Anne Rice is now famous for her move to “quit Christianity.” She says she hasn’t lost her faith. She just has quit the organized religion. True enough. And right on target for why – she refuses to be anti-life in the many ways so much of the mainstream church in all its forms has been and still is. But realize that Christianity itself was never intended by Christ. It was the outgrowth of people trying to take the one who announced their utter freedom and using him as a front. This freedom of Jesus, identified as Christ, is the total reliance on God and total obedience to God that had nothing to do with using reliance or obedience to shape identity, community, meaning and destiny by claiming a place for self or by creating boundaries to keep others from polluting the purity of it all.
We take Christ and declare positions and demarcations in his name for our own status and power, our own safety and security. Christianity is a system of belief and morals used to justify ourselves. Christ is the end of all justifications. He is the end of all our projects and schemes to create a safe haven for ourselves by either building up our cache or by tearing others down or fencing others out.
But people, perhaps including Rice, are deluded in thinking a Christian can follow Christ without church. Not church as “organized religion” in the form of existing or developing denominations or judicatories or even congregations. Yes, you can follow Christ without those forms of church, but you cannot follow Christ without church in some way shape or form since when you follow Christ you are church. Those that reject today’s “organized religion” are not wrong or radical in such a move. There’s nothing original or particularly creative, however, in rejecting a pattern or style of organizational management that doesn’t meet the needs of one’s needs or worldview. This happens generationally, if not more often. To quit organized religion and go one’s own way of following Jesus on your own – whatever that may mean – is to distinctly miss the mark of Jesus himself. His focus was the dream (aka “kingdom”) of God, to be sure. But this dream is built on the community connection and in many ways is itself the community connection. Church, do we need to say it again, is not what you attend; it’s what you are when you follow Christ. You can stop attending organized religion as a follower of Jesus but you can’t stop being church. Not if you are following Christ. So the challenge and privilege of Anne Rice and all of us who do not agree with an “anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-artificial birth control, anti-Democratic, anti-secular humanism, anti-science organization” approach (as Rice put it), is to follow Jesus Christ into organizing into loving all these “anti’ folks as much as we love our self-righteous and politically correct selves and to shape this new organization, however wonderfully amorphous as it may be, around Jesus Christ and his radical love that destroys our self-justifications and leaves us free to love and serve others at all costs. You cannot not organize if you are people working and living together in mission. And if you are following Christ, you are doing it together, not alone. So, given that, what might the organizing principles be for today’s church? How about love your enemies (teaching of Jesus), see the secular as the sacred and the sacred as secular, with no distinctions (a worldview where it’s all holy, it’s all belonging to God) and making sure nobody goes without (a seriousness and intentionality about community)? How about that?
Interestingly, there needs to be something more, though, than this new or renewed manifesto. There must be more than Jesus and his way of life and living. There must be Christ and his destruction of the myth of human constructions and his new creation of a human being freed from all self-justifications (aka self-improvement plans…take your pick of all the choices! Shall we Eat, Pray, Love or shall we dance?) Today’s church must renew it’s following of Jesus, but it cannot do so while throwing out the thing that Christ did: he died for our sin and was raised from the dead for our life. This work of Christ gets thrown out when those critical of the “theology of glory” (bluntly and too simplistically put as seeing Christ as using the cross as a starting point for personal gain, a place of becoming healthy and wealthy and successful because of God) replace this theology of glory with what is called a “negative theology of glory.” A negative theology of glory takes the end result of the theology of glory (namely a right and secure place with God because of your belief and behavior) and simply applies a “sacrifice self and serve others and become vulnerable and poor and faithful because of God” approach to get that right and secure place instead of the “positive” theology of glory’s application of Jesus’ sacrifice.
We don’t need a negative theology of glory to counteract the positive theology of glory.
We need something entirely different. Martin Luther called it the “theology of the cross.”
For our purposes here, we could simply say that the theology of the cross allows Jesus Christ to do all the saving and doesn’t replace him with anything, not even our wonderful new plans to be what Brian McClaren identifies, in referencing various key leader and voices showing us the way into what the church will or should look like (A New Kind of Christianity, 2010) as “a Christianity worth believing with Doug Pagitt or the new Christians with Tony Jones, whether we call it generative Christianity with church historian Diana Butler Bass or emerging mission with Marcus Borg, or a generous orthodoxy with Hans Frei or integral mission with Rene Padilla.” In other words, again, Jesus Christ is the end of all our scheming, however salutary and genius, and the beginning of new life (see Romans 6 for Paul’s expression of this in death and resurrection language). Once this is done to us, we are free to have at it.
And, well, have at it is what we need.
We do need to be the church of Jesus Christ even as we might “quit Christianity.”
By the way, in closing, let me just make a reference to a stark and direct connection I made with all of this. Just coincidently I finished last week reading the classic little tome Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Douglass’ autobiography published in 1845. The whole thing is compelling, but it was the “Appendix” that was the amazing correlation to Anne Rice’s critique of today’s Christianity. In this Appendix Douglass cuttingly critiques the church of his day and calls it up short against Christ. Listen: “What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference – so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”
In every day and age we lose sight of Christ and replace him with our own agenda, social or other wise. Some agendas are destructive and need themselves to be destroyed, but destroyed by the love of Christ, not brute force. And certainly, as per the theology of the cross, the constructive agendas cannot be our saving grace or holy grail. Only Christ saves. And he never quits.
