John Carroll (from THE EXISTENTIAL JESUS):
The waning of Christianity as practiced in the West is easy to explain. The Christian churches have comprehensively failed in their one central task--to retell their foundation story in a way that might speak to the times. They have failed at what the ancient Jews called "midrash"--the art of reworking stories so as to bring them up to date. The church Jesus is a wooden residue of tired doctrine about a benevolent and omnipotent Lord God up above, the Trinity, the forgiveness of sins, Holy Communion, resurrection from the dead, and so forth--little of which has cogent mainstream resonance today.
This is not just a recent problem. From the outset...the churches have not wanted anything to do with Jesus the teacher of the deep truths about human identity. They have made him superficial and boring, a background prop for their own creeds, rituals, and power. This history of denial and falsification has finally caught up with the clerical elites and their priesthoods.
It is a mark of the cultural and psychological maturity of the modern West that individuals have come to make their own judgments about what they find plausible in answer to the three big questions of meaning: Where do I come from?, What should I do with my life?, and What happens to me when I die? In the end, the highest authority has become the individual's own conscience. The vast majority have turned their backs on the churches, and have come to roll their eyes dismissively at Christian doctrine...
Churches have a necessary logic they must obey if they are to survive. They are communities of individuals. To bind those individuals together into a cohesive whole, and make them dependent, they must build a body of moral laws--"Thou shalt nots"--then proclaim and sanction them, punishing those who break them. Churches are ethical institutions. To gain legitimacy here, they are in need of a charismatic foundation figure who was a moral teacher.
Also, they usually call for a Jesus who is benevolent and forgiving, one who comforts those who suffer. Hence he has been projected as the Good Shepherd--Jesus the meek and mild, a gentle figure of sweetness and light. From such a characterization derives the children's "little Lord Jesus" who "lays down his sweet head".
[The gospel] Jesus is not remotely like any of this--and he is not interested in ethical teaching. Worse, he identifies all churches with the withered and stonyhearted. He exposes their nature as innately driven to suppress Truth. Truth is their lethal enemy.
[The gospel] Jesus teaches that the person is the locus of Truth. His perspective is individual-centered and anti-tribal. Whatever the virtues of a community for human well-being--most commonly in the form of the family--that is not where a person will find who he or she is, or what is meant to be. Indeed, group traits and attachments have to be stripped away...
The sociological signs are that the modern West has entered a post-church era. The West seeks its answers to the big questions outside the stone walls, and especially in everyday life in the secular world. Its new altars are modest and obscure--at home, at work, in sport, and in nature. However, without the security of community or institution--to provide boundaries and direction--it is all the more in need of a Teacher. So it is time to return to the beginning, before the churches were built, when there was Jesus alone, and his story.
What emerges is a mysteriously enigmatic, existential Jesus whose story has not been told elsewhere, and whose teachings have not been spelt out...this Jesus learns through his own bitter experience to reject temples and churches. What he finds himself left with is nothing, apart from his own story. So he invites those who have ears to hear to join him, to stand in his shoes, and to learn from his tragic journey. By the end, the total accumulation of what he has done and what he has said is stripped back to one single teaching: all you need is his story. You don't even need him, only what his story teaches--a dark saying about being...he himself is that mysterious stranger intruding on the afternoon walk, fleetingly there and then gone, his own presence everything.
The story is a self-contained numinous object. It is like a precious stone with complex internal faceting, flickering planes of light, within which shadows--strangely difficult to glimpse--flit and shimmer. Here dwells the radiance.
Completely agree! If it’s not relevant to how we can live today, how we can live more deeply, richly, and abundantly (and I’m not talking about material riches and abundance), why bother? Better to just sleep in on Sunday morning.
Posted by: Ann Markle | 10/06/2019 at 10:09 AM