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!
[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.
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