I have seen Maclaren's name blown up over the last couple of years - almost always stuck in an arena controversy and I'm sure his responses in the Sojourners interview will give his accusers more and more weapons to turn against him. Yet, I have really only seen strength of character and confident humility from him. I appreciate his willingness to be honest, open, raw and willing to live life stuck in the sticky and icky aspects of living.
I want to highlight one of Maclaren's answers:
One of the problems is that the average Christian in the average church who listens to the average Christian broadcasting has such an oversimplified understanding of both the Bible and of church history - it would be deeply disturbing for them to really learn about church history. I think the disturbing would do them good. But a lot of times education is disturbing for people. And so if The Da Vinci Code causes people to ask questions and Christians have to dig deeper, that's a great thing, a great opportunity for growth. And it does show a weakness in the church giving either no understanding of church history or a very stilted, one-sided, sugarcoated version.
On the other hand, it's important for me to say I don't think anyone can learn good church history from Brown. There's been a lot of debunking of what he calls facts. But again, the guy's writing fiction so nobody should be surprised about that. The sad thing is there's an awful lot of us who claim to be telling objective truth and we actually have our own propaganda and our own versions of history as well.
Let me mention one other thing about Brown's book that I think is appealing to people. The church goes through a pendulum swing at times from overemphasizing the deity of Christ to overemphasizing the humanity of Christ. So a book like Brown's that overemphasizes the humanity of Christ can be a mirror to us saying that we might be underemphasizing the humanity of Christ.
I really appreciate the insight of Maclaren here. If he doesn't cause us to think by his words then we are probably predisposed to not wanting to think at all.
PS - I have not yet read Brown's book, but one has to give the author credit for writing a best seller and doing so creatively. The controversy is not so much with the author, but those who ascribe too much authority to the fiction writer's pen.
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