I am reticent to comment on Andrew Sullivan’s latest contribution to contemporary Christianity. I am sure that his comments, as controversial as they are, will ignite a firestorm of comments on the blogosphere, and I don’t want to beat a dead horse. I’m hoping the horse isn’t completely dead yet, and someone has thrust a stick into my hand.
Sullivan has not said anything new. He raises a concern he has with Christianity seeking power in the political realm. He believes that Jesus never sought that power and because Christianity is seeking that power, it’s in crisis. The “radically simple” message of Christ was his “greatest miracle”:
It was proven by his willingness to submit himself to an unjustified execution. The cross itself was not the point; nor was the intense physical suffering he endured. The point was how he conducted himself through it all—calm, loving, accepting, radically surrendering even the basic control of his own body and telling us that this was what it means to truly transcend our world and be with God. Jesus, like Francis [of Assisi], was a homeless person, as were his closest followers. He possessed nothing—and thereby everything.
While Sullivan does not deny Christ’s deity, he does identify the significance of Christ’s life as his attitude toward life. I could say much about Sullivan’s error in reducing Christ’s message to his attitude toward the world (wasn’t the death and resurrection an essential part of Christ’s message?). I would rather focus on the phenomenon of transforming Christ into a visage of what one thinks Christianity ought to be.
In reducing Christ’s message down to the “radically simple essentials,” Sullivan rejects the Bible’s message about Christ (he does admit that the New Testament is just “copies of copies” which I think means he rejects inerrancy). What we have about Christ is contained in the Bible. In rejecting the New Testament’s portrayal of Jesus, he remakes Christ, albeit with the help of the New Testament, into the man of his own image. He then uses this man to make his argument about true Christianity. How is this any different than what he’s accusing “organized religion” of doing?
I do think Sullivan has a point though. We should reform our own thoughts about who Christ is. He’s not the NRA card-carrying republican, and he’s not the radical hippie liberal. Jesus is like the rock cut out of a mountain. No hands cut that rock out, and when it was cut out, it smashed all the false conceptions of Christ into pieces. What we need is not to remake Jesus, but understand what his Bible says that he is. What will solve the “crisis” of Christianity is radical devotion to the Christ of the Bible.
Well-said!