Two Things to Learn from Richard Herring
The week before Christmas, The Times featured an article by the comedian Richard Herring that contained an interesting couple of insights. Defending his irreligious new tour show, Christ on a Bike, Herring wrote the following:
Even though I am an atheist, I love Jesus. I think that He’s amazing … Yet … the one thing that seems to be edged out of Christmas is Christ … Even churches seem to be almost embarrassed to mention Jesus.
Notwithstanding the flippant tone of the article, I think there are two things we can learn from it…
(1) Even atheists who make a living out of ridiculing Christianity – and there are quite a lot of those around – tend to think very highly of Jesus. They use words like ‘amazing’, and write ‘His’ in capital letters, which even bishops don’t do any more. They often admire both his ethics and his example, and I am still waiting for an atheist polemic targeted at Jesus himself (in contrast to the many tomes on the evils of the wicked church, or the improbability of creation, or the character of the Old Testament God, or whatever else.) That’s a good sign. It means that Christians who primarily talk about Jesus, and not primarily about science or morality or politics or religion, are more likely to get a hearing.
However, this good news is tempered by a piece of bad news…
(2) To the uninitiated (for whom the believing church, the established Church, religious broadcasting and ‘Christian’ public holidays all blend in together) Christians are not perceived to be as focused on Jesus as one might hope. He may be preached in the churches, but for the millions who never attend them, the perception is often that Christianity might be about many things – morality, tradition, commerce, ceremony, and so on – but it isn’t mainly about Jesus. It has become commonplace to say this in recent years, with bestselling titles like They Like Jesus But They Hate the Church, but it is worth reflecting for a moment that, whichever side of the pond you live on, the chances are that secular people around you can’t quite join the dots between Christianity and Jesus. Which, I guess, is either a problem or an opportunity, depending on which way you look at it.
So there are two things to learn from Richard Herring: atheists mostly like Jesus, and they don’t always see the link between Jesus and the church. In that sense, although there are lots of secular people who might identify with Yancey’s title The Jesus I Never Knew, not many would buy a book called The Jesus I Never Liked. Presumably, then, it’s a good idea to be people who talk about Jesus a lot, and live like him.
Comments