Hazel Motes, the protagonist of Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel, “Wise Blood,” is a Southern evangelical street preacher. Reacting to the burden of guilt instilled by his fire-and-brimstone grandfather, he establishes what he calls The Church of Christ Without Christ.
Motes wants a church without responsibilities, without inner conflict, without struggle, without guilt. Instead of turning to the Gospels, to prayer, to the patient, lifelong wrestling with the truth every follower of Christ must undertake, his idea is to blow the church up.
“Leave!’ Hazel Motes cried. ‘Go ahead and leave! Listen … if Jesus had redeemed you, what difference would it make to you? … What you need is something to take the place of Jesus, something that would speak plain. The Church Without Christ don’t have a Jesus but it needs one! It needs a new jesus! It needs one that’s all man, without blood to waste, and it needs one that don’t look like any other man so you’ll look at him…. Give me such a new jesus and you’ll see how far the Church Without Christ can go!”
As O’Connor famously said, “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock — to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
She’s “shouting” with Hazel Motes, but it takes very little stretching to recognize that the Church of Christ Without Christ is everywhere we look. Let’s remake God in our own image. Let’s pick and choose our own doctrine. Let’s interpret the Gospels as we please — as humans would do, not as God does.
The impulse is understandable and, if we’re honest, universal. Who doesn’t at times long for a less demanding, perplexing Jesus? Can’t we just be good people on our own? Why do we need the also demanding, perplexing Church? Why must we mingle and cast our lot with all those people who often have very different sensibilities, philosophies, opinions, and ideas than we do?
In fact, The Church Without Christ is a contradiction in terms, a theological and existential impossibility. Father Louis Bouyer (1913-2004), a French theologian, wrote: “Christ is … the divine Head of the Body that is the Church, the Head whence she receives all life and light. He is the Bridegroom and she is the Bride, two in one flesh. … Christ is not a part of the Church; rather, the Church might be called a part of Christ, grafted upon him, living by him and for him, suffering with him in order to rule with him.”
That the Church is sacramental — built around the central miracles of the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and Transubstantiation — has infinite ramifications.
Because of its sacramental nature, Catholicism is not just a difference of degree, or even kind: it’s of a different order altogether. It’s a living, breathing, ever-evolving relationship based on love.
As Msgr. Romano Guardini observed in his book “The Lord’s Prayer”: “For the believer … what binds in conscience is not only an abstract moral law but something living, which comes from God. It is the holy, the good, which impresses itself upon our inmost souls. … A new dimension, if one may express it so, stands out in the relationship — the creative dimension.”
How could we not long with all our hearts to enter into the creative dimension described by Guardini? Who would not want to be in the firm embrace of the Church from which that dimension is generated? We tend to avoid the Church because of what it demands of us, in other words — but what of the innumerable graces and gifts the Church gives to us?
A torts concept in employment law is called “a frolic of one’s own.” Ordinarily, employees are protected from on-the-job injuries by workers’ comp. Outside work time or the scope of employment, however, the company can’t be held vicariously liable.
You might sneak off to a hotel room tryst on your lunch hour, but if you slip on the bathroom floor and break your ankle, you pay your own hospital bills.
You’re outside the enclosure of workers’ comp protection — and also outside the creative dimension of God’s love.
To be outside the Church is to be on a frolic of one’s own. You might follow your own ideology or philosophy or self-styled leader, but no one in the Church Without Christ can baptize you, sacramentally marry you, absolve your sins, commit your spirit to eternity — nor can you join in the sacraments whereby those graces and mercies are extended to the next person.
Christ both loves us absolutely and calls us higher than we ever quite want to go. The Church of Christ Without Christ is a church without the cross, which presents itself to our purely human minds as logical, sensible, and attractive.
Peter was all for it, especially when Jesus announced that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.
“Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, ‘God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.’ ”
Jesus replied: “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do” (Matthew 16:23-24).
