Christ without the supernatural … reflections on a divisive preacher who speaks to our times but was no personal therapist
Not all Christians believe in God. Back in the 1960s, a cult of so-called religionless Christianity briefly thrived, along with people who called themselves Christian atheists. This meant that they accepted the moral teachings of Jesus, but rejected what they saw as the theological baggage with which he had been lumbered.
Christian atheism leaves Jesus as a dispenser of moral maxims, in a long tradition from Confucius to Billy Graham. Yet as Julian Baggini recognises, not much of what he said was original. The injunction to love your neighbour as yourself goes back to the Old Testament. Jesus was a Jewish prophet who taught that the kingdom of justice and comradeship was at hand, and that a sign of its arrival would be the poor coming to power and the rich being sent away.