Saving Jesus from the Church, by Robin R. Meyers

 In the interest of Christian charity, I will begin this review by looking at the positive elements of Robin Meyers's Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus.  As a tenured pastor, at Mayflower Congregational Church in Oklahoma City, and a professor of rhetoric at Oklahoma City University, you might expect that Meyers knows how to communicate.  Indeed, his writing is lucid and engaging, as I suspect his sermons are as well.

The latter half of the book's subtitle encapsulates the strength of Meyers's message.  The church has tended to ignore the teachings of Jesus and has not done a good job of following him.  We have reduced faith to "a set of 'beliefs' that certain statements about the Bible, Jesus as the Christ, and church doctrine and dogma are true. . . . faith as intellectual assent to propositional statements."  In doing so, we neglect the Christian life as a way of being.  Being a Christian should not simply mean reciting a creed or praying a formulaic prayer, but should be an all-encompassing way of life.

Some of Meyers's chapter titles show how he builds on this theme: "Faith as Being, Not Belief," "Christianity as Compassion, Not Condemnation," "Religion as Relationship, Not Righteousness."   I can jump in with Meyers on many of his assertions, especially as they apply to American megachurches and fundamentalists.  There is often more concern with theological, biblical purity that with practice, defending the Bible but neglecting to do what it says.  As a telling example, he recalls Albert Schweitzer.  While he was toiling in Africa, heroically treating the sick and destitute, well-fed theologians sat in their comfortable offices criticizing Schweitzer's liberal theological writings.  Meyers asks, Who better exemplifies and follows the teachings of Jesus?

So Meyers rightly calls on the church to examine itself and follow the example and teachings of Jesus.  The problem is that Meyers jettisons orthodox Christian theology.  The first half of the subtitle reveals Meyers's case: Jesus is not the Christ.  Stop acting like he is.  The church's obsession with the blood atonement needs to stop.  We are not sinners in need of a savior, we are children of God trying to do good works.  So in spite of his friendly tone and readable prose, Meyers lost me early in chapter 1, "Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior."  That title says it all.  He buys into the whole liberal project, denying the divinity of Christ, his resurrection, and his redeeming work on the cross.  How about these examples:

[Fundamentalist Christians] are 'decoding' the salvation 'contract' that is presumed to be hidden in scripture, so that true believers can cash in their winning ticket and collect their eternal inheritance.  Being a disciple today means little more than believing stuff in order to get stuff.

The conviction of the followers of Jesus that he was still with them was itself the resurrection.  To ask the question of whether the resurrection is true, and to mean by this that only a resuscitated corpse constitutes such proof, is to impose the standards of the modern mind upon a prescientific culture of myth and magic. 

We need to turn away from the institutional forgeries that constitute orthodoxy for millions: the blood atonement, fear-based fantasies of the afterlife, 'vertical' notions of heaven and hell, selective providence based on human ignorance. . . . (emphasis added)

Winning ticket?  No resurrection?  Myth and magic?  Forgeries?  Fantasies?  Ignorance?  Throughout Saving Jesus, Meyers ridicules and rejects core values of orthodox theology.  Many Christians have held to the Apostles' Creed as a statement of central beliefs that unify Christians across denominational lines.  He can only mock it, directly and indirectly.  "The Apostles' Creed . . . eliminated the life and message of Jesus."  Meyers quotes from the Creed: "'Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate. . . .'  Look carefully at what separates the birth of Christ from his death.  The world's greatest life is reduced to a comma."  He makes a clever point, but the larger point is that he would throw out most of the Apostles' Creed as superstition or irrelevance.

Here is the creed, and my imagined response by Meyers.
I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.(OK, so far so good.  But the creation stories in the Bible are primitive superstitions.)
I believe in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, our Lord, (Yes, as a historical figure, but certainly not divine.)
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, (Are you kidding me?)
born of the Virgin Mary, (Mary, sure, but a virgin?  A laughable claim added by later Christians.)
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried; (He may have been crucified.  He certainly died--doesn't everyone?--and would have been buried, perhaps, although he may have been carrion, like most who were crucified or otherwise executed.)
he descended to the dead. (Are you talking about Hell?  It doesn't exist.)
On the third day he rose again; (Haha!  You really believe that stuff about the resurrection still?)
he ascended into heaven, (a figment of hopeful imaginations. . . .)
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come again to judge the living and the dead.(Whatever.)
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints, (This is what it's all about.  People who follow Jesus' teaching getting together to share community and do good works.)
the forgiveness of sins, (As if we need forgiveness.)
the resurrection of the body, (Not.)
and the life everlasting. Amen. (This life is the one that matters.  Not some fantasy of an afterlife.)

Meyers'sMeyers's position is not unlike that of followers of Buddha, Hare Krishna, Martin Luther King, or Justin Bieber.  Pick someone you admire, and try to be like him.  But Jesus did not come just to be a teacher or role model; he came to seek and to save the lost!

I can join with Meyers's mocking of televangelists, megachurches, and certain streams of fundamentalism such as the prosperity gospel.  But he uses these as straw men to attempt tear down a huge swath of historical Christianity, anyone who believes in the redemptive power of the cross and Jesus death and resurrection as atonement for our sin.  It's almost as if he's never met Christians who both believe in the traditional Christian faith and follow Jesus.  For every Albert Schweitzer, there are thousands of Christians whose theological conservatism would appall Meyers but whose works in service to God would rival Schweitzer's.

Paul said he "resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified," and that "Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day," and that "if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless."  Dr. Meyers, I'm sure you know how to preach a lovely sermon.  Although I've never been to your church or heard you preach, my thought is that perhaps your preaching is useless.


Don't buy this book.

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