Christianity without God - Book Review

by Lloyd Geering (Polebridge Press, 2002); 157 pp; $18 paper--reviewed by Joseph S. Silverman, M.D.

Even before the gospel writers put stylus parchment, Christianity's dominant focus had shifted from the teachings of Jesus to the death and resurrection legends and the notion of universalized human sacrifice. Theism was thereby perpetuated, along with other aspects of the supernatural, making way as time went on for the often brutal institutional authority of the church, the doctrine of the divine right of kings, male dominance, and the exploitation of Earth's resources.

Lloyd Geering, ordained Presbyterian minister and emeritus professor of religion, reconstructs history with a different emphasis. He views Christianity as a stage in the maturation of humanity. He believes that religion, first manifested as animism and dread of nature's unpredictability, will develop ultimately into Humanism.

Geering is a New Zealander among the two hundred mainly American scholars associated with the Jesus Seminar since its founding in 1985. In the foreword to Christianity without God, Robert W. Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar, endorses Geering's major conclusion: "Christianity should learn to live without God."

Climbing out of theological institutes and other quiet educational settings, Jesus Seminar academics, previously listened to but seemingly unheard, assured the accessibility of their findings by establishing their own publishing house. Their research, employing the tools of social science, rejected the dogma of divine authorship and offered the open-minded a new understanding of sacred texts. The seminar's body of work, no shock to Humanists, has the power to devastate unquestioning believers.

Christianity without God portrays the Nazarene as joyful and surprisingly Epicurean. A pacifist, Jesus is depicted as compassionate toward the marginalized as well as his antagonists. Above all, he is a teacher, promulgating a strikingly original vision of this world. The Jesus Seminar in general finds the historical Jesus to be innocent of messianic pretensions, innocent of claims of divinity or miraculous birth. His death is seen as preordained only in retrospect and his resurrection is viewed in a spiritual, nonphysical sense, not as bodily reanimation.

As Geering tells the tale, Western thought had been shaped and constrained by the Roman Catholic Church, which was really the only game in town until a competitor finally emerged. Modern scientific thinking began with scholarly Christians like the Bacon boys, Roger (1214-1292) and Francis (1561-1626), and proceeded through Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Darwin.

In parallel fashion, traditional Christian concepts were challenged from another direction--philosophy: G. W. F. Hegel's pantheistic monism; the writings of David Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Friedrich Nietzsche; and the secular Christianity of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Geering contends that the stone that the builders rejected--the relatively nontheistic wisdom stream of Bible books such as Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Jesus' parables--underrated by both Judaism and Christianity, deserves to become the chief cornerstone of the intellectual/emotional edifice of the future.

Geering argues that, in deifying the person Jesus, Christianity was unconsciously transferring prime importance from gods to human beings. This psycho-dynamic explanation fails to persuade. If the concept of Incarnation (God is Jesus/man is God) is considered a bridge to Humanism, it must be an awfully long bridge--the eighteen centuries between the apostle Paul and Hegel. But perhaps, when telling a story of this scope and dimension, the narrator is entitled to maximum dramatic license.

The New Christianity, as envisioned by Geering, admires but doesn't revere Jesus. He is appreciated for his teachings and his advocacy of the poor and the rejected, not for his fabled metaphysical beginning or his fabled metaphysical, indeterminate end. The revised Christianity, nontheistic like Buddhism, allows us to strip from our holidays the vestments of holy commemoration and facilitates the explicit celebration of solstices and harvests, the original inspiration anyway. Respect for nature replaces reverence for the unworldly (a double blow to many conservatives). Ethics, interpersonal and global, is promoted for practical human reasons, not because of alleged divine revelation. Presumably, like Rabbi Sherwin Wine's Humanistic Judaism, Humanistic Christianity will encompass most of the joys of the tradition, trumpet the glories of its history, explain and apologize for its lowlights, and preserve the charming legends--all while abandoning any pretense of literal truth.

Even the most optimistic Humanist may be incredulous about these projections. U.S. society a century and a half after Charles Darwin still soaks in the bubble bath of childlike religiosity. Seldom in the public arena is heard a skeptical word about the appropriateness or potency of prayer and angels, and saints freely roam the psychic landscape. Geering reminds us, "It is less than 200 years since nearly everyone in the Western world believed the earth was only 6000 years old and that we were all descended from ... Adam and Eve." Plenty of holdouts remain, however, though science has predominated in most educated circles.

Humanistic Judaism. Humanistic Christianity. It may be quite a wait until Humanistic Islam. We should all live so long.

Joseph S. Silverman, M.D., is a psychiatrist in private practice in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He has been a member of the American Humanist Association for over twenty years.

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