Organized religion is now so dysfunctional that amateur atheists are writing bestsellers

“I have never believed in the virgin birth as a biological fact, the infallibility of scripture as a test of faith, the miracles as past suspension of natural law demanding current suspension of reason, the blood atonement (that the suffering of the innocent can vicariously atone for the sins of the guilty) as the foreordained mission of Jesus, the bodily resurrection as the only way to understand Easter, or the second coming as a necessary sequel-and I am the pastor of a church that does not define Christianity this way either.

Naturally, people ask," So what do you believe?”They seem puzzled by the answer. I say that we are not"believers"At all, not in the sense of giving intellectual assent to postbiblical propositions. Rather, we are doing our best to avoid the worship of Christ and trying to get back to something much more fulfilling and transformative: following Jesus.

We all know too well the abuses of fundamentalism in our time, and in one way or another we have all been living through a nightmare of bad theology married to bad public policy. But in the liberal church, some of us have failed to work as diligently at reconstructing the church as we have at taking secret, self- confirming delight in deconstructing it. As liberal Protestant churches declined and we bought the myth that it was because they were liberal (rather than how they were liberal), a whole generation has been asked to accept a false dichotomy. Either you believe that Jesus is God or you dont—therefore either you're are a Christian or you're not.

Meanwhile, the most urgent question of all goes unasked: What kind of God did Jesus reveal? That question has been sub- merged beneath"battles for the Bible"And bitter disputes over the metaphysics of a Galilean sage. So it has become fashionably iconoclastic these days to ask," Can I even call myself a Christian now?”Yet perhaps this is the wrong question, at least for those of us still in the church. Instead, we should be asking, "What is the proper object of our worship, and what would it take to make Christianity compelling, even irresistible, again?” How can our faith become biblically responsible, intellectually honest, emotionally satisfying, and socially significant? ...

Organized religion is now so dysfunctional that amateur atheists are writing bestsellers. it's easy-we wrote the script for them. It is no wonder so many mainline churches are dying. They have so long existed in maintenance mode that they have lost their prophet nerve. They have put so much energy into survival that they have forsaken their responsibility to be places of free and fearless inquiry and radical hospitality as well as spiritual sustenance. Alas, the work of rigorous biblical scholarship now takes place in almost complete isolation from the church and in some cases with a palpable animosity toward the clergy, considered by many in the academy to be clods.

Yet the people in the pews are not just reading The Da Vinci Code, The Secret, or The Prayer of Jabez. They are also reading Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and Karen Armstrong. They know the arguments for the Bible as both inspired and covered with human fingerprints, but they could use a little help in constructing a meaningful faith in a postmodern and, for many, a postorthodox world. They may not be literalists, but they are not atheists either, and many long to become part of a beloved community. They need help to construct a Christian faith worth having in a community worth belonging to.”

Robin R. Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church
HarperOne (February 24, 2009), pages 6-9

Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi