Yes, Rev.. Palmer, But....

Yes, Rev. Palmer, But….

September 30, 2021

 

Yesterday my Facebook friend the Rev. Peg Faulman put a quote on Facebook from the author Jim Palmer. I intend here to offer a critique of Palmer’s view of Jesus and of Christianity as I have been able to discern them from what I admit is only a few quotes of his or descriptions of his work. I apologize in advance if I have misconstrued any of his views. I believe, however, that reflection on the bit of his work I have seen leads to some important conclusions. So I’ll go ahead and offer here  the fruits of my reflection on what I know of Mr. Palmer’s work.

The quote my friend put on Facebook is apparently from Palmer’s book Inner Anarchy. I was not previously at all familiar with Mr. Palmer’s work. I found some information about him on line, particularly at the site jimpalmerblog.wordpress. com. That site has quotes from what it calls an “Amazon Description” of Inner Anarchy. It says that since 2005 Palmer has been “exploring the terrain of spirituality beyond the mindsets of organized religion.” I might actually say the same thing about myself, although I’ve been doing it for quite a while longer than since 2005. This post says that in Inner Anarchy Palmer “shows how the Christian religion has twisted the true life and message of Jesus, and has preached a powerless gospel that is preventing millions of people from being free.” It contains an unattributed quote that reads, “We must dethrone and tear down the mindsets and ideologies that are ruling our world from within us and taking us further down a road of certain doom.” In the Facebook post I mentioned Palmer calls Jesus “an iconoclast.” It seems that Palmer is something of an iconoclast himself, not that being an iconoclast is in any way necessarily a bad thing.

Palmer does not reject Jesus outright. Rather he seems to want to claim what he sees as the historical Jesus and put that Jesus in the place of the Jesus of the Christian faith. The blog post I mentioned above says, “Palmer offers a hopeful place for all human beings to explore the possibility of birthing a new reality in the world.” It also contains this quote, also unattributed except to say that Palmer writes it:

 

‘Jesus announced the inauguration of a new age—the likes of which we have never seen but have dreamed of. His words are compelling and fascinating. He implies that this age is hidden in the human heart and is now ready to be birthed into existence. Jesus said it would come in the midst of great turmoil and would be led not by religious preachers and Bible scholars, but by those who open up their minds, become like a child, and trust what is deep inside their hearts.’

 

In the bit of Palmer’s writing that my friend put on Facebook Palmer says that Jesus is largely about “defying the legitimacy and authority of the dominant religious system and its ecclesiastical hierarchy.” He also sees Jesus as a threat to the established social and political systems within which Jesus lived: “To the Romans, he was a radical—a religious fanatic who would no doubt try to overturn their social order if allowed to gain too many followers.” Palmer calls Jesus “the greatest debunker of religious hierarchies and traditions this world has ever seen.”

It is unclear to me whether Palmer considers Jesus to be any kind of savior at all, but he certainly does not see Jesus as a savior in any traditional sense. He writes, “Jesus did not die to save people from God, rescue us from ourselves, or snatch sinners from the flames of hell. Jesus is not a ticket-puncher to heaven, he’s a jail-breaker for people locked up in religion.” The piece of Palmer’s that my friend put on Facebook ends:

 

I consider the life, teachings, and wisdom of Jesus to be universally relevant, regardless of one’s religious, spiritual, or philosophical point of view. Christianity does not hold unique and absolute claim to Jesus. Just because you’re a Christian doesn’t mean you truly get Jesus. In fact, it may be the reason you don’t.

 

When I first read the bit of Palmer’s writing that my friend put on Facebook I thought, “I’ve got so many responses to what he says that I don’t know where to start.” I have to start somewhere if I’m going to say anything, so I’ll start with the positive. Palmer is quite correct when he calls Jesus an iconoclast. Jesus took about every social and religious truth, order, or custom of his day and turned them completely upside down. The first shall be last and the last shall be first, he said. His prophetic act of overturning the tables of the moneychangers and driving the sellers of sacrificial animals out of the temple was not a cleansing of the temple as it is usually called. It was Jesus rejecting the whole structure of the Judaism of his day, including in particular the temple with its priests and other officials. Jesus blessed the peacemakers not the warmakers. In another prophetic act he demonstrated God’s way of peace not war when he rode into Jerusalem not on a battle steed but on a donkey, an animal of the farm and peaceful production not of the battlefield and death. The examples of Jesus overturning the religious, political, and social conventions of his time could go on and on. The vision he gives us of God’s ways of justice for the poor and the oppressed achieved not though violence but through assertive, creative nonviolence was revolutionary in his day. It is still revolutionary in ours.

Palmer is also right when he says that Jesus believed the new age of a transformed world lies in the human heart. Whether or not that new age is ready to be “birthed into existence” as Palmer says it is may be a separate question, but Jesus believed and taught that liberation from the oppressive, unjust ways of the world begins from inside each person. In chapter 5 of the Gospel of Mark we find the story of Jesus exorcizing a demon named “Legion” out of a man who was violent and uncontrollable while Legion was inside him. A legion of course was a basic organizational unit of the Roman army, roughly equivalent to a modern brigade or division. This man’s problem wasn’t first of all that Rome was out there. It was that Rome was in here, in the man’s heart and soul. For Jesus transformation of the world from the way it is to the ways of God begins with the inner, spiritual transformation of each individual person. In all of these things Palmer is absolutely correct.

I do however have several disagreements with Palmer that I want to present for your consideration. One is my disagreement with his statement that the traditional gospel of the Christian faith is “powerless.” The problem here is that Palmer fails to see that for all its failings and shortcomings, of which there have been a great many over the centuries, many of which are still with us today, the Christian faith has been a profound spiritual home for untold numbers of people from its beginnings. It remains a life-giving, life-sustaining, life-transforming spiritual tradition for an enormous number of people. Countless Christian women and men have found and do find within that tradition the gifts of the Spirit. They find hope, courage, challenge, comfort, peace, and salvation in Christianity’s teachings and tenets. Palmer dismisses those teachings and tenets because they don’t all come from Jesus himself. That they do not does not however make them untrue. It is no reason to take them away from people who find in them precisely what they need to get them through the night. I happen to be one of those people myself.

My next quibble with Palmer has to do with how he says the new age to which Jesus testified would and would not come. He says that it would not be led by religious preachers and Bible scholars but by those who are able to open their minds, become like children, and trust what’s in their heart. My first quibble with Palmer here is that his statement seems to assume that religious preachers and Bible scholars are not able to do those things. Of course many of them aren’t, but Palmer’s statement seems to be an unwarranted wholesale dismissal of a great many Christian people. It seems to me that religious preachers and Bible scholars are neither less nor more able to do those things than are people generally.

Power’s dismissal of Bible scholars also seems to be inconsistent with what Palmer is all about. Palmer’s critique of the Christian tradition appears to come down to the contention that it is illegitimate because it does not limit its view of Jesus to the historical person Jesus of Nazareth but instead presents a Jesus quite different from what Palmer thinks that Jesus was. For example, in the piece of his writing that my friend put on Facebook he says, “Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founder’s than any other agency in the world….What are now called ‘essential doctrines’ of the Christian religion, Jesus does not even mention.” In his focus on Jesus as iconoclast Palmers seems to be lifting up what he believes to have been true of the historical Jesus against what the Christian tradition has made Jesus into.

The truth for Palmer and everyone else is that the books of the New Testament, especially the four Gospels found there, are the only sources we have on who Jesus of Nazareth was. Bible scholars tell us that those Gospels were written between roughly forty and perhaps as much as ninety years after Jesus’ death. Those scholars tell us that the New Testament texts probably contain some historically accurate facts about Jesus, but the Gospels in particular are more confessional testaments to who Jesus had become for the early Christians for whom those texts were written. They certainly are neither history nor biography in the contemporary sense of those terms.

At least since the nineteenth century CE some writers have tried to tease out of the Gospels what, if anything, in them is historically factual about Jesus of Nazareth. In his book The Quest for the Historical Jesus, first published in 1906, Albert Schweitzer—yes, that Albert Schweitzer—contended that it is not possible to get behind the biblical texts to discover who the historical Jesus actually was. Nonetheless, in the more than a century since Schweitzer’s book appeared different scholars have renewed what Schweitzer called the quest for the historical Jesus. Scholars such as Marcus Borg (who was more a popularizer than a scholar, but never mind) and John Dominic Crossan have published books that claim to have discovered who Jesus of Nazareth actually was. The work of those scholars is enticing, but Schweitzer’s contention that when people claim to have discovered the historical Jesus what they have actually discovered is only who they want Jesus to have been not who he actually was retains a good amount of truth. Nonetheless, Palmer rather clearly thinks he knows who the historical Jesus really was. I believe him to be largely correct about who Jesus was, but neither I nor anyone else can truly know who the historical Jesus was. The Christ(s) of the New Testament are the only ancient images of Christ that we have. Palmer quite clearly relies on the work of Bible scholars in formulating his view of who Jesus actually was. Yet he also dismisses those scholars. He apparently dismisses them both as scholars and as women and men with their own faith and their own spirituality. In doing that Palmer is at least inconsistent. He may actually be contradicting himself on a point that is central to his thesis about who Jesus really was.

In the bit of his writing that I’ve seen, Palmer says that Jesus did not come to “rescue us from ourselves.” It’s not entirely clear to me what he means by that statement, but it seems to contradict one part of an important way that Jesus has functioned over the millennia. I and many others have found it helpful to understand Jesus as being about our overcoming three forms of alienation that afflict us humans and keep us from becoming the whole individuals God created us to be. They are alienation from God, alienation from each other, and alienation from our true selves. In that sense he did indeed come to rescue us from ourselves. In the New Testament we find a Jesus who knows that whatever alienation from God we feel is entirely of our own making. Jesus overcomes our self-imposed alienation from God. That’s the meaning of the story in the Gospel of Mark that has the curtain of the temple torn in two at the moment of Jesus’ death. That curtain concealed the Holy of Holies, the most sacred place in the Jerusalem temple. It was where God was actually thought to dwell or at least to be most immediately present on earth. The curtain that separated the people from the Holy of Holies symbolically separated the people from God. Mark saying that at the moment of Jesus’ death that curtain was torn in two is a mythic or symbolic way of saying that in Jesus whatever we believe separates or alienates us from God has been overcome. Because in Jesus Christ we overcome what we believe alienates us from God we can also overcome our alienation from each other and even overcome our alienation from our true selves, from the persons God created us to be.

Finally, let me turn to what I believe to be the major shortcoming of Palmer’s view of the Christian faith as I discern it from the pieces of his work I have seen. Palmer apparently believes that the only things that are true about Jesus are the facts of his human life. I see Palmer at least implying that Christianity must be grounded in the facts of the life of the historical Jesus because only those facts are true. Yet spiritual truth is not limited to facts. The deepest truths of faith are not factual, they are mythic and symbolic. I have explored that truth in more depth then I can here in Part Two of my book Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Revised Edition, which is available at amazon.com. Here I will say only that factual truth is a very shallow, limited kind of truth. The Christian faith is grounded to some extent in factual truth. Its truth is however far deeper than mere fact. It is mythic and symbolic. The picture of Jesus Christ as God Incarnate and as Savior, as misinterpreted as they have often been, arose from the spiritual longing and discernment of Christian people over a long period of time. The stories and understandings of Jesus understood as mythic and symbolic touch Christian people at a psychospiritual level far deeper than mere facts ever can. As mere facts the stories of the Bible are merely something that may have happened a long time ago to other people in a place far away. As true myths they are about us. They are stories that mediate God to us and us to God in ways far more powerful and powerfully true than mere facts ever can. The Christian faith does not consist primarily of mere facts about Jesus or about anyone or anything else. It consists of spiritual truths that touch us at the deepest level of our psyches. Paul Tillich said that one should never say something is only a symbol. We should instead say that a symbolic truth is not less than a symbol. That is a truth that it seems to me Palmer overlooks.

So I find the bit I’ve read of Palmer to be both interesting and challenging. He is absolutely correct that the Christian tradition has blunted the revolutionary, iconoclastic edge of what Jesus was and is all about. If the great Christian faith is to survive, something that by the way is in no way guaranteed, it must recapture that cutting edge of Jesus’ life and teachings. But we must never lose the profound spiritual truths of our faith. The power of those spiritual truths far transcends the power of any mere facts. They connect us to God and God to us. Let us never let go of that salvific truth.