Confessions of an Irreligious Christian

Or, Christ plays in ten thousand places

Guède (Sextidi), 26 Pluviôse, CCXXXIII

Be patient with me, please. This is all likely to sound very peculiar, and I have long hesitated to say any of it for fear of creating misunderstandings; but I have been so often asked about the nature of my faith and my reasons for espousing belief in Christ that I thought it was about time I gave up being demure. This is not a comfortable undertaking; the confessional mode is not natural to me; but a few weeks back I agreed to give it a try after a number of readers here pressed me (politely) to do so. Before, however, saying why I believe, I first have to take account of all the more common motives for faith that seem to be utterly absent in me; I have no desire to scandalize anyone, though I just might, but I think I need to own up to certain of my own limitations. The best designation I seem able to come up with for describing my general spiritual sensibility is that of ‘irreligious Christian’, though I acknowledge that it is an obscure phrase. I do not mean something along the lines of Bonhoeffer’s ‘religionless Christianity’—nothing quite so admirable—as that was a moral call to living out one’s faith in all the concrete occasions of worldly life. Much less do I mean something like Gianni Vattimo’s Heideggerean reduction of the metaphysical inheritance of Christianity to a historical stream of ontological dispensations or a redemptive nihilism or a hermeneutical Überlieferung consequent upon the annunciation of God’s kenosis in Christ, which culminates in secularization and the irreversible weakening of all ‘strong structures of thought’. (I see a certain solvency in the historical analysis, but not so much in the ontology.) Least of all do I mean something like Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian-Feuerbachian-Marxist-Heideggerean-Lacanian ‘Christian atheism’, which is a fairly obvious philosophical move but one better explored by way of Ernst Bloch (who lacked Žižek’s theatrical flair, but who had a more genuinely prophetic soul). I mean something altogether more mundane and maybe a little psychologically morbid: the faith of someone—myself, that is—who has little or no natural aptitude for religious sentiment, enthusiasm, devotion, or ritual observance. I do not mean to say that I am wanting in reverence or the ability to feel awe; I have all of that in sufficient quantity. I simply find that what excites those aspects of my character is rarely if ever found in a conventionally ‘religious’ context. I have come to accept that I am a thoroughly secular man who happens to believe that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead.

Of course, in my case in particular this is something of an amusing predicament, rather like the situation of a musicologist who happens to be tone-deaf. After all, I have been writing on religious topics for decades now, and one might reasonably suppose that I have done so because they occupy a central place among my special intellectual and spiritual concerns; I am even routinely described as a ‘theologian’, though I have never used that word about myself. But, as I have frequently noted (though with little success in convincing anyone), theology is not a form of writing in which I take very great pleasure, and I pour far more of myself into my fiction, literary essays, observations on the arts, cultural laments, studiously perverse obiter dicta, and disquisitions on baseball. And then, on the next tier down, my philosophical writing is of more importance to me than my contributions to debates on dogma, scripture, or systematics. Not that I do not take some satisfaction in having made a theological argument well, at least by my lights, but even my most sympathetic readers have as a rule noticed an occasional tendency toward the combative, the flippant, and the satirical even when I am dealing with matters of the utmost spiritual import, which is certainly a personal flaw to which I have all too often and too gleefully surrendered. Persons naturally suited to theology do not do that. The truth is that, for me, the task of writing on theology has been one of negotiating a small number of delicate conceptual difficulties, in the hope of better understanding two historical anomalies that I believe I perceive at the origins of Christianity.