Graham, I enjoyed reading this piece and its predecessor, and appreciate your clarity and integrity of thought. You describe an axis of differing assessments of how and why Christianity needs to be reformed, along the lines of (1) clean it, repair and repaint it, (3) remodel it, or (4) tear it down and replace it, if we were talking about houses instead of religion.
I think where people locate themselves on your axis is in part a factor of where they locate themselves on other axes:
1) How much do they accept the idea of the supernatural?
2) How much credence do they put in the Bible?
3) How do they think Christianity should influence their actions?
4) What is their purpose for being Christian?
For instance, some people believe:
1) Jesus was a great man and teacher, but wasn’t divine and didn’t perform miracles.
2) The Gospels are literally true and historically factual, and ignore their discrepances.
3) They will go to Hell if they don’t follow the instructions in the New Testament, anre are indifferent to resolving its factual claims and internal contradictions.
4) They only need to say they are Christian to get to heaven and following Jesus’ teachings are beside the point.
5) With respect to their Christian pastors and leaders, they must always follow their instructions and must never their wisdom or morality.
So how you want to reform Christianity is in part a function of which of these babies do you want to throw out with the bath water. Some feel some of these babies pollute Christianity, and others feel they purify it.
Cahill’s Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus, which I’ll bet you’ve read, was a huge influence on my personal thinking about Christianity. I process the Christian imperative as “try to be nice to other people” and don’t worry about the supernatural, historic or factual questions, which I think aligns with Armstrong’s argument in The Case for God.
Churchland’s Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition pointed out how we have one set of rules for family members and another for strangers, which might be axis #6. Consider a woman who witnesses two murders, one done by a stranger, one done by her son. Her natural biological inclination will be to join in the stoning of the stranger but to embrace her son saying “my boy would never hurt a fly.” To what extent is she Christian? And is it to the heart or the brain—the human or the beast—we turn to answer that question?
