The author recently gave a well-worth-a-look interview to Christianity Today. Read it and see what you think. She talks about her thinking on the church, why she left, and her personal spiritual life.
While I found myself at times agreeing, at times disagreeing with her, she made a statement that jolted me:
“Christians have lost credibility in America as people who know how to love.”
Discuss.
PS: A nice bonus in the article is we get to find out what she reads. Her answers may (or may not) surprise you:
Are there any other religious authors you read?
I read theology and biblical scholarship all the time. I love the biblical scholarship of D.A. Carson. I very much love Craig S. Keener. His books on Matthew and John are right here on my desk all the time. I go to Craig Keener for answers because his commentary on Scripture is so thorough. I still read N.T. Wright. I love the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner. I love his writing on Jesus Christ. It’s very beautiful to me, and I study a little bit of it every day. Of course, I love Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
You mentioned D.A. Carson, Craig Keener, and N.T. Wright. They are fairly conservative Protestants.
Sometimes the most conservative people are the most biblically and scholastically sound. They have studied Scripture and have studied skeptical scholarship. They make brilliant arguments for the way something in the Bible reads and how it’s been interpreted. I don’t go to them necessarily to know more about their personal beliefs. It’s the brilliance they bring to bear on the text that appeals to me. Of all the people I’ve read over the years, it’s their work that I keep on my desk. They’re all non-Catholics, but they’re believers, they document their books well, they write well, they’re scrupulously honest as scholars, and they don’t have a bias. Many of the skeptical non-believer biblical scholars have a terrible bias. To them, Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, so there’s no point in discussing it. I want someone to approach the text and tell me what it says, how the language worked.
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COMMENTS
13 responses to “The Anne Rice Chronicles: Part 2”
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1. Rice is a Christian
2. Rice has repudiated Christians
3. The above two events took place in America
4. Christ defined love as not repudiating your loved ones (2 Tim 2:13)
5. Christians are people who define love the same way Christ did
6. Ergo, Rice is absolutely correct. Christians have lost credibility in America as people who know how to love.
I hear you about her inconsistency. I would say: read the article, and hear the voice of someone under great public pressure to be a certain way, and feeling this pressure from the institution of the church. I don't think she has repudiated Christians. I think some of her critiques of the church are similar to some of what St. James and St. Paul wrote. "If I have not love…"
I'm not surprised that she reads conservative writers – I do, too, because I admire their scholarship.
I may not agree with certain conclusions these writers come to on certain topics; I think they're completely wrong. Which is why I want to argue with them on solid scholarly footing – sometimes even having co-opted their own arguments and used them for my own ends. (That's top-of-the-line, in fact!)
I'm not sure why what she's saying and doing causes anybody any agita, though; to me it's completely to be expected and in fact healthy. The only reason anybody cares at all is that she's well-known – but all kinds of people say and do the same thing all the time. Denial about this isn't good for anybody, really….
"The law of love is not obeyed simply by being known. Whenever it is obeyed at all, it is because life in its beauty and terror has been more fully revealed to man."
Getting a lecture from Rice on love, or even getting a good law/gospel lecture, is not going to create love. It is true that only beauty and terror create love, and those can be described or explained didactically, but never revealed didactically. I think that is at least one reason why Jesus had to die and be resurrected, not just talk about love…and why we have to die, and be resurrected, as well.
Well, I wouldn't classify it as a "lecture." She was responding to a question somebody asked of her:
"What did you hope to accomplish by announcing this? Were you hoping people would join you?"
"Not at all. Because I had written Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, I had become a public Christian. I wanted my readers to know that I was stepping aside from organized religion and the names Christian and Christianity because I wanted to exonerate myself from the things organized religion was doing in the name of Jesus. Christians have lost credibility in America as people who know how to love. They have become associated with hatred, persecution, attempting to abolish the separation of church and state, and trying to pressure people to vote certain ways in elections. I wanted to make it clear that I did not in any way remain complicit with those things. I never expected anyone beyond my Facebook page would be interested. I was doing this for my readers to let them know."
It would have been far more interesting, I think, for her to have voiced all that without leaving the church, though, I'd agree. More conflict is always more interesting, and produces – well, perhaps beauty or terror.
But millions of people have quit the church in the past 40 years, and lots of them say the same sorts of things. I personally have quit a thousand times. I bet there are people reading this right now who've quit the churches of their youths and gone someplace else, too – and they have their reasons, too. So again, I'm not sure why this is newsworthy – but then, I'm not sure why a lot of things are newsworthy….
I remain curious what her theological beliefs actually are, now that she has left the church.
Does she believe the Nicene Creed? Does she accept the classic Christological dogmas regarding Christ's person and atoning work on the Cross?
I was surprised that CT didn't probe even slightly for answers to these questions. Until we know them, her claims to have "faith in Christ" continue to be an inkblot into which people of wildly different theological perspectives can project their own meanings.
bls– I beg to differ. Rice was responding to a question that was being asked of her that was prompted by her previous facebook "lecture" on the subject. Her claim now that she is surprised by the response and that her grand announcement was just meant to be a private little post for her readers seems totally disingenuous.
Rice makes the incredible and broadly condemning claim that "Christians have lost credibility in America as people who know how to love." What if Rick Warren made the statement "Muslims have lost credibility in the world as people who know how to love." ??? He would be denounced by one and all as a self-righteous, judgmental bigot. Well, what's good for the goose…
All of this boils down to the fact that Rice has judged the RC church, in particular, as "unloving" because it doesn't agree with her views on homosexuality, abortion, etc. I am about as Prod as they come, but Rice's whining, upper-middle class assessment that "the Church" doesn't "know how to love" is an insult to the many thousands of loving and self-sacrificing American Catholic clergy and lay people who toil every day in total anonymity around the world in service of the most destitute and forgotten people. Too bad they don't share Rice's social views, so that she could in good conscience grace their pew with her presence.
Michael Cooper, Anne Rice is a Christian criticizing other Christians; your analogy to Rick Warren and Muslims constitutes a non sequitur. I don't think it's ever been considered off-limits to criticize a group that you yourself belong to – or to give reasons for why you're leaving a group when you do.
And Christianity Today really has played a part in this; they didn't have to interview her, but they did. Anne Rice could easily have published her own article about this; that might be considered a "lecture."
But again, I can't really understand why what Anne Rice says should bother anybody – when ordinary people have been saying these things for years. Lots of recent studies about this, too: lots of people think and say exactly the same things. Why doesn't it matter until Anne Rice says them?
bls– As for my analogy, the fact that Warren is a Christian rather than Muslim is a distinction without a difference. The point is that such a broad generalization of condemnation, made against any entire group of people, is self-righteous by it's very nature, even if the one making the preposterous statement is nominally a member of the group they condemn. I could say "Southerners are a bunch of ignorant red necks" and the fact that I am a Southerner would not make that a legitimate accusation that would be rendered illegitimate coming from, say, Mayor Bloomberg. Rice may be, as you say, one of many who make the same broadly condemning claims. If so, that only means that she is no more, but no less, guilty of the same self-righteousness she claims so to abhor.
Perhaps. But then, you'd have to conclude that all those people in the studies I linked (particularly the first one) are merely being "self-righteous," too. They, also, were asked questions by others and responded that Christianity was "judgemental, hypocritical, and anti-gay." And they said that they'd had "unChristian" experiences with Christians.
Here, I'll quote:
When young people were asked to identify their impressions of Christianity, one of the common themes was "Christianity is changed from what it used to be" and "Christianity in today’s society no longer looks like Jesus." These comments were the most frequent unprompted images that young people called to mind, mentioned by one-quarter of both young non-Christians (23%) and born again Christians (22%).
Kinnaman explained, "That’s where the term 'unChristian' came from. Young people are very candid. In our interviews, we kept encountering young people – both those inside the church and outside of it – who said that something was broken in the present-day expression of Christianity. Their perceptions about Christianity were not always accurate, but what surprised me was not only the severity of their frustration with Christians, but also how frequently young born again Christians expressed some of the very same comments as young non-Christians."
….
David Kinnaman, who is a 12-year-veteran of the Barna team, pointed out some of the unexpected findings of the research. "Going into this three-year project, I assumed that people’s perceptions were generally soft, based on misinformation, and would gradually morph into more traditional views. But then, as we probed why young people had come to such conclusions, I was surprised how much their perceptions were rooted in specific stories and personal interactions with Christians and in churches. When they labeled Christians as judgmental this was not merely spiritual defensiveness. It was frequently the result of truly ‘unChristian’ experiences. We discovered that the descriptions that young people offered of Christianity were more thoughtful, nuanced, and experiential than expected."
bls–Maybe I am just cynical, but it seems less than earth shattering that "studies" have found that people who call themselves Christian actually share the same faults as the rest of humanity. And, I would guess, the "young people" cited by the study, who are portrayed as the one-way victims, might in some rare instances share those faults as well. I'm not condemning them, I'm just saying welcome to the club.
That's true, Michael Cooper – but here we have numbers of people from various backgrounds (including Christians themselves) telling the same story. I can say personally that the church for me for most of my life has been a hostile, treacherous, enemy territory. This is not hyperbole in any way; I stayed away for 30+ years out of pure self-preservation (and have occasionally had a very hard time remaining in it, myself).
But now that I'm here, I'm not willing to give up the idea that the church could offer salvation (i.e., "health") to millions who so far haven't been able to find it there. That seems to me to be the whole point. I do support people who attempt to find health in whatever way they can – but it seems a deep tragedy that so many people have written off Christianity for the reasons they have.
So I think criticism is actually good; the first step is acknowledging that there's a problem – and I do think there is. I kind of thought that other people who read this blog thought so, too, actually….
bls– I certainly don't mean to imply that there is no place for valid criticism of those who profess Christ and yet exhibit profound and hurtful sinfulness that is and has been harmful to the Christian witness in general. On the other hand, general broad-side attacks on "the church" by those who identify themselves exclusively as "victims" smack of a lack of sef-examination, to me anyway.