Review: Michael Spencer's Mere Churchianity
Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 10:37AM | by Otter 
Early in Michael Spencer's Mere Churchianity he delivers his most scathing and accurate assessment of the state of American Christianity: "unbelievers see some things about life, integrity, and consistency much more clearly than Christians do."
It's a profound, if somewhat overly general, diagnosis, and the best of Michael Spencer.
In these pages he writes to Christians who have "come to the end of the road with the church but who can't entirely walk away from Jesus."
He is looking, in other words, for what it means to be a Christian without... well, the church. Or more accurately, a way to define the church in terms that don't scandalize his vision of Jesus.
That's a romantic hope.
I think that Spencer (whom I admire very much) knew that it is. (Cancer claimed him before the book's publication.) He advances on the church with a tremendous amount of courage and integrity.
And that makes me hurt for Spencer and those like him. They love Christianity. They love Jesus, or at least their idea of him. They love the good experiences that their faith has offered to them. They want the freedom to believe without the bondage of deadening shame, stultifying group-think, and dead-end optimism. They want to be faithful servants of the best ideals that cluster for them around the personality of Jesus.
But like so many romantic hopes it's rooted as much in desire as it is in truth. Spencer's diagnosis doesn't go nearly deep enough.
Spencer desires a "Jesus-shaped spirituality," and he goes to great lengths in the book to show (quite accurately, I'm sure) the defects in his own church upbringing. They can be summed up in the words, "We assumed that Jesus bought into our idea of what was important in life. All anyone had to do was read the Bible to see that we were in the right and everyone else was wrong." The book passionately drives a wedge between Jesus and such easy appropriations of him.
To have one's spirituality shaped by Jesus, he avers, isn't so clouded by one's personal desires.
In my own evangelical upbringing I'm not sure that we ever really made such assumptions, and Spencer admits that his diagnosis does not always apply: but it's quite believable to me that such evangelicals exist in huge numbers, and that such a church experience is well worth rejecting root and branch.
Spencer's just condemnation of such Christian forms (I decline to call them "Churchianity") leads him to long for the perfection of one's messiah without the mess and muddle of fellow travelers who get it wrong, who half-believe, who use their messiah as a stepping stone to agendas Spencer can't endorse.
More troublingly, Spencer makes this weird declaration: "Religion is our negotiation with God to try to get his help in exchange for our good behavior."
That's not true, and I sometimes wonder as I read Mere Churchianity whether much of the book doesn't come from a too-cursory reflection on what the human self is, and what religion is.
What religion is, is the external structure and liturgy we impose upon our faith and our imagination. It's the pattern of behavior derived from faith. And in rejecting it, Spencer casts adrift his vision of Jesus as a messiah of love. He can hold to it in the manner of a man who loves desperately a woman he hasn't seen in thirty years.
All love, faith, and hope structures itself. It designs little liturgies almost spontaneously. It externalizes the inner state, reflecting one's deepest beliefs and also reinforcing them as "two or more are gathered" around such liturgies. Love draws its strange, mystical powers from that, even among deluded imbeciles, foolish lovers, witless political parties, parading Nazis, and, yes, evangelicals.
But Spencer thinks Jesus is good. Religion mustn't interfere. And while I think he's trying merely to get a stake further into the heart of evangelicalism's easy habit of excusing itself on the grounds that it's holy, it's difficult not to catch a Manichean whiff in the idea that religion tries to coerce God. It might do that. But then, if God genuinely speaks, human beings will collect around that speech, making (surprise!) a religion.
Putting it another way, Jesus-shaped spirituality would still be religious. And that could easily come to resemble evangelicalism.
Of course Spencer in his fifties has a more accurate picture of Jesus than he did as a child and young adult, and it's essential for "Jesus-shaped spirituality" to define that accurately. Spencer approaches Jesus pretty methodically, even apophatically. He is not about good feelings, fans, politics (at least not in a God-and-Country kind of way), social organizations...
But he is... well, a great deal like Spencer needs him to be: he is scandalously inclusive, full of integrity, truthful, a little mistrustful of wealth, and interested in the suffering of the world.
I like this Jesus. He appeals to me.
But he's a Jesus of my (and Spencer's) desires as much as he is like the Jesus of the first century, who was, among many other things, a political and theological revolutionary, not above deceit (see John 7), and frequently exclusive, telling the same unwashed that he welcomed that if they turned away again they were not fit for his kingdom (a point the New Testament endorses over and over). He abused his followers, calling them stupid and even "Satan" at one point, demanding their allegiance to the death.
Spencer's Jesus has none of these traits except the demand for lifelong allegiance, and I don't really mind that. But I think what this ends up being then is a call to a better construction about what Jesus is than the one he grew up with. It's a Jesus that takes its cue from the idea that God is love, and if it helps people to love that god, then god speed Mere Churchianity.
"Wrong ideas about God are false gods," says Spencer. In the Reformed tradition, Spencer believes right ideas about God must be approached through the biblical Christ: "What I need is a personal transformation by the real Christ, not the one that is manufactured by organized Christianity."
And yet... the god who wanders in and out of Mere Churchianity isn't exactly free of organized Christianity. It couldn't be. If that god has any relation to love, it structures itself with all the agony that history imposes on love.
And Jesus... well, he's certainly not free of Spencer's desires here, but Spencer shows a beautiful set of desires. It's difficult to know where this "real Christ" comes from if not through organized Christianity that handed Spencer his Bible and taught him to read it through the lenses of the Councils: all the underpinnings of this book are by no means self-evidently biblical without the interpretive grids Christianity (and a very, very messy Christianity!) has given to him.
Spencer is looking for the authentic Christ so he can find the authentic God.
But God is not to be baited so easily into the human brain.
Maybe She never could be, residing in light inaccessible. Still less residing in history in the flesh of a Jewish peasant
History doesn't give you Jesus served up with watercress. Rather, we are given a bare image, seething with contradictions, unresolved, but striking in an importance (if you're Michael Spencer, and countless others) that you can't even articulate.
Maybe god is like that.
Reader Comments (10)
More troublingly, Spencer makes this weird declaration: "Religion is our negotiation with God to try to get his help in exchange for our good behavior."
God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
(Bob Dylan would never have said that, though!)
Otter,
I really think you have accurately portrayed some of the issues around Michael's Book. Thank you for writing this.
I have a little difficulty understanding what you mean by "But God is not to be bated[sic] so easily into the human brain.
Maybe She never could be, residing in light inaccessible. Still less residing in history in the flesh of a Jewish peasant"
Perhaps a change in sentence structure might help me comprehend what you mean.
Michael, thanks for the kind comment (and the spelling correction... the editing window is tiny).
I mean that God is approached first and foremost imaginatively.
If you have a physical incarnation in front of you, that might be one way to get around that, but biblically speaking, all you've got is the church for your incarnation.
And if you're coming from a Protestant position, you're confronted with the problem of textuality: it's necessarily interpretive, which means Michael's Jesus and the Pope's and Billy Graham's are going to be reflections of themselves at least to some degree.
God _as God is_ then necessarily involves one's desires.
I'm partly saying that Michael could do no other than he has done.
Otter, thanks for the review. IMHO, when you say Michael is speaking against the "church" or "religion," that needs some clarification. Though I think the book can be constructively criticized for not giving enough direction for a positive corporate practice of the faith, what Michael is speaking against is not the organization of faith into corporate religious practice, but rather the dominant evangelical/fundamentalist church culture that has held sway in conservative Christianity since the mid-20th century. A "church" that has functioned more by American cultural norms than by its Founder's example and teaching. Perhaps volume II would have set forth a positive ecclesiology to balance this book. But remember, Michael and many of us who have been his readers have described ourselves in the "post-evangelical wilderness." At this point, many of us know what the church shouldn't be; we haven't yet fully imagined what the church should be.
Chaplain Mike, thank you for this and your several kind comments here. I do think that you're on to something there with a Volume II (get cracking! I look forward to it!).
But of course one thing I mean to suggest there is that Spencer was unable to do other than what he has done so long as he holds to Protestant tenets. He was hard at work in Mere Churchianity reinventing the wheel while (rightly) deploring that it was ever dis-invented by Protestantism. (Please note: I am not Catholic.)
Protestantism switched off the gravity and is left to float freely. Alas.
It seems to me that there are only two directions you can go with your evangelical experience: towards greater liturgical form, which, however you couch it in baby steps, is a frank admission of catholicity in some sense; or else towards greater individualism and a gradual disconnection from authorities in both the past and the present.
Having defined oneself as Protestant uniquely handicaps a person. She is left with a profoundly deep and magical text, with a long and distinct history, but without any authoritative guidance about how to read it, or how to make sense of the chaos that leads to the sorts of things Mike Spencer rightly worries about.
Which is an odd sort of limbo, saved from individualism only by one's Bible and tied to the historic faith only by the merest threads (usually an ability to affirm ancient creeds, whether one does so or not). They fear authority (probably rightly) but have no authority with which to straighten out evangelical experience (which is radically subjective to begin with).
The continuance of the post-evangelical wilderness results from an inability of the disillusioned people in it to face and overcome what it is that has been done to them. They know that Jesus matters.
Saving your reverence, they seem to have no idea why. The chaos of evangelicalism is the natural fruit of its doctrines, as is true of almost every movement.
"Religion is our negotiation with God to try to get his help in exchange for our good behavior."
That is so wrong it makes me doubt that a person who could write that has much to say to me about religion, God, or anything.
That's my feeling too, Gallowglass, though I've seen enough of Michael Spencer's blog to know he has more subtle chops.
But I'm disturbed by that failure to speak to the most obvious question here: what _about_ the historic religion that Protestantism abandoned on its way to becoming a religion so many "post-evangelicals" can't live with?
I don't follow.
What seems dubious to me is to say that evangelicalism has failed, but that you're going to keep rooting around in a non-historic form of faith when it's precisely the rejection of Christian history that defines the Reformation. That rejection is what got you there in the first place.
Ah, I thought that was where you might be going, but I thought my own Orthodox bias was making me think that.
I heard a rumor that some Protestant leaders met with the Orthodox Church during the Reformation, but decided to strike out one their own rather than trade one hierarchy for another. If that is true, I would love to read some more details about who discussed what with whom and why they then did what they did.
Do you think that this (back to the original issue) is why there has been a small (compared to the number of Protestants, large compared to the number of Orthodox in America) but steady flow of converts to Orthodoxy in the past few decades?