What's missing from Mainline religion: the need for transcendence

"Is God Dead?" asked a seminal cover story in Time magazine. Yes, the western European cultural leadership eagerly affirmed. Not so much that God was alive and now was dead, but that the myth of a "Most High God" beyond this world was no longer a vital reality. It was no longer a living part of our culture.

A generation of church leaders embraced this insight, and developed what they called a secular Christianity. It would be a faith perfectly suited for the modern age. It was a faith that let go of outmoded and irrelevant concerns about heaven and eternity. It was a faith that would focus on the urgent and immediate concerns of human compassion and service. It would be a modern, relevant faith, worthy of the embrace of a new generation. It would focus on real problems like hunger and employment.

The trouble was, the new generation did not embrace it. People stayed away in droves. The "mainline" churches that embraced the new secular gospel (mostly members of the National Council of Churches) saw their attendance drop sharply. The Christian churches that were able to maintain their attendance were those that embraced the old fashioned ideas of transcendence.

At the heart of the traditional view of Christianity is Jesus Christ as simultaneously human and divine. He is the very power of God in human form. And yet, he is also one with us in our weaknesses and challenges. In his life we can see a hope of something more for our lives.

Perhaps the place where that plays out most dramatically is in Christ's struggle in the Garden of Gesthemene. On that night, he was seized with the enormity of the task before him. The gospel accounts don't explain why, they simply report his desire to let the task pass. Was the task too big? Too difficult? Too painful? Too much? It was too something, and so Jesus asked that the cup pass from his lips; a way of asking that he be excused from the task.

And yet he went beyond that: not my will but thy will be done. In that choice, Jesus found the power to be and do more than his humanity could do on its own. And in that we can find the hope of power to be more than we can imagine now. (The picture to the left illustrating that is "Getsemane, harjoitelma Savitaipaleen kirkon alttaritaulua varten" by Magnus Enckell, 1902, from the Finnish National Gallery.)

And in that victory, there is hope for all people. We also can find the strength to do things we find too much. We also can be more than we can imagine. When modern religious leaders moved away from transcendence, they moved away from that hope, from that victory. They moved away of what made a religion worth professing and following. No wonder people stayed away.

As Anglican blogger Captain Yips observed,

there's always something we can't do, don't want to do, that stands in the way, and every one of those mirrors in small the reluctance Jesus felt that Thursday night in the garden. I'’d rather not do this, Father. But of course, he did. And that is why Jesus is the way to the Father.
All this is missing from Social Work Anglicanism, why it has become a shell, a political action committee.

A transcendent God is not an empty myth. It is instead a real hope what we can be more than we ever thought was possible. Far from being a dead idea, it's a realty that makes life worth living.