Neo-Orthodoxy - Saving Jesus From The Church

Usually when I speak with Christians about neo-orthodoxy, I get a glazed look. So it is easier to talk about it in the context of a book I recently finished, Saving Jesus From The Church, (2009) by Robin N. Meyers, a pastor and a philosophy professor at Oklahoma City University. Dr. Meyers believes science rules out miracles and thus it is intellectually dishonest to believe in the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the miracles of Christ, Original Sin, the Blood Atonement forgiving sins, the Resurrection, the Ascension, eternal life, or to accept the Bible as truth on these points.

Yet Pastor Meyers passionately affirms the resurrection - the continuation of the teachings of Jesus in his followers. He promotes a faith in living the teachings of Jesus apart from beliefs. He urges a discipleship of sacrifice, disconected from worship. He pleads for a Christianity of compassion which says nothing about sin. He asks us to enter into a relationship with God and each other, though it is unclear if Meyers believes in a God beyond a great mystery - the wholly other - certainly not the infinite personal God of the Bible. As with other neo-orthodox, Meyers wants to use the historic words of Christianity and the Bible in a modern sense to trigger an experience leading to an authentic man in an existential sense.

Meyers finds nugets of the teachings of Jesus, the sage, in the New Testament, but they must be sifted out from the nonsense the Church threw in to make up the Christ, a false God to be worshiped. That is why Jesus must be saved, or rescued from the Church. Meyers finds the work of the Jesus Seminar especially helpful where liberal and neo-orthodox scholars voted with colored beads for which passages of the New Testament were true and acceptable, and which passages were made up by the Church and thus to be rejected.

Meyers does well to reject a dead orthodoxy that merely recites beliefs without sacrificial discipleship, and Christians should heed this. However, Meyers sets up a false dichotomy when he asserts that an intellectually honest living faith must reject miracles, doctrine, or worshiping Christ as God. Meyers ignores solid scholars who stand up for, and explain, an orthodox Historic Christianity.

While some Christians might be tempted to condemn Meyers, and those like him, it would be better to love them and be prepared to give an answer for the hope we have with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15) by explaining how Christianity promotes reason and by living our Christian faith in such a way that wins others.

The Confessions - Book IV

Book IV of Augustine's Confessions takes us through his life from age 19 to age 28. Augustine taught rhetoric as depicted in in the painting to the left by the Dutch painter, Jan Van Scorel (1495-1562), "St. Augustine Teaching Rhetoric." (That may be Monica on the left grieving or praying for her son.) As a master rhetoritician, Augustine was very full of himself at this time.

Though Augustine continued to pursue sexual sin, he eventually settled down with a woman for close to ten years, and had a child through her, though he did not formally marry her.

Augustine continued during this time in Manicheaism, including a form of prediction, partly based on astrology, associated with an elaborate sacrificial ritual. The painting to the left by an unknown Flemish artist, "St. Augustine Sacrificing to a Manichean Idol," depicts this ritual. Augustine, with the help of a friend, eventually concluded that astrology was "uterly bogus," and that when the predictions did happen to come true, it was mostly by chance aided by some skill of the predictor in discerning something about the nature of the one who sought a prediction.
Augustine formed a very close friendship. He found that a close friend was like having one soul in two bodies (poetic). His friend became gravely ill. Christians baptized him while he was mostly unconscious  He began to recover, and Augustine looked forward to jesting with him about this baptism (which Manicheans despised). However, before he could share this laugh, his friend suddenly relapsed and died. Augustine was crushed, feeling like half his soul had been torn away. "At this grief my heart was utterly darkened; and whatever I beheld was death."

Augustine would recover, but from then on, his thoughts would be marked by the transitiveness of this life. He studied and wrote books, and begins to deeply ponder life - what is permanent, what is beautiful, what is fitting? Though he thinks he is brilliant, ultimately he finds nothing satisfactory and no satisfactory answers.

On to Book V.
Back to Book III.