Like most Evangelicals, I was taught a very specific technique for looking at scripture. You pick out a verse and think of ways that the verse can be applied to your personal life. You let the Holy Spirit guide you and reveal the meanings that are intended as a fix for the issues in your own life. There is no doubt that this can “work”. Many lives (including my own) have been blessed by this method and the Bible can be an extremely transformational and comforting book when read this way. However, what happens when we take some of the most profound social and political statements ever written and domesticate them by reducing them to truths about our own personal relationships and private needs? Is there a downside to this approach?

Christians often complain that our religion is loosing its position of influence in the world. I believe that Christianity got what it has asked for when it domesticated the good news of Jesus. When the message of Jesus was skewed toward merely another personal message about private issues of piety, self-help, and the eternal salvation of our souls, then Christianity became a private religion with private results. Let’s face it - it is easier to focus on ourselves because it can often feel like we just don’t have any control over our city, state, national, and global issues. I think this is exactly what the Empire wants us to think. The imperial forces that acquired and institutionalized Christianity needed to domesticate its radical anti-imperial message by shifting its emphasis and that shift has huge psychological effects to this day. We have been told that those big issues are “in God’s hands” and therefore out of our hands. We have lost hope in the ability to make big changes and when hope is lost then the battle is over. We feel a lack of power so we focus on what we can control, then we disconnect from the system and lose more power so we focus more on ourselves. This vicious cycle continues until all hope is lost and all power has dissipated.

Brian McLaren is challenging this domestication of Jesus in his new book “Everything Must Change”. He is challenging Christians to look deeper at our sacred texts and recover its message of hope for big changes and its lost challenge to be more than a religion of personal piety. Jesus’ critique of the Pharisees was not a criticism of their “Jewishness”. His message was not about being less Jewish. Jesus’ message was about returning Israel to its full sense of being God’s people and it’s calling as a radical catalyst for global change.

[in this book]We have raised the possibility that Jesus’ message might be seen as an alternative framing story that, if believed, could save the system from suicide. To test this possibility, we will need to consider the possibility that “Jesus” as we have understood him has himself been domesticated and made part of the dominant framing story. For Jesus to save the system, we must first, in a sense, save Jesus – by reframing him outside the confines of our dominant and largely unquestioned assumptions. (p. 73)

The conventional view, however, is more dualistic, with human souls and other “spiritual” things in one category and human bodies and other “secular” things in another. This dualism conveniently keeps faith a private and personal “spiritual” matter so believers see themselves as “just passing through” this world, steering them away from “worldly” social engagement beyond their personal, family, and church-related concerns(p.81)