From 2007: It's now an Open Letter

The contents of this post is actually from March 2007, but given the bru-ha-ha over Anne Rice's recent exeunt from the label "Christian", I'm reprinting it here are my personal open letter to her. Consider my response here to Pastor Matt Lauterbauch's old post a larger exhortation about Christ, culture, and what it means to keep Him in the center of your life as an object of worship. Enjoy.

Dear Anne Rice ...

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I have a sort of backlog on the blog here which I think needs to be cleared up, and in part it revolves around a link provided by reader “scott” to Matt Lauterbach’s blog about what missional means. I give it here for a context, and I have two reactions to it.

The first is this: his exegesis of 1 Cor 6:9-11 is sloppy. Paul’s point in saying what he says in 1 Cor 6 is not, “boy, it’s a sloppy mess when you convert the sinful”. His point is that the Corinthians, who are supposed to be “called to be saints” and “enriched in speech and in knowledge”, don’t have the ability to settle their own disputes: they take their alleged problems to secular courts for judgment. In that, Paul says they disgrace themselves when they have to have the ungodly settle their alleged wrongs against each other. And the admonition that none of these kinds of sinners will inherit the Kingdom of God is made to make the point clear: you are not like this anymore, so don’t give these people authority over you.

And this is a transition from the fact that the ungodly should not judge those in Christ to the fact that those in Christ ought to treat each other as if they were in Christ. That is: “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”

Paul is not talking about missiology here in the sense Pastor Lauterbach is. Paul is saying that our witness to the world ought to be that we have power (cf. 1 Cor 4), and that we are different than what we used to be. That is a missiological statement, but it is couched in ecclesiology and frankly Christian ethics – not in talking about how messy it is to be a person being reformed by the Holy Spirit.

But that said, here’s the real question: what is the mission of the church to those people Pastor Lauterbach has listed by example in his post here? Do we have one – or can we write off the partnered homosexuals who find methods for getting children, the single moms who adopt, the tattooed, the pierced, the surrogate mom, all the people who not only don’t look like “us” but also probably cannot ever “look” like “us”?

I think it’s a great and important question. But there’s a really big problem in the way Pastor Lauterbach frames it: he has implied that somehow “Republican” values are inherently “Christian” values. You know what? That’s a root-cause problem in this discussion.

Yes: I vote Republican – over one issue only, and that’s right-to-life. But I’d vote for a Mormon for public office if he was going to dedicate his political career to the end of abortion. But I have no inherent love for the Republican party. They do not represent me on the matter of the institution of marriage (I’m for the Genesis 2 model – how many laws are based on Genesis 2?). They do not represent me on the matter of public prayer (I’m for the Acts 2-3-4 model of public prayer). They do not represent me on the matter of freedom of religious expression (I’m for the Rom 1:16-17 model of freedom of religious expression). They do not represent me on the matter of race relations (I’m for the Eph 2 model).

So the idea that somehow the Republican party is a template of Christ-in-culture bothers me.

Which brings us, thankfully, back to the matter of Gospel being the solution to culture. The solution to culture is to refute all the errors of culture with the truth of Jesus Christ. And since Pastor Lauterbach brought it up, 1 Cor is a great example of how Christ leads the way for us to be in a culture and at the same time be contra mundum.

For example, Paul says this:

I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people – not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler – not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. "Purge the evil person from among you."[1 Cor 5:9-12]

Listen to Paul. In this passage, he is saying, on the one hand, the church has an obligation to deal with men and women who do not repent of sin but instead abide by their own sinfulness if they want to be called part of the family of God. But equally necessary here is what Paul is saying about those outside the church: you cannot be cut off from these people who have not been saved. You cannot come out of the world.

That is missiology, my friends. If that is not missiology, then there is no such thing, or else it is the shabby thing I have been on about in my last few posts to iMonk. The church must be something which is radically set apart from the world and at the same time in the very presence of the world for the sake of showing them the truth.

Paul says more about that here:

For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men. We are fools for Christ's sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we entreat. We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things. [1 Cor 4:9-13]

Paul doesn’t say, “Gosh, we have a good footing in the political arena and now we can go do God’s work.” And he doesn’t say, “I’m glad I have, at last, become my own reality TV show so that I can influence the culture.” He says, (I paraphrase) “God has made me suffer greatly in all things so that I can be theatron for angels and men and everything in the world.”

Theatron. Listen – that’s got to slap you in the face no matter who you are. Paul says he is made sport of for the public amusement for the sake of Christ; he’s the object of scorn. It doesn’t mean he’s in people’s face with some kind of insult: it means, as he says clearly here, that he makes a fool of himself for the sake of Christ.

He is not seeking anyone’s respect. And why is that? Does he say why? I think he does – it’s the premise of what he is telling the Corinthians here:

And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

Paul says that his mission was itself not to gain anyone’s trust or to gain anyone’s approval but to in fact to deliver a message which, by any other standard except God’s standard, is a folly -- so that God will be glorified.

Now, please hear me clearly: I’m still the guy who thinks that the message of Jonah has a lot to do with what our missiology ought to be. I’m still the guy who thinks that Stephen delivered the Gospel to the council of the High Priest. I’m still the guy that believes strongly that God is just as glorified by His love as He is by His justice and holiness. But my point here is that we are not sent here to get anyone’s approval but God’s.

You must speak to people in an idiom they grasp, and you must use the aspects of the Gospel which will have the most impact on culture. You know: in a nearly-monolithic American Republican culture, the truth that Jesus Christ demolishes the demands of the Law is devastating. And in a nearly-monolithic American Democrat culture, the truth that Jesus Christ fulfills the Law and demands repentance from sin is equally devastating. And in a popular counterculture where nihilism and radical autonomy is exalted, the fact of Jesus as Lord and Christ sweeps the ants off the anthill without and regard for their outrage.

These are all expressions of the Gospel – all cross-centered, Christ-exalting, God-filled visions of what the world is and they do not contradict each other. But they do create a culture which contradicts what the world demands of us.

This is missiology: being something in the world which is an affront to the world and a stumbling block to its ideas of wisdom and status. The mission of the church is not to try to make Republicans out of disenfranchised bar hoppers, gender role breakers and all manner of prostitutes: it is to make sinners grateful to God for grace, and to make them repentant that they have tried to reinvent His law, and to make them humble in love and service to men. It might obviously cause them to vote against abortion and those who protect it, but that doesn’t mean it’ll make the world into a suburban Tennessee cul de sac.

When the finger starts wagging about “missiology”, let’s not forget that the purpose here is not to become as much like the culture as we can before we fall into just being the culture: the purpose is frankly to devastate the idols of culture and all their sacraments in order that Christ may be lifted up.

[#] Anne Rice Christ the Lord (3 of 3)

What gradually became clear to me was that many of the skeptical arguments -- arguments that insisted that the Gospels were suspect, for instance, or written too late to be eye witness accounts -- lacked coherence. Arguments about Jesus himself were full of conjecture. Some books were assumptions piled upon assumptions. Absurd conclusions were based upon little or no data.

That's an interesting quote, yes? I've got another one for you:

I was unconvinced by the wild postulations of those who had claimed to be children of the Enlightenment. And I had sensed something else. Many of these scholars, scholars who had apparently devoted their life to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a hopeless failure. Others sneered at him, and others felt an outright contempt. This came between the lines of the books. This emerged in the personality of the text.

These aren't the mad ravings of some blogger who's just now discovered internet apologetics and is voicing his disgust at what he finds in skeptical circles: this is Anne Rice in her Author's Note at the end of Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. They are part of the reason I saved this part of the review for last.

See: when I got wind that Anne Rice was going to write historical fiction about Jesus Christ, I was somewhat, well, disgusted. Frankly I find the Lestat novels creepy and amoral (which, of course, is their point), and I have intentionally distanced myself from reading any of Mrs. Rice's other works because of that work.

I am refraining from saying, "apparently, something has happened to Anne Rice," because she has gone from being a lapsed Catholic to being a relapsed Catholic. In all her years of researching this book, apparently the matter of the Reformation didn’t come up -- and really, why should it if all she is studying is the first century? But Mrs. Rice has discovered something in her reading that doesn’t normally dawn on people coming from her perspective.

She has discovered the problematic nature of 21st century religious skepticism -- independent of prior religious conviction. In that, even with the flaws I mentioned in the previous installment of this review, the novel clearly reflects her position that Jesus Christ was not just a misunderstood man.

She also says this:

Anybody could write about a liberal Jesus, a married Jesus, a gay Jesus, a Jesus who was a rebel. The "Quest for the Historical Jesus" had become a joke because of all the many definitions it had ascribed to Jesus.

The true challenge was to take the Jesus of the Gospels, the Gospels which were becoming ever more coherent to me, the Gospels which appealed to me as elegant first-person witness, dictated to scribes no doubt, but definitely early, the Gospels produced before Jerusalem fell -- to take the Jesus of the Gospels, and try to get inside him and imagine what he felt.

So let's be clear that she doesn't take the Scripture to be inspired (at least, not in this confession), she doesn't take the Gospels to be inerrant even if she finds them reliable, but she also doesn't think they are completely biased trash.

In contrast to the ham-handed DaVinci Code, this is as fair a treatment in fiction from the secular world as we probably can expect. Mrs. Rice's academic heroes are diverse -- from Blomberg and D.A.Carson to N.T. Wright to Frank Kermode to Karl Rahner -- and of course taking a detailed survey of her informal references would undoubtedly not turn up the reading list at Monergism.com. She is not openly hostile to the Gospel, and in many respects that's somewhat refreshing, but that is the real rub.

In the final tally, it is the best reason to read this book. Given that she has composed a psychological history of Christ here -- and we have to presume she intends to round it out with the rest of Christ's life -- which does not conform to conventional orthodoxy, I strongly urge the readers of this blog to take this book under consideration and mark it carefully for the near-misses it has with orthodoxy. It's going to come up. People are going to ask questions about it. Be prepared to give an account.

[#] Anne Rice: Christ the Lord (2 of 3)

The real irony of this book is that, in many ways, it is not about Jesus at all -- not in the sense that he is the protagonist. Of course, he's the narrator, but in this book it is apparently Jesus remembering being a 7- or 8-year-old boy who is returning to Nazareth. Frankly, the Jesus Mrs. Rice portrays in this book who it the narrator ... he's not very compelling. He's somewhat average. He doesn't really reflect the person that all the people in this book interact with and find so compelling. That was one of the distracting things about the book as at the level of being a "good read": the Jesus people seemed to be interacting with was very different than the Jesus we were listening to narrating the story.

"cent: ignoramous," says the English major reading this review, "The Jesus narrating the story is not the Jesus these people are interacting with. You said yourself this is a grown Jesus reflecting on his past. Of course the Jesus these people are interacting with is not the Jesus narrating the story." Yeah, that's exactly the opposite of what I actually mean. It seems to me that the people the narrator talks about are all far more impressed with this young boy than this young by merits, and the narrator himself apparently does not know why. That's extremely problematic if you consider that this grown Jesus narrator is himself God incarnate not just in the aloof christological sense, but also in the immediate sense that plainly Jesus the adult knew what was in men's hearts. From the perspective of an omniscient first-person narrator, you really shouldn't be able to do better than Jesus, and I found the Jesus Mrs. Rice produced not quite up to that task.

But if this book is not about Jesus the narrator, who or what is it about? The novel is itself 300 pages long, and you really have to read every pages to discover that this book is being released at Christmas because it is, itself, a book about Christmas - a book about that night in Bethlehem when angels appeared to shepherds, and days later Kings from gentile nations came and gave that child honor. Of course, Jesus the 7-year-old doesn't remember any of that - even though it is not actually Jesus the 7-year-old who is narrating. What this book focuses on is the catalytic event in the life of Joseph's household that bring them back to the events of Jesus' birth: the death of Herod, and their return from Egypt to the land of the Jews.

That journey, in Mrs. Rice's account, is a journey of discovery for Jesus. It is a discovery of the story that his mother told - and, in this account, all her family believes - that she was visited by an angel, and there conceived a child by God. It is the discovery of the story of Joseph, her husband, who received multiple visitations from angels, causing him to take Mary as his wife (even though he never actually "takes" Mary as his wife in this account, which I will get to in a minute), leave ahead of Herod's murderous rage after the 3 Kings refuse to tell Herod where the King of the Jews is, and then return to Galilee after the death of Herod. Most staggeringly, it is the story of Jesus' older brother James (yes, yes: I know; just a second), and what happened that night in the stable from his perspective.

The novel has somewhat-astounding historical detail - and I'll admit that because I am not even a novice at the period, I'll take Mrs. Rice's word for it that she spent the better part of 20 years researching this book. And in the end, I think it is a flawed account. She gets the "nuts and bolts" about-right, recounting with some license the infancy narratives of Christ as reported by Luke and Matthew. But, for example, James the son of Joseph is not mentioned in either of these Gospels as being present or alive at the birth of Jesus - Joseph went to Bethlehem for the census, reports Luke, and he did not go "with his household" or "with all his family" to be counted: he went with Mary his Betrothed, who was with child. The matter of Mary's perpetual virginity is dealt with in what I would call an apologetic short-form (in effect, how could Joseph have intercourse with Mary after Mary had born the son of God? My answer would be, "because that's what married people in love do."). And the matter of James' account of Jesus' birth seems to overlook that James' mother is not Mary, and that his view of Mary would be formed by that fact -- even as a child.

However, before I give some more of my concerns about this book, here I am going to give a summary assessment of it: if you're a reader of this blog, you should read this book. Don't wait for it to come out on a bargain pallet, if it ever does. It goes for $26 at any bookstore that has it, you can get it on-line for under $20, and right now it is #26 on Amazon's total sales ranking. #26. So it will have some impact on popular reaction to Christians and the story of Christ, and you, as a reader of this blog, should have some first-hand knowledge of it in order to give an answer.

And you should have an answer because this book raises a lot of questions. Like Mel Gibson's the Passion of the Christ, this book is an access point to matters of critical importance in the proclamation of the Gospel. And, like Gibson's movie, it is an unmistakably Catholic version of events. I'm sure some Lutherans and Anglicans will not find much to grouse about in this novel, but if you do not accept the perpetual virginity of Mary, you're not going to be able to say, "this is as it was."

There are other problems, too. This 7-year-old Jesus is not quite sinless. He capriciously strikes a young child dead while playing roughly with him, and then out of remorse or guilt or fear brings him back to life. He prays for snow just to see what it is like. The legend that he turned clay birds into real birds is here propped up as a method he used to escape being accused of violating the Sabbath as a young child. And for those excited that Mrs. Rice wants to perpetuate the idea that Mary was a perpetual virgin, the part-and-parcel corollary to that is her immaculate conception and virgin birth - which are untenable in the face of the Mary portrayed in this novel as a somewhat-naïve girl with a supernatural "secret" (which is itself a little weird, given the number of people who are "in" on the secret) who is somewhat emotionally high-strung. Also somewhat bizarre is the portrayal of Satan in this book as a being who does not know Jesus is God's son (therefore very God from Very God) in spite of the fact that, as an adult, all the demons know Jesus at first sight.

What we ultimately find very little of, though, is rank skepticism about Jesus. In her concluding Author's note, Mrs. Rice makes a point of saying that she believes her portrayal of Christ in this book is inside the orthodoxy of the Council of Chalcedon in its representation of one who was always all man and always all God.

That's quite a statement from the woman who created Lestat and spent most of her adult life as an atheist. We'll examine that statement and the rest of the Author's Note in the last part of this series.

Note to Challies Readers: There is a part 3 coming, but I wanted to tease you all to stay tuned, since today is my last day of king for the week from Challies. Now you must come back for the last part.

[#] Anne Rice: Christ the Lord (1 of 3)

It is somewhat stupid to write a complete review of a book you haven't finished. I have read the first 100 pages of this book (200 more to go), and I have 3 distinct things to say about it:

(1) If you treat it as merely historical fiction, it's readable and has a nice flavor to it. It makes a lot of apparently-researched historical references -- and strangely, most of them are pretty vanilla. I have a hard time, however, treating Jesus Christ as a fictional character.

(2) If you didn't know that Anne Rice was a relapsed Catholic, you could tell by reading this book. If you thought Mel Gibson's the Passion of the Christ was Catholic, you will undoubtedly see the Catholic fingerprints all over this book.

(3) By a long shot, I find the Author's Note to this book more actually-interesting than the book itself. It's 2/3rds informal bibliography and 1/3rd autobiography.

That's all I have to say about this right now. My initial impression about this book is that one probably shouldn't pick it up if one is trying to sort out what one believes about the Christian faith. However, if one is secure in his faith (or lack thereof), this book reads like any historical novel.

Two more parts to come. Challies.com readers can look forward to the suspense of seeing how quickly I get to parts 2 and 3.