There are many other examples, and my knowledge of Jesus is quite limited so I imagine others can think of many more than I am able. His influence has changed our culture and attitudes in a profoundly positive way. Whether or not he was divine, this is true.

One obvious counter-argument is that any positive influence Jesus or Christians have had over the last two thousand years has to be compared against the negative influence Churches acting in his name have had. Despite my positive feelings about the philosophy of Christianity or the beauty of Christian stories, I am concerned about many of the things institutions claiming to act on Christian motivations are doing.

For example, I've met a gay person or two in my life, and I can't imagine that if they prayed really hard that they would be able to change who they are attracted to. I didn't choose to be straight, it's just the way that I am. I imagine the situation for gay people is similar. Yet, large Christian institutions cannot reconcile certain statements in the bible to the harmless, private behavior of gay people. Consequently, these institutions dehumanize a large group of people for a trait they seem to have no control over.

Another example, I think the world has been around for billions of years. I have this opinion because thousands of smart people who have spent their lives studying such things believe that it is the best possible explanation for the things we see. For most of my opinions in various topics, I tend to trust the experts in those topics. Yet, large Christian institutions cannot reconcile certain elements of their worldview to the scientific theories of the modern world. Consequently, these institutions ignore objective science and demonize scientists.

I am concerned because It seems like foundational elements of many major Christian churches are pointed against the flow of history. They deny aspects of human nature that are harmless and essential. They are opposed to scientific theories that are critical to the development of our understanding of the natural world.

Rationality is an essential part of being human. So is belief. We have the ability to analyze our environment, remember what has happened to us and predict what will happen in the future. Because our sensory capacities are not perfect, we have the ability to fill in the blanks with our beliefs.

In my view, elements of major Christian Churches are doomed because they advocate beliefs that paint over things we know to be true. For example, many Christians argue against theories of evolution, neurobiology and genetics because discoveries in those fields seem to threaten an image of the natural world those Churches have held for hundreds of years.

If a Church cannot adapt to truths our evolving civilization reveals, it creates an unsustainable process. The Church's influence will diminish and it will hold back the people it is important to. I want Christianity to survive because I think the lessons of Jesus are profoundly good and for that reason important to humanity. A New Kind of Christianity presents a picture of a Church that stays true to principles that are inherently Christian, but adapts to truths that are apparent in the modern world. This is why I loved the book, it gave me hope.

Many Christians, of course, see it differently. Within the Christian community, this book is a polarizing influence. The author, Brian McLaren, is a pastor of Ceder Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, Maryland. This church has grown to involve several hundred members, many of whom were previously not members of any Christian church. He was rated by Time Magazine as one of the 25 most influential Evangelicals in America. This influence is largely the result of his many books, of which this is one, on the topic of the emerging church.

A New Kind of Christianity is based on ten questions that address areas where existing major Churches seem to be weak, but where the emerging church is attempting to adapt. These are the three examples that stuck with me.

1. What is the Overarching Story Line of the Bible?

This is a visual representation of the story line of the Bible:

Even non-Christians will immediately recognize this as the fundamental story of Christianity. It explains what has happened and is the argument for why people should adopt the faith. That is, we started in a divine state, there was a fall from grace, we were condemned, then some of us (if we do the right stuff) can be saved and then return to the divine state. Those of us who don't do the right stuff are doomed.

McLaren makes the argument that this storyline is not articulated anywhere in the Bible itself. The interpretation is a projection of the prevailing philosophy during the birth of Christianity as a mainstream religion. That is, the philosophy of ancient Rome, which was primarily the dualism of Plato and Aristotle. McLaren refers to this as the Greco-Roman philosophy:

Plato believed that reality was based on forms. All of the changing, material world we see is an illusion. What lies beneath is perfect and never changes. Redness, for example, applies to apples and blood. But neither apples nor blood perfectly embody the quality of being red.

Aristotle believed that reality was based in the material world. Ideal concepts become "instantiated" in the natural world.

In other words, the foundation of what most Christians believe is not what the Bible is about or what Jesus advocated, it is a simplification of those things that resulted from Roman society attempting to fit Christianity inside of itself. In other words, it is the consequence of Western civilization assimilating the philosophy of Jesus. This was based either consciously or unconsciously on the ideas early Christian leaders were raised with. These ideas, however, miss the point of the actual stories in the Bible and the teachings of Jesus, which were much more complex.

2. How should the Bible be understood?

McLaren makes the argument that most major Churches today use the Bible as a form of legal constitution.

With that approach, simply given the size of the work being considered and the eras of human history during which it was written, an industrious person can find an argument to justify a number of acts that by today's standards would be considered unethical, immoral or at worst, criminal.

For example, slavery has been fact of the human condition for a large portion of our time on this planet. Due to this, many of the stories in the Bible involve slaves and arguments in favor of slavery. Approaching the Bible as a legal constitution, therefore, made it easy for people defending slavery in the United States to say they were on the side of God. All they had to do was find a few passages, and there you have it: legal precedent from God's hand.

Reading the Bible in this way, however, is a mistake. McLaren makes the claim that we should instead see the Bible for what it is: a community library. It is a collection of stories that trace the progression of people oriented around shared ideals and beliefs, all the way back to Abraham.

The problem is, the expectations we have of a constitution and a library are very different.

A constitution needs to be an efficient, neat document. It covers all relevant subjects to avoid creating uncertainty. And in each of those subjects, only one opinion is revealed: the law of the land. Furthermore, the constitution can only be changed to adapt to new challenges through a regimented process. (Of course, no such process exists to change the Bible.)

In a library, there are often dissenting opinions and irrelevant information. We cannot be sure when we examine any one part of a library if we are seeing an instruction, a recommendation, or a cautionary tale.

This view obviously makes the Bible much more difficult to use as an instrument of proof. It makes the Bible something to be filtered through our capacities of critical thought. In this way, the document becomes far less useful to some and far more beautiful to others.

3. Is God Violent?

Stemming from the previous question, McLaren presents the stories in the Bible over time. The Bible was not written in one generation, it had contributions from societies at many different stages of civilization. As a consequence, one cannot interpret fully the meaning of the Bible from any one story. Instead, we have to look at the direction those stories seem to be progressing along as the contributors to it changed over time. In the diagram below, each letter represents a story from The Bible:
 
There is a greater truth to be gleaned from the Bible, but looking at individual passages or stories can sometimes be misleading.

There are many stories in the Bible that depict God as violent and uncaring. These stories, though, tend to change in a positive way over time. As we understand more about God, deeper truths are revealed to us. God starts as a violent defender of a tribe to a more mature lover of all humanity. McLaren argues that there are five significant ways that our view of God changes through the course of the Bible:

1. God's uniqueness - our God becomes the one and only God.
2. God's ethics - concern for ritual becomes concern for social justice.
3. God's universality - our tribe's God becomes God of all tribes.
4. God's agency - God intervening becomes God is everywhere/nowhere.
5. God's character - God is violent becomes God is love.

The character of Jesus in the stories of the Bible plays a unique role in this evolution. We cannot gather from everything Jesus said and did what his true motivations were. As the story goes, he was divine. Jesus represented the ideal end point in the direction of the Biblical narrative:
 
As stories of humanity are added, to the Bible and to our lives, we move along the path. We never reach the destination. Over time we reveal more details of the natural world, and possibly deeper understanding of Jesus' motivations and goals, but there is always more that remains to be discovered.


They say there are two things you should never bring up in polite company: politics and religion. People tend to have strong opinions about both that are based largely on emotion and cultural identity. Disagreements about these kinds of opinions are not likely to result in a conversation. At this level of thought, the human mind resorts to Us vs. Them. I think books like this are important because they dare to start the conversation, polite or not. The conversation begins with one opinion both sides can agree on: this subject is important.

Tradition is also important, it always will be. One has to understand that people in a position of ownership over a tradition have an interest to claim that things have always been the way they are now. Things change all the time. Christianity is different today than it was in the Holy Roman Empire, or in Europe five hundred years ago.

I believe there are elements of the Christian philosophy that may have been lost by focusing too much on tradition. I believe these elements can benefit our lives, even if they have no influence on what happens to us after our lives are over.

Story. Robert McKee. 1997.

Robert McKee is an instructor of creative writing who has had a profound influence on Hollywood for the last 25 years. In 1983, while a Fulbright Scholar and a professor in the University of Southern California he developed a lecture series called the 'Story Seminar'. This lecture series was ultimately opened to the public and has been delivered to sold out audiences ever since.

This book covers an outline of what is presented in McKee's lecture series. It is basically a book about how to write a good screenplay. It is currently required reading in the film and cinema schools at Harvard, Yale, UCLA and USC and known as the 'Screenwriter's Bible'.

This may lead one to think that the book is of value primarily to people who are interested in writing a screenplay. In fact, the appeal is much more broad.

About three quarters of the book is focused on two subjects: elements of story and story structure. The remainder of the book concerns the creative process and contains advice for aspiring Hollywood writers. It's the former two sections that best highlight the fact that there is more going on in this book than one might think. When McKee talks about essential elements of stories and how they are built, even while he frequently references successful films to illustrate his points, it is clear that the medium of film is not necessary. The ideas that McKee discusses can be applied to any storytelling medium.

Elements of Story

McKee describes roughly a dozen different elements that are essential to any story. His approach is not structured. He bounces back and forth between topics, so the quotes below are pulled from several places.

Event

A story event creates meaningful change in the life situation of a character that is expressed and experienced in terms of a value and achieved through conflict. For example: alive/dead (positive/negative) is a story value, as are love/hate, freedom/slavery, truth/lie, courage/cowardice, loyalty/betrayal, wisdom/stupidity, strength/weakness, excitement/boredom and so on.

"Event" means change. Story Events are meaningful, not trivial. To make change meaningful it must, to begin with, happen to a character. 

Character

Characterization is the sum of all observable qualities of a human being, everything knowable through careful scrutiny: age and IQ; sex and sexuality; style of speech and gesture; choices of home, car, and dress; education and occupation; personality and nervosity; values and attitudes - all aspects of humanity we could know by taking notes on someone day in and day out. The totality of these traits makes each person unique because each of us is a one-of-a-kind combination of genetic givens and accumulated experience. The singular assemblage of traits is characterization ... but it is not character.

True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure - the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character's essential nature. Pressure is essential. Choices made when nothing is at risk mean little.

Aesthetic Emotion

Your intellectual life prepares you for emotional experiences that then urge you toward fresh perceptions that in turn remix the chemistry of new encounters. The two realms influence each other, but first one, then the other. In fact, in life, moments that blaze with a fusion of idea and emotion are so rare, when they happen you think you're having a religious experience. But whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion.

... A story well told gives you the very thing you cannot get from life: meaningful emotional experience. In life, experiences become meaningful with reflection in time. In art, they are meaningful now, at the instant they happen.

 Story Design

The below diagram is copied from Story:

A story begins when the protagonist acts to achieve an object of her desire. This action is believed to be minimal and conservative, all that is required to reach the desire. The action, however, prompts forces of antagonism which drive the protagonist further from her desire. At this point, the protagonist realizes that only continued action will allow her to reach her goal. Moreover, she realizes that this action involves risk.

This is also known as the story arc. A story arc involves a character striving for something they desire and in the process encountering an obstacle that forces them to change. Within the primary story arc there are minor arcs. Each arc must contain characters interacting with each other in a way that is logically consistent and encountering environmental factors that are logically consistent.

I've never taken a creative writing class or been involved in drama, so it's possible that these concepts meant more to me than they would to somebody who has been exposed to them before. McKee makes it clear that he has not discovered most of what he discusses, and in fact much of it is as old as Aristotle. But for someone with a recreational but deep interest in storytelling of all kinds, the clarity of McKee's approach was profound. Also, it would be impossible to demonstrate without additional paragraphs of quotes, but the writing is poetic in its own right. Story is a work of art about works of art.

But that is not the primary observation I want to share. The fact that these principles seem to work in any storytelling medium has broad implications.

Stories without the elements described above, and built without taking basic story structure into account do not achieve what all stories are meant to achieve. Something fails in the minds of the audience. I imagine that all of us have experienced a feeling of oneness with the protagonist while seeing a good movie, reading a good book or being told a good story. We naturally put ourselves in the shoes of the character whose experiences are being relayed to us. When these story elements are lacking, we are either not compelled to see our sameness (we are bored) or we don't believe the sameness being communicated (we don't buy it).

It can be argued that the reason storytelling works at all is due to this principle: the fact that the human mind merges the self with the protagonist. The human psyche naturally inserts itself into the protagonist role of any story it is exposed to. In this way human beings can communicate a great deal of information to each other in a short amount of time. Details that would otherwise have to be described are imagined by the audience. Good stories put us in a position to see this "truth" in a very efficient way, they only describe what is essential to put us in a believable, alternate life. 

This was the concept that really stood out to me in this book, and why I argue that it appeals to a broad audience. But it is not because the book is intended to be anything more. Story makes it clear that its purpose is to assist aspiring Hollywood writers. In doing so, however, it also shows that the purpose of a film is more than just to entertain. To me, it seems that there is a much more primal force at work, one that has been a part of human life for thousands of years.

We take for granted now that technology has made it easy to pass on great deals of detailed information to the next generation. We have whole institutions dedicated to educating our population and buildings devoted to storing our collective wisdom. For the majority of our time here, this was not possible. People had to find a way to ensure the hard lessons they had learned about the principles of life would not be lost. They had to somehow prevent the people who had done so much to shape civilization from being forgotten by their ancestors. For thousands of years, stories were the only way to do this. Either because they are inherently efficient in their ability to transmit information, or because our species adapted to their use, they became essential to the human experience.

Fragments of the oldest stories still survive today (e.g. creation stories, religious texts, pieces of wisdom, archetypes, themes, etc.) We naturally work to protect these stories by ensuring our children know about them and by creating new works of art that incorporate them. We seem to instinctively sense how important they are. We don't always know exactly what they mean, but we know they mean something.

Stories serve to define communities, cultures and nations. Whether stories like these have been passed along via oral tradition or by summer blockbusters, it is the same principle. Perhaps this comparison is obvious, but what may not be is this: behind all of these stories is a person trying to communicate more than just what is on the surface. Life is filled with subtext, symbolism and metaphor. In many cases, the authors of stories themselves may not know exactly what is beneath the story they are telling, perhaps there is meaning deep within their subconscious trying to articulate itself. Artists frequently describe the sensation that they are not creating their art, but discovering it.

Late in Story, McKee provides the following advice:

We all share the same crucial human experiences. Each of us is suffering and enjoying, dreaming and hoping of getting through our days with something of value. As a writer, you can be certain that everyone coming down the street toward you, each in his own way, is having the same fundamental human thoughts and feelings that you are. This is why when you ask yourself, "If I were this character in these circumstances, what would I do?" the honest answer is always correct. You would do the human thing. Therefore, the more you penetrate the mysteries of your own humanity, the more you come to understand yourself, the more you are able to understand others.

To me, this seems to be obviously true, but I believe the opposite is just as true: the more we understand others, the more we are able to understand ourselves. All of us know one story better than any other: the story the human psyche creates of our own experiences. The one protagonist that is all protagonists. The amalgamation of all of the stories we have ever been told. The story of "I am." 

Good stories have a depth that we do not frequently enough explore. American films are often about more than what they appear to be. I encourage you to think about this the next time you pay $12 to see the latest Hollywood offering. When you dig through a couple of layers, though, don't be surprised if you see a part of yourself looking back.