Robert D. Brinsmead
Duranbah, NSW 2487,
New Year Essay – 2001:
THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE JESUS OF HISTORY AND THE JESUS OF
CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION
About 200 years ago, a few NT scholars started to
draw attention to the distinction between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of
Christian interpretation. One of the pioneers in this field lost his chair at
his university for his "subversive" observations. Another scholar who
came to similar conclusions had his findings published posthumously. This illustrates
the extreme reluctance on the part of the Christian world at that time to even
consider the possibility that any distinction existed between the Jesus of
history and the Jesus of Christian interpretation.
About a hundred years ago, Albert Sweitzer launched what is now called the "first
quest" for the historical Jesus. The Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars
who transcend denominational affiliations, are
currently on the forefront of what is now called the "third quest"
for the historical Jesus.
Out of all this ferment, one
significant advancement has been made: the distinction between the Jesus
of history and the Jesus of Christian interpretation is now widely acknowledged
among both Catholic and Protestant scholars. A good Catholic example of this is
Alfred Nolan's very popular Jesus Before Christianity.
One of the best known Protestant examples is Marcus Borg's “Meeting Jesus Again For
the First Time.”
Whilst Christians were slowly and sometimes
grudgingly coming around to admit the validity of any distinction,
non-Christian admirers of Jesus had always recognized a distinction. One of the
most celebrated of these was Gandhi. His politics of non-violence was inspired,
at least in part, by the teachings of Jesus. When he was asked what was the greatest hindrance to the message of Jesus reaching
Martin Buber, a Jewish
thinker of universal distinction and respect has said, "I am more than
ever certain that a great place belongs to [Jesus] in
American Christians are often quite surprised and
shocked to learn that the revered founding fathers of their nation were so
ruthlessly critical of the Christian religion.
James Madison declared that Christianity bore the
fruits of "superstition, bigotry and persecution." John Adams
contrasted the Gospels, which he admired, with the "foolish trumpery that
we find in
Christianity."
Atheist
thinkers have often made a distinction between the Jesus of history and the
Jesus of Christian interpretation. Bertrand Russell dismissed Christian
theology as "an outline of intellectual rubbish," but he retained a
lot of respect for the Jesus of history.
There is now an Atheists for
An example of this is Thomas Sheehan's very
excellent First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity.
These non-Christian sources are cited simply to
illustrate that there now appears to be a broad consensus among Christian and
non-Christian thinkers alike that, at least for discussion purposes, we need to
acknowledge the difference between what is history and what is interpretation.
This essay is not going to propose that we abandon
all interpretations of the Jesus of history. That is manifestly impossible.
Even those who are not convinced about the Christian interpretation of his
history have their own interpretations. Vermes, for
instance, sees Jesus fulfilling a role similar to a number of other Galilean
holy men (Hasidic rabbis) who were known to that era.
Being human means that we are
always driven to find meaning, not only in our own lives, but in the lives of
others. That is why humans are addicted to telling stories and
listening, reading or watching stories. Stories give us insights into the
meaning of the human condition with its joys, suffering, disappointments, loves
and contradictions. Jesus was a master story-teller.
His life, no less than the stories that he told,
demand some kind of interpretation. We have to make something out of the facts
of his history.
This paper raises the question being asked all over
the world today by an increasing number of both Catholic and Protestant
scholars: Can the Jesus of Christian interpretation continue to be satisfying
and convincing? Is the Jesus of the
Christian creeds the real Jesus of history?
The
Christian Interpretation Re-examined
The heart of Christian interpretation is what
theology calls "the Person and Work of Christ." Under the heading of
Person is the doctrine of the Incarnation, meaning that God appeared on this earth
in the human form of Jesus of Nazareth.
Work refers primarily to his death on the cross as an
atonement for sin.
It has often
been said that the heart of the Catholic faith is the mystery of the
Incarnation, while the heart of the Protestant faith is the atoning sacrifice
made on the cross for human salvation. If there is any difference here, it is
one of emphasis rather than substance, for both branches of the church hold to
essentially the same doctrine of the Person and Work of Christ.
As we have already pointed out, no one is ever
going to prove one way or the other whether Jesus was divine or whether his
death on the cross was a blood atonement for human
salvation. We can only ask if such statements about his Person and Work are
still satisfying and convincing. After two hundred years of Biblical
scholarship, and after three quests for the historical Jesus in the last one
hundred years, is the Jesus of Christian interpretation compatible with the
Jesus of history?
Everyone, of course, has to answer these questions
before his own conscience and to his own satisfaction. What I want to do in
this paper is to suggest a methodology that may prove the most helpful to those
willing to undertake a re-examination of the Christian interpretation of the Jesus
of history.
Instead of trying to marshal all kinds of arguments
and proof-texts to use one way or another, we will simply try to understand how
and why Christian interpretation developed the way it did.
All ideas have a history of development, and Christian
ideas are no exception. One of the best ways to evaluate an idea is to
understand how that idea developed. This is a big picture approach, or at least
it looks at the big picture before it tries to grapple with a lot of the fine
detail.
Any good teacher will tell you that this is the
best way to get a handle on any subject. It is also the way Albert Einstein
worked out his theory of relativity and the way Stephen Hawking does his
astronomy.
If the reader will excuse a personal illustration,
I grew up in a Christian sect which had its own doctrinal icon called "the
investigative judgment."
I was not the first one in the ranks to call this
sectarian doctrine into question, but it was clear that the questions about it
were not going to disappear. I finally decided that the best way to evaluate
this teaching was to investigate all the steps in the development of the idea
between 1833 and 1857. When I understood the history of how the idea was
developed step by step, it was no more convincing to me than the story of Jack
and the Beanstalk.
How Did
the Christian Interpretation of Jesus' Death Develop?
In Jesus' death on charges of blasphemy and
sedition, the early Christians not only had to come to terms with his tragic
death, but they were hard pressed to explain an embarrassing scandal. Jesus had
been executed as just another bandit messiah from
The early
Christians were hard put to explain the scandal of his death.
Eventually they proposed that there was more to his
death than the tragic mistake that met the eye. Somehow God was involved in his
execution too! He had ordained that
Jesus should be slain as a blood sacrifice for our benefit. His death was said
to be a propitiation "for our sins."
This interpretation of Jesus' death found its first
cogent expression in the gospel according to Paul. Then it rapidly took hold as
the view of things most satisfying to the early Christians.
Paul said
almost nothing about the historical circumstances of Jesus' death.
He only had eyes for the apocalyptic dimension of
things – the supra-historical, end-time act of atonement by which the world was
redeemed and somehow brought back into the embrace of Almighty God. In Paul's
who-dunit story, he lets us into an amazing secret.
The prime mover in the death of Jesus was not Jewish quislings or Roman
executioners. They were merely the pawns in a grander purpose. It was God
himself who allowed and even ordained it all to happen! It was God who
"set him forth" to die. God was the one who "offered him up for
us all."
Paul's interpretation is not rounded out in any
kind of systematic theory of atonement. Answering such questions as "Why
did he have to die in order to save us?" spawned all kinds of theories of
the atonement. The most persuasive theories came from men of a very legal turn
of mind - Tertullian, Athanasius,
Augustine, Anselm and Calvin. The doctrine came to its fullest and most logical
expression in Protestantism's most celebrated lawyer and theologian -John
Calvin. His theory of the penal or substitutionary
atonement was skillfully crafted to answer all the legal questions concerning
the divine jurisprudence. It became the heart of Protestant orthodoxy and has
not undergone any development since. Catholic teaching, on the other hand, has
always subscribed in general terms to the doctrine of the atonement, but it has
preferred to emphasize the mystery of Christ's death without trying to answer
too many questions with legal explanations.
When we examine the background to the whole idea of
making atonement by some kind of bloody sacrifice, it becomes clear that there
are ideas here that did not originate with the early Christians. Joseph
Campbell's multi-volume series on Primitive Myths, Oriental Myths, and
Occidental Myths demonstrate that when it comes to blood sacrifices, there is
nothing new under the sun, including the Christian one. What we are dealing
with here are ideas that have been common to humanity right back to the
beginnings of human history.
From the dawn of human consciousness, human beings
started asking question about the human condition. What is the cause of
suffering? Why do evil things such as drought, crop failures, earthquakes, floods, wild beasts, diseases
and enemies come to destroy our homes or our lives? Why are we cursed with pain
and death? Why do we have to struggle to survive in a hostile world?
The world of the nuclear Near East, the cradle of
civilization, shared some creation myths that were designed to provide answers
to these questions about the human condition. Although the myths varied from
country to country and from culture to culture, they had a common theme. There
was a golden age at the beginning of creation when heaven and earth were much
closer in that men and the gods were on much friendlier terms. This all changed
when the gods became offended, and then as a pay-back, they punished humans
with all the miseries of the human condition.
The Hebrew Bible had its own version of what was
essentially the same myth. That the Jews borrowed their creation story from
Babylonian sources has been well documented by many OT scholars. The Jews encountered the Babylonian creation
myths during their Exile. They refined them by eliminating some of their pagan
crudities, and then recycled them in the setting of a Jewish monotheism. There
are also remarkable parallels between the OT story of creation and earlier ones
found in the Persian religion of Zoroaster.
In the OT story, man's fall from an original state
of innocence resulted in the snake crawling on its belly, women having pain in
childbirth, women being made subordinate to men, humans being made to sweat to
survive in a harsh environment, human shame about being the one naked animal,
separation from a God who withdrew to his high heaven, and if that was not
enough, the curse of death upon the whole human race. A heavy pay-back indeed for
a deed that was inspired by ordinary human curiosity!
Other versions of this myth have been found all
over the earth - in the jungles of
In this kind of world-view, every human set-back or
calamity - whether it be crop failure, military
defeat, sickness or the threat of death – was thought to be some pay-back of an
offended deity. This was a world in which the whole cosmic arrangement had to
be kept in equilibrium by adequate pay-back. Any failure to balance things up
would put the universe out of balance, jeopardizing the orderly cycle of
reproduction, harvests and life itself. The gods had to maintain the balance by
getting even with retributive justice. And man himself had to maintain the
balance by getting even with pay-back justice too. As the old Babylonian code
of King Hammurabi decreed, there must be an eye for
an eye and a tooth for a tooth. This Babylonian code was copied straight into
the priestly writings of the Hebrew Bible. And we might add that the
head-hunting tribes of
In its most primitive form, atonement or pay-back
took the form of offering human sacrifices to the gods. Screaming children
(generally the first born) slaves or other hapless victims were regularly slain
on altars or fed into ritual furnaces to make atonement to the gods and to
bridge the gulf between heaven and earth.
Although generally frowned on, the offering of
human sacrifices appeared from time to time in the history of the Old Testament
people. At one time, even God demanded that the seven sons of King Saul be
hanged to make an atonement for a wrong done to the Gibeonites. Only after this atonement had been made did God
stop killing the Israelites with a pestilence.
On another occasion, God is represented as telling
Abraham to offer up his son on a sacred mountain. Abraham proceeds to impress
God with his willingness to do it. (An enlightened society, of course, would
lock up an old man who intended doing any such thing.) But just as the old man
was about to thrust the knife into his son, God intervened to provide a ram to
take Isaac's place on the altar of death.
There is more than a grain of truth in this
appalling legend, however, because the story suggests how more enlightened
human societies began to slaughter animals instead of humans in their religious
rituals.
It appears also that the rite of circumcision originally
began as a substitute for human sacrifice in some primitive societies. This is
even suggested in the Biblical story wherein Yahweh threatened to kill Moses'
two sons. They were saved when their mother hurriedly circumcised them with a
sharp rock -hardly the hygienic procedure that some practice today!
About the 8th century BC, which some scholars
suggest was the beginning of historical consciousness,
some great reformers began to appear in different parts of the world. They had
a new spiritual and ethical vision for humanity that rose above shallow
tribalism or priestly ritualism.
Among these reformers were the great Hebrew
prophets. They vehemently refused to see any value at all in the offering of
sacrifices. They passionately called for the practice of a new kind of justice
that had nothing to do with making any blood atonement. The kind of justice
that God wants, they said, was the kind of justice that God exhibited when he
freed some oppressed slaves in the beginnings of
Not offering firstborn children as a pay-back for
human sin! Only a compassionate kind of justice - doing the human thing - for
all your fellow men!
The prophets were generally persecuted or put to
death by a priesthood bent on retaining their privilege and power. They ate the
meat of the animal sacrifices and were not amused by the prospect of the
prophets drying up their religious trade. Yet the witness of the prophets was
preserved in the OT side by side with the priestly writings - the prophets
speaking of a saving justice for the oppressed, and the priestly writings
speaking of making atonement in sacrificial rituals.
We need to keep these two OT streams in mind, for
when we come to the formative Christian years, we find the same two streams
represented in the Jesus of history and the Jesus of Christian interpretation.
One stream embodies the prophetic passion about a justice for the oppressed,
while the other takes up the priestly tradition of making atonement with blood
sacrifice.
Before we get to this very crucial point of this
early Christian development, however, we need to trace a couple of further
trends that played a role in the Christian interpretation of Jesus' death.
The first
concerns Judaism's tradition of "the suffering servant."
The Jewish return to their homeland after their
Babylonian Exile inspired some of the most beautiful poetry every written in
any language. This is now known as the Second Isaiah. It contains a series of
songs about a "servant of Yahweh."
The servant is a poetic metaphor for the Jewish remnant which suffered
and survived the Exile. In a famous passage in chapter 53, this remnant is
depicted as a suffering servant who is punished by Yahweh on account of the
nation's sins. That the Exile was a well deserved chastening of the Jewish
nation had already been proclaimed by prophets such as Jeremiah and Ezekiel.
But Second Isaiah joyfully announces that the period of suffering is over.
In the next national calamity - when the Syrian
king Antiochus IV subjugated the nation and tried to wipe out the religion of
Judaism in the late second century BC - Second Isaiah's very poetic description
of the suffering servant began to take on a meaning that became gruesomely
literal.
As some of the pious Jewish martyrs were being
horribly tortured for their faith, they prayed that God would count their dying
agonies as sufficient punishment for their nation's sins. From this folklore
about the Maccabean martyrs, the idea developed
within Judaism that somehow the martyrdom of a righteous man could pay for the
sins of the nation. This idea was already in circulation, waiting to be picked
up and used by the early Christians to interpret the meaning of Jesus' death.
Meanwhile, in the non-Jewish world, parallel ideas
had also developed. To start with, there existed a parallel tradition of
offering up animal sacrifices. The Greek mystery religions, awash through the
Greek-speaking world of Paul's day, had recycled some old Egyptian and
Babylonian myths about dying and rising gods in their own myths about Zeus, Sarpedon, Perseus Hercules,
Apollo, Dionysus, the healer Asclepius and others.
Many of these were virgin born god-men, heroes who in some way suffered
and died before ascending to heaven as divinities. Virgin born god-men included
rulers such as Alexander the Great and Caesar Augustus. In the mystery
religions so popular in Paul's Greek world, salvation was obtained by some kind
of sacramental union in the suffering and death of a god-man.
Long before Christianity arose, the Persian
religion of Mithra proclaimed a theology of the fall
of man and the redemption of the world that was astonishingly like the
Christian story of
Joseph Campbell, a specialist in comparative
mythology, summarizes his findings by saying, "Modern scholarship,
systematically comparing the myths and rites of mankind, has found just about
everywhere legends of virgins giving birth to heroes who die and are
resurrected.
In his Study of History, Arnold Toynbee wrote:
"Behind the figure of the dying demigod there looms the greater figure of
a very God that dies for different worlds under diverse names - for a Minoan
world as Dionysus, for a Sumeric world as Tammuz, for
a Hittite world as Attis, for a Syriac
world as Adonis, for a Christian world as Christ."
What ought to be clear by now is that the Christian
interpretation of the death of Jesus did not suddenly drop down out of heaven
as some new revelation to the mind of Paul or anyone else. The Christian ideas
about the blood atonement were an amalgam of ideas that had a long history in
both Judaism and Paganism, with roots going right back
to the dawn of human consciousness.
Paul was the real founder of the Christian
religion. His gospel of the cross became the Christian interpretation of the
death of Jesus. Basic to his world-view was the same creation myth from which
sprang all the priestcraft mystery religions and
blood sacrifices across the face of the earth. Paul interpreted the meaning of
Jesus' death against the backdrop of sin and death entering the world by Adam's
one act of disobedience. Jesus' death was seen as the second Adam's act of
obedience which made an atonement for the Fall and
reconciled the world to God. (See Romans 3 -5)
It was left to the theologians of the Church to
fill out this interpretation of Jesus' death with various theories of
atonement, using all kinds of regal, military, feudal and law-court metaphors
and models. There was one underlying idea which united all the theories,
however, and that was the basic idea of atonement.
In the OT the word atonement comes from the Hebrew
word kaphar which literally means to cover. That is
to say, an atonement was something which covered an
offence from the eyes of the one offended. But more important
than the etymology of the word is its plain contextual and practical sense
wherein atonement means to make amends or to pay back. Atonement is
based on the very old pay-back or retributive principle of "an eye for an
eye and a tooth for a tooth."
So in the language of the Church and its
theologians, the atonement has been defined in all the terms of a retributive
or pay-back justice. Jesus' death has been called such things as payment,
reparation, penalty, satisfaction, compensation, price, punishment,
retribution, etc. As an apologist for orthodox Christianity
put it: "Christ propitiated the judicial sentiment in God, thus making it
possible for God to offer pardon to sinners. This is the essence of the
atonement=8AThis is Christianity; let no one be deceived." (Edward
Carnell, quoted in Rudolph Nelson, The Making and Unmaking of an Evangelical
Mind, p. 202)
Why the
Christian Doctrine of Atonement is Being Called into Question
The Christian interpretation of the death of Jesus
is becoming less satisfying and less convincing to an increasing number of both
Christian scholars and ordinary Christian people around the world. Scholars
have become particularly uncomfortable with the penal and substitutionary
theory of atonement which has been the hallmark of Protestant orthodoxy since
the days of John Calvin.
The reasons why the Christian doctrine of atonement
is being called into question are as follows:
1. To start with, the Christian interpretation of
Jesus' death is based on a world-view that is as unscientific and as out of
date as the Flat Earth theory. The mainline churches and their scholars now
accept evolution and the evidence that earliest man walked out of
2. Is it is even defensible to say that the
Biblical myth of creation is metaphorically or theologically true? For is not the theology of the creation myth
as bad, if not worse than its science? Is this God who sentences not just Adam
an Eve to a life of hardship leading to death, but billions of their
descendents too, all because of one solitary act of natural human curiosity,
worthy of any sort of credence? And if
this Lord of the universe is so easily and implacably offended by one human
fault that he gets in a snit, withdraws to his high heaven and shuts the gate
against the whole human race, worthy of respect? How can we seriously build a theology on this
kind of intellectual rubbish?
3. Doesn't the Christian doctrine of atonement really
imply that the only thing wrong with human sacrifices was they were not
valuable enough to effect an adequate atonement? In order to satisfy divine
justice, the Christian doctrine says that the human sacrifice had to be perfect
and of infinite value. According to Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Adam
had sinned against an infinite majesty. It was therefore an infinite offence
that demanded an infinite punishment. The atonement or human sacrifice,
therefore, had to be of infinite value. Couldn't we be excused for calling this
kind of theology medieval twaddle?
4. The
Christian doctrine of the atonement is part of the wider story of God's severe
response to the sin of man at the beginning of history, and the terrifying
punishments of hell at the end of history.
Does not the bloody sacrifice of Jesus in the middle of this history
teach us that at is heart, Christianity is a religion of violence,
notwithstanding all the talk about God's love and mercy? Should we be
surprised, therefore, to find that a religion that portrays these acts of
divine violence as a remedy for human sin should find itself legitimizing so
much violence throughout its own history? In Catholic theologian Hans Kung's
assessment of things, Christianity has made more martyrs than it has produced
from its own ranks in the persecution of heretics, in pogroms against the Jews,
in the Inquisition, in the Crusades, in the drowning of Anabaptists by the
Reformed Church, in the floggings of the Quakers at the hands of the Puritans,
in Pope Pius xii looking the other way during the Holocaust.
5. Does the
God who insists that the debt be paid in full before he extends his forgiveness
really forgive at all? One can demand that a debt be paid or one can forgive
the debt, but doing both is mutually exclusive. Yet according to Christian
teaching, Christ died "making it possible for God to offer pardon to
sinners." (Edward Carnell)
6. In Christian theology, justice is represented as
an attribute of God which was in tension with the attribute of his mercy - that
is, until these opposite attributes were reconciled in the death of his son.
Citing an OT Psalm, the Christian theologians were fond of saying that at the
cross, "justice and mercy kissed each other." There is a failure in
this kind of theology to recognize that in the OT the Hebrew word for justice, sadak, is actually used as a synonym for loving kindness
toward our fellow humans, and especially for "all that are oppressed"
- orphans, widows, debtors, poor, homeless, foreigners, imprisoned,
slaves and the guilt ridden. Sadak is rarely, if
ever, given a retributive meaning, especially in the Prophets and the Psalms.
If the poet can say that justice and mercy kiss each other, it is because they
never needed any reconciliation. Justice is being merciful!
So Daniel could say to a selfish king, "Break
off your sins with justice in showing mercy to the poor, etc."
7. The icon
of the cross and its dying victim is so central to the church that the
Christian religion tends to become morbidly pre-occupied with sin, guilt, death
and personal salvation. Walter Kaufmann (The Faith of a Heretic) says that this
ego-centric guilt-ridden focus results in the Christian religion
falling short of the robust ethical and humanitarian vision of the OT prophets.
It is possible, of course, to marshal answers to
the above questions. What needs to be understood, however, is why an article of
faith, once so satisfying and convincing, should now be called into such
serious and radical question.
The need for a re-assessment of Christian theology
may be illustrated by the following analogy. There was a time when Christians
generally accepted, or even vigorously advocated the persecution of heretics,
the subordination of women, the practice of religious intolerance, the divine
right of kings against democratic freedoms, the institution of slavery,
indifference about cruelty to animals, the suppression of civil rights, white
supremacy, racism, religious exclusivism, opposition to scientific progress, the
burning of witches, and the state's enforcement of the Christian religion on
the whole of society. The church didn't change its stance on any of these great
issues because it got some revelation from God ahead of the rest of world. It
can't even be claimed that the Christian religion led the world in any of these
necessary humanitarian reforms. It was simply that a developing human
consciousness throughout the world made these old Christian practices
unacceptable.
This same development of human consciousness -
expressing itself in the Enlightenment, in the age of science, in literary
scholarship and historical criticism, in social progress and democratization -
has forced us to rethink Christian theology. Just as the old Christian
practices had to be called into question, so the old Christian theology must
also be called into question. A more enlightened human consciousness and a more
scientific world-view is bound to change the way we
interpret a lot of things.
We must not get too carried away with any
theological interpretation, because as we have already pointed out, no
theological interpretation is provable one way or the other. Accepting these
limits is just part of accepting the finite nature of the human condition. The
reader may discount many or all of the seven objections to the Christian
doctrine of atonement that are listed above. But there is one body of evidence
that has become impossible to brush aside. This is the evidence of the
historical Jesus . The Christian doctrine of the
atonement appears to be totally at odds, totally incompatible with the Jesus of
history. Apologists may argue all they like to show how the Christian teaching
is logical, reasonable, defensible and consistent with what the Bible says, but
the fact remains that the Jesus who died to make an atonement
for human sin is not the Jesus of history.
This now appears to be the consensus of mainline
Christian scholars engaged in the quest for the historical Jesus.
Yet the Gandhis and the Jeffersons of this world had always recognized that the
Jesus of Christian interpretation was not the Jesus of history.
A good starting point to illustrate this disparity
is the so-called Sermon on the Mount. Even if we allow for some embellishments
or adaptations in Matthew's creative arrangement of the sayings of Jesus, the
core teaching is unmistakably clear. He calls us to become like his Abba
(dearest papa or daddy) Father by going beyond the justice of loving those who
love us. In order to be the light of the world, he says, we must love and do good to those who hate and injure us. There is no pay-back
or getting even in the Sermon on the Mount. The old priestly law code of
"an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" must be replaced with the
justice of returning good for evil, giving generously
without expecting to get anything back, and endlessly forgiving those who seem
to wear out any more forgiveness. Do these things, he says, because this is
what your Abba Father is like.
Jesus says nothing to even remotely suggest that
his Abba Father does anything in the way of revenge, pay-back, getting even, or
that his justice requires an atonement before he can
forgive sin. His core aphorisms and parables indicate that God's justice is a
scandalous generosity to good and bad alike, that in his heart he forgives and
shows mercy even before we come to our senses and ask for it.
So in his story about the son who was a waster, he
tells of a father who runs to meet the waster as he appears a long way off. The
father has no thought for his own injured dignity, he abandons any concern
about his own reputation (What will the neighbors or the rest of the family
think?) and certainly he has no thought of any compensation or pay-back for the
wasted years and the squandered inheritance. The waster's older brother was
quite incensed by the scandal of his father's kind of justice. Forgiveness without making amends? Only a fatted calf killed
and dressed for the celebration?
So Jesus talks about God's scandalous generosity in
a way that shocks or even outrages his culture, especially when he proceeds to
act it out in ways that defies all the canons of honor and shame - such as
making no distinction between "clean" and "unclean" people in his
table fellowship Jesus clearly stands in the tradition of the OT prophets and
exhibits their spirit. He quotes the prophets who say that God wants mercy
rather than sacrifice. He cites the words of the prophets to show that justice
means being merciful, forgiving and helping the weak. His gospel of the
There is something else which links Jesus to the OT
prophets. The prophets did not build their theology of justice on the old
creation myth, but on the liberation model of the Exodus. It was later Jewish
apocalyptic that became pre-occupied with the myth of creation, the fall of
man, and in the divine violence of an end-time intervention. This is the
apocalyptic imagination that prevailed in the time of Jesus and Paul. But the
prophets never though in terms of the creation myth, the fall of man, a God who
withdrew his presence from this earth, or an apocalyptic kingdom yet to come.
And neither did Jesus.
Jesus' teaching was like a new wine that was never
meant to be put into the old wineskins - that is, the old world-views about the
fall of man, an offended God withdrawing into his high heaven and shutting the
gate, or a gulf between God and man that needed to be bridged by some act of
retributive justice. In the teaching of Jesus, the world never fell out of
divine favor, and God never left. He didn't need anyone to perform some act to
unlock heaven's gate. Jesus destroyed the premises upon which all religion is
built.
The Jesus of history who was put to death on
charges of blasphemy and sedition is totally incompatible with the Christian
Jesus who died as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world.
To be continued…
A Personal
Footnote
I would not deny that the Christian teaching about
the atoning death of Jesus has been helpful and meaningful for many
people. There was a time when it made
sense to me and gave a lot meaning to my life. I have ministered to dying
people with this gospel of the cross, and have seen how effective it can be in
liberating them from the burden of guilt and the fear of death. I can
charitably recognize, if only because I can extrapolate from my own experience,
that if people are locked into a certain world-view (especially one that has a
very legal framework) then the Christian remedy of atonement may very well be
the best one for them. I would have no hesitation comforting a dying person
with the remedy best suited to that person's world-view, and I would not be so
inhuman as to try to change a person's world-view if I had any indications that
the person was not ready for it.
Some of my old friends, especially those who say
that they were once moved by my passionate advocacy of Pauline and Reformation
theology, wonder how it can be that I no longer find such teaching satisfying
or convincing. I want to assure these good folk that I am really the same
person, moved by the same spirit, but I have moved on in my thinking,
especially to where I have another world-view. From where I now sit in my
journey, some of the old answers are no longer satisfying if only because they
answer the wrong questions. Some of my old presuppositions and premises appear
no longer valid. If, for instance, I abandon the starting point that man has
fallen and something or someone has to bridge the gulf between man and God and
open heaven's gate again, then a lot of other things have to change too. I now
start on the premise that humans have developed by a long creative process (evolution),
that God is not in one place more than he is in another that he never left this
world, that he did not visit this world
in a once only excursion, that we don't have to wait for his apocalyptic
return, that the on-going development of human consciousness shows the leavening influence of God's spirit rather
than the coercive intervention of a celestial dictator, that no one people in
any place or in any religion are more favored than another or are able to break
from the human pack, as it were, to be far in advance of the rest of humanity -
as if God only talks to one group of people who are pathetically huddled
together separate from the rest of the world. This means too that I must remain
open to learn the truth from anybody of any cultural or religious background,
for my human neighbor now becomes God's sole icon through which I can touch God
or be touched by God.
When I became seven years of age, I could no longer
believe in Santa Claus. In the same way, a long time ago I stopped imagining
there was ever such a thing as a fiat creation and a fall of man, or a three
story universe, or a God who was more in one place than another in his vast
universe. All of us interpret everything according to our world-view. If a
person has another world-view, he can never see things the way we do. That is
why Christians generally cannot succeed in getting through to Moslems, Hindus,
or Buddhists with the Christian message. Given their culture and world-view, it
could never make any sense to them. That is why we need to have a spirit of
charity, tolerance and acceptance of people that is not in the least qualified
by their religious or cultural background.