Rice’s publishers squirmed a bit when she told them she would write only of the life of Jesus Christ.  Imagine the financial fallout when the high priestess of gothic dark fiction sees the light.  What would happen to the sales of the bookcase full of vampire novels in every bookstore from Telluride to Transylvania?  Rice has sold over 75 millions books.  Her decision to write entirely on Jesus himself and how Christianity emerged could cost publishers and retailers billions.

Evidently gothic despair, however demoralizing, is quit lucrative.

Rice left the church at age eighteen, and broke with her belief in God.  Two years later she married Stan Rice, a passionate atheist who “had something akin to a vision which had given him a certainty that God didn’t exist.”

Rice began writing novels that reflected her “guilt and misery in being cut off from God and from salvation; my being lost in a world without light.”  Her research for her writing took her back through history.  She confesses that she was obsessed with finding meaning in a world without God.   As any historian knows, this journey leads to the undeniable fact that Christianity had the seminal influence on our lives today.  How did this happen?  She wondered what caused the fall of Rome, and what is in the very character of the Christian faith that enabled it to pick up the pieces?  And even more perplexing, how have the persecuted Jewish people, the people of the Book, not only sustained themselves, but remained the great people they are.

These remarkable people of faith from our past, both Christians and Jews, along with friends in New Orleans who were churchgoers and believers, coaxed Rice back to God.  It was a journey of the mind as much as a journey of the heart.

It was also a journey that would “do violence to (her) career.”

Immediately, there was speculation in the blogosphere that Rice had lost her mind.  It was suggested that following the death of her husband and her own brushes with death from an intestinal blockage and a diabetic coma, she had slipped from edgy to crazy.

Yet if you read the author’s notes at the back of Out of Egypt, or if you listen to her interviews following her return to the church, you must conclude that nothing could be further from the truth.  As distressing as it may be to those perplexed with her decision to return to the church, she seems emotionally stable and her scholarship is as careful as ever.

Rice has immersed herself in first century research for Christ the Lord out of Egypt, learning along the way that many Biblical Studies professors use literary criticism to discredit the authenticity of the Bible.  And she recognizes that secular materialism, from her own first hand experience and her reading of history, is a cancer of the individual and collective soul that can metastasize to all of life.

She must be reading tothesource!

Since most tothesource readers are leaders in Protestant churches, it is possible some of you are not aware of this remarkable woman. Rice has intimate understanding of the limitations of radicalized materialism, having been drowning in it for decades.  In interview after interview, with great confidence, she describes the demoralizing prison of living in a world you consider to be ultimately meaningless.  This is why she continues to have so much affection for her Goth friends and fans, because they at least try to make meaning in a world seduced by exclusive secular materialism.

Rice also understands that the belief in God as the ultimate source of meaning is very serious business.  The decision to embrace or reject God, including His demands on us, carries considerable personal and cultural cost.  The newest iPod, though a nice Christmas gift, won’t provide ultimate and sustainable meaning in our lives.  Nor will decoding the human genome or reducing maternal love to a sociobiological survival mechanism.  We are more than stuff and drive.  Stuff and drive alone will not fulfill us.

If your have not done so already, please read Christ the Lord out of Egypt.  It is a wonderful Christmas story.  The following is an excerpt from the author’s notes regarding biblical literary criticism:

What gradually came clear to me was that many of the skeptical arguments— arguments that insisted most of the Gospels were suspect, for instance, or written too late to be eyewitness accounts—lacked coherence. They were not elegant. Arguments about Jesus himself were full of conjecture. Some books were no more than assumptions piled upon assumptions. Absurd conclusions were reached on the basis of little or no data at all.

In sum, the whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified by nobody and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would be horrified by it if he knew about it—that whole picture which had floated in the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist for thirty years—that case was not made. Not only was it not made, I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I'd ever read.

I saw almost no skeptical scholarship that was convincing, and the Gospels, shredded by critics, lost all intensity when reconstructed by various theorists. They were in no way compelling when treated as composites and records of later "communities."

I was unconvinced by the wild postulations of those who claimed to be children of the Enlightenment. And I had also sensed something else. Many of these scholars, scholars who apparently devoted their life to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a hopeless failure. Others sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt. This came between the lines of the books. This emerged in the personality of the texts.

I'd never come across this kind of emotion in any other field of research, at least not to this extent. It was puzzling.

The people who go into Elizabethan studies don't set out to prove that Queen Elizabeth I was a fool. They don't personally dislike her. They don't make snickering remarks about her, or spend their careers trying to pick apart her historical reputation. They approach her in other ways. They don't even apply this sort of dislike or suspicion or contempt to other Elizabethan figures. If they do, the person is usually not the focus of the study. Occasionally a scholar studies a villain, yes. But even then, the author generally ends up arguing for the good points of a villain or for his or her place in history, or for some mitigating circumstance, that redeems the study itself. People studying disasters in history may be highly critical of the rulers of the milieu at the time, yes. But in general scholars don't spend their lives in the company of historical figures whom they openly despise.

But there are New Testament scholars who detest and despise Jesus Christ. Of course, we all benefit from freedom in the academic community; we benefit from the enormous size of biblical studies today and the great range of contributions that are being made. I'm not arguing for censorship. But maybe I'm arguing for sensitivity—on the part of those who read these books. Maybe I'm arguing for a little wariness when it comes to the field in general. What looks like solid ground might not be solid ground at all.