Humanism at Easter

Way back in Easter I took the time to visit a number of very different churches and was pretty startled and concerned about the humanist philosophy which had sunk through to Church teaching. Here are two examples that, although rather radical, seem to reflect ideas common throughout the church.

St Michael’s Uniting
Francis Macnab, minister of St Michael’s Uniting, is something of an old hat in ways, repeating the same heresies popularised by Bishop Spong years ago in the US – but I had never read Spong and, not having prepared myself, his message came as a bit of a shock.

The Good Friday address was entitled ‘The Churches Love Affair - With Violence. Time to Choose a Better Way.’

Humans, he suggests, are naturally fascinated by violence – as evidenced by our captivation with violent films, our love of high contact sport. The Church’s concentration on the cross – which he rightly observes to be a symbol of brutality, criminality and domination – is another symptom of this. Substitutionary atonement, he claims, promotes a cycle of violence by suggesting that violence cancels out violence.

The ‘better way’ suggested by Macnab is for Christians to stop focusing on the figure of Jesus and the cross and find instead the good within themselves. This internal goodness (‘god’) allows one to break the cycle of violence. You can watch it for yourself here.

The message was clearly humanism wrapped up in a rather unconvincing guise of Christianity. Gone were any suggestions of human depravity or helplessness. We are the solution to our own problems – the power is within.

St Patrick’s Cathedral Not quite so explicitly heretical, but still problematic, was the message given at the Catholic Cathedral on Easter Sunday. The priest presented the story of two (fictional) couples. One of which were good Catholics who went to Mass, had children and basically lived happy lives. The second could have been equally blessed, except for the abortion they chose to take which, naturally, led to relationship breakdown and a stream of other unfortunate events.

The obligatory defamation of abortion done, he proceeded to inform us of the message of Easter, is one of hope – hope that in the bad times, good times will follow; hope that in our sadness, happiness will follow; hope that (assuming we don’t have an abortion) God will look after us. Look at the disciples after Jesus died –afraid and hopeless, but then comes Easter Sunday and everything is somehow okay again, he didn’t actually explain why this was though.

Much like at St Michael’s, the message was easy words to comfort the heart. There was no explanation of the cross, no assumption of sinfulness. Rather, we can forge for ourselves a happy future by remembering the ‘hope of Easter’ and doing good (or rather avoiding evil, i.e. abortion). We are the solution to our own problems – the power is within.

This is common in the church when we emphasise works over the absolute grace of God. We live in an arrogant age where we can’t accept that we are far gone and desperately in need of saving. At St Pat’s, the motivation for obeying the Church was that God would make our lives easier; it is not God but our own abilities, needs and interests that are central to understanding and living in the world.