Taking Christ out of Christianity

May 5, 2008 By

WithoutGod 01When the Jeremiah Wright scandal first broke, I was one of the voices here calling for more context. Well, I’m done with contextualizing. Sometimes it’s nice to just get a news story that asks hard questions while treating a subject fairly.

Charles Lewis, writing for Canada’s National Post, writes about what “Christianity without Christ” looks like. His hook is a new book by Pastor Gretta Vosper. She doesn’t believe the Christian creeds, rejects miracles and thinks the Resurrection is a fraud. Here’s how he begins:

There is a Bible on a pedestal in Gretta Vosper’s West Hill United Church in Toronto. She would prefer it did not have a special place, she said, because it is just a book among other books. In a similar way, the cross that is high above the altar has no special meaning, but there are a few older congregants for whom the Bible and the cross are still nice symbols so there they remain.

Though an ordained minister, she does not like the title of reverend. It is one of those symbols that hold the church back from breaking into the future — to a time “when the label Christian won’t even exist” and the Church will be freed of the burdens of the past. To balance out those symbols of the past inside West Hill, there is a giant, non-religious rainbow tapestry just behind the altar and multi-coloured streamers hang from the ceiling.

“The central story of Christianity will fade away,” she explained. “The story about Jesus as the symbol of everything that Christianity is will fade away.”

The story is very fair to Vosper. But unlike so many stories about recently published books, Lewis digs a bit deeper. He asks the head of the United Church of Canada, Vosper’s mainline denomination, what he thinks. Rev. David Giuliano says it’s not his job to condemn and that the church is broad enough to encompass a wide range of theologies.

Even Rev. Giuliano agrees that the name Christian — which carries the baggage of colonialism and other ills — should probably be phased out.

Lewis provides many details of what Christianity without Christ looks like. Vosper does not believe in the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the miracles and the sacrament of baptism. Nor does she believe in the creeds, the presence of Christ in communion or that Jesus was the Son of God. There’s more:

In With or Without God, her book that was formally launched this week, she writes that Jesus was a “Middle Eastern peasant with a few charismatic gifts and a great posthumous marketing team.”

The Bible is used in her services, but it gets rewritten to be more contemporary and speak to more people. Even the Lord’s Prayer — also known as the Our Father — does not make the cut because it creates an image of a God who intervenes in human existence. And then there is the “Father” part that is not inclusive language and carries with it the notion of an overbearing tyrant who condemns people to hell.

By this point in the article, everyone reading is wondering, why, exactly, she calls herself a Christian, much less a minister. So he writes:

So why exactly does she still call herself a Christian, let alone a minister?

She gives a somewhat ambiguous answer, including this part:

“The church is extremely important because it can be a transformative element in individuals’ lives and communities,” she said. “And that was the root of what the Christian Church was about: transforming the way people see themselves in relation to the communities around them and in relation to each other and about living that in community. Christianity took over that story and manipulated it into a very different story.”

He gives her many quotes to explain herself but he doesn’t try to overcontextualize it. He mentions that Vosper chairs a group that aims to do a complete overhaul of Christian beliefs. But he lets her defend herself. It’s just a very fair article with a healthy amount of skepticism. It would be nice to see more stories look critically, instead of glowingly, at such deviations from orthodoxy.

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  • Martha

    “And that was the root of what the Christian Church was about: transforming the way people see themselves in relation to the communities around them”

    Which is the entire point: we didn’t start out with a majority Christian society and the Church in a position of dominance. Christians were a weird minority sect that came out of the Middle East and were competing for devotees, like all the other weird minority sects that came out of the Middle East.

    People were living in communities without Christ and for some reason they decided they liked the Christian notion of things better. And that transformative element includes all the baggage this lady would like to dump.

    We’ve *had* a culture without Christ, Christianity, or the Church. And we decided to change it. This is not a daring new attempt to advance boldly into the future; this is attempting to resuscitate the corpse of Julian the Apostate.

  • Stephen A.

    I agree that the article was quite fair and simply let the subject speak for herself (or hang herself verbally, whichever viewpoint you’re coming from.)

    Far too few reporters actually research the published books of their subjects during these profiles. The book quotes were enlightening. Like this one:

    “We call it love, radically inclusive love. It is here, in the caring, challenging, prophetic role with which it is so familiar that the church can really shine.”

    I would push it further and ask: If not from her God-man Lord, where does this “radical” love come from, and on what authority does she accept it? And what “prophetic” role can a church have if it has eliminated all superstitious elements (my words)? She disbelieves in miracles, but somehow believes in prohpecy? Or is she simply appropriating that word for her own uses?

    I find her history lessons a bit off the mark. Clearly, the Christian church’s doctrines aren’t “hundreds” of years old.

    Personal note: Sounds like she’s a perfect candidate for Unitarian Universalism.

  • Lone Star

    Gretta Vosper, meet Katharine Jefferts Schori.

  • Dave

    At the risk of getting stepped on for diversion: There is indeed a small but lively community of Christian Unitarian Universalists within the larger UU family. They are recreating the minority experience of the early church. And a large cohort of UUs’s, who don’t adopt the C-word, still acknowledge the Beatitudes and the Parables as important guidelines for life.

  • Dave

    There is a question I would like to ask Vosper: Does she believe we now live in a special time? She believes that religious differences will fade away. In fact the differences between, say, Christianity and Islam probably will fade away in the fullness of time, for the same reason the differences between Zoroastrianism and Graeco-Roman religion have faded away: These things change over time. But, if human nature remains constant, new religious differences will arise, because that’s what human beings do.

    So my question to Vosper would be: Does she think that human nature has changed (perhaps since the Enlightenment)? Does she think that no future religious differences will arise to replace the ones that cast their shadow over the world today as the latter fade away? That might be the start of an interesting story.

  • Chris Bolinger

    She doesn’t believe the Christian creeds, rejects miracles and thinks the Resurrection is a fraud.

    And she is a pastor in a creedal church. Check out its belief statement. One excerpt: “We believe that Jesus was raised victorious over death and declared to be the Son of God with power; and that He is alive for evermore, our Savior and our Lord.”

    Rev. David Giuliano says it’s not his job to condemn and that the church is broad enough to encompass a wide range of theologies.

    The reporter could have and should have challenged Giuliano, the head of a creedal church, to defend such a statement and to explain why the church hasn’t changed its statement of faith, which has stood for 68 years and is contradicted directly by the statements and beliefs of Vosper and Giuliano himself.

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  • Amanda Mae

    Reminds me of Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Church of Christ without Christ’.

  • danr

    Vosper says, “that was the root of what the Christian Church was about: transforming the way people see themselves in relation to the communities around them and in relation to each other and about living that in community.”

    Actually, the best account of what the earliest church community was about is found in the book of Acts, the model passage for my own church:
    Acts 2:42 “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.”

    Vosper has rejected the apostles’ teaching, therefore rejected one of the cornerstones of the early church she ostensibly seeks to “return” to. Of course she would presumably deny the authority of that passage since it’s in the Bible, so she’s apparently free to conveniently (re)define what church is, and arbitrarily pick whatever part of the “root” seems most appealing. Much as I disagree, as this is the USA, I hope and pray she remains free to do so.

  • danr

    “as this is the USA”

    oops, she’s in Canada. It’s Monday. Universal principle of freedom of religion equally applies to our friends up north.

  • Dan

    Mr. Lewis might have mentioned that “Christianity Without Christ” is not exactly a new idea. In the Flannery O’Connor novel “Wise Blood,” which was published in the 1950s, Hazel Motes based his “Church Without Christ” on the same idea. Motes’s church was one “where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way.” In other words, a church where Rev. Vosper would feel comfortable.

    But “Christianity Without Christ” was not even new when Flannery O’Connor was writing. The notion dates back to at least the French Revolution. And, moreover, we know what “Christianity without Christ” looks like — it looks like fallen Man. In the 20th Century there were a couple of major experiments with deifying man, one in Germany and one in Russia, and niether turned out very well. But in fairness to “Christianity without Christ,” the Nazis and the Communists, unlike “Christians without Christ,” did not conceive of themselves as living off the fumes of Christianity.

  • Dan

    Also subject to challenge is the idea expressed in the subtitle of the book: “The way we live is more important than what we believe.” Does not what we believe determine how we act? If the Resurrection was a fraud, why should I bother following anything that is written by those who perpetrated the fraud? And if I don’t know what to believe, how would I know how to act?

  • Dale

    Why is this book newsworthy? From the article, it sounds like a regurgitation of Spongianity. Perhaps the Canadian publishing business also has a content requirement. Canada has to protect its own theological provocateurs.

    I’ll return Ms. Vosper the favor; perhaps (in fact, probably) in a couple of generations the memory of her and her none-too-original book will fade away.

  • Kyle

    A few problems with the article itself, for one, a rainbow is a religious symbol (used by God as a reminder that there would never be an earth destroying flood again) and there was no critic of the critic in the article.
    If an opinon like that is going to be shown and a large question like “How can you call yourself a Christian if you don’t believe in Christ or God or that the Bible is a book no different than anyother book,” is asked, shouldn’t there be a counter arguement to that, where they get somebody, anybody to say, no, some people don’t believe this. its the same thing that happeend with a Macleans article about whether Christ was anything special or not, they interviewed Vosper without anyone offering counterpoints. this article is one of the more balanced ones i’ve seen, but it can still do better in my opinion.

  • Julia

    the differences between Zoroastrianism and Graeco-Roman religion have faded away

    No, they haven’t. Most Zoroastrians now live in India and are called Parsis. I met one last year at a Christmas party at my brother’s house. His son had brought her home for the holidays from college. Her religion is very much not the same as Greco-Roman religion.

    Several comments on Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood are so appropos. When I first read the book, I thought Hazel Motes’ church sounded so bizarre. And here it is come to life. Weird. Real life is often funnier than The Onion.

  • Jill C.

    The book has a forward by J.S. Spong. Even if I hadn’t seen the title, that alone would be enough to dissuade me from reading it.

  • Dave

    Julia:

    Correct. But your Parsi friends are no longer in conflict with the Graeco-Romans.

  • Dave

    Dan:

    The Nazis and the Communists may have imploded, but the Unitarian Universalists and the neoPagans are chugging right along, not invading or exterminating anyone.

  • Martha

    Ms. Vosper’s own words (I’ll do her the courtesy to call her ‘Ms.’ since ‘Reverend’, ‘Pastor’, ‘Minister’ and the like are outmoded remnants of offensive titles from a hierarchical, repressive past of male-dominated social inequality):

    “Indeed, in different Christian communities, even in the same community, people have developed wildly divergent understandings; god can mean everything from that theistic being it once described to the feeling we have when our parents or our partners or our children act in ways that make our hearts just want to burst with joy.”

    Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow. And I’ve spared you her cute little metaphor about why, as a minister of a (presumably) Christian or at least monotheistic religion, she doesn’t talk about ‘god’ as ‘if I were a scientist who specialised in nematodes, I’d have to find means of explaining all about nematodes in ways the simple word ‘nematode’ could never handle’ because frankly, it makes No. Freakin’. Sense. Whatsoever.
    This piece makes that church sound like a crack version of the Catholic joke (“Oh no, Catholics don’t worship statues anymore; we worship felt banners”):

    Q. What does West Hill United Church believe in?

    A. Multi-coloured streamers!

    Why doesn’t this lady hook up with the guys in the Humanist Church mentioned in a previous post on here? It’d be more honest and everyone would be clear on what they meant and thus happier and more effective. People who were so weak-minded as to need the crutch of a theistic, interventionist entity could go to one place, and the smarter, better, superior folks could go to the other.

  • FW Ken

    Oh no, Catholics don’t worship statues anymore; we worship felt banners

    Tbat’s funny, Martha! I hadn’t heard it. :-)

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  • Dave

    Martha wrote:

    We’ve *had* a culture without Christ, Christianity, or the Church. And we decided to change it.

    Well, Emperor Constantine decided to change it. ;-)

  • http://fff.com Matt

    This trend will only creep up further into Protestantism. The religion is slowly merging with, and soon will become indistinguishable from the surrounding culture. Just like a radio signal eventually dissipates until it becomes indistinguishable from the surrounding EM noise. Even now, the theology of Evangelical Christianity seems to closely resemble the planks of the Republican Party. Just look how “unChristian” it is to believe in Global Warming. With no theological base other than being against Medieval Catholicism, Protestantism is in the process of simply disintegrating. In the end, Orthodoxy and Catholicism will be the only religions that resemble what we think of as Christianity.

  • http://www.geocities.com/hohjohn John L. Hoh, Jr.

    Gretta Vosper’s message is really nothing new. The book bears a forward by John Spong. “Rev.” Spong is an east coast Episcopalian who has denied the virgin birth, the Resurrection, the miracles, et. al. for well over twenty years. Gretta Vosper has just written another book on the subject.

    I suspect a hidden story is *why* certain people feel they need to toss doctrine overboard and try to replicate what they see as an inclusive love of Christ. Has the church developed Pharasaical warts? Saturday I sat in a seminar for churches to reach out and meet the needs of their community and I’m asking myself, “Why are we in the church institutionalizing what should be the fruits of our faith?” Maybe we create a problem in building grand buildings and fighting over doctrine. Maybe as Christians we also need to replicate Jesus’ love to others, regardless of race, creed, color, or lifestyle.

  • Michelle

    It’s very simple. Christianity without Christ isn’t Christian. Vosper, Spong, and their ilk need to just make a clean break, declare themselves agnostic, and cut the excrement.

  • Stephen A.

    Matt (#24) surely you’re being facetious. The trend clearly and rather obviously is that Protestantism is lurching towards the hard political Left, and that’s why it’s dying in the US I speak of course of the Mainline churches. Though even some Evangelicals on the so-called “right” are embracing the “100% Man-Made Global Warming” myth, not rejecting it.

    But the overall thesis of disintegration is correct, despite the spin you’ve put on it.

    Like others above, the credal issue struck me, too. I wonder why she can be considered in good standing with her church if she rejects their creeds, their theology of God and even their name, “Christian.”

  • AmaniS

    This is a story and a good one. I gives people information and then they need to do something with it. If leaves reader with questions, but the best one only can be answered by the reader. Do the people in her church know how she feels or are they just sitting in the pews? Do I know what my pastor believes or am I just sitting in the pews?(Obama was.) So those in the United Church of Canada not have a problem with a minster used there name for such things? Do they not think the head of there church should let this woman go on ministering to people? If people reading this really cared, you would see something. There is nothing wrong with this story. It is the people themselves.

  • John

    Read Matthew Chapter 24. In God’s Grace John

  • Stephen A.

    AmaniS writes:

    “Do the people in her church know how she feels or are they just sitting in the pews?”

    An excellent question, as all of your questions were. Sounds like the basis for a WONDERFUL follow-up story.

  • Kamal

    Even before realising the reporter’s initials I was reminded of the exchange in C.S. Lewis’ the Great Divorce with the liberal theologian who hadn’t known he was in Hell. In fact, I remember that exchange every time I hear about someone as quintessentially liberal as this lady or that guy who wrote the foreword to her book.