Why Celery is Boring and Why the Church Needs to be Stranger

Because I fear that I may begin to think my infant thoughts are important, this post and all following opiniony kind of posts will be kept under five hundred words.

            I had a talk with two of my friends today about an article in the New York Times which can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/opinion/sunday/douthat-can-liberal-christianity-be-saved.html?_r=2&smid=fb-share about the failure of “liberal Christianity.” My first answer is that of course liberal Christianity—in the sense of the modernizing, debunking Christianity that appeared in the Nineteenth Century—was bound to fail because it was about as interesting and upsetting as a piece of celery. It was a product of nineteenth century ideas about science and was probably designed to allow people who had no interest in the supernatural historical events that are central to the Christian faith to continue to go to church and appear respectable in a context when they were socially required to. It was palatable, cultured, logical, and easy to tack on like a stripy scarf or a tie. But now, as the article says, liberal Christianity is dying, with Episcopal (as the liberal archetype) and progressive Catholic attendance taking a deathly kind of dive.

            Both of my friends, and G.K. Chesterton (who is not in fact my friend, but I wish he was), and most of the great Christian thinkers who have thought about this point out the uniqueness of the Church in the face of every other thing the world has seen. The Christian faith, and the Church as its living out, is profoundly strange. We openly confess to worship a dead Man Who isn’t actually dead. We get together once a week to shake people’s hands we don’t know and sit together awkwardly before we eat human flesh and blood—and people come back routinely for that. We say that God’s one, but also three. And then there’s the problem of evil, so troublesome to the idea of God that anybody with half a mind would give up on any kind of theism, nevermind this extravagant absurdity. And it seems the genuine Church has stuck with it for two thousand years. If we step back, it's profoundly bizarre.

            And so, as Chesterton says, the greatest argument for Christianity is that it seems all the time that it ought to die, but comes back. It seems so silly that it should have died long ago, but it keeps returning. The greatest argument for the faith is perhaps that it really can’t be argued for. Any respectable, reasonable person would think it ludicrous. But respectable faiths, like Arianism, like “Liberal Christianity,” die out. It seems that it’s the discord with what we think reality is that makes the Church so powerful and longlasting. Anytime it tries to assimilate it becomes ridiculous (as politically conservative evangelical Christianity often seems as well); but when it refuses it becomes powerful and strange and draws us to it. Where the Episcopal bishops in the article were asking how to make the Church respectable and refined, maybe we should be asking how we can keep the Church weird.