Anne Rice, Christ, and Christianity
On
July 29, 2010, the celebrated American novelist Anne O’Brien Rice announced to
the world that she was leaving Christianity. Born in 1941 in
In
many ways I can sympathize with her. That consummate propagandist of atheism,
Christopher Hitchens, couldn’t have said it better—in fact, if that vitriolic
critic could make the same distinction between God and religion, or between
Christ and Christians that Rice has, it could turn out to be his salvation. But
unfortunately doing so is not all that easy. Rice, after having announced some
years ago that she was going to devote her considerable talents to writing a
series of books on the life of Christ (Christ
the Lord — two volumes so far) must have found out by now that it is no
easy task to separate Christ from Christianity. In fact, after several
centuries of scholarly efforts, the modern attempt to extricate the historical
Jesus from the so-called “Christ of Faith” has only proved increasingly
problematic. The problem is that, aside from two independent but fleeting early
references to his existence (one by a pagan, the Roman historian Tacitus, and
the other by a Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus), everything we know about
Jesus depends on the recollections and impressions of his followers, none of
which seem to have begun to take on any written form until several decades
after his death. And even then, it took several centuries before his followers
reached any definite decision as to which of these writings (by the third
century there was any number of spurious “gospels” in circulation) could claim
to accurately represent the authentic tradition. So, as Rice has discovered, there is no road
to the authentic Jesus except through the Christ of faith—that is, the faith of
Christians.
What
to do then? It seems to me, despite my criticism, that
Rice has been basically on the right track, even if for the moment she seems to
have lost all patience with Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church in
particular. Did Jesus not predict, despite his reported prayer “that all may be
one,” that the same time that his message would be like a “sword,” even causing
division within families? And if this is true even within the intimacy of the
immediate family, must this not also be unfortunately true within the “family”
of Christianity? And as for what Rice herself should do, I think she need only
to remember and remain true to what she wrote only two years ago in her own
memoir.
“In
the moment of surrender, I let go of all the theological and social questions
which had kept me from [God] for countless years. I simply let them go. There
was this sense, profound and wordless, that if He knew everything I did not
have to know everything, and that in seeking to know everything, I’d been, all
of my life, missing the entire point. No social paradox, no historic disaster,
no hideous record of injustice or misery should keep me from him. No question
of scriptural integrity, no torment over the fate of this or that atheist or
gay friend, no worry for those condemned and ostracized by my church or any
other church should stand between me and Him. The reason?
It was magnificently simple: He knew how or why everything happened: He knew
the disposition of every single soul. He wasn’t going to let anything happen by
accident! Nobody was going to go to hell by mistake.” (Called out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession.
Knopf, 2008, p. 183)
Maybe so for Hitchens—but it will certainly be a
mistake if Anne Rice ends up there.
R