MysteriousFaith

Anne Rice’s Journey Towards Faith

Primarily known for her vampire and historical quasi-horror novels, author Anne Rice has turned her attention towards telling an intriguing story about the early life of Jesus. For Rice, the story is of more than literary value, as the novel captures her turn from a life absent belief in God towards the life of faith. This book covers the part of Jesus’ life as he and his family departs Egypt to go back to Israel. Interestingly, the book follows the scholarship of N.T. Wright particularly closely, paying specific attention to the question of Jesus’ understanding of himself – something Wright has the intellectual courage and honesty to wrestle with in his series Christian Origins and the Question of God.

The “Author’s Note” at the end of the book introduces Rand’s journey, including the loving story of her atheist husband of 41 years being diagnosed with brain cancer and dying within 4 months of the diagnosis. This event drove Rice towards a deeper exploration of faith, a journey she was fated to walk. Rice was raised in a Roman Catholic home and left her faith as a young adult, encountering the works of “Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus” which fed a part of her inner being that had gone unnourished and unexplored within the church. Her career as a writer drew her towards the occult, no doubt revealing her profound interest in the mythical and supernatural. Her career allowed Rice to placate herself with the tawdry and trivial as she downplayed her more deeply hidden spiritual needs and mystical tendencies with stories of demons and vampires; many a reader is thankful to her for these flights of fancy. During research for another book, she encountered the story of the Jews and began to ask herself how a people so persecuted could survive. This led her to explore Jesus as a Jew, which ultimately led her towards the same question that turned C.S. Lewis from his atheist beliefs towards the life of faith: what other explanation fully answers the question of the origin of Christianity than the resurrection of Jesus?

While wrestling with this question, Rice again encountered the faith of her childhood, reminding us of the truth implicit in the saying “the child is the father of the man”. Rice engaged the skeptics of Jesus, although her comments at the end of the book suggest Rice was looking for a myth to believe was true, and in doing so gravitated towards the best of evangelical scholarship (which Wright certainly represents), but seems to quickly pass over the moderate critics of Jesus’ divinity such as Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan. Rice is very much right to disagree with much of the quasi-Jesus scholarship that has arisen in the last 30 years based on scholars so eager to discredit Christianity that they disavow even the idea that the existence of Jesus can be proven at all. But the excesses of members of this community should not inherently discredit every question they are asking, most specifically the essential argument that supernatural events raise to a wholly different standard what is required to prove it occurred than does the required proof of a historical event very much set and bound to the events and continuity of terrestrial occurrences. However, in an important way, Rice’s honesty about wrestling with Jesus’ identity affords an opportunity for two communities with their own legitimate scholarship to come together in a dialogue over what they do not understand from the other’s perspective.

Perhaps Rice is slated to create a round of literature similar in its vision and imagery as did Lewis. American Christianity would benefit from a genuinely unique form of literature as opposed to the pabulum that passes for most Christian literature, the Left Behind series being the best example of this. If this is Rice’s intention, her next book in this series is critical as it will need to improve and expand on the inner turmoil taking place within Christ’s understanding of himself and his deity. In order to do her story credit, Rice is going to have to develop a line of her writing that has not previously been essential - in addition to telling a good story, she is going to have to wrestle with the inner tension of a character torn between worlds, identities, loves, longings and missions. For me, Christ the Lord came up short in its treatment of the tension in Jesus’ inner life, coming short of fully developing the questions Jesus was struggling with as to his identity as God. I could not shake the nagging thought that a God born flesh who does not know he is God is troubling and, frankly speaking, so conflicted as to be quite unhelpful. In asking the question of Christ’s awareness (or lack thereof as Rice honestly introduces) of his divinity, Rice would be following through in the most honest and sincere of ways at the implications of Wright’s scholarship, which has acknowledged that the Gospels portray a Jesus less than certain of the Messiah-status his modern-day followers are very certain of.

I doubt skeptics will find Wright’s treatment of Jesus as a child particularly helpful – for me it only raised the ante of the difficulties and disconnects within Christian theology. By framing the book entirely from the first person-perspective of Jesus as a child, Rice intends for us to appreciate the humanity of Jesus, and the problems of his personal development as he begins to encounter his divinity. But for those attempting to make sense of the “wholly man, wholly God” logic, Rice’s literary vehicle only accentuates the difficulty in believing God became flesh, but was not aware at all of his godhood. This struggles to make sense at a literary level, but is the logical consequence of Christian theology – Wright’s version of it particularly. One particular prayer of Jesus towards the end of the book captures this profound identity confusion best:

“Lord. Lord, whoever I am, whatever I am, whatever I am meant to be, I am part of this, this world that is all of a flowing wonder – like this music. And you are with us. You are here. You have pitched your tent here, among us. This music is your song. This is your house.” (page 273).

We are left with a book that is written in the most approachable and non-offensive of ways, which sincerely wrestles with a question too many Christian theologians refuse to acknowledge: what was it like for God to be born a man and to not know he was God? This is an honest question that Rice deserves much credit for asking. Some will luxuriate in its honesty and the questions it explores, while others will become further perplexed at a part of Christian theology that has never made sense to them – their perplexity being captured quite humanely through the narrative Rice has bestowed to us all.

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• December 22, 2005

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