Quotes from Brian D. McLaren

I guess you could say that the Bible is a book that doesn't try to tell you what to think. Instead, it trys to teach you how to think. It stretches your thinking; it challenges you to think bigger and harder than you ever have.

All my road is before me, but All familiar paths lie far behind me. My map's here in my hand, but I have ventured past its tattered edges.

Roman Empire had been weakened by political corruption and a series of invasions, mass migrations

So if God is forgotten, we want to join God in being forgotten. So if God is rejected and opposed and misunderstood and misrepresented, we want to suffer each indignity and sorrow with God.

Since many Christians see God as an absolute authoritarian, we shouldn't be surprised when they prefer authoritarian leaders to democratic ones.

the only viable response to religious hostility is love, empathy, compassion, understanding—not more hostility. (What could be more pathetic than a hostile fight against hostility?)

The popular and domesticated Jesus, who has become little more than a chrome-plated hood ornament on the guzzling Hummer of Western civilization, can thus be replaced with a more radical, saving, and, I believe, real Jesus.

We hate those times of weakness, but I can see why life would be engineered to bring us to them; without them, we might never learn what faith is at all. Someone has said that you never know if your faith is real until it is all you have left.

We saw how Christian Zionism perpetuates a simple but terribly dangerous theological idea, an idea that Christian missiologist Lesslie Newbigin called "the greatest heresy in the history of monotheism," the idea that God chooses some people for exclusive privilege, leaving everyone else in a disfavored (or we might say "dis-graced") status.14 They are the other. They don't belong here. They are in the way. Their rights don't count.

We can—we must—seek treatment for and recovery from our addiction to instant, cheap, convenient innocence, so we can deprogram ourselves from the innocence cult.

And we are coming to see that this repentance and conversion do not express infidelity to Christ, but fidelity, because we are coming to see in the life and teaching of Christ, and especially in the cross and resurrection of Christ, a radical rejection of dominating supremacy in all its forms.

Christianity promised that it had some special divine guidance and protection that would lift it above these human problems to some degree at least, but it's becoming apparent that this promise was on par with those made by Christian leaders claiming to "pray away the gay" or pray in the fast cash.

Postmoderns are not less interested in religion than ever before. Indeed, they are exploring new religious experiences like never before. The church has simply given them a less interesting religion than ever before. Leonard Sweet, Quantum Spirituality: A Postmodern Apologetic

Human kingdoms advance by force and violence with falling bombs and flying bullets, but God's kingdom advances by stories, fictions, tales that are easily ignored and easily misunderstood. Perhaps that's the only way it can be.1

An unexamined, status-quo Christianity is not worth perpetuating. I cannot and will not stay Christian if it means perpetuating Christianity's past history and current trajectory.

Church!" she cried. "Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They'd just make me feel worse.

How one is remembered doesn't matter when one is focused on integrity.

we consider the religion a lost cause anyway).

If God dominates the world and everything in it with an iron fist (or rod, as in Psalm 2:9 and Revelation 2:27), we may find ourselves more amenable to authoritarians who do the same, especially if they hold up Bibles in front of churches.

Having strained out qualified experts, journalists, and scientists, gullible Christians swallowed any number of frauds and fools, rendering themselves susceptible to the actual shallow ideologies and "empty deceit" I was warned about in Colossians 2:8 as a boy.

An unexamined, status-quo Christianity is not worth perpetuating. I cannot and will not stay Christian if it means perpetuating Christianity's past history and current trajectory. The only way I can stay Christian is to do so as part of a creative movement forging a new kind of Christianity

By joining the anti-abortion movement, the once guilty are propelled from deep moral unease to a secure position of moral innocence and superiority, with the added social bonding that comes from uniting against a shared enemy whom they depict as murderous and vile. That's quite a set of perks for a very low price of membership (namely, agreeing to vote Republican in the United States—or its counterparts elsewhere).

In the end, Christian Zionism reduces Jews to the status of pawns in the fulfillment of end-times prophecies that many Christian preachers love to speak and write about.

Faith before doubt: it's about correct beliefs. Faith after doubt: it's about revolutionary love.