Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

by Brian D. McLaren

As I wrote the book, I was coming to realize that the very idea of being clean carried in it the rendering of the other as dirty, which is the seed of ethnic cleansing. So I dug more deeply into baptism in the New Testament, centering the story of Peter and Cornelius in Acts 10. I saw (as we noted in Chapter 17) that baptism could actually be understood as a rejection of clean/unclean narratives; it could be understood as an immersion into the current of the Spirit running through our world, bringing us into solidarity with all people. I similarly looked at how common understandings of the eucharist (evoking blood sacrifice), election (being chosen for salvation and leaving others for damnation), foreign missions (which have tended to collude consciously or unconsciously with colonialism in recent centuries), and other elements of inherited Christianity could be radically reimagined and repurposed … not just thrown away, but recycled.5 So we are recycling salvation as liberation, evoking its original biblical meaning in Exodus. We are recycling the final judgment as the realization that only time will reveal the full goodness or evil (or mix of both) that flows from any action. As we considered in Chapter 15, we are recycling demons and the devil as an early theory or model of mental illness and systemic evil. We are reframing the doctrine of the Trinity from a math problem to a profound insight into the dynamic, creative relationality of God and the universe, helping us r...