Alas, poor Canterbury

The Archbishop of Canterbury assures BBC listeners and Ricky Gervais that a lot of the Nativity story is more or less myth. Well, Rowan, good to know. To be fair, if you read the entire transcript of the interview, the Abp comes off better than the headline sounds. Still, I think Mark Shea has a good, though not entirely fair to Canterbury, point here:

Meanwhile, down the street, in the mosque and madrassa, other children are being schooled in very definite notions about God and man by people who are not at all interested in the full range of human experience and values and not at all worried about whether Ricky Gervais disapproves. Happily, a man of Gervais' gumption would never think to challenge them, so it's all good.

Reminds me of this passage from a book review I did of a liberal Episcopal seminarian Chloe Breyer's memoir a decade or so ago (BTW, here's the Rev. Breyer's more recent argument that Jesus might not have been born of a Virgin, and besides, it really doesn't matter):

Our Chloe decides to set up a Bible study for a group of Bellevue patients who are in from Rikers Island, the notorious city prison. She plays a video segment from the Bill Moyers series Genesis. The inmates see Bible scholars agreeing that Genesis gives us plenty of questions, but few answers. Her students don’t get it.

“They’re supposed to be experts, right?” says Tyrone. “So then why are they giving us all this stuff about not having any answers? I mean, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. not to have answers! And if they don’t have any answers, then who does?”

Others chime in with contempt for the equivocating liberal scholars Breyer so admires. Finally, a Muslim convert speaks up. “See, this is what I’m telling you, man. The Koran is the place to go for answers! . . . I became a Muslim because the Koran has the most truth in it. You don’t argue about what it means. You read it, and you know what to do. The Prophet got the word directly from God.”

“Is that right?” asks Tyrone. “Is that how it is? The Koran has more answers than the Bible?” Undeterred, and unable to grasp the significance of the moment, Breyer sets out to teach these poor sinners that the Bible doesn’t have to be taken literally. There are lots of gray areas, she tells them, and they should feel empowered by the fact that they can interpret Scripture any way they like. The inmates are unmoved.

“They want answers, not questions,” Breyer writes. “[T]he more contradictions I point out in the Bible, the more the inmates decide there is no point in wasting their time with a religion that lacks answers.”

Smart cookies, those crooks, who intuitively grasp the worthlessness of Breyer’s baptized sophistries to their broken lives. Their critique is utterly lost on this earnest young woman, who does not know, or perhaps simply does not have the courage or conviction to say to these men, that Jesus is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”