Over on his newly launched blog, Michael Brendan Dougherty comments on children’s author Philip Pullman and his latest attempt to deconstruct Christianity. In his new book The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Pullman follows a well-trod path by excising any reference to the miraculous in the Gospel accounts, leaving a Jesus who resembles more “a televangelist mixed with David Blaine.”
As it turns out, such a character doesn’t make for very good reading, as Dougherty explains:
The moral and the miraculous threads in the Gospels cannot be unwound, just as the noble Jesus cannot be separated from Christ. Christian morals may outlive conviction in Christian metaphysics for a time, but morals without warrant become mere sentiment and eventually dismissed as such. (See the decline of German Protestantism)
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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Pullman’s book leaves me marvelling at a strange mystery cult, now entering its third century. Why do intelligent men become so desparate to save a noble, non-divine Palestinian from the faith that bears his name? Trying to make sense of Christ apart from the stories of the Garden of Eden, the Jewish exile, the cycle of feasts, and the heart-stopping flow of blood on the Temple altar, leaves us with a story of an inscrutable moralizer. And a boring one. Odd for someone of Pullman’s literary strength to take out all the good bits.
Philip Pullman: Rescuing a deadly dull tale from the jaws of the Greatest Story Ever Told.