For those of you who have been living in a cave (or finishing up a seminary degree), the last installment of Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian trilogy is out and either blessing people or pissing them off…sometimes both. The Last Word and the Word After That continues and kinda wraps the saga of Pastor Dan Poole and his friend Neil Edward Oliver (aka “Neo”) that began with Dan’s disillusionment with his brand of modern Christianity. I won’t give a recap of the whole story here - visit Amazon or a post-everything friend.

On the surface, TLW seems to be largely about hell: its evolution before and along Christendom’s timeline, its various incarnations at the hands of respected theologians. Is it a place? If so, who goes there, and how does one avoid it? Is it a metaphor? If so, what does it mean? Under all this hell-speak, however, TLW is really asking questions about God. What kind of God do we believe in? What is God doing? What is God’s agenda, and how does one get on it?

McLaren’s specialty is taking a step outside of the usual theological arguments and wondering, “Are we even asking the right questions?” In TLW, he suggests that our theology of hell has been informing our theology of God for an awfully long time, and it might be time to turn the coin over. Do we really think that God has gone to all this trouble to tell us about hell? Or might there be something larger at stake?

Many people are apparently very happy with hell, and are extremely upset - past the point of Christian charity - that McLaren has dared to trifle with their eternal torment. (If I knew how to put in links, I would point you to the reviews page on Amazon, where you would read nastiness that would cause your hair to stand on end. I trust you will be able to find it without my help.) I, for one, am glad that someone had the cojones to open up the conversation.

-ah