Rethinking Christianity
(Foreword to: Por un cristianismo creíble. [In Support of a Credible Christianity] Author: Pedro Miguel Ansó-Esarte. Publ. Tirant lo Blanc, 2024)
What you have here is a tremendous little book, profound and simple, interesting and vibrant, critical and impeccably respectful, and brimming with information and clarity. Each chapter, brief yet substantial in equal measure, strikes me as masterly in its simplicity: clear, vibrant, restrained, beautiful.
It is a highly topical book, despite what the subject matter: Rethinking Christianity might imply. Rethinking Christianity –its historical formulations, its dogmas, rites and canons, all its institutions, and also its brilliant and potentially inspiring basic intuitions–, rethinking it in light of our great ethical, political and cultural challenges, rethinking everything, from A to Z, critically, freely and in a non-confessional way, strikes me as a necessary, productive task for today. That is what the author sets out to do, and he does it brilliantly.
If, as the wise, critical Cicero (1st century BCE) taught, the very term religion is derived from the Latin relegere (to reread critically, to look and to thoroughly look again, to reinterpret unceasingly), does not its very etymology suggest that the religious fact arises out of the deep, detached, critical contemplation of the signs –the mystery, the beauty, the drama– of reality as a whole? And if “rereading” is its origin, won’t it have to be its permanent destination? Won’t religion, to be religion in its deepest and truest sense, need to be accompanied by a constant reinterpretation of every preceding religious belief, formula and form? Didn’t all figures of profound wisdom, religious or otherwise, do just that?
That is what Confucius and Laozi in China, Buddha and Mahavira in India, Zoroaster in Iran, the prophets of Israel, the great pre-Socratic thinkers of Greece (Parmenides, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Thales…) did during a period of profound cultural transformation that K. Jaspers called the “Axial Age” (between the 8th and 3rd centuries BCE). So did Jesus, critic of legalistic religion, prophet of healing mercy. That is what the best witnesses of his liberating Good News have been doing ever since throughout these 2000 years. Faced with the high price of being declared heretics and even burned at the stake, they were faithful to the spirit that gave life to the Christian tradition and freed it from the rigid forms of the past so that it could inspire the present.
That is what the Spirit or spirituality is demanding of the established religions today. Now, more than ever, because never before have the great religious systems, ever since their origin some 7,000 years ago, experienced such a radical, widespread crisis as we are witnessing: their worldview (dualist, fixist, anthropocentric), anthropology, linguistic categories, social and ethical foundations, conception of life and death… no longer support them as they have done for millennia. Religious faiths, codes, rituals and organisations are facing a global, accelerating, irreversible crisis. And nobody “believes” what they want, but only what they find culturally credible and reasonably coherent. If religions want to be faithful to the breath that moves them, if they want to live and bring to life, they will have to be willing to strip themselves of nearly all their millenary forms.
What applies to religions in general applies to Christianity in particular. John Shelby Spong, Episcopalian bishop and theologian, was right when –24 years ago now– he wrote Why Christianity Must Change or Die (1999), one of his greatest books. Indeed, I think that this is the alternative. Failure to thoroughly rethink and transform will be tantamount to death. And simply enduring as a social and cultural ghetto will also be tantamount to dying, to allowing the flame to be extinguished: the flame that moved Jesus, the soul that beats in the extraordinary heritage –life, action, thought, literature– of its 2000-year-old history, the inspiring spirit that has encouraged the best in its 20 centuries.
Today, as always, we need encouragement. Perhaps today more than ever. We live in a time of more radical, accelerated transformations and more disturbing challenges than at any time since the origin of the species Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago. The ecological balance of the living planetary community, the fair and peaceful coexistence of humanity as a whole, the survival of Homo Sapiens itself, everything is under threat, everything is at stake. Will Christianity still be able to inspire life?
Only a new Christianity that is mystical and liberating, plural and open to dialogue, de-clericalized and de-hierarchicalized, trans-religious and always itinerant, could still imbue the universal Spirit of Life; the Spirit of Life that, according to the beautiful biblical myth of creation, “vibrated in the waters” in Genesis, the Spirit of Life that –before and beyond all religious forms and all boundaries between believers and non-believers– continues unceasingly to vibrate on Earth and in the Universe. Will Christianity –the Christianity of the Roman Catholic Church in particular– still be able to transform itself and live to inspire within a religious or non-religious framework, the post-religious and post-positivist world in which we live? It would be a question that has little to do with making predictions about the future.
In any case, Pedro Miguel Ansó opts for this transformed Christianity without confessionalism of any kind, without denying his Christian roots or his deep attachment to the person, the message and the utopia of Jesus that continue to inspire him. And I feel bound to say that, having devoted my life to teaching theology, I have found every page of this book instructive and interesting. Thank you, Pedro Miguel!
José Arregi, Aizarna (Basque Country), May 15th, 2023
(Translated by Sarah J. Turtle)