The Offensive Christ

One of the things I've always wondered about Christianity and its interaction with the postmodern Western world is why Christianity seems to be so offensive to people, as opposed to other religions. Now, one reason is likely that because the postmodern Western world owes its existence to Christianity, probably some of the offense comes from the reaction of troubled off-spring to a parent that they find odiously embarrassing (I can't claim that analogy; it springs from the mind of one of Regent's professors [also an international economist!], Paul Williams).

But another one of my professors, Craig Gay, in his book The Way of the (Modern) World Or, Why It's Tempting to Live as if God Doesn't Exist suggests the following:
"...It is not particularly surprising to find that the Christian understanding of God's personal self-revelation in Christ - particularly as expressed in the doctrine of the Trinity - has proven offensive to modern post-Christian sensibilities. After all, Christian understanding intensifies what Kierkegaard termed 'the earnestness of existence' by quite clearly placing us in a position of having to respond to God's call. We would much rather not have been placed in this position, and in an attempt to evade our 'response-ability,' modern post-Christian thought has sought to debunk the suggestion that God could possibly have gotten so close to us as to be able to call us into personal relationship with himself."

As people living in the modern post-Christian world, we generally want to be responsible for our own self-definition, and we do not want to be held, as Gay terms it, "response-able" to God's definition for us. Modern post-Christians (as we are) are suspicious of anything that looks like it is going to take from us the freedom we believe that we need and deserve for defining ourselves. This supposed freedom to self-define results, however, in a state of anxiety that is peculiar to this age of Western society. We are anxious to be able to define ourselves for we feel constantly that our self-definition is slipping away. We are terribly afraid that if we can't make our own meanings, then we will lose ourselves. Yet our ability to make our own meaning is so tenuous and ill-grounded (for if there is no ultimate meaning in which to ground personal meaning, then how does one know that one is defining oneself effectively?) that we are constantly needing to redefine and re-establish ourselves.

To all appearances, the God of Christianity looks like an autocrat who will force a definition on our selves that we would much rather not have, we think. We will have our freedoms (to choose our own behaviour, perhaps?) taken away from us. So, we attempt to reject the God of the Bible, we attempt to argue away the possibilities of the Trinity, of revelation, of the incarnation (i.e. who was Jesus, anyway? probably just a man with some good ideas).

Gay says, "For while God's call to us in Christ opens up the possibility of true personal existence, it also calls for our decision and so leaves open the possibility that we might refuse the invitation, indeed, that we might go our own way and try to establish ourselves in some other fashion."

Generally in our world, we have gone the way of establishing ourselves in some other fashion. And when the God who suggests that this fashion is unhealthy, unfulfilled (and don't we always feel that we are unfulfilled in our own self-definitions), and incomplete, asks us to respond to Him, we attempt to argue Him out of existence.

So perhaps that's why Jesus seems to be particularly offensive to the modern mind. I really have often wondered. But I think that it's because when we offer a relationship with Jesus to the modern person, we are offering a relationship that calls for response, and that is something that the modern person doesn't want to have (they think). I wish that I had some way to communicate to people that this relationship with Jesus really isn't one that will usurp your right to self-definition, or, rather, that the right to self-definition isn't something that you would want anyway.

I don't know how organised all these thoughts were, but there they are. Please respond! :-)