EASTER ESSAY -
2001
Part 3
Author: Robert
D. Brinsmead
THE
DIVINITY OF JESUS
HISTORICAL FACT OR RELIGIOUS
MYTH?
In the Christian Creeds of the fourth century, Jesus is said to
be "God of very God," the second Person of the Blessed Trinity. As far as orthodox Christianity is concerned,
the babe in the
The divinity of Jesus Christ has been the sine quo non of the Christian faith. Any
so-called church or sect that falls short of confessing that Jesus is God in
the highest sense has not qualified to be called "Christian" or
"evangelical." For centuries, the Arian heretics who denied that
Jesus was co-eternal with the Father were condemned, persecuted and even put to
death at the instigation of the great Church.
In the view of mainline Christian society through most of its
history, no one who denied that Jesus was God could be saved or was even fit to
live.
When the brilliant physician, Michael Servetus,
was brought before the judges of Calvin's
The Protestant Reformers, along with the Catholic theologians
of the church going right back to the fathers of the ecumenical Creeds of the
fourth century, recognized that the entire edifice of the Christian religion
stood or fell on the divinity of Jesus.
As the Jesuit historian/theologian, Ian Guthrie, puts it, "Indeed,
if one asked how much of all that Christians have held most dear would be left
intact if we abandoned the traditional idea that Jesus Christ was God, surely
the answer must be very little, since both the divinity of Christ and the
divine inspiration of the whole of Scripture are almost the twin foundation
stones on which the whole structure of Christianity has been built up and
supported over the past 1,500 years or so." (The
Rise and Decline of the Christian Empire, p.344)
The doctrine of Jesus' Godhood did not suddenly dawn on the
church. Scholars in all branches of the church, whether conservative or
liberal, now generally acknowledge that it took about 400 years to fully
develop. As Karen Armstrong puts it,
"The doctrine that Jesus had been God in human form was not finalised
until the fourth century. The development of Christian belief in the
Incarnation was a gradual, complex process." ( A History of God, p. 98) It then took another 400 years before it
was fully established throughout Christendom. As Guthrie comments, "the
divinity of Christ was not universally accepted until well into the 8th
century." (Ibid. p. 340)
"The odyssey of Jesus of Nazareth from crucified prophet
to divine ruler of the cosmos is an extraordinary event in Western intellectual
history," writes Thomas Sheehan, "and, given the current state of
Biblical scholarship, one of the best documented." (The First Coming: How
the
As we proposed in Part 1 of this series of Essays, one of the best
ways to evaluate any interpretation about Jesus of Nazareth is to trace how
that particular interpretation developed. This is what we now propose to do
with the doctrine of Jesus' divinity.
Jesus in the
Intra-Jewish Movement
The original Jesus movement was an intra-Jewish movement. Jesus
of Nazareth was a Jew. And all of his apostles were Jews. The first church in
It is clear from the NT book of Acts that these first
"Christians" continued to worship with their fellow Jews at the
synagogues. They kept the Jewish Sabbath, ate Kosher, and circumcised their
children like all practicing Jews. James was highly regarded by the broader
Jewish community even though he was the recognized leader of the first church
at
Fundamental to Jewish belief and worship was their strict
monotheism. Every act of worship in every synagogue was founded on their sacred
shema:
"Hear, O Israel, The Lord our God is one." (Deuteronomy 6:4) Geza Vermes is absolutely correct when he says that
"the identification of a contemporary historical figure with God would
have been inconceivable to a first-century AD Palestinian Jew. It could not
have been expressed in public, in the presence of men conditioned by centuries
of biblical monotheistic religion." (Jesus
the Jew, p. 212)
When we put the matter into historical context, it becomes
impossible to imagine that the Jesus party could have continued to worship in
the synagogue with their fellow Jews for the next 50 years if they had been
teaching either that Jesus was God or a second divinity. No concord in synagogue worship would have
been possible if the Jesus party was seen to be putting the ancient shema at risk.
As a contemporary Catholic
author, Michael Morwood, puts it,
"It would have been unthinkable for the early
Jewish-Christians to identify even the exalted post-resurrection Jesus with
God…Christianity did not begin with the belief that Jesus was identified with
God in the way later trinitarian thought would come
to understand him. In its beginnings the Christian movement did not see itself
as separate from Judaism. This is significant for Judaism could not in any way
accept the idea of a human person being identified with God…[In the Creeds of
the fourth century which speak of Jesus as God] we are a long way removed from
the initial Christian thinking about Jesus here. It is a model of thinking
about God that Jesus, as a Jew, would never have dreamed of, and most likely,
because he was Jewish, would not have given credence to." (Tomorrow's Catholic, pp. 60 -63)
That the first Christians did not proclaim that Jesus was God
is not just a conclusion drawn from the historical background. It is also
supported by a lot of direct evidence drawn from the NT documents themselves.
Peter was the first apostle to proclaim the Christian faith
about the resurrection of Jesus. According to the record in the book of Acts,
Peter said that Jesus "was a man, commended to you by God by the miracles
and portents and signs that God worked through him among you." He accused
some of his fellow Jews of being a party to his condemnation and death. In
raising him to life again, Peter declared that God not only reversed the human
verdict, but "made this man Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and
Messiah." (Acts 2: 22-36)
There are a couple of very crucial points to be noticed from
these passages from the book of Acts.
First, to cite the words of Karen Armstrong, "Peter did not claim that Jesus
was God." (Ibid. 107) Second, Peter
expressed the earliest Christian view that Jesus became the Messiah when God
raised him from the dead. According to Acts 13:32, this was
also Paul's view of things. He preached to the Jews that Jesus was
"begotten" or was installed as God's son - that is, he became the
Messiah - on the day of his resurrection and exaltation to God's right hand.
In the earliest Christian faith and preaching, therefore, Jesus
was believed to be a martyred prophet whom God appointed to be the Messiah by
resurrecting him from the dead. There is nothing in this early Christian
proclamation that suggests either that Jesus was the incognito Creator or that
his death was an expiatory sacrifice for the sins of the world. The road from
Peter's first preaching about Jesus on the Day of Pentecost to the Creeds of
the Church declaring that Jesus was God was a long 400 year journey. It is
certainly not legitimate to read the Christianity of the Creeds back into the
teaching of the first apostles!
Jesus was called the son
of God throughout the NT era, but when and how he became son of God was
subject to a lot of development. Paul was the first NT writer. His letters were
written from twenty to thirty years after Jesus' death. In his greatest letter,
to the Roman Christians, Paul said that Jesus was "declared to be the son
of God by the resurrection from the dead." ( l:3;
See also Acts
Jesus in the
Synoptics and Acts
The so-called Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) never
speak in a way that blurs the clear distinction God and Jesus. Christians today
are too prone to read these Gospels through the lens of the Fourth Gospel and
through the lens of the later Creeds and traditions of the church, but as
Vermes rightly argues in Jesus the Jew,
any fair reading of these three Gospels on their own terms cannot find any
evidence that they teach that Jesus was God. A man of God
like Moses or Elisha? Yes! But a God-man? No!
Further than this, there is not even the slightest suggestion
in these New Testament Gospels that Jesus pre-existed prior to his supernatural
birth. According to Luke's account of things, Jesus became the son of God as a
result of his supernatural birth. (Luke 1:34,35). As
the well known NT scholar, B.F. Wescott, puts it,
"In the Synoptics there is no direct statement of the preeexistence
of Christ…They do not anywhere declare his preexistence."
(The Gospel of John, lxxxiv,lxxxvii) Well known Catholic theologian, Raymond
Brown, also acknowledges that in Mathew and Luke's virgin birth stories
"there is no suggestion of an incarnation whereby a figure who was
previously with God takes on human flesh." "…Matthew and Luke show no
knowledge of preexistence; seemingly for them the
conception was the becoming or begetting of the Son of God." (The Birth of
the Messiah, pp. 141, 31,fn.7)
So also in the book of Acts, there is no hint of a pre-existent
Christ except in the foreknowledge and counsel of God.
Jesus in Paul
On all sides it is acknowledged that Paul and John of the
Fourth Gospel teach a higher or at least a more advanced Christology. But do
even these New Testament authors teach that Jesus was God? And in what sense do
they talk about his pre-existence?
Paul was a Jew of the Diaspora, a Hellenist who knew how to
communicate the message about Jesus to a world permeated with Greek culture,
religion and language. Yet for all this, Paul never departed from his strict
Jewish monotheism. To his Corinthian converts he wrote, "There is one God,
the Father." (1 Corinthians 8:6) In
his great epistle to the Romans he refers to the person of God more than 150
times, but never in all this does he once blur the distinction between God and
his son Jesus Christ. Karen Armstrong is therefore quite correct when she says,
":Paul never called Jesus 'God'. He called him
'the Son of God' in its Jewish sense: he certainly did not believe that Jesus
had been the incarnation of God himself…Paul was too Jewish to accept the idea
of Christ existing as a second divine being beside YHWH from all
eternity." (A History of God,
pp. 99,106)
Frances Young concurs with Armstrong when she says, "Paul
neither calls [Jesus] God, nor identifies him anywhere with God. It is true he
does God's work; he is certainly God's supernatural agent who acts because of
God's initiative." (The Myth of God
Incarnate, p. 21)
As a Jew, Paul would have been familiar with the well-known Rabbinic tradition which said that from the beginning, the Messiah
had been concealed in heaven before he would appear on this earth. Even his
name was known to God before the beginning of time. But when we press this
Jewish thought further, we find that the Messiah's pre-existence was notional
rather than actual. (See Vermes, Ibid. pp. 129-156) He was said to have existed
in the predestined will and foreknowledge of God. In Jewish thought, whatever
existed in God's predestined plans and purposes, could
be spoken of as already existing in heaven. As Paul said, "God calls
things that are not as though they were." (Romans 4:17) In the same way, perhaps the most Jewish of
all NT books, can speak of Jesus being "crucified before the foundation of
the world." (Revelation 13:8. For an excellent treatment of this very Jewish
meaning of "pre-existence, see Anthony F. Buzzard and Charles F. Hunting, The Doctrine of
the Trinity: Christianity's Self-Inflicted Wound, pp.171- 214)
So Karen Armstrong says, "When Paul and John speak about
Jesus as though he had some kind of pre-existent life, they were not suggesting
that he was a second divine 'person' in the later Trinitarian sense. They were
indicating that Jesus had transcended temporal and individual modes of
existence. Because the 'power' and 'wisdom' that he re-presented were
activities that derived from God, he had in some way expressed 'what was there
from the beginning.'." (A History of
God, p. 106)
We need to remember that the New Testament, no less than the
Old Testament, is a very Jewish book. It is steeped in very Jewish expressions
and thought forms. The authors of every part, with the possible exception of
Luke, are all Jewish. Their ideas about predestination, foreordination and
pre-existence are comprehensible enough if read in a proper Jewish and OT
context.
But a huge problem arose when later Christians from a very
non-Jewish background began to interpret these things in a very un-Jewish way.
The problem became even greater when the great Church, composed entirely of
Gentiles, became rabidly anti-Semetic and hostile to
all things Jewish, including even Jewish-Christianity.
The Church lost contact with the Jewish thought forms of its
own NT. It began to interpret these documents through its own Greco-Latin eyes
and its own Greco-Latin thought forms. Christianity lost contact with its Semetic roots in Palestinian soil. It became an alien
Greco-Roman religion. It not only became hostile to the Jews in general, but to
Jewish Christians in particular. Although Jesus and the apostles were all Jews,
although the NT authors were Jews and although the message about Jesus began as
an intra-Jewish movement, Jewish Christians were condemned, driven out of the
Church and persecuted from the beginning of the second century.
All this raises the disturbing question whether Greco-Latin
Christianity was the great cuckoo in the nest of the original Jesus movement.
The Church lost contact with the Jewish thought forms of its own New Testament,
and then proceeded to take many of the sayings of the NT out of their true
Jewish context! How could a Church infected with the rabies of anti-Semitism
possibly understand a very Jewish book like the NT?
Following the lead of scholars such as J.A.T. Robinson and
James Dunn, more and more Christian scholars are now beginning to question whether
Paul taught an actual pre-existence of Jesus. Even the late F.F. Bruce,
regarded by many as the prince of conservative evangelical scholars, made this
amazing statement before his death: "On the preexistence
question, one can at least accept the preexistence of
the eternal word or wisdom of God which (who?) became
incarnate in Jesus. But whether any New Testament writer believed in his
separate conscious preexistence as a 'second Divine
Person' is not so clear…I am not so sure Paul so believed." (From
Correspondence cited by Anthony F. Buzzard and Charles F. Hunting in The Doctrine of the Trinity, p.190)
We will not here take the time to examine every Pauline
statement that is appealed to as "proof" that the apostle taught an
actual pre-existence of Jesus. It is not hard to read these passages in another
light when Jewish thought about predestination and pre-existence is
understood. After examining all these
Pauline texts, even the Trinitarian James Dunn is convinced that outside John's
Gospel, there is no doctrine of a literal pre-existence of Jesus in the
NT. (Christology
in the Making, p. 24)
What settles the matter, however, is the historical context of
these contentious Pauline texts. We know that Paul's refusal to impose the
keeping of the Jewish Law on Gentile converts brought him into a protracted and
bitter dispute with some of the Jerusalem Christians. We now know from
second-century Jewish Christian documents, some unearthed at Nag Hammadi in 1945-6, that this passionate controversy about
whether the OT Jewish Law should be observed followed Paul long after he was
dead. But whilst these Jewish Christian
documents vehemently denounce Paul as an enemy of the Law, not a word is said
about his departure from a strict Jewish monotheism. If Paul had been teaching
that Jesus was God or a second divine person, his opponents would surely have
highlighted this as a blasphemous repudiation of the Jewish shema.
Looking further ahead to the history of the Church in the third
and fourth centuries, we see that Christianity was plunged into a long and
sometimes violent controversy on the question of Jesus' divinity and
pre-existence. The battle raged on for hundreds of years. There was political
intrigue, clerical manipulations, shameful power-plays, riots and at times
outright bloody mayhem before the doctrine of Christ's absolute divinity was
universally imposed on pain of death throughout Christendom.
And whilst all this conflict over the divinity of Christ was
going on in the great Church, the banished Jewish believers, who were called Nazoreans or Ebionites, never
entertained the idea that Jesus was some sort of second divine person. Right
down to the fourth century we find the Ebionties
clinging to the book of Matthew as the only valid NT document. They claimed for
themselves a direct line of descent from the apostles and the original church
at
The point we want to emphasise here is that the whole history
of Jewish-Christianity, from its beginnings with the apostles in the Jerusalem
church to its final disappearance in the desert sands of the Middle East in
about the fifth century, is a stark testimony to the fact that this important
stream of the Jesus movement never did accept that Jesus was God.
Jesus in John
When we keep pressing the NT for an unambiguous witness to the
pre-existence and divinity of Jesus, the only candidate left standing for
consideration is the Gospel of John. But even here we must ask the question, Has this NT book also been misunderstood by reading it
through the lens of the Christian Creeds of the fourth century?
The Gospel of John is widely recognized to be the most
virulent, anti-Jewish book of the NT. It reflects the bitter break between
Jewish synagogue and the intra-Jewish church which took place about 85-90 AD.
When the Romans destroyed
The Fourth Gospel stands in some considerable tension with the
three Synoptic Gospels.
John has no virgin birth story and seems to assume that Jesus
is the biological son of Joseph. On a theological level, John has no need for a
virgin birth since he grounds Jesus' special relationship to God in the Word
which existed with God before time began. Whereas Mark, Matthew and Luke see
the Last Supper in terms of a Jewish Passover meal, John's Last Supper is no
Passover meal since the Jewish Passover was on the Friday evening following the
crucifixion. The Synoptic Gospels indicate that Jesus' public ministry lasted
only about 12 months. In John, Jesus' public ministry lasts at least three
years. The Synoptics have Jesus driving the money-changers from the temple
precincts only hours before his arrest and crucifixion. John puts this temple
incident three years earlier - at the commencement of Jesus' public ministry.
Mark and Matthew clearly locate the first resurrection appearance to the
disciples in
The above differences between John and the Synoptics ( and the list is by no means complete) are only superficial
and inconsequential compared with the more serious issues about the man at the
centre of it all. John's portrait of Jesus is so vastly different from the
portraits of the man in Mark, Matthew and Luke that it almost seems they could
be talking about a different person. For instance, in the Synoptic Gospels,
Jesus is presented as a sage who hardly says anything except in parables and
short, witty aphorisms. But John's Jesus does not utter one single parable. In
the Synoptics, Jesus refuses to give any sign of his authority. But John says
that Jesus frequently gives signs of his authority. But most importantly at
all, the Jesus of the Synoptics is a self-effacing man who steadfastly refuses
all titles of honour. He does not even want people to call him Rabbi, and
certainly not Messiah. He even rebukes a man who addresses him as "Good
master," saying, "Why do you call me 'Good'.
There is none good but one, and that is God."
(Matthew 19:17) He unpretentiously calls himself "the son of man" -
the human one, the son of Adam - which Vermes has shown from Jesus' own native
Aramaic tongue could never be construed as a title. Yet John has Jesus giving
long monologues about himself, and claiming the most breathtaking titles -
"I am the Bread of life," "I am the Light of the world,"
"I am the good Shepherd," and many more.
More and more Christian scholars today, both Catholic and
Protestant, recognize that the Synoptic Gospels give us a more historical
account of Jesus than the Fourth Gospel. John's presentation is a theological
reflection rather than an historical account of Jesus. As The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church puts it, "The
differences in historical value between
"The weight of modern Biblical scholarship," says
Guthrie, "tends to question the traditional idea that Christ ever claimed
to be God." ( The Rise and Decline of the Christian Empire,
p. 337) Jesus did not go around telling
people that he was God or even think that he was God or even the Messiah. There
would be good reason to question the mental health of any man who made such
claims about himself. Marcus Borg suggests a simple law that goes like this:
"Any one who thinks he is the Messiah is not the Messiah."
The book of John is now being seen as a confession of a community's
faith. This community of John (whoever he was, we don't really know) had come
to see that Jesus' life and teaching revealed God to them like nothing else had
ever done. They believed that God's Word, Wisdom, Grace, and Truth had been
uniquely enfleshed in this person - just as Paul had
said some years before, "God was in Christ." This revelation of God
in the Galilean teacher was to them the Light of the world, the Bread of life
and all those other wonderful figures of speech used in the book of John.
All the things that the Jews had traditionally ascribed to
their Torah, - Light, Bread, Water, Shepherd, Word, Truth, even agent though
which God made the world - this community now ascribed to God's new revelation
in Jesus. They believed that this revelation of God was greater than the
revelation of God given in the Torah. No wonder Rabbinic Judaism expelled them
from the synagogue!
The book of John should not be read as if Jesus actually went
around giving long monologues about himself in the language of John's Gospel.
The author of this Gospel would probably be quite amazed that anyone would take
his theological reflection about Jesus so literally. Lapide,
a contemporary Jewish scholar, suggests that John's writing is like a Jewish midrash - a form of literature that creates imaginative
speech not altogether unlike poetic licence, parabolic story and drama. But midrash, being a Jewish literary art and mode of teaching,
became completely foreign and unintelligible to Greco-Latin Christianity. It preferred
to read the book of John off literally as if it was some legal Latin document.
With these preliminary remarks, we are now ready to put the question, Does the Fourth Gospel really teach that Jesus was
God? Does this Gospel tell us that Jesus eternally pre-existed with the
Father?
More and more Christian scholars are coming to the same
conclusion of J.A.T. Robinson, who said, "The clear evidence of John is
that Jesus refused the claim to be God." (Cited in Buzzard and Hunting's Doctrine of the Trinity, p.173) Even
the late F.F. Bruce conceded shortly before his death that it is "not
clear" whether any NT writer really taught the pre-existence and Deity of
Jesus. What an amazing concession from a
man so widely regarded as the dean of conservative evangelical scholars!
If we quit reading the Gospel of John through the lens of the
fourth century Creeds, and start reading this creative NT book with some degree
of sensitivity to its Jewish thought forms, we will see that the book does not
teach what Gentile Christianity read into it for centuries.
The Fourth Gospel begins with a lengthy prologue about the Word
which existed with God from eternity. John does not say, "In the beginning
was Jesus" or "in the beginning was the Son," but "In the
beginning was the Word." John does not say that the Word was Jesus, or
that the Word was the son of God, but rather that the Word came to tabernacle
in Jesus.
The Greek word Logos has
a much richer meaning than is conveyed to us by the expression
"Word." Logos means not
only Word, but Reason, Thought, Will, Purpose, Counsel, Plan, and Wisdom, etc. Although there was a lot of
speculation about the divine Logos in contemporary Greek philosophy, John's
prologue makes much better sense when it is read against the background of the
OT and Jewish thought about the Torah. In this it was said that the Torah
existed with God from the beginning. John's prologue, moreover, reflects the
OT's personification of Wisdom as a "she" who existed with God from
the beginning. (See Proverbs 8)
The point of John's prologue is that everything starts in the
divine Logos - the Word, Plan, Purpose, Counsel, Reason and Wisdom of God. In
the fullness of time, the "glory" and "truth" of this Logos was given a fleshly or human
expression in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. John's Gospel does not say that
Jesus actually and consciously pre-existed as a son with the Father. What
pre-existed in the divine Will-Wisdom-Plan-Thought was given visible and
audible expression in human flesh, that is, in the life of a real human being.
Yet in a deeper, very Jewish sense, God's chosen Messiah did
pre-exist in that he existed in God's thought and purpose from the beginning.
As we pointed out earlier in our discussion on Paul's thought about
pre-existence, this was a well established Biblical and Jewish way of thinking.
For whatever God predestines and foreordains can be said to already exist. In
this sense, there never was a time when Jesus was not close to God, loved by
God and chosen by God. In this we encounter the mystery of eternal Love which
is without beginning as much as it is without end. He whom God loves, that is
to say, he whom God predestines and foreknows, has always existed and will
never cease to exist as far as God is concerned. So Jesus could be represented
as saying, "before Abraham was, I am," or praying that after his
death, God would grant him the glory that he had with the Father before the
world was. (John 8: 17:3)
The astonishing thing in John's theological reflection is that
he wants the believing community to understand that they too have pre-existed
in the glory of God's life and eternal love. So Jesus is represented as
declaring in his prayer to the one whom he called "the only true God (how
true to Jewish monotheism!), "The glory which you gave me I have given
them, that they may be one, as we are one." (John 17: 22) This is God's gift of eternal love and life
which has no beginning or end. As far as God is concerned, those who are loved
by him have always existed and will never cease to exist. But this can be
understood only in the framework of a strict Jewish monotheism. It has nothing
of the meaning of an Eastern re-incarnation.
Summary of Jesus in
the NT Era
In summary, on the evidence from the NT, we have to say that
none of the NT authors blur the fundamental distinction between God and Jesus
the man. This point is well put by Geza Vermes:
"None of the
Synoptic gospels try to do this. Paul, the Jew from Tarsus at home in the
Greco-Roman world, shies away from it. Even the theologising author of the
Fourth Gospel, writing a couple of generations later, shows understandable diffidence.
One well-known contemporary, by no means radical, New Testament scholar is of
the opinion that when 'God' is occasionally used apropos of Jesus in some of
the epistles of the New Testament, this usage never exceeds the notion of
exalted Lord and revelation incarnate.
"It was not
until Gentiles began to preach the Jewish Gospel to the Hellenised peoples of
the
Whether
Jesus himself would have reacted with stupefaction, anger or grief, can never
be known. One thing however is sure. When
Christianity later set out to define the meaning of son of God in its Creed,
the paraphrase it produced - 'God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God,
consubstantial with the Father' - drew its inspiration, not from the pure
language and teaching of the Galilean Jesus, nor even from Paul the Diaspora
Jew, but from the Gentile-Christian interpretation of the Gospel adapted to the
mind of the totally alien world of pagan Hellenism. (Jesus the Jew, pp. 212,213)
JESUS IN THE
GENTILE ENVIRONMENT
The doctrine that Jesus was God in the highest sense could only
have developed in the environment of Gentile Christianity. So we will now look at
the cultural and religious environment of the Gentile world to see how it
provided the soil so favourable to ideas so completely at odds with OT and
Jewish monotheism.
To start with, the NT designation of Jesus as son of God tended to take on a whole new
meaning on the lips and in the thinking of Gentiles.
In the OT and in Jewish thinking God had neither
wife or son who shared his essence in an ontological sense. There was
always one God and God was one. The term son
of God was, however, used throughout the OT and in the speech of Judaism in
an adoptive or metaphorical sense. A classical example of this is when David was
declared to be God's son on the day that he was anointed king of
On the Jewish meaning of son
of God, Vermes says, "Whereas every Jew was called son of God, the
title came to be given preferably to the just man, and in a very special sense
to the most righteous of all just men, the Messiah son of David." (Jesus the Jew, p. 195)
Karen Amstrong too is right on the
ball when she says: "The Psalms sometimes called David or the Messiah 'the
Son of God' but that was simply a way of expressing his intimacy with Yahweh.
Nobody since the return from
Son of God in the
Gentile World
When we turn to the Gentile world into which the message of
Jesus spread, son of God meant
something very different.
In the first place, the kings of the ancient world were often worshipped
as divinised sons of God. The Egyptian
Pharaoh was said to be the son of Helios, the god of the sun, not in a mere
adoptive or metaphorical sense, but in a real ontological sense. This meant
that Pharaoh was an incarnation of the god Helios.
After the Egyptian empire crumbled and the Pharaoh's
disappeared from history, the cult of Helios was kept alive at
Alexander's Greek successors founded the Seleucid dynasty in
The divine title, son of
God, was passed on to the Roman rulers. The legendary founders of
When Jesus began to be proclaimed as the son of God or anointed king (Messiah) throughout the Greco-Roman
world, it would have been difficult, if not almost impossible, not to begin to
bend the meaning of this to fit the deeply entrenched Gentile culture. The
point should not be missed from Luke's nativity story, written near the end of
the first century, that Jesus is not just born during the reign of
The Dying and
Rising Gods
Then there is the matter of other sons of God thought to be the progeny of the gods. The gods of this ancient world often came
down to impregnate some chosen woman. The father of the Greek gods, Zeus, for
instance, sired about one hundred sons through a variety of women, most of whom were said to be virgins. The most famous of these
virgin-born godmen were Archilles,
Demeter, Heracles, Apollo, Dionysus, Asclepius. Legends about them had been influenced by the
older legends of Osiris of Egypt, Attis
of Syria, Mithra of Persia, and Tammuz of
Babylon. This great pantheon
of divine men, most of them virgin born, were also what many scholars
call the "dying and rising gods" of ancient mythology. They were
always getting killed. Most of them either suffered and died like Heracles, or
in some way disappeared for a time, only to reappear again or be raised from
death to become some kind of divinity in the world above.
These dying and rising divinities of
When Celcus, the pagan critic of
Christianity in the second century, complained that Christians had obviously
copied and duplicated these pagan rites, Justin, the greatest Christian
apologist of the age, freely acknowledged that some kind of mimicry was going
on. One explanation given by Justin was that the Devil got in first and began
in mimic and pre-empt the Christian religion before it dawned on the world. At
other times, he acknowledged that it was right that the best in pagan
revelation should have been borrowed and taken up in the Christian revelation.
Turning Men into
Gods
There is one more feature of the Gentile world that is very
relevant to the development of Jesus' divinity. The age in which these ideas
developed was an age of amazing religious credulity. Men who appeared to be
unusually gifted, whether as a ruler like Augustus, a healer like Asclepius, or philosopher like Plato, were thought to have
been endowed with their gifts by a supernatural birth. Whereas the Jews had
been conditioned by centuries of monotheism never to worship any man as God,
the Gentiles seemed only too ready to acclaim that some ruler, warrior, healer
or athlete was a god. Here are three incidents recorded in the NT's book of
Acts that illustrate this Gentile proclivity.
1. "So, on an
appointed day, attired in his royal robes and seated on his rostrum, Herod
harangued them; and the populace shouted back, 'It is a god speaking, not a
man!'" (Acts
2. "When the crowds
[at Lystra] saw what Paul had done [in healing a lame
man] they shouted, in their native Lycaonian, 'The
gods have come down to us in human form.' And they called Barnabas Jupiter, and
Paul they called Mercury, because he was the spokesman. The priest of Jupiter,
whose temple was just outside the city, brought oxen and garlands to the gates,
and he and all the people were about to offer sacrifice [to Barnabas and
Paul]." (Acts 14:11-13)
3. "The rough
Islanders [at
(For a more detailed and very fascinating account of this
Gentile world of Greek heroes and virgin-born gods, and how these things were
influential in the development of Christianity, see Gregory J. Riley's One Jesus, Many Christs)
In summary, the foregoing historical evidence indicates that
the Gentile soil into which Christianity was
transplanted from its original Jewish soil, was wholly favourable and even biased
toward the transformation of Jesus from humble Galilean teacher into some kind
of divinity. All brakes that held back this development were lifted when all
traces of Jewish-Christianity was expelled or purged from a purely Gentile
Church.
The Triumph of Athanasius
In the second century, Justin the Apologist and Tertullian the father of Latin Christianity,
began to teach an actual conscious pre-existence of Jesus. Yet even then, their
Christ was a created divinity along the lines of what later became the Arian model. In the third century we
find the Bishop of Antioch, Paul Samosata, putting up
some resistance to the popular trend. He said that Jesus was simply a man in
whom the Word and Wisdom of God dwelt as in a temple. But the stream was
already moving too swiftly toward making Jesus God, so Paul Samosata's
theology was condemned by a synod at
The debate on the divinity of Jesus was really won when Athanasius appealed to one central premise that was
accepted by all parties. Redemption was defined in terms of undoing the
consequences of Adam's Fall. Athanasius reasoned
that only God himself could make an atonement for
Adam's sin against an infinite majesty, and only God could bridge the infinite gulf between man and
God. If Christ was one step removed from being God in the highest sense - as in
the competing theology of Arius - Athanasius
reasoned that this would leave us without an effective redemption. He therefore
fought for his position, by fair means and sometimes by foul, as if the
integrity of the Christian message and the salvation of the entire world
depended on it.
The victory of orthodoxy was not achieved by reasoned debate
alone. The Church was never a democratic institution, or even one in which the
laity played a significant role. The definition of orthodoxy and heresy was
worked and decided by the power-holding elite. The bishops fought over the body
of Jesus like quarrelsome geese, and issues were often settled by the big stick
of political power. Orthodoxy did not emerge from this conflict without some
blood on its hands and the smell of political corruption on its garments.
(Richard E.Rubensteins' very riveting
account of these things, in a new publication called When Jesus Became God - The Struggle to Define
Christianity During the Last Days of Rome is recommended for further
reading.)
If we today accept the same religious and mythological premises
about the Fall of man as the churchmen in the
Athanasian era did, then the Anthanasian Creed may
still be convincing. On this basis we can proceed to dismiss anything that
departs from orthodoxy as Arianism - or Sebbellianism,
Nestorianism, Adoptionism, Modalism or whatever other term the ancient Councils used
to dismiss any views that challenged orthodoxy. But according to a modern,
scientific worldview, this whole premise on which Athanasius
built his divine Christ has become untenable.
By making the Fall the starting point
or premise of its thinking about Christ, the Church has saddled humanity with
the blame for bringing all human suffering and death into this world - plus an
appalling misogyny on the premise that it all started with Eve tempting Adam in
the garden. Anyway, all temporal suffering and death was seen as some sort of
divine judgment for Adam' sin, and this as a mere down-payment on eternal
damnation. What an awful blasphemy against humanity, to say nothing of its
appalling representation of God. Yet, as we have pointed out, this was the
worldview on which Athanasius and the Christian
Church built its final, clinching argument for the absolute divinity of Christ.
THE HISTORICAL
JESUS
The most decisive evidence against the divinity of Christ rests
on the teachings of the historical Jesus himself. All that he taught was summed up in what he
kept calling "the
His own family
thought he was "outside himself," the scribes thought he was
"possessed," and other declared him "mad."…The kingdom was
his madness. He celebrated it with anyone who would join him at table, declared
everyone free in its name, broke all rules that stood in its way, and finally
gave up his life for it - or rather, gave up his life to save the only thing he
lived for. ( Thomas Sheehan, The First Coming: How the
Later Christian preaching made Jesus himself the message. But
it is quite astonishing that in all Jesus' teaching about the
Jesus' teaching about the
The Creeds of the Church have absolutely nothing to say about
Jesus' core teaching of the
This raises some very disturbing questions about the possible
identity of the Antichrist - if any reality is to be given to this mythical
figure. Apparently Peter was the first apostle to positively and publicly
identify Jesus as being the Messiah. It was on the Day of Pentecost that he
made the startling announcement that God made Jesus his Messiah when he raised
him from the dead. (Acts 2: ) Two NT authors warn the early Christians
about the real danger of embracing "another Jesus" who is called
"Antichrist." In one place it is said he would be a man who
"takes his seat in the
A Kingdom Already Present
In Jesus' teaching, the
In Jesus view of things, the arrival and presence of the
Jesus' teaching about a silent, hidden kingdom that had already
arrived was totally at odds with the Apocalyptic mood
and worldview of contemporary Judaism. In the first place, Apocalyptic thought
of the
Apocalyptic teaching was based on the view that God related to
this world in a very episodic and miraculous type of way. For instance,
the Creation/Fall myth was taken very literally and played a foundational role
in Apocalyptic. Just as God will end the world and solve all human problems
suddenly as if by the wave of his miraculous wand, so Apocalyptic thought that
at the beginning of history, God had instantly and miraculously created a
perfect man and woman, and then put them into an equally perfect paradise.
Apocalyptic had no appreciation of how the development of a
human language, culture and character would take an enormous amount of time if
the end product was to be truly human. Even God could not build
Apocalyptic depicted
This Apocalyptic background only served to make the contrast of
Jesus' "good news of the kingdom" even more startling. Jesus insisted
that the arrival of God's kingdom in the midst of the human situation was not
accompanied by any signs or outward show. This kind of teaching would have been
a scandal in Jewish circles - like someone today telling Christians in our day there is no Second
Coming!
(The best work in recovering this non-Apocalyptic Jesus is
found in the publications of - Robert Funk, Roy Hoover, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Robert Miller, Stephen Patterson and
other scholars of the Jesus Seminar. But Thomas Sheehan's chapter on the Kingdom of God in The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity stands
out as a brilliant jewel.)
The
Some scholars interpret the term "
So instead of interpreting the
It is not correct, however, to say that Jesus' teaching was wholly
new. Unlike Jewish Apocalyptic, the great OT prophets also believed that God's
kingdom was a present reality and that history was the scene of God's presence
rather than his absence. There are even passages that eloquently speak of God's
fatherly or even motherly care for humanity, especially for the oppressed. The
prophets had no theology of the Fall and God's
withdrawal from the world. In the spirit of the OT prophets, Jesus clothed
their teaching of God's essential presence in the world and his fatherly care
for humanity with freshness and power.
In his teaching of the kingdom - the loving presence of the
Abba Father - Jesus also had nothing to say about the Fall,
much less a teaching about an offended God withdrawing from the earth to his
high heaven and shutting the gate. And unlike the Christian Creeds and
theologians, Jesus had nothing to say about some great gulf between humanity
and the Abba Father that needed to be bridged. Not a bit of it! As far as Jesus
was concerned, God never left, and he never needed anyone to unlock heaven's
gate to give the human family free access to his presence.
As Thomas Sheehan brilliantly sums up the meaning of Jesus'
God, as God, had
identified himself without remainder with his people. The reign of God means
the incarnation of God. This entirely human orientation of the Father - the
loving, incarnate presence of the heretofore distant Sovereign - marked the
radical newness of Jesus' message of God's reign. The kingdom was not something
separate from God, like a spiritual welfare state that a benign heavenly
monarch might set up for his faithful subjects. Nor was it any form of
religion. The
This is the reason why Jesus always spoke of the
Jesus called himself the son of man. This was not a title. It
simply meant son of Adam, the human one,
this man, just human, etc. On the face of it, this appeared to be a
self-effacing, even demeaning name to give to oneself. His was an age when each
group of people wanted to sacralize their identity as special and above the
common crowd of humanity. But Jesus knew there was a dignity and an authority about being truly human that was greater than any title that
any religious or political system could conjure up.
To be human is "the image and likeness of God."
(Genesis 2:28: Psalm 8:5-8) "God is a spirit," said Jesus, and even
as the spirit of the Abba Father, he has no hands or voice or face. The human
hands, voice or face are the only hands, voice or face that God will ever have
in this world; and the neighbour, whether sick or well, poor or rich, hungry or
well fed, happy or sad, is the only presence that God has in this world. Hence,
to paraphrase the words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount, "You are
the light of the world, a city set upon a hill…You are the salt of the
earth…Let men see your good works [your simple acts of being human] in such a
way that they will come to see what your Abba Father is like."
God Revealed Only
In and Through Humanity
This means that every quest or claim to know God-in-himself is
a religious delusion. For God-in-himself is unsearchable, unimaginable,
incomprehensible, unthinkable, unfathomable, unknowable, and as the Hebrews
used to say about his name, unpronounceable.
The religious burden of trying to conjure up love for
God-in-himself is a crushing burden that humanity has never been able to carry.
Devotion to this unknowable, abstract God out there or up there has driven
people crazy enough to resent, neglect, abuse, hate, persecute and slaughter
millions of people. There is no violence on earth so
bad as religious violence.
When Jesus replaced devotion to a God-in-himself with devotion
to a God-with-humanity, he conflated the two great commandments of the Law -
love of God and love of neighbour - into one. There is now no higher
commandment than love of fellow man. The so-called golden rule "is the Law
and prophets."
This explains the mysterious absence of any emphasis on the
so-called "higher" or "first" great commandment in the
teachings of Jesus. Rather than repeat the tired old religious clichés about
putting God first, Jesus even said that we ought to put reconciliation with our
brother before the worship of God. As Sheehan puts it:
Henceforth,
according to the prophet from
The idea that there is some sort of vertical authority out
there or up that takes precedence over love of neighbour has caused more
divisions, hatreds and blood-letting than anything else in the history of
mankind. This is what drove Saul of Tarsus to persecute the early Christians.
It caused the Church to banish or burn Jews and heretics. It drove Calvin to
execute Servetus and the Puritans to flog the
Quakers. It still drives the religious extremists in our day to burn, bomb, or
shoot up others out of devotion to a God who takes precedence over humanity.
But by conflating the two great commandments into one, Jesus laid the axe at
the root of all religiously inspired acts of inhumanity.
An Unbrokered Access to God
In Jesus teaching of the
It is true, of course, that the Church put Jesus in the centre
of things as the essential link between God and man, but in doing this it
altogether lost Jesus' vision of the kingdom and set up religion again with its
brokered access to God. But Jesus did not even talk about salvation in the Christian
sense. In his view of things, humanity has never existed outside of God's
saving embrace. "Fear not," "don't be anxious about
anything," "fear not him who can kill the body," he was always
saying, because the Abba Father is with you and in you - in your working,
loving, playing, eating, drinking, success, failure, suffering and dying. He is
nearer to you than your hands and feet or even closer than your own breathe and
heartbeat. His care for us goes back beyond the dawn of the first human consciousness
itself to the depth of an eternal love that planned for this emerging humanity
in the eternal counsels of God. There never was a time when we did not exist or
will ever cease to exist in the heart of the Abba Father.
It was this stark, clear vision of the kingdom that made this
bare-foot Galilean itinerant appear so eccentric,
possessed, and out of his tree even to his own family, including his own
mother. How else could we explain some of his more outrageous one-liners which
seemed to express such a reckless disregard for family ties or prudent
financial planning - statements like "Let the dead bury their dead,"
"Hate father and mother and your own life also," "Sell what you
have and give it away," "Go barefoot and take no clothing or purse for your journey,"
"Give to everyone who asks and don't expect to get it back," etc. As
one very perceptive writer observed, it is far easier just to make him into a
worshipped divinity than trying to take his rugged perspective on living too
seriously. That's what the followers of Zoaraster and
the Budda did too!
The End of Religion
All of these features of Jesus' teaching are summed up in what
may be called the end and abolition of religion. It is the greatest irony that
the greatest religious iconoclast of them all is said to be the founder of a
new religion! Or that he became an object of religious devotion! This is like
making Adam Smith the patron saint of the Communist state. As Robert Funk,
founder of the Jesus Seminar, says:
When the name of Jesus
is mentioned, "religion" is assumed to be the subject. But, in fact,
the Jesus of whom we catch glimpses in the gospels may be said to have been
irreligious, irreverent, and impious. The first word he said, as Paul Tillich once remarked, was a word against religion in its
habituated form; because he was indifferent to the formal practice of religion,
he is said to have profaned the temple, the sabbath,
and breached the purity regulations of his own legacy; most important of all,
he spoke of the kingdom of God in profane terms - that is, nonreligiously…The
inauguration of a priesthood and clergy therefore appears to inimical to Jesus
wishes."
(Honest to Jesus, p.302)
Sheehan, another scholar in the Jesus Seminar, says,
His proclamation
marked the death of religion and religion's God, and heralded the beginning of
the post-religious experience: the abdication of "God" in favour of
his hidden presence among human beings…And when God arrives on the scene, Jesus
seemed to say, all go-betweens, including religion itself, are shattered. Who
needs them? The Father is here! (Ibid. chapter on The
JESUS' VISION OF
THE KINGDOM LOST:
RELIGION RE-ESTABLISHED
The break between Jesus' teaching about the
Jesus' gospel of the kingdom was about God-with man, God
incarnated in the whole of humanity, God in and with my neighbour on this earth here and now! This means God present in what looks like the
mess, the confusion and the sinfulness of an emerging humanity in this
historical process. It means God as the ubiquitous spirit and as the
"still small voice" - prompting and inspiring a developing humanity
into the likeness and image of God - not in coercion, not in grand episodes of
intervention, but as the spirit of suasion, leavening this human ferment toward
being truly human as man was meant to be.
The Christian Church also proclaimed a message of God-with-man.
This was God incarnated in just one man at his own right hand in heaven. God
was with man only in heaven! He was with this man for a fleeting moment on this
earth, but it was a man born of a virgin (Catholicism says an immaculately
conceived virgin), and a man whose absolute sinless perfection was equal to
God's infinite righteousness. This man is no longer on this earth, but he has
been withdrawn to heaven.
Here we confront again this withdrawn-from-this-earth-to his
high-heaven-God of Apocalyptic. When this is combined with the Augustinian
doctrine of original sin, this is a God who is so elevated and separated from
this earth that he could not even touch sinful humanity with a disinfected
pole. He is with a man in heaven, this mythical man of the Creeds who has been
shorn of historical content and divested of his teaching about the
This aloof, withdrawn-to-his-high-heaven, shutting-the gate-God
of Apocalyptic is said to mediate his presence to this earth only through the
divine Jesus, plus the intercession of Mary and the saints (in the Catholic tradition)
and through the sacraments and priestly or clerical ministrations of the Church - out of which,
according to Christian orthodoxy, no one can be saved. What we have therefore
in the teaching of the Church is a return to religion and Apocalyptic. To cite
Sheehan again,
Jesus
had freed himself from religion and apocalypse by transforming hope into
charity and by recasting eschatology as present liberation. But his disciples
redirected their attention into a fantastic future and thus reinstated Jesus into
the religion he had left behind. They remade God's presence-among-men into
God's presence-yet-to-come and eventually into Jesus himself. Henceforth one's
relation to God (who Jesus had said was already present) was determined by
one's relation to Jesus (who the disciples now said was temporarily absent). (Ibid. chapter on The Apocalyptic Judge)
Sheehan also makes the point that the more the followers of
Jesus elevated his status, the further they got away from his teaching about
the kingdom.
The return to religion is illustrated by the Church's return to
the practice of fasting. Early in the second century fasting became a rigorous
and dreary exercise that put Jewish fasting in the shade for its morbid
flagellation of the body. Jesus had refused to fast, for as he said, "The
children of the bridechamber cannot fast when the
bridegroom is with them." In this
parable, Jesus was not referring to himself. He used a familiar OT figure of
speech in which God was said to be the husband of
Religion and Apocalyptic are human attempts to deal with the
historical despair caused by the absence rather than the presence of God. The
Christian Apocalypse makes this telling admission when it says that in the
future, no temple for the practice of religion will be needed when God finally
comes to dwell among his fully restored and sinless people. (See Revelation 2l:3,22). But this religionless
existence is all transposed from the present, as in Jesus' teaching, to the
future, as in the Christian Apocalypse.
In Jesus' teaching, God dwells with imperfect, emerging
humanity in the here and now. But according to Christian teaching, God will
dwell with the saved only after all their human filth has all been washed away.
This reflects an aloof father who will kiss and cuddle the child only after the
nanny has changed the nappies, washed the runny nose and made it acceptable
with perfume. In Christian theology, no mortal humanity could dare approach the
awful presence of God's infinite majesty apart from all the mediatorial
provisions of the Christian religion. The absolute centre-piece of this religious
mediation is the divinity of Jesus.
THE FRUITS OF
JESUS' DIVINITY
Having traced the history of how the doctrine of Jesus'
divinity developed, we need to look at the fruits of this doctrine. James
Madison, one of the founding fathers of the American nation, was not too
flattering about the fruits of the Christian religion. He wrote,
During almost
fifteen centuries the legal establishment known as Christianity has been on
trial and what have been the fruits, more or less, in all places? These are the
fruits: pride, indolence, ignorance and arrogance in the clergy. Ignorance,
arrogance and servility in the laity, and in both clergy
and laity, superstition, bigotry and persecution."
Christianity has been guilty of systematic and sustained crimes
of enormous proportions against humanity. When this painful evidence is
reviewed, it is sometimes suggested that these crimes against humanity were the
result of lapses from true Christianity. But on the contrary, we need to see
that these evils were the expression of authentic Christianity, the heart of
which was the myth of Jesus' divinity.
Once the Church took the position that the whole of the
inexhaustible reality of God had been manifested in just one human being,
Christianity became the most exclusive
cult of salvation that this world has ever seen. The Church became the
sole custodian of the heavenly treasures. Every other religion outside of
Christianity had to be counted as darkness, superstition and ignorance.
In our modern Global Village, churchmen are trying to
re-interpret this historic Christian exclusiveness to make it sound less
arrogant and less offensive to non-Christians; but it is not really possible to
exorcise this exclusive element from the Christian tradition as long as the
central pillar of Jesus' divinity remains. When the Church elevated Jesus to
the status of God, it became impaled on the stake of its own special status.
This Christian exclusiveness - no saving truth outside of Christianity - is a
burden that many thinking Christians would like to be rid of. It smacks of
being a bad neighbour. It is essentially inhuman. Rosemary Ruether
calls it "an outrageous and absurd religious chauvinism." And it is
totally at odds with both the spirit and teaching of the historical Jesus.
By claiming that the total revelation of God was found only in
one man, the Church could not avoid becoming the most totalitarian system of religion that the world has ever
seen. In order to be true to its own
confession, the Church had to claim for its religion total truth and total
allegiance.
The next step was to enforce these claims with a reign of
crushing religious intolerance and persecution. If the Church was in possession
of the exclusive and total revelation of God in its
divine Man, why should it tolerate any rival insights into the mysteries of God
or the human condition?
Instead of carrying on Jesus' message of the kingdom, the
Church turned the messenger into the message. Whilst those who believed its
ever expanding claims made about Jesus were promised salvation to life eternal,
those who did not make the right noises about Jesus' status were said to be
damned and deserving of divine punishments. Even St. Paul got carried away in
his Apocalyptic thought when he said that his Jesus would come in flaming fire
to wreck vengeance on those who do not obey his gospel (2 Thessalonians 1:8)
This statement is tame, however, compared with the blood thirsty woes, plagues
and torments that the Book of Revelation heaps on everyone outside the little
Christian cult.
The OT story of Jonah seems to illustrate the law that those
who start out declaring that certain people are going to be punished,
will end up hoping or even demanding that they should be punished. The Book of Revelation,
which depicts the Christian cult as rejoicing in the divine punishments meted
out to their opponents, is an excellent example of this law at work. The most
objectionable feature of the Christian message right from the beginning was its
tendency to cajole and threaten people into believing its claims about Jesus.
The logical end to this kind of intellectual blackmail was physical thuggery to
enforce the faith. The intellectual thumb-screws were eventually followed by
the real thumb-screws of the Inquisition.
The doctrine that Jesus is God is not just one Christian
doctrine among many. It is so much the
heart and essence of Christianity that everything else is only a corollary of
that central issue. We have already seen that this central Christian teaching
was not fully established until it was championed by Athanasius
in the 4th Century. The battle for the divinity of Jesus was not won
without enormous conflict, political intrigue and even some bloodshed. But even then, many of
the Barbarian kingdoms which settled on the
Having obtained the support of the political power, the Church
set about to systematically destroy the literature, learning, art, medicine,
science and culture of the pagan world, all of which was judged as demonic.
There is also reason to suspect that the Church was anxious to bury the
evidence of how extensively it had borrowed much of its thought and practices
from the pagan world.
It was this Christian exclusiveness, totalitarianism and
religious intolerance that played a significant role in the onset of the Dark
Ages. Whilst the Islamic world kept learning alive, created universities and
hospitals, and even granted a great measure of religious freedom to Jews and
Christians in countries under its jurisdiction, Christian Europe clung to its
divine Jesus and ruthlessly suppressed the human spirit.
The Catholic author Walbert Buhlmann (God's
Chosen Peoples) laments that the Christian religion has shed more blood
than any rival religion. The chief issue in all this blood-letting, whether of
Jews, Muslims or dissenters from within its own ranks, was the divinity of
Jesus. The systematic persecution of the Jews was the official policy of the
Church, but on the authority of Augustine, it always stopped short of genocide.
He said that the suffering of the Jewish people was to stand as a testimony to
their rejection of Jesus' divinity. As for dissenters who questioned the
absolute divinity of Jesus from within Christendom, it was the official policy
of the Church for centuries to banish or burn them.
Even the Reformers did not abandon this policy, as Calvin
proved when he had Servetus burned at the stake. Over
in
When the Christian Crusaders invaded the Holy Lands, they were
stunned to discover a
Neither Catholics or Protestants seemed to recognize
that their centuries of brutal religious intolerance was desperately inhuman.
The triumph for religious tolerance was largely the fruit of the Enlightenment,
the age of science and the triumph of liberal democracies. In many cases,
the modern secular powers stepped in to prevent religious conflicts boiling
over into persecution and blood-letting. But above all, it was an emerging
human consciousness that judged religious intolerance to be totally inhuman and
totally unacceptable.
We observed earlier that the notion of a God-in-himself, out
there or up there, combined with the idea that devotion to this kind of God
must take precedence over any human considerations, is the most dangerous and
destructive idea that has ever been let loose on this planet. Fired with
religious devotion for this abstract God, there is nothing humans will not do
to dehumanise and crush one another. Christianity has proved that it is no
exception when it comes to religiously inspired violence. In
In little Christian sects, even the pacifist ones who will not
participate in any form of military bloodshed, members who step out of line are
shunned, emotionally battered and subjected to all kinds of inhuman treatment,
especially if the divinity of Jesus is called into question. The popes in these
little Christian sects are far more despotic than the big pope in
This inhuman treatment of dissenters in the name of the divine Jesus
extends to the world of Christian scholarship. A case in point is the vitriolic
abuse that is currently heaped on the scholars of the Jesus Seminar whose only crime is that they are using their best
endeavours to recover the historical Jesus. As one Seminar fellow said in a
recent publication,
"…some critics
of the Seminar denounce
it in language that is rancorous and sometimes venomous. The
polemical rhetoric of these critics is the ugliest I have ever encountered in
scholarly writing. The operative assumption of these scholars and of the editorial committees who
approve their writing for publication is that it is proper not only to attack
opponent's ideas but also to insult them personally, to impugn their intellectual
honesty, and even their religious commitments. Perhaps I am saddened more than
others by this verbal abuse because I belong to the group at which it is
aimed." ( Robert
J. Miller, The Jesus Seminar and its
Critics, pp. 76-77)
The point that cries out for attention here is that Christianity
has shed rivers of blood and bruised multitudes of people for the sake of
Jesus' status, but never for his teaching. No one could ever be motived to
persecute or injure his fellow man by following what the historical Jesus said
or did. No one could possibly do these brutal things to his fellow men if he
believed the teaching of the historical Jesus about God being present only in
and with the neighbour - and it makes no difference whether that neighbour is a
Jew, a Muslim, a heretic, an Atheist or any kind of "sinner." The God of the historical Jesus was equally
present in all and to all of humanity without distinction.
It would be remiss of us if we did not freely acknowledge that
the spirit of the historical Jesus was often given expression within the
Christian movement. For in spite of its theology, the Church did carry a
witness to the historical Jesus in its NT, and this has always inspired a vast
amount of humanitarian work carried on within the Church. We gladly salute the
expression of this human spirit in the lives of people like St. Francis,
Abelard, John Milton, William Wilberforce, Mother Teresa and countless others
dedicated in giving expression to a true human spirit.
Besides the spirit of exclusiveness, totalitarianism,
intolerance and persecution which has marked so much of Christian history,
there are a great number of inhuman practices which were not only sanctioned by
the Church, but which were vigorously advocated for centuries. We refer to the
Church's support for the institution of slavery until very modern times, an
attitude to women which ranged all the way from their subordination to the
downright misogyny of the Church fathers, the suppression of civil rights,
support for the divine rights of kings over against democratic freedoms,
European supremacy and crass racism, state patronage of the institutions of the
Church and the enforcement of Christian teaching on the rest of society,
opposition to scientific knowledge and resistance to the age of Enlightenment
and modern Biblical scholarship - just to name a few inhuman things. (See John
Hick's Non-Absoluteness of Christianity,
pp. 17-30)
If the divinity of Jesus was the bright Light
shining in a dark place, as the Christian religion has always maintained, how
was it that all these inhuman practices thrived in the presence of this great
Light? Or was this Light so heavenly that it was of no earthly use?
The Christian movement can't even claim that it was the first
to pioneer human liberation in any of the above areas. Very often the Church
resisted progress and
dragged its feet in the name of some kind of loyalty to its divine Jesus and
the Bible. It was generally the influence of the Enlightenment, the age of
science, or liberal humanism that blazed the trail in these human reforms. Or
perhaps we could say it was an emerging human consciousness working throughout
the world in general that caused even the Church to adjust its practices to be
more in line with an advancing human consciousness. The impetus for change
certainly didn't come from the Church's theology.
The question needs to be asked whether there was a relationship
between the Church's theology centred in the divinity of Jesus and these
inhuman practices. Of course there was a connection! The inhuman practices were
the fruit of its inhuman theology. If the Christian movement thinks it can
change its practices in so many areas without changing its theology, it is
cutting down the tops of the tree but leaving the roots.
At the end of the day, the divinity of Jesus has to be judged
by its history and its fruits.
A POSTLOGUE ON THE
MODERN WORLDVIEW
Jesus' teaching about the
In the teaching of Jesus, the
The religious imagination about aFall
of man and an offended God withdrawing to heaven is completely out of place in
a modern cosmology. (Does even a heaven
up there make any sense in the context of a scientific cosmology?) It is also
completely out of place in Jesus' vision of the kingdom. Unlike his
contemporaries, he did not think that people got sick or died as a result of
anyone's sin either now or in the past. His God never held this world to ransom
over some human mistake in the past or in the present. What was important to
him was not the sins people had committed - he never even called upon them to
repent on that account - but whether they accepted the scandalous generosity of
the Abba Father's forgiving presence among them.
People with an enlightened modern worldview will no longer
accept the proposition that God only talks to one group of people in the entire
world - at first the Jews and then the Church. The claim that the Christian
religion is the one and only true religion that God can work through, or that
the Church alone holds the keys to the kingdom of God is dismissed nowadays as
a piece of narrow-minded sectarian nonsense. And rightly so, for this is an age
in which there has been a lot of progress in important human issues such as
non-discrimination in regard to race, gender equality, religious tolerance,
human rights, environmental awareness, and justice for the disadvantaged. This
emerging human consciousness is not confined to the Church or to any one group
of people, but is spread over the face of the earth like Jesus'
The Church should stop trying to make people feel guilty about
not being religious. Becoming religious and becoming human are
not the same thing. The prophets of the
OT were no great fans of the religious scene in their day, and Jesus carried on
where they left off. He removed all distinctions between the sacred world and
the secular world. Everything, even the
In the light of Jesus' teaching about God-with-man on this
earth in the here and now, we need to redefine the meaning of a true
"believer." Since Jesus never put himself forward as an object of
faith, much less did he want to become the substance of the gospel, we can
think about dropping the Church's teaching about "faith in Jesus."
This may be the Church's idea of the gospel, even in NT times, but it was not
Jesus' idea about the content of the gospel. And if we are also to abandon
faith in the God-in-himself up there or out there, we must also conclude that
God is not going to be upset with anyone who concludes that this God of
religion is unbelievable. If the God we are left with is the God who is in and
with our neighbour, then faith in humanity and love for the neighbour is the
only encounter with God that is possible, no matter what handle one tries to
place on that stupendous reality. No one could say it better than this NT
passage: "He who lives in love, lives in God and God lives in him." ( 1 John