Fixing or Destroying Christianity?
Tuesday March 8, 2005
There's a lot of debate among American Christians about the nature and future of their religion. The divide is generally liberal vs. conservative: liberals push for more radical interpretations of biblical texts while conservatives argue for more traditional interpretations.
David Templeton writes in Metroactive about the biblical think tank known as the Westar Institute:
The seminar's detractors--most from among the evangelical minority of modern Christians, who believe that every contradictory word of the Bible is resoundingly true--claim that the Westar scholars are hell-bent on destroying Christianity. In the minds of those same scholars, however, the Rev. Stinson included, what they are really attempting to do is fix Christianity, which many of them see as a fractured, dysfunctional, yet intrinsically beautiful religion that has strayed too far afield from what its inspiration, the historical Jesus himself, was talking about all those years ago.
Stripping away 2,000 years of mystical mumbo-jumbo, digging beneath layer after layer of Church-sanctioned dogma and medieval spiritual spin, the scholars of the Westar Institute have led the way--now being taken up by a growing number of progressive faith communities--to building a faith around Jesus the man, rather than Jesus the myth. "I think there's a fairly clear notion now of who Jesus actually was, an idea of Jesus that is separate from a great deal that the early church said about him," Stinson says. "My question is--and I'll be talking about this in my presentation--if we take that historical Jesus and try to live out his legacy, what would that make the Church, as a faith community, look like?
One thing that strikes me about rhetoric like the above is how similar it is that used during the Protestant Reformation. Those early Protestants also wanted to strip away centuries of traditions and mumbo-jumbo in order to get back to an authentic Christianity and an authentic Jesus. They were also opposed by traditionalist leaders (Catholic, at that time) who felt that "reform" meant the same as destroying what Christianity was all about.
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
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