The Body Within

When I hear the stories of how so many people gave up on God, I'm generally confused. It's done so often so lightly, from Salman Rushdie's dropping of his Muslim faith to John Oliver's abandonment of Anglicanism, the path is similar: as a child some simple theological problem blocks them, some question that was not well answered. "Why did my friend Billy have to die?" "It was God's will." Hmm. Well if that's God's will, said John, I don't really think I want to have anything to do with God.

And that's it. So real struggle, no growing up and thinking, "You know, maybe the problem was that the person I was asking didn't give me an adequate answer."

And it just doesn't seem to be worth the effort to bring it all all up again. There's so much going on in life, and questions of this type never have absolute conclusions and seem to be less and less relevant to day to day existence. In economic terms, a large investment would be needed for little profit. Better invest one's energy elsewhere.

You can't really blame them. It's hard to say, "but there really is a huge profit--even laying that whole idea of heaven and eternal life aside." They point with the same superficial zeal at the horrors of the church, of religious people, now and throughout history. You can't deny these horrors.

What you have to realize is this: that there is a true church hidden pretty much inside the visible church. It's not quite so simple as that there is a smaller group of "good" people in among the hypocrites who actually get it--though there is some of that too. Rather it's that there is a church, true bride of Christ core within the institutional church (and of course outside it as well). People, yes, but also parts of people, impulses of charity within even any number of the hypocrites. Sure, many of them don't get it and are just hypocrites. This is the lesson of the parable of the sheep and the goats.

But most of us are part sheep, part goat. Goats wanting to be, struggling to become sheep. The point is that you mustn't look at all that's shallow and benighted in the vast church and dismiss the whole thing. You can and should rail against the hypocrisy and the alignment with power. But you should also be prepared to see and seek the church inside the church, where Christ in fact resides.