Brian McLaren | Showing Up in the Face of Doom

McLaren:

Hope means many different things. To some people, hope means the will to keep trying, the will to keep going, the will to keep loving. And I am 100% for that. I think we should keep living every second we can and keep trying, and keep giving, and keep loving. It’s interesting to me that Paul wrote in I Corinthians that there are three great qualities, faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love. And there’s a kind of hope that makes us say, “I’m going to love no matter what happens.” And that’s the hope that I just want to fan the flames of that hope wherever I possibly can.

I’m Brian McLaren and I’m an Author and I’m involved in a number of activist projects.

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God, I’m your host, Jim Stump. Brian McLaren’s new book, Life After Doom is challenging because in order to get to Life After Doom, you first have to go through some doom. We’re aware that’s not entirely comfortable for some of our audience. In fact, one listener recently left a scathing one star review, lamenting that this podcast has become a cry fest for Doomers.

Two quick things to say about that. First, if you have any nice things to say about this podcast, we’d really appreciate you leaving a positive review at Apple Podcasts to help balance things out and give potential listeners an accurate sense of what people think. Those things really do affect the algorithms. And secondly, yes, we accept the consensus view of the science of climate change and the grim reality of the way things are headed right now. But I’m not so sure I’d label such an acknowledgement as Doomerism.

I actually asked McLaren how he’d respond to that listener’s comment and you can hear his very hopeful sounding answer toward the end of the show. But his is not a hope that buries its head in the sand and just does wishful thinking. Instead, there’s a kind of hope against hope like the apostle Paul attributed to Abraham and maybe even a way of being hopeful when you’re not very optimistic.

At any rate, the more complex notion of hope is something we spend a good deal of time talking about in this episode. McLaren’s very pastoral and his conversation is full of insight from scripture. I hope that whether or not you agree with all of his views, you can find some wisdom here about loving God and loving our neighbors no matter the circumstances we find ourselves in. 

Let’s get to the conversation.

Stump: 

Brian McLaren, welcome back. We’re glad to talk to you again.

McLaren:

I am glad to be back and it’s always a pleasure to be talking with someone with such a great hairstyle.

Stump:

I agree. I agree. Well, last time we had you on, it was about the book you wrote after visiting the Galapagos Islands, one of the most stunning natural habitats on earth and your love for nature for the wild and undomesticated parts of creation was obvious. This time we’re talking about your new book, Life After Doom, which also has the natural world as one of its characters, but I don’t think it’s the central character here.

So I wondered to start, is it fair to say that your central concern here is not what happens to the earth and maybe not even what happens to us? We’ll have to come back to that, but rather how can we live good lives no matter what happens to the earth, no matter what happens to us?

McLaren:

Yes. Well, if this were a movie, I think it would be hard to pick the main character. Maybe we could say the main villain and the main victim are the human race. Because when we look at the big scope of the Earth’s history, the earth has survived some huge traumas, a huge asteroid hitting it, maybe even earlier the moon was formed, a main theory is, by a massive strike of another planetoid with the earth. And so the earth has survived and life has rebounded back after enormous impacts.

But I think one of the things this book is about is helping us humans face the impacts we’re having on the earth. And if we love the earth, that breaks our heart. And if we love ourselves, that breaks our heart and we love our children and grandchildren. So it’s all pretty interwoven, I think, and that’s one of the changes I think we have to see is how interwoven we are with this beautiful creation.

Stump:

So this hasn’t been what most of your books have been about, but I gather from reading this that it’s been a concern for quite a while. Tell us the story about how you first got looking into climate change issues.

McLaren:

Well, the short story is I never planned to be a pastor, which I was for 24 years. My plan was to be a college English teacher because I loved literature and in many ways that love of literature was inspired by love for the Bible and just realizing how stories and words and poetry can so deeply affect and shape us.

But when I became a pastor, I felt that I went through, I guess you could say a theological transformation where I realized that in the Lord’s prayer, we are not taught to pray. “May we go to heaven after we die.” The Lord’s prayer is not “Now I lay me down to sleep,” where the primary function is “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” The primary narrative arc of the Bible is God making a beautiful creation, us human beings messing it up and messing ourselves up and us needing help beyond ourselves. Wisdom and strength and grace beyond ourselves to face that and join God in the healing of the world.

The Lord’s prayer is “May your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” So I was preaching a sermon in the late ’90s at my church about our need to care for the earth and about just the biblical story connecting with that. And our church is not far from a couple of universities. And a young woman from one of those universities came up and introduced herself afterwards. I’d never met her before. She said, “I’ve never heard a sermon like that. I’m in the sciences and earth science and environmental science.” She said, “That was just amazing but I noticed you never mentioned global warming.” And I’m embarrassed to say this, but at that point in the late ’90s, I had never heard the term global warming, somehow it missed me.

Even though I was very engaged in environmental issues. I’d been a volunteer in a number of environmental projects through the ’90s, and she just said, “You should go home and Google…” Or actually back then it was Alta Vista and other search engines, some people will remember. “You need to do a search on global warming.” And I did. And I remember I came upon a website that had a graphic of the shrinkage of the low point of Arctic sea ice, and it was just so obvious and clear that we human beings were changing the planet’s balance.

And that became a kind of awakening. In 2006, 2007, I left the pastorate and the first book I wrote as a full-time author was called, Everything Must Change. And that was the book where I was trying to understand global crises and the environmental crisis was really one you couldn’t avoid.

Stump:

Well, you say this book isn’t for everyone, and in one thing in particular, you’re not trying to persuade people of climate change, the climate skeptics or deniers. You also say, “This isn’t for you if you’re already on a very narrow ledge, anxiety and depression.” But rather you say “It’s for everyone who’s reached a point where not facing their unpeaceful, uneasy, unwanted feelings about the future has become more draining than facing them.”

So I read this book in just a couple of sittings over 24 hours this last week, and it’s challenging, heavy and depressing times, but also uplifting and inspiring at times. Curious, what was it like to write? What were the emotions you went through writing it?

McLaren:

Certainly the most intense writing experience of my life. One of the things I was coping with in the writing of this book is that many of my friends who are deeply involved in the struggle against climate change and the struggle for environmental sustainability over the last several years have reached a point of despair and they just feel it’s too late. All is lost.

And I watched the ground fall out from under their feet and some of them have managed to get their footing again, but some of them haven’t. And I watched that happen to them and I felt like… I remember having this fear, if I really face the facts, maybe I would feel the same despair. And so I felt in a certain sense, this obligation to try to face the very, very worst, the worst case scenarios, to not sugarcoat things, to not…

The way I felt is that I was diving into the deep end of the pool, trying to touch the bottom, and I wasn’t sure I’d come up again. And I’ll just say if anyone faces the full range of challenges that we see, which by the way are not just environmental, there’s a term that’s being used among experts in these fields called the poly crisis or the meta crisis, the sense that we have a number of crises that are interconnected. And anyone who faces these challenges in their depth will not just walk away saying, “Everything’s going to be fine, capitalism will solve it, science will solve it, the technology will solve it, or religion will solve it.”

I think we have this sense that the problems we have created for ourselves, many of them unwittingly, some of them, there are very sinister dimensions to this, but the problems we’ve created for ourselves are bigger than our current solutions. And so we’re going to have to grow in order to face these problems. But that to me is an exciting prospect, especially for me as a Christian because to me that’s how I think life works. We face problems that challenge us to grow in ways that we never would without those problems.

Stump:

You mentioned a couple of times throughout the book, Katherine Hayhoe, whom we work with at BioLogos fairly often. She often references, I think it’s the Department of Defense or one of the governmental agencies that calls climate change a threat multiplier in the sense that you’re talking, all these other problems are made worse and they’re interconnected to what’s happening to our climate and what’s going to happen here in the future.

So the book’s really rich. We can’t do anything like a complete discussion of it here in 45 minutes or so, but we need to get on the table these four scenarios you mentioned. So you’ve articulated these as possible scenarios for the future and the way things will go, calling them collapse avoidance, collapse rebirth, collapse survival and collapse extinction. Can you give us just a quick summary of these?

McLaren:

Thanks for asking that. I think this is one of the main contributions of the book as I sort of waded into the literature. What I realized is that a lot of people when they write or speak have already decided what the future is going to be, and they’re certain of that. I don’t think we are in a place to rationally have certainty about what the future can be. I think emotionally we have polls to seize on one or another scenario, but I just think we’re not big enough to know the future with that kind of certainty.

But the four scenarios basically are that our civilization… Well, the first thing I should say is that we are already experiencing environmental collapse in limited but significant regions. So for example, just about everybody knows that the Great Barrier Reef, this amazing phenomenon on the earth, if aliens came and studied the earth, the Great Barrier Reef would blow their minds that something like this exists and it’s experiencing collapse in many settings.

And recently some data came out and a bunch of scientists said, “Now the Caribbean coral reefs, that’s a whole system that will experience collapse.” People are really worried about the Amazon Rainforest, which some people have called the Lungs of our Planet, it’s certainly one of the Lungs of our Planet.

And so we have all of these areas where there’s a real threat of environmental collapse. But here’s the thing that I think was stunning to me as I immersed myself in this field. Before there’s global environmental collapse, there will be civilizational collapse because our civilization is built within very narrow environmental parameters. And so some people feel, and it’s possible that we will figure out a way to change our ways to steer the Titanic away from the iceberg, so to speak, to steer our civilization away from its self-destructive ways to avoid collapse in the near term. So let’s just call that 250 years. That maybe we could steer our civilization, it’ll be a bumpy road, but maybe we could avoid a civilizational collapse.

Second option is, it’s too late. We can’t avoid that collapse. But somewhere on the bumpy road to the bottom, we’ll wake up and there’ll be enough change that something new and better and more sustainable, what many of my friends call an ecological civilization, can emerge from the struggles of a downward collapse. This would be like a married couple whose marriage is heading toward divorce, but somewhere between the big breakup and the separation and the final divorce papers being signed and officiated, they save their marriage. And so that’s this second and maybe make it better than it ever was before.

The third scenario is collapse survival. And in this scenario there will be a collapse. We humans will not get our act together to change our economy, change our way of life, and so on. And some number of humans will survive 2%, 10%, 50% of our current population will survive. But they will survive in a way that’s a lot more like pre-modern times than modern times.

And then the last scenario is that we will let things get so out of control and we will turn on each other. This scenario very often involves nuclear war on the way down, that we will drive ourselves out of existence.

And so those are four scenarios. And people don’t like to think about the third or fourth of those scenarios especially, but serious, thoughtful people who study these things, this is keeping them awake at night and they understand this is what’s at stake. Even when you hear Joe Biden say that climate change is an existential threat, those two words mean that any of these scenarios are possible. And as Katherine Hayhoe says, the US military whose job is to study threats, this keeps those folks awake too.

Stump:

The timeline for this is speculative, you said maybe 250 years. But part of the psychological problem for us is that that’s just far enough away that we don’t really need to think about it every day. And the natural disasters we’re having so far are such that we can keep rebuilding. Can you say anything about the impending doom and its nearness to us or farness away from us that makes this difficult to process as well?

McLaren:

Yes. Well, here we have a couple of problems. One of the problems is psychological. Social psychologists have basically said that climate change is a problem that our human brains are not very well adapted to face.

Now, I might make a slight adaptation of that and say our human brains as affected by our current economic system and our current culture… Here’s a way to say it for all of us who are Christians in Romans 12, it says, “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of our minds.”

And this world, this world system teaches us to only think short-term, especially in economic terms. What will bring the best shareholder returns in the next quarterly report? But those of us living in the United States, the indigenous people of this country before Westerners arrived and changed their whole worldview. Well, they’ve resisted, my ancestors tried to change their worldview. Their worldview was every decision requires wisdom and wisdom involves thinking seven generations ahead. So this was a value that was inculcated but has been lost by so many of us in the West.

It’s been just driven out of us by our economic system. And sadly, this is my opinion, our religious system, our Christian theologies have very often conformed to this world, conformed to short-term thinking, have lost wisdom. And this is one of the reasons why I think those of us who are Christians need to rediscover our deepest roots to help us face longer-term thinking.

But one last thing I’ll say about this, Jim, is that this is the biggest scientific endeavor in the history of the human race. It’s our greatest threat and it’s the greatest scientific exploration. And scientists are honest that when they make a prediction that turns out to not be right, they admit it. But here’s what scientists will say to us. “We have a number of…” what they call “tipping points.” Where major earth systems, things that keep the whole earth in balance could change.

Think of it like this. If your air conditioning goes out in your house and it’s the middle of a hot summer, you notice and you have to deal with that system, or if you plumbing goes out and you don’t have running water, or if your electricity goes out, these different systems in our home, one of them can break down. And what scientists know is that many of Earth’s sustaining systems are at tipping points. And we don’t know enough about how the earth works. It’s such a complex system that we can’t guarantee this is going to break down soon.

A little bit like going to the garage and the mechanic says, “Look, your brakes are not good. I’m not saying they’re going to fail tomorrow, but if I were you, I’d get them changed now or I get new brake fluid now.” That’s what scientists are telling us about multiple systems that we’re tampering with.

Stump:

So you have these four positions and they exist on a continuum with probably degrees between them. I often, when I use a continuum like this, put the ones on the outside that you’re not really… the middle is typically what you think. I want to talk a little bit about these outside positions and wonder if there’s any, maybe, pushback from on the one side, maybe from the theological perspective, that collapse extinction, humans going extinct. Is that really a possibility?

And then maybe on the other side, as you’ve started talking about some of the science and some of the collapse that has already started to happen and how many of the scientists I talk to in this are pretty sure that we’re already past collapse avoidance. On your continuum are we really talking about those middle positions? Talk a little bit about those two extremes again.

McLaren:

Yes. So I don’t know the answer to that question, and I feel myself being emotionally pulled back and forth. Rationally, I’m not certain, but I think collapse voidance every single day becomes less likely. I guess this is the place where I have to come clean. I worry that collapse avoidance, that we might achieve it short term in a way that produces even more devastation long term.

Stump:

I want to push into that point a little bit more because I think this is a really interesting angle you bring in that you’re not really going all in on collapse avoidance. You wonder, rather persuasively to my mind, you wonder about whether avoiding collapse without radically reconfiguring these underlying value systems will actually make things worse in the long run.

I will quote you here again and say that you prefaced this by saying you wanted to delete this question as soon as you wrote it, but you had to ask it. Might it be better for collapse to happen now? Maybe expand on that and defend it a little bit.

McLaren:

Yes. When you look at the world’s multi-billionaires, they have enormous power. And if people become desperate enough, I think they would surrender their freedoms to these billionaires who don’t understand the earth, who don’t understand the kind of deep values you and I, and I think many of our listeners would share as Christians. They really… We don’t understand. Those who aren’t billionaires have no idea how the billionaire’s mind is shaped by the very pursuit of billions of dollars.

We need to think seriously about that because we tend to give these people respect as being successful. We don’t tend to understand them as people who maybe have lost some things in seeking what they have gained. But if they were to combine all their billions of dollars to keep the current system going, one way they do it is they would say, “Look, we make our money through fossil fuels. Let’s keep fossil fuels going. Let’s just invest a lot of money in sucking carbon out of the atmosphere.”

And right now we can’t do that. It’s impossible. It’s a pipe dream. It’s a myth. But let’s say that they get some big technological breakthroughs and they figure out how to suck carbon. So that means we’ll burn more carbon and we’ll suck more carbon out. What that will mean is it will be like an abusive husband who beats up his wife and children and one day she says, “I’m going to leave you.” And he figures out a way to threaten her even more so that she will stay and the children will stay.

He succeeded in keeping the family system going, the family civilization going, but he’s causing even more damage in doing it because he hasn’t had a change in heart. And this is where, I mean for me as a Christian, all of my Christian roots tell me that when we’re in trouble, we need a change in heart. And I’m worried what we will achieve with collapse avoidance without a change of heart. We can avoid it keeping going with the same assumptions that we’ve had.

Stump:

So to get that kind of change of heart, to make the world a better place in that regard, a lot of people are going to suffer and die. And if we don’t make the world a better place, there might be a lot more people who suffer and die over the next two centuries. I’m not sure how to do the calculation of that and which is worse. And there seems to be a lot riding on it. How do we think about that?

McLaren:

Oh, my goodness. Well, to my mind, you’re touching one of the deepest issues that has so many layers to it. And it’s a question we could spend hours and days bringing the smartest, and best, and deepest people together to ponder.

If I were to cut to the chase, so to speak. Here is what happened to me as I thought through this. As one of the chapters is, I am a Candle. And it’s a chapter about facing the reality of death that all of our lives on earth have a limited duration. And what this did to me is it made me say my existence, my individual existence, what if that’s not existence on earth in this life? What if that isn’t really the ultimate issue? What if my responsibility is to think about future generations and their wellbeing and those future generations are potential human lives that could or could not happen?

And then if I were to expand it to say those human lives don’t exist unless there are a lot of plants for them to eat, and animals, and ecosystems. So for me to be concerned about hundreds of thousands of years of human life, that’s potential, then I have to be concerned about the whole, not just about human civilization.

And to me, this brings me back to that verse in Romans 12, that when it says “Don’t be conformed to the world.” It means the world system as you know it, the world’s economy, and politics, and values and so on. And to me, one of the great opportunities here is for us to be able to separate human beings from human civilization as we know it, and to start to try to imagine a good future for human beings. And this to me is exactly what happens in the Bible.

You take the prophet Isaiah who’s living in a very dark time when his civilization is about to collapse because it’s going to be overrun by some enemies very, very soon. And what does Isaiah do? He imagines a world where we beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks. He has one of the most beautiful visions of the future.

By the way, when he talks about the lion lying down with the lamb, I don’t think he’s actually literally imagining that lions will use their canine teeth to eat grass. I think that’s a metaphor to say predatory people will stop being predatory. The problem isn’t lions and lambs, the problem is human beings, predatory human beings and vulnerable human beings. And at a time when collapse threatens, he imagines things being better than they are now. And that’s what I think we have an opportunity to do now.

Stump:

So this brings me back to a question I asked, and we skated over a little bit about the other end of the spectrum of your four positions and extinction and whether human extinction, I mean particularly for those of us who are Christians and are committed to this Christian story and the place of humanity, is this really a possibility? Some of what you’re saying here takes us out of the arch individualism that western society has pushed on us, but is human, is anthropocentrism up for grabs here too, in your view of the ultimate fate of the world?

McLaren:

Well, here we Christians have all of these passages in the Bible, in the Hebrew scriptures, in the Christian scriptures that have this apocalyptic feel. And here we actually face apocalyptic scenarios and suddenly we don’t want to… We’re happy to preach about these if they might happen to somebody else, but if they could happen on our watch, it becomes a little more intimidating.

But let me say it like this. I memorized the Bible verse as a young boy from Galatians, “Do not be deceived. God is not mocked. A person will reap what he sows.” Those are pretty stark words and that’s a pattern we see in the Bible. So here’s the way I’d say it. If we find out that burning fossil fuels is destroying the Earth’s climate system, if we continue to burn fossil fuels and pump them into the atmosphere, we will reap what we sow.

And just as if a seventh grade kid doesn’t study for his math test, he will fail the course. And if people tell him, “You need to study or you’re going to fail.” And he keeps not studying, he will fail. And if we want to think about God as somebody who helps, that kid says, “I’m not going to study. I’m just going to pray that I will understand algebra and trigonometry when I wake up tomorrow morning.” I think we’d say, “Look, any God who helps kids succeed without studying is making them lazy. He’s making them worse, more foolish, less responsible people.”

So our understanding of God can’t be this kind of sugar daddy in the sky who lets us be irresponsible and doesn’t care. So to me, Christians should face this possibility. We could be stupid enough to have very bad outcomes.

Stump:

So the examples you give there are primarily of individuals who are doing those things. And my question here again is whether that extends to the species as a whole, where God might be saying, “You humans, I entered into this covenant with you, you to be my image bearers, but you’re going to reap what you sowed and you’re not going to make it. So I’m going to have to instead enter into covenant with the octopuses to be my image bearers to creation when you’re all gone.” Is that a possibility?

McLaren:

Well, let me just say, I would hate to keep walking out on thinner and thinner ice because I was saying it’s not a possibility. I would hate to put my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren under that kind of risk.

What I would say is if people find themselves using their theology to say, “This could never happen, so we don’t need to do anything.” I would just say “You are in danger of using your theology to be a fool and to be morally irresponsible to future generations. Why would you ever want to do that?” So I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that question, but I would sure hate to be a person who continues to be irresponsible based on…

Stump:

Let’s move to the chapter on hope. I really like this and want to spend a little time here. I’ve been writing and speaking a bit myself about hope being different from optimism and that it’s possible for me to be pessimistic about the way things are going while still being hopeful. If you understand that optimism is more an emotional response and hope is a virtue or something that can be cultivated. I think that’s right. But I worry a little whether I’m just pulling a philosopher’s trick of redefining words to make them do what you want. And your chapter on hope here presents a lot more complexity and nuance to that. So let me introduce it by quoting you again from the chapter where you say, “So here’s the paradox. According to people I respect and trust hope is essential because it motivates. According to other people I respect and trust hope is dangerous because it keeps you from facing how bad things really are in responding appropriately.”

So I think I’ve heard more from the side of people who say that hope is essential. Maybe you can explain and defend a little bit this other side that hope is dangerous in these times. What do you mean by that?

McLaren:

I want to give two examples from my years as a pastor. I remember a woman whose husband was deployed in Iraq and she missed him greatly and she was very worried about him as any loving wife would be. And I remember she came to see me and said, “God told me that my husband will be back by Christmas.” And I’m not exactly sure why she was telling me this, I think she wanted me to validate that that was happening.

And as a pastor, I’d seen this happen enough where people said, “God told me something,” and it helped them survive. But if it didn’t happen, they were now doubly devastated because not only were they disappointed in what the outcome was, but they were disappointed in God or disappointed in their own ability to know what God was about.

And I just remember as she talked to me, I felt as a pastor, I was in a no-win situation. If I said, “Hallelujah, praise God. We’ll confess that and believe it as true.” Then if it didn’t happen, it would be devastating. On the other hand, she was in such a desperate place psychologically that I could understand why she needed to say that.

Well, the truth was her husband did not make it home by Christmas and she was angry at me because I guess somehow I was supposed to have the inside track with God. And I had tried to help her prepare for that possibility and she got mad at me for doing that. So there are so many psychological dimensions to this. I’ve seen this same thing with people who receive a prognosis of a terrible disease and they have a limited time to live.

And many of them, their response is to refuse to accept it. Psychologists who talk about grief talk about anger and denial being early dimensions of grief. And I can understand why a person would do that, but I’ve watched other people who receive a prognosis that is hopeless and instead of succumbing to despair, what they say is, “I have the doctors tell me I have six months to two years to live. I want to really live the way I should live for this time.”

And I just had this experience recently with someone who’s passing away and had contacted me and said, “I just wanted to call and say goodbye. You’ve been a great friend. I love you. It sounds kind of weird, but I’m going to be really busy with other things in the next couple of months. So I’m just calling to tell you thank you for your friendship and if we don’t see each other again in this life, you’ve been a good friend to me.”

And it was this incredibly meaningful exchange and he was doing this with a number of different people and it was becoming a joyful and meaningful time of letting people know how much he loved them. And instead of us sitting around crying, there was laughter about good memories we’ve shared. It was a little bit like having a funeral while a person was still alive, but it was this wonderful celebration of our relationship and friendship, along with the grief.

And all that’s to say that a kind of hope that leads to denial or that is part of a psychological coping mechanism, it’s understandable, but it’s not the same as the hope that I think helps us cope in the wisest way with reality.

Stump:

Are people different in this regard? Are we painting with too broad of a brush when we try to say, “This is how we ought to present it to people.”? Where some people really may be helped by the kind of hope that feels a little superficial to some of us, but they just need something to keep them going. And other people are saying, “Now, come on, there’s all these issues and I need more complexity and nuance to really understand the situation better.” Because again, what I fear is hearing from people who think to criticize hope is to just succumb to the doomerism and that it works against mobilizing people that need to be mobilized in some way.

Are we painting with too broad of a brush, and if the answer to that is yes, the question is how do we make sure the right message gets to the right people to hear it the right way?

McLaren:

Yes. Well, as you can imagine, that was one of my challenges in writing that chapter and that was the chapter when I was working on it I thought, if I can work out this chapter, I have a book that’s worth writing.

So here’s a way I would say it. First, we ought to acknowledge that hope means many different things. To some people, hope means the will to keep trying and the will to keep going, the will to keep loving. And I am 100% for that. I think we should keep living every second we can and keep trying, and keep giving, and keep loving.

It’s interesting to me that Paul wrote in I Corinthians that there are three great qualities, faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love. And there’s a kind of hope that makes us say, “I’m going to love no matter what happens.” And that’s the hope that I just want to fan the flames of that hope wherever I possibly can.

I don’t want to attack or criticize hope, even though I’m aware that it is often used to pacify people and to give them permission to be complacent. But this is where we just have to be careful. We don’t want to hurt the will to live that’s essential when we’re also needing to critique a lack of wisdom and just wanting to comfort ourselves so we can remain in complacency.

Stump:

So you, in this chapter quote, Cynthia Bourgeault, a Spiritual Director who says, “Our great mistake is that we tie hope to outcome.” That resonates a lot with a quote from Mother Teresa I’ve been using a lot when she said, “We’re not called to be effective, we’re called to be faithful.” And you quote Wendell Berry at the beginning of the chapter, “The only question to ask is what’s the right thing to do.” 

So I wonder how you feel about this: so Puddleglum from The Silver Chair is one of my favorite characters in all of literature, and he’s one of the most pessimistic glass is half empty guys you’ll ever meet. But I think he gave what’s one of the best examples of the kind of hopefulness you’re talking about when he and the children are trapped in the underworld and under the spell of a witch and he figures that all is lost or that maybe they’re even mistaken about what is real. But in this defiant and hopeful speech, he says, “I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it, and I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can, even if there isn’t a Narnia. Is that the kind of active hope or what you quote from Paul again, the hope beyond hope, that’s worth holding on to, even if we’re not sure of the outcome?

McLaren:

First, I really want to thank you because I had totally forgotten about that quote.

Stump:

One of my favorite scenes in all of literature.

McLaren:

Oh, my goodness. And that’s something that CS Lewis says in a couple of different places. And look, as a writer, I’ll just say every character in a writer’s work expresses a part of that writer, even parts that the writer doesn’t necessarily like. And so to me, that just feels like this beautiful deep insight from CS Lewis’s own soul. And something people need to remember who love literature is CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien both lived during one of the darkest times in human civilization, which is carpet bombing that went on in World War II. And they were watching the wheels fall off in a way that I don’t think a lot of us could imagine until recently. And we’re maybe starting to imagine it now.

But I love that. And I would’ve used that quote, because that says it even better than some of the quotes I used. Yes. And here’s the fascinating thing about that. When Puddleglum says that he makes things possible that would not have been possible before. And after I finished the book, I finally came up with a sentence that I wish I would’ve included in the book that makes a similar point. “I don’t know what the future, but I know how I want to show up.” And that was what Puddlegum was saying.

“I know how I want to show up and I know how I want to be, the kind of person I want to be.” And that to me is an incredible gift of the deep questioning and the deep challenge, the feelings of doom that literally millions, probably billions of people are facing or will face in the near future. Yeah, I love that. Thank you for that.

Stump:

Good. I want to come back to how I show up in this world. But one more thing before we get there. You’ve invoked the Bible several times and you make the point at the beginning of this book that you’re not just writing for Christians in this book, but it’s obvious that you write from that tradition. And the book has lots of reflection on your faith and on passages from scripture.

And one of the surprising things to me as I came across it though after you said it should have been very obvious, is that you name the Bible as a book of indigenous wisdom. And even that Jesus was an indigenous prophet, and maybe that’s not all that the Bible is or all that Jesus is, but they were certainly those things at least. So explain a little bit that perspective and how it might change the way that we view the Bible, how we even view organized religion and Christianity and what it has to offer to the world during a climate crisis as coming from an indigenous perspective?

McLaren:

Yes. Well, I’ll tell you an anecdote that I hope will make this clear. I have a Jewish friend who wrote a book on the 10 Commandments and it hasn’t ever been published, but he sent it to me and said, “As a Christian, how does this strike you?” And I told him, “It’s the best book on the 10 Commandments I’ve ever read, and I’m just broken-hearted that it hasn’t been published yet.”

But here’s how he evaluated the first two commandments. You’ll have no other gods before me and you’ll make no graven images. He said the Jewish people were living in the hill country of Palestine. They were indigenous tribes, they were agricultural people tied to the land, their entire life and security was involved with the land. They thought their future generations needed to live on the land. They needed to preserve the land, the entire Torah, the Jewish law, Hebrew law was about caring for the land and all the rest.

And they kept being invaded by these empires. Egypt would conquer them or they’d have to flee to Egypt to escape a famine and be made into slaves, or the Assyrians, or the Babylonians. Later, the Greeks, and the Syrians, and the Romans would conquer them. But in ancient Hebrew time, these people didn’t want to be conquered. And so they said “One of the things that all empires have is big temples with very fancy idols, and we better stay away from that. We don’t want that kind of a world. We want a God who we know through our daily lives. We don’t need a big fancy temple and magic idols. We know God in the soil and the air and every breath that we take. We don’t need anything physical like that. We know God experientially.”

And I just think that this is one of our challenges now is to rediscover the presence of God that we know in our daily life and to be suspicious of these empires that use gods. They always use gods to justify their right to kill other people. And if we don’t want to be part of that, we need to be sure that we don’t let our God or gods be corrupted to become a license for hate, for exceptionalism, that we should be first and everybody else should be subordinated to us.

In some ways, we know there are many different religions, but I think there are two kinds of religions. There are religions that help people justify violence toward their fellow humans and toward the earth. And there are religions that teach people love and respect for their fellow humans and for the earth.

Stump:

You quote a number of indigenous people, some of whom identify as Christians as well, some of whom don’t. Do you see a particular sort of fruitfulness for Christianity in particular in recapturing that indigenous flavor? What does that look like moving forward for us, for those of us who are in the church and who are committed to following Christ who happens to be an indigenous prophet?

McLaren:

Yes. So one of the characteristics of our current civilization is that it does a great job of making us conform and it conforms our minds to its values.

Stump:

Romans 12 again.

McLaren:

And the problem is how do we experience a transformation of our minds? What leverage point do we have? Especially when we have a global civilization that has conformed just about everybody of every religion to the same set of values. Money is most important. Pleasure and comfort are most important. Violence toward them is okay, as long as we’re safe. And indigenous culture where it exists it’s one of the only places left where live by a different value system and where they see something wrong with that value system.

Probably the other places monasteries where people are basically saying, “Yeah, we don’t even want to be part of that whole thing. We’re trying to preserve a different way of life.” Now I don’t think we can go back. Well, we may be forced to at some point, but I don’t think we can go back. I think what we have to do is a vision, a future that rediscovers many of those more ancient values.

And this is what I see happening at the end of the book of Revelation. I don’t think Revelation is a roadmap of a predetermined future as many people do, but I do think it’s incredibly valuable and important. And what does it end with? It ends with a tree of life evoking the Garden of Eden when human beings are naked, hunter-gatherers living in a garden, but it’s still a city.

And so some of my friends use this phrase, eco-civilization, to say what the book of Revelation gives us a picture of in the future is a civilization that is re-centered on that very primal way of life, a relationship with the earth, a relationship with each other that was there in that Garden of Eden story. Even, it’s so interesting, in the book of Revelation, it says, “There will be no temple for the light of God, the presence of God is there. You don’t need a temple.”

It’s this fascinating vision of the future that rediscovers forgotten treasures from the past. That’s what I think we… I think the moment that we’re in and the opportunity that we have dangerous times, but usually it takes things getting pretty bad for us to rediscover what really matters.

Stump:

How do you speak to Christians who don’t think that climate change is really that big of an issue that we need to be worried about? And let me give you an actual comment left in a one star review of this podcast just recently who said, “It’s such a tragedy that you’ve turned an important and informative podcast into a cry fest for doomers.”

Clearly there are people listening to this podcast even who feel like spending our time talking about these issues are taking away from good work we’d do otherwise. How do you respond to that kind of critique in general or maybe even to that listener in particular? That I want to affirm and say what you feel is what you feel for sure, but how do you redirect that kind of passivity, that kind of even disdain for what… After my reading your book here, this is all I can think about. This just seems like the most important thing, isn’t it? How do we channel such people and their passions into the direction that we’re pretty sure is most important?

McLaren:

Well, if I were talking to that person, I would say, “Listen, you think someone like me is a fool, you think I’m an idiot, you think I’m deceived, you think I’m wrong.” And maybe I am, maybe I am. But I’m telling you this is my sincere concern. And so if I’m wrong, I’m sincerely wrong and you might tell me I’m a liar. You might insult me. I’m just going to tell you you’re misjudging me. I’m sincere about this. So if I’m sincerely wrong, is it possible you could be sincerely wrong? I.

If you want to judge me as sincerely wrong, do you think you’re better than me? Do you think you’re on some different level than me? And do you understand how dangerous it is to think that it’s impossible for you to be sincerely wrong? So I’d say, “Please feel free to think of me as sincerely wrong. But in some moment when you’re falling asleep at night, would you at least be open to the possibility that you could be sincerely wrong?” And I might say to them, I don’t know if this is true, I’d have to find out if this is true. “But the difference between us is that I used to think like you and I’ve had to change based on things that I’ve experienced and learned in life. You have probably never thought like me. And so maybe you should at least be open to that.”

That’s probably something that I would say. But most folks, the thing I have to say is that most folks choose their beliefs by choosing the group they want to belong to. And when they hear a belief that would get them in trouble with a group they belong to, alarm bells go off in their subconscious, “I can’t think this or I will be mocked and rejected by the group I’m part of.” And I understand how difficult that is. And so that’s why for a lot of people, I just say, “God bless you.” I don’t need to argue with you.

Stump:

Well, we’re coming toward the end here, and I want to finish by talking about how we live magnificently, what we bring, as you were talking about the hope section, what we bring, no matter which of these scenarios ends up happening. I said, I read the book in two sittings and the first of those was sitting on the beach at Lake Michigan for about five hours one evening this week. And it was just a perfect evening.

Sitting there in the natural beauty and felt like paradise. And reading this, I thought was in pretty tension with the doom section. And then I got to these sections about living magnificently and you give a thought experiment about how we might live if the end is really upon us and made this very inspiring case that there’s so much good in the world still and that we ought to lean into that.

So I actually put the book down and went out into the lake for a swim and just floated there a while and watched people enjoying themselves and was just being glad to be alive for those moments and loving life. Is that the kind of application of what you urge in the book after quoting Jesus, this indigenous prophet again from the Sermon on the mount, “Don’t worry about your life, what you’ll eat or wear. Life is more than food and clothing. Seek first the kingdom of God.”

You say that Jesus’s message there is “It’s time to withdraw emotional attachment from the collapsing human systems. It’s time to transfer attachment to the ecosystem of God, this sacred web of life that ravens and wildflowers thrive within. Free of barns and bank accounts and free of worry and stress.” That’s such a beautiful moment. And guess I ask, how do we extend those from being just a rare, beautiful moment that I had floating in Lake Michigan to all of life? Is it possible to make that how life goes all the time?

McLaren:

Well, first thanks for sharing that. That makes me so happy as a writer to imagine that experience for you. And I think this is what happens, when I was a teenager, I went on a retreat and I had this experience with the Holy Spirit that it was this feeling of the beautiful love of God. And it wasn’t just God’s love for me, it was God’s love for all of creation and every human being. I was so overwhelmed.

And I remember it lasted about 20, 30 minutes and then I sort of went back to normal life. I had to go to bed that night, get up the next morning, brush my teeth. But I remember thinking, “It must be possible to live with that awareness more and more.” And that’s what I think puts in us a desire, that’s what spiritual disciplines or practices are for, to put in us a desire for what seemed like fleeting intense experiences to become more normative.

And the interesting thing is when they become more normative, we don’t notice them because they’re normal. We are transformed by the renewing of our mind. We’re changed. And I think in some ways that’s one of the gifts of these disorienting times where we stop getting so much of our encouragement and support from the world system, from having another double espresso latte or whatever it is, and we find these deeper wells of sustenance. Thank God for the moments when they happen intensely and then that allows us to know there’s another way to live.

I wish that more of our churches were actually focused on helping people experience that in their daily life rather than telling them that this life is terrible and all the blessings are waiting for after they die or telling people, “Join us in being against these people and you’ll be righteous and you’ll have that kind of satisfaction.” So yeah, I think that is possible.

I think though it’s the quest and the interesting thing is in my experience, at any rate, and I imagine this is true in yours as well, even as we make progress, our vision of what’s possible becomes higher and better, which keeps us moving forward.

Stump:

So Paul says in the Philippians, after thanking them for trying to look after him during some troubles, but he says, “Look, I’ve learned the secret of being content in any circumstance.” And that’s what came to mind during this, of being able to bring that attitude into no matter what happens, that…

Well, let me end by taking up the role of Mahalia Jackson as you tell the story at the end of the book, when in 1963 at the mall in Washington, D.C., she was listening to Martin Luther King Jr. and wanted something more from him. And she calls out, “Tell them about the dream, Martin.” So in closing, I am saying “Tell them about the dream, Brian.”

McLaren:

Well, thank you. I suppose what I should say is there are three paragraphs in the book where I try to summarize this. I’ll just read the first of those paragraphs maybe as a good way to close this time and hope people will find the others as well.

“I dream that the wisdom of indigenous people, the wisdom of Saint Francis, and Saint Claire, and the Buddha, and Jesus, the wisdom of climate scientists, and ecologists, and spiritual visionaries from all faiths could be welcomed into every heart. Then we would look across this planet and see not economic resources, but our sacred relations. Brother Dolphin and sister Humpback Whale, swimming in our majestic indigo oceans with Sister Gull and Brother Frigate Birds soaring above them beneath the blue sky.

We would see all land as holy land and walk reverently in the presence of Sister Meadow and Brother Forest, feeling our kinship with Brother Bald Eagle and Sister Box Turtle, Sister Song Sparrow, and Brother Swallowtail Butterfly, all our relations.”

Stump:

Amen. Well, you don’t end the book with a list of, “And here’s now what you ought to go and do.” But you do end with saying that some things matter more than other things. And I wondered if you wanted to maybe call out a few of those. I’ll call out and end with number 11, “What you think matters and how you love matters even more.” Any other final words from you in this regard?

McLaren:

Well, you know at the core of Jesus teaching, he is on this theme again and again. He talks about the danger of money. And all of us immediate say, “Yeah, but money is necessary.” “Yeah, it’s necessary, but it’s dangerous.”

He says that either we will love God and hate money or love money and hate God. It’s very strong language. And I think one of the things that all of us can step back and realize is that money is powerful and it has taught us to value certain things and not value other things. And if we sincerely want to follow Jesus in the way of life that he modeled and taught, I think what we’re going to have to do is say “There are things that matter more than money. There are things that matter more than economy.”

It’s an election year, and someone said, “The only thing that matters in election years is the economy. It’s the economy, stupid.” Was the saying. But I think we have to say “No. There are things that matter way, way, way, way more than money.” And one of the items in that list is I say, “Look, you have a job that has to matter. Your job’s important, but more than the money you get from your job is the benefit or harm related to your job.”

And so some of us are in jobs that are harmful. We need to look for a new job. And others of us are in jobs that bring benefit and we need to understand the benefit to ourselves and others. That’s the really beautiful thing. So that would maybe be the one that I would say, there are a lot of things that matter more than money.

Stump:

Well, Brian, thanks so much for this book. I highly recommend that everybody get a copy, read it, even with all of its challenges. And thank you for the insights. Thank you for your work and life and how they’ve pointed so many people toward healthier spiritual practices. And thank you for talking to us here. I hope we might do it again.

McLaren:

I look forward to that. It is a deep honor to be in conversation with someone who’s taken this book so seriously and I can tell we’re both human beings who are feeling the reality of our situation, and so I’m deeply, deeply grateful. Thank you.

Colin Hoogerwerf:

Language for God is produced by BioLogos. BioLogos is supported by individual donors and listeners like you. If you’d like to help keep this conversation going on the podcast and elsewhere, you can find ways to contribute at BioLogos.org. You’ll find lots of other great resources on science and faith there as well. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf, that’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River Watershed. Thanks for listening.