How is it that those who proclaim the loudest that context influenced scripture and the subsequent interpretation of Jesus by Christians seem the least able to step out of their own current culture and see how context influences them? Fundamentalists and literalists might have some excuse for insisting that the Bible has one, generally understandable interpretation (usually an Anabaptist, 17th- 19th C salvation message), which does not change. Their timescale of church history tends to stop at Patmos and pick up again at Luther. Yes, I am being a bit unfair.
Yet it’s the others that concern me at present. In our Advent liturgy we had the following
passage from Revelation 19, and it brought me up short:
11 I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and wages war. 12 His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. 13 He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. 14 The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. 15 Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.”[a] He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. 16 On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS 17 And I saw an angel standing in the sun, who cried in a loud voice to all the birds flying in midair, “Come, gather together for the great supper of God, 18 so that you may eat the flesh of kings, generals, and the mighty, of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all people, free and slave, great and small.” 19 Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to wage war against the rider on the horse and his army. 20 But the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who had performed the signs on its behalf. With these signs he had deluded those who had received the mark of the beast and worshiped its image. The two of them were thrown alive into the fiery lake of burning sulfur. 21 The rest were killed with the sword coming out of the mouth of the rider on the horse, and all the birds gorged themselves on their flesh.
When this vision first came into the hands of the church,
there was debate off and on for the next three centuries whether it was
scripture. But what doesn’t seem to have
been debated was whether this is a possible Jesus. I know, I know, it’s apocalyptic literature,
it concerns the Second Coming, it’s all very symbolic and hard to understand,
and everyone seems to get a lot of final chances before this Jesus goes into
action. Yet I still would claim that
most people today, not only outside the church but in it, would not regard this
as a possible Jesus. And I would most emphatically include clergy in that. Whatever they might say by way of
rationalization that they do too include that Jesus, there isn’t any evidence
of that in all their other references to him when they are commenting on social
or political Jesus. I believe that people eventually say what they really mean,
and their Jesus has a lot of 60’s liberal in him.
I had church professionals putting "Peace on Earth, Good
Will Toward Men" up on FB in the
entirely secular "Gee, Jesus really hates war, don't you get it?"
context this year. Jesus came so that
Jews, Greeks, Samaritans and Romans could all have access to the Kingdom of
God. Whether the Jews and Romans who
didn't follow him got along politically doesn't seem to have mattered to Him
all that much.*
Tangent on conservative Christians: They may do a bit worse
on this, as their tendency is to reference defending Christian culture, not
mentioning any favorite Jesus quite so much in this context. However much they
mention Christ in other discussions,
it’s Christians in the political ones.
End tangent.
*You can derive a "peace among the nations" doctrine
at some distance from an understanding that secular events aren't that
important in the overall scheme, plus the worry that there might be Christians
on the other side of a war. But it's
derivative. It's not in the NT, certainly
not in the gospels.
***********
Jaroslav Pelikan, highly esteemed professor of theology at
Yale, wrote Jesus Through The Centuries
(among many other works). I fought my
way through some of it, but I found his style difficult. Nonetheless, the overarching ideas are
important: Christians in different eras have seen different things in Jesus and
have emphasized different interpretations. They are not necessarily
contradictory, nor are they beyond each other’s understanding. The culture influences how people see Jesus,
which in turn influences the culture. One of Pelikan’s chapters is “The
Rabbi.” I have certainly read and heard
people expound on this idea. “The
Turning Point of History,” is another way the church once looked at Jesus, and
I have heard that too. “The Teacher of
Common Sense” is more 18thC rationalist. It is no longer so much taught, but it has
several descendants in the present era. Golden Rule Christians, for example.
Health and Wealth gospel is looked at as magical, but its social interaction
equivalent is looked on as just Common Sense.
If we spread peace and treat
others with kindness, it will win them to Christ, and in foreign policy, we
won’t have wars. Yes, I am being a
bit unfair. But it goes back at least as
far as JB Phillip’s Your God Is Too
Small, and its “Jesus Meek and Mild.” This Jesus seems to have taken over
whole sectors of the church. Perhaps to
counter other Jesuses.
My friends who have read Pelikan, or who have even heard of
him other than from me, should thus be most alert to the possibility that the
cultural and political events from their 16th to 20th
birthdays, and the views and values of their secular peer group, may have an
inordinate influence on their view of Jesus.
Because they know that such things happen. Because they know that this is human nature,
and where our theology will naturally fall unless we take active steps to
counteract that.
Jesus speaking to the woman at the well (and there’s a 60’s
folk song about that!) is a trifecta of marginalization: Samaritan, woman, and
sexual sin, so it is of course prominent, because Jesus was especially focused on the marginalized is a modern
doctrine. Favorite Jesus. The parable of the sheep and the goats is big,
because people are quite sure it includes advocating for government programs. There
are a few other faves. And they are
true, certainly. We can’t have a gospel that leaves them out. But they fit so
nicely with what people want to be true for other reasons that they should be
suspicious. When we come to secretly believe that Jesus came so that Greeks,
Romans, and Jews could get along we should be more than suspicious.
We could make a counter-list of Jesus driving out the
moneylenders, or giving permission to carry a sword, and telling stories of
people in torment and leaving the dead to bury the dead. But that would just be the same problem in a
mirror, seeking justifications for some other favorite Jesus.
6 comments:
It doesn't need to be a justification. We could cycle through such constellations of attributes the way we can cycle through the Psalms, and maybe get a better picture. Or maybe confuse the heck out of some people. I doubt the thief on the cross had a very well-rounded picture of who Jesus was and what He could do.
The incomplete Jesus images you mention all seem to me to err in one direction, by leaving out the incandescent conqueror and judge. They are all leftist errors. But as you point out, there are rightist errors, too, and people who are hypnotized by the fiery judge and by fire and brimstone generally. I know people whose big and constant religious problem is believing God really loves them rather than hates them.
Today, the border between Meek & Mild and Fire & Brimstone is probably somewhere within the right half of the political spectrum, not at the boundary between left and right. As you note, not even conservative clergy wants to talk much about brimstone, not until you get way right.
The reason is pretty obvious: it's a scary and repellent picture, and lots of people are going to either flee to Meek & Mild or stop believing altogether rather than put up with it or try the tricky project of mortaring a measured amount of brimstone into a more complete and nuanced picture of Christ.
Brimstone only "works" when you have a captive audience - belong to the state church or burn; later, belong to some church or be a pariah. When that situation collapses, it leaves brimstone absolutely discredited and a standard reason for condemning Christianity. It's been two or three generations, or more, since there was much brimstone around, but, notoriously, the scent lingers.
C. S. Lewis wrote in the '30s and '40s, and was already coping with the brimstone discredit. In The Screwtape Letters, damned souls are picked off by devils simply because Heaven won't defend and collect them. In The Last Battle, at the end of the Narnia series, the damned Narnians flee Aslan of themselves and vanish into His shadow. In The Great Divorce, damned ghosts self-destruct or flee back to Hell of their own will. In his little-read Pilgrim's Regress, John's dread of the Landlord's dungeon is part of his reason for fleeing his family's land.
Before Lewis wrote, Stella Gibbons pilloried brimstone in Cold Comfort Farm, published in 1928. I'm confident I could go further, but I'm going on just based on my own scattershot reading.
I guess I'm just saying Be careful what you wish for.
The Samaritan woman at the well always has been one of my favorite Bible stories, because it shows Jesus simultaneously at his most mild and most uncompromising. He didn't hesitate to call her out for shacking up with one guy after another, but he didn't get distracted from the main point, either. We seem always to be trying to figure out what the most important sin is, but my understanding--as always, strongly influenced by Lewis's Screwtape--is that "murder is no better than cards if cards do the trick." He keeps telling us that God isn't rigidly hateful and in fact will do pretty much literally anything possible to get us right with Him, but also that there's no alternative whatever to getting right with Him. He's never going to say, "OK, go ahead and do whatever strikes your fancy, I'll make sure it's comfortable," any more than He's going to make gravity work backwards so we can pretend stepping off a cliff is a good idea. Reality will always be at uncompromising war with error.
Oh, that's the old understanding of that story.
You might like the goofy book Imaginary Jesus by Matt Mikalatos.
I get the impression from my FB feed that a lot of the folks who preach Jesus Meek and Mild would not mind a little fire and brimstone smiting anyone they disagree with.
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