"The Church of Christ Without Christ"

I've been reading Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood for several days now (about 2/3 through it today), and I keep chuckling at Hazel Motes's "Church of Christ Without Christ" (a.k.a. "Church Without Christ") that he keeps trying to start.

Well, I preach the Church Without Christ.  I'm member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way. ... I'm going to preach it to whoever'll listen at whatever place. I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn't the first two."

Sounds a lot like Neibuhr's 1938 assessment of mainline liberal theology:

A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.

Hazel Motes, Deepak Chopra, and Katharine Jefferts-Schori apparently have a lot in common.

Comments

[Victor Salcido]

A church without Jesus Christ is no church at all. God bless you
-Vic

sources: The Holy Bible, or The word of God. Same thing.

[Kate]

But there probably is no such thing as God. Is it not just a long line of superstition?
Something devised for control over the masses maybe? For the weak to control the strong?

[Roy Davison]

Unfortunately, many churches are without Christ because they do not follow His teaching but the traditions of men. Jesus said worship based on commandments of men is vain (Matt. 15:9).

[Forced Bi Femdom]

eh... attractive..

[Zeno]

I don't know if you're fully grasping Flannery O'Connor's work in this book.

For starters, Hazel Motes' church is called "Church without Christ." When a charlatan sees his preaching and thinks he can make a buck off of it he then starts calling it "The Church of Christ without Christ." I.E. "The Church of Christ without Christ" is the charlatan's name for the church, not Hazel's.

Furthermore Hazel is not espousing a liberal theology--he's espousing an outright denial of theology. So the comparison to Neibuhr (whoever that is) is flawed, to say the least.

I could go on and talk about the how Hazel is a paradoxical character, but it seems that you would rather view the text through the lens of Christian rather than a critical thinker.