© 1998 Meredith Sprunger
© 1998 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
Bruce Bawer
Crown, 1997, 340 pp.
Bruce Bawer is an Episcopalian and one of our leading cultural critics. He has published several volumes of criticism, including Diminishing Fictions, The Aspect of Eternity, and Prophets and Professors, as well as one of the most influential books about homosexuality, A Place at the Table. He has delivered talks and sermons in churches around the country and has published essays on religious subjects in The New York Times Magazine and elsewhere.
Stealing Jesus focuses primarily on Protestant legalism and nonlegalism, the Church of Law and the Church of Love. “In recent years,” Bawer observes, "legalistic Christians have organized into a political movement so successful that when many Americans today hear the word Christianity, they think only of the legalistic variety… Far from being a vestige of traditional Christian faith, in short, it is a distinctively modern phenomenon-one that, while making tradition its rallying cry, has at the deepest level betrayed Christianity’s most precious traditions. In fact it has, as we shall see, carried out a tripartite betrayal.
Bawer traces the development of Protestant legalism during the 19th and 20th centuries. Rooted in John Nelson Darby’s dispensational premillennialism and End Times theology that was popularized by the Scofield Reference Bible, the writings of E. Schuyler English, and The Fundamentals, a series of essays authored by ministers and theological professors defending fundamentalistic doctrine, the stage was set for the resurgence of legalistic theology.
The dynamic behind this conservative revival was the fear aroused by the theory of evolution, HigherCriticism in biblical research, and a reaction against Rauschenbush’s Social Gospel. “Faced with the chance to embrace new knowledge and reason, American fundamentalists — unlike virtually all other Christians around the world — chose instead to ally themselves with ignorance and irrationality.” (p. 90)
This heritage is carried on by Hal Lindsey in The Late Great Planet Earth, Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptists, Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition, and to a lesser degree by James Dobson and Focus on Family, and Bill McCartney and the Promise Keepers. This Church of Law, in the opinion of Bawer, is not a setting in which intelligent, serious people can expect to work out meaningful and responsible answers to ultimate questions. “Nor is it something that the earliest followers of Jesus would have recognized as Christianity. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration, in fact, to suggest that if the first Christians were exposed to the rhetoric of Robertson, Reed, Dobson, Falwell, and company, they might well ask, in astonishment, 'How did these vicious people manage to steal the name of Jesus?”” (p. 28)
Stealing Jesus at times bogs down in minutia, but it is a good survey of the origin and development of differences among fundamentalists, evangelicals, and mainline churches. It might be regarded as a sequel to John Shelby Spong’s Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism.