I feel somewhat odd writing on the cross again, but it’s a subject that has kept popping up in the most unlikely places and has been keeping me up at nights (literally… look at the time up top). I’m not sure how I was able to avoid it until now, but this summer I’ve been forced to look at the reality of the cross in all its horror as the scandal it truly was and is. And I’m finding, rather than my heart being “strangely warmed” through the experience, that my heart has been strangely chilled. Which isn’t to say emptied of love, but haunted by what it means for God to have entered into our world in the flesh, to have suffered, and to have died on the cross for the sake of His wayward creatures
Freud said that religion was little more than a way for people to alleviate the harshness of the real world. I am convinced he had it backwards. I think what we often perceive to be the ‘real world’ is an attempt to alleviate the harshness of what the Gospel reveals. The same Jesus whose love and solidarity with the suffering and the God-forsaken led to the cross bids us to come and follow Him by loving others in self-sacrificial solidarity, no matter the consequences. I fail to see even a hint of escapism. If anything, the Gospel’s call is a self-consciously probing realism, a call to proactively seek out suffering in the world and participate in God’s redemptive work. If it has been a source or encouragement of escapism, I’m afraid it’s because we’ve misread the Gospels along with the rest of the New Testament.
I don’t know the ins and outs of blog-ethics, but this post borrows heavily from British atheist-Marxist Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution. As I said above, unlikely places.
I just watched a rebuttal of Rick Warren by Dan Dennett, a neuroscientist turned philosopher of sorts, and much of talk focused on the capacity for good without the need of God. He proposed religion as a product of natural selection in humanity, much like humans have bred a variety of dog. Nothing that he said though, ever once pointed outward, his arguments centered around ourselves. Even his view of God centered around what humanity has done through time to promote the idea of God, as if God were a byproduct of us.
I am so struck by the fact that God and the message of the Gospel must be taken from the beginning through self sacrifice. Part of the “harshness of what the Gospel reveals” lies in the message of loving others and loving God, not ourselves. I often question the similarity between the love a Christian claims for others and the love a secular humanist claims for others. It seems that the love Christ has called us to lies far outside ourselves as the purpose of it points to redemption and a worship of God. Whereas the love of a secularist seems, for lack of a better word, to promote an incest of goodness. -Sincerely, Your little guy
that’s a similarity I’ve wondered about as well… I’m curious what you mean exactly by “incest of goodness”?
I appreciate your reflections. I often lament the great irony of what Christians today are marked as being: homophobic, judgmental, hypocritical. The true, an-adulterated message of Christ is the antithesis of these attitudes. But the thing that gives Christianity that mark is our human flesh trying to be Christ. This only makes us cowardly, smug and self-righteousness. Our flesh is far too evil to convincingly masquerade as Christ.
I was perusing Craig’s list the other day looking for roommates and typed in “Christian” as a keyword search. It saddened me that not only all the Christians were out in the suburbs (is the inner city too sketchy for Christ?) but people were actually seeking roommates who were “preferably not Christian”. I hear you when you wonder if we’ve misread the gospels and N.T. I’m afraid that it’s because we’re so pre-occupied that we “look” good to others, that we only prevent Christ’s true, life altering transformation from occurring. It’s much, much easier to have the right answers and the right “do’s and don’ts” to prove one’s religious devotion than to be broken down and utterly powerless so an invisible God can be powerful in us. This sort of life, I suspect, would blow away our neatly constructed systems of religion that we so cowardly hide behind (myself loudly included).