“The Church is an organization of sinful men.” - Joseph Iannone, former Holy Cross Brother
When I look back at my life, I can safely say that my faith began and ended the day I heard those words.
Despite the fact that I was just a sophomore in high school, my “relationship” with the Church had already become contentious. Despite the end of the Viet Nam War, I was faced with registering for the draft. I had decided, against the wishes of my family, to register as a conscientious objector available for non-combatant, non-military duty. When I sought the council of my pastor, the man in whose parish I had worked since I was nine, he told me to leave and not return until I accepted my “duty to kill communists for Christ.” I never returned. A few years later, I founded the Greater New Haven Coalition for Peace. We — the members of the coalition — had mailed the pope in order to call his attention to the need for adopting a strong anti-war position. He, of course, did not bother to answer. So, by the time I found myself in Brother Joe’s class, my discontent with the Church had reached a fevered pitch.
Something about the words Brother Joe spoke resonated deeply with me. For the better part of the next decade, those words would be enough to keep my faith alive. I entered Yale Divinity School because my faith was still alive. Every time my faith was shaken, and it was many times, I retreated back to Joe’s words. When I realized that the myopia of the Church would keep it from ordaining married men and women, I joined the Association for Rights for Catholics in the Church. When the young priest who had officiated at my wedding refused to baptize my son on the grounds that my questioning the divinity of Jesus precluded his being present as the representative of the Church, I remembered Joe’s words.
Each time returning to his words, returning to my faith became harder.
So, at Yale Divinity School, I began conversations with a number of other Christian churches. Those conversations ended when, in each case, there was little concern for my commitment to serving a congregation. The concern, it seemed, was for my commitment to whatever their specific doctrinal commitments happened to be. Again disillusioned, I attempted to return to Joe’s words. I found my way, one winter afternoon, to the chapel, got down on my knees and prayed. With all my heart, I didn’t want to lose my faith.
If the myopia of the “Church” had been the only challenge I faced, then perhaps my faith would have survived. Long before my confrontation with my pastor, there were other “forces” at work. I read the Iliad and the Odyssey at 7. That lead me to an intensive study of comparative mythology, and that led me to an interesting and life-altering confrontation with my father.
I had discovered that in every ancient mythology there is a story of the flood. I discovered parallels between the story of creation in Genesis and numerous other mythologies. My father was shocked. He didn’t know what to say. He picked up one of my books, read a passage, and replied with one word — “Interesting.” Though I didn’t know it or see it at the time, by the time I arrived at YDS, I had already begun to dismantle the last shred of orthodox Christian faith. The fist sign of that dismantling was a paper I wrote in the spring of my first year at YDS. It was called “The Human Face of Jesus.” The argument was simple: We — Christians — had lost sight of the most important aspect of our faith — the humanity of Jesus.
The human face of Jesus.
Reading Bornkamm’s Jesus of Nazareth provided the period at the end of a long sentence. We had lost any and all access to the Jesus of History. We only knew the Christ of Faith. That fundamentally disturbed me and the more I studied Paul, the more deeply I found myself at odds with Christianity. I came to see that, not only did Paul have no regard for James, the Brother of Jesus, but he had an agenda of his own, one with which I took issue. I could not accept the idea that god entered history in order to die for us. Theologically, I understood Paul’s argument — Jesus as the Christ had to die. The promise of the cross, as Moltmann would remind me during one of our confrontations, was that god died for us, and in that death the promise and hope long lost was again ours.
In one particularly heated conversation with Moltmann, my response was both pointed and simple: If god died on the cross, then god is dead, and there is no point to faith. If god only appeared to die on the cross, then the death of god and salvation itself are a cruel joke. As far as I was concerned, I told Moltmann, Jesus’ cry on the cross was addressed to god and it was not ours to answer. We did not know what god’s silence meant. Perhaps god was dead. Perhaps god didn’t care. Perhaps god refused to intervene. Worst yet, perhaps god was impotent in the face of death. Or, as we are reminded in the story of Rabbi Akiva, perhaps god wanted Jesus to die. Perhaps god is our murderer. The best we could do, until and unless god emerged from the silence to answer the question, I argued, was love god any way.
To follow Jesus, then, was more than to take up a cross and follow him. It was to place oneself on a cross, by his side, and to cry out as did he — “My god, my god, why have you abandoned me?”
Had that been the sum total of what had happened to me, then, perhaps, I would still be a person of faith. However, my second year at YDS ended on Easter Sunday morning when I awoke to find a 7 year old girl who was dying of brain cancer asleep in my arms. I cursed god, just as Wiesel had done when he was at Auschwitz. As had he, I stood among the congregation, not as a person of faith, but as god’s accuser.
But it isn’t simply that I have become god’s accuser, I stand in judgment against Christianity as well. The history of Christianity, from the time it sold its soul to Constantine, has placed love of power and money over the human face of Jesus. With Augustine, it allowed the distortions of Manichean theology to further embed misogyny into its “faith.” When the Church “absorbed” the Manichean hierarchical structure into that of the “Church,” that hierarchy took on a life of its own, apart and above the people it was supposed to serve. To this we can add the Crusades, the selling of indulgences, tithing, siding with the rich over the poor, lying, stealing, hypocrisy, child abuse, pedophilia, turning a blind eye to the “Final Solution,” failing to stand against racism…. The collective Christian Churches’ Crimes against Humanity are well documented. And those acts continue to this day.
If all this were not enough, the failure of the World Council of Churches to address the moral vacuum present in the West from the mid 1930s to the present speaks volumes about the emptiness that has become Christianity. I would have thought that the Death of God Movement in the 1960s would have been the voice in the wilderness that would have changed the Church’s focus. Of course, it did not. The Churches continue to pretend all is well, that speaking about equality is the same as working towards equality, that speaking against racism is the same as not being racist.
Well, it isn’t.
The pews continue to empty, and we continue to worry about doctrine and purity of faith. There is nothing to suggest that, when the last person leaves the last church, this will change. Ironically, we continue to assert the ambivalence of human weakness couched in terms of “original sin,” “free will,” and the need for god’s grace. Assuming god is there. Assuming there is grace to be had. But in the end, we wash our hands of responsibility for our world. We do nothing because we assure ourselves we can’t — the “ontological stain” of original sin is always in the way.
Well, it isn’t.
It is only because we tell ourselves it is. It is only because we prefer to accept the world as it is rather than to accept responsibility for changing the way things are. The poor, the sick and the hungry do not always have to be with us. They are with us because we won’t do anything to alter the situation. And again today, a priest will molest a child. A minister will bless an autocrat. A member of the clergy will place being white above being human. Once again, the Church is an organization of sinful people.
I do not come to condemn the Church, nor do I come to condemn god. I come to bury them.
There is a particularly chilling — and yet appropriate — passage in one of Koestler’s books: “When the dead are left to bury the dead, the living are left alone.” Or, as I would say, when god is dead, the living are left alone. Alone and finally responsible for changing the world. Somewhere in the world tonight, a child will die, and we, all of us who dare call ourselves Christians, are responsible for that death. Prayer cannot change that. Faith cannot change that. Only acting can.
If there is any truth to the Gospel, if there is a shred of truth to Christianity, it is not that god died for us on the cross. It is that Jesus lived, and loved, and died, on the cross, in the silence of god. Within that love unto death, there is no room for doctrine nor for theological purity. The fires that burned human flesh in the Inquisition, the priests and ministers who have pronounced war just and slavery biblical, have no place in that world. The simple truth is that there is no room in this world for a messiah who promises life after death for the faithful. There is only room for the human who pronounced the words, “Blessed are the pure of heart…..” There is room only for the human who said, “Give all that you own to the poor, take up your cross and follow me.”
Paraphrasing one of the last lines of Camus’ The Rebel, Jesus is the one who teaches us not to be a god, or to see ourselves as children of god, but the one who taught us what it means to be human and humane. In a world in which all that is human dies, nothing is more powerful, nothing more profound, nothing is more human, than to love. There is only love and death. And for me, the essence of taking up my cross, the essence of following Jesus has nothing to do with the virginity of Mary, whether or not to baptize children, the number of sacraments, or with the authority of the pope. The essence of taking up my cross is loving in a world in which all that is human dies. Until we do that, Christianity will remain empty, hollow, vacuous and irrelevant.
I do not come to condemn the Church, nor do I come to condemn god. I come to bury them. I come to nail the doors of the Church shut.
