What McLaren misses.

Progressive futurist theologian, Brian McLaren, once a conservative evangelical, calls for a new definition of God as "a bigger, non-dualistic, non-binary God." He prefers a God who is "in the story, not outside of time and space like a prime mover or divine watch maker" McLaren's god is not different from us; he actually is us. Non-dualistic is another term for non-binary, since "dual" also means "two." These are broad simplified ways of describing reality. Things are understood either through the rubric of oneness or two-ness: non-binary or binary, non-dualistic or dualistic. This sounds ridiculously simple, but it is deeply theological.

From Jones, P. Whose Rainbow? 2020. Ezra Press, Grimsby, p. 22.

 

McLaren clearly has nothing in his previous theology that leads him to understand the relation between God and creation. His only recourse is to place God either remotely from the creation, or contained within it! I hazard the guess that he relegates the days of creation to fiction, myth, symbolism or fantasy, which removes God from 'the story' and reifies his complaint; because it is these very days, set out as real concrete days, that prevent us conceiving God as either indifferently and impersonally distant from or impotently internal to the creation. They show that God is in, and the originator and Lord of 'the story'.

The days are the days that delineate our life domain and his acting in such days, explicitly brings that activity into our history.

God is present within our world in the very existential terms of our world that denominates history. This is a God who is close, whose love is demonstrated in intimacy of action in creating the real concrete place for fellowship of man with God, man equipped for such fellowship by being like him, in his image reflecting him into the creation as his agents. The intimacy of God and creation is driven home in Genesis 3:8: God in the garden (presumably God the Son) in pursuit of fellowship with the creatures-in-his-image! Nothing like the pagan fictions about improbably flawed gods contained within the cosmos, such as Enuma Elish.

 

No other religion is remotely like this: knowing God in direct contact with the domain of human life, but also prior to and outside that domain as Creator. They all either internalize or depersonalize and remove the 'god' as a knowable thing, or diffuse it throughout everything and equally unknowable.

 

Not a sermon that one would hear in most churches!

 

Also see McLaren and Christ.

And A Theological Pivot