Below is my piece for today's "By the Way," the local clergy column in The Medicine Hat News. As I read it again I'm thinking I should have made it clear that I am a Christian who is more on the conservative end of the spectrum than liberal. I agree with Douthat and Marks more than Butler Bass.
As a result of The Episcopal (United States Anglican, that is) Church’s recent General Convention, there’s been a flurry of activity in the press and blogosphere about the fate of “liberal” Christianity.
For example, New York Times op-ed columnist, Ross Douthat, asks “Can Liberal Christianity be Saved?” He points out that in the last decade The Episcopal Church experienced “something between a decline and a collapse…average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.” He suggests that by being “flexible to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form, willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes…liberal Christianity has simply collapsed.”
In response, Jim John Marks, in his The Life of Meaning blog, asks, “Why Should Liberal Christianity be Saved?” “Getting hip to the culture,” he writes, “is not the way to reach people, and to save them. The culture around us is what people need saving from. The more you look like it, the less effective you can be.”
Then, on the Huff Post Blog, author Diane Butler Bass, reckons the real question is not so much about just liberal Christianity, but “Can Christianity be Saved?” “Decline is not exclusive to the Episcopal Church,” she writes, “nor to liberal denominations--it is a reality facing the whole of American Christianity.” Far from being the problem, “Can Liberal Churches Save Christianity?” she wonders. ‘The twenty-first century has yet to answer that, but I think we may be surprised.”
There are also liberal and conservative expressions of Christianity in Canada and Medicine Hat. We struggle with similar problems. Many of our churches are also in decline. Divisions can, and do, arise here, too. The challenging question for those of us who follow Jesus is how to treat the people with whom we disagree. Jesus is clear on the matter. We are to love, do good to, bless and pray for them; and not just those with whom we disagree; but even our enemies and those who hate, curse, and mistreat us (Luke 6:27-28). When we disagree, even sharply (Acts 15:39), there is always the commandment to love (Mark 12:29-31).
In any case, if there is any saving to be done, Jesus will do it.
Various Churches and CHRIST should never be confused. Christ is totally different from Church, so whenever we want to understand Christ, go directly and immediately -- not via different Theologies; then we will never understand Christ. Christ cannot be organized: he is so vast that no organization can do justice to him. Only small things can be organized. Politics can be organized, not religion, Nazism can be organized, communism can be organized -- not Christ. The sheer vastness is such that the moment we try to force him into a pattern he is already dead.
ReplyDeleteChrist himself is a revolution. We will have to be transformed through him; he is the baptism of fire. We can be a Christian conveniently... but we can never be a REAL Christian conveniently. If we are REALLY following Jesus, there is bound to be trouble.
He himself ended on the cross; we cannot end on the throne. It is a very convenient way to adjust Christ to our self rather than adjusting our self to Christ. If we adjust OUR SELF TO CHRIST, there will be a transformation; if we adjust Christ TO OUR SELF, there can be none. Then Christ himself becomes part of the decoration of our imprisonment, part of our furniture -- our car, our house; a convenience at the most -- but we are not related to him.
Shibu Kuriakose