Essay #10: Christ Versus Christianity

A Paradox There From the Beginning

I attend a traditional, conservative Christian church. Christ sometimes bids me to live in conflict with its teachings. I think this is a paradox. I don’t think it is a problem.

A few weeks ago, while visiting media outlets to promote my latest mystery novel, I sat down for a long-form interview with traditional Catholic Matt Fradd on his podcast Pints With Aquinas. Matt is a warm, intelligent man of good will. To spend a few hours with him, smoking cigars and talking God, was a delight.

Matt took issue with me, as many traditional Christians do, for my laissez faire attitude toward off-center sexuality as well as my belief that Christ can save those who serve him unawares — people, I mean, who serve the God of love without realizing it is Jesus. Matt sticks to traditional Catholic teaching that homosexual actions must be condemned. He believes one must profess faith specifically in Jesus in order to be saved.

I am not a natural debater. Good novelists don’t argue with people, they imbibe them. I like to allow other people’s opinions to inhabit me for a while before I decide how their outlooks may or may not gibe with my own. All these weeks later, I find I respect the integrity of Matt’s viewpoint. But I stick to my positions. I will not sacrifice Christ’s tender mercy on the altar of orthodoxy.

“Judge not, that you be not judged,” Jesus said. “For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged.” I am often told that this just means you should not judge hypocritically. I do not think that is correct. Who is more loving and forgiving, God or me? Trust me on this: it’s God. So whatever judgment I make, even one based in scripture, it will be less loving, less forgiving than God’s judgment. I then will be judged by my own standard, rather than God’s more gracious standard. That’s why I believe when Jesus said, “Judge not,” he meant exactly that.

Now, of course, this doesn’t stop me from recognizing actions that are self-destructive or harmful to others. It simply means I do not know where any given sinner stands in relation to God. “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy,” God told Moses. “And I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” I therefore mind my own business — which is loving God and my neighbor — and leave salvation to the only person who has a vote.

This is not a theological declaration. I am not a theologian. I am a man in a relationship with Jesus Christ. It is the central relationship of my life. And I know from experience that the more I let go of spiritual judgment, the closer my relationship with Christ becomes and the greater becomes my joy in living.

And yet, I feel that the church and its orthodoxies are absolutely essential. I have no truck with liberal churches. It seems to me the liberals have allowed the values of the moment to replace scripture, time-tested wisdom and intellectual integrity. What’s more, such liberalization does not seem to give believers what they need. In most denominations, conservative churches grow whereas liberalizing churches dwindle to nothing. I was baptized an Episcopalian. I watched as leftwing radicals took over Episcopal leadership. They worked hard to transform the denomination from a central Protestant touchstone to the MySpace of religion but with many fewer members. I have moved on to find deep satisfaction in the much more conservative Anglican Catholic church with its traditional liturgy and Nicean beliefs.

Still, there persists this tension between my personal relationship with Jesus Christ and my church worship. Traditional church teachings like the ones that guide Matt Fradd seem to me not only worthwhile, but somehow necessary. And yet — this is so strange to say I’m not sure I can make it clear — and yet through those very teachings, Christ guides me down a different path.

Christ has blown the hinges off the door to my heart. I see a sweet creation now, tornado-struck with sin. I crawl after him through the rubble. I have no notion whatsoever of how or whether the soul beside me is making his way. I feel if God loves me, he must love that guy too. Is his sexuality abnormal? Does he know Jesus by another name? Whatever. God will have mercy on whom he will have mercy. It is literally not for me to judge. On I go, and I wish him well.

My reading of the New Testament convinces me that this tension between individual and church was built into Christianity. It was there from the beginning. The Gospels have a different tone from the book of Acts and the Epistles. “I do not condemn you,” Jesus tells the adulteress. “Adulterers will not enter the kingdom of heaven,” says St. Paul. Jesus dined with sinners. St. Paul advised his followers not to associate with believers who sin. I’m not going to tie my mind in knots trying to prove that these conflicting messages are compatible. I think they serve different purposes. The Gospels provide a soul-altering encounter with the incarnate God. The other writings organize a church that will carry that encounter to people around the world.

Without that church, the encounter with Christ cannot exist. If there is one thing the Gospels show us, it’s that we cannot know the invisible truth except in its visible forms. We cannot know God without the incarnation. We cannot be baptized by the spirit but with water. We cannot know the holiness of creation except through the bread and wine. These forms are given to us through holy texts, and gain weight and specificity by church authority, tradition and ritual. Without the visible forms, the invisible spiritual truths become a jumble of personal prejudices and corruption. Thus, whenever someone tells my priest, “I’m not religious but I am spiritual,” my priest replies, “It is the same with Satan.” To paraphrase my fellow mystery writer, the late great Dorothy L. Sayers, you either have the creed or you have chaos.

That said, in every matter that inhabits this broken world, there is a need for balance. If you cling too tightly to the forms — the creeds, the rules, the traditions — you tangle yourself in sophistry and reduce the great forgiving Christ to an irritable scold. If you let go of the forms, you release the hand of mother church and wander off with the world and its perversions. I do not believe the church should coddle our sins and peccadilloes. But in my opinion, no one should be denied communion. Even Judas shared the cup with Christ.

It is urgently important to acknowledge the tension between Christ and Christianity and address it with humility. I think — I am almost certain — we are at the beginning of a great awakening. We have had a long, long fall away from faith, from the morn of the Reformation to this dewy evening of unbelief. We are coming to the bottom of that tumble down. The madness of materialism’s logical conclusions — lives without purpose, bodies without meaning, an unwinnable philosophical war against reality — have made a hell of the feeling heart. A world without the Lord is too fantastic to believe in, too immiserating to be sustained. The little gods that cluster on God’s abandoned throne — science and capitalism, psychology and liberated sex — have given us greater health and wealth, a new language of self-understanding and a night or two of guiltless pleasure — and we are dying of despair. We drug and drink and eat ourselves to death by the hundreds of thousands. We kill our babies by the millions in the womb when we even bother to create them at all. Some say it’s the end of days, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up. An apocalypse spent watching your enemies swallowed in a lake of fire while you are raptured into paradise may sound like a good time, but it could include some grim surprises. And anyway, I see no sign of it. More likely, we are entering one of those transitional eras when the faith of our fathers either renews itself or sinks away entirely, taking our culture with it. We are going back to church, I think, or down the drain.

The church then has to stand fast in the traditions that connect it to the apostles. The people won’t come to it looking for innovative sops. They know they’re broken. They don’t want affirmation or self-esteem — let alone pride, heaven forbid. They’re looking for forgiveness. They’re looking for the image of God in themselves and in one another.

They will find it in the form of Christ where he hangs upon the cross, beyond the rail where they are kneeling, above the altar where the meal is made. Where he leads them from that place will be as unique and eccentric as each believer, an unconstrained encounter between individuals, not the sort of rule-based hopscotch that gives structure to a religion.

Will the man beside me follow where Christ leads? Will he find salvation? I do not know. The journey is his not mine. Truly, it is not for me to judge.