More From Douthat

For Good Friday, and uncompromising and provocative understanding of the Gospel message by Terry Eagleton in Reason, Faith and Revolution. I have ordered the book!

... for Christian teaching, God's love and forgiveness are ruthlessly unforgiving powers which break violently into our protective, self-rationalizing little sphere, smashing our sentimental illusions and turning our world brutally upside down. In Jesus, the law is revealed to be the law of love and mercy, and God not some Blakean Nobodaddy but a helpless, vulnerable animal. It is the flayed and bloody scapegoat of Calvary that is now the true signifier of the law

... Here, then, is your pie in the sky or opium of the people, your soft-eyed consolation and pale-cheeked piety. Here is the fantasy and escapism that the hard-headed secularist pragmatist finds so distasteful. Freud saw religion as the mitigation of the harshness of the human condition; but it would surely be at least as plausible to claim that what we call reality is a mitigation of the Gospel's ruthless demands, which include such agreeable acts of escapism as being ready to lay down your life for a total stranger. Imitating Jesus means imitating his death as well as his life, since the two are not finally distinguishable. The death is the consummation of the life, the place where the ultimate meaning of Jesus's self-giving is revealed.

... What is at stake here is not a prudently reformist project of pouring new wine into old bottles, but an avant-gardist epiphany of the absolutely new - of a regime so revolutionary as to surpass all image and utterance, a reign of justice and fellowship which for the Gospel writers is even now striking into this bankrupt, dépassé, washed-up world ... The coming of the kingdom involves not a change of government, but a turbulent passage through death, nothingness, madness, loss and futility ... signified among other things by Christ's descent into hell after his death. There is no possiblity of a smooth evolution here. Given the twisted state of the world, self-fulfillment can ultimately come about only through self-divestment.

This view, that the institutional church has perverted the Gospel message, can also be found in Jacques Ellul's The Subversion of Christianity and in Ivan Illich and David Cayley's The Rivers North of the Future. A large collection of Ellul's writings can be found in the theology section of the Jesus Radicals site.