But, then I noticed another book, Misquoting Jesus by Bard Ehrman - listed as nonfiction because it will tell you how "mistakes and changes by ancient scribes shaped the Bible we use today." And there, on the same list was Gary Wills's new book, What Jesus Meant - about the radicalism of Jesus, a fresh reading of the Gospels. It was there for the second week. The Last Templar also made the list for the 10th. week, a book about the medieval Knights Templar, and something called Earthly Powers, The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe. Still another I spotted on the nonfiction list was entitled American Theocracy, about the dangers of religious zealotry. Dan Brown's Angels & Demons was featured for the 131st. week, and Mitch Ablom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven was also there. Finally, there was a book entitled Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, where for $24.95 you can find out how to find yourself by traveling to Italy, India and Indonesia!

Now the New York Times is not exactly Christianity Today, but isn't it astounding that there are this many books all exploring the roots of religion in general, Christianity particularly, and Jesus quite specifically? And this doesn't even mention articles throughout the paper that deal with religious issues What is going on here?

Samuel Huntington in his Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, another New York Times best seller in 1997, says that "the late twentieth century has seen a global resurgence of religions around the world." (p.64) Instead of modernization leading to the withering away of religion as a significant element in human existence, as the intellectual elites assumed, there has been a revival of religion that has pervaded every continent, every country, and virtually every civilization. (p.95) While some of it is Fundamentalist and extremist, Huntington, a Harvard political scientist, insists that "it far transcends the activities of fundamentalist extremists. In society after society it manifests itself in the daily lives and work of people and the concerns and projects of governments." (p.96) What we're seeing, as the Catholic scholar George Weigel puts it, is the "unsecularization of the world."

But there is a funny thing about the American version of this unsecularization. Because the elites in our country are so uniformly against any orthodox expression of belief, and are so hostile to America's first religion - evangelical Protestantism - the quest here in this country takes an unusual shape. It is twisted into a search for whatever is bizarre, strange, out-of-synch, heterodox, and Gnostic. The books that are being read by millions of Americans, as testified to by the best- seller lists, are almost all (not quite all, but almost all) attempts to re-interpret historic Christianity, and re-present it as something different from what you and I thought it was. The Bible isn't what it appears. Jesus didn't say what you think he said. Jesus wasn't who you thought he was. And now we have The Judas Gospel hitting the stands, and being touted on TV, telling us that the great Betrayer was really a nice guy who only did what he did because Jesus told him to. Ancient Gnostics who wrote this text believed that the God who made this world was evil, and therefore they - and their modern counterparts -- have a vested interest in trying to rehabilitate people the world has traditionally called evil. So, Judas must be good. It's the world he lives in that is evil.

It reminds me of the time I attended a dinner at the home of a wealthy German-born industrialist in Andover, Massachusetts. He and his family had emigrated in the late 1930's, done extremely well here, and were noted for their Christian faith and support of Christian causes. As I entered the house, my host asked me to sign the guest book, which I did. He then retreated into the house, leaving me a few minutes to flip through the guest book in search of a famous name or two. My heart stopped, because there in the book my eye fell on the signature of Adolph Hitler. Later he explained how many Christians in the Germany of the early 1930's had thought Hitler was to be the answer and entertained him in their homes. But later, they abandoned him. Just three weeks ago I learned that that very guest book is in the archives of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary not far from Andover, Mass. I told the Development Director there my story, and he said: "We have the very book in our archives!"

But, if Christians have gotten it so wrong - whether in their attitudes towards Hitler, or - vastly more importantly - in their attitudes towards the Bible and Jesus, how can we be sure that the faith we celebrate week after week in churches like this is anything like the original article? And, of course, that's the point. Most of the literature people in America are gobbling up is aimed at getting us to doubt whether the faith we confess in the creeds, sing about in our hymns and songs, offer up in our prayers, and read in our devotional literature is anything like what really happened. According to Dan Brown, who wrote the Da Vinci Code, the church through the ages has purposely led us down a blind alley, and suppressed the feminized God that the real Jesus was all about. But the many other books out there do much the same thing, only with less flamboyance.

So, here's my thesis: Americans want to be religious, but they do not want to believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins, and was raised for our justification, and that nothing we can do, no secret we need to know, no rules we can keep, no experience we can have will save us. It is Jesus and Jesus alone who is the Savior; and he and he alone can set us free from our sins. No, no, no, say the scholars and pundits, and not a few clergy - if they were honest: We've got to find a way to be religious without having to face the stark truth of our sin - our alienation from God -- and God's self-sacrifice on the cross. We've got to find a way to be spiritual without needing any transformation of our lives. Because it's so enormously flattering to our egos to think that there is something we can do, something we can know, some secret we can discover, something we can offer that will make us acceptable to God, and that the old hymn "nothing in my hand I bring, simply to thy cross I cling" is a bit of sentimental mush we can discard along with "that ole time religion."

Anglican spirituality makes a perfect case in point. It is easy to demonstrate that the spirituality that shaped our Church, from its earliest days, has morphed into something that would be unrecognizable to those who created this branch of Christendom.

But let's first define our terms. Anglicanism? This is that branch of the worldwide church that stems from England, and specifically from the Reformation in the 16th. Century. Although it had existed in England for centuries, in the 16th. Century it cut itself off from its parent root, Rome, and its Holy Father, the pope, for reasons both political and religious. It was those critical years in the mid-Sixteenth Century that gave us our Book of Common Prayer, The 39 Articles of Religion, the Book of Homilies, and our Anglican martyrs - several bishops and archbishops who were burned at the stake for their unwillingness to renounce Protestant views in favor of Catholic ones after Catholicism had returned under the Queen we know as Bloody Mary - Henry VIII's Catholic daughter. In the long struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism, it was Protestantism that became the English norm under Queen Elizabeth I. She steered a middle way between the Catholic Traditionalists of her day and the Radical Puritans who wanted to purge the church from anything remotely Roman, and therefore to throw out bishops, and Prayer Books, and candles, and processions, and any action that might be mistaken as Catholic. Elizabeth I gave us the much touted Anglican Via Media: a Reformed Catholicism that was Protestant in doctrine and Catholic in spirit.

Anglicanism arrived in the New World as the Church of England, and at the American Revolution, it became the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. The Episcopal Church, along with 38 other national and regional Anglican Provinces together constitute the Anglican Communion. Until recently, you could go almost anywhere in the world, and you would find an Anglican Church where there was a very similar Prayer Book, many familiar hymns and prayers, and a structure of worship and devotion that was not too dissimilar from what you'd have at home. That's Anglicanism.

And spirituality? Spirituality is what one writer calls "the lived experience of Christian belief." (Michael J. Gorman, Cruciformity, St. Paul's Narrative Spirituality of the Cross, Eerdmans, 2001, p.3) Spirituality is not this or that religious exercise such as praying, fasting, solitude, study, and so on. These are disciplines that many Christians find helpful. But spirituality is the experience that ought to lie behind these disciplines. Spirituality is "life with and in Christ...It is a relationship with the triune God that impacts one's daily life with others." (ibid, p.3)

So Anglican spirituality is that experience of God that has been shaped and influenced by our formularies, The Book of Common Prayer, the Articles of Religion, together with our tradition of devotional writing and hymnody. It is the lived expression of those beliefs that we cherish and hold dear, as filtered through the prism of specific Anglican teaching and emphases.

Because I was troubled by the tendency within Anglicanism to move away from the wonderful synthesis that we were given into this or that party of churchmanship or theology, I wrote my book A Church To Believe In. I tried to show from both the Bible and our Anglican heritage that the church, as Jesus intended it, should be "evangelical in experience" (cherishing the Gospel and its transforming power), "catholic in spirit" (maintaining the creeds and being a good steward of the Scriptures), "reformed in doctrine" (cherishing the insights of the Reformation, especially Justification by faith alone), "charismatic in ministry" (being open to the Holy Spirit's gifts through every member of the body of Christ), "liberal in ethos" (giving place to reasoned discourse and caring for the social dimensions of the Gospel), and "global in scope" (having a missionary heart, and reaching out to include all believers whether Anglican or not). This was the true Anglican synthesis, and no aspect of this comprehensive view of the church should be marginalized, rejected, maligned, caricatured, or despised.

But over the centuries, and more recently with a rapidity that is astounding, Anglican spirituality has been re-shaped to fit into a mold that is perceived to be more in tune with the spirit of the age. What has been lost is our historic, and I would argue, biblical focus on the cross of Christ. Historic Anglican spirituality, Prayer Book spirituality, is cross-centered. It is a cruciform spirituality, one shaped by prayerful reflection on what God did for us in that one critical moment of self-offering, where our sins were laid on Christ and his righteousness was given to us.

The stages of this devolution are worth noting, because they quietly replace what God has done for us with what we can do for God, and in the process the uniqueness of Jesus Christ is obscured, and his sacrifice is rendered impotent.

I recently read a book entitled Glorious Companions, Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality by Richard H. Schmidt. (Eerdmans, 2002). There are short biographies of 29 Anglican heroes from the 16th. through the 20th. centuries, and then these are followed by excerpts from their writings. You find Archbishop Thomas Cranmer on the list, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, John Wesley, Samuel Johnson, Hannah More, Charles Simeon, F.D. Maurice, Charles Gore, Evelyn Underhill, William Temple, Dorothy Sayres, C.S. Lewis and Desmond Tutu, and many others.

Through the years there were subtle changes that I noticed, and while I could get something out of every writer, I had the sinking feeling that as Anglicanism came down the centuries it was morphing into something very different, and - unhealthy.

There was first of all, a growing de-emphasis on the reality and seriousness of sin. We really are no longer "miserable sinners", as the old Prayer Book Confession put it. Nor do we any longer say, "there is no health in us," again as the old Confession said. Emphases on judgment, guilt, fear of God, or hell have almost all disappeared. Take the Marriage Service, an innocuous service if there ever was one. The original Book of Common Prayer marriage service said: "I charge you both, as you shall answer at the dreadful day of judgment, when the secrets of all hearts will be disclosed, that if either of you knows any reason why you should not be joined in Holy Matrimony, you do now confess it." This has been progressively softened in every prayer book revision, so that today the Minister simply says: "I require, and charge you both, here in the presence of God, that if either of you know any reason..."

We have come a long way from the days in the 19th. century when staunch Episcopal Rectors would address cultured congregations as "vile earth and miserable sinners, worms and children of wrath." [Manton Eastburn, later Bishop of Massachusetts, at Trinity Church, Copley Square] Although educated people may not have liked that then any more than they do today, most of them stayed on to hear more.

Today, however, reflecting the mood of a kinder gentler society I wouldn't be surprised if someone rewrote our liturgical confession as follows: "Benevolent and easy-going Father, we have occasionally been guilty of errors of judgment. We have lived under the deprivations of heredity and the disadvantages of environment. We have sometimes failed to act in accordance with common sense. We have done the best we could in the circumstances; and have been careful not to ignore the common standards of decency. And we are glad to think that we are fairly normal. Do thou, O Lord, deal lightly with our infrequent lapses. Be thy own sweet Self with those who admit that are not perfect, according to the unlimited tolerance that we have a right to expect from thee. And grant as an indulgent parent that we may hereafter continue to live a harmless and happy life and keep our self-respect."

But our original Anglican Formularies were clear. We have a terrible infection. We are inflicted with original sin, which doesn't mean that we're no good, only that we cannot by ourselves save ourselves. When in the early 20th. Century a number of great thinkers were asked to write brief articles in the London Times entitled "What's Wrong With This World?" most said the problem was society, or technology, or greed, or intolerance, and so on. But G. K. Chesterton, who was not asked to write, nonetheless sent in a very brief responsive letter to the editors: "What's Wrong With This World? I am."

Along with a growing emphasis on the non-seriousness of sin - a term that has almost disappeared from Episcopal pulpits, except to deride such social ills as racism, militarism, and homophobia - attitudes it's easy to keep at arm's length, or blame others for, there is a second area where Anglicans have increasingly got it wrong. I'm referring to the common idea that the key doctrine for Anglicans, or Episcopalians, is the Incarnation.

Incarnation, along with the adjective "incarnational" are favorite Anglican/Episcopal words, and they carry many meanings. On the surface, there is absolutely nothing wrong with them, as long as they don't replace the distinctive Anglican doctrine which I would argue is the Atonement, as understood by the architects of our Church. The Incarnation is, of course, God becoming man in Jesus Christ. It's there in all the creeds, and it is clearly the orthodox, or correct, way of thinking about our Lord's identity.

But doctrines answer more than one question. They shape the way we think and feel, and they can be stretched to say all kinds of things that they may not have originally intended.

To some, usually those way out on the Anglo-Catholic end of the Church, the doctrine of the Incarnation is stretched so that the divine and miraculous elements of Jesus' becoming man are over emphasized. For example, it is argued that because God dwelt in a man, that man (Jesus Christ) literally and in some sense corporeally "dwells" in the consecrated bread and wine at Communion. Therefore the consecrated bread and wine must be treated with utmost reverence, and woe betides the clumsy curate who drops a crumb of it on the ground during distribution. Incarnation to them becomes something very close to the Roman Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation.

At the other end of the theological spectrum are the theological radicals who overemphasize the human dimension. They are content to make the Incarnation mean that God dwelt in the man Jesus more or less the way God dwells in all of us - only in his case more so. In other words, Jesus was not really fully God and fully man, ontologically, as the Creeds say, but just a man in whom God dwelt rather more fully than He does in all other people. At some point in his life Jesus - a fully human person -- was drawn up into the godhead, and therefore he can be spoken of as "the Son of God." But this is not what Christians have said through the ages.

An Episcopal seminary dean, Urban Holmes wrote a book entitled What Is Anglicanism? (Morehouse-Barlow, 1982) Inadvertently he showed the ridiculousness to which this overemphasis on the human side of the Incarnation could take you. Incarnation to Holmes meant that God is in all of creation, and all creation is in God. The two are so identified that there is really no God left outside of creation. In other words, he argued that Panentheism (only slightly different from Pantheism) is the real meaning of the Incarnation and ought to be considered a classical Christian doctrine. This got him into some very deep water, because he argued that if evil is a part of creation, then how can we exclude evil from God himself? Holmes isn't sure we could. Furthermore, since Holmes prefers to see creation as essentially feminine, to him, the authentic Anglican consciousness becomes feminine. Anglicans, he says, approach truth in an intuitive, communal, impressionistic way, rather than a rational, logical, precise one, which Holmes identified as typically masculine. This then leads him to the idea that there is no "Word from the Lord" within Anglicanism, because God is really not outside of creation, and therefore cannot speak to it. So much for preaching! In the end, for Holmes, and his followers the Incarnation really can't mean "God became Man", but rather "God is feminine." This can hardly pass as authentic Christian doctrine. However, Holmes finds all of it in the Incarnation!

Then there are the worldly Anglicans, those who want to identify Christianity with the culture of comfortable, upper middle class, gentility. And so they stretch the Incarnation to say that - yes -- it means that God came at a point in history to inhabit this world. But once God got here, Jesus looked around, and said: "Hey, it's really not bad here, after all. I think I'll stay." It's quite legitimate to say that the Incarnation potentially sanctifies all of human life: art, work, leisure, sex, music, family, and so on. But emphasizing the humanness of life can become just another idol; and we can forget that there's an other-worldliness in Jesus also.

By making the Incarnation the central Anglican doctrine, it is all too possible to come up with some zany conclusions. But, why is this? Why does the stress on the interconnectedness of the human and the divine, as if this were the distinctive Anglican contribution to theology, lead us astray? Why can it not be the starting point for spirituality? I will offer a suggestion here: We all know that the church in England, and hence Anglicanism, has been infected at least since the Fifth Century by the heresy that you and I can do something that will result in our salvation. Pelagius is the name of a British monk who said that we must take initial steps towards our salvation, and only when we've done that does divine grace kick in. Never mind that Pelagius and his teaching were condemned as heresy, and he himself excommunicated. His influence has overshadowed our tradition so that it pops up again and again. My hunch is this: human pride being what it is, people are always searching for a way to offer, or do, or think or say something that will help us on our way to salvation. Never mind that it brings pride in by the back door. We want to do something to affect our salvation. Because if there is nothing we can do, then it's all up to the work of Jesus Christ for us. And that makes us debtors, utter debtors, to Jesus Christ. This malaise may afflict especially those who because of education or affluence tend to think of themselves as above the rest of humanity. Is this why most Anglicans think that they can earn their way to salvation?

In contrast to this focus on the Incarnation, I would argue that the classical Anglican doctrine, and the one that has shaped our liturgy and our spirituality through the ages, is the Atonement. Eighteenth Century hymn writer Augustus Toplady (1740-1778) put it well in Rock of Ages: "Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to thy cross I cling." Why was I not surprised to discover that in our 1982 Hymnal these words have been altered?. ["In my hand no price I bring, simply to thy cross I cling"]

Our Articles of Religion, hammered out in the Sixteenth Century, were for centuries required to be signed by all clergy and still are today in many parts of the Anglican Communion. They go to pains to say that there is nothing we can do in our own natural strength to make us acceptable to God, that we are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of Jesus Christ by faith, and not (by) our own good works, and that Christ came to take away the sins of the world by the sacrifice of himself once made. (Articles 10, 11, 15)

Our sacraments highlight the fact that salvation is only through Christ. What is baptism but a powerful symbolic way of dying with Christ and rising again with him to new life? And what is Holy Communion, or Eucharist, but a partaking by faith of the broken body and outpoured blood of Jesus, that his life might dwell in us? Nothing is more distinctive of Anglicanism than this. Both sacraments are something done to us - by Grace, not by human effort. No denomination reads more Scripture in public worship than we do, and during Holy Week, beginning with Palm Sunday, we rehearse the events that led to the cross in great detail. And lest we forget the significance of the cross, do you remember the Prayer of Consecration that was used in the Episcopal Prayer Book until 1979, and is still used throughout the Anglican Communion? It said that "he, there(meaning on the cross), by his one oblation of himself, once offered, made a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world." Could a more complete statement of the entire sufficiency of the cross of Christ be given? It was burned into the consciousness of Anglicans for 450 years, and is still there in our 1979 Prayer Book, though much de-emphasized I'm sad to say.

Atonement means that without God building a bridge to us, we really are lost and cut off from Him by our sin. Jesus Christ is the "bridge over troubled waters." He is the one who makes it possible for us to get rid of our sins, by giving us his righteousness, even while he takes on our unrighteousness. St. Paul puts is blankly: "He, who knew no sin, became sin for us, that we might know the righteousness of God in him." (2 Cor. 5:21) All we need is real faith, the kind of faith in which we entrust ourselves to Him and then live that out in daily life. He puts himself in the place of our sin, and transfers over to us his righteousness - a marvelous exchange that is entirely by Grace.

I believe that it would be easy to quote from great Anglicans through the ages who have made the Atonement their central thesis. Let just one suffice. Bishop Gregory T. Bedell of Ohio, preaching at the consecration of another bishop in 1871 put it nicely:

"The doctrine of the Atonement gives character to all our formularies...Whatever else this Church has lost, in the lapses of the ages, she has never lost the truth of the Atonement. Obscured, corrupted, often misunderstood...that truth which whosoever believeth shall be saved, that truth which is a repentant sinner's only hope, a faithful believer's fountain of joy, that truth, round which all others gravitate...that truth rings in our ears today." (Men and Movements in The Episcopal Church, Chorley, Scribners, 1946, p.64)

Here, then, are a few implications for spirituality if we once again put Atonement where it belongs, at the very center of our thinking and praying.

First, we are saved from the gnawing need to be perfect. Perfectionism, whether expressed in obsessive compulsive behavior, in eating disorders, in judgmentalism towards others, or in low self-image eats away at any joy we might have in life, and makes Christianity into a loveless effort to scale Everest all by ourselves. The Atonement says that we might as well give up the effort, because we'll never be perfect enough for God. It is only Christ who is perfect, and we find our perfection by resting in him and in him alone.

Second, we can face our guilt without descending into despair. "O happy guilt" was Augustine's cry when he discovered that all his sins were covered by Christ on the cross. We can take off the masks we wear to impress others, and to hide our own deficiencies, and look at ourselves with all our warts. Guilt is real; but it is never the final word. Grace is the final word. So this makes us honest people, and honesty is always the best policy - something we learned as kids. The only unforgivable sin is the sin that refuses forgiveness; so we can really be ourselves - to ourselves, to God and to one another. That's why the taking away of the penitential dimension of our services in the 1979 Prayer Book is so wrong. It sounded hip, contemporary, and hopeful. But it does the opposite because it undercuts our ability to be totally honest with ourselves.

Third, we can walk in the sunlight of God's grace. At a fundamental level, we can know ourselves totally accepted, and so we no longer need to find acceptance in all the wrong places. The "in crowd" loses its appeal. The "exclusive club" no longer makes us feel like "insiders" or - more likely - "outsiders." We can be the same person in the boardroom as in the backroom. We are included in the only company that counts: the communion of saints - and what better party to be invited to than the marriage supper of the Lamb? All that fear of never being really accepted dissolves in the bright light of His love.

And fourth, we can see even our worst enemy as a potential brother - or sister. There at the foot of the cross were the three Marys, plus the Centurion who drove the nails in, and the dying thief who had done Lord knows what. They were united in gratitude and in faith. The barriers fell, and those who were enemies became friends. So also with Saul of Tarsus, and millions upon millions down the ages for whom the cross broke down the wall of hostility (Eph.2:14) between enemies. If Jew and Gentile were reconciled through the cross, then there is hope for the Middle East today, hope for broken families, hope for our worst enemy, and even hope for our divided selves.

William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, once wrote that "the only thing we have to contribute to our salvation are the sins that we bring with us." This is the heart of Anglican spirituality, and it is where our life, our strength, and our hope lies.

Four years ago at Trinity Seminary we helped rescue a young Anglican Sudanese man from an Saudi jail. He had been working with the underground Sudanese Christians who work in great numbers in Saudi Arabia, and was tattled on, imprisoned and tortured. Fortunately, he was spared the worst by being scurried out of the country, and admitted into the United States. Today he is an ordained Anglican and head of all the Sudanese churches in America.

When he was in prison, his Muslim guard glared at him and said: "My religion tells me to kill you." Michael quietly thought for a while, and then replied: "Yes, but my religion tells me to love you." The Muslim man was totally undone.

---The Rev. Dr. Peter Moore delivered this lecture to the parish of St. Francis-in-the-Fields in Harrod's Creek, KY. He is the former President and Dean of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry and now is involved with FOCUS, a ministry to high school students.

END