On the Really Real, A Christmas Eve Message

 

On the Really Real

A Christmas Eve Message

December 24, 2020

 

I have expended a lot of energy over the years trying to get people to understand religious faith in a way other than literally. I call that way symbolic and mythic. More popular writers like Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, though I assume they know better, tend to call it metaphorical. I don’t want to get hung up here on terminology. Instead I want I want to develop a thought I take from Crossan’s book How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian. In that book, in a chapter on Roman imperial theology, Crossan says that we post-Enlightenment people mistakenly take the distinction between the factual and the metaphorical to be the distinction between real and unreal. We take the factual to be real and the metaphorical (or to use my word for it, the mythic) to be unreal or false. Crossan is absolutely correct about that. The European Enlightenment reduced truth to facts. People of European cultures (wherever they were located) came to believe that facts are real and anything else is unreal, that facts are true and anything else is false. Popular theologians raced to keep up with the explosion of scientific knowledge of the physical world that accompanied the Enlightenment. They reduced the truths of faith to mere facts. That’s how most western people think of faith today. If it’s fact it can be true, if it isn’t fact it can’t.

The Enlightenment’s reduction of truth to fact gives us a woefully impoverished understanding of reality. There is a depth to reality to which facts can point but which they can never capture. It is the dimension of spirit, the dimension of the divine. Every human culture has experienced it. Even in our post-Enlightenment, fact-obsessed culture some of us are aware of it. Some of us have experienced it breaking into our lives in ways that mere facts never can. Call it what you will—the depth dimension of reality, spirit, Spirit, God—there is no doubt that it is as real and true as any mere fact can ever be. Indeed, many human cultures consider it to be more real that physical reality because it is the foundation and source of physical reality.

And it is so much richer, more dynamic, comforting and challenging than any combination of mere facts alone ever could be. It touches us in ways no mere fact can, or at least it can do that if we’ll just let it. Yet most people in our culture never experience it. They don’t experience it because they deny it. They’ve convinced themselves that facts and the physical world are all there is to reality. We humans cannot experience anything to which we are not open. Enlightenment rationalism and the secular humanism to which it leads close us off to it. Because they do, they impoverish our lives. They leave our moral standards suspended in thin air without foundation or grounding. We miss what can be the most powerful experiences of our lives simply we won’t let them in.

Our access to this depth dimension of reality doesn’t come through facts. Mere facts are incommensurate with the truth that is so much deeper than fact. Our access comes through what Crossan calls metaphor and I call myth. I mean by myth not something thought to be true that isn’t true. I use the word in its technical theological sense to mean a story that points us toward and connects us with this deeper dimension of reality. Myths can unlock the spiritual for us in ways mere facts never can. They are non-factual but profoundly true, or at least they can be profoundly true. The dichotomy fact = true and myth = untrue is a profoundly false one. Our lives could be so much richer than they are if we would just get over it, if we’d open our souls to a new level of reality (new for most of us though as old as creation itself), open ourselves to depth, to spirit. The spiritual level of reality is at least as real as the physical, and it is much more enduring.

So on this Christmas Eve, 2020, at the end of what has been such a difficult year for so many, with the end of the pandemic in sight but not yet here, I pray that you will be at peace and that you will open your minds, hearts, and souls to the truth that there is so much more to reality than mere facts, more than the physical world. It doesn’t matter what you call it. It’s real. It can change your life, making it so much richer and more fulfilling. May it be so.

A Biblical Betrayal

 

A Biblical Betrayal

December 22, 2020

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

In his book How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian John Dominic Crossan describes a dynamic of how the New Testament treats Jesus that every Christian should know and understand. Crossan explains that the historical Jesus was vocally and physically nonviolent, that Q makes him vocally but not physically violent, and Revelation makes him the central violent figure in the most violent book in the Bible. I want here to trace that arc through the New Testament relying heavily on Crossan’s exposition of his thesis. Seeing that arc may open your eyes to a radically new (though actually ancient) and absolutely correct way of understanding both the Bible and Jesus.

Whether we entirely buy into Crossan’s certainty that we know who the historical Jesus of Nazareth was or not (and I don’t), it is clear that the New Testament’s earliest and most radical picture of Jesus presents him as nonviolent. We know that the radically nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels is the earliest and truest depiction of Jesus because is the most radically countercultural image of him that we have. As I’ve said elsewhere on this blog in commenting on Crossan’s book, God didn’t need to send us Jesus to teach us the ways of the world. We know and follow those ways, including the world’s way of violence, all too well already. The nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels shows us a radically new way of being that turns the ways of the world upside down. That authentic Jesus condemns violence as not God’s way and calls us to lives of creative, assertive, nonviolent, resistance to evil.

The most significant place where the New Testament gives us that nonviolent Jesus is well known. I won’t quote all of it here, but I’ll direct your attention to Matthew 5:38-45. Those verses include Jesus saying “love your enemy, and pray for those who persecute you,” and “Do not resist an evildoer,” meaning do not resist violently. Here we find the famous sayings turn the other cheek, give your cloak as well, and go a second mile.[1] In these famous lines from the Sermon on the Mount Jesus undeniably teaches radical nonviolence as the way of God and the way God calls us to live.

Crossan emphasizes another New Testament passage as well as establishing that Jesus was radically nonviolent. In the Gospel of John, when Jesus has been arrested essentially on a charge of sedition, the Roman Governor Pilate asks him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” John 18:33. Jesus answers, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over….But as it is my kingdom is not from here.”[2] John 18:36. Jesus means that his kingdom is located on earth but doesn’t arise or gain its authority from the earth but from God. Jesus’ followers are not resorting to violence to free him because Jesus and his kingdom are from God, and God is radically nonviolent. [3] This is the New Testament’s original image of Jesus as a radical prophet of God’s divine nonviolence.

Crossan sees that original New Testament vision of Jesus change first in passages he attributes to Q.[4] Crossan points to the phrase that appears several times in Matthew (but not elsewhere) “where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.” At Matthew 13:42 and 13:50, for example, Matthew’s Jesus has bad people being case into a furnace of fire where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. The image of a furnace of fire where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth is certainly a violent one. The image of a God who would cast anyone there is an image of a violent God. Jesus’ violence here is verbal only. He talks about people being cast into a fiery furnace, but he doesn’t cast anyone there. Neither does he inflict any other kind of violence on anyone. Still, the contrast between a Jesus who would talk about sending people to a fiery furnace and the Jesus who said love your enemy so that you may be children of your (nonviolent) Father in heaven is striking. I have in the past attributed the lines in Matthew about a fiery furnace (also in other verses an outer darkness) where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth to the author of the Gospel of Matthew. Crossan attributes them to Q, which makes them older than Matthew Either way they represent a major revision to the Christian tradition’s early images of Jesus. His actions haven’t yet become violent, but his words have.

The Christian Bible (though mercifully not the Hebrew Bible) ends with the book of Revelation. Revelation is by far the most violent book in either Testament of the Christian Bible. No other biblical book speaks of God inflicting violence upon the earth sufficient to cause blood to flow “as high as a horse’s bridle, for a distance of about two hundred miles” the way Revelation does. Revelation 14:20. The Jesus of Revelation is an agent of unimaginable violence. Here’s just one example, one Crossan also uses:

 

Then I saw heaven opened, and there was a white horse! It’s rider is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems; and he has a name inscribed that no one knows but himself. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is called the Word of God. And the armies of heaven, wearing fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations; and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name inscribed, ‘King of kings and Lord of lords.’ Revelation 19:11-16.

 

Unmistakably the rider is Christ, and there is nothing metaphorical about the sword of his mouth. In the verses that follow, “the beast” (essentially Rome) and the kings of the earth make war against the rider on the white horse and his army They’re all killed, most if not all of them by the sword of that rider on the white horse, that is, by Christ himself. Revelation 19:17-21.

What a transition! From a Jesus who says love your enemy through a Jesus who speaks of casting people into a furnace of fire, to a Christ who leads a heavenly army into a battle in which an entire earthly army if slain! What’s going on here? Which Jesus Christ is the real one whom we are to follow? Surely it can’t be both the Jesus of Matthew 5 and the Christ of Revelation 19. They just aren’t the same Jesus Christ. One is the world’s greatest prophet of nonviolence. The other is a military leader who inflicts massive violence on the earth. What are we to make of the way the New Testament’s image of Jesus changes so dramatically from the Testament’s beginning to its end?

Here’s what Crossan makes of it, and I’m sure he’s right. He sees a pattern across the whole Bible of depictions of what he calls the radicality of God later being contradicted and denied by reassertions of what he calls the normalcy of civilization. Throughout the Bible, he says, radical prophets proclaim God’s demand for distributive justice and peace. Then other writers contradict the radical truth of God by reasserting the world’s ways of violence and oppression. In the great eighth century BCE prophets like Isaiah and Amos we see both the radicality of God and the normalcy of civilization in the same people, as Crossan tells us. These prophets demand distributive justice for the poor and vulnerable, but they also say that a violent God will violently punish the people for disobeying that demand.

What the New Testament does with Jesus is the prime example in the Christian Bible of an assertion of the radicality of God being later negated by an assertion of the normalcy of civilization. The specifically Christian scriptures begin with Jesus saying love your enemy and end with him leading an army in a massive slaughter of enemies. Jesus proclaimed God’s radically unearthly ways of peace through justice and nonviolence. The later Christian tradition couldn’t deal with Jesus’ radical proclamation. They thought it didn’t work, or at least some of them did. Roman oppression still ruled their world. Some of them, like John of Patmos (the author of Revelation) turned to the ways of the world blown up to a cosmic scale as the solution to the world’s problems. To them Jesus’ “love your enemy” just wasn’t enough to set the world right, so John turned the nonviolent Jesus into a Christ on a warhorse leading a massive slaughter of enemies. Crossan sums up this development this way:

 

Revelation’s promise of a bloodthirsty God and a blood-drenched Christ represents for me the creation of a second ‘coming’ to negate the first and only ‘coming’ of Christ; the fabrication of violent apocalypse to deny the nonviolent incarnation; and the invention of Christ on a warhorse to erase the historical Jesus on a peace donkey. Jesus’ nonviolent resistance to evil is replaced by Christ’s slaughter of evildoers.[5]

 

What we have here, I believe, is nothing less than early Christianity’s utter betrayal of Jesus. There simply is no doubt that Jesus taught, lived, and died for his vision of God as a God of distributive justice who is radically nonviolent. Dominant elements of the later tradition that claimed Jesus as Lord and Savior couldn’t handle it. In them the violent ways of the world reasserted themselves even on a cosmic scale. That betrayal, so evident in the book of Revelation, would reach its climax over two hundred years later when Christianity abandoned nonviolence altogether and sold its soul to become the official state religion of the empire that had crucified Jesus. To call what happened to Jesus’ message of God’s nonviolent nature anything less than a betrayal is to fail to recognize just how far the Christian tradition deviated from the message of it central figure.

So which Jesus are we to follow? The answer seems obvious. It basically comes down to do we follow God’s way or do we follow the world’s way. If we claim to be Christian the answer has to be God’s way. Of course, Christians are as apt as anyone else to live according to the ways of the world, accepting or even perpetrating oppression and engaging in violence, as anyone else. That sad truth doesn’t mean that doing those things is really Christian. They aren’t. The Christ of Revelation is a monstrosity. The Jesus of the Gospels is our model of ideal human living and the ways of God. He is for us nothing less than God Incarnate, God in human form, Emmanuel, God with us. Our call is to follow him in nonviolent protest against the ways of the world. Anything else perpetuates the betrayal of Jesus that we find even in the Bible itself. Let’s not do that, OK?

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[1] For what these verses really mean see Wink, Walter, The Powers That Be, Theology for a New Millennium (New York, Galilee Doubleday, 1998), Chapter 5, “Jesus’ Third Way,” 98 ff. They almost certainly don’t mean what if you’re like most Christians you think they mean unless that is you’ve already read Wink.

[2] I have omitted the phrase “to the Jews” from this quote. Jesus wasn’t handed over to the Jews. He was a Jew. He was handed over to the Romans. I won’t go into John’s anti-Judaism here, but it is disturbing at best and historically inaccurate. For a discussion of the issue see Sorenson, Thomas Calnan, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume Three, The New Testament (Coffee Press, Briarwood, New York, 2019), 170-179.

[3] On the accuracy and significance of the translation “My kingdom if not from this world” rather than the more familiar “My kingdom is not of this world” see Sorenson, Thomas Calnan, op. cit., 184-186. There actually is something of a problem with the way Crossan uses this passage. The most important thing about any saying attributed to Jesus for Crossan is usually whether he thinks the saying comes from the historical Jesus or not. The Jesus Seminar, of which Crossan was a part, doesn’t think any saying attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John comes from the historical Jesus, but Crossan treats this saying as though it did. I think the saying is correct whether the historical Jesus ever said it or not, but Crossan may be a bit inconsistent here.

[4] Q is a hypothetical, nonexistent document the assumed existence of which scholars use to explain the origin of sayings of Jesus that appear in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark. Q stands for Quelle, the German word for source.

[5] I read Crossan’s How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian in its Kindle form. That version of the book doesn’t use page numbers. This quote appears in Chapter 11, “Christ and the Normalcy of Civilization,” at the 63% mark of the book. Crossan’s reference to “Jesus on a peace donkey” refers to Jesus riding a donkey, an animal of the farm not of war, into Jerusalem, the event we celebrate on Palm Sunday.

Trust is the Way

 

Trust is the Way

December 16, 2020

 

I’m going to write here about a powerful existential dilemma of which I am painfully aware these days. I’ll start by explaining something that I spend a good deal of time on in my book Liberating Christianity.[1] It starts with an understanding of the way we are as created beings. We exist as centered selves. We all exist as a center of consciousness. From that center we experience what seems to us to be a world that has its own objective reality. We assume that what we see or hear or touch is “really there.” We mean by “really there” that it is still there when we aren’t perceiving it as there. I assume that the wine bottle I see standing on my kitchen counter is still there when I’m not looking at it. Yet all I can really know about that wine bottle is that I perceive it standing there. All I really have, and all I can have, is my perception that there is a wine bottle standing on my kitchen counter. I can assume that what I see as a wine bottle exists as an object apart from my experience of it, and I live in that assumption always and about all things. Because all I have and all I can have about the wine bottle is my perception of it, I know that I see it. I cannot know that it is real in the sense of having independent, objective existence. My perception of the wine bottle makes it real for me, but that the wine bottle seems real to me only means that it seems real to me, not that it is objectively real.

Back in September, 2011, I had to have my much loved Irish Terrier Jake put down because his kidneys had failed. He had been with me since 1998, back when I was in seminary. When I got him I was married to my first wife Francie. He was our dog before he was my dog. He became only my dog on July 31, 2002, when Francie died of metastatic breast cancer. Jake had been my faithful friend through a career change, Francie’s death, my marriage to my wife Jane, a couple of moves from one residence to another, the deaths of my parents, and many other significant events in my life. Now his life would and, and I was an emotional wreck. As I drove to the vet’s office to end Jake’s life I was already grieving the loss of my best friend, my faithful companion, the best dog (for me) that there ever was or ever would be again.

As I began my drive from my home to the vet’s office a most remarkable thing happened. Francie, who had been dead for over nine years at that time, appeared to me. It wasn’t that I could see her exactly, although there was something I could faintly see or at least perceive just in front of me, a little bit off to my left, and slightly above the level of my eyes. I knew that it was Francie. I can’t for the life of me tell you how I knew that my late wife was with me, but I did. She spoke to me. She said, “It’s OK. I’m here waiting for him.” Then she was gone. The whole experience lasted only a few seconds, but it was as real to me as anything else I have ever experienced.

Recently, years after I had that experience, I’ve been wrestling with the question of whether what I experienced that day was “real.” The philosophy I developed in Liberating Christianity and have briefly restated here says that all I can know bout my experience is that I experienced it. Recently however I’ve tried to think beyond that conclusion of my philosophy and have considered what the possible sources of my experience that day might be. I’ve come up with four possible sources for it. One I can easily dismiss. In theory my conscious mind could have generated the experience. In other words, I could just have thought the experience into being. I reject this possible source because I know that my conscious mind didn’t make the experience up. I wasn’t consciously thinking about Francie or her relationship to Jake. I wasn’t thinking about life after death. I wasn’t thinking much at all, just enough I guess to keep my car on the road and avoid running into the car in front of me. I was feeling a lot but thinking very little. I have no doubt that my experience did not come from my conscious mind.

Which leaves me with three other possible sources for the experience. One is that my unconscious generated it. This solution to the question of the source of my experience appeals to my commitment to Jungian psychology. In Jungian psychology the unconscious is far larger and more active than it is in Freudian psychology—and it isn’t just about sex. It is the storehouse of our hopes and fears, our neuroses and our dreams. It speaks to us in ways our conscious mind and the seemingly objective world do not. It speaks through dreams and visions. It most often speaks in symbols rather than in simple facts (or what we take to be facts). It seems quite possible to me that my unconscious generated my apparition of Francie in an attempt to deal with all of the powerful, painful emotions I was feeling at that time.

A third possible source of my apparition is that it could have come from outside of me altogether. It could be the work of the Holy Spirit active both in me and beyond me. The Holy Spirit could have given me my experience for the same reason my unconscious may have done it, to comfort and reassure me in a time of great emotional distress. That solution appeals to my Christian faith, for it has God actively caring for me at a time when I needed a good deal of caring for. When I consider this possible source of my experience I consider that the Holy Spirit gave me a vision I needed but not necessarily one that shows me an objective reality.

The fourth possibility for a source of my experience is the one I desperately want to be the real one. The fourth possibility is that as a matter of objective reality Francie really is present in some sort of life after death and that she came to me that day to offer me what she could for comfort and support. Lord how I want this one to be the one! I even need this one to be the one. I need the comfort and assurance I’d get from knowing that what I experienced that day represents some objective, concrete reality. But how can it be the one, or rather, how can I know that it is the one? This solution to the question of a source for my experience requires there to be an objective reality beyond my experience of something as real. Yet I’ve long insisted, in print even, that we can never know that there is such an objective reality behind our perceptions. So I’m stuck on the horns of an existential dilemma. I need something to be correct that I can never know to be correct. My ability to know is incommensurate with my need to know. My ability can never meet my need. Such, it seems, is the dilemma of human existence. We need what we can never have.

So what are we to do? What am I to do? I could just accept and live with the dilemma. I could resign myself to the impossibility of ever having what I need. Resigning myself to the inevitability of that dilemma can lead either to a stoic calm or to a stark cynicism about the nature of human existence.  It can however never get me off the horns of that dilemma. So is there no way off of those horns?

In one sense there isn’t, but in another way there is—at least sort of. The dilemma will never go away. It will always be with us. It flows inevitably from the fundamentals of what it is to be human. We cannot step outside ourselves, so we can never get beyond the fact that we are created as centered selves from which perspective we perceive what appears to us to be an external, objective reality.

We can however ask about the ways in which it is possible for us to relate to that seemingly objective world. We can accept that our perceptions do not deceive us and that what we perceive to be objective really is objective. Or we can go too far in the opposite direction and believe that since we can’t prove an objective reality, there is no such thing. However, neither of these extremes works. An acceptance of what we take to be the fact that our perceptions do not deceive us fails because we know that sometimes our senses do deceive us. I recently had an ophthalmologist ask me if I saw bright light flashes. Seeing such flashes can be a symptom of various vision disorders. The bright flashes aren’t really there. The visual sense of one with a particular vision disorder deceives her into seeing something that isn’t there outside of her malfunctioning visual sense. Going to the other extreme doesn’t work either. To cite a rather broad example, assuming that what you see isn’t objectively there can get you hit by a bus as you cross the street.

Fortunately there is a third way of relating to what we perceive but cannot know to be objective reality. It is the way of trust. We can trust that what we perceive as existing really exists.  What could it mean for us to trust that what we perceive as real is real beyond our perception of it? To answer that question we start with definitions. Google.com defines trust in our sense as “firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.” Merriam-webster.com defines it as “assured reliance on the character, ability, strength or truth of someone or something.” To trust that what we observe as having separate objective reality actually has objective reality is to live as though we knew that it did while knowing that we don’t know that it does at all. Perhaps looking at a concept of Marcus Borg from a different context will help explain this idea.

In his discussions of how we can relate to the question of the literalism of the Bible, Borg gives us what he calls “post-critical naivete” as a solution to the question of whether to take the Bible literally or not. When you live your relationship to the Bible in a state of post-critical naivete you know about the higher biblical criticisms. You know at least something about the reasons why we truly cannot take the Bible literally, that is, as always factually correct. You know something about the editorial history of many of the books of the Bible and about some of the unavoidable vagueness, ambiguity, or just plain obscurant nature of some of the original words in the Hebrew Bible. Most importantly you know that the stories in the Bible are myths, that is, that they are human stories the purpose of which is not to convey facts but to point beyond themselves to a spiritual truth far deeper than any mere factual truth.[2] In a state of post-critical naivete you know all that, but when you engage in worship, prayer, or spiritual exercises you set all that knowledge aside. You enter into the Bible’s stories without worrying about whatever critical insights the scholars may have discerned about those stories.[3] You let the myths work in you as myths and don’t reject them simply because you know that they are myths rather than factual accounts. Your status is post-critical because you know about the higher biblical criticisms and accept rather than reject them. Your status is naïve because at least in come circumstances you think and act as though you knew nothing at all of those higher biblical criticisms.

To live in trust in the objective reality of what looks objective to us is to know that you can’t prove the validity of a belief in objective reality but to live nonetheless as though you could. It is to live in relationship to what appears to be objective without worrying about the fact that you know that you can’t know whether it is objective or not. We could say that to live in trust in the reality of the objective is to live in a state of post-critical naivete with regard to that reality. You know you can’t prove it. You live as though there were no question about it. You trust that what you perceive as objective reality is actually objective reality.

Living in trust that what we perceive as objective reality is real actually has strong biblical roots. In any English translation of the New Testament you will find many references to faith and belief or believing. Today most of us understand those words to mean to take as fact something you can’t prove is fact. To most of us they mean to accept as factual truth something you don’t have the evidence necessary to prove is factual truth. That however is not what the Greek words that are translated into English as faith, belief, or believe mean. Those words all have as their root the Greek word pistis. Pistis  does not mean take as true something you can’t prove is true. It means instead something much more like trust in or give your heart to something or someone. When the Gospel of John refers to people who believe in Jesus (John 3:16 for example) it doesn’t mean people who take certain unproven facts about Jesus to be true. It means people who put their trust in him. We trust Jesus to be who our Christian tradition says he is. In the New Testament to have faith or to believe is about trust, not about unproven knowledge. It’s the same when we live our relationship with apparently objective reality in a state of trust. We don’t know that what looks like objective reality is actually objective reality. We trust that it is.

Now let me apply this concept of trust to my experience of my late wife appearing to me in my car on that sad, sad day several years ago. I said above that I both want and need what I saw and heard in that experience to be objectively real but that I can’t prove that those things are objectively real. I can’t prove it, but I can trust that it is so. When I do, here’s what happens. I relax. I stop worrying about the objective reality of my experience. When I trust that it is real I can live as though I know that it is real even though when I stop to think about it I know that I know no such thing. When I trust in the objective reality of experience I gain the benefit of it being objectively real without needing to know that it actually is.

No, trusting in the reality of something is not the same as knowing that something is real. An element of doubt remains. Living in a state of trust is to live in between the extremes of certainty on one side and total denial on the other. It’s not a perfect solution, but then there’s nothing perfect about human nature or human existence. Trust is just the best we can do. Living only with the knowledge of our inability to meet our need for certainty can lead to despair. Living in trust that what we perceive as objective is truly objective reality is our way out of that despair. God knows the truth about objective reality, but we are not God. Trust is the best we can do, and it is enough.

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[1] Sorenson, Thomas C., Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium (Eugene, Oregon, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2008).

[2] Borg does not use the word myth. He speaks of historical metaphors instead. The technical term for what he means is however myth.

[3] When I was a church pastor I used to explain to my people that I spoke differently in adult education classes than I did from the pulpit. In adult education classes I was all about the higher biblical criticisms. From the pulpit I spoke much more in a spirit of post-critical naivete. In the pulpit, when I was drawing meaning our of a biblical myth, I didn’t say that the story was a myth though I knew that it was.

It Makes No Sense, Except....

 

It Makes No Sense, Except….

December 14, 2020

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

We are approaching the fourth Sunday of Advent for this year, so I recently looked at the Bible readings for that Sunday in the Revised Common Lectionary. The Lectionary’s Gospel reading for the fourth Sunday in Advent, Year B, which we’re in, is Luke 1:26-38, the story known as the Annunciation. That story tells of the angel Gabriel coming from God and appearing to a woman named Mary in the village of Nazareth in Galilee. He recruits Mary into the sacred mission of bringing what the story calls the Son of the Most High, i.e., Jesus, into the world. Mary is essentially a nobody, a young Jewish woman, probably very young—I’ve seen some speculation that she may have been fourteen years old—from a backwater town in a backwater part of the Roman Empire. In the song she sings after she accepts Gabriel’s offer that she become Jesus’ mother, known as the Magnificat, she acknowledges her low station in life. She sings that God “has looked with favor on the lawlessness of his servant.” Luke 1:48a. Yet she is the one God has chosen to bring the Messiah into the world. Centuries later the Christian tradition would call her Theotokos, the God-bearer. Artists have painted how they have imagined this scene for centuries. The Annunciation is one of the foundational stories of the Christian tradition.

It is a great story of God choosing a good but perfectly ordinary young woman to perform the sacred task of giving birth to Jesus and that young woman consenting to do it. Yet it has something in it that doesn’t make a lick of sense. I don’t mean the part where Mary agrees to become pregnant through the Holy Spirit rather than in the usual way with her husband. I mean the part where Gabriel says to Mary “the Lord God will give to him [Jesus] the throne of his ancestor David.” Luke 1:32. There’s more than one thing wrong with this statement. First of all, Jesus is not a biological descendant of David. In the purely biological sense David is not Jesus’ ancestor. Yes, like Matthew Luke gives us a genealogy (though one quite different from Matthew’s) in which Joseph, Mary’s husband, is a descendant of David. Luke 3:23-38. Yet Luke’s genealogy begins with an acknowledgement that Joseph is not actually Jesus’ father. It says, “Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his work. He was the son (as it was thought) of Joseph….” Luke 3:23. People thought Joseph was Jesus’ father, but Luke knew better.[1] The Holy Spirit was Jesus’ father not Joseph. So while Luke can contend that Joseph was a descendant of David he really shouldn’t contend that Jesus was. Yet he does just that when he calls David Jesus’ ancestor. We start to wonder what’s going on here.

Then there’s the bit about David’s throne. Gabriel tells Mary that God will give Jesus the throne of his ancestor David. OK, but David has been dead for nearly one thousand years by the time Jesus comes along. His throne hasn’t existed since at least 586 BCE when the Babylonian Empire conquered Judah and Jerusalem and put an end to the Davidic kingdom. How can you give someone something that hasn’t existed for well over five hundred years? Pretty obviously you can’t. Saying that God would makes no sense at all. Now we wonder even more what’s going on here.

These things that Gabriel says to Mary make no sense. That is, they make no sense if we insist on understanding them merely as statements of facts. As facts these statements are nonsense, but what if we were never supposed to take them as facts in the first place? What if there were some other way of understanding them? Indeed there is another way of understanding them, and it’s the way Luke surely meant for us to understand them.

Gabriel’s statements that tie Jesus to David aren’t facts, they are faith confessions of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. For Luke, for Christians before him, and for Christians ever since Jesus was and is the Messiah. We may more often call him the Christ, but Christ is simply a word that derives from the Greek that means the same thing as Messiah, which derives from the Hebrew. Jesus’ world was tense with Messianic anticipation. Would-be Messiah’s were popping up and failing all the time. Most of the Jewish people and their religious leaders thought that the Messiah, who they thought God had promised them, would be a human king and that he would be a descendant of David.[2] David would be one of his ancestors. Christians insisted that Jesus was the Messiah, and that meant that he had to be a descendant of David. Because he believed in Jesus’ conception by the Holy Spirit the best Luke could do was to make Joseph a descendant of David, then to call David Jesus’ ancestor and say that God would give him David’s throne.

Surely Luke saw the factual inconsistency here, but just as surely Luke never meant for anyone to read his words as mere facts. They aren’t assertions of facts, they are confessions of faith. They are a way to say in story that Jesus really is the Messiah. He really is the Christ. When ancient authors had something profound like that to say they were a whole lot more likely to assert them through story than through a theological essay. People like me write theological essays. People like Luke didn’t. They told stories. It didn’t matter much if what sounded like facts in their stories weren’t accurate facts at all. What mattered was the truth to which those apparent facts pointed. We are to take the claim that David was Jesus’ ancestor and that God would give him David’s throne not as mere facts but as signs that point to the much deeper truth that Jesus is indeed the long-expected Messiah. Facts don’t matter here. The much deeper truth that Jesus is the Messiah matters a lot.

In the ways the story of the Annunciation uses what appear to us to be statements as fact not as statements of fact but as confessions of faith this story a fine model for how we are to understand all of scripture. We’ve all been conditioned to read the Bible as giving us facts, but that’s the problem. There are facts in the Bible, but the facts are never what really matters. What matters is always the more profound truths to which the apparent facts that probably aren’t really facts at all point. Did God create all creation in seven days? No. Is God Creator of all that is, is God’s creation good, and are women and men created in the image and likeness of God? Yes. Genesis 1 isn’t a factual account of creation. It is a faith confession of God as Creator of all that is and of the nature of creation and of human beings.

That’s how it is with scripture. We make a big mistake when we reduce scripture to a mere record of supposed facts. We need to learn not to worry about the facts. We needn’t worry about whether they really are accurate facts or not. We need to learn to read the Bible not as fact but as faith confession. We need to seek out what the far more profound truth is to which things that appear to us to be facts point. We need to look for truth far deeper than facts. That truth is there in the Bible, and it can make a huge difference in your life. So stop worrying about the facts. Look not for mere facts but for deep spiritual truth when you read the Bible. It’s there, and it can change your life. Thanks be to God!

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[1] We don’t know who wrote the Gospel of Luke. When I call the author of that Gospel Luke I do so only as a matter of convenience. I do not mean to suggest that Luke the “beloved physician” wrote the Gospel. He didn’t.

[2] The phrase “of the house of David” which you’ll see in the Bible means a descendant of David.

They May Be Guilty of Sedition

 

They May Be Guilty of Sedition

December 11, 2020

 

Sedition. It’s a powerful word. It is different from but similar to treason. Treason is betrayal of one’s nation for the benefit of a foreign nation. Benedict Arnold, the epitome of American treason, betrayed the colonies for which he supposedly was fighting to the British. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg betrayed their country to the Soviet Union. Sedition is betrayal of one’s own country internally. Subversion of one’s country’s constitution is a form of sedition. Words or acts intended to undermine the established order of one’s country can be sedition. Lawful efforts to effect change in one’s country, including changes in the country’s  constitution, are of course not sedition. Acting outside the country’s legal structure to defeat or nullify the lawful functioning of the country’s institutions can be sedition. Whatever its legal definition, sedition is an effort by a citizen of a country to defeat the proper functioning of the country’s foundational institutions.

On November 3, 2020, former Vice President Biden won the 2020 presidential election defeating incumbent president Donald Trump by a significant margin, significant at least by the standards of American presidential elections. The electoral college is scheduled to vote on Monday, December 14, to make Biden’s election as President of the United States official. There is no doubt on the basis of either the facts of the election or of electoral law that Biden won the election. He won it fairly and legally. President Trump and his minions have filed numerous lawsuits alleging massive voter fraud in the election. There isn’t a shred of evidence that there was any such fraud, and Trump and his forces have lost in federal court again and again precisely because although they screamed voter fraud they could produce no evidence of such fraud at all.

On Tuesday, December 8, 2020, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit on behalf of the State of Texas in the United States Supreme Court against the states of Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, all of which Biden won, claiming massive voter fraud and failure by state officials to follow their own state law in the 2020 election.[1] The suit sought to have the election results in those states thrown out and either to have the legislatures of those states choose the state’s electors or to have the US House of Representatives decide the election under the 12^th Amendment to the Constitution. In either case Trump would probably win. President Trump and seventeen states led by Republicans sought to join the suit as plaintiffs. On December 11, 2020, the US Supreme Court formally declined to take the case. As expected by nearly everyone familiar with the applicable law, the Court found that Texas did not have standing to bring the suit. In an unsigned order the Court said that Texas “has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.”

As a general rule of American jurisprudence any person or entity having legal standing may file whatever lawsuit they want in any court they want. The mere filing of a lawsuit establishes nothing. If a lawsuit is improperly filed for any reason the court in which it was filed will simply dismiss it upon motion by the opposing party, thereby putting and end to the matter. There are rules of court procedure and standards of attorney ethics that limit the type of case that may properly be filed and for which an attorney may sign the pleadings. That the lawsuit that the state of Texas filed against four other states was totally unmerited on the basis of both the law and the facts of the matter was obvious from the very beginning to anyone marginally informed about the facts and the law of the case. The case was frivolous and even blatantly dishonest, something no one can really deny. So the Supreme Court, which has more discretion than most other courts over what cases it will hear, refused to hear the case.

Yet the obvious intent behind Texas’ lawsuit makes it worse than frivolous and dishonest. It may constitute sedition, but there is a threshold question we must consider. It was wildly improper for Texas to file the suit it filed because that suit had no merit whatsoever in law or fact, but filing it was not illegal. Improper yes, illegal no. So the question arises of whether an improper but legal act can constitute sedition. I am not at all familiar with the law on that subject. I wouldn’t be surprised to find courts saying that a legal action no matter how improper cannot constitute sedition. Yet this case was so frivolous and was so obviously filed with an anti-democratic intent that even if what Texas did doesn’t constitute sedition legally it certainly constitutes it morally. This suit was a blatant attempt to circumvent and thereby undermine our country’s constitutional democracy. It was an attempt to disenfranchise tens of millions of legal voters and to have the Supreme Court impose on this country an electoral result other than the one the country’s constitutional and statutory electoral provisions produced. It was an attempt disguised as a legitimate lawsuit to supplant American democracy and replace it with a judicially imposed undemocratic process and result.

No lawsuit ever filed in this country before may have reeked of sedition as much as this one did. It was so obviously baseless in law and fact that it could only have had a purpose and intent other than to produce a legitimate court decision based on the law and the facts of the case. It’s purpose and intent had to be political not legal. This lawsuit was patently an attempt to impose an unlawful, undemocratic result on the American people. It was an attempt to make a person president by means other than those specified in the United States Constitution. What we have here is nothing less than an attempt to circumvent and undermine the US Constitution. If that isn’t sedition in a legal sense because the act of filing the suit was not illegal, it certainly is sedition in a moral sense. That numerous other states and elected representatives sought to join it is a moral and political outrage that just makes the whole matter worse. Those who filed it and those who sought to join it do not deserve to serve in any public capacity in this country. That they won’t be thrown out of office by their Republican constituents just makes this sorry incident all the sadder.

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[1] The Supreme Court normally hears appeals and is not a court of original jurisdiction in which lawsuits are filed. The Supreme Court does however have original jurisdiction in lawsuits between states.

On Good, Evil, and Human Nature

 

On Good, Evil, and Human Nature

December 8, 2020

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

There’s something about the Psalms in particular that bothers me. We see an example of it at Psalm 33:1: “Rejoice in the Lord, O you righteous. Praise befits the upright.” Do you see the assumption about people behind that verse? People are either righteous and upright or they aren’t. You’re either one or the other, righteous or unrighteous, good or bad. We see scripture dividing people into the good and the bad often. Christ does it in the great last judgment scene at Matthew 25:31-46. Either you cared for “the least of these” or you didn’t. I always want to ask: What about those of us who sometimes are righteous and sometimes aren’t? What about those of us who sometimes care for the least of these and sometimes don’t? After all, isn’t that every one of us? My quarrel with so many biblical texts that sharply divide people into the good and the bad is that that’s just not how it is with us humans. There’s no nuance in these texts. Yes, texts like Matthew 25:31-46 can be great teaching tools, but they just don’t reflect what it is to be human. Aren’t we all a bit of both? Aren’t we all some good and some bad all bound together in one complex package of imperfect humanity made in the image and likeness of God? I know that’s how it is with me. I know that that’s how it is with you too. I may not know you, but I know that you’re human. I don’t know the particulars about you and your life, but that you are human is all I need to know to know that you too are a complex mixture of the good and the bad. We all are. As St. Paul said, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Romans 3:23.

Yet all of us have done some good in our lives too We are nuanced creatures, made little lower than God (Psalm 8:5), but fallible, imperfect. I don’t much care for the hoary Christian notion of “the Fall,” but we cannot deny that none of us is perfect. Neither can we deny that each of us has a spark of the divine in us. That spark glows brighter in some people than in others, but it is implanted in each of us. Even Donald Trump, hardly a paragon of virtue, probably loves his children. Far too often scripture doesn’t seem to get it about how complex and nuanced we humans really are.

As I was writing these words, however, I thought, “Wait a minute. Wasn’t there one perfect human being? Wasn’t there one person in history who was all good and no evil?” That’s what I was taught, probably in Sunday School, about Jesus Christ. Yes, he was truly human, but he was also perfectly human. He is the perfect model of how God wants human life to be. I recently said something along those lines in something I was writing. My wife read what I had written. She said in effect no, if Jesus were perfect then he wouldn’t be truly human. She pointed to one Gospel passage in which Jesus sure seems to have messed up, to have gotten it wrong, to have done something we could hardly call good. It’s the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman at Matthew 15:21-28. It goes like this.

Jesus has gone from Galilee into the district of Tyre and Sidon. Tyre and Sidon were Phoenician port cities on the Mediterranean coast of what today is Lebanon. They’re still there, although I suppose that today they are Arab not Phoenician. The Phoenicians were Semites, but they weren’t Jews. A woman the text calls Canaanite comes to him. Sometimes you’ll see her called the Syrophoenician woman, but either way she isn’t Jewish. She shouts at Jesus, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” Matthew 15:22. The unstated implication is that this mother wants Jesus to exorcized the demon out of her daughter. We’re told that at first Jesus “did not answer her at all.” Matthew 15:23a. Jesus’ disciples, who it seems have come to this place with him though we haven’t been told that they did, urge him to send the woman away because she keeps shouting at them. Then Jesus speaks, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Matthew 15:24. It’s unclear whether Jesus meant all the people of Israel or only those who were particularly lost, but either way he’s saying that he was sent to minister only to Jews. The woman in question here wasn’t a Jew, so at least by implication that’s why Jesus refuses to help her.

Clearly Jesus has made a mistake here, but then what he does gets worse. Once again the woman pleads for help. Jesus answers her, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Matthew 15:26. Say what?! Jesus has just called this woman a dog! She was a human mother distraught over her daughter’s unwell condition. She interpreted the daughter’s problem as demonic possession. We’d probably say the daughter suffered from a mental illness, but either way Jesus scorns the woman and essentially calls her a bitch.

The woman won’t give up. She knows that Jesus can cure her daughter. We don’t know how she knows that, but she does. She’s not about to stop pleading for the help her daughter so obviously needs. She says to Jesus, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Matthew 15:27. Finally Jesus gets it. He says, “Woman, great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish.” Matthew 15:28. The story ends with the woman’s daughter instantly healed, presumably through Jesus’ divine intervention.

There simply is no doubt that Jesus screwed up here. At least it certainly appears on the surface of the story that he did. He called a distraught woman pleading for help for her child a dog. Even if it were true that Jesus came only to minister to the Jews, which it isn’t, it wouldn’t make this woman a dog. I like actual dogs as much as the next guy, but calling any person a dog is clearly an insult and a putdown. Even if ministering to this woman had somehow violated the terms of Jesus’ divine mission, which it wouldn’t have, he’d hardly be justified in calling her a dog. In this incident Jesus Christ, God Incarnate, Emmanuel (God With Us), our Lord and Savior got it wrong. At least if we take this story at face value he got it so wrong that it’s surprising that the story made it into the Bible at all. The best thing we can say about what Jesus did here is that he made a big mistake, came to realize his mistake, and then did what is right.

Does the fact that Jesus made a mistake here establish that he is not a model of perfect humanity? I don’t think so. First of all, this is one story out of a great many stories about Jesus in the Gospels. It is legitimate to ask, Why is it here? Perhaps it is here as a model for the proper way for us to handle our mistakes. Jesus doesn’t tell us how to do that, he shows us how to do that by making a mistake and then correcting it. Of course there could have been a story about Jesus told to make the same point without having Jesus call a woman distraught about her daughter’s dire illness a dog and refusing at first to help her as only he could, but this is the story we get. So let’s learn from it that our mistakes are not things for us to cling to and keep repeating. The proper response to our mistakes is to  realize them, then do what we can to repair any damage our mistakes have done to ourselves or others. That certainly is a lesson worth learning from this story.

Then consider this. Try thinking of this story not as proving that Jesus wasn’t perfect but as showing us what perfect humanity actually is. Even a perfect person is not God. Well yes, Jesus was God, but his acting so human here tells us that as the perfect human being Jesus made mistakes.  Perfect humanity screwed up. There’s a powerful lesson for us in that way of understanding this story. It tells us that to err is human, as the old saw has it. So don’t beat yourself up too badly when you make a mistake. Don’t expect to be perfect in the sense of never making a mistake. That goal is beyond us. Rather, be perfect in the way you handle your mistakes. Acknowledge them, do what you can to make up for them, confess them to God and pray for forgiveness (which God is always offering (actually has already given) even before you ask for it), then let go of the mistake. We never read in the Bible that Jesus let guilt over his mistake in this story eat at him or stop him from pursuing his divine mission. We learn that we mustn’t let our mistakes eat us up and keep us from living lives as much like Jesus’ life as we can.

So mistake and all, Jesus is our model of perfect humanity. We can make mistakes and still strive to live perfect human lives. Perfect humanity isn’t flawless humanity. It is humanity lived as flawlessly as we can. Jesus doesn’t model something that is beyond us. Rather he models for us not what divine life is but what God calls human life to be, mistakes and all. Perfect humanity is not divinity. It is perfect humanity, but it isn’t perfect in the sense of flawless and error free because it is human not divine. That is the perfect humanity Jesus models for us in this story.

So let’s not get hung up on the way so many Bible passages suggest that we humans are either all good or all bad. We aren’t either of those things. None of us is. We’re all a mixture of both. So be gentle with each other. Be gentle with yourself. Understand that no one is perfectly bad and accept that no one is perfectly good. That’s just how it is with us humans; and like God said at the very beginning, it is good. Thanks be to God!

On the Norm and Criterion of the Biblical Christ

 

On the Norm and Criterion of the Biblical Christ

December 7, 2020

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

I’ve been reading John Dominic Crossan’s book How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Is God Violent? An exploration from Genesis to Revelation (HarperCollins, 2015). I owe a lot to Crossan. I’ve read a lot of his work. I’ve heard him speak three times. I even asked him a question during the Q and A session after one of those talks. He is a great scholar of the Bible, Jesus, and St. Paul. The issue he takes up in How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian is that the Bible presents Jesus as radically nonviolent in the Gospels but cosmically violent in Revelation. How are we to decide which of these two images of Jesus is the correct one, the one we are to follow? Crossan’s basic answer to that question is that the Jesus of the Gospels is the norm and criterion for understanding the Bible, and the historical Jesus is the norm and criterion for understand the Jesus of the Gospels.

There are I suppose a number of assumptions behind that formula, but there is one in particular that I want to raise here. Crossan’s answer to his question assumes that we can know who the historical Jesus was. Crossan of course has no doubt that he and certain other Jesus scholars have discovered the truth of who the historical Jesus was. He claims to have mined the truth of the historical Jesus that lies behind the many, varied images of Christ in the New Testament. He is convinced that the historical Jesus was indeed radically nonviolent. I agree. I’m sure the historical Jesus was radically nonviolent and that he calls us to be radically nonviolent too. Yet I reach that conclusion by a different path than Crossan does. It is that difference in our approaches to the question of which Jesus we are called to follow that I want to consider here. I’ll start to do that by considering another of Crossan’s major themes in How to Read the Bible. It is one of Crossan’s major themes that I find to be powerfully insightful and helpful. Indeed, I base my answer to Crossan’s fundamental question  on this understanding of the Bible.

There is no doubt that the Bible gives us both what Crossan calls the radicality of God and what he calls the normalcy of civilization. Crossan shows us that in the Bible we find a recurrent pattern of a statement of the radicality of God that is countered later by an assertion of the normalcy of civilization. Crossan discusses this thesis at considerable length. Here I’ll just consider the incidence of this pattern that is perhaps the easiest to understand and the most central to Crossan’s thesis in this book. It is the question of whether Jesus was violent or nonviolent.

Near the very beginning of the New Testament we find a powerful statement of the radicality of God around the question violence. In the collection of the sayings of Jesus that we call the Sermon on the Mount we find these statements of Jesus:

 

You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and is anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well, and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Matthew 5:38-41.

 

And:

 

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Matthew 5:43-47.

 

Both of these passages give us the radicality of God and the normalcy of civilization. They juxtapose the one against the other. Civilization says “an eye for an eye.” That is, civilization says when your are hurt, hurt back, just make sure your violent response is proportionate to the harm done to you. The world says if you are attacked, attack back. The three examples Jesus gives of what our relationship to violence should be—turn the other cheek, give the cloak as well, go the second mile—all assume that our reaction in each situation would be to resist and to use violence if necessary. Jesus give us instead the radical nonviolence of God as how we are to live.[1] Though Jesus often quoted Torah law when he said “you have heard that it was said,” Jewish law never explicitly tells people to hate their enemies. “Hate your enemies,” however, is very much the way of the world, the way of human civilization. Jesus give us the radicality of God’s nonviolent nature, will, and ways instead: “Love your enemies.” It simply cannot be denied that Jesus here rejects and condemns the violent ways of human civilization and replaces them with the nonviolent ways of God.

The book of Revelation (not Revelations) with which the Christian Bible ends is the most volent book by far in either Testament of the Bible. It even gives us a violent Christ. We read:

 

Then I saw heaven opened, and there was a white horse! Its rider is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems. And he has a name that no one knows but himself. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is called the Word of God. And the armies of heaven, wearing fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name inscribed; ‘King of kings and Lord of lords.’ Revelation 19:11-16.

From his names and titles the rider is clearly meant to be Christ. He leads the armies of heaven in a battle against “the beast” and his armies.[2] The soldiers of the beast are “killed by the sword of the rider on the horse, the sword that came from his mouth.” Revelation 19:21. In these verses, so far from the nonviolent Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount, Christ himself takes a sword and kills an entire army of enemies. The contrast could hardly be more stark. At the beginning of the New Testament we have Jesus  as history’s greatest prophet of nonviolence. At the end of the New Testament we have Christ the warrior leading an army of heaven into a very earthly battle of blood and death. We have here a classic example of the way the Bible gives us a statement of the radicality of God, then contradicts it with a statement of normalcy of civilization.

So which is it? Which Jesus is the Son of God that God sent to us because God so loved the world? John 3:16. How are we to decide between the two? Crossan has one answer to that question, I have another. Crossan’s answer is that we are to look to the historical Jesus as our norm and criterion for decision. Crossan believes that he has teased out of the available sources, mostly the canonical Gospels, just who the historical Jesus actually was. For Crossan the historical Jesus was a first century Jewish peasant who conducted a ministry of healing and who proclaimed a radical, nonviolent, revolutionary vision of the world transformed from the ways of civilization to the ways of God. Jesus called that vision “the kingdom of God.” Crossan’s thesis is that this historical Jesus tells us that the authentic Jesus, the one we are to follow, is the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount, the radically nonviolent Jesus, not the monstrously violent Christ of Revelation.

Now, I like Crossan’s vision of the historical Jesus a lot. I want Jesus to be committed to a radical, nonviolent transformation of the world from the ways of civilization to the ways of God, the ways of justice and peace achieved nonviolently; but therein lies the problem with Crossan’s solution to the question of how we choose between the Bible’s different versions of Jesus Christ and how he related to violence. Scholars have been trying to draw the historical Jesus out from behind the confessional statements about him that make up the Gospels for a very long time. Albert Schweitzer (yes, that Albert Schweitzer) critiqued that effort in his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus. The first version of this book appeared in German in 1906 and was translated into English in 1910. Schweitzer’s theses was in essence that it is not possible to discover the historical Jesus and that every attempt to do so ends up with a Jesus made in the image of the person who conducted the search. He was right about that. Anyone searching for the historical Jesus is necessarily guided by her or his personal preferences and prejudices. The materials on which to base the search are so sparse that the searcher must make numerous assumptions unsupported by the available evidence if she is going to reach any conclusions at all. The result is unavoidably a historical Jesus based more on conjecture than on solid historical evidence.

Crossan and his associates in the Jesus Seminar believe that they have overcome the problem in any search for the historical Jesus that Schweitzer uncovered over a century ago. As they considered the sayings the Gospels attribute to Jesus they adopted a set of criteria for determining which of those saying are likely from the historical Jesus and which are not. One significant criterion they used was the number of separate sources that contain a particular saying. I can tell you as a professionally trained historian myself that this is a legitimate criterion for judging something from ancient history. Yet we cannot avoid the conclusion that the Jesus Seminar’s most important criterion for determining whether a particular saying the Gospels attribute to Jesus was actually from the historical Jesus or not was whether they thought a particular saying sounded like Jesus or not. Yet how do they know what Jesus sounded like? They don’t. They can’t. This criterion basically comes down to whether or not a particular saying attributed to Jesus sounds like what they want Jesus to have sounded like or not. A group of mostly liberal scholars gave us a very liberal historical Jesus, precisely what Schweitzer would have told them would happen. Therefore I cannot accept Crossan’s thesis that the historical Jesus tells us which of the New Testament’s visions of Jesus we should accept.

I propose instead a different criterion to use in deciding our fundamental question of how Jesus related to violence. It has to do with the reason God sent us Jesus in the first place. (I will however resist the temptation to call this section of this essay Cur Deus Homo.) I approach the question of why God sent us Jesus using one of Crossan’s theses, the one that I find most important and helpful. It is his distinction between the radicality of God and the normalcy of civilization that we have already seen. We confess Jesus as the Word of God Incarnate. Why would God become incarnate in a particular person anyway? Surely it would have to be in order to address some problem God perceived that we humans have that could best be addressed in that way. The most common Christian understanding of the problem that Christ came to solve is sin. Certainly sin is a big problem that we humans have, but when we read the Gospels with an open mind we find Jesus dealing with a different problem a lot more than we see him dealing with sin. The problem we see him dealing with most is that we humans live our lives according to the normalcy of civilization rather than according to the radicality of God. We conform ourselves to the world a whole lot more than we conform ourselves to God. We create and live in a  world that while it may have kingdoms in it, it is definitely not the kingdom of God.

God became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth to teach us and to show us what the kingdom of God is and to call us to live kingdom lives not worldly lives. Jesus taught us that the kingdom of God is radically different from the ways of the world. God didn’t need to send us Jesus to teach us the ways of the world. We know and live those ways far too well already. Jesus taught us that the kingdom of God turns most of the ways of the world on their heads. The kingdom of God is the world as it is turned upside down. In the kingdom of God the meek and the peacemakers are blessed not the strong and the warmakers. In the kingdom of God the poor are filled with good things and the rich are sent empty away. The poor beggar rests in the bosom of Abraham not the rich man who did nothing to help the poor man during his life. In the kingdom of God enemies are loved not killed. In the kingdom of God the last shall be first and the first shall be last. In the kingdom of God the rejected are included and the despised are loved. The Jesus we have, the Jesus of the Gospels, is our guide here, not some historical Jesus we make up.

So how do we decide between the Jesus of Matthew 5 and the Jesus of Revelation 19? We ask whether one of those images reflects the ways of the world and whether one of them turns the ways of the world upside down. If one of them turns the world upside down while the other merely echoes the ways of the world, albeit writ on a cosmic scale, we know which to choose. Jesus’ way is undeniably the way of the vision that turns the world upside down. The ways of the world, which Crossan calls the normalcy of civilization, are all violence, greed, oppression, and exclusion. When we have a choice about which Jesus to choose, as we do here around the question of violence, our choice is easy to make if perhaps far more difficult to live. We choose the Jesus who is standing the world on its head. We choose the Jesus who accepted those the world condemned and who told us to pay workers according to what they need not according to what they earn.[3] We choose the Jesus who replaced the purity code of Leviticus with a new law of love and who lifted up the ancient prophetic rejection of sacrificial worship in favor of distributive justice.

And we choose the Jesus of Matthew 5:38-41 and 43-47 over the Jesus of Revelation 19:11-16. We choose Matthew’s Jesus (or at least much of Matthew’s Jesus) over the Jesus of the Apocalypse not because we think Matthew’s Jesus is at least somewhat close to the historical Jesus and Revelation’s Jesus isn’t (even if we agree with that assessment, which I do) but because as the prophet of transformative nonviolence Jesus turns the ways of the world on their heads. The Jesus of Revelation is merely an earthly soldier engaged in soldierly violence writ large. God didn’t send us Jesus to teach us what we already know. God hardly needed to do that. God sent us Jesus to teach us and to show us what we don’t know, what we seem to know no better now than the Roman Empire did in the first century CE. The Jesus who’s teaching us a different way, a better way, a more peaceful and just way, God’s way, is the one for us to choose and to follow. That is the Jesus who is doing what God sent him to do. That is the Jesus who is true to his divine mission.

So whenever you see the Bible presenting conflicting visions on any subject, which it does all the time (and the Old Testament does it as much as the New Testament does) ask yourself: Is this vision merely giving us the ways of the world albeit perhaps blown up to a cosmic scale? If so, reject it. It is not true to God’s will and ways. Is another vision turning the world on its head, is it calling us to work for justice, inclusion, and peace? If so accept it. Do your best to live into it, for in it you have found God’s way and will, the divine way and will Jesus came to teach us. Thanks be to God!

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[1] As much as it may sound like he does, Jesus does not actually counsel passivity here, just nonviolent resistance. See Wink, Walter, The Powers That Be, Theology for a New Millennium (Galilee Doubleday, New York, 1998), Chapter 5, “Jesus’ Third Way,” pp. 98 ff.

[2] In Revelation “the beast” means the Roman Empire.

[3] See Matthew 20:1-16.