By David Gushee
There was only one Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of God. But, sadly, there is not one “Christianity.” There are instead competing Christianities.
This conviction burned bright for me last week when trying to figure out our dear brother, Terry Jones of Gainesville, Fla. His is a version of Christianity that seems essentially unrecognizable. And yet it has its own heritage, its own twisted internal logic, its own appeal to at least a very small number of people who believe that this is faithful Christianity.
I remember the first time it became crystal clear to me that there is no such thing as Christianity, but only competing Christianities. It was when I was working on my doctoral dissertation on Christians who rescued Jews during the Holocaust. During that time I attended a most remarkable conference in New York on hidden children of the Holocaust. This gathering brought together the now-grown adults who had hidden from the Nazis to survive. Some of these children were saved by Christian families.
The most memorable speaker for me was a hidden child, and now a sociologist, named Nechama Tec. A Polish Jew, she survived the war hiding with Christians. She was asked after her address whether it was Christianity that motivated her rescuers. Her unforgettable response went like this: “It wasn’t just any kind of Christianity that would motivate a rescuer. Only a certain kind of Christianity would lead someone to risk their lives for us.”
A certain kind of Christianity — the phrase stayed with me. It is enormously helpful. From hard experience, young Nechama Tec learned the difference between versions of Christianity that teach hatred of the religious/ethnic other and versions that teach sacrificial and inclusive love. Her very survival depended on being able to tell the difference between these competing Christianities and the people who embodied them.
My current book project on the sanctity of life reaffirms this theme for me. I just finished writing a section on the competing versions of Christianity exhibited by Christian Crusaders and Francis of Assisi in the 13th century. During the 5th Crusade, a typically bloody mess involving outrageous “holy” violence on both sides, Francis actually trekked unarmed through a war zone to meet with the Muslim sultan. While the crusaders — egged on by the papal representative, Cardinal Pelagius — waged war relentlessly, Francis engaged in a peaceful audience with the sultan and his religious advisors. He apparently hoped that if he could convert the sultan then all the killing would end. He failed, of course. But he seems to have won a friend in the process, and returned unharmed. His visit is today honored by both Christians and Muslims who know about it.
Somehow, I like Francis’ version of Christianity a whole lot better than the cardinal’s.
To say that there are competing versions of Christianity is not to say that any version is as good as any other one. Quite the contrary — the contest over which version of Christianity is truest to the intent of the God we have met in Jesus Christ is a matter of desperate importance. But because of the diversity of the biblical materials, because of the way Christian faith has been transmitted through various traditions, because we are all still sinners, and because we see through a glass darkly, Christians have always contested various versions of the faith. Traditionalist conservatives like to identify a pristine “faith once delivered to the saints,” and to plant their flag there. But despite heroic efforts to pin down the nature and content of that faith, its content was — and is, and ever shall be — contested.
I tell my students now that when I teach Christian ethics I am offering a version of said ethics to them and that my version is contested by others. I commend my version but inform them of alternative renderings, while trying to get down to the assumptions underlying each version. I tell them that every time they open their mouths to preach or teach anything they are entering the historic contest over how the Christian faith is to be understood and lived — so they better get it right.
So the Christianity of “International Burn a Koran Day” exists. It is a sorry version of Christianity, but it exists. It must be defeated by better versions of Christianity. Maybe some progress has been made on that over the last week.
Could it also be that there is no such thing as “Islam,” but only competing versions of Islam? Could it be that those who are casually declaring that al Qaeda’s Islam just is Islam are about as accurate as those who would say that Terry Jones’ Christianity just is Christianity? Could it be that we need a moratorium on people who know nothing about the competing Muslim traditions making blanket declarations about the eternal nature of that religion?