This week’s installment of Saving Jesus at my church applied its revisionist sledgehammer to the doctrines of the Virgin Birth and the Incarnation. It would be too easy to make fun of the worksheet, which appears to have been written by unemployed former Soviet re-education camp counselors. So-called discussion questions included “Name some of the reasons why the virgin birth is not to be taken literally” and “What are some of the words that were confused by the early translators and writers [of the Bible]?”

On the DVD, Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong averred with equal certainty that we should “stop thinking of God as a great big parent figure up in the sky — a supernatural being who is external to life” and instead imagine God as a life force that is present in all of us. The difference between Jesus and ourselves is one of degree, not of kind. As a logical matter, said Spong, Jesus could not be fully human and also different in kind from us, as the church has mistakenly considered him to be.

I’ve got to give Spong credit for understanding why the Incarnation is such a radical concept, although his anti-supernatural bias makes him reject it. Precisely because there is a separation between humans and God, such that the divine light within us is clouded, Jesus can’t be fully divine and also fully human if we understand human as meaning “just like us”, i.e. no more than us. Spong closes the gap by eliminating God, insofar as God is distinct from His creation. But at least he sees the central problem, which is that the difference between the holy God of the Bible and us mere mortals is so great that our brains freeze when we try to picture them coexisting in the same person.

I’ll confess right now that I believe in the Incarnation — as history, not just metaphor — because it makes me happy. Not because I can prove it through archaeological, textual or scientific evidence. For Spong & co., this makes me an idiot. On the DVD, Marcus Borg said the best we can hope for is “post-critical naivete”– though our critical intellect says these miracles couldn’t possibly have happened, our mature faith returns to find value in the stories as metaphor, bracketing the question of historical truth.

I suddenly felt more sympathy for the Saving Jesus project after hearing this, because it reminded me of where I was around the time of my conversion. I was totally convinced that the gospel of grace presented in St. Paul’s letters was the truest picture of human nature and our relationship to God that I could find. But was it intellectually honest to infer a historical truth from a psychological one? Ultimately I threw up my hands and said, “Well, if it didn’t exactly happen the way it said in the Bible, I still believe with all my heart that God is the kind of God who would love us enough to die for us, and that gets me most of the way there.”

Somehow since then I’ve become furiously certain that it actually happened more or less the way the Gospels said. I can’t rely confidently on God’s forgiveness unless I believe, first of all, that there is a real, personal, loving God, and when I start to doubt that, I’m forced to cling to the idea that He actually died to close the cosmic rift created by human sin. I wasn’t able to save myself, so I can’t rely on a Jesus who’s only the product of my imagination (even if I do ask the characters in my novel for advice on my love life).

Here’s a paradox for liberals to chew on: If religious truth is “what works for me,” what if the only thing that works for me is to believe my religion is objectively true?

Because “Saving Jesus” comes but once a week, I thought I’d post this article by N.T. Wright (yes, I’m a Bishop of Durham groupie) in case anyone else is going through heresy withdrawal. Musing on the appeal of The Da Vinci Code, Wright identifies and critiques the worldview that underlies both this book and the theological movement from which “Saving Jesus” arises. (BTW, have you ever wondered why the logo for the DVD series looks like a ransom note? Is it that he gave his life as a ransom for many, and now he needs us to return the favor?) And now, here’s Tommy:

The New Myth of Christian Origins
The myth that I am about to describe and critique is well known and widespread. I have met it at Harvard; I have met it in Baptist churches in the South; I have seen bits of it all over the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature, which is the more ironic since those societies used to be devoted, in theory at least, to the supposedly scientific historical study of religions and ancient texts, and this myth is anything but scientific or historical. There are five elements in the myth, and The Da Vinci Code offers a sketchy but clear enough account of all of them.

This is the myth: First, there were dozens if not hundreds of other documents about Jesus. Some of these have now come to light, not least in the books discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt 60 years ago. These focus on Jesus more as a human being, a great religious teacher, than as a divine being. And it is these books which give us the real truth about Jesus.

Second, the four Gospels in the New Testament were later products aimed at divinizing Jesus and claiming power and prestige for the church. They were selected, for these reasons, at the time of Constantine in the fourth century, and the multiple alternative voices were ruthlessly suppressed.

Third, therefore, Jesus himself wasn’t at all like the four canonical Gospels describe him. He didn’t think he was God’s son, or that we would die for the sins of the world; he didn’t come to found a new religion. He was a human being pure and simple, who gave some wonderful moral and spiritual teaching, that’s all. Oh, and he may well have been married, perhaps even with a child on the way, when his career was cut short by death.

Fourth, therefore: Christianity as we know it is based on a mistake. Mainstream Christianity is sexist, especially anti-women and anti-sex itself. It has aimed at, and in some places achieved, considerable social power and prestige, enabling it to be politically quietist and conformist. This, I find, goes down especially well with those who are escaping from either fundamentalism or certain types of Roman Catholicism.

Fifth, the real pay-off: It is time to give up, as historically unwarranted, theologically unjustified, and spiritually and socially damaging, the picture of Jesus and Christian origins which the church has put about for so long, and to return to the supposedly original vision of Jesus himself, not least in terms of getting in touch with a different form of spirituality based on metaphor rather than literal truth, of feeling rather than structure, of discovering whatever faith you find you can believe in. This will revive the truth for which Jesus lived, and perhaps for which he died….

Wright goes on to discuss the historical background and accuracy of the non-canonical “gospels” and reasons for their exclusion. The political payoff of the article, though, is here:

Early Christianity was not primarily a movement which showed, or taught, how one might live a better life; that came as the corollary of the main emphasis, which was that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had fulfilled his age-old purposes, had dealt with the powers of evil, and had launched his project of new creation upon the world. The early Christian gospel, which was then written up in the four canonical Gospels, was the good news, not that a new teaching about hidden wisdom had appeared, enabling those who tapped into it to improve the quality of their lives here or even hereafter, but that something had happened through which the evil which had infected the world had been overthrown and a new creation launched, and that all human beings were invited to become part of that project by becoming renewed themselves.

In particular, this included from the start a strong political critique. Not the tired old left-wing harangue in Christian dress, of course, but a more subtle, more Jewish, more devastating critique: Jesus is Lord, therefore Caesar isn’t. That is there in Paul. It is there in Matthew, in John, in Revelation. If the canon was written, or read, to curry political favor, it was dramatically unsuccessful. Those who were thrown to the lions were not reading “Thomas” or Q or the “Gospel of Mary.” They were reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and the rest, and being sustained thereby in a subversive mode of faith and life which, growing out of apocalyptic Judaism, posed a far greater threat to Roman empire and pagan worldviews than Cynic philosophy or Gnostic spirituality ever could. Why would Caesar worry about people rearranging their private spiritualities? And when Constantine, faced with half his empire turning Christian, decided to go with the tide, what was the church supposed to do? Protest that it would be more authentic to remain a beleaguered and persecuted minority? Let comfortable Western Christians think about what the church had suffered under Diocletian in the years immediately before Constantine — and what the church is suffering in many parts of the world today — and ask themselves who has compromised, and with what.

In fact, the contemporary myth gets things exactly the wrong way round. It isn’t the case that the canonical New Testament is politically and socially quiescent, colluding with empire, while the Jesus whom we meet in the Nag Hammadi texts and similar documents is politically and socially subversive, so dangerous that he had to be suppressed. It’s the other way round, and this may be among the most telling points we have to recognize for today. You may salve your own conscience by embracing Gnosticism, by telling yourself how very wicked the world is and how you are going to escape it once and for all by following the path of spiritual self-discovery and enlightenment. But if Caesar takes any notice at all, all he will do is sneer at you and go on his way to yet more triumphs of sheer power. And if that happened in the second century, we can be sure it’s precisely what’s happening today. Heidegger and Bultmann couldn’t prevent Hitler; Derrida and Foucault and their numerous disciples can’t do anything to stop the new empires of today. Certainly those who are advocating a new kind of do-it-yourself spirituality, and claiming that Jesus is somehow in or behind it all, cut no ice on the political front….
 

One of the basic fault lines in the contemporary Western world is the line between neo-Gnosticism on the one hand and the challenge of Jesus on the other. Please note that, despite strenuous attempts to make this line coincide with the current sharp left-right polarization of American culture and politics, it simply doesn’t. Nor, for that matter, does it coincide with the polarizations of British or European culture either. So what is this real, deep polarization which runs through our world?

Neo-Gnosticism is the philosophy that invites you to search deep inside yourself and discover some exciting things by which you must then live. It is the philosophy which declares that the only real moral imperative is that you should then be true to what you find when you engage in that deep inward search. But this is not a religion of redemption. It is not at all a Jewish vision of the covenant God who sets free the helpless slaves. It appeals, on the contrary, to the pride that says “I’m really quite an exciting person, deep down, whatever I may look like outwardly” — the theme of half the cheap movies and novels in today’s world. It appeals to the stimulus of that ever-deeper navel-gazing (“finding out who I really am”) which is the subject of a million self-help books, and the home-made validation of a thousand ethical confusions. It corresponds, in other words, to what a great many people in our world want to believe and want to do, rather than to the hard and bracing challenge of the very Jewish gospel of Jesus. It appears to legitimate precisely that sort of religion which a large swathe of America and a fair chunk of Europe yearns for: a free-for-all, do-it-yourself spirituality, with a strong though ineffective agenda of social protest against the powers that be, and an I’m-OK-you’re-OK attitude on all matters religious and ethical. At least, with one exception: You can have any sort of spirituality you like (Zen, labyrinths, Tai Chi) as long as it isn’t orthodox Christianity.

By contrast, the challenge of Jesus, in the 21st century as in the first, is that we should look away from ourselves and get on board with the project the one true God launched at creation and re-launched with Jesus himself. The authentic Christian gospel, which is good news about something that has happened as a result of which the world is a different place — this gospel demands that we submit to Jesus as Lord and allow all other allegiances, loves and self-discoveries to be realigned in that light. God’s project, and God’s gospel, are rooted in solid history as opposed to Gnostic fantasy and its modern equivalents. Genuine Christianity is to be expressed in self-giving love and radical holiness, not self-cosseting self-discovery. And it lives by, and looks for the completion of, the new world in which God will put all things to rights and wipe away all tears from all eyes; in which all knees will bow at the name of Jesus, not because he had a secret love-child, not because he was a teacher of recondite wisdom, not because he showed us how we could get in touch with the hidden feminine, but because he died as the fulfillment of the Scriptural story of God’s people and rose as the fulfillment of the world-redeeming purposes of the same creator God; and because, in that death and resurrection, we discover him to be the one at whose name every knee shall indeed bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, confessing Jesus Christ as Lord to the glory of God the Father.

This week’s episode of the Saving Jesus DVD series at my church featured John Dominic Crossan describing Christianity’s countercultural challenge to the political theology of the Roman Empire. It was a real eye-opener for me and the other students to discover that the kingly titles given to Jesus in the creed and liturgy — God from God, Prince of Peace, Savior and Redeemer of the World — were originally applied to Caesar Augustus. Those titles may scare us now because they sound so hierarchical, but as the early Christians heard them, they were the ultimate rebuke to human tyranny and the propaganda that supports it. Because we don’t recognize the radical critique of human power contained in the words “the kingdom of God,” we’re always tempted to read this language as a divine rubber-stamp for our imperialist projects.

One of the class members, who’s widely read in church history, noted that the processions that open and close the worship service in liturgical churches (Catholic and Episcopal) are modeled on the Roman triumphal processions, but with the imperial values reversed. In the Roman scheme, a procession celebrating a military victory would have the emperor at the head, the captured slaves at the rear, and everyone else between them in descending order of importance. In a church procession, the cross is carried at the head, and the priest comes last, because he is the servant of all.  

Crossan concluded with the question: What would the world look like if we acted as if God were in charge, rather than the Roman Empire or its modern equivalent? The kingdom of God is not reserved for a future place and time. It’s a new perspective that’s available to us right now.

Or, as Anglican theologian N.T. Wright put it in his article “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire”, St. Paul’s missionary work

must be conceived not simply in terms of a traveling evangelist offering people a new religious experience, but of an ambassador for a king-in-waiting, establishing cells of people loyal to this new king, and ordering their lives according to his story, his symbols, and his praxis, and their minds according to his truth. This could only be construed as deeply counter-imperial, as subversive to the whole edifice of the Roman Empire; and there is in fact plenty of evidence that Paul intended it to be so construed, and that when he ended up in prison as a result of his work he took it as a sign that he had been doing his job properly.

I’m going to give away how it ends, but you should still read the whole thing: 

If Paul’s answer to Caesar’s empire is the empire of Jesus, what does that say about this new empire, living under the rule of its new lord? It implies a high and strong ecclesiology, in which the scattered and often muddled cells of women, men and children loyal to Jesus as Lord form colonial outposts of the empire that is to be: subversive little groups when seen from Caesar’s point of view, but when seen Jewishly an advance foretaste of the time when the earth shall be filled with the glory of the God of Abraham and the nations will join Israel in singing God’s praises. From this point of view, therefore, this counter-empire can never be merely critical, never merely subversive. It claims to be the reality of which Caesar’s empire is the parody; it claims to be modelling the genuine humanness, not least the justice and peace, and the unity across traditional racial and cultural barriers, of which Caesar’s empire boasted. If this claim is not to collapse once more into dualism, into a rejection of every human aspiration and value, it will be apparent that there will be a large degree of overlap. “Shun what is evil; cling to what is good.” There will be affirmation as well as critique, collaboration as well as critique. To collaborate without compromise, to criticise without dualism—this is the delicate path that Jesus’ counter-empire had to learn to tread.

Wright’s analysis feels to me like more of a complete breakfast than the “Saving Jesus” perspective, which stops at the critique of state power without recognizing its tragic necessity. “Civilization has always been imperial,” Crossan asserted. But as one of the participants in our class asked, what’s the alternative? We don’t want chaos, either.

Although I don’t agree with his defense of the current war in Iraq, this article in First Things by Wilfred McClay, about the intellectual legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr, eloquently captures our Incarnational faith’s paradoxical relationship to the princes of this world:

In his youth, Niebuhr was a devotee of the Social Gospel, the movement within liberal Protestantism that located the gospel’s meaning in its promise as a blueprint for progressive social reform, rather than in its assertions about the nature of supernatural reality. Social Gospelers were modernists who had largely dismissed the authority of the Bible and the historical creeds. But they insisted that the heart of the Christian gospel could still be preserved by being “socialized,” i.e., translated into the language of scientific social reform. As Walter Rauschenbusch, perhaps the leading figure in the Social Gospel movement, once put it, “We have the possibility of so directing religious energy by scientific knowledge that a comprehensive and continuous reconstruction of social life in the name of God is within the bounds of human possibility.” The Kingdom of God was not reserved for the beyond, but could be created in the here and now by social scientists and ministers working hand in hand.

Niebuhr soon grew impatient with this kind of talk. He found the progressive optimism undergirding the Social Gospel to be utterly naive about the intractability of human nature, and therefore inadequate to the task of explaining the nature of power relations in the real world. Sin, he concluded, was not merely a byproduct of bad but correctible social institutions. It was something much deeper than that, something inherent in the human condition, something social institutions were powerless to reform. In what was perhaps his single most important book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, published in 1932 in the depths of the Depression, Niebuhr turned the Social Gospelers’ emphasis on its head, arguing that there was an inescapable disjuncture between the morality governing the lives of individuals and the morality of groups, and that the latter was generally inferior to the former. Individuals could transcend their self-interest only rarely, but groups of individuals, especially groups such as nation-states, never could. In short, groups generally made individuals morally worse, rather than better, for the work of collectives was inevitably governed by a brutal logic of self-interest.

Niebuhr dismissed as mere “sentimentality” the progressive hope that the wages of individual sin could be overcome through intelligent social reform, and that America could be transformed in time into a loving fellowship of like-minded comrades, holding hands around the national campfire. Instead, the pursuit of good ends in the arena of national and international politics had to take full and realistic account of the unloveliness of human nature, and the unlovely nature of power. Christians who claimed to want to do good in those arenas had to be willing to get their hands soiled, for existing social relations were held together by coercion, and only counter-coercion could change them. All else was pretense and pipedreams.

This sweeping rejection of the Social Gospel and reaffirmation of the doctrine of original sin did not, however, mean that Niebuhr gave up on the possibility of social reform. On the contrary. Christians were obliged to work actively for progressive social causes and for the realization of Christian social ideals of justice and righteousness. But in doing so they had to abandon their illusions, not least in the way they thought about themselves. The pursuit of social righteousness would, he believed, inexorably involve them in acts of sin and imperfection. Not because the end justifies the means, but because that was simply the way of the world. Even the most surgical action creates collateral damage. But the Christian faith just as inexorably called its adherents to a life of perfect righteousness, a calling that gives no ultimate moral quarter to dirty hands. The result would seem to be a stark contradiction, a call to do the impossible.

But Niebuhr insisted that the Christian life nevertheless requires us to embrace both parts of that formulation. Notwithstanding the more flattering preferences of liberal theologians, the doctrine of original sin was profoundly and essentially true, and its probative value was confirmed empirically every day. Man is a sinner in his deepest nature. But man was not merely a sinner, but also a splendidly endowed creature formed in God’s image, still capable of acts of wisdom, generosity, and truth, and still able to advance the cause of social improvement. All these assertions were true. All have an equivalent claim on the Christian mind and heart. In insisting upon such a complex formulation, Niebuhr was correcting the Social Gospel’s erroneous attempt to collapse or resolve the tension at the heart of the Christian vision of things.

Toward the end of our class, my minister — otherwise a complete devotee of the Social Gospel’s message of self-salvation — came out with something orthodox and profound. When we try to rely on ourselves alone, he said, we become insecure and violent, fighting to protect the territory on which our livelihood depends. What if, instead, we back away and trust God instead of whatever social system protects our property, and recognize that all the world’s riches belong to God? We have to depend on a different kind of strength — not ourselves or our empire, but God — so we can feel safe enough to go to the back of the line.

Jerusalem Post columnist Jonathan Rosenblum’s intriguing recent post at Jewish World Review revisits the age-old debate over free will versus determinism, and how it makes a difference to our understanding of morality. Among other good points, the article helped me reconcile the Old Testament’s emphasis on moral choices with other passages where God appears to predetermine the outcome by hardening people’s hearts to do evil:

In his Discourse on Free Will, Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler describes how the area of free will differs for each and every person, based on education and other factors, and how it shifts constantly. It is only possible to speak of the exercise of free will, he writes, at that point where a person’s apprehension of the truth, i.e., what is right, is in perfect equipoise with a countervailing desire. Precisely at that point, nothing besides the person himself determines the outcome.

Rabbi Dessler employs the spatial metaphor of a battlefield to capture the process. The point at which the battle is joined is the point of free will. Behind the battle line is captured territory — the area where a person feels no temptation to do other than what he perceives as right. And behind the enemy lines are all those areas in which a person does not yet have the ability to choose.

The battlefront moves constantly. With every victory — every choice to do what is right — a person advances. And he retreats with every defeat. Pharaoh provides the paradigm of the latter. By repeatedly hardening his heart, he finally lost the capacity to exercise his free will.

In a contemporary context, Rabbi Dessler remarked that those who deny the possibility of free will do so because by failing to develop their own will power through the positive exercise of their free will they have lost their freedom.