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Response to Elizabeth’s Little Blog

03.03.07 | 4 Comments

I saw in my comments section yesterday that Elizabeth’s Little Blog has posted a response to a post I made, “Christianity without Christ,” about a year and a half ago.

Elizabeth correctly points out that there have been multiple Christianities over the years, a fact that scholars have been pointing out especially over the last decade. But there are Christianities and there is Christianity™. One is in charge, the others are not. This also is a fact.

Probably the preeminent measures of Christianity™ are the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creeds. For centuries, these two confessions have defined Christianity, and they will continue to do so for centuries. The overwhelming majority of Christians over the centuries agree, a number I guess is well over ninety percent.

It is simply a descriptively true fact that heretical Christians are not Christians™.

I have long suspected a certain deviousness in the current vanguards of heretical pop Christianity, your John Shelby Spongs and your Jesus Seminarians. (Marcus Borg seems a notable exception.) It as if they say, “Ha ha! So I have unmasked your orthodox Jesus! He is not who you thought he was after all! And I knew it all along!” It is a Scooby Doo approach to liberal religion.

What recent religious scholarship on the history of Christianities has shown is that we Unitarian Universalists are not the only losers of the Christian game. We already knew our fellow losers were out there. Now we know more about them. Yet Christianity™ remains nonplussed.

How many folks are there in liberal, mainline Christian congregations who have little to no interest—even an aversion—to reciting, honestly, the Apostles and Nicene Creeds? They are secret, reluctant heretics.

Jesus is their Great Teacher and Moral Exemplar, even their Guru and Avatar. But he is not their Christ in any way that the vast, vast majority of Christians™ would recognize. They are not the first off-brand Christians to believe this, to be sure. They have good reasons to believe they have a truer, more authentic Jesus than Christianity™. But they are still off-brand Christians. It is as though they expect the Christian™ powers-that-be to exclaim in frustration, “And I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for you crazy kids!”

The root meaning of “heretic” is “one who chooses.” It carries the connotation of “splitter,” one who knowingly diverges from Christianity™ in spite of opposition because they believe their version of Christianity is better. There is a certain moral courage needed to be a good heretic.

It’s too easy to say that all Christianities are equal, but some Christianities, because they won, are more equal than the others. They are the Christianities that ran the Council of Nicea and the Inquisition. They are the Christianities that killed the Cathars and Michael Servetus and so many others. It’s a game, but it’s a killing game.

This fact isn’t nice, and it doesn’t sit well with us religious liberals with religious freedom in Western democracies, where we don’t have to worry about these things. But the consequences of religious difference are still deadly in many parts of the world today. Someday they might be deadly here too. I hope we heretics will have more courage then than we do now.

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