On Letting the Christian Myth Be Myth

 

From Today's Journal Entries

December 25, 2023, Afternoon

The Christian myth is the whole arc of the Jesus story. It helps to see it as a whole rather than get fixated on one or another of its parts. It begins with a virtuous but otherwise quite ordinary, young, Jewish woman giving birth to a child with a relationship to God more intimate than that of any other human. The myth says she was a virgin, the point apparently being to emphasize how unique her son was. At around the age of thirty he emerges as the leader of a popular movement for the renewal of his Jewish faith. He teaches a vision of God and God’s ways that, though it clearly has roots in the Hebrew tradition, is new for his time—and for ours. His teaching is both anti-imperial and anti- religious power structure. He teaches what the Catholic tradition has come to call God’s “preferential option for the poor.” His critique of both the secular and the religious authorities of his time provoked violent opposition to him and his teaching from both such authorities. Almost certainly with collaboration from the Jewish power structure at the temple but not from the Jewish people as a whole, the secular authorities, i.e., the Roman Empire, arrested him and crucified him. He died a horrifically painful death, something that was the whole point of crucifixion. The Christian myth says he was buried in a borrowed cave. It also says that on the third day after his crucifixion, that is, on the Sunday after a Friday, some women from among his followers found his tomb empty. In the myth he appears to different people at different times and in different ways after his execution, when he was supposed to be dead and gone. They myth says that those appearances continued for a while, then stopped, according to the myth when he ascended into heaven. There are differences in the different biblical accounts of parts of this story, but this, I think, is an honest overview of the Christian myth.

What does this myth mean? It means first of all that the Christian faith is centered on one particular figure, the man we call first of all Jesus of Nazareth and later on Jesus the Christ or Jesus the Messiah, the two words meaning the same thing. The Christian faith confesses him to be the one God anointed (that’s what both Christ and Messiah mean) to bring a new, more complete revelation of God’s nature and will to people on earth. Because of the myth’s element of his most intimate relationship with God, the Christian myth means that it is in him that we see not just human truth but divine truth. The Christian myth tells us many things about God, or rather, it points us toward many truths about God. It points us toward the truth that God is radically nonviolent and calls us to be radically nonviolent. It points us toward the truth that when God comes to God’s people it’s not to the rich or the powerful but to the poor, the marginalized, the powerless. It points toward the fairly obvious truth that God’s will and ways of nonviolence, justice, and preference for the poor provoke the violent opposition of both secular and religious authorities. It tells us that if you truly, fully, preach and live the gospel of peace through nonviolent justice you will almost certainly suffer at the hands of those authorities. Doing so may even cost you your life just as it cost Jesus his life. It is extremely important that it points us toward the truth that with God human death is not the end. God is with us beyond death. Even more importantly, the Christian myth points us toward the truth that God is present in solidarity with us in everything that happens to us in life no matter how miserable, no matter how unjust.

We must remember that it doesn’t matter at all whether any of this is historical fact. What matters is that it is incredibly powerful myth. It points us toward universal truths. Toward truths that have always been true, not truths that happened once and changed anything beginning at that time. It is vitally important to understand that Jesus didn’t bring a salvation that didn’t exist before. Rather, the Christian myth points to the truth that God has always saved humans, all humans. Always. It’s not that none of these truths was available to humanity before Jesus. When we see it as myth, we see that the Christian story isn’t about before and after. The concepts before and after don’t apply. The divine truths to which the Christian myth points us are beyond time.

The Christian story is set in a particular place and a particular time. It is about that place and that time, but only superficially. It is set in a particular place and time because stories told by and to humans must aways be set in a particular place and time. We live in places, and we live in times; but God doesn’t. God transcends place and time absolutely. God’s truth transcends place and time absolutely. The Christian myth isn’t about God being revealed as it about expressing the truth that God has always been the way God is in the Christian myth. Paul says as much in Romans 1. That Paul says it isn’t necessary to the myth, and his saying it doesn’t, in itself, make it true. Yet Paul saying as much helps make this truth one to which the Christian myth truly points.

So, Sorenson, if you know these things to be true, set your historical training aside. The Christian myth isn’t about history. It is about divine truth. It can’t contain that truth; it can only point to it. But it points to it in ways at least as powerful as any other faith story does. It is not everyone’s myth, but it is our myth. Our call is not to impose it on anyone. It is to live into it. It is to work to make the universal truths of peace, nonviolence, and justice more real in God’s world. It is to put our faith into action, not to convert anyone but to serve the people God serves, the people God prefers, the people in need not those with immense privilege and prosperity.

The Christian myth has a lot to say to those people of privilege, wealth, and power. It says to them less give up your privilege, wealth, and power than it says use them to make God’s priorities of distributive justice, peace, and nonviolence more real in the world that has given you so much. After all, your wealth, power, and privilege certainly come to you at someone else’s expense. It’s not money that is the root of all evil. It is the love of money that is. So, if you have money, don’t love it. Send it out into the world to do good for God’s people. If you don’t have money, don’t crave having more of it than you need for the basics of life. Rather, know that God wants you to have what you need for a decent life but does not want you to profit at the expense of others.

So, Sorenson, move yourself beyond the intellectual-spiritual stage of critical thought. Yes, critical thought has its importance in the world. There is far too little of it afoot. But psychospiritual growth involves moving beyond it. Moving to what Borg called postcritical naivete. Sorenson, you’re lousy at postcritical naivete. Maybe you’re overeducated. Maybe your professional training in critical thinking as an historian and a lawyer, and maybe even as a pastor, has made it harder than it is for most people to move beyond critical thinking and entering a story as a story, a myth as a myth. If so, you really need to get over it.

Introduction to Another Book

I recently posted here the Introduction to a book I've been working on with the working title A Balm in Gilead. Before I started that book I had begun work on another one. This one has the working title Transformed Christianity, An Un-Conventional Faith for a Changing World. This is the draft Introduction to that book. I suspect I will be combining these two projects into one book in the future.

 Introduction 

 

It is the thesis of this book that Christianity in the United States today needs nothing less than a new Reformation. We need a new Reformation at least in significant part because Christian affiliation is in steep decline among us. In 2022 the Pew Research Center published an extensive study of the status of Christianity in the United States under the title “Modeling the Future of Religion in America.”i Pew reports that Christianity’s majority position in America has been declining for years. It says that if current trends continue, Christians could make up less than half of the U.S. population by 2070. The report contains four predictions based on different assumptions of what could happen in the future. It says that it does not predict what will happen but only what could happen. It also says, however, that its predictions “model what the U.S. religious landscape would look like if switching [of religious affiliation], at its present pace, continued to speed up (as it has been doing since the 1990s), or suddenly halted.” Note that in this study the terms “switching” and “disaffiliation” are synonyms. They both  refer to people changing their self-expressed religious identity. 

The study’s four predictions, here called scenarios, are: 

 

Scenario 1: Steady switching—Christians would lose their majority but would still be the largest religious group in 20270. 

Scenario 2: Rising disaffiliation with limits—‘nones’ would be the largest group in 2070 but not a majority. 

Scenario 3: Rising disaffiliation without limits—“nones” would form a slim majority by 2070. 

Scenario 4: No switching—Christians would retain their majority through 2070. 

 

This report tries to avoid making firm predictions. It does say, however, that “the U.S. might be following the path taken over the last 50 years by many countries in Western Europe that had overwhelming Christian majorities in the middle of the 20th century but no longer do.” It seems obvious that the US is indeed following that path. Its following that path is a major reason why we need a new Reformation. 

The Pew report does not address the causes of the decline in Christian affiliation in this country. However, a September 17, 2022, NPR report on the study cites Stephanie Kramer, the senior researcher who led the study, as expressing two possible causes for the decline.ii One is, Kramer says, that societies naturally tend to secularize. It quotes her as saying, “Once people’s basic needs are met, there is less need for religion.” That statement, of course, suggests a gross misunderstanding of the nature and function of religion, but never mind.  

Kramer’s second possible cause of the decline of Christianity among us is more important for our purposes here. She notes that Christian affiliation dropped sharply in the 1990s. She comments: “And it may not be a coincidence that this coincides with the rise of the religious right and more associations between Christianity and conservative political ideology.” The “religious right” to which Kramer refers is almost certainly the kind of Christianity that I will here call “Conventional.” In our culture today Christianity is nearly exclusively associated with a faith that is very or even extremely conservative both theologically and politically. I am convinced that it is that association that creates our faith’s need for a new Reformation. 

Christianity has, of course, already had one major transformation that we call the Reformation. The Protestant Christian tradition has it that on October 31, 1517, a German Augustinian monk named Martin Luther attached a document containing 95 theses about Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany. The theses challenged many of the beliefs and practices of the Roman Catholic Church of that time. Luther was prompted to raise the issues he raised by the church’s practice of selling something called “indulgences.” The Church was selling them at the time to raise money to complete the construction of the new Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the one that’s still there today that many of us have visited. The notion behind the sale of indulgences was that if a person gave money to the Church, they could reduce the amount of time a deceased loved one had to spend in purgatory paying for past sins before being released into heaven. The selling of indulgences appalled Luther, and he set out to challenge it. He did not intend to create a new type of Christianity. He did not intend to create a new church. It probably had never occurred to him that what he did that day would lead to the creation of both of those things, but it did. We call the long and complex chain of events that followed "the Reformation." 

In the early sixteenth century the Roman Catholic Church, which was for all practical purposes the only Christian church there was in western Europe at the time, clearly needed renewal. It needed to stop doing things like bilking people out of their money by selling indulgences. It needed to start making truly faithful men pope rather than the grandees of the leading Italian Renaissance families it had been electing. It needed to stop making claims to spiritual power no reasonable person could believe that it had. 

In the end Luther did create a new sort of Christian church and a new type of Christianity. That Christianity was actually ancient, but it seemed new in western Europe in the early sixteenth century CE. Luther’s church rejected some of the key principles of the Roman church. It confessed no allegiance to the pope in Rome. It taught and teaches that every person has direct, personal access to God without the mediation of a priest. Luther started a movement in which many reformers, Zwingli, Calvin, and the theologians of the Radical Reformation primary among them, asserted their own understandings of the Christian faith and of people’s relationship to God. Martin Luther turned the religious world (and, because in his world the two were so intimately connected, ultimately the political world) of his time upside down. 

Today we need to turn that world upside down again. We need nothing less than a new Reformation. Yes. I know. The notion that Christianity needs a new Reformation is hardly an original one. I’ve heard people say that that’s what the faith needs for years. It’s not a new idea, but it’s still true. We need a Reformation that will radically transform our faith. Our need of a reformation goes to the heart of Christianity, for the things that make what I will here call Conventional Christianity ultimately untenable arise at the very foundations of the faith. They arise from and remain connected to Conventional Christianity’s concept of God.iii A faith’s conception of God ultimately forms or at least strongly influences everything else about that faith. In ways I will explain in what follows, Conventional Christianity has gotten God all wrong. So this book will begin with a consideration of that conception, critiquing it to see what is good about it and what isn’t. Then it will offer a new way of looking at God that forms the basis of the Transformed Christianity for which I argue. That’s Part 1 of this book. 

All Christians of whatever variety confess Jesus of Nazareth as the person around whom the faith and its tenets are formed. There are however many different ways of understanding him. Conventional American Christianity understands him all wrong. We’ll go into what that conception is and what’s wrong with it in Part 2 of this book. For now I’ll just say that Conventional Christianity thinking he was all about saving souls from hell when in fact he was hardly about that at all is a hugely significant error in most Christians’ understanding of the one most of them confess to be their Lord and Savior. 

Christianity has a foundational book, the Bible. It is where we read about the conceptions of God of our forebears in the faith both Christian and Jewish. The four Gospels of the New Testament are the sources we have about Jesus, who all Christians confess to be the Christ, the Messiah. It is clear that a proper understanding of the Bible is essential for any Christian. Conventional American Christians often say they believe in the Bible. That’s a significant error in itself because we are called to believe in God and Jesus Christ not in a book. Moreover, their understanding of the book in which they say they believe is just wrong. In what follows we will show what that understanding is, why it’s wrong, and offer a better understanding of the Bible with which to replace it. That’s Part 3 of this book. 

When properly understood, Christianity is a lot more than a collection of beliefs about God and Jesus Christ. Properly understood, Christianity is a way of life. The earliest Christians didn’t call themselves Christians. Rather, they said they were followers of “the Way.” Today’s Conventional Christianity often tells people how to live, but when it does it gets the Way of the Christian faith all wrong. For now I’ll just say about the Christian life that it is not about getting your soul to heaven not hell after you die. The Christian life properly understood is hardly about that at all. We will critique that conception of the Christian life and explain what the Christian life really is about. That’s Part 4 of this book. 

It is I trust clear that the new Christian reformation of which I speak deals with all aspects of the Christian faith. It critiques all (or at least most) of the characteristics of Conventional Christianity in our context today. It does not, however, stop with that critique. It offers a different vision of every aspect of the Christian faith. In each of the major parts of this book I first offer a critique of the aspect of the faith under consideration in Conventional Christianity. Then I will offer the way Transformed Christianity understands that aspect of the faith. 

Throughout this book I will attempt to explain why Transformed Christianity’s understanding of the faith is better than the understanding of Conventional Christianity. I mean a couple of things by “better.” A proper understanding of the faith is better first of all because it functions the way the first Christians, those closest to Jesus, intended the faith to function. Second, and more importantly, Transformed Christianity is better than Conventional Christianity because it responds more meaningfully to Christianity’s current context and to the spiritual needs of real people living today. Transformed Christianity is better than Conventional Christianity in that it is grounded in love not in fear. It also addresses the needs of today not the needs of various ancient communities the way Conventional Christianity does. 

By my phrase “Conventional Christianity” I do not mean the understanding of today’s best theologians nor of the best theologians of previous centuries. The best academic theologians have understood Christianity far better than Conventional Christianity has. They have done so for a very long time. By Conventional Christianity I mean Christianity the way most of the American public both inside the churches and outside them understands it. I mean the understanding of Christianity that people have gotten from televangelists like Jerry Falwell, from other conservative, evangelical preachers online and in person, or from preachers in the denominations we used to call mainline who are afraid to share new (new to them at least) insights into the faith because they think their people can’t handle them.  

Of course there are many different takes on the faith among the Conventional Christians. Southern Baptists disagree with Jehovah’s Witnesses in many ways, to cite just one example. I intend to identify positions and beliefs that I believe at least most of the conventional expressions of the faith share. I will no doubt say some things to which people on that side of the faith will object. I believe, however, that here I express some of the basic characteristics of Conventional Christianity. How well I have succeeded in that effort is not for me to judge. 

There is another legitimate question I wish to address here. I have already written and self-published an original and a revised version of the book Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium. I cover some of the same ground in this book as I did in that one. So why am I writing this book? There are, I think, three answers to that question. The first reason is that many lay church people have told me that they find Liberating Christianity hard to follow. They tell me that they would read many paragraphs of that book over and over again in an effort to understand what I’m trying to say. Emmanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard may have thought there was some virtue in being obscure. I don’t. I am not an academic theologian. I am a pastor with an MDiv degree not a PhD in systematic theology.iv I aim always to write so that reasonably intelligent and well-educated people in the pews—and people outside the churches altogether—can follow my language and the way I develop my ideas. It seems that in Liberating Christianity I did not succeed in that effort as well as I would have liked. I write this book in part as an attempt to remedy that error. 

The second reason why I write this book is, if anything, more important. I first drafted Liberating Christianity in the fall of 2006. I stand by everything I said there. Yet my theological thinking has changed some in the sixteen years between when I wrote that book and when I’m writing this one. My theology has progressed. Today I find that in some ways Liberating Christianity doesn’t go far enough in re-contemplating the Christian faith. In some ways it find it insufficiently radical for today’s context. In that earlier book I didn’t always develop what I now believe to be the foundational rationale for the contentions I make there. In this book I intend to do a better job of developing foundational rationales for the points I make. I intend not to pull any punches in this book that I may have pulled in that one. 

Finally, I write this book at least in part for a different purpose than the purpose for which I wrote Liberating Christianity. The subtitle of that book states its purpose reasonably well, “Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium.” It is organized around what I believe to be just that, obstacles to faith in today’s world. I write this book more with a view to addressing and overcoming what I consider to be an existential crisis in Christianity today. This book, as I’ve already said, is organized around major areas of Christian theology rather than around things that keep people away from that theology. Whether this book is better organized than that one is not for me to say. All I can say is that it is organized differently. 

If you have read Liberating Christianity you may notice these and perhaps some other differences between that book and this one. If you haven’t read Liberating Christianity, don’t worry about it. You don’t have to have read that book to understand this one. This book will stand or fall on its own merits or shortcomings, not on how it compares with my earlier book. 

Finally, I will say again here what I have said many times before both in writing and when talking to church people. I know that what I say here may offend some (or more likely many) people. I mean no harm to those people. I do not mean to deprive anyone of a faith that gets them through the night no matter how much I may disagree with the tenets of that faith.  I write here as a theologian, but I am also a pastor. If you find what I say here too offensive for you to deal with, please just stop reading and know that I mean you no harm.