I know I said I was done writing about this, but I am finishing the book. I found McLaren's eschatology to confusing and saddening, so I am looking for someone to correct me here if I am mistaken in my understanding.
As I read through McLaren's chapter on eschatology, I found one concept curiously absent--resurrection. So, I did some digging, scouring the pages for any reference to resurrection or any discussion of it in the footnotes, and the best I came up with was a link to a deleted chapter called "Making Echatology Personal." McLaren says that the article was written in response to the question, "What happens to me when I die?"
Here is the article. Is this resurrection? Note especially the italicized portions on pages 12–14.
It seems to me that McLaren's "resurrection" is that the good deeds that we did are swallowed up into the memory of God, so that they live on, but our bad deeds are consumed by the judgment so that they are forgotten. Curiously, his descriptions of Jesus' resurrection are starting to look like that to me, too--the resurrection shouldn't be interpreted as a bodily resurrection, but as rememberance by Jesus' people. Jesus is "resurrected" in the sense that the church is his body and memory of him lives on.
If this is the role resurrection (especially Jesus' resurrection) plays in the new kind of Christianity, then I don't think it can be called Christianity in any meaningful sense. That saddens me.
I hope I am mistaken about this. If anyone can correct me, please do. I would appreciate it.
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