For her, this space is one in which we can become entirely at ease with, and even supportive of, a secular world view and focus instead and shared ethics and values -- on building a better world "with or without God." In North America at least, the question of who ultimately occupies this very contested space may well emerge as the key question regarding the future of the church. It is where almost all that is interesting for us is happening right now. And in this context, her argument is compelling. But, for me at least, it is not ultimately persuasive.
It is compelling because she like so many others makes such a strong case both for setting aside rigid strictures on belief so beloved of the fundamentalist crowd and many others as well and of centering the church and its work on the building of community instead. Indeed, this accords with much of what we can know of the early message of the Jesus community. So far, so good.
Why is this unpersuasive? In a passage on the work of the Jesus Seminar in recovering evidence of the historical Jesus, she insists that the message of this itinerant prophet that emerges is utterly impractical in 21st century North America. Yet this is to miss the point. It was pretty impractical in 1st century Roman occupied Palestine too. It got people dispossessed and killed. And it did so because it rejected the dominant norms, even the progressive and inclusive dominant norms, of the day. It was meant to be, and was, a faith by and for losers. And just as with Forrest Gump, belief was as belief did. It was a liberation of the dispossessed and it scared the Romans because it should have.
So in a sense, Vosper is right. All of the dogma and ritual and power and money (and not just for the Catholics) are accretion. Using the social scientific, historical and literary tools now available to us, we can now dig back much further, to at least the very early church. And our inability to relate to that early church, I would suggest, arises not from our modernity but from our power and wealth. This helps to explain why when the urban and rural poor in Latin America, most nominal church members, began to form communities of faith autonomous from the Roman hierarchy the message of this early church was clearly evident in their reading of scripture. And it was here in the second half of the last century that a theology of liberation arose.
Yet this is not very evident in North America, particularly from our upper-middle class perch. Here what we see on the one hand is the religion of empire in the suburban megachurches catering to the Chevy Tahoe crowd and on the other, empire lite (less filling but tastes great) in the dying liberal churches catering primarily to the soon to be departed. And of course an attempt, of which Vosper is a part, to carve out a new space which might attract those members of our class rightly disaffected with both. This is not a perspective that encourages great hope.
Yet in urban slums and rural backwaters throughout the world, the church is growing explosively. And here the church is again a church of the dispossessed -- of the losers. Here as well, however, the religion of empire can be found both in an evangelical movement that is a thinly disguised prosperity gospel and in a conservative catholicism and protestantism that has all too often served the forces of reaction. But it is here as well that the message that Vosper and others reject as impractical is also gaining a toehold, however tenuous.
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