The Inconvenient Messiah
There's a really interesting article in the London Spectator that wonders what Christianity would be without Christ?
If Jesus Christ had not existed, it would almost certainly not have been necessary for the Church to invent someone like him. What does the Church want with a man who plainly despised ritual? Can you imagine the man who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey wanting anything to do with bells and smells and frocks, with gilt and silver and semi-idolatry, and repetitive chants and chorused inanities? The man who said he had come to break up families being paraded as a paradigm of family values? The man who had absolutely no interest in politics or administration and preached forgiveness, not 'the rule of law', wanting anything to do with the Conservative party or the Third Way? ...When we consider all those painfully counter-intuitive sayings and parables - the Prodigal Son, the idea that it is no good restraining your actions if your thoughts are bad, the impatience with good works ('the poor always ye have with you') except as a means for personal purification - and when we consider how Jesus keeps saying ... the wrong thing, it becomes even clearer that he must have been real: if Jesus had been a hoax, the Church could have invented someone so much more convenient."
VIA Andrew Sullivan
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Comments
Some interesting stuff.
I often say the most underrated, undernoticed sin is that of idolatry. These days most people don't worship golden calves. But many seem to make false idols of their own Christianity, or their own nationalism.
Posted by: barabajagal | April 25, 2006 8:21 AM
Hey there Derek. :)
I don't consider myself Christian, but I was ruminating on the what-would-Christianity-be-without-Christ question (it would have a different name, for starters) in a sort of different way recently. I just re-read The Diary of Anne Frank, and am reading a novel called The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank that imagines what might have been if Peter had escaped to America. In it, there are many incidences of anti-Semitism, including the slur on Jewish people of "Christ-killer" that some Christians seem to think is OK.
But where would Christianity be if Jesus hadn't been crucified? Hadn't died for the sins of Christians? It's the basis for quite a bit of modern Christianity, isn't it? I wonder which direction the religion might have gone in without that martyrdom to kick it off.
Then I realize my thoughts are getting to heavy and I go watch The Daily Show. ;)
Posted by: Diana | April 27, 2006 2:45 PM