The postmodernist Christ is completely unnecessary. He did not and cannot conquer death, because he was not truly unique or divine and did not rise. He was a divine story and rose in our hearts, but in reality he died, and he had no more real power than any other prophet or story in our world. He cannot conquer sin, because sin does not exist. There is no need for a savior who can save us from our sins, when we can simply define them out of existence. He becomes merely a prop, a comfort, a mascot for our own easy self-righteousness that proceeds directly from our identity in ourselves.
We’re willing to revere him and value the postmodern Jesus, but we don’t need him. The dangers he saves us from only exist in our minds, and his grace exists only for our psychological comfort. So any savior we believe in sufficiently will do. There’s no real difference between them, only in what they mean to us. He is our comfort, but he is not our savior, because there is nothing wrong with us, only with our attitude or with our circumstances. And since Jesus didn’t generate any savings accounts or social benefits or infrastructure by dying on the cross, we don’t really need that part of his story.
We can get the divine gifts of peace and affirmation from therapy and positive thinking and self-love, and we can get the divine gifts of safety and opportunity from the government. Our psychologist will help us claim all the love and affirmation we deserve, and our human and civil rights will grant us everything else we need to enjoy it. We don’t need a savior because the world already owes us divinity; we just need to put in the effort to collect it and demand it. But Jesus can be our wingman.
The modernist Christ is not much better. Sin is very real; the harsh, unforgiving realities of the world are real, but Christ is a deconstructed, demystified, and ineffective symbol. He has to power to save or forgive. He’s a nice idea, but is an impractical, impotent symbol. He is not divine and not unique. He has no power to overcome the very real problems that our universal understanding reveals. Jesus is just a man, he’s far too small. And we have little use for such stories and symbols in an age of immense knowledge and power and expertise.
This Jesus is a mournful savior, forever reminding us of the harsh, unconquerable reality of our sin and limitations and our wishful thinking that a sky man could somehow solve them. He had some nice ideas, but reality killed him for it. Even grace has to submit to the weight of the harsh realities and necessities of the world. Better still is to harden yourself and face the world with the powers at hand. Get some real powers, some real knowledge. Get some science or economics. We have no savior but ourselves. The weight of the world, the weight of divine responsibility, is on us.
Classical Christianity believes it both needs a savior and has one. Sin is real, suffering is real, death is real. None of them are symbolic or exist only in our perceptions or perspective; they’re real, tangible problems of humanity and history. They have a definite nature, they are universal and persistent. And they require a real, tangible solution. And that solution is real, also. That’s the essence of classical Christianity. There is a lot of variation within it, lots of different perspectives, but the fundamental basics are there that set it apart from the modern and postmodern variations that are not clearly part of the same fundamental philosophical tradition, whatever the surface symbolism and language might indicate.
There have been modern and ancient sects of Christianity whose core tenets were actually much closer to those of pantheism, and only appeared similar on the surface, in the use of language, but beyond the grammar shared little substantive content. The temptation to pantheism has always been there; a large part of the total story of the Bible is devoted to the difficulty of keeping people focused on the difficult prospect of a God that transcends figuration and delineation but is still personally interested in you.
It’s much easier to imagine something infinitely closer or infinitely further from us than something that seeks to be both. The far-off philosophical abstraction of the tetragrammaton fits well with modernist conceptions of God, while the nearness of a God who eats and weeps with us in Christ fits well with a postmodern conception of God. One is as far off and as abstract as the great universalities, the other is as small and near and tangible as ourselves. The fact that classical Christianity asks us to accept and maintain both simultaneously is its most interesting and curious feature. That it has struggled to do so historically is no surprise.
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