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“Christianity is in crisis – and in a deeper crisis, in my view, than many Christians are allowing themselves to believe.”

Top of the morning to you too. ;-P

I woke up this morning and began reading Andrew Sullivan’s interesting perspective on Christianity.  And I pick this out because Andrew represents for me the broader view of faith in America.  He’s extremely intelligent, refreshingly honest and insightful, shares a deep love of God, but doesn’t fall into neat little categories of evangelical belief.  He’s gay and I believe Catholic, but he also is one of the more important bloggers in America and has a huge audience that listens to him.  So when Andrew suggests Christianity is in crisis, people listen.

Andrew suggests that we’ve entered into a different period of faith.

“I start from a simple premise. There can be no conflict between faith and truth. If what we believe in is not true, it is worth nothing. The idea that one should insincerely support religious faith because it is good for others or for society is, for me, a profound blasphemy if you do not share the faith yourself. I respect atheists and agnostics who reject faith; I find it harder to respect fundamentalists – of total papal or Biblical authority – because of the blindness of their sincerity; but I have no respect for those who cynically praise religion for its social uses, while believing in none of it themselves. Sadly, a critical faction of the Straussian right has been engaged in exactly that kind of cynicism for a while now.”

“No modern Christian, it seems to me, can claim the literal inerrancy of the Bible without abandoning logos. No educated Christian today can deny that the scriptures we have – copies of translations of copies of copies of oral histories – are internally and collectively inconsistent, written by many authors, constructed in specific historical contexts, reflecting human biases, and supplemented by several other gospels that at the time claimed just as much authority as those gospels eventually selected by flawed men centuries later.”

While I don’t share Andrew’s (or Bart Ehrman’s) cynicism regarding the validity of Scripture, he brings up one really important point in his post.  He shares the tension that is the Catholic and Protestant problem.

“When the man whose authority rests on being the vicar of Christ on earth consigns children to rape rather than tarnish the image of the church, he simply has no moral authority left. Yes, his position deserves respect. But its claims to absolute authority have fallen prey to the human arc of what Lord Acton called “absolute corruption”.”

As Phyllis Tickle says, “Where now is our authority?”  If science, literary criticism, and reality are exposing the fallacy of a perfect Scriptures (the Protestant authority) and history is revealing the fallacy of the Papal authority (the Catholic authority), where is the authority?

Could this be a period of time that shifts authority back onto Jesus?  Andrew even suggests this.

“So we are left in search of this Jesus with a fast-burning candle in a constantly receding cave where we know that at some point, the darkness will envelop us entirely.”

What I love about this time in history is that we’re not only aware of the problem.  Because of the Internet, we’re also aware that we’re aware of the problem.  The crisis is as much our awareness as the problem. History is forcing us to face reality and we don’t like it. We’re conscious enough to know what hasn’t worked in the past but we don’t know how to progress in the future.  This is why I have suggested that we need a new story to progress forward. We need a better understanding of the problem and how to participate with God in faith.  And that structure must in some way recognize the reality of the problem, but suggest a logical, and wholistic solution.

So I would ask if you think Christianity is in crisis?