One of those religious needs of our culture is historicity—the contention that this or that happened in time and space. This is not the case in the heart of the Gospels. Jesus spoke of things that had both happened and were yet to happen; things that were yet to happen while they were already happening; things that were happening neither here nor there yet were still happening in both places—there is no hiding or denying this.
Time and space meant nothing to Jesus (sort of a no-brainer when we consider the God he was glorifying), yet time and space represented as historicity mean everything to modern Christianity. And, in my experience, it is the importance of the question of historicity that matters to them, not how it is answered. Tell them you admire the ethics of their Savior but deny him a place in your view of history, and they’ll view you benignly as a logical puzzle to solve; tell them historicity matters not to you and you’d like to devote all that much more attention to Jesus’ teachings about religious ethics, and they’ll consider you a lurking menace.
Christianity prefers to choose its menaces, framed to its advantages, whether it views itself as triumphant or besieged. For instance, there is the fallacy of the secular Western world as supposedly “post-Christian.” Let the example in question be an “un-churched”, “liberal”-ly educated young journalist trying to address “religious issues,” and you can bet your bottom dollar you’ll hear the reporter talking about evolution, sexual mores, and abortion—because the template of un-religion or even anti-religion in the West is still Christianity and its hobbyhorses.
From comments to Geeky Humanist.
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