Why Don’t You Eat Cows? or The Pluralism Question
This is the ninth post interacting with Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity. Please remember that I cannot reproduce the book in these posts. I will do my best to summarize without being overly simplistic or reductionistic. Each post will be two parts. The first will be a summary of McLaren’s discussion and the second will be my reflections.The Pluralism Question: How should followers of Jesus relate to people of other religions?McLaren begins his chapter on pluralism by setting the stage with this statement:
“If we want to get on the right side of the life-and-death divide, we need to start with some sober, serious, old-fashioned repentance, starting with this admission: Christianity has a nauseating, infuriating, depressing record when it comes to encountering people of other religions (and a not much better record when encountering people of other brands of Christianity either). (208)”
The question he determines to answer is, “how do we find a better approach to the religiously other...