The Anchoress
Regular readers know I am not one of those easily offended types who get a case of the vapors at every salvo blasted at Christianity or the Christ or his Blessed Mother.
I figure Christianity – if it is true, and it is – can stand up to the slings and arrows of the world, Mary has her own way of dealing with anyone stupid enough to disrespect her (hint – she hounds you with love until you give in) and Jesus has the big shoulders that are required to carry the cross or move the world, so he can deal with sneers and snivelers.
The reason I am not easily offended is because so much of what gets Christians up-in-arms is as the grass that withers and fades. The Da Vinci Code was so much a product of the world that it is already as forgotten as most of yesterday’s news.
Perpetually adolescent Madonna’s lifelong and recurrent cruci-fixations made me chortle at her. Oh, look, Madge is on her cross again and is that a red shirt she’s wearing? Oh, how freakin’ brilliant! A red shirt to symbolize blood – who woulda thoughta that? She’s just a freakin’ genius, that Madonna, ain’t she? No wonder the world loves her!
When some Catholics were huffing over a beautifully wrought chocolate sculpture of Christ on the Cross – mostly, I suspect, due to his nudity, I was thinking – hey, I love well-done sculpture, I love chocolate and I love Jesus – what’s not to like! The truth is, Jesus probably did hang naked on the cross, and there are plenty of Christians out there who ordered chocolate crosses for their kids last week! And besides a chocolate sculpture is a delicate and melty thing – more grass that fades.
So, it takes a lot to offend my Christian sensibilities. I admit, I was mildly put off by the adolescent hunky Jesus contest in San Francisco – mostly because, you know, it is HOLY WEEK fellas – why not show a little of your vaunted sensitivity, hey? But mostly I just felt sorry for these people who seem like they’re trying to convince themselves of something, and failing.
I did finally find something to offend me, though (although truthfully, I am less offended as a Christian than as a tail-end baby boomer) thanks to Deacon Greg, who never fails to find the interesting nugget, and this one is especially interesting: the tale of the “progressive” “Christian” church that does not want to talk about Christ, salvation, resurrection – you know, any of that stuff that requires faith in something other than ourselves:
…at West Hill on the faith’s holiest day, it will be done with a huge difference. The words “Jesus Christ” will be excised from what the congregation sings and replaced with “Glorious hope.”
Thus, it will be hope that is declared to be resurrected – an expression of renewal of optimism and the human spirit – but not Jesus, contrary to Christianity’s central tenet about the return to life on Easter morning of the crucified divine son of God.
[…]
There is no authoritative Big-Godism, as Rev. Gretta Vosper, West Hill’s minister for the past 10 years, puts it. No petitionary prayers (“Dear God, step into the world and do good things about global warming and the poor”). No miracles-performing magic Jesus given birth by a virgin and coming back to life. No references to salvation, Christianity’s teaching of the final victory over death through belief in Jesus’s death as an atonement for sin and the omnipotent love of God. For that matter, no omnipotent God, or god.
Do you know why these “progressive” Christians want to “progress” right through the tenets of Christianity into the grim world of neither-faith-nor-reason but self-actualizing instinct and “hopeful” feelings? Why they want Jesus with no Christ, God with a small g and all that? Can you take a guess?
If you said “it is the logical culmination of baby-boomer narcissism and that generations’ tireless effort to deconstruct the universe and put itself at the center of all things” then ding, ding, ding! You win the daily double!
Ms. Vosper does not want to dress up the theological detritus – her words – of the past two millennia with new language in the hope of making it more palatable. She wants to get rid of it, and build on its ashes a new spiritual movement that will have relevance in a tight-knit global world under threat of human destruction.
She says there’s been virtually a consensus among scholars for the past 30 years that the Bible is not some divine emanation – or in Ms. Vosper acronym, TAWOGFAT, The Authoritative Word of God For All Time – but a human project filled with contradictions and the conflicting worldviews and political perspectives of its authors.
And yet, she says, the liberal Christian churches, including her own, won’t acknowledge that it is a human project, that it’s wrong in parts and that, in the 21st century, it’s no more useful as a spiritual and religious guide than a number of other books.
She says now that the work of biblical scholars has become publicly accessible, the churches and their clergy are caught living a lie that few people will buy much longer. “I just don’t think we can placate those in the pews long enough to transition into a kind of new community that doesn’t keep people away.”
Aw, aren’t they just adorable, though, these baby boomers? The woman is frustrated because these damn Christians she is trying to enlighten won’t admit that all wonders and mysteries boil down to a “human project” of staggering opportunism. Thank small-g-not really-relevant-god that she and her generation have come along to enlighten us, over these last 30-40 years, and to tell us – for the eleventy-billionth time that everything that came before them is all wrong.
She sounds frustrated, doesn’t she? “Look at us! No, not over there, look at us! STOP LOOKING AT GOD – look at us! At US!”
This actually sounds like a church Obama could love: WE ARE THE GOD-LINGS WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR!
Now that these baby boomers are all so educated – so advanced beyond inferior preceding generations and minds – they can simply tear it all down and start from scratch, and they will make unto us a new church, one that embraces the secularist mentality and finds the sacred in whatever one chooses to find sacred. “Madonna on the cross in a red shirt? Hunky Jesus? Hey – that’s profoundly sacred if you need it to be!”
This appears to be an effort to create a church that the state can endorse and live with – an amorphous blob of “quasi-churchiness” unto which almost anything at all may be assigned and found “holy.” I’m almost certain that the only non-negotiable, non-optional ritual will be liturgical dancing with pantomime.
Progressivism can’t help itself. As Mother Mary Francis, PCC wrote in The Right to be Merry
The children of light walk heedless of the source of their light. The children of darkness know better. And when the hour of darkness is at hand in any country, the first act of the powers of evil is invariably to throw the switch…They turn the contemplatives out of their monasteries with loud speeches about the good of the state and about contributing to the social need. […]
By a strange paradox, the persecutors of religion are always far more spiritual-minded than the common run of humanity. It is a perversion of spirituality, but it is a kind of spiritual vision, nonetheless…Those who hold power in communist-dominated countries have a very comprehensive grasp of it. They understand its significance quite perfectly. If they sometimes draw red herrings of “national churches” across their atheistic paths, they dare not deal even in half-measures with cloisters. We shall grow old and die waiting for Russia or (Communist) China to set up “national cloisters.”
I read this and think of Ignatius Cardinal Kung Pin Mei, who spent 30 years in Chinese prisons for refusing to abandon the Roman Catholic Church for the state-approved Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, which pretends to be what it is not. You probably have never heard of him, even though he is at least as heroic as Nelson Mandela – but if “progressive Christianity” has its way, he may become our patron – patron of The Remnant that will always, resolutely, keep on, no matter how torn and frayed.
Meanwhile – don’t let this freak you out. Don’t be afraid of children-of-all-ages playing dress-up, or the pranks and guffaws of those who are taking the wide road and pretending it’s a martyrdom. We live in an interesting age, where the meaning of things – even of martyrdom – is being muddied up. Nothing to fret about – it’s only what Jesus promised us, after all.
UPDATE: Someone reminds me of Siggy’s excellent comments from a while back:
I suspect those who are so comfortable redefining what God ‘really means,’ would not take to kindly to someone else reinterpreting and unpending their words with the same certainty.
Bingo.
Ace has a ten point plan for the new church.
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