On Remaining “Christian”

(6/20/23)

[Brian McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned (2022).]

O Lover,

Insofar as You already know me infinitely better than I am known by myself or others, I risk one of my most radical questions: do I continue to self-identify as “Christian”? This query has multiple triggers: revulsion, an emerging attraction, and Brian McLaren’s recent book. On the one hand, I am repeatedly repulsed by what I see today in many Christian institutions, Roman Catholic and/or Evangelical: active or complicitous support for what borders on christo-fascism; policies of pelvic preoccupation; ongoing suppression of exposés of clergy sexual abuse of children; a clerical mindset fed by ideology, hierarchy, misogyny, and the infantilizing of the faithful. Granted You always work with less than optimal material—witness me!—but is there not an authenticity issue in identifying with much of what passes for Christianity today?

On the other hand, I am increasingly attracted by expressions of moral beauty, longing for You, and commitment to working to build what Dr. King called “The Beloved Community” which I see outside Christian precincts, whether among atheists, fellow Abrahamics, or elsewhere. The underside of my uneasiness with the growing exit from ecclesial institutions, both among youth and my own peers, is of late garnished with a green blade of hope. I ponder the fact that radical proposals as to how best to address America’s “original sin” of slavery in all of its present shape-shifting adaptations are increasingly coming from nonChristian quarters. And I am encouraged by the diluting of white Christian nationalism by the religious elements embodied in immigrant diversity.

So, again, why do I continue to self-identify as “Christian”? Did my roots even allow me a choice, or was I irrevocably set, long since ruined for life? And were I free to choose, what would be the criterion for that decision? On the latter question I have more clarity: whether or not I remain “Christian,” it is because of Your Christ.

Bu why Your Christ, O Lover? Against the background of my origin’s fixation on sacrificial atonement, I was skewered in my early twenties by a theologian’s reference to the “intellectual love for the Incarnation” on the part of Karl Barth (1886-1968). A decade later, aided by nurturers as diverse as C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) and H. Richard Niebuhr (1894-1962), I was exploring the shimmering idea of Your wall-to-wall identification, solidarity, and hallowing of Your love-child, humanity. The Christ was becoming for me Your Voilà! regarding Your heart’s disposition, heílsgeschichte, Self-ligature, and residency. Was not the staggering and dazzling chútzpah of such a notion irrefutable evidence of You?

“Intellectual love,” “idea,” “notion”? Alas, all of the above was still largely in my head, my primary residence. Still later the mystics nudged me further toward and through the Incarnátio portal beyond which was nothing less than “new creation!” (II Cor 5:17) encompassing all Your finite beloveds, a macrocosm prefigured by Your microcosmic Christ. Immeasurably more than mere historical figure, moral exemplar, wise guru, or doctrinal tenet, the Christ was becoming peephole into Your Sacred Heart, Your timeless commitment to Self-bind to the creation. Whatever other windows You employ, the Christic one became for me definitive, decisive, and non-negotiable. He is the window to You, Reality Itself. If “in him all the fullness of [You] is embodied” (Col 2:9), then we have the basis for response to Alfie’s “What’s it all about?” query. To You via the Christ I can surrender not only my head, but my heart, my love, my very being.

But if Your Christic embodiment among us is nonnegotiable for me, what about “Christianity”? Can the two be separated? Is being a Christ-one possible outside of the church, of religiosity, of “Christianity”? My “church” presently consists of two concentric circles: the intra- and institutional one explicit and often cramped, and the extra- one more implicit, wide open, and, yes, complicated. Your Christ is at both the center and the margins of each. I seek kindred sojourners in both circles, for restricting Your tsunamic transformation to the individual level, being an isolate, is rank heresy.

In short, I cleave to You, O Incarnator, chiefly glimpsed in the all-encompassing Christ. All else is less clear.