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The title of this review nicely summarizes, at least for our family, the heart of Brian McLaren's whacked out book. The words "Nobody can tell you you're not Jewish" were inadvertently uttered by a friend of my college-student daughter. This pearl of wisdom means, simply, that anyone can define herself (to employ McLaren's neologistic, PC use of the feminine pronoun to include everybody) in anyway she wants, to the effect that her position is unassailable, her self-definition unchallengeable. The idea here (which McLaren blithely appropriates) is that words, even concepts, can mean anything I want them to mean, and no one can tell me any differently. Or, you can challenge me if you want, but I don't care; that's just your position and anyone can think anything they want and why can't we all just be brothers? Sound familiar? Check out Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland from more than a century ago, or, more recently, Jack Handy. It is not used satirically here; it is used with utter seriousness. Brian McLaren, a "Post-Protestant," actually seems to think he can really-and-truly "be" all the silly-contradictory words and phrases he links together in his subtitle. This reminds me of something one of his favorite authors (ironically, as it turns out; their thought is so radically different), G. K. Chesterton, once said: "A man who stops believing in God doesn't believe nothing; he believes anything." Or as my son, with a Masters in Philosophy Summa Cum Laude from Boston College, said when I told him the subtitle of the book: "That sounds like the road to atheism." (By the way, for those of you who object to the breezy-narrative style I've cast this review in, I'm only mirroring the author's own writing approach [with somewhat more substance, one hopes]; what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, no?) What's wrong with McLaren's approach? Well, it's one thing to imagine McLaren ADMIRING all the words/concepts/denominations he rather cavalierly strings together in his subtitle; it's another thing to actually imagine him BEING them all. Let's look at just a couple, Reformed and Catholic. In the first instance, he gives one of the more supercilious accounts of the Reformation I have ever read; then, to compound the problem, he substitutes for the traditional TULIP of Calvinism (Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited Atonement, Irresistable grace, and Perseverance of the saints) his neo-TULIP of revisionist McLarenism (Triune love, Unselfish election, Limitless Reconciliation, Inspiring grace, and Passionate, Persistent saints) all the time acting as if the two are essentially the same. It's clear from this chapter that he ADMIRES Reformed Christianity, but that his most certainly IS NOT himself a Reformed Christian. Then he makes what for any knowledgeable person can only be regarded as a completely ridiculous statement: "In terms of intellectual rigor, I believe that Reformed Christianity is the highest expression of modern Christianity," which is scarcely the case. For example, who in Reformed Christianity can equal the intellectual rigor of, say, Catholics Jacques Maritain, Bernard Lonergan, Jean-Luc Marion, and Rene Girard, persons of the highest achievement in their respective fields? What Reformed Christian leader can match the intellectual accomplishment of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI? Regarding Catholicism, McLaren first vulgarizes the discussion by claiming he is a "catholic" (small "c") Christian, which essentially means nothing, either historically or theologically. He then claims a deep love and respect for the liturgy, failing to realize that these feelings matter for little unless one is actually a "Catholic" (big C), that is, a member of the Roman Catholic Church. Moreover, he acts as if liturgy is something that can just be appropriated by whatever church would like to have it as part of their worship mix, completely missing the reality that liturgy has an intrinsic relationship to the Catholic understanding of Tradition, Apostolicity, priesthood, Real Presence, and Eucharistic sacrifice, which no church (save Orthodoxy) even approaches. Another really irritating thing about this book is its incredible arrogance. For example, McLaren acts as if "missional Christianity" is some recent, new invention, whereas in reality it can be traced back in terms of a formal statement at least to Gaudium et Spes from the Vatican II (mid 1960s) and much farther back in other official pronouncements of the Catholic Church. And just what is the "emerging church"? Does this mean she has plodded through the past two millennia in a befuddled fog from which she is only now "emerging"? Or, to change the metaphor (McLaren's big on metaphors), has she been bound up, pupalike, in a cocoon, from which the glorious post-modern butterfly-church is only now emerging in all its magnificence? On the theme or arrogance, the title (and much of the book, it must be admitted) seems to position McLaren as something of a super-Christian, able to appropriate and make manifest in his person (and, one supposes, in the church he pastors) the best of the best of Christianity, judiciously retaining the doctrino-liturgico-ecclesiastico-"missional" wheat even as he discards the "denominationally distinctive" chaff, while the average Christian schmuck remains mired in his narrow-minded, pinched, benighted, obsolete, sorry little Christian box. But you know what the truth is? This project doesn't work. You can't be all the things McLaren wants to be. McLaren's approach is truly a case of the whole being far less than the sum of its parts. Why? Because you just can't adequately appropriate something like the Liturgy as a non-Catholic. Why not? Because your self-understanding will be so significantly different than the self-understanding of the community in whom the liturgy is so much an essential part of their life that it cannot be lived, let alone even understood, apart from membership in that community. In short, what you will have won't be the Liturgy, but a pale imitation of it. I know, because I've experienced both sides of that equation as an Anglican and now as a Roman Catholic. Sorry, Charlie, not just any tuna can be a Star Kissed tuna.