The Final Testament and Liberal Christianity

By Ken Russell in All Sorts

reviewing James Frey book from a liberal Christian perspective

I am not recommending this book, though you can borrow it, as I did, from the Dunedin Library. Were you brave enough to read further than the first chapter or two, I'm guessing you would be shocked and scandalised! And you would be in good company. The author has been damned from the heights of ecclesiastical power and authority.
But as I got into this book, increasingly I could not put it down, and after 5 nights of very late reading, I have since been trying to come to terms with what I read. Is it the cheapest form of blasphemy, as many have labelled it? Or is it, in fact, an honest attempt by a reputable contemporary novelist to answer the most hypothetical question asked by succeeding generations of Christians since Jesus of Nazareth lived and died two thousand years ago in what is now Palestine and Israel? If Jesus were
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to reward the promise of the Gospels and the faith of the Church to return again as a human being, where, when, and in what manner would be the likely nature of his return?
The book in question is one author's answer to that question. James Frey is an American author living in New York, and his book The Final Testament of the Holy Bible was first published by John Murray in the UK, 2011.
So what is the plot? It is the story of Ben Zion Avroham, otherwise known as Ben Jones, from a New York Jewish family. Having drifted away from his orthodox and God-fearing family, Ben miraculously survives an horrific industrial accident. Coming out of a near-fatal coma he is portrayed as being in possession of otherworldly powers, unmistakeably like those attributed to the Jesus of the gospels. So is he the Messiah? The question is repeatedly asked by those who encounter him, and faithful to the Gospel script, Ben is evasive. "If you care to think so!" Yet an answer is there for those who can embrace it, for Ben brings a sense of peace and serenity to those whom he meets, and develops a small and faithful following.
Ben does not live in the highrises of Manhattan, but in the disused tunnels alongside the NY underground, fetid dank corridors where the marginalised of the great city exist as best they can, an underbelly living off the crumbs that fall from capitalism's over-laden tables. It is alongside and among this mottley lot, the drug addicts, prostitutes and petty criminals, that Ben Jones' followers make their home, sharing their meagre resources and practising unconditional love - and I really mean "unconditional."
Two characters stand out - a "villain," as in all good plots, Ben's older brother Jacob, the insider, who converts from the Judaism of his upbringing to become the worst kind of narrow-minded, born-again preacher: bigoted, self-righteous and homophobic. And a "heroine," Judith, the outsider, a self-described "fat, ugly failure" whose painfully barren existence is transformed by Ben's ability to love the unlovely and to include even the least desirable. Both these recognisable manifestations of gospel identities respond in startlingly different ways to Ben's unconditional love for them. Uncomfortable and unsettling stuff!
Needless to say, Frey attributes to Ben the same aversions of Jesus to religious and temporal authority. As one commentator puts it, Ben rejects the hierarchies of organized religion, as "the longest-running fraud
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in human history." And not for him such "worn-out and repressive" concepts as the afterlife, prayer, the soul, and sin. "Faith," Ben says, "is the fool's excuse... faith is what you use to oppress, to deny, to justify, to judge in the name of God.... if there were a Devil, faith would be his greatest invention." Not surprisingly, the Ben Jones "messiah" rejects all religious dogma per se, the Bible and all. The Bible is "just a book," he says, and "books are for telling stories."
In the end the inevitable collision with the power of the city and of the church is terrible to behold, and New York's "crucifixion" of Ben Jones is no less sad and harrowing than that laid on in the city of Jerusalem two millennia ago.
As I implied in my intro, I cannot in all honesty imagine most of my parish friends getting far with this novel. Everything in our faith upbringing predisposes us to turn away, repulsed, from this James Frey creation. And so I have asked myself - what kept me so riveted ? Was it the uncomfortable sense that were the same Jesus of Nazareth to be transplanted and become Jesus of New York, he would not be a tame pale replication of the amenable Jesus created by centuries of veneration, but a Jesus equally as offensive as the one "despised and rejected" for taking love so far and condemning hypocrisy too honestly? And, isn't James Frey at very least entitled to credit for insisting that a contemporary Jesus would simply not fit in to 21st century life as we moderns have made it to be, and that his call to discipleship today would not be any less radical than the one issued to Peter, John, Mary Magdalene & Co.
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, and like many other things in this life we share, the Final Testament of the Holy Bible" is just another work of fiction, and we can be thankful for the freedom in our little corner of the world to 'take it or leave it.'
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Postscript You may well ask what it was that in the final analysis made this shocking book even worth a mention? Well in my case a recent flurry on the Methodist liberal online network over an article by Ross Douthat gleaned from the N Y Times citing evidence that churches that have gone helter skelter to embrace liberal attitudes and values are all in serious decline, and may be only a generation way from extinction. The reason given was that such churches (including ours?) don't seem to be offering anything that can't just as readily be got from purely secular liberalism. The article closed with words that I personally find disturbing
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and challenging - liberal churches "should pause amid their frantic renovations, and consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world."
As if to defend themselves, the network was quick to find a rebuttal, and produced another from the American media (Diana Butler Bass) with her evidence that not all liberal churches are declining. Their regeneration is linked to a return to the core of the Jesus vision, his command to love God, and to love ones neighbour as oneself, a transformative personal faith that is warm, experiential, generous, and thoughtful. Evidence is there, the second article said, that churches totally committed to the unconditional love exemplified in Jesus, are showing clear signs of growth. Some good news at last.
It occurs to me that while James Frey has chosen a controversial, even outrageous medium for saying so, his 21st century "messiah" points the way to a plain and uncluttered expression of the Jesus way, simply to love one another. Perhaps, then, this book is more prophetic than outrageous, and the future of the Church is not about numbers, but authenticity.
Ken Russell