I don't get it. 9marks reviews Shane Claiborne's book The Irresistible Revolution, and they pass it off as 'the easy way out':
The fundamental issue is not that Claiborne is too radical or even rebellious. No, it's that he takes the easy way out. It's hard to spend your money in a godly way and to give it to the poor wisely, so he scatters it on the ground as a "jubilee" and abrogates a responsibility given to him by God. It's no fun to hold a job and legally purchase abandoned buildings for the homeless, so he "reclaims" them as a squatter. It's difficult to be patient under the current regime of sin and death, and so Claiborne pretends that swords can be pounded into plowshares and poverty can be eliminated without the return of Christ.
That's it. I'm calling bull crap on Shane Walker, the author, right here and now.
I have a very hard time believing that the life Shane Claiborne is living is easier than the life Shane Walker is living. Which isn't to say that Walker's life as a minister in suburban Baltimore is easy--I doubt it is.
But I'd be willing to bet Walker's bed is more comfortable, the water in his shower warmer and his clothes less worn than Claiborne's.
I'm not trying to say that hippies are more holy, just that I think Walker's attempt to disregard Claiborne's prophetic foolishness as the easy way out is a facade for not taking that prophecy serious.
Bizarrely, Walker recognizes how dead on Claiborne is. And leads his article with it:
Much of his critique of the American evangelical church is accurate. In general, we are fat, insulated, and isolated from the poor and disenfranchised. We have compromised with our culture on the issue of civic religion. Our churches are characterized by the market's brand of statistically-driven pragmatism. And our theology and practice can be an incoherent mess. When our bright young people notice all this, they begin looking around for a way to follow Jesus that is less staid and less compromised...
But goes on to worm his way out of actually making any sort of radical changes.
To be honest, I don't know much about Shane Claiborne. I heard an interview with him on the Nick and Josh Podcast a while back--he sounded like a big goofball (which, like Don Miller, lent considerably to his credibility in my mind), and I've heard and read bits and pieces here and there.
So I'm not real interested in defending him--I don't know enough about him to say he's doing things right or wrong.
But I think that review was pretty illustrative of the way we tend to wuss out when somebody calls us on the carpet: we've got pretty decent reasons for doing things the way we do, and for not taking seriously the parts of Jesus' teaching we don't want to take seriously, and Walker carts them out and does a nice job justifying the same kind suburban normalcy than I'm living right now, while trying to make Claiborne look like a confused Che Guavara with some Jesus mixed in.
But sentences like "A bit of head scratching is in due order when one reads such statements. How does one make the universal need of salvation identical to the particularized need of the rich young ruler?" [try teaching the rich young ruler to a group of college students who haven't grown up in your 'if it applies to giving money away, it's probably not a universal rule' subculture to see the answer to that question] and "The irresistible revolution...fails to make distinctions between the deserving and the undeserving poor (as required by 2 Thes. 3:10), between the megalomaniac dictators and the management of Taco Bell, between Christians and non-Christians" [read 2 Thes 3...I don't think it means what you think it means; and if you can't tell the difference between a megalomaniac dictator and a psychopathic Taco Bell manager, it's only because you've never worked at Taco Bell], tend to reveal Walker's position as on substantially shakier ground than he'd like you to believe.
I say this as someone who tends to find myself (and even now finds myself) on that same ground--I know what's he's talking about and how he's back-pedaling to justify his own lifestyle because I do it on a regular basis.
The easy way out, Shane Walker? The easy way out is to stick with the way we're doing things now, the way that says, 'poverty will work itself out; we should care about the poor. and sometime...um...next month or so...I'll get around to doing something about poverty in my town.'
That's the easy way out--to keep doing the same thing I've been doing and justifying it with Scripture that makes me feel like I'm being discerning. When really, I'm just being lazy.
I might be talking about you, Shane, I don't really know. But I know I'm talking about me.
