Response to Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan's Easter Week cover article was provocative and deserves a response.  Here is part 1 of three responses. 

Sullivan represents what I would call deutero-Protestants.  These are people who somehow believe that not only can Christianity exist without being bound to a single unified church but that Christianity can exist without any church whatsoever.  It’s a view held not only by Jefferson but also by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Soren Kierkegaard, Gothold Lessing and the list goes on.  The pesky historical detail they tend to neglect is that there is not memory of Jesus without the church.  We cannot access any first hand written document composed by Jesus.  Nor do we have really any existing document that describes Jesus and his activity outside those written by people of faith.  Many biblical scholars believe that there existed a “Q” for (Quelle, the German word for source) that, like Jefferson’s Bible contained the sayings of Jesus but not much else.  But even that would have been compiled by followers and its existence is still hypothetical (I say that even though I believe that there was a sayings source or “Q” document). 

Whether we like it or not we are dependent on the church for both the introduction and content of our knowledge about Jesus.  There’s nothing of Jesus that’s directly accessible—I’m distinguishing here between the historical person of Jesus and the living presence of Christ.  Surgeon Atul Gawande has recently written a book entitled The Checklist Manifesto.  In it, he tells the story of being responsible for improving surgical safety.  He concluded that the way to avoid post-operative infection was through the use of checklists.  The narrative is both more nuanced and interesting.  But he begins and ends by talking about the miracle on the Hudson.   At the end of the book the chapter is entitled “The Hero in the Age of Checklists.”  He talks about how the pilot kept trying to explain to people that what saved people that day was a system—a system within the plane of pilot, co-pilot and crew and a system that preceded the flight that instilled the necessary actions and reactions in the event of this sort of disaster.  Gawande points out that no matter how hard Sullenberger tried to make that point, “It was as if we simply could not process the full reality of what had been required to save the people on that plane.”  Call it the deutero-Protestant work ethic:  We must find the single person responsible and either make them a hero or a villain.  We do not know how to see the virtue or the villainy in systems.  This is not less true here where scripture comes to us as an interlocking system of writers, readers, retainers, copiers, canonizers, and translators.  All of these handlers of what has come to us as the words of Jesus are members of the same system--the Church.  There is no access to Jesus without the church. 

This does not excuse any of the gross misdeeds conducted by these systems and Sullivan is right to call these into accountability.  It is to argue, however, that would be followers of Jesus Christ must participate in the continual effort to bring the church of Jesus Christ to places of needed repentance rather than create yet another "They" that "we" refuse to engage.