Heart Too Small? Try Jesus.

This may pertain to this blog: "A spirited explorer of religion's role," appearing in The Baltimore Sun over this past weekend, tells of the new book by religion elucidator Huston Smith, The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition.

How can we recover the core teachings of Christianity, Smith, in his book, seems to be asking, so to heal the rift between conservatives and liberals in the faith today?

Smith, author of the well-known survey The Religions of Man, updated as The World's Religions, disparages the conservative Christian outlook on grounds that it "ignores the contexts that give words their meaning — different contexts, different meanings." Failing to compensate for the very different context in which Jesus preached and then the changed one in which the evangelists wrote leads many of us today to misinterpret the words, giving them meanings that were never intended. We can thereby become "narrowly dogmatic and chauvinistic," as we find ourselves "in constant danger of slipping into disastrous political agendas."

Liberal churches, meanwhile, lack "a robust, emphatically theistic worldview to work within." Their "rallying cries to be good" are simply not enough. Without firm commitment to a belief in "a two-story universe: this world, and another world that is greater and more important than this," they wither on the vine.


Smith accordingly undertakes "a re-examination of the life and language of Jesus." In doing so, he of necessity "returned to first-century Palestine, where [says the Sun article] those he encountered would have found both to be utterly alarming." This sounds like exactly what Albert Nolan in Jesus before Christianity has done as well.

In a side article available here, we learn that Smith, a lifelong Methodist, also "returns [in his book] to the early church — the community of believers before the Great Schism of 1054 divided Catholic and Orthodox, before the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century further split the faith." The failure to say much if anything about the early, 2nd-century/1st-millennium church mars Nolan's work, I feel, quite badly. We need to see what Jesus meant in his day, and we need to see what he meant, and why, to the unsplintered early church, that vital bridge between the original Jesus movement and now.


"In all, a wind of freedom blows through these teachings," Smith is quoted from his book in the Sun review, "that frightens the world and makes us want to deflect their effect by postponement — not yet, not yet! H.G. Wells was evidently right: Either there was something mad about this man, or our hearts are still too small for his message."

That resonates, sad to say. I know my heart to be way too small to put me squarely among, per Smith, "the happy people ... those who are meek, who weep, who are merciful and pure in heart."

But I'm working on it.