Can you have Christianity without Christ?
Lamb Chopped
Shipmate
in Purgatory
I'm asking because I've been listening around the Ship for a long time, and it seems quite a few of us stick with Christianity because of the music, or the liturgy, or the love-your-neighbor thing, or any number of other things which are all good. And I'm feeling odd man out, if you know what I mean. Connection, commitment to the person of Jesus Christ--whether that's emotional or purely volitional--that seems to me to be the heart of Christianity. But I'm thinking it's not so for a lot of people. And I'd like to ask--
How is it for you?
If you are committed to some other aspect of Christianity but could do without Christ himself, what is that aspect? And do you think there ought to be a different name for that faith?
I'm not trying to get at anybody, and I don't want it to turn into that kind of thread. I'm just feeling more and more out of place, and I'm trying to check the vibes I'm sensing against reality.
How is it for you?
If you are committed to some other aspect of Christianity but could do without Christ himself, what is that aspect? And do you think there ought to be a different name for that faith?
I'm not trying to get at anybody, and I don't want it to turn into that kind of thread. I'm just feeling more and more out of place, and I'm trying to check the vibes I'm sensing against reality.
Comments
It may be for some people a good thing that "the music, or the liturgy, or the love-your-neighbor thing, or any number of other things" keep them from giving up altogether when their lamps are flickering. For many others, though, I fear that those things can become something that can lull a person into a false sense of security that somehow one can get by without eating any food if one has a plate, a knife, a fork and an empty crystal glass next to one's place setting.
It isn’t Christianity though without Christ.
My impression is that what some seem to be saying is along the lines of they have trouble believing in the church’s claims about Christ, much less committing to Christ, but they still find meaning that matters to them by participating in some ways in the life of the church.
I think it’s a good thing for people who feel that way to be welcome in the church.
I'm trying to understand some vibes I've picked up. Because I've been feeling like a freak, frankly--like the only one in a large discussion who doesn't get what's going on. You know, like being an outsider on Superbowl Sunday, and you don't know shit about football?
And I thought it better for me to ask a straightforward question than to keep on worrying about it.
That aspect for me is many of the Christian values and ethics, which I think are totally sustainable without Jesus Christ. The different name is probably humanism, though I haven't given that any thought till now, so that might not be exactly what I'm talking about. Probably the tao of Bill and Ted is really it: "Be excellent to each other." You don't need to believe in God to live as a good person in the world. Plenty of non-religious people are at least as good or better than many Christians, and all the stuff about the afterlife and the soul and having a relationship with God or Jesus or whatever is simply not important to me anymore because I can't see that it makes a material difference in this life. I understand that for many people their spiritual life undergirds the rest of their life, but many people manage to behave at least as well without a spiritual life.
But I no longer go to church. Too many people there are not being excellent to each other.
But I personally don't subscribe to any of those supernatural claims about Christ. I think maybe I'm nostalgic for a time and place when I did believe those claims, or was at least ensconced in a milieu where people did?
Jesus was very critical of self righteousness, indifference to the poor, emphases on non-essentials which ignored values of justice and mercy, lack of love for neighbour. All of which he was manifest in the Judaism of his time as practised by its leaders. That part of his teaching expressed an urgent need for repentance and reform.
He also saw faith exemplified in the behaviour of those seen as faith outsiders.
These things suggest to me that unless Christian faith communities demonstrate a similar humble self-criticism they are not really following their leader. Whereas faith outsiders may actually be doing a better job.
Rest assured, lambchopped, that as a deist who, as mentioned, does not believe in any of the supernatural claims about Christ, I don't find anything freakish about your contributions as someone who does, and actually find your perspective as an active Lutheran informative and thought-provoking.
I'd also speculate that the board as a whole might be closer to your way of thinking than is apparent from a cursory glance, eg. heterodox the general christology may be, I do think it is a mostly sincere sentiment when shippies mourn the passing of a mate with "Rest in peace and rise in glory." (Though, of course, I can't speak for what any particular individual believes.)
There are times when it is hard to participate in a conversation because the premises are too tricky to resolve. If you have posters talking about resurrection as a historical event, I struggle with the danger of putting forward a trivialised or reductive understanding that does not hold together Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection in their proper unity. To absolutise one of these aspects is to neglect the others, and fail to do justice to something so core to my life. In the same way I could say with certainty that, for me, my understanding of Christ is inseparable from my understanding of the Church as the Body of Christ and that I hold to the Eucharist and sacraments as core to following Christ; but that has not always been the case in my life, and would sound excluding to those who follow Christ but will not or cannot belong in any church. The statement needs to be qualified, made provisional.
Who is Christ for us today? It isn't for me an individual or privatised question or discipline. How and when to speak or write from South Africa of the centrality of Christ in a context of deracinated and politicised anomie? I go back to Bonhoeffer (a major influence on my thinking as some here know) and his reclamation of Luther's two-kingdoms position. Bonhoeffer talks about the ultimate and the penultimate. The world’s reality as established and revealed in Christ is the ultimate. The penultimate is the world as conceived apart from Christ, both within and outside of broken and divided churches.
If we as Christians find ourselves in the penultimate, amidst circumstances of war, desolation, poverty, exploitation, oppression, and hunger, we find ourselves as believers among those whose circumstances make it nearly impossible for them to believe in Christ. So we in the South African churches speak of the now, the struggle against injustice, oppression and gender-based violence, we show solidarity and active daily concern. Bonhoeffer puts it this way: “To give the hungry bread is not yet to proclaim to them the grace of God and justification, and to have received bread does not yet mean to stand in faith." It may, though, open a window onto hope and the ultimate.
Before Luther understood what he needed to do, he had those long years in the monastery and his inward doubts and fear; before Paul met Christ on the road to Damascus, he was an angry righteous Saul blundering through life; before the thief on the Cross heard Jesus promise him salvation, he had to have lived as a thief and to be nailed and hung up to die. Most of the time, it feels right to be speaking from that before, not-yet place until it might feel right to speak of the already and ultimate.
All of this.
Discussing theory, features of theology, proper praxis, "issues" of Christianity require little to no vulnerability. One can take a detached stance, avoid exposing one's core -- which is precisely what I just did.
To the OP, Christ is the foundation and the center of Christianity. Or of what it should be. (Already I am moving toward safer versions of this topic). Since Jesus said that the sick are the ones who need a doctor, then those in the place where Christ is proclaimed should expect them and minister to them.
Looking at some of the discussions here, I see people talking in ways I think reflect the centrality of Christ to their faith, which is what I assume is meant by "Christianity" here. But not everyone who has faith in Jesus feels comfortable or able to talk about it in such a format, or any at all.
Well, I guess it could be argued that they are increasing the chances that they will one day accept Christ in the way that their particular church deems correct.
(Though you'd have to compare the number of people who convert after spending time in the church, to the number who experience a sudden conversion, eg. by being evangelized by one of the church's members out of the blue in a social setting.)
I think that you'd be talking about very small datasets in both categories.
Conversions to a religion are I think rather rare. People tend to inherit their religious position from their parents. The only conversion type that's been really successful in recent decades has been from a religion to none. I understand that second and third generation immigrant communities are seeing this happen from other religions as well.
My definition would have to include those who are agnostic about the person of Jesus but nonetheless try to live their lives according to his ethical teachings - "by their fruits etc."
Well, they might be small datasets compared to cradle-adherents, but I think it would still be possible to study them? A google on "sociological studies of religious converts" certainly turns up articles.
Unofficially, as a Unitarian, I'd say the majority of fellow adherents I encounter converted from some other religion or none. (Though Unitarians might not be suitable for comparing out-of-the-blue to lingered-awhile-first conversions, since there's no formal process quite equivalent to baptism, and so the distinction between a lingerer and an adherent can be pretty blurry.)
I was just reading about the Ebionites - quite unorthodox, but do they count? Also (in my very recent eclectic reading) the Druze and Urantia Book believers (not sure they even have a collective noun). All of which have a variety of cosmologies and understandings about Christ.
What counts and who decides?
The complicating factor is that different groups have different understandings of what 'conversion' is. The Druze I mentioned before have a situation where nobody can join who wasn't born into it, and where curiously it seems that 90% of the Druze community are never considered to be properly initiated and so only have a shaky understanding of what they believe.
There have been various Christian groups which are like this too over the centuries of course.
I therefore don't believe there is one unique way to God or to salvation again however you may interpret those terms. To follow the path of renunciation which Jesus has shown us is, in my opinion, the only true way to God. To deny self and take up one's cross is to live in self-sacrificial love of God and one's neighbour. To strive to do God's will on earth as in heaven, is to bring His kingdom among us, and to live in the knowledge of our universal brother and sisterhood under His paternal rule and guidance.
Of course, non of this is possible for us mere mortals and both Jesus and John the Bapist gave us the solution. Repent. Which in Hebrew is teshuva, which means turning. From whatever fallen state we are in, we can immediately turn to God and restore the divine image in which we were created. So yes. Christ is essential to Christianity. Christianity is an authentic path to God. It was originally called "The Way" but I think that the inner transformation of the Way is available in other religions and cultures as well.
Could we go back to the original question on this thread, scary and vulnerable as it may feel?
I'm drawn to something Richard Dawkins (of all people) said:
John Finnemore (UK comedian) has said similar things about why he feels comfortable doing sketches that use Christianity for humour but wouldn't do the same with Judaism or Islam.
But liberally backslid as I am I can’t quite visualise a Christianity as a believed in, followed religion that isn't somehow focused and founded on Jesus. Even if I take the progressive line I'm also drawn to - that Christianity is an approach amongst many to God, it's still an approach whose distinctive and defining point is that it's informed by the corpus of holy writings about Jesus we call the New Testament.
I missed this - my last post referred to @KarlLB's - but yes, you make a telling point @HarryCH.
FWIW, that chapter is (to me) one of the finest in the whole Bible, much of which I find inexplicable, far-fetched, or just plain horrible...
It may not mention Jesus by name, but it is (as far as we know) what he himself said, and, in a way, forms my own approach to God/god/gods/religion/churchy stuff.
I think the notion of commitment to Christ is not how some christian traditions express themselves. Is it a particularly Protestant way of looking at it? I have never heard a fellow RC use that sort of language.
I suspect that it is indeed a more Protestant way of expressing it. The *personal commitment to Christ* thing was the subject of much that was said and taught in the very Prayer Book evangelical C of E Church Of My Youth (1960s).
There were times in my life when I have felt less close to Christ. I was finding prayer difficult, and had plenty of "is it all just made up" moments. I kept going to church, and found that my faith came back. If I had chosen to walk away from church at that point, I expect I'd now be in some sort of comfortable agnostic existence where church, or Jesus Christ, didn't really enter in to my thoughts at all.
But, in relation to the question in the OP, I don't see that making much difference. The Church is the body of Christ, Communion is a uniting of the church community with each other and with Christ. I can't see how the community of the Church could exist without Christ.
Nobody ever said that Christians have a monopoly on striking ceremonial or convivial meetings or morality or helping others ... or hypocrisy even.
All these things can be found both inside and outside the Christian faith.
Someone once said to me that a Muslim could he a 'good Christian' - by which they meant leading a good and moral life.
If I'd have been quicker off the mark I'd have said, 'Why not say that they were being a good Muslim?'
As @Ruth has reminded us, if any reminder were needed, Christians can and do behave pretty shabbily.
Whether the acknowledgement and acceptance of that leads us to abandon church or abandon faith is down to a wide range of factors and I'd try not to be in a hurry to judge any one else's position on that.
At any rate, @Lamb Chopped I can readily understand how you might feel on some threads as you appear to be in something of a minority on some issues or emphases.
I may not always be with you on the detail but I'm generally with you in principle.
I'm reminded of a comment the moderate Puritan Richard Baxter made about the poet George Herbert. I'm quoting from memory but it was along the lines that whereas with some very polished writers of devotional verse you could admire the outward form yet with Herbert, rough round the edges though his poetry could be, the reader would get the impression that there 'was a God' and that the writer meant business with this God.
I might have got the wrong end of the stick but am I right in thinking that some extreme liberal Protestants took things to the extent where they did not believe that God 'is' but that the liturgy serves the purpose of providing a shared and cohesive ritual - and was in effect 'god'?
Or was there more to it than that?
I can understand Lamb Chopped's reticence and unwillingness to offend as it could be taken to imply that she - and people like her - have Christ and that others here don't but are simply going through the motions.
I'm sure that's not what she is saying though.
The Orthodox, like the RCs, can be very prescriptive and sniffy about what constitutes 'true worship' and 'valid orders' and so on. But other than some pretty chauvinist types they wouldn't tend to deny that Christ wasn't active beyond their own circles.
I'd suggest that Christ can be and is active beyond the various churches themselves - often more so.
And I think it's possible to hold that alongside an emphasis on the Visible Church.
I am not criticising any of them. My answer to the thread title is Yes.
However, you cannot have Christian church servives without Christ.
It's a difference between confessional and communion churches. Alan Cresswell noted that for many Christians, "being in communion" with one another is what matters as church. What is actually believed, confessed, preached and taught may be extremely variable, within the bounds of that communion relationship. The confessional content is generally thought to be implicit in liturgy.
Coming from a confessional background, it's puzzling to be viewed as slightly eccentric for actually believing, confessing, preaching and teaching Jesus as central to Christianity.
Very broadly speaking, in Anglican circles you would be labelled - and I do mean labelled - as evangelical, for a confessional approach to faith in Jesus. That may even come with a slight whiff of disapproval. For faith in Jesus! What?!
My theory is that it's peculiar to the historical trauma of religious divisions in the United Kingdom. To sum up very briefly: being evangelical is a step away from fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is a step away from violence. The violent religious wars in the United Kingdom meant that there is a great deal of relief in, and support for, the idea voiced by Elizabeth I, that one ought not to make windows into [men's] souls.
Certainly violent religious wars are not unique to the UK. But it seems to me that the vibe you're getting is an artefact of that historical trauma.
Is the vibe that Lamb Chopped is getting only coming from Shipmates based in the UK?
I don't disagree that the violence of the Reformation and the Civil Wars of the 17th century left their mark on the religious psyche of the British people.
Hence Latitudinarianism, Deism and similar reactions.
But Enlightenment ideas crossed the Atlantic too, of course. There wouldn't have been the US Constitution and Bill of Rights without them.
There aren't many Lutherans in the UK so if Lamb Chopped lived in drizzly Croyden or Carlisle rather than sunny California, she'd be considered an evangelical.
So yes, I think you are onto something but I also think there's more here than simply Pond Differences.
Are you or I 'firm believers'?
These days I tend to be wary of pontificating about other people's spiritual condition. There's certainly a lot of nominalism and folk religion in the circles I move in though.
I agree that we can't have church services without Christ, but whatever those services consist of they must surely be some kind of expression of what we believe.
'Lex orange, lex credendi.'
So my answer to the question, can we have Christianity without Christ is 'No.'
My answer to the question, 'Can non-believers or people of all faiths or none act in a Christ-like way?' is a resounding, 'Yes, of course!'
Predictive text is my undoing again.
That sounds like utter tosh to me, having moved in faithful Anglican circles all my life and having a constitutional hostility to evangelicalism.
Any slight whiff of disapproval would tend to come from the liberal catholic end of the Anglican spectrum, at least here in the UK.
Even there, though, I've come across positive vibes and noises towards some aspects of evangelicalism.
Truth be told, I think Lamb Chopped would be hard to categorise in UK terms but she'd be lumped with the evangelicals as the closest but not exact fit.
Whatever the case, I can understand how and why she feels a bit of an outlier on these boards but by and large I detect a lot of goodwill towards her, even from those she might be furthest from theologically.
If we're using it to fob off responsibility for a problematic person, then that's different to deciding who to ordain.
But if you explicitly assert the absence of all Christly recognition of Jesus, then I think you officially crossed the threshold of needing to pick a new name for most purposes (it doesn't make you a bad person).
If you assert that Jesus being Christ means something different to what I assert being Christ means, then that's a harder question.
There are Anglicans on this side of the Pond. Who brought their baggage, literal and figurative, with them.
What part of it is tosh? Particularly with the statement about "constitutional hostility to evangelicalism." Gamma Gamaliel has noted that Lamb Chopped's position would map closest to, but not exactly, evangelical in UK terms.
The claim that Anglicans consider "faith in Jesus" to be evangelical is utter tosh.
A couple of points. I do question many basic assumptions of who Christ was, and is--about his ministry etc. However, I do not question the resurrection.
Two: a number have talked about the need for a personal relationship with Christ, others have talked about the communal nature of faith, But one big part of being a Christian is the commitment to bringing about the Kingdom of God by doing justice. As Jesus says in his story about the Son of Man dividing the sheep from the goats, one side will be welcomed into the kingdom for doing things for the least of his brothers (and sisters) while the other side will not be welcomed for ignoring them.
You can go about claiming a personal relationship with Christ and ignore the beggar with the sign asking for a hand out. You can live practically your whole life withing the confines of the church building while stepping over the sleeping Jesus on the bench outside its entrance. Doing justice means living a life for the fellow person as much as you can.
In the Eucharist: perfectly fine.
As the focus of every Sunday sermon: eccentric if not problematic.
I'm going to continue speaking childishly, if you all don't mind. The thing I was noticing was that on so many, many threads, full of wit and intelligence and funds of research, we were yet doing the equivalent of coming into a man's house and discussing everything--his hospitality, his choice in music and architecture, the people he chose to associate with (or who chose to associate with him, who knows!), yadda yadda yadda, but oddly enough, there was almost never a mention of the Master of the house. Surely it's odd to never mention Jesus at all, except in a passing way while we argue about some passage in Kerygmania? To never wonder (this is me being naive again) what his personal opinion on the subject at hand might be? Or what the ramifications might be for me, as his servant (yes, that's a damn personal relationship, much as I loathe the baggage that comes along with the term!) to do such-and such or this-and-this, and what exactly is he going to think of it, and how am I going to make my decisions with that in mind?
Because I don't find him cut-and-dried--at all. And I've seen him drop unexpected creative solutions into insolvable situations, not only in the Scriptures (see, for instance, the woman taken in adultery) but also in daily life.
And so I go through my life with fairly constant reference to what he might be thinking or wanting. Yes, there's that childishness again, because I do think he has the capacity to know about my tiff with X at work or my jealousy of Y who just got a promotion... and I think it matters to him, how I respond. And I do have some concern about disappointing him, on a human level (as opposed to breaking some moral law). Because I love him (okay, terminal blush here).
I am a Lutheran, and we, too, try to avoid "making windows in men's souls," largely because we mostly come of Germanic stock and we just don't DO that, ugh. But also because "the heart is deceitful... who can understand it?"
So about the only time when someone is going to ask you searching questions about your personal faith is when you come of age, ecclesiastically speaking, and get confirmed; at which point you will be asked the baptismal promises again, to be made this time in your own voice and name. We don't get more specific than that unless you request private confession, which is never required. And there's the occasional situation when one of us takes fright about a loved one and might sit down for a heart to heart. But prying into details is very much not a Lutheran phenomenon. It makes us (by and large) vastly uncomfortable. Which is why I'm uncomfortable with having started this thread at all, as I'm exposing rather a lot of my vulnerable underbelly, if you know what I mean.
But it seems--odd--verging on rude, occasionally, to talk all around the master of the house, the host of the party, the groom at his own wedding--and never mention him. For going on years, it feels like. And it made me uneasy. And so I asked.
I've got to go and think further.
Only if you think Jesus is the master of the house in the first place.
Well, since almost everything we know about Jesus and his teachings comes from the bible, it probably IS the case that most of the serious discussion about him will, in fact, be in Kerygmania. (Whether those references to him are always "in a passing way", I don't spend enough time in Kerygmania to know.)
Are you wishing for more discussion where people talk about their own personal encounter with Jesus, unmediated by scripture? Most of that would be prayer, I guess, or perhaps unsolicited visions, dreams etc.
I wonder what @Lamb Chopped intends "the house" in her analogy to symbolize. Christianity itself? The church? This website? Or...?