Defending Christianity?

Dan Scott wrote:

Recently, I heard a gifted pastor, a man who leads a large nondenominational church, say this:

“You may not want to hear your pastor say this, but some of the things Jesus says are not very helpful. Loving your enemies, for example. We don’t need to love our enemies. We need to love our friends and crush our enemies.”

I winced, but I could hear my younger self trying to shock an audience with a line like that. I figured the pastor would follow up with something like, “But if that is what our Lord says, we need to be figuring out how we are going to obey him.”

No. His following comments dug in deeper. He said in essence that the Lord’s teaching was unrealistic and damaging to the present cause.

It astounded me.

How can one claim to be defending Christianity by disagreeing with what Christ said?

From my standpoint, American Evangelicalism has been gradually reconstructing Christianity. This reconstruction looks different than what has occurred on the Left. The various expressions of Progressive Christianity usually modify the faith by rethinking the role of scripture and entertaining doubts about Christ’s resurrection and miracles. The Evangelical reconstruction, in contrast, retains the miracles. What it does is dismiss the Gospel’s ethical and communal norms.

A believer, according to this reconstruction, can swear and insult; bully his neighbors; and malign and bear false witness against real and imagined enemies. He has no obligation toward the poor, the sick, or the orphaned. He need not go to church if he finds it inconvenient. Believers do embrace the right side of cultural issues, but few other forms of common good or communal relationship is expected.

Moral transformation is certainly not a thing, especially if one seems to advance the “Christian cause.” We simply should extend grace and not judge.

In this Evangelical reconstruction, Jesus retains his moment in the manger. So, Christmas is a big deal – though where the sacred celebration ends and the economic machinery of its secular expression begins rarely concerns us. The Lord’s death too remains important – that is our “get out of Hell free’ card, after all. The resurrection, which implies that we can rewrite our lives after experiencing devastating loss, offers a huge congregational party-moment as well.

What Jesus does not retain in the Evangelical reconstruction, is the right to speak. No one wants to say it out loud, though the pastor I mentioned here comes close, but the words of Jesus have no audience. His Jewish neighbors didn’t accept them. If Christians also view his words as irrelevant, then all we needed from our founder was for him to descend from heaven as an adult, offer his blood to get us out of Hell, and then return in a few days to heaven. He needed not have bothered with the other 33 years.

St. Paul’s words to the Roman Jewish community could be applied to this populist apostasy:

“Well, then, if you teach others, why don’t you teach yourself? You tell others not to steal, but do you steal? You say it is wrong to commit adultery, but do you do it? … You are so proud of knowing the law, but you dishonor God by breaking it. No wonder the scripture say, ‘the world blasphemes the name of God because of you.”

I believe the words of Jesus embarrass us. They require us to rethink our views about the economy, war, social class – well, just about everything. Silencing Jesus removes that embarrassment. We can rebrand a silent Jesus as a Rambo-like Avenger – someone who doesn’t take any sass off anyone. It’s a big improvement over the man who “when reviled, reviled not in turn; who like a lamb led to the sheerer, opened not his mouth.”

Our rebranded Jesus would kick Pilate’s patootie and then lead his movement to raise hell in Rome. No more talk about “my kingdom is not of this world,’ or ‘if a man smites thee on one cheek, offer him the other.”

What we have here, in the name of Jesus, is the dismissal of Jesus. It is based on the assumption that defending Christianity requires us to silence Jesus.

It’s a bold experiment, but it seems to be working for many of us.

The issue is at what point does this reconstruction leave us with something that is utterly different than the “faith once and for all delivered to the saints?”

What if, despite our frequent invocation of the name of Jesus, the reconstruction of our faith has left us with something that has little to do with Jesus?

What if it is a Christianity without a Christ?

Originally on Facebook here.