This chapter calls for less revision than some of the others, not because Romans 13 has not continued to be studied since 1972, but because the text has become less central in the thought of some. The notion that out of this one apostolic passage there could be derived a normative and timeless divine pattern for what “The State” both is and should be, which dominated Protestant thought since the Reformation, was not a promising base for further development. Those who hold to that hope, on the grounds of their theory of Scripture, need say no more, and have said no more recently than they said generations ago. On the other hand, those who read the letter to the Romans with critical concern for what mattered to the author and his addressees no longer tend to put these seven verses at the center of their concern.
Many scholars who have been reading Romans most carefully over the last generation find the author to be most concerned for the reconciliation of Jews and Gentiles in the new community This theme brings Romans closer to Galatians and Ephesians, and thus to the topic of my chapter 11.
Another set of critical readers see in this passage its cross-references to the themes both of the principalities and powers (my chapter 8) and of subordination (chapter 9). They then study (a) Whether Paul, when he thought about the Roman government, was essentially politically conservative and, if so, (b) whether he thereby betrayed the radicality of jesus or applied it to a new agenda. Thus the deeper reading of the Romans passage overlaps at each point with concerns this book works with more thoroughly under other headings.
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Thursday, April 26, 2012
EPILOGUE TO CHAPTER 9 (2nd Edition)
No other single chapter provoked as much angry objection as this one when The Politics of Jesus first appeared. The omnipresence of liberation as the preferred agenda of our age, colliding with the traditionally conservative use so often made of the Haustafeln in defense of patriarchal structures from the second century to the present, made it hard for readers to entertain the case made in this chapter for the initially critical and empowering impact of the apostolic witness. On grounds of their own modern ideology some readers had decided that the apostolic generation had to be wrong about “subordination,” since the autonomy of the independent individual is the center of the modern liberal vision. That easy dismissal dispensed some readers from attending to the detail of the above chapter’s argument.
That kind of a priori dismissal was of course facilitated by the already widespread tendency of many in our times to use the apostles' witness more as a foil than as gospel. This fits the notion of one school of readers that the witness of Jesus was lost sight of very soon in the development of the apostolic church. This view is commonsensical on the surface, since the notion of a founder’s unique vision being betrayed or diluted by his less powerful or less creative successors is a sociological commonplace. Yet for a realistic understanding of the first century it is odd, since the epistles may well be just as old as the Gospels.
Since the studies cited above in my original chapter, New Testament scholars have continued to attend to the Haustafeln. Debate still continues about the sources of the notions of orderly society from which the apostolic witness borrowed; specialists seek to disentangle those derivations (from classical Greek thought, Stoicism, Hellenistic Judaism . . .) with more confidence than their expositions evoke in the amateur reader. It is possible, if one contrasts the several passages,56 rather than seeing them as relatively parallel witnesses to a standard approach to a general problem, to argue that the transformation which the theme of subordination undergoes in the light of the cross is not equally evident in all of the texts. The subordination is explicitly reciprocal in Ephesians 5:21; less so in the other texts.
There is in the expansion of the amount of scholarly attention given this topic since 1970 no substantial refutation of the starting point of my exposition above, namely that these passages testify to a collision between the liberating core of the jesus message and the patriarchal assumptions of the cultures into which that message came. In a setting like that of 1 Peter the concern is more to avoid giving occasion for persecution by hostile authorities; in Colossians and Ephesians a “thicker” description of the setting can illuminate more concretely just how the message adjusted to the setting. This fuller, more complex analysis reinforces our awareness that without the initial messianic thrust the entire subject would not have arisen. In none of the three settings” would there have had to be a warning against overdoing enfranchisement, if there had not in the first place been good news pointing in that direction. The appeal “don't overdo celebrating your liberation” is only pertinent if somehow the vision of empowerment had authentically arisen. The one thing the Haustafeln cannot have meant originally is what they have mostly been used for since the second century namely to reinforce extant authority structures as divinely willed for their own sake, by borrowing propatriarchal arguments either from a Stoic or a jewish world vision, from an appeal either to creation or to nature.
A quite different and perhaps more difficult dimension of responding to the Haustafeln is not about ancient origins or original meanings but about how or whether to let these' texts speak through the grid of twentieth-century assumptions. After all the care he has taken with early texts Crouch concludes as a modern: “. . . the gospel is not a reform movement and . . . Christian faith does not imply social change.” He calls this “an affirmation of finitude within the social order,” as if the only way to be finite were to be conservative. This simple statement is not the product of any of his study of either the society or the literature of the first century Crouch avows that his own moral vision is simply the product of his own conditioning. If he had been born in Switzerland he might oppose women’s franchise and if in Arabia he might favor slavery54 Then he takes back the claim that the early church did not care about social reform by conceding that any alternative strategy which would have sought to change the imperial social order from the top, would not have worked.
The reader remembers that the intention of this book is not to innovate in New Testament scholarship, but rather to free the results of scholarship from the grids imposed on it by customary unthinking assumptions about ethics. When Crouch moves beyond his first-century expertise he becomes a good example of traditionalism about ethical axioms.
Footnote 25 above was too brief to be appropriate in this setting, since it moves from interpreting the text to challenging the contemporary fashion of doctrinaire egalitarianism which some bring to the text as a grid from the present. That oblique reference to cultural fads was out of place. I am no more convinced of the adequacy of oversimple egalitarianism than I was in 1970, but of course the setting in which its adequacy needs to be challenged keeps changing. The notion that those components of the scriptural heritage which modernity finds incongruous should simply be screened out rather than wrestled with is no more convincing now than when I first wrote.
Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza cited this sentence66 but reversed its meaning into “it motivates Christian slaves and women to accept ‘things as they are.” In that passage the formulation of “things as they are” was that in Christ (and in baptism) the differences between “Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female” have been transcended. That is in some important sense “real” Yet Jews are still jewish and Greeks greek; that also is “real” Both reality claims and social strategies need to be more nuanced. What the Haustafeln texts project is a tactic for change in the light of the new christological reality.
As I have already shown, I agree with Schiissler Fiorenza (and with Eduard Schweizer before her) that in the first century an original vision of equality68 soon came to be modified by less revolutionary interpretations of the Gospel setting in which subordination made sense. Our difference is in the details; for Schussler Fiorenza and Schweizer the explanation for the dilution was primarily an “apologetic” concern for the perception of the Christian movement by outsiders as being disorderly whereas while not disagreeing with that I also note that for the New Testament writers there was a christological component to the appeal as well.
That kind of a priori dismissal was of course facilitated by the already widespread tendency of many in our times to use the apostles' witness more as a foil than as gospel. This fits the notion of one school of readers that the witness of Jesus was lost sight of very soon in the development of the apostolic church. This view is commonsensical on the surface, since the notion of a founder’s unique vision being betrayed or diluted by his less powerful or less creative successors is a sociological commonplace. Yet for a realistic understanding of the first century it is odd, since the epistles may well be just as old as the Gospels.
Since the studies cited above in my original chapter, New Testament scholars have continued to attend to the Haustafeln. Debate still continues about the sources of the notions of orderly society from which the apostolic witness borrowed; specialists seek to disentangle those derivations (from classical Greek thought, Stoicism, Hellenistic Judaism . . .) with more confidence than their expositions evoke in the amateur reader. It is possible, if one contrasts the several passages,56 rather than seeing them as relatively parallel witnesses to a standard approach to a general problem, to argue that the transformation which the theme of subordination undergoes in the light of the cross is not equally evident in all of the texts. The subordination is explicitly reciprocal in Ephesians 5:21; less so in the other texts.
There is in the expansion of the amount of scholarly attention given this topic since 1970 no substantial refutation of the starting point of my exposition above, namely that these passages testify to a collision between the liberating core of the jesus message and the patriarchal assumptions of the cultures into which that message came. In a setting like that of 1 Peter the concern is more to avoid giving occasion for persecution by hostile authorities; in Colossians and Ephesians a “thicker” description of the setting can illuminate more concretely just how the message adjusted to the setting. This fuller, more complex analysis reinforces our awareness that without the initial messianic thrust the entire subject would not have arisen. In none of the three settings” would there have had to be a warning against overdoing enfranchisement, if there had not in the first place been good news pointing in that direction. The appeal “don't overdo celebrating your liberation” is only pertinent if somehow the vision of empowerment had authentically arisen. The one thing the Haustafeln cannot have meant originally is what they have mostly been used for since the second century namely to reinforce extant authority structures as divinely willed for their own sake, by borrowing propatriarchal arguments either from a Stoic or a jewish world vision, from an appeal either to creation or to nature.
A quite different and perhaps more difficult dimension of responding to the Haustafeln is not about ancient origins or original meanings but about how or whether to let these' texts speak through the grid of twentieth-century assumptions. After all the care he has taken with early texts Crouch concludes as a modern: “. . . the gospel is not a reform movement and . . . Christian faith does not imply social change.” He calls this “an affirmation of finitude within the social order,” as if the only way to be finite were to be conservative. This simple statement is not the product of any of his study of either the society or the literature of the first century Crouch avows that his own moral vision is simply the product of his own conditioning. If he had been born in Switzerland he might oppose women’s franchise and if in Arabia he might favor slavery54 Then he takes back the claim that the early church did not care about social reform by conceding that any alternative strategy which would have sought to change the imperial social order from the top, would not have worked.
The reader remembers that the intention of this book is not to innovate in New Testament scholarship, but rather to free the results of scholarship from the grids imposed on it by customary unthinking assumptions about ethics. When Crouch moves beyond his first-century expertise he becomes a good example of traditionalism about ethical axioms.
Footnote 25 above was too brief to be appropriate in this setting, since it moves from interpreting the text to challenging the contemporary fashion of doctrinaire egalitarianism which some bring to the text as a grid from the present. That oblique reference to cultural fads was out of place. I am no more convinced of the adequacy of oversimple egalitarianism than I was in 1970, but of course the setting in which its adequacy needs to be challenged keeps changing. The notion that those components of the scriptural heritage which modernity finds incongruous should simply be screened out rather than wrestled with is no more convincing now than when I first wrote.
Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza cited this sentence66 but reversed its meaning into “it motivates Christian slaves and women to accept ‘things as they are.” In that passage the formulation of “things as they are” was that in Christ (and in baptism) the differences between “Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female” have been transcended. That is in some important sense “real” Yet Jews are still jewish and Greeks greek; that also is “real” Both reality claims and social strategies need to be more nuanced. What the Haustafeln texts project is a tactic for change in the light of the new christological reality.
As I have already shown, I agree with Schiissler Fiorenza (and with Eduard Schweizer before her) that in the first century an original vision of equality68 soon came to be modified by less revolutionary interpretations of the Gospel setting in which subordination made sense. Our difference is in the details; for Schussler Fiorenza and Schweizer the explanation for the dilution was primarily an “apologetic” concern for the perception of the Christian movement by outsiders as being disorderly whereas while not disagreeing with that I also note that for the New Testament writers there was a christological component to the appeal as well.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
EPILOGUE For Chapter 8 (from 2nd Edition)
Few themes in recent New Testament interpretation have “taken off”
in the popular theological culture as has the vision of the rebellious powers. The kind of popularization represented in my original notes by the references (n. 6) to Albert van den Heuvel and William Stringfellow continued to grow in popularity since the 1970s. The vision of a dialectical interlocking of created goodness and rebelliousness, in what makes the world the way it is, has been found illuminating by many.
A simple example: in the major addresses presented at the 1980 Assembly of the Division of World Mission and Evangelism of the World Council of Churches, gathered at Melbourne, allusions to “the principalities and powers” were in every major address.” Hendrikus Berkhof updated his booklet (n. 5 above).
The most thorough review of the theme is the trilogy by Walter Wink. Anthony Tyrell Hanson devoted to it an insightful chapter. Jacques Ellul, the prolific French Reformed sociologist and lay theologian, made the dialectic of creatureliness and rebellion the key to his entire oeui/re of critical social thought.” It would not be too much to claim that the Pauline26 cosmology of the powers represents an alternative to the dominant (“Thomist”) vision of “natural law” as a more biblical way systematically to relate Christ and creation. But for our purposes it suffices to observe that exegetical scholarship has continued to confirm that in the Pauline witness Jesus is confessed as foundationally relevant to the political realm -- not only in the biographical sense which we saw at work above in chapters 2 and 3 of this book, but in the cosmological sense that “cross and resurrection” designates not only a few days’ events in first-century Jerusalem but also the shape of the cosmos.
This is not to say that there is any detailed consensus among scholars on the simplest levels, as to the sense in which the powers are “real.”27 Are they a metaphor for constructs in the human mind? Are they “real super-human spiritual entities” something like angels? Walter Wink tries a new answer of his own to this question; Jacques Ellul seems to have shifted his answer recently from something more realistic to something more metaphorical. None of these debates about nuance would seem to undermine the thesis that this set of passages from the Pauline corpus demonstrates an astoundingly sweeping and coherent “translation” of the political meaning of Jesus into the worldview of the audience of Paul’s missionary witness.
I doubt that our concern to interpret the witness of the apostolic Scriptures in their setting is much served by our importing this kind of modern question into the interpretation of first-century literature, however much we as moderns are driven to ask them. Whether Jesus’ work and witness were and are politically relevant for the witnesses of the first generations does not depend on our answering our contemporary question, “In what sense are the powers real? In what sense are they ‘persons’?" The growing bulk of serious social thought using these concepts, referred to at the beginning of this epilogue, should be sufficient demonstration that the Pauline vision is realistic and illuminating.
If it could be our task here to enter modern conversations about social ethics, the point to make would be that this Pauline vision is far more nuanced and helpful than much contemporary discussion about “the problem of power” in Christian social ethics. For many who use that phrase it designates little more than a sense of guilt about “realistically” having to “take responsibility” for harming some persons in the interest of desirable social ends. The Pauline perspective is far more clear about the intrinsic complexities of institutional and psychodynamic structures, such that basically good creaturely structures can nonetheless be oppressive, and basically selfish decisions can sometimes nonetheless have less evil outcomes. Neither guilt about losing personal purity, nor pragmatism about doing lesser evils to achieve greater goods, is then at the heart of “the problem of power” for “Paul," as they are for our contemporaries.” The challenge to which the proclamation of Christ’s rule over the rebellious world speaks a word of grace is not a problem within the self but a split within the cosmos.
A simple example: in the major addresses presented at the 1980 Assembly of the Division of World Mission and Evangelism of the World Council of Churches, gathered at Melbourne, allusions to “the principalities and powers” were in every major address.” Hendrikus Berkhof updated his booklet (n. 5 above).
The most thorough review of the theme is the trilogy by Walter Wink. Anthony Tyrell Hanson devoted to it an insightful chapter. Jacques Ellul, the prolific French Reformed sociologist and lay theologian, made the dialectic of creatureliness and rebellion the key to his entire oeui/re of critical social thought.” It would not be too much to claim that the Pauline26 cosmology of the powers represents an alternative to the dominant (“Thomist”) vision of “natural law” as a more biblical way systematically to relate Christ and creation. But for our purposes it suffices to observe that exegetical scholarship has continued to confirm that in the Pauline witness Jesus is confessed as foundationally relevant to the political realm -- not only in the biographical sense which we saw at work above in chapters 2 and 3 of this book, but in the cosmological sense that “cross and resurrection” designates not only a few days’ events in first-century Jerusalem but also the shape of the cosmos.
This is not to say that there is any detailed consensus among scholars on the simplest levels, as to the sense in which the powers are “real.”27 Are they a metaphor for constructs in the human mind? Are they “real super-human spiritual entities” something like angels? Walter Wink tries a new answer of his own to this question; Jacques Ellul seems to have shifted his answer recently from something more realistic to something more metaphorical. None of these debates about nuance would seem to undermine the thesis that this set of passages from the Pauline corpus demonstrates an astoundingly sweeping and coherent “translation” of the political meaning of Jesus into the worldview of the audience of Paul’s missionary witness.
I doubt that our concern to interpret the witness of the apostolic Scriptures in their setting is much served by our importing this kind of modern question into the interpretation of first-century literature, however much we as moderns are driven to ask them. Whether Jesus’ work and witness were and are politically relevant for the witnesses of the first generations does not depend on our answering our contemporary question, “In what sense are the powers real? In what sense are they ‘persons’?" The growing bulk of serious social thought using these concepts, referred to at the beginning of this epilogue, should be sufficient demonstration that the Pauline vision is realistic and illuminating.
If it could be our task here to enter modern conversations about social ethics, the point to make would be that this Pauline vision is far more nuanced and helpful than much contemporary discussion about “the problem of power” in Christian social ethics. For many who use that phrase it designates little more than a sense of guilt about “realistically” having to “take responsibility” for harming some persons in the interest of desirable social ends. The Pauline perspective is far more clear about the intrinsic complexities of institutional and psychodynamic structures, such that basically good creaturely structures can nonetheless be oppressive, and basically selfish decisions can sometimes nonetheless have less evil outcomes. Neither guilt about losing personal purity, nor pragmatism about doing lesser evils to achieve greater goods, is then at the heart of “the problem of power” for “Paul," as they are for our contemporaries.” The challenge to which the proclamation of Christ’s rule over the rebellious world speaks a word of grace is not a problem within the self but a split within the cosmos.
Monday, April 9, 2012
EPILOGUE TO CHAPTER 7 (from 2nd Edition)
A very helpful recent study is The Paradox of the Cross in the Thought of Saint Paul by Anthony Tyrell Hanson. By researches both broad and deep, Hanson demonstrates that the Pauline theme cited above (especially III/A) is far more widely present and more important for Paul and his successors than is usually discerned. Hanson brings to bear powerful erudition in three directions: the power of paradox as not merely a literary form but a theological value; a deep review of Paul’s scriptural citations and allusions; and a review of the overlap between Paul and his fellow believers saw themselves as continuing the work of the cross, in the way which the texts cited above state most simply.
In his chapter “Go Thou and Do Likewise” A. E. Harvey” reviews some of the nuances surrounding the notion of “doing as Jesus did.” He argues that where that imperative is stated most simply (e.g., 1 John 2:6, listed II/a above) what is meant is not any literal conforming of the disciples' lives to that of Jesus but the broad pattern of self giving love. Harvey agrees with Harnack that the notion of following ]esus’ example was absent from Christian thought until the age of Francis.
The Franciscan theologian Bonaventure cited as coming from Gregory or even Augustine the phrase omnis Christi actio rostra set instructio every deed of Christ teaches us. Yet Bonaventure’s intent in the citation is to distinguish between “instruction,” which is like “the broad pattern of self-giving love,” which is binding, and “imitation,” which disciples are not called to. He distinguishes six ways in which perfection “shines forth” in Christ; only one of the six is exemplary for believers. He describes it in six traits: poverty virginity obedience, praying through the night, praying for his enemies, and offering himself to die for his enemies. To fall short of perfection (thus defined as equal to the monastic state) by marrying, using property soberly sleeping through the night, and serving one’s prince in war, is not sin and requires no forgiveness.
None of these writers, contemporary or classic, seems to have been attending to the quite evident distinction between a naive outward (“franciscan”) replicating of the shape of Jesus’ life (barefoot itinerancy celibacy and manual labor), which never arises in the apostolic writings, and vulnerable enemy love and renunciation of dominion in the real world, which is omnipresent. The latter is far more concrete than “a broad pattern of self-giving love,” and the former is a red herring. Thus mainstream interpreters, even when intending to take seriously the originality and radicality of Jesus’ teaching in the original setting (as Harvey certainly does at the outset) wind up eviscerating or platonizing the concreteness of the ethic of gospel.
In his chapter “Go Thou and Do Likewise” A. E. Harvey” reviews some of the nuances surrounding the notion of “doing as Jesus did.” He argues that where that imperative is stated most simply (e.g., 1 John 2:6, listed II/a above) what is meant is not any literal conforming of the disciples' lives to that of Jesus but the broad pattern of self giving love. Harvey agrees with Harnack that the notion of following ]esus’ example was absent from Christian thought until the age of Francis.
The Franciscan theologian Bonaventure cited as coming from Gregory or even Augustine the phrase omnis Christi actio rostra set instructio every deed of Christ teaches us. Yet Bonaventure’s intent in the citation is to distinguish between “instruction,” which is like “the broad pattern of self-giving love,” which is binding, and “imitation,” which disciples are not called to. He distinguishes six ways in which perfection “shines forth” in Christ; only one of the six is exemplary for believers. He describes it in six traits: poverty virginity obedience, praying through the night, praying for his enemies, and offering himself to die for his enemies. To fall short of perfection (thus defined as equal to the monastic state) by marrying, using property soberly sleeping through the night, and serving one’s prince in war, is not sin and requires no forgiveness.
None of these writers, contemporary or classic, seems to have been attending to the quite evident distinction between a naive outward (“franciscan”) replicating of the shape of Jesus’ life (barefoot itinerancy celibacy and manual labor), which never arises in the apostolic writings, and vulnerable enemy love and renunciation of dominion in the real world, which is omnipresent. The latter is far more concrete than “a broad pattern of self-giving love,” and the former is a red herring. Thus mainstream interpreters, even when intending to take seriously the originality and radicality of Jesus’ teaching in the original setting (as Harvey certainly does at the outset) wind up eviscerating or platonizing the concreteness of the ethic of gospel.
Friday, April 6, 2012
EPILOGUE OF CHAPTER 6 (from 2nd edition)
As I noted above under the heading (3) “catastrophic or inner kingdom?”, the modern notion that the early Christians must have been profoundly shaken by the non-arrival of the Messiah is open to challenge. A. Strobel makes a careful study of this “problem” from the standpoint of Jewish understanding of Habakkuk. The not-having-come and the having-come of the Rule of God were both present in the faith of each biblical epoch. The concept of a purely future coming, so firmly dated that at a certain time its failure to arrive becomes a clear disappointment, is foreign to the biblical mind. Thus the concept that the specific character of Jesus’ ethic was conditioned upon the imminence for him of a purely future end of human history is likewise unthinkable. This study confirms that the problem of the delay of the parousia is one that scholars have imported into the New Testament. It is certainly one that did not trouble the early church to any degree, to say nothing of providing motive for theological redefinition in the next century as especially the school of Martin Werner would claim.
Graydon P. Snyder pursued the same theme further in his "Sayings on the Delay of the End,” This concept of the adjustment to the kingdom's nonarrival is inept also in its unspoken assumption about the development of New Testament literature. Reading through the New Testament in narrative sequence, we find first the human-social Jesus, who calls men to follow him about in a real community in a real Palestine; then we move on to Paul’s cosmic Christ, whose risen glory transfigures the cross and dispenses with the earthly career. It is then thinkable that in this movement there was a necessary dehistoricizing, de-Judaizing process, indispensable if the church was to spread beyond Palestine into the Hellenistic World. But this is to forget that Paul wrote before, not after, the Gospel writers. First there was the bare resurrection message; then there was the lordship proclamation; then it was filled out with the body of memories of the Words and works of Jesus of Nazareth. The movement in the formation of the New Testament literature was toward, not away from, filling out the picture of Jesus' humanity. This consideration applies to the point at issue in our present study The sources that make most clear the social-apocalyptic realism of Jesus’ claims are those whose authors or editors had had the most time to know that the end of history had not yet come. Fittingly Titus lifts up the Servanthood episode of John 13 as expressive of the concretization of glorification-Christology with human history.
Of the respected senior scholars in the New Testament field, it is perhaps Amos Wilder who comes closest to holding the door open for the concern of this study. His Eschatology and Ethics in the Teaching of Jesus competently dissects the Schweitzerian argument that the radicality of Jesus’ call can be understood only if one posits a very brief “interim” before the parousia. Yet Wilder does not finish his sketch of a coherent alternative. He retains a conceptual division in Jesus’ teachings between those of general validity and others characterized as “extraordinary” “drastic,” “desperate,” or “hasty” -- that is, as limited to a kairos or a crisis of the “exigencies of his work.” Sometimes this distinction seems to suggest after all the legitimacy of a lower-voltage discipleship for run-of-the-mill believers in noneschatological times or places. If this line of thought were carried through we would have once again what Schweitzer meant by his “interim ethic” concept, namely the priority in our noneschatological context of a nonheroic and nonchristological standard for “normal” Christian ethics.”
The theme of the end’s not having come, noted here as background to the teachings of ]esus in the Gospels, has grown in significance for some modern readers, in the light of the increasing scholarly attention being given to apocalypse as a literary genre and as a worldview. To this we shall return in Chapter 12 below.
Graydon P. Snyder pursued the same theme further in his "Sayings on the Delay of the End,” This concept of the adjustment to the kingdom's nonarrival is inept also in its unspoken assumption about the development of New Testament literature. Reading through the New Testament in narrative sequence, we find first the human-social Jesus, who calls men to follow him about in a real community in a real Palestine; then we move on to Paul’s cosmic Christ, whose risen glory transfigures the cross and dispenses with the earthly career. It is then thinkable that in this movement there was a necessary dehistoricizing, de-Judaizing process, indispensable if the church was to spread beyond Palestine into the Hellenistic World. But this is to forget that Paul wrote before, not after, the Gospel writers. First there was the bare resurrection message; then there was the lordship proclamation; then it was filled out with the body of memories of the Words and works of Jesus of Nazareth. The movement in the formation of the New Testament literature was toward, not away from, filling out the picture of Jesus' humanity. This consideration applies to the point at issue in our present study The sources that make most clear the social-apocalyptic realism of Jesus’ claims are those whose authors or editors had had the most time to know that the end of history had not yet come. Fittingly Titus lifts up the Servanthood episode of John 13 as expressive of the concretization of glorification-Christology with human history.
Of the respected senior scholars in the New Testament field, it is perhaps Amos Wilder who comes closest to holding the door open for the concern of this study. His Eschatology and Ethics in the Teaching of Jesus competently dissects the Schweitzerian argument that the radicality of Jesus’ call can be understood only if one posits a very brief “interim” before the parousia. Yet Wilder does not finish his sketch of a coherent alternative. He retains a conceptual division in Jesus’ teachings between those of general validity and others characterized as “extraordinary” “drastic,” “desperate,” or “hasty” -- that is, as limited to a kairos or a crisis of the “exigencies of his work.” Sometimes this distinction seems to suggest after all the legitimacy of a lower-voltage discipleship for run-of-the-mill believers in noneschatological times or places. If this line of thought were carried through we would have once again what Schweitzer meant by his “interim ethic” concept, namely the priority in our noneschatological context of a nonheroic and nonchristological standard for “normal” Christian ethics.”
The theme of the end’s not having come, noted here as background to the teachings of ]esus in the Gospels, has grown in significance for some modern readers, in the light of the increasing scholarly attention being given to apocalypse as a literary genre and as a worldview. To this we shall return in Chapter 12 below.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
EPILOGUE OF CHAPTER 4 (from 2nd edition)
Ever since Marcion, the picture of the God of the ancient Israelites as a God of war has been an occasion for caricature and embarrassment for Christians. That is one of the reasons why both Christians and Jews have developed ways to read those stories that might avoid ascribing to God qualities that we do not praise in men and women. The above chapter did not address that embarrassment, since its concern was not our modern reading of the holy war heritage but how that heritage made sense in the first century as background to Jesus’ and his contemporaries’ thought about God’s possible intervention in history
Older interpretations of how Christians should understand the wars of YHWH most often sought simply to set them aside. Some have sought to resolve this on the grounds of a “new dispensation” after the model of Jesus’ repeated “but I say to you” in Matthew 5. This was done by the Czech Brethren of the fifteenth-century “First Reformation,” by "Anabaptist"-type pacifists since then, and by Tolstoy. Jesus being God’s qualified envoy inaugurating a new age, he had every right to change the rules.
In a different form of the same logic, the wars of the early Hebrews can be set aside on the more general grounds of the post-Enlightenment notion that we moderns are qualified, by the mere fact of our modernity to rule on which elements of an ancient culture we choose to find usable. Thus it is we, in place of Jesus, who have the right to declare “ancient good uncouth.”
Both of these postures are still very much alive among us; their simplicity makes them more accessible than the more careful historical-anthropological angle which I here have assumed.
The above chapter interprets only one dimension of the legacy of the Hebrew story of YHWH/God helping Israel in war: namely the difference which that heritage, remembered as Jews in the age of Jesus must have remembered it, should make for our interpreting the setting of Jesus’ decisions. Yet there is much more to say about how the Old Testament story of YHWH as warrior should be taken in its own right.
Almost simultaneously with the first publication of The Politics of Jesus, my more analytical chapter, “If Abraham Is Our Father,” addressed the challenge of how the Christian can own the Israelite history, in such a way as to see the gospel as an organic prolongation of the original early Israelite experience and vision, rather than as a rejection or reversal.
In 1980 Millard C. Lind’s Yahweh Is a Warrior exposited with much greater scholarly depth the same perspective. I have sought once more to capsule this message briefly in “ ‘To your tents, O Israel’; The Legacy of Israel's Experience with Holy War.”
The general theme of how Christians can understand the wars of YHWH has since continued to draw widespread attention. Other studies have built upon the Hebrew understandings of faith, power, and nationhood, reaching beyond the issue of war itself among these are dissertations on the Hebrew Scriptures by Gerbrandt and Ollenburger and on Ephesians 6 by Thomas Yoder Neufeld.
The numerous works of Walter Brueggemann and Norman Gottwald support in a broader way the above chapter’s concern for letting the ancient texts themselves dictate how we should discern the unity of the canonical corpus as a witness for justice. They also find in the Hebrew story when empathetically and critically read, values compatible with rather than contradictory to the New Testament.
Older interpretations of how Christians should understand the wars of YHWH most often sought simply to set them aside. Some have sought to resolve this on the grounds of a “new dispensation” after the model of Jesus’ repeated “but I say to you” in Matthew 5. This was done by the Czech Brethren of the fifteenth-century “First Reformation,” by "Anabaptist"-type pacifists since then, and by Tolstoy. Jesus being God’s qualified envoy inaugurating a new age, he had every right to change the rules.
In a different form of the same logic, the wars of the early Hebrews can be set aside on the more general grounds of the post-Enlightenment notion that we moderns are qualified, by the mere fact of our modernity to rule on which elements of an ancient culture we choose to find usable. Thus it is we, in place of Jesus, who have the right to declare “ancient good uncouth.”
Both of these postures are still very much alive among us; their simplicity makes them more accessible than the more careful historical-anthropological angle which I here have assumed.
The above chapter interprets only one dimension of the legacy of the Hebrew story of YHWH/God helping Israel in war: namely the difference which that heritage, remembered as Jews in the age of Jesus must have remembered it, should make for our interpreting the setting of Jesus’ decisions. Yet there is much more to say about how the Old Testament story of YHWH as warrior should be taken in its own right.
Almost simultaneously with the first publication of The Politics of Jesus, my more analytical chapter, “If Abraham Is Our Father,” addressed the challenge of how the Christian can own the Israelite history, in such a way as to see the gospel as an organic prolongation of the original early Israelite experience and vision, rather than as a rejection or reversal.
In 1980 Millard C. Lind’s Yahweh Is a Warrior exposited with much greater scholarly depth the same perspective. I have sought once more to capsule this message briefly in “ ‘To your tents, O Israel’; The Legacy of Israel's Experience with Holy War.”
The general theme of how Christians can understand the wars of YHWH has since continued to draw widespread attention. Other studies have built upon the Hebrew understandings of faith, power, and nationhood, reaching beyond the issue of war itself among these are dissertations on the Hebrew Scriptures by Gerbrandt and Ollenburger and on Ephesians 6 by Thomas Yoder Neufeld.
The numerous works of Walter Brueggemann and Norman Gottwald support in a broader way the above chapter’s concern for letting the ancient texts themselves dictate how we should discern the unity of the canonical corpus as a witness for justice. They also find in the Hebrew story when empathetically and critically read, values compatible with rather than contradictory to the New Testament.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
EPILOGUE OF CHAPTER 3 (from 2nd edition)
Oversimple Relevance
In 1976 I received a letter which drew my attention to a possible interpretation of the jubilee message which I had not foreseen. A devoted Christian, writing on behalf of a local body of believers, asked whether, since André Trocmé had cited (p. 61 above), the year A.D. 76 as the scholars' best guess for the date of the beginning ofJesus’ public ministry and therefore for the Nazareth sermon, it would then be in 1976 (after 39 X 50 years) that the jubilee should fall again.
It had not occurred to me that Jesus’ use of jubilee language to describe the imminence of the kingdom could have been construed as continuing or reinstating literally the fifty-year pattern of .the Mosaic legislation, so that his followers should continue the same literal application through the centuries.
The more normal line of interpretation, in response to this sincere question, was so normal that it did not occur‘to Trocmé or to me. t0 say so. It would be that the fundamental notion of periodic leveling would have been lifted, as Jesus appropriated it out of the Hebrew heritage, from the level of some practices implemented every seven years or every forty-nine years. It would have become in Jesus’ teaching a permanently defining trait of the new order. That would have been parallel to what jesus did with other elements of the jewish heritage. It would fit with what actually turned out to be practiced in the community he created.
Further Critical Scholarship
More important is the question whether Trocmé’s hypothesis, which I characterized in 1972 (p. 30 above) as “ingenious,” at a time when professional Bible scholars were ignoring his book, does in fact make sense as contributing to a serious interpretation of the Nazareth sermon. Such further study has since in fact been forthcoming.
In 1977 the Theology Faculty of the University of Basel awarded its doctorate insigne cum laude to Robert B. Sloan, Jr. for his dissertation “The Favorable Year of the Lord": A Study of Jubilary Theology in the Gospel of Lake. Sloan’s primary interest is not in the sermon’s impact on social ethics. His concern is, as his title says, with “theology,” and even more narrowly with Luke’s eschatology. The themes which the Nazareth sermon picks up from the Old Testament are as much prophetic as they are legislative. Luke’s editorial intention is to introduce his Gospel with the proclamation of the beginning of a new age. For Sloan to make that argument, however, presupposes that he must concede some degree of accuracy in Trocmé’s original point, namely that the phrase “the acceptable year of the Lord” (whether or not in the original intent of the Isaiah passage, at least to readers in jesus' age) meant the jubilee in the first place.
Sloan strengthens the case for that meanings being evident by showing the presence of the jubilee concept within the eschatology of the Dead Sea communities. Sloan also shows that the language and the tone of the Nazareth Sermon cast a special light across the rest of the Gospel. Luke’s continuing use of the terms euangelizein (proclaiming good news) and aphesis (release, pardon) in the remaining account projects the jubilee language through the rest of Jesus' teaching.
Sharon Ringe, now teaching at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio, was awarded her doctorate in 1981 by Union Theological Seminary for The Jubilee Proclamation in the Ministry and Teaching of Jesus: A Tradition-Critical Study in the Synoptic Gospels and Acts. Ringe’s focus on “tradition criticism” indicates less concern than others might have for what can be known or surmised about Jesus' actual public ministry. Ringe’s interest is in how sets of thoughts and sets of phrases, motifs, and images were correlated with one another as the language of the early Christians was passed on from jesus to the point where our extant Gospel texts were redacted. Like Sloan she is more interested in jubilee proclamation as a component of Jesus’ kingdom language, that is, in knowing how clusters of metaphors work, than for narrative realism about Jesus’ movement.
As Sloan did for Luke, Ringe shows how language derived from the jubilee complex ("good news,” "forgiveness," “return”) is present even in parts of the New Testament where the concrete jubilee meaning (i.e., freeing slaves and reclaiming land) is no longer implied. This would seem to confirm the derivation of these terms from jesus’ own usage, rather than indicating that they were the contributions of later authors. This is also reinforced by the fact that some of the juxtapositions of jubilee-related words make sense only in Aramaic or Hebrew not in Greek. To Sloan’s interest in the Hebrew prophets Ringe adds the awareness that in ancient Israel to proclaim “release” or “amnesty” was a royal prerogative, not the role of a scribe, a priest, or even a prophet.
Donald W Blosser’s dissertation Jesus and the Jubilee: The Year of Jubilee and Its Significance in the Gospel of Luke was accepted by St. Mary’s College of the University of Saint Andrews in 1979. In contrast with the other two dissertations, whose concerns were with specific questions of hermeneutical method, Blosser reviewed in an encyclopedic way the entire scriptural corpus, also reaching beyond the canon to the Mishnah, Qumran, Philo, and Josephus.
Blosser’s historical conclusion is that the entire body of jubilee prescriptions, all the Way to land redistribution, was never regularly practiced, yet nonetheless remained alive in the mind and culture of Jews. As the centuries passed, the accent changed from a command to be obeyed to a dimension of the promise about what God would do in the age to come. Yet the elements of debt release and leaving some land fallow were practiced often enough that they were in people's minds and often enough to make an economic difference (e.g., there are clear records of decreased agricultural productivity every seven years).
Blosser then turns to a very broad survey of all the commentary literature on Luke 4, and a dozen other Lucan texts with analogous themes. I-Ie sees the proclamation of jubilee as central to jesus’ message according to Luke’s thought. Luke probably moved the Nazareth event from a later time, where it was found in his sources, to Where we find it in his chapter 4, because it mattered for him to use this account as a programmatic “platform statement” for the beginning of the public ministry and to make that beginning fall on a jubilee year. Blosser takes seriously the ethical pertinence of jubilee as the background to other teaching (treasures in heaven, the rich ruler, Zacchaeus) and refutes Sloan’s overdone “eschatological” or metaphorical spiritualization.
Along the way Blosser expertly investigates numerous prickly problems of chronology and of source criticism, and enriches his account with recent practical and pastoral literature.
Other interpreters who affirm the jubilee dimension in Luke are Marshall, Tiede, and Danker.
The simplest strong challenge to Trocmé’s thesis is another dissertation, accepted in 1978 by the Toronto School of Theology. The Beginning of Jesus' Ministry in the Gospel of Luke by Jacob Elias examines in great detail the single Nazareth passage, Luke 4:16-30. Elias uses the tools of redaction criticism, setting aside the matters of context that were given more Weight by Strobel and Trocrné, whom he cites (pp. 147, 198), and Blosser, whose work Elias of course could not cite. Elias looks at one verse, one line at a time, asking first with every phrase the question of Luke’s redactional intent. Elias sees no case for considering “the year of the Lord's favor” in 4:19 (Isa. 61:2) as referring to the jubilee.
One component of the tradition to which the Trocmé text could have given more attention was the way in which jubilee language Was part of prophetic images of the return to the land of Israel after the exile. Distributing land is part of regaining the land:
Pastoral Appropriation
The metaphor of “jubilee” continues to encounter wide resonance in our culture. “jubilee housing" is a ministry of the Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C. “Jubilee partners” is a voluntary agency serving captives of the U.S. prison system and of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Popes frequently proclaim “jubilee” as a special time for pilgrims to visit Rome.
In 1976 I received a letter which drew my attention to a possible interpretation of the jubilee message which I had not foreseen. A devoted Christian, writing on behalf of a local body of believers, asked whether, since André Trocmé had cited (p. 61 above), the year A.D. 76 as the scholars' best guess for the date of the beginning ofJesus’ public ministry and therefore for the Nazareth sermon, it would then be in 1976 (after 39 X 50 years) that the jubilee should fall again.
It had not occurred to me that Jesus’ use of jubilee language to describe the imminence of the kingdom could have been construed as continuing or reinstating literally the fifty-year pattern of .the Mosaic legislation, so that his followers should continue the same literal application through the centuries.
The more normal line of interpretation, in response to this sincere question, was so normal that it did not occur‘to Trocmé or to me. t0 say so. It would be that the fundamental notion of periodic leveling would have been lifted, as Jesus appropriated it out of the Hebrew heritage, from the level of some practices implemented every seven years or every forty-nine years. It would have become in Jesus’ teaching a permanently defining trait of the new order. That would have been parallel to what jesus did with other elements of the jewish heritage. It would fit with what actually turned out to be practiced in the community he created.
Further Critical Scholarship
More important is the question whether Trocmé’s hypothesis, which I characterized in 1972 (p. 30 above) as “ingenious,” at a time when professional Bible scholars were ignoring his book, does in fact make sense as contributing to a serious interpretation of the Nazareth sermon. Such further study has since in fact been forthcoming.
In 1977 the Theology Faculty of the University of Basel awarded its doctorate insigne cum laude to Robert B. Sloan, Jr. for his dissertation “The Favorable Year of the Lord": A Study of Jubilary Theology in the Gospel of Lake. Sloan’s primary interest is not in the sermon’s impact on social ethics. His concern is, as his title says, with “theology,” and even more narrowly with Luke’s eschatology. The themes which the Nazareth sermon picks up from the Old Testament are as much prophetic as they are legislative. Luke’s editorial intention is to introduce his Gospel with the proclamation of the beginning of a new age. For Sloan to make that argument, however, presupposes that he must concede some degree of accuracy in Trocmé’s original point, namely that the phrase “the acceptable year of the Lord” (whether or not in the original intent of the Isaiah passage, at least to readers in jesus' age) meant the jubilee in the first place.
Sloan strengthens the case for that meanings being evident by showing the presence of the jubilee concept within the eschatology of the Dead Sea communities. Sloan also shows that the language and the tone of the Nazareth Sermon cast a special light across the rest of the Gospel. Luke’s continuing use of the terms euangelizein (proclaiming good news) and aphesis (release, pardon) in the remaining account projects the jubilee language through the rest of Jesus' teaching.
Sharon Ringe, now teaching at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio, was awarded her doctorate in 1981 by Union Theological Seminary for The Jubilee Proclamation in the Ministry and Teaching of Jesus: A Tradition-Critical Study in the Synoptic Gospels and Acts. Ringe’s focus on “tradition criticism” indicates less concern than others might have for what can be known or surmised about Jesus' actual public ministry. Ringe’s interest is in how sets of thoughts and sets of phrases, motifs, and images were correlated with one another as the language of the early Christians was passed on from jesus to the point where our extant Gospel texts were redacted. Like Sloan she is more interested in jubilee proclamation as a component of Jesus’ kingdom language, that is, in knowing how clusters of metaphors work, than for narrative realism about Jesus’ movement.
As Sloan did for Luke, Ringe shows how language derived from the jubilee complex ("good news,” "forgiveness," “return”) is present even in parts of the New Testament where the concrete jubilee meaning (i.e., freeing slaves and reclaiming land) is no longer implied. This would seem to confirm the derivation of these terms from jesus’ own usage, rather than indicating that they were the contributions of later authors. This is also reinforced by the fact that some of the juxtapositions of jubilee-related words make sense only in Aramaic or Hebrew not in Greek. To Sloan’s interest in the Hebrew prophets Ringe adds the awareness that in ancient Israel to proclaim “release” or “amnesty” was a royal prerogative, not the role of a scribe, a priest, or even a prophet.
Donald W Blosser’s dissertation Jesus and the Jubilee: The Year of Jubilee and Its Significance in the Gospel of Luke was accepted by St. Mary’s College of the University of Saint Andrews in 1979. In contrast with the other two dissertations, whose concerns were with specific questions of hermeneutical method, Blosser reviewed in an encyclopedic way the entire scriptural corpus, also reaching beyond the canon to the Mishnah, Qumran, Philo, and Josephus.
Blosser’s historical conclusion is that the entire body of jubilee prescriptions, all the Way to land redistribution, was never regularly practiced, yet nonetheless remained alive in the mind and culture of Jews. As the centuries passed, the accent changed from a command to be obeyed to a dimension of the promise about what God would do in the age to come. Yet the elements of debt release and leaving some land fallow were practiced often enough that they were in people's minds and often enough to make an economic difference (e.g., there are clear records of decreased agricultural productivity every seven years).
Blosser then turns to a very broad survey of all the commentary literature on Luke 4, and a dozen other Lucan texts with analogous themes. I-Ie sees the proclamation of jubilee as central to jesus’ message according to Luke’s thought. Luke probably moved the Nazareth event from a later time, where it was found in his sources, to Where we find it in his chapter 4, because it mattered for him to use this account as a programmatic “platform statement” for the beginning of the public ministry and to make that beginning fall on a jubilee year. Blosser takes seriously the ethical pertinence of jubilee as the background to other teaching (treasures in heaven, the rich ruler, Zacchaeus) and refutes Sloan’s overdone “eschatological” or metaphorical spiritualization.
The Jubilee is not simply a theological concept providing insight into the nature of God; it is a guide for living which is to be observed in normal daily practice among believers .... These jubilee acts are not simply to be expected in the future, they are to be given concrete expression among the people of God in the present . . . what had been expected in the future can now be experienced in the present because we are now living in the new age ,... characterized by jubilee activity among the believers. (p. 297)
Along the way Blosser expertly investigates numerous prickly problems of chronology and of source criticism, and enriches his account with recent practical and pastoral literature.
Other interpreters who affirm the jubilee dimension in Luke are Marshall, Tiede, and Danker.
The simplest strong challenge to Trocmé’s thesis is another dissertation, accepted in 1978 by the Toronto School of Theology. The Beginning of Jesus' Ministry in the Gospel of Luke by Jacob Elias examines in great detail the single Nazareth passage, Luke 4:16-30. Elias uses the tools of redaction criticism, setting aside the matters of context that were given more Weight by Strobel and Trocrné, whom he cites (pp. 147, 198), and Blosser, whose work Elias of course could not cite. Elias looks at one verse, one line at a time, asking first with every phrase the question of Luke’s redactional intent. Elias sees no case for considering “the year of the Lord's favor” in 4:19 (Isa. 61:2) as referring to the jubilee.
One component of the tradition to which the Trocmé text could have given more attention was the way in which jubilee language Was part of prophetic images of the return to the land of Israel after the exile. Distributing land is part of regaining the land:
“In the hour of my favor I answered you, I helped you on the day of deliverance; putting the land to rights, sharing out afresh its desolate fields. I said to the prisoners, ‘go free!" and to those in darkness ‘come out and be seen!’ ” (Isa. 49:8ff NEB)This is one of the “servant songs”; the similarity to the language of chapter 61 is evident.
Pastoral Appropriation
The metaphor of “jubilee” continues to encounter wide resonance in our culture. “jubilee housing" is a ministry of the Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C. “Jubilee partners” is a voluntary agency serving captives of the U.S. prison system and of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Popes frequently proclaim “jubilee” as a special time for pilgrims to visit Rome.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
EPILOGUE (to Chapter 2, 2nd Edition)
Luke’s Biases
There are two ways to read the editorial tendency of the Gospel according to Luke. In the 1950s and ’6Os (this part of The Politics Jesus goes back to a text first prepared in 1957 for presentation to an ecumenical conference of the “Church and Peace” series), the dominant understanding among exegetes was that Luke’s principal editorial intention was "apologetic.” Luke’s objective was to assure his reader “Theophilus,” a man of some status, that the Christian movement was not a threat to the peace and order of the empire. Such an editorial intention can be discerned by asking how Luke differed from Mark and Matthew as he edited the same material to fit his special purposes. Then the persistence within Luke’s collection of elements describing Jesus as a kind of revolutionary after being filtered through the grid of Luke’s assumed apologetic intentions, should be an index of the veracity of those reports. Luke would not have invented or added such accounts, as they would not further his thesis.
Yet there is another way to understand the intentions of Luke. Instead of asking how Luke modified older material, one may ask what material he selected and accentuated. Some who follow this line see Luke as especially attentive to underdogs, women, tax collectors, soldiers, the poor, lepers; in short, he gave status to outsiders. This would fit with contrasting Luke's Sermon on the Plain with Matthew’s counterpart, or with the foundational importance Luke gave to the Nazareth sermon (4:1ff), which is not found in the other Gospels. Then Luke was a Social Gospeler. Then my choosing to follow the Lucan story line could have made my task easier.
I do not grant that my original reading was limited to the vision of Luke, in such a way that it would not be a coherent witness common to all the Gospels. Since all of the Gospels say enough of the same things to make my point, I have no stake in preferring one school of Gospel criticism to another.
Historical Skepticism and the Jesus of History
There was in my study no intention to offer an original contribution to the debate about “the historical Jesus.” This is a deep axiomatic debate, which has been going on in University theology since Reimarus in the 1770s, and in popular literary culture at least since Renan a century later. There is, however, a subliminal awareness of that debate operating in my text. It is noteworthy that within that debate, what is least open to doubt, in all of the Gospel accounts and in all the critical reconstructions, is the historical/ political dimension of what Jesus did. It is with regard to the Zealot option, that is, to the prospect of anti-Roman violence, that the Gospel text is closest to the issues of historical conflict.
One point at which the shape of the debate has changed somewhat in the last quarter-century is the awareness that the reading of ancient texts is a creative process. The “original meaning” of a text or of its author will not stand still, as an earlier scholasticism assumed, since every reader does something new with it.63 The “History” itself “as it really happened” will not stand still either, since the meaning of events is never free from interpretation. These awarenesses of still greater variability stand only to reinforce my thesis; they will never effectively undergird an antipolitical reading of Jesus, now that our sense of incarnation has been let loose.
What I just called a “sense of incarnation" has been developing further at the hands of what some call “sociological exegesis” or “social scientific criticism.” I cannot seek to review the substance of these studies;66 the fact that they take place at all suffices to attest to the acceptance of my formal thesis.
From Story to Creed
As a kind of outrigger to the present study I take note of a related concern upon which my case does not depend. The last quarter-century has seen a new kind of attention given to the Jesus of the Gospel account as the basis for a nontraditional approach to the previously more abstract discipline of “systematic” theology that is, as an access to traditional themes like “Incarnation” and “Trinity” This occurs both in brief “radical” works of reconnection) and in massive mainstream studies under the rubric “Christology from below.” It is the claim of some of those studies that the New Testaments narrative reading of Jesus is not only a way to approach the believers' commitment to social righteousness; it is also the best way to retrieve or to reconcile what is valid about the themes which came to prominence in later developments of dogma (divine sonship, kenosis, lordship) which for centuries have been interpreted “from above” as if they had been derived from elsewhere than from the Jesus story
Was Jesus a Rebel?
Two lines of challenge have been addressed to my description of “the Zealot option” in Jesus’ career. One line argues that the term “Zealot” is anachronistic, and should not be used, because it was not used by Jesus, or by anyone before Menachem’s uprising of the years 66ff This statement is literally true and substantially trivial. When Luke wrote a generation or two later, he used that noun because it would be meaningful to his readers, whenever that was, to designate the general phenomenon of subversive violence. What the noun means was present in the time of Jesus, as was already sweepingly demonstrated by Oscar Cullmann in lectures in Basel in 1950.69 Since then studies by Richardson, Hengel, Horsley and the Bammel collection have enriched and complicated the picture but not essentially changed it.
That may be correct, historically though as long as the anti- Roman forces had no power at all, historians can hardly be sure about distinguishing between visions describing the restoration of something like the rule of David and Solomon and other visions calling for the poor of the earth to have a better deal.
What my narration meant by “the Zealot option” was, however, not the details of some Zealot’s or some Zealots’ social blueprint, but more simply the principle of violent insurrection as such, which “Zealots" whether on the right or the left held would be justified by a divine mandate and empowered by angelic assistance. The question facing Jesus was not a choice between backward-looking and forward-looking visions of liberation (as socially committed people in the 1980s or 19905 assume we are qualified timelessly to identify “backward” and “forward”), or between socialist and bourgeois understandings of freedom; the issue was whether violence is justified in principle for what one considers to be a very righteous political cause.
Concerning the rest of jesus' social blueprint, we have plenty of information from the rest of the story It was different from that of the several types of "Zealots”; and for that matter from that of Marxists. None of jesus’ teachings about love for the enemy or about the wrongness of lordship indicate a basis for discriminating between bourgeois enemies and other enemies, or between socialist lordship and other kinds of lordship, in such a way that the violence which would be forbidden to obtain one could be mandatory to attain the other.
Further Support
Friendly critics have pointed out that the above summary neglects components of the Gospel account which would be very supportive of my thesis, especially Jesus’ “teachings” like the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the conversation with the Syrophoenician woman or with the “rich young ruler,” or the Sermon on the Plain. My reason for omitting them was not that they would not support my case, but that those are specifically the materials which the traditional arguments for setting Jesus aside as apolitical were calculated to relativize. My last page of text in the 1972 chapter identifies numerous other omissions of yet other strands of the story which would strengthen my case.
There are two ways to read the editorial tendency of the Gospel according to Luke. In the 1950s and ’6Os (this part of The Politics Jesus goes back to a text first prepared in 1957 for presentation to an ecumenical conference of the “Church and Peace” series), the dominant understanding among exegetes was that Luke’s principal editorial intention was "apologetic.” Luke’s objective was to assure his reader “Theophilus,” a man of some status, that the Christian movement was not a threat to the peace and order of the empire. Such an editorial intention can be discerned by asking how Luke differed from Mark and Matthew as he edited the same material to fit his special purposes. Then the persistence within Luke’s collection of elements describing Jesus as a kind of revolutionary after being filtered through the grid of Luke’s assumed apologetic intentions, should be an index of the veracity of those reports. Luke would not have invented or added such accounts, as they would not further his thesis.
Yet there is another way to understand the intentions of Luke. Instead of asking how Luke modified older material, one may ask what material he selected and accentuated. Some who follow this line see Luke as especially attentive to underdogs, women, tax collectors, soldiers, the poor, lepers; in short, he gave status to outsiders. This would fit with contrasting Luke's Sermon on the Plain with Matthew’s counterpart, or with the foundational importance Luke gave to the Nazareth sermon (4:1ff), which is not found in the other Gospels. Then Luke was a Social Gospeler. Then my choosing to follow the Lucan story line could have made my task easier.
I do not grant that my original reading was limited to the vision of Luke, in such a way that it would not be a coherent witness common to all the Gospels. Since all of the Gospels say enough of the same things to make my point, I have no stake in preferring one school of Gospel criticism to another.
Historical Skepticism and the Jesus of History
There was in my study no intention to offer an original contribution to the debate about “the historical Jesus.” This is a deep axiomatic debate, which has been going on in University theology since Reimarus in the 1770s, and in popular literary culture at least since Renan a century later. There is, however, a subliminal awareness of that debate operating in my text. It is noteworthy that within that debate, what is least open to doubt, in all of the Gospel accounts and in all the critical reconstructions, is the historical/ political dimension of what Jesus did. It is with regard to the Zealot option, that is, to the prospect of anti-Roman violence, that the Gospel text is closest to the issues of historical conflict.
One point at which the shape of the debate has changed somewhat in the last quarter-century is the awareness that the reading of ancient texts is a creative process. The “original meaning” of a text or of its author will not stand still, as an earlier scholasticism assumed, since every reader does something new with it.63 The “History” itself “as it really happened” will not stand still either, since the meaning of events is never free from interpretation. These awarenesses of still greater variability stand only to reinforce my thesis; they will never effectively undergird an antipolitical reading of Jesus, now that our sense of incarnation has been let loose.
What I just called a “sense of incarnation" has been developing further at the hands of what some call “sociological exegesis” or “social scientific criticism.” I cannot seek to review the substance of these studies;66 the fact that they take place at all suffices to attest to the acceptance of my formal thesis.
From Story to Creed
As a kind of outrigger to the present study I take note of a related concern upon which my case does not depend. The last quarter-century has seen a new kind of attention given to the Jesus of the Gospel account as the basis for a nontraditional approach to the previously more abstract discipline of “systematic” theology that is, as an access to traditional themes like “Incarnation” and “Trinity” This occurs both in brief “radical” works of reconnection) and in massive mainstream studies under the rubric “Christology from below.” It is the claim of some of those studies that the New Testaments narrative reading of Jesus is not only a way to approach the believers' commitment to social righteousness; it is also the best way to retrieve or to reconcile what is valid about the themes which came to prominence in later developments of dogma (divine sonship, kenosis, lordship) which for centuries have been interpreted “from above” as if they had been derived from elsewhere than from the Jesus story
Was Jesus a Rebel?
Two lines of challenge have been addressed to my description of “the Zealot option” in Jesus’ career. One line argues that the term “Zealot” is anachronistic, and should not be used, because it was not used by Jesus, or by anyone before Menachem’s uprising of the years 66ff This statement is literally true and substantially trivial. When Luke wrote a generation or two later, he used that noun because it would be meaningful to his readers, whenever that was, to designate the general phenomenon of subversive violence. What the noun means was present in the time of Jesus, as was already sweepingly demonstrated by Oscar Cullmann in lectures in Basel in 1950.69 Since then studies by Richardson, Hengel, Horsley and the Bammel collection have enriched and complicated the picture but not essentially changed it.
What Christ really rejected must therefore have been within the compass of his earthly life .... This offer comes mainly from the “freedom party” that zealots and their followers among the crowd, and such a role would then include action against Roman domination. The reality of Jesus’ temptation is best understood when we reflect upon the fact that this role stood in fact open to him and that it appealed to him as a chance to establish God’s Kingdom.A different complaint about attention to the Zealot option has been stated by some Marxist-oriented critics. What the actual “Zealots” of history wanted, it appears, was to reinstate the law as a backward-looking social force, with God on the side of the landlords and the managers of the temple, not as a “progressive” power in favor of the proletariat. The Zealots were thus nationalist, reactionary monarchist, ethnocentric. It is therefore inappropriate to juxtapose the “Zealot temptation” facing jesus with the advocacy of a just and “liberating” revolution in our time.
That may be correct, historically though as long as the anti- Roman forces had no power at all, historians can hardly be sure about distinguishing between visions describing the restoration of something like the rule of David and Solomon and other visions calling for the poor of the earth to have a better deal.
What my narration meant by “the Zealot option” was, however, not the details of some Zealot’s or some Zealots’ social blueprint, but more simply the principle of violent insurrection as such, which “Zealots" whether on the right or the left held would be justified by a divine mandate and empowered by angelic assistance. The question facing Jesus was not a choice between backward-looking and forward-looking visions of liberation (as socially committed people in the 1980s or 19905 assume we are qualified timelessly to identify “backward” and “forward”), or between socialist and bourgeois understandings of freedom; the issue was whether violence is justified in principle for what one considers to be a very righteous political cause.
Concerning the rest of jesus' social blueprint, we have plenty of information from the rest of the story It was different from that of the several types of "Zealots”; and for that matter from that of Marxists. None of jesus’ teachings about love for the enemy or about the wrongness of lordship indicate a basis for discriminating between bourgeois enemies and other enemies, or between socialist lordship and other kinds of lordship, in such a way that the violence which would be forbidden to obtain one could be mandatory to attain the other.
Further Support
Friendly critics have pointed out that the above summary neglects components of the Gospel account which would be very supportive of my thesis, especially Jesus’ “teachings” like the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the conversation with the Syrophoenician woman or with the “rich young ruler,” or the Sermon on the Plain. My reason for omitting them was not that they would not support my case, but that those are specifically the materials which the traditional arguments for setting Jesus aside as apolitical were calculated to relativize. My last page of text in the 1972 chapter identifies numerous other omissions of yet other strands of the story which would strengthen my case.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
EPILOGUE TO CHAPTER 1 (2nd Edition)
The Basic Thesis
In taking stock of the responses which The Politics of Jesus called forth, my first step must be to review the state ofthe debate in New Testament studies, with regard to whether ]esus was in principle a political person. There continues to be deep diversity among the scholars as to detail, but less than ever does any of them make _Iesus apolitical. Two of the profession’s senior authorities, Ernst Bammel and C. F. D. Moule, for instance, recently edited a massive symposium, Jesus and tha Politics of His Day. Their intention was to counteract especially the extreme thesis of Brandon; yet in so doing they could not avoid meeting him partway.
This massive flow of scholarship in the field, representative of a much broader body of writing, did not come about in response to The Politics of Jesus. Some of it was responding directly as already indicated, to the farther-out thesis of Brandon,” according to which Jesus was very political, but in a very traditional way, that is, in a violent, state-oriented, military way. Some scholars review the theme “was ]esus political?” by means of innovative modes of reading (“postmodern,” “poststructuralist,” or “sociological”) which were not present in the same way in the 1960s. What it means that every reader of a text has and owns a specific perspective, as over against seeking or claiming some kind of quasi-neutral “objectivity” is itself part of a continuing debate among scholars about proper method. This debate has proliferated enormously since 1970. I have no intention of claiming the capacity to evaluate what can come through these new grids, but in no case can it be the previous precritical, apolitical Jesus.
Some of the ongoing retrieval of awareness of the political dimension in the work of Jesus has been fostered by the perspectives of specific interpretative constituencies, notably in the broad spectrum of “theologies of liberation.” As a somewhat informed amateur I have opinions on these matters,” but the thesis of The Politics of Jesus is not dependent on my claiming expertise of my own in the new subfield of “liberation.” The prerequisite for appropriate reading of any text is the reader's empathy or congeniality with the intention and genre of the text. We do not ask someone hostile to the discipline of mathematics to read a mathematics text expertly To read a text ofthe genre gospel under the a priori assumption that there could be no such thing as “good news” (whether as a true message or as a genre) would be no more fitting.
I do not mean with this comment to brush off the numerous criticisms properly addressed to some of the oversimplifications and short-circuits that have surfaced in theologies under the heading of “liberation”;23 but for such critique to be valid it must be text- and context-based. It cannot be held to be wrong for the New Testament text to be read as the testimony of a liberation movement sui generis.
Why Not jesus?
A second component of my continuing conversation with comments since 1972 must engage the reasons (pp. 16ff. in the 1972 version, pp. 5ff. above) that various schools of ethics give for not taking Jesus straightforwardly as moral model. There I identified six reasons; there are more:
There is historical-critical skepticism about whether the text says anything clear enough to guide us in the moral life, assuming that we would want to follow Jesus. This kind of expert attention to the canyon within the canon, between “whatever really happened” and “what the text actually says," has continued to develop in complexity during the last generation. There continue to be scholars who are very skeptical about the historical accuracy of details in the ancient accounts, and others who affirm a greater level of trust that there is within the texts a reliable historical core.” In either case, scholarly developments have not had the effect of discovering an apolitical Jesus, nor has any of the most astute scholars given up making appeals to the authority of the figure behind the text.
There is another historical-critical debate going on, not about whether there is something clear to be found in the old texts but about whether what is there is internally consistent. Every New Testament author had his own sources and his own readership. Even the same author could address different guidance to different readers in different settings. Any redactor could pass on differing traditions from more than one source. This observation would be damaging against the claims of fundamentalism, or of high Protestant scholasticism, in which the content of belief to which people seek to be faithful is not really the Bible but the seamlessly consistent system of propositions in which one believes all its revelatory “teachings” cohere. This same awareness of diversity, however, does nothing to undercut a postcritical or narrative understanding, for which the witness of a text consists in the direction in which it pointed, along the trajectory from earlier tradition to present challenge, within the actual life of the community for and to which it spoke. From this perspective, unity within diversity is more credible, and more helpful, than simple uniformity would have been.
There is the general theological bias of more recent scholars against the historical/particular quality of the narrative and prophetic strands of Scripture which proclaim a “God Who Acts” and in favor of "Wisdom," that is, in favor of moral insights less tied to time and place. No one will deny that numerous genres of witness are present in Old Testament and New. It does not follow, however, either a priori or empirically, that Jesus seen as sage, as rabbi, or as incarnate Wisdom, would be any less politically relevant than ]esus the nonviolent Zealot.
There is the effort which some systematic theologians make to filter the Gospel witness through some rnuch later epistemological grid. One very popular such grid is the “distributive” epistemological understanding ofthe Trinity promoted by H. Richard Niebuhr. One should not make Jesus too important for ethics, Niebuhr argued, since God the Father would call for a different (perhaps more institutionally conservative) social ethic, based on an understanding of creation or providence whose content is derived otherwise than from Jesus. God the Spirit might guide us toward another, also different ethic, based on the further revelations received since Pentecost, during the history of the church. This widely influential scheme is worthy of careful criticism, but since it is derived from a modern epistemology alien to the New Testament, that argument does not belong here. Niebuhr’s analysis does not make one person of the Trinity more or less political than the others. If such a distinction were to make any substantive difference at all, it would be to come out in favor of a different political ethic, not of apoliticism. It would presuppose that jesus is political.
Jesus did not come to teach a way of life; most of his guidance is not original. His role is that of Savior, and for us to need a Savior presupposes that we do not live according to his stated ideals. The classical Lutheran tradition designates as usus elenchticus the claim that the function of the law is less to tell us what we can do than to bring us to our knees because we cannot do it.
A. E. Harvey” provides a very illuminating discussion of ways in which various intellectual forces, driving toward a generalizable ethic, set aside the most characteristic teachings of Jesus. The considerations he cites overlap more or less with those listed above, although with different language. Harvey’s project differs from that of the present book: (a) He centers on a handful of “strenuous” and “distinctive” texts, mostly on the Sermon on the Mount, whereas I protest against those few chapters’ being singled out. (b) He trusts more than I do the scholar's capacity to reconstruct, behind the texts, varieties of strands and strata of tradition corresponding to various styles and shadings of belief and carried by various first-century subcommunities. (c) He posits a clear disjunction between “aphorisms" and what was “meant to be” rules for community life. (d) He omits, during most of the exposition, the possibility that the reason for Jesus’ radicality in “taking a maxim to its logical conclusion” might be the Kingdoms coming.”
If Not ]esus, Then What?
If our concern here Were to spell out the substance of social ethics, it would be appropriate to widen the theme “what other norm is there?" (pp. off above). The classical theological appeals for this purpose are to “nature,” “reason,” “creation,” and “reality.” What these four terms have in common is:
In taking stock of the responses which The Politics of Jesus called forth, my first step must be to review the state ofthe debate in New Testament studies, with regard to whether ]esus was in principle a political person. There continues to be deep diversity among the scholars as to detail, but less than ever does any of them make _Iesus apolitical. Two of the profession’s senior authorities, Ernst Bammel and C. F. D. Moule, for instance, recently edited a massive symposium, Jesus and tha Politics of His Day. Their intention was to counteract especially the extreme thesis of Brandon; yet in so doing they could not avoid meeting him partway.
This massive flow of scholarship in the field, representative of a much broader body of writing, did not come about in response to The Politics of Jesus. Some of it was responding directly as already indicated, to the farther-out thesis of Brandon,” according to which Jesus was very political, but in a very traditional way, that is, in a violent, state-oriented, military way. Some scholars review the theme “was ]esus political?” by means of innovative modes of reading (“postmodern,” “poststructuralist,” or “sociological”) which were not present in the same way in the 1960s. What it means that every reader of a text has and owns a specific perspective, as over against seeking or claiming some kind of quasi-neutral “objectivity” is itself part of a continuing debate among scholars about proper method. This debate has proliferated enormously since 1970. I have no intention of claiming the capacity to evaluate what can come through these new grids, but in no case can it be the previous precritical, apolitical Jesus.
Some of the ongoing retrieval of awareness of the political dimension in the work of Jesus has been fostered by the perspectives of specific interpretative constituencies, notably in the broad spectrum of “theologies of liberation.” As a somewhat informed amateur I have opinions on these matters,” but the thesis of The Politics of Jesus is not dependent on my claiming expertise of my own in the new subfield of “liberation.” The prerequisite for appropriate reading of any text is the reader's empathy or congeniality with the intention and genre of the text. We do not ask someone hostile to the discipline of mathematics to read a mathematics text expertly To read a text ofthe genre gospel under the a priori assumption that there could be no such thing as “good news” (whether as a true message or as a genre) would be no more fitting.
I do not mean with this comment to brush off the numerous criticisms properly addressed to some of the oversimplifications and short-circuits that have surfaced in theologies under the heading of “liberation”;23 but for such critique to be valid it must be text- and context-based. It cannot be held to be wrong for the New Testament text to be read as the testimony of a liberation movement sui generis.
Why Not jesus?
A second component of my continuing conversation with comments since 1972 must engage the reasons (pp. 16ff. in the 1972 version, pp. 5ff. above) that various schools of ethics give for not taking Jesus straightforwardly as moral model. There I identified six reasons; there are more:
There is historical-critical skepticism about whether the text says anything clear enough to guide us in the moral life, assuming that we would want to follow Jesus. This kind of expert attention to the canyon within the canon, between “whatever really happened” and “what the text actually says," has continued to develop in complexity during the last generation. There continue to be scholars who are very skeptical about the historical accuracy of details in the ancient accounts, and others who affirm a greater level of trust that there is within the texts a reliable historical core.” In either case, scholarly developments have not had the effect of discovering an apolitical Jesus, nor has any of the most astute scholars given up making appeals to the authority of the figure behind the text.
There is another historical-critical debate going on, not about whether there is something clear to be found in the old texts but about whether what is there is internally consistent. Every New Testament author had his own sources and his own readership. Even the same author could address different guidance to different readers in different settings. Any redactor could pass on differing traditions from more than one source. This observation would be damaging against the claims of fundamentalism, or of high Protestant scholasticism, in which the content of belief to which people seek to be faithful is not really the Bible but the seamlessly consistent system of propositions in which one believes all its revelatory “teachings” cohere. This same awareness of diversity, however, does nothing to undercut a postcritical or narrative understanding, for which the witness of a text consists in the direction in which it pointed, along the trajectory from earlier tradition to present challenge, within the actual life of the community for and to which it spoke. From this perspective, unity within diversity is more credible, and more helpful, than simple uniformity would have been.
There is the general theological bias of more recent scholars against the historical/particular quality of the narrative and prophetic strands of Scripture which proclaim a “God Who Acts” and in favor of "Wisdom," that is, in favor of moral insights less tied to time and place. No one will deny that numerous genres of witness are present in Old Testament and New. It does not follow, however, either a priori or empirically, that Jesus seen as sage, as rabbi, or as incarnate Wisdom, would be any less politically relevant than ]esus the nonviolent Zealot.
There is the effort which some systematic theologians make to filter the Gospel witness through some rnuch later epistemological grid. One very popular such grid is the “distributive” epistemological understanding ofthe Trinity promoted by H. Richard Niebuhr. One should not make Jesus too important for ethics, Niebuhr argued, since God the Father would call for a different (perhaps more institutionally conservative) social ethic, based on an understanding of creation or providence whose content is derived otherwise than from Jesus. God the Spirit might guide us toward another, also different ethic, based on the further revelations received since Pentecost, during the history of the church. This widely influential scheme is worthy of careful criticism, but since it is derived from a modern epistemology alien to the New Testament, that argument does not belong here. Niebuhr’s analysis does not make one person of the Trinity more or less political than the others. If such a distinction were to make any substantive difference at all, it would be to come out in favor of a different political ethic, not of apoliticism. It would presuppose that jesus is political.
Jesus did not come to teach a way of life; most of his guidance is not original. His role is that of Savior, and for us to need a Savior presupposes that we do not live according to his stated ideals. The classical Lutheran tradition designates as usus elenchticus the claim that the function of the law is less to tell us what we can do than to bring us to our knees because we cannot do it.
A. E. Harvey” provides a very illuminating discussion of ways in which various intellectual forces, driving toward a generalizable ethic, set aside the most characteristic teachings of Jesus. The considerations he cites overlap more or less with those listed above, although with different language. Harvey’s project differs from that of the present book: (a) He centers on a handful of “strenuous” and “distinctive” texts, mostly on the Sermon on the Mount, whereas I protest against those few chapters’ being singled out. (b) He trusts more than I do the scholar's capacity to reconstruct, behind the texts, varieties of strands and strata of tradition corresponding to various styles and shadings of belief and carried by various first-century subcommunities. (c) He posits a clear disjunction between “aphorisms" and what was “meant to be” rules for community life. (d) He omits, during most of the exposition, the possibility that the reason for Jesus’ radicality in “taking a maxim to its logical conclusion” might be the Kingdoms coming.”
If Not ]esus, Then What?
If our concern here Were to spell out the substance of social ethics, it would be appropriate to widen the theme “what other norm is there?" (pp. off above). The classical theological appeals for this purpose are to “nature,” “reason,” “creation,” and “reality.” What these four terms have in common is:
(a) that one claims that their meaning is self-evident,The connection of this discussion to the theme of the present book is of course that the impact of these several arguments, each in its own way is to set the authority of Jesus aside, not by avowing that one chooses not to follow him, nor by reading the story and finding in it a different message, but by claiming that in one way or another Jesus’ claims on the disciple’s life are set aside a priori, on systematic logical grounds. The inquiry to which this volume is dedicated aims to test whether being thus set aside is fair to the intent or the substance of the New Testament texts.
(b) that said meaning is very hard to define with the concreteness that would provide strong moral guidance, especially with a View to guiding and motivating dissent,
(c) that these guides differ in their moral substance (i.e., in what We should actually do) from the teachings and example ofJesus; and
(d) that those guides are ascribed a priori a higher or deeper authority than the “particular” Jewish or Christian sources of moral vision, Whether these be the Bible in general, or Jesus in particular.
PREFACE TO THE 2ND EDITION
Each of the chapters of the 1972 book was then a summary of the widely known scholarship of the time. As New Testaments scholarship it was popularization, not fresh research. Its preparation back then had required a few years’ attention to the then current scholarly publications, but I never pretended to be a professional New Testament scholar.
Obviously I am farther from being a specialized scholar in that field today than I was a quarter-century ago. Meanwhile, each of the major subfields represented in the book has seen considerable new scholarly work since I wrote. These themes have continued to receive attention during the past twenty years, not because of what I wrote in 1972, but because what I wrote then was representative of the lively research agenda in the field.
It would therefore have been quite inappropriate, in the frame of reference of such a brief text as this, that I should have attempted to rewrite the text proper to catch up with a quarter-century of frontier scholarship on all its topics. After all, the original purpose of the book had not been to offer a compendium of New Testament scholarship for its own sake, but only to select a few representative specimens pertinent to the general thesis of the book.
That “general thesis” belongs in the field not of exegesis but of ethical methodology. It has to do not with the substance of the moral testimony of the New Testament texts for its own sake, but with whether their total witness is “political.”
Nevertheless the reader will be right to wonder whether the kinds of insights summarized in the synthesis of 1972 have been supported or left behind by ongoing research. By and large, the answer is “supported,” but of course only study in detail could validate that summary. What that state of affairs means for this present revision of The Politics Jesus is that while leaving the text proper with only minimal changes, most chapters will be followed by a brief epilogue, by way of update, in which I seek to identify the lines that further research has taken. In the preparation of these epilogues and in other updating details I have been aided by Kim Paffenroth.
Two things that I generally cannot and should not do in an update like this are: (a) to give an overall accounting for “how my mind has changed in a quarter-century” or (b) to respond in detail to criticisms of particular passages. There are of course numerous points where my original statement in the 1972 text would need to be corrected or retracted. There are others where it would be fitting to defend it against misinterpretations or to argue it further against interlocutors who understand it correctly but disagree. That kind of argument would, however, usually call for much more text, and a more fine-grained kind of argument, than the original passage. To do that generally would unduly burden the revision.
A separate matter is the style changes needing to be introduced within the original text for reasons of tone, and to take account of today’s sensitivities as to gender-related overtones. In this editing the most important contributions have been made by the Reverends Augustus and Laurel Jordan.
My first preface referred to “biblical realism” as characterizing my mode of reading Scripture. That phrase was current among specialists in the 1960s. It was, like the substance of the survey no idea of my own. Yet it never became widely known, nor did the scholars whom it then described try in any concerted way to work together as a team or a “school.” It named an approach which sought to take full account of all of the tools of literary and historical criticism, without any traditional scholasticism, yet without letting the Scriptures be taken away from the church. In a way foreign to my intentions, this book has been taken by some as representing an original way to relate the Bible to the church or to ethics. Others have called it “fundamentalist”; also a misreading.
If I had known the book would be put on review as a prototype of something methodologically ambitious or profound, I might have gone further into the discussion of theoretical prolegomena--or I might have refused to do so, since one can very soon come to a point, in the abstract discussions of method, where that very discussion gets in the way of letting the text play its role as the documentary spine of the church’s identity.
Obviously I am farther from being a specialized scholar in that field today than I was a quarter-century ago. Meanwhile, each of the major subfields represented in the book has seen considerable new scholarly work since I wrote. These themes have continued to receive attention during the past twenty years, not because of what I wrote in 1972, but because what I wrote then was representative of the lively research agenda in the field.
It would therefore have been quite inappropriate, in the frame of reference of such a brief text as this, that I should have attempted to rewrite the text proper to catch up with a quarter-century of frontier scholarship on all its topics. After all, the original purpose of the book had not been to offer a compendium of New Testament scholarship for its own sake, but only to select a few representative specimens pertinent to the general thesis of the book.
That “general thesis” belongs in the field not of exegesis but of ethical methodology. It has to do not with the substance of the moral testimony of the New Testament texts for its own sake, but with whether their total witness is “political.”
Nevertheless the reader will be right to wonder whether the kinds of insights summarized in the synthesis of 1972 have been supported or left behind by ongoing research. By and large, the answer is “supported,” but of course only study in detail could validate that summary. What that state of affairs means for this present revision of The Politics Jesus is that while leaving the text proper with only minimal changes, most chapters will be followed by a brief epilogue, by way of update, in which I seek to identify the lines that further research has taken. In the preparation of these epilogues and in other updating details I have been aided by Kim Paffenroth.
Two things that I generally cannot and should not do in an update like this are: (a) to give an overall accounting for “how my mind has changed in a quarter-century” or (b) to respond in detail to criticisms of particular passages. There are of course numerous points where my original statement in the 1972 text would need to be corrected or retracted. There are others where it would be fitting to defend it against misinterpretations or to argue it further against interlocutors who understand it correctly but disagree. That kind of argument would, however, usually call for much more text, and a more fine-grained kind of argument, than the original passage. To do that generally would unduly burden the revision.
A separate matter is the style changes needing to be introduced within the original text for reasons of tone, and to take account of today’s sensitivities as to gender-related overtones. In this editing the most important contributions have been made by the Reverends Augustus and Laurel Jordan.
My first preface referred to “biblical realism” as characterizing my mode of reading Scripture. That phrase was current among specialists in the 1960s. It was, like the substance of the survey no idea of my own. Yet it never became widely known, nor did the scholars whom it then described try in any concerted way to work together as a team or a “school.” It named an approach which sought to take full account of all of the tools of literary and historical criticism, without any traditional scholasticism, yet without letting the Scriptures be taken away from the church. In a way foreign to my intentions, this book has been taken by some as representing an original way to relate the Bible to the church or to ethics. Others have called it “fundamentalist”; also a misreading.
If I had known the book would be put on review as a prototype of something methodologically ambitious or profound, I might have gone further into the discussion of theoretical prolegomena--or I might have refused to do so, since one can very soon come to a point, in the abstract discussions of method, where that very discussion gets in the way of letting the text play its role as the documentary spine of the church’s identity.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Chapter Four (of Jesus and Creativity)
Creativity Is Good News!
The early Christian message was a gospel, the good news that the creator of the heavens and the earth, the ruler of the universe, had sent his son to the earth in order to save humankind from all the sin, suffering, and other evils into which they had fallen. As the Gospel of John puts it "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life." (3 16) That was good news for those people who first heard it, and it has remained good news for many down through the centuries. The creator and ruler of the universe loves us humans and has made the highest sacrifice to redeem human life from all evils and bring humankind into the perfect divine kingdom for which it was created. It is hardly surprising that once this gospel caught on, it spread throughout the Roman Empire and beyond. In the early decades, as we have seen, it gave rise to new visions of what human life was all about and to a new conception of God Over the many following centuries, it spawned magnificent music and art, it stimulated profound philosophical, theological, and moral reflection, and it was a seedbed for the emergence and development of modern democratic politics and the modern sciences. All of this creativity was a product, at least in part, of Jesus-trajectory1; the appearance of that trajectory proved to be an enormously creative event. There were, of course, breakdowns and failures of many sorts over the years: betrayals of the faith confessed by the churches and their leaders; crusades and murderous wars, plagues and famines, the horrors of modern slavery; Western colonialism along with Christian triumphalism; and so on and so on. But through it all the loving God was believed to be ruling from on high, and all would ultimately be good for his children on earth, if not in this life then in the next.
This good news, originally preached by the disciples and reiterated down through the centuries, was, first, that there is an other world than the one in which we humans now find ourselves, the heavenly world where God's perfect rule assures happiness and peace for all; and second, that God sent his son to the earth to rescue us humans, no matter how broken our lives might be, thus giving us access through Jesus to that heavenly abode. But for those of us today for whom there is no "other world" than this one in which We find ourselves, this kind of 'good news"--though a lovely dream, plausible for many centuries--can no longer provide an adequate focus for the orientation and ordering of life. Though we all sing Christmas carols rejoicing in the birth of baby Jesus, most of us know in our hearts that this beautiful story--a magnificent creation of the human imagination--is too simple and too implausible to be much of a guide to living in the world in which we today find ourselves.
Many persons, therefore--including many who think of themselves as Christians--no longer take seriously the good news of the original Christian message. What then can take its place? There is a price to pay in comfort and the hope of wish»fulfillment when we give up the anthropomorphic/anthropocentric God that we have inherited. In exchange for that price, however, there is available to us an understanding of God as creativity, a creativity that is real, not just an imaginary dream. It is a creativity manifest on all sides around us and present in and with our own human creativity. We humans are deeply indebted to this creativity that--through a long, precarious passage--has brought our human trajectory (and us along with it) into being. This realization gives us a basis for the hope char our trajectory--despite all failures in past and present--might continue on toward a more humane and ecologically sustainable world, Moreover, though the supernatural aspects of the traditional Jesus-story are no longer plausible, another story of the significance of jesus still remains: the story recounted in Jesus-trajectory2 can be quite meaningful for contemporary Christian faith, In this book I have been sketching an understanding of today's world in which each of the two central Christian symbols--God (understood as serendipitous creativity) and Jesus (as set out in Jesus-trajectory2)--have an important place. It should be noted, however, that the "abundant life" (John 10:10) that this Jesus can bring to women and men today will be of a different sort than that expected by many earlier generations.
This understanding of Christian faith (like many earlier versions) requires a profound conversion to a way of living introduced to us by the image/ story of Jesus, and those who make a serious commitment to this jesus are still offered the "good news" of hope for a better human world. But instead of proffering a heavenly reward in an afterlife, this understanding offers the satisfaction of living out our years entirely within this world in which we find ourselves--with all its problems and pain, tragedy and suffering--a life to be lived within a community of love and forgiveness and hope, of reconciliation and healing--and joy. It is a life given over to building new communities of peace and justice and well being for all, a life devoted to protecting and enhancing the environment that sustains humans and many other species here on planet Earth--a this-worldly kind of "abundant life."
I
Let us review the story of jesus as recounted in Jesus-trajectory2. It begins with the ministry and message of Jesus of Nazareth, a remarkably gifted man. He was a healer, a preacher, an excellent storyteller--one who believed the end of the world (as he and his friends knew it) was coming soon, as the kingdom of God takes over from on high. Some began to believe he might be God's messiah who would overthrow the Romans and inaugurate God's kingdom on earth. Many of his stories--vivid parables recounting situations quite familiar to all his hearers but each making a distinctive point about the coming kingship of God--were long remembered and eventually recorded in the New Testament Gospels. His sermons were sprinkled with teachings about God's love for humankind, especially the poor, the sick, and the outcast; and he called for similar love and forgiveness among humans. Some of his teachings--as recorded in the Gospels--were very radical and quite puzzling, especially to those who thought he might be preparing to overthrow the Romans:
But that event was, in fact, not the end of the story of Jesus but instead the beginning of a new and quite different sequence of events with, as it turned out, enormously creative consequences of a sort not expected by anyone. Had these strange events--quite difficult even to imagine--not occurred, we today would never have heard of Jesus, his ministry and his comportment in life, his death, his provocative teachings. After Jesus' death and burial some of his disciples began to speak of his continuing appearances to them, and they (and others) came to believe he was alive again: God had resurrected him from the dead and through him had begun inaugurating his kingdom on earth. A new story about Jesus was being created. It soon began to spread rapidly and the Jesus-movement grew incorporating many Gentiles as well as Jews. This alone might have been of significant historical importance, but the creativity in this movement was not limited simply to growth in size: over the next decades it also produced substantial rethinking of who or what God really is and what God requires of humans, how humans are to live. These significantly transformative changes were summed up compactly toward the end of the first century c.E. by the writer of 1 John:
We need to consider further now what can be said about Jesus and creativity. Three distinctly different points--can be made. There was Jesus' own creativity in his ministry healings, and teachings; then there was also the amazing creativity that occurred after his death: first the resurrection appearances of Jesus, and following on these the several decades of reconceiving--in decisively new ways--God, the kingship of God, and how humans were to live out their lives; finally there has been the striving by committed followers of Jesus over the centuries to live within this new creative pattern of human life, a mode of creativity continuing all the way clown into the present. We know very little about how all this creativity got under way. With respect to the creativity of Jesus before his death, there was of course the influence of John the Baptizer in the desert and Jesus' joining John's company of disciples, as well as the fertile consequences of Jesus' own strong hope and expectation that God was about to bring in (or was already bringing in) a New Age. With respect to the creativity immediately following upon jesus' death, we can say a few things, but it is all very murky Obviously the vivid memories of Jesus' ministry death, and teachings, and the disciples' great disappointment following his crucifixion, must have been important factors. But we can only speculate about how these were related to the resurrection appearances, which then led to the disciples' creative attempts to understand the meaning of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, and eventually to the strikingly new vision of God as love, as well as to the missions that spread abroad that remarkable message. The powerful ongoing historical momentum of the Jesus-movement, a momentum still under way was thus coming into being.
The most important evidence of this new creative thinking of the disciples is found largely in the Pauline and Johannine documents in the New Testament. But the earliest of these, some of Paul's writings, were not written until about a generation after Jesus' death; and Paul must have had important creative predecessors about whom we know little. The Johannine texts were produced much later, probably toward the end of the first century C.E., or even after that. By the end of that century the story of Jesus was on its way to becoming a worldwide phenomenon. Jesus was going to be one of the most influential figures of history one whose story would continue to transform lives creatively one who would inspire religious and cultural creativity of many sorts. An enormous stream of human social, cultural, artistic, and intellectual creativity has followed upon his life, death, and resurrection. (Perhaps the only comparable examples have been the creativity that followed upon the lives of the Buddha and Mohammed.) Human existence around the world has obviously been greatly enriched by this Jesus-stream of creativity. It must be granted, however, that this creativity has also been the fountain of some very destructive historical movements and events: one thinks of the long history of Christian intolerance of other religions (as well as of other Christians, in all too many cases!), and especially of the anti-Semitisrn during much of Christian history culminating in the Holocaust of the twentieth century. One thinks also of the patriarchal oppression of women throughout Christian history; of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the slave trade, modern colonialism, and modern mass warfare carried on by each side in the names of Jesus and/ or God; and so on. Today we live in a historical period in which there is still a very wide Jesus-stream, but the ambiguity of that stream's creativity is obvious.
There are, of course, many churchgoers who are basically nominal Christians but who do not let their religion interfere with "the good life"--a frenetic pursuit of "American values," such as a "high standard of living" with plenty of money entertainment, and other pleasures. The creativity to be found in this stance would seem to have little connection with jesus. Then there are those far»right Christian fundamentalists (especially in the United States) who seem to be all too creative in their willingness to use almost any kind of instrumentalities (including mass media brouhaha, political "dirty tricks" of many different sorts, some forms of "brainwashing," even modern warfare) as they spread their version of "the Gospel" and combat those they regard as "Gods enemies" (atheists, secularists, jews, Muslims, and many others--including other Christians) in their effort to create a "Christian America." And there are faithful ordinary Christians for whom jesus presents the most compelling model of how We humans ought to live, but--finding it impossible to order their lives in terms of his extreme demands--who are simply good, decent people. Then there are those who seek to order their lives by creatively responding to jesus' most radical teachings about love, caring for the poor and needy and practicing forgiveness, reconciliation, and peacemaking. And there are those who think that although one ought to lead one's personal life in terms of the radical teachings about forgiveness and love, these teachings do not apply to the wider social and political order. There are those who are convinced that jesus' teachings require us to create a new social, political, and economic order in which all will be cared for in justice and peace. And so on and so on. The Jesus-stream has long since lost its creative cutting edge--or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it has spawned many quite different cutting edges, in confusing contradiction with each other--and it is hard to know just what we should make of this enormous ambiguity.
Some may think it is time to acknowledge that jesus can no longer help us much, either in identifying the problems with which we humans must today come to terms or through inspiring creative address to those problems. But where else should we turn for truly creative inspiration? lt is clear that the radicality of jesus' preaching and teaching (as we find it in the New Testament) simply cannot be lived out in any legalistic Creativity is Good News! 97 way--and this accounts for some of the diversity and ambiguity just noted in the many different responses to jesus in today's world. But it should also be clear that the radicality of jesus' demands may startle our minds into fresh thinking about how we humans need to reorder our lives and our world? Perhaps only a powerful dramatic vision of what human life can and should be--such as jesus' radical vision of life under God's kingship--is capable of inspiring us to break through today's barriers and create new forms of human existence.jesus' radicality, that is to say may still inspire us to strive toward creating a new and better world. And for just this reason, it seems to me, it is precisely this radicality of jesus to which Christians should be attending as they seek to move creatively into what will undoubtedly be a complex and difficult future. Other Christians, of course, may feel there are good reasons to opt for other features of the jesus-story And non-Christians would likely move in some entirely different directions as they seek creative ways to identify and address the major problems to which we humans today must direct our energies--though doubtless some who do not claim to be Christian at all might (as has often been the case) continue to turn toward the radical jesus for inspiration.
It is not obvious that the jesus-stream in the contemporary world still has the resources either to identify or to creatively address the major problems that we humans are increasingly facing as we become a single, highly interdependent--though still quite pluralistic--humanity. Can Christian churches find ways--other than the exercise of dominative power (which they have not hesitated to employ in the past)--to help bring a new creative peace and order into today's pluralism, with its many divisive socio»cultural dimensions? Can the Christian spirit find sufficient inspiration--in its notes of nonviolent and nonresistant love even of enemies--to put aside its idolatrous claims to be the sole truly redemptive force in human history? Can it learn to rejoice in the creativity manifest in other religious and secular movements and begin to work more cooperatively with them? Can Christians--moving beyond their traditional anthropomorphic/anthropocentric god, and standing in awe of the creativity (God!) manifest throughout the universe as well as in human affairs--begin to order their activities more fully in terms of what will be good for all of life on planet earth, not simply human life? All Christians who commit themselves to versions of the Jesus image/story that emphasize what I have called the radical character of his vision and message would, I hope, be able to say yes to all of these questions.
II
In chapter 3 we explored briefly the understanding of humans as fundamentally biohistorical beings, a conception that enables us to connect such valued features of human existence as agency creativity freedom, and love with our complex biological and historical grounding. Obviously we are biological beings, products of a long evolutionary development of life here on planet Earth, but we are not ordinary animals. We are "incomplete or unfinished animals" (Geertz), which, through a long, slow process of emergence from our biological origins, have become beings who cannot survive unless we are "completed" by the humanly created cultures into which we have been born. As beings created in part by the sociocultural setting in which we have grown up, we have acquired capacities to act self-consciously responsibly and creatively and we are thus able to participate actively in the transformation of our biohistorical world. Though we have been decisively shaped, and continue to be nourished, by the biological and sociohistorical pasts from which we and our forebears have come, it is the problems confronting us in the present with which we must come to terms, if human life is to continue and to flourish in the future ahead of us. Past, present, and future are bound together in our lives, each playing its own distinctive part in our biohistorical existence. Today our local sociocultural worlds are changing very rapidly as a global society is coming into being, and there are many enormous problems that need to be addressed.
The picture of our human situation that I have been presenting here is a naturalistic/ humanistic one. In this picture there is no creator-God on high ruling all of these developments, a God we can be confident is bringing humanity to a glorious final consummation. But it is not the case, either, that the predicaments we humans face will be overcome simply by our human decisions and actions. A mysterious creativity (God) has been manifest throughout the universe all the way back to the very beginning of things. And the human biohistorical trajectory was a Creativity Is Good News! 99 serendipitous product of this creativity; we humans did not create the world in which we find ourselves, nor did we create ourselves. Our forebears, however, gradually began to play a role in the creativity through which humanity emerged from ordinary animality as the mysterious creativity in the universe brought into being a human offshoot (so to speak). For many generations this specifically human role in these creative developments--though gradually increasing in significance--was very small. By several millennia ago, however, human creativity was playing an important part, and in the modern era it has had a significant role in the creative transformation of both human existence and the surface of the earth. The Wider creativity manifest throughout the universe--God--has, of course, always had the larger part in these matters: certainly the fundamentally biohistorical character of human existence, as well as its happening here on planet Earth, was not the result simply of human decisions and actions. What the future will bring is, very likely partly in our hands; but the final outcome (unless we destroy ourselves, which now seems possible) is not in our hands at all. Ultimately thus, we must put our trust in that wider creativity--deeply mysterious, but also surprisingly beneficent--as we humans play out our own creative role in addressing the problems we face.
This, of course, is how it has always been with God. Faith in God was born initially in ancient Israel, as the Israelites came to believe that what God (Yahweh) had done for them in the past--especially in the escape from Egypt and the invasion of Canaan--provided grounds for hope about what he would do in the future. Despite this hope, however, what God was believed to be actually doing always turned out to be in many respects quite unpredictable and incomprehensible--a profound mystery. The situation remains the same today. The human story and its context to date (as we now understand these) can provide grounds for hope respecting the future; from its very beginning this story is about a trajectory of serendipitous creativity and its effects--a creativity that was deeply beneficial to the gradually emerging human life. This creativity made possible both the emergence of humans and their distinctive development. As we look backward down our human trajectory we can see that the creativity working in and through these evolutionary and historical processes did not move forward every which way; rather, it built upon what was already in place, extending it and expanding it as it moved on into the future. That is, this creativity adapts itself so to speak, to the possibilities for growth and development in each new stage, and this enables the trajectory to move onward. (Without this adjustment, the trajectory might well die.) Even though this has been a long, slow evolutionary-historical development requiring hundreds of thousands of years and much tragedy and pain, it can still provide a basis for hope that the creativity here on planet Earth will continue opening up new possibilities for the human trajectory as it moves on into the future. We can and should place our confidence respecting that future in this ongoing creativity--this creativity that, as I have been arguing, we should understand to be God.
It is difficult for us to grasp all that is involved in this sort of judgment unless we bracket our ordinary human timescale--measured basically in days and years and generations--and think in much larger terms.6 The creation of the new in the world often comes quite slowly and it was only through very gradual changes that the emergence of humankind, as we know it, came about. It was, for example, a considerable achievement--taking many generations to accomplish--for emerging Homo sapiens to begin taking into account the most minimal of moral considerations, such as rules restricting vengeance. We find such a rule in Exodus, shortly after a summary of the Ten Commandments: "You shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot" (21:23b-24). This rule equalizing the punishment with the crime may seem rigid and harsh to us today; nevertheless, it represents a significant moral advance over the practice of Lamech, the father of Noah, who bragged to his wives: "I kill a man for wounding me, a young man for a blow. Cain may be avenged seven times, but Lamech seventy-seven” (Gen. 4:23b-24; 5:28-29 NEB). And it took many generations more, as can be seen from the record in the Hebrew Bible, to develop such values as mercy justice, and kindness--strongly emphasized by the eighth-century B.C.E. prophets--and to begin ordering human life by them. In other cultures, similar developments were also occurring--sometimes, of course, going in quite different directions. Even given the deep and rich moral consciousness being serendipitously created in Israel's culture, it took another eight centuries for a quite new vision to appear in the ministry and preaching of jesus--a vision of human life ordered and oriented by love and forgiveness.
The image/story of jesus brought forth possibilities for human existence heretofore unimagined: a vision and hope that Christians (and some others) have believed could guide humans creatively into a new future. Of course, the jesus-story can also lead us into despair: to what extent, after all, has it really changed the human condition in the last two thousand years? I have claimed above that it has been very creative in many ways, but one cannot help but wonder whether its creativity may now be largely spent. Other historical forces clearly dominate human life today and the manor churches and movements that claim to be Christian seem to be thoroughly compromised in many respects: very little is heard these days about what I have been calling the radical character of the image and story of Jesus. Perhaps its time is over?
A judgment of that sort takes for granted our ordinary human timescale, and (as we have just been noting) this may be quite misleading when considering the kind of issues with which we are here concerned. If it took thousands of years for Homo sapiens to move beyond bare animality and begin to acquire--to create--an elemental moral consciousness; and even with that new sensitivity in place, it took hundreds of years more for such basic moral ideals as justice, kindness, and mercy to become widely affirmed in cultures and religions, we should not be so surprised and disappointed that these norms are so often still violated around the world (think of recent and ongoing outbreaks of massive genocide, brutal dictatorships, wars, to say nothing of the all-too-frequent incidents of everyday ordinary meanness). We need to remember that our basic human physiology after all--including our limbic system, nervous system, and brain--was formed in times when humans had to fight for their lives against ferocious predators (see, e.g., Ehrenreich 1997 and Ashbrook and Albright 1997). That underlying equipment is still with us, along with--in nearly every culture--practices, traditions, and institutions that encourage violent aggression against, and violent responses to, enemies believed to be threatening. Human morality has to temper, tame, and discipline all of this in each new generation so it should not be surprising that progress toward cultures of reconciliation, peace, and goodwill has been painfully slow--and with many reversals. It is difficult for us humans to sustain even such obviously wise ordinary moral standards as the ones just mentioned. Why would anyone expect, then, that the radical vision of Jesus ought to be taken seriously? It is clearly an impossible dream.
But perhaps the time for that impossible dream has come. We humans are today in a different situation than we have ever been before. This new situation was ushered in at the end of World War II with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Theologian Henry Nelson Wieman realized almost immediately that for the first time in history humans had available a kind of power that could bring the human story to an end, and this meant that the human situation on Earth had changed decisively:
The dangers of environmental breakdown to ongoing human life are not new. They have been a factor throughout human history and failure to adjust human activities intelligently to environmental changes has often been a major factor in the collapse of civilizations in the past (see Diamond 2005). But heretofore these were always local failures, and the human project was able to continue because it was carried on elsewhere. Today we are facing worldwide environmental changes, at least partially caused by human failures to care properly for the environment; and there no longer are other places to which our population of six billion humans can go to continue the human story Either we today learn how to accommodate our living to the ecological requirements around the globe, or the human story is likely to come to an end.
None of the great world religions anticipated this state of affairs; that we humans would at some time have the power to destroy the entire human project, and that we might exercise that power. So Wieman was correct that in the middle of the last century we humans moved into a completely unprecedented (and unexpected) historical situation. In these circumstances what is needed above all is truly imaginative creativity. Actually this is the kind of creativity that we humans possess. There is no reason to expect that the wider creativity manifest throughout the universe (God) will intervene here in our behalf (as may be hoped by some devotees of the traditional anthropocentric God); as far as we know this is not the way in which that creativity happens. Our human creativity however--alone in the universe in this respect?--can be guided to some degree by our human imaginings, our human desires, our human intentions. The dilemma with which we are here concerned is one that we humans have (unexpectedly) produced as we enthusiastically exercised our own increasingly developing creativity and power--and we are the ones who must address it.
So what is now required of us humans most of all is (1) creativity imaginative creativity deliberately directed toward addressing this very dangerous situation; and (2) the moral and political will to hasten disarmament (nuclear and otherwise) and take whatever steps are necessary to reverse our growing environmental destruction. This is a large and difficult agenda, an agenda politically quite unpopular, at least here in the United States--the worst offender in the world on these matters. In this country today we do not seem to have in our culture and political leadership--or in our religious consciousness--either the moral resources or the imagination to grasp the enormity of this problem. We are myopic lemmings running toward the sea as we spread the gospel of corporate capitalism around the globe and (mis)manage affairs at home with a politics of fear. And instead of seeking to understand and appreciate cultures and religions and languages different from our own, we put our hope in a Fortress America that will keep out poverty-driven people led by "evil terrorists."
There may however, be an ironic feature in this picture. We are living in the midst of a new globalism that is breaking down isolationist boundaries of many sorts around the world. From the time Homo sapiens left Africa and began to travel around the globe, humans took up abode in many different, often quite isolated, locations; and further development of the human biohistorical line occurred in each of these separate settings. Since each society and culture developed its own way to live--as it adapted itself to its geographical setting--diverse human societies, cultures, languages, religions, practices, and values were created in these different places. The human story thus became many quite distinct and separate stories. Some of these groups evolved into manor civilizations; others became quite isolated and remained small. Although there have been--all the way down to the twenty-first century--many political and military attempts to bring some order into this thoroughly pluralistic situation, no empire has succeeded in bringing all these diverse groups together and ruling the world. Modern technology, however, has made possible increasing interchange among civilizations around the globe during the past several centuries; and during the last decades of the twentieth century something truly new has begun to happen.
With the creation of the worldwide electronic Web, instantaneous moving of information of all sorts everywhere around the globe is now in place; and we are rapidly becoming one world economically industrially and scientifically. There is also much social interchange and cultural mixing. So the many distinct human stories in our pluralized history are becoming one overall story; it will likely remain very pluralistic and complex well into the future, but there is going to be a unified human story once again. Unfortunately however, we remain politically divided into so-called sovereign nation-states (though the European Union is taking important steps to overcome that); and with a weak United Nations, it is still much too easy for powerful arrogant nations to make highly destructive warfare against weaker powers. A third world war, if it should occur, would be among nations with weapons of mass destruction, and therefore might be virtually the end of the human story. If we manage to avoid such a war, we will, of course, still have the ecological crisis to deal with, so either way the human future at present looks dark.
Our most important human task today therefore, is to see that we avoid both of these disasters. We must continue to move as rapidly as we can into one, largely democratic, political world; and we must make major progress on our environmental problems. Is there any chance for both of these to happen? It surely will not be easy since there is not even agreement in the major civilizations that we should put these objectives high on our agendas. To make the necessary sharp turn in the roads we are presently following will require a great deal of quite imaginative creativity and that right soon.
III
In short, what is needed is a worldwide conversion--a religious-like conversion!--to a new and quite different way of ordering our societies, our institutions, our cultures, our religions, our families, our individual lives. Throughout the Whole long history of humankind, in all its many different sociocultural and religious strands, it has been taken for granted that we humans should largely live out of the authoritative traditions and practices of the past. We are, of course, biohistorical beings, shaped by the past--indeed, we have been given our very humanness by the past--and in all cultures we have been taught and have learned that we must respect, honor, cherish, and pass on this past to the future. But as historical beings we are not only created and nourished by our past: We actually live in the present, and we must, therefore, come to terms with the major problems we now face if the human race is to survive into the future and flourish in that future. As we have noted, we have inherited powerful biohistorical momentums from our human pasts, momentums that are today driving us toward self-destruction; these must be changed. Those basic patterns of orientation in life--which divide us from each other and into groups suspicious of each other and often fighting, enemies seeking to destroy each other instead of living peacefully together in communities and societies ordered justly; and which lead us to neglect care of our environment, continuing to exploit it for our own short-term pleasures and gain--must be drastically transformed. We no longer dare to live out our lives and carry on our activities in our politics and economics, our cultures and religions, our sciences and technologies, our personal relations and friendships, in the terms largely specified by these historical momentums, however effective and valuable they may have been in the past. For we are living in a new present, qualitatively different from any of our human pasts, a present in which these patterns of orientation and ordering that enabled us to live and flourish throughout our long human history are now threatening to destroy us and the entire human future. Unless we change these inherited ways of living and acting, believing and hoping, we may commit species suicide. We have no alternative, therefore, (1) to learning how to live together in some kind of lasting peace and justice, in which (2) we cooperatively find ways to deal effectively with the ecological crisis. A massive religious-like conversion is needed.
Does this mean that we must become members of some new religion that displaces and wipes out the cherished values and meanings and standards by which our lives have heretofore been ordered? That is a self-contradictory idea, not even imaginable, for it would involve destroying what makes us human in order to make us more human. Nevertheless, it is a religious-like conversion that is needed, for what is called for here are changes in very deep-lying patterns that at present orient and order most of human life worldwide. They are patterns partially grounded in the biological side of our human nature, grounded in features inherited from the prehuman and early human stages of the evolutionary developments through which humanity emerged; and they are also grounded in long-standing historico-cultural patterns. From early on, of course, developments in the historical side of our humanness often involved (or led to) significant transformation of some aspects of our strictly biological inheritance;8 and, as Sigmund Freud saw this gave rise to major enduring tensions in human selfhood between what he called the "superego" and the "id." As we noted above, it took many centuries for moral (and other) constraints on the id to become sufficiently effective to enable large-scale societies to emerge. And in today's world, of course, there continue to be breakdowns of many different sorts in this order. I am not suggesting here that it is necessary for the constraints of the superego to be tightened still further today--even if that could be accomplished, the consequences might be explosive. Rather, I suggest that, as is often the case in religious conversions, these constraints be creatively transformed into new configurations more appropriate to the situation in which humanity now finds itself.
What might these new configurations be? And how could they be brought about? I cannot give a general answer to either of these questions. That would require massive knowledge of the religio-moral and secular-humanist patterns that presently orient and order human existence around the globe, as well as proposals for transforming each of these patterns in an appropriate new direction. This important religio-cultural task--a task of worldwide proportions--needs to be undertaken from within each of the manor civilizations and religio-cultural groupings that presently order humanity around the globe; it cannot be imposed from without.
Actually however, changes of the sort we are considering here may already be getting under way serendipitously: many persons and groups in countries around the globe seem to have become aware of our ecological problems, and the problems rooted in situations of extreme poverty; and they are becoming more and more insistent that governments and other agencies take appropriate action. Worldwide conferences have been held for a number of decades, and such achievements as the Kyoto Protocol represent a beginning cooperative step forward with regard to the environmental situation--the outstanding exception to making this step being the United States. Establishment of the International Court of justice is also a major cooperative step toward necessary legal standards for ordering world affairs. The United Nations is, of course, the major international institution--however weak it may be--that must move us forward on these matters; but other institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are also beginning to wake up to the need for manor changes in the way international economic and ecological problems are handled. Moreover, some large worldwide corporations have obviously seen the handwriting on the wall and are attempting to mend their ways accordingly. We may hope, thus, that some beginnings of important transformations in the ways we humans have been ordering and orienting human life for hundreds of generations are already under way. There is, of course, resistance in many quarters to the decisive changes now required in our familiar patterns of ordering our affairs--defenders of "national sovereignty" being an obvious example, with advocates of international corporate capitalism a close second, and religious institutions and traditions unwilling to respect each other and work together cooperatively an important third; and we may not make the changes as rapidly as is necessary. But the worldwide religious like conversion in our thinking and our feelings, about the way we humans have heretofore ordered our affairs, does appear to be under way to some extent. The creativity that brought our human trajectory into being and enabled it to go forward over many millennia is, perhaps, opening up some new possibilities as we move into the future. And it can be hoped that, as we slowly learn how to make some of these moves cooperatively we may begin to move forward more confidently and thus more rapidly.
I am not qualified to suggest the ways in which our many religious and humanist traditions need to reorient themselves, nor can I speak for all Christians. I can, however, suggest what I think is appropriate for the version of Christian faith that I have been presenting in these pages. We are concerned here about a human world that is beginning to be forced by economic, industrial, ecological, and humanitarian forces to come together again, after being separated into distinct cultures, religions, languages, and civilizations for thousands of years. It is a world in which these disparate traditions have usually been quite suspicious of each other; have fought wars with--and often sought to completely destroy--each other; have seldom lived in any kind of deep respect for each other. A11 of this must now change as we become a single world-wide society--a society doubtless remaining pluralistic in many respects but in which the major groupings are increasingly interconnected and thus interdependent. If this new world is actually to be created, many of the long-standing practices, prejudices, beliefs, values, attitudes, ways of living and interacting of our nations, our cultures, our civilizations, our religions, our political institutions, our large corporations, and other social groupings must be transformed into much more cooperative and trusting patterns. For if we do not succeed in moving forward into a new global society char can effectively address the problems we humans now face, utterly destructive breakdowns may bring the whole human story to an end.
IV
I would like to suggest now what a Christian perspective and faith, of the sort to which I have been alluding, have to offer in this crucial historical moment. The kind of transformative changes needed--in our cultures, our practices, our attitudes, our institutions, our ways of living--will undoubtedly require very considerable human creativity. At present we do not know how to bring about these changes; we do not even know what the necessary first steps should be. New insights into the problems we face, new proposals on how to address these problems, fresh thinking and imagining of ways to proceed--in short, a new willingness to acknowledge the seriousness of our enormous problems and a new willingness to be open to radical changes in the orientation and the ordering of our inherited ways of living must all be created.
In the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, creativity has always been a central mark--indeed the dining mark--of God. In the theology with which we are working in this book, creativity is God, God is creativity--the creativity that has brought all that exists into being, the creativity that continues to be active throughout the universe, the creativity that has brought us humans into being and is manifest world-wide in and through our own human creativity. God-as-creativity is not to be thought of as in any respect a sectarian god, largely connected with, say only the Abrahamic religions. The God of which I am speaking here is the creativity manifest throughout the cosmos, the creativity evident in all human practices and traditions, the ongoing coming into being of the new to be seen everywhere in the universe. When I say then, that creativity will be required if we are to address effectively the worldwide problems we humans today face, it is not some parochial Western or Christian kind of creativity to which I am referring and appealing. It is the universal creativity--the coming into being of the novel and transformative wherever and whenever that happens--the creativity known of and manifest in the lives and cultures of all peoples.
It is on this creativity that our hopes for the human future should be placed. The creative changes that are needed around the world must come about in ways appropriate to each tradition and culture, not just changes that we in the Abrahamic religions or we in the West might desire and hope for. The new world that we hope to help create must be one to which peoples of all cultures, religions, and languages contribute, and in which they can all feel at home.
The creativity required to bring about this new order may well go beyond the creative inspiration we humans are able to provide: we must hope and expect and believe that the wider creativity (God) will continue to engender a context in the world roundabout that will enable us, indeed encourage us, to move forward. In view of all that this wider creativity has done for us humans--bringing us forth in the world over countless generations--it is fitting that we continue to have faith in it as we move forward into an unknown future. Doubtless as we attempt to address the large problems we humans now face, there will be many differences in our judgments about which insights we should regard as truly creative and therefore pursue; so we will need to learn how to search together for creative ways to move beyond these differences, and that will often be difficult. However, it is worth noting that throughout the Whole of humanity today there appear to be serendipitous pressures that, after all those past centuries of divisions and separateness, are beginning to pull us humans together again in spite of ourselves. Is God--the creativity manifest in the wider context in which we humans live--now nudging us forward? It is important that we accede to these pressures and do everything we can to facilitate this transformation.
As We have been observing throughout these pages, the Christian message is not only about God, the wider creativity. It is also about Jesus, a very creative figure of two thousand years ago. As might be expected, those of us who are Christians will turn to the mission and message of jesus for help in addressing the massive problems that we humans today confront, problems about which there is much disagreement. Jesus' creativity--in his ministry his comportment, his healings, his teachings, and especially in the manner in which he went to his crucifixion--inspired those around him. And following upon his alleged resurrection from the dead, his mission and message were carried around the Roman world and beyond, and it inspired many others to become his disciples and followers--a movement that continues to grow. We Christians need to ask ourselves, Do the life and death of this Jesus in any way significantly bear on the complex of problems with which we humans must now come to terms? Does this Jesus have anything to say that might illuminate these problems in some significant way?
Jesus believed that the kingdom of God was beginning to break into human history; and he regarded his own healings of sickness and suffering, and his forgiveness of sins, as signs that this kingdom was coming soon. He believed that humans should love not only both God and their neighbors but their enemies as well, "so that you may be children of your Father in heaven" (Matt. 5:44-45). And this love was understood in a very radical sense. It required, for instance, repeatedly forgiving the offenses of others against us (according to Matt.18:22, Jesus told Peter that those who had offended him should be forgiven "seventy times seven"); going out of our way to help other human beings who are suffering (as the story of "the good Samaritan" suggests, Luke 10:29-37); going "the second mile" and turning "the other cheek" (Matt. 5:43-47). I am not suggesting that followers of Jesus are duty-bound to obey literally these prescriptions. I am suggesting that the life to which Jesus called his followers involves a reversal of ordinary social and political, cultural and--all too often--religious standards, according to which power over others signifies one's importance, and serving others is regarded as demeaning (Mark 10:43-44). All this was brought into sharp and unforgettable focus by the final events of Jesus' life: he refused to defend or protect himself from his enemies, and he accepted meekly the whips and curses and finally the suffering of a violent death at their hands.”
Jesus was obviously a very creative figure: he imagined a world decisively different from the one he lived in--this present world governed by relations of power and violence, this world of injustice, disease, and ugliness; and he announced that this new world of reconciliation, love, and peace was soon coming here on Earth. And so, in keeping with that expectation, he called for new and quite different human behaviors--even in this present world--behaviors driven by a love that sacrifices itself without reservation to the needs of others; that ministers to the sick, the weak, the poor; that refuses to fight back against those who have done harm but instead forgives.
This vision of the possibilities of human beings--of the potentiality of humankind--is certainly one of the most radical ever set forth. Jesus' belief; and his enactment of that belief in his own life and death--that human existence should (and could!) at all points radiate agape love--captivated his followers and powerfully motivated them to change their lives. Virtually every writer in the New Testament affirms the importance of love in one way or another. Paul and John, the two great theologians of the New Testament, both emphasized love's centrality and its glory: Paul, especially in his great hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13, in which he very straightforwardly affirms that of the three basic Christian virtues--faith, hope, and love-- "the greatest of these is love" (13:13) a Johannine writer, especially in his daring pronouncement that “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them" (1 John 4:16). This radical vision of the human potential may help us see more clearly what will be required if we are to move past the hatreds and aggressiveness,`the misplaced loyalties, the defensive ideas of duty and honor and patriotism, and the like, to an openness that welcomes other peoples, cultures, and religions; and a willingness to forgive and forget past injuries and crimes. The radical love and forgiveness advocated by Jesus can transform destructive human practices and lives, thus helping to break down long-standing barriers of hatred and fear that make it impossible for peoples and nations, ethnic and religious groups, to live together and work together cooperatively for a better human world, The apostle Paul had something like this in mind when he laid out his vision of the meaning and power of love: "Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it . . . rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends" (1 Cor. 13:4-8). Christians were being transformed by this gospel of love, and they had been given the commission to spread it around the world. It was because of the transformative power of this love that Paul was able to declare that "if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything . . . has become new! A11 this is from God" (2 Cor. 5:17-18).
In the New Testament, of course, this vision of humankind's potential presupposed a supernaturalistic world»picture: God was doing all these things in connection with bringing human history to its climax and goal, the perfect kingdom of God in and over the human world. Perhaps only in a context of this sort could such an implausible vision of the human potential ever have been created--human existence being what, for the most part, it has been. However that may be, as new generations of Christians came and went, and it became increasingly apparent that the apocalyptic expectations of Jesus, Paul, and the others simply were not happening as anticipated, the new vision of the possibilities of human existence as a life of "love, joy peace, patience, kindness, generosity faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control" (as Paul described it in his letter to the Galatians, 5:22-23) did not die away. Instead, it became the hoped for quality of ongoing human existence, a quality much desired in Christian communal life. And so it has remained through the centuries of Christian history. It is to be emphasized that this was not just a vision of what Christian communities should be: it was a vision of what humanity could become. We need to ask ourselves now have we come to that moment in history when this vision of what human existence could be is in fact most needed?
If we are now at the point at which humankind must find some way of growing together into a unified though still thoroughly pluralistic humanity; might this vision provide us with some insight into what we humans must do and become if our more unified peaceful world is ever to come about? At this portentous moment in history; more than ever before, we need visions of the human and understandings of history that will facilitate our movement toward an ordering of life char is at once humane and universal, an ordering in which the integrity and significance of each tradition and each community are acknowledged, and the welfare of every individual is respected. It is important that We lift up into full view every insight and every vision--no matter from what tradition or culture it comes--that might throw light on how to move forward from the ugly inhumanities in which we seem to be trapped toward reconciliation of contending peoples, nations, cultures, religions. New cultural patterns of association and cooperation must be developed, new institutions must be invented, new ideologies that are at once universalistic and truly pluralistic must be created. For these sorts of things to come about, a spirit of self-sacrifice for the well-being of the whole of humanity--and indeed the well-being of the rest of life on planet Earth--will be widely needed, a spirit that can subdue the instincts for self-preservation and self»defense (perhaps among the strongest that we possess) that so dominate our communal and national, as well as our personal, lives. It is images and stories of communities of reconciliation--in which all recognize that they are "members one of another" (Rom. l2:5) and that they "are all one" (Gal. 3:28), with no discrimination among groups, classes, or sexes--that can focus our attention and our lives on the sorts of commitments We must make and loyalties we must keep if We are to align ourselves with those cosmic and historical forces (whichever ones they may be) that move us creatively (God!) toward a more humane World. Within this context of hopes and dreams, the image of the self-sacrificial Jesus, who gives himself completely so that all may have "abundant life" (John 10:10), stands out in its full pertinence to today's human world. We have here a vivid emblem of the radical transvaluation of our present values that is required if our world of violence and aggressive self-assertion is to become more truly humane and thus more human.”
I make no claim that the image/ story of Jesus and his early followers is the only one that can inspire the creativity that is needed if we humans are to address effectively the large problems We face today." However, I do want to remind the reader that the history of the many sorts of creativity evoked by this story and image over the last two thousand years is quite remarkable. Some of that history I admit, has been enormously destructive; creativity can go in many different directions, some of them quite unfortunate, as we have seen. It is with this in mind that I am suggesting that, above all, it is the radical themes in the image/story of Jesus, demanding the transvaluation of our generally accepted values, that are most likely to inspire new models for the creativity that we humans must now cultivate. Some, of course, continue to invoke the names of Jesus and God to authorize terrible wars and further exploitation of the environment--behaviors clearly opposite to those that can bring peace and reconciliation, love and hope, into our human world. Creativity inspired by the radical jesus should be healing, redemptive, reconciling in our suffering world. The self»giving agape»love that Jesus advocated and exemplified during his life will inspire us, we can hope, to find ways that will help create a more truly humane world for the future. The creativity of jesus continues ....
This good news, originally preached by the disciples and reiterated down through the centuries, was, first, that there is an other world than the one in which we humans now find ourselves, the heavenly world where God's perfect rule assures happiness and peace for all; and second, that God sent his son to the earth to rescue us humans, no matter how broken our lives might be, thus giving us access through Jesus to that heavenly abode. But for those of us today for whom there is no "other world" than this one in which We find ourselves, this kind of 'good news"--though a lovely dream, plausible for many centuries--can no longer provide an adequate focus for the orientation and ordering of life. Though we all sing Christmas carols rejoicing in the birth of baby Jesus, most of us know in our hearts that this beautiful story--a magnificent creation of the human imagination--is too simple and too implausible to be much of a guide to living in the world in which we today find ourselves.
Many persons, therefore--including many who think of themselves as Christians--no longer take seriously the good news of the original Christian message. What then can take its place? There is a price to pay in comfort and the hope of wish»fulfillment when we give up the anthropomorphic/anthropocentric God that we have inherited. In exchange for that price, however, there is available to us an understanding of God as creativity, a creativity that is real, not just an imaginary dream. It is a creativity manifest on all sides around us and present in and with our own human creativity. We humans are deeply indebted to this creativity that--through a long, precarious passage--has brought our human trajectory (and us along with it) into being. This realization gives us a basis for the hope char our trajectory--despite all failures in past and present--might continue on toward a more humane and ecologically sustainable world, Moreover, though the supernatural aspects of the traditional Jesus-story are no longer plausible, another story of the significance of jesus still remains: the story recounted in Jesus-trajectory2 can be quite meaningful for contemporary Christian faith, In this book I have been sketching an understanding of today's world in which each of the two central Christian symbols--God (understood as serendipitous creativity) and Jesus (as set out in Jesus-trajectory2)--have an important place. It should be noted, however, that the "abundant life" (John 10:10) that this Jesus can bring to women and men today will be of a different sort than that expected by many earlier generations.
This understanding of Christian faith (like many earlier versions) requires a profound conversion to a way of living introduced to us by the image/ story of Jesus, and those who make a serious commitment to this jesus are still offered the "good news" of hope for a better human world. But instead of proffering a heavenly reward in an afterlife, this understanding offers the satisfaction of living out our years entirely within this world in which we find ourselves--with all its problems and pain, tragedy and suffering--a life to be lived within a community of love and forgiveness and hope, of reconciliation and healing--and joy. It is a life given over to building new communities of peace and justice and well being for all, a life devoted to protecting and enhancing the environment that sustains humans and many other species here on planet Earth--a this-worldly kind of "abundant life."
I
Let us review the story of jesus as recounted in Jesus-trajectory2. It begins with the ministry and message of Jesus of Nazareth, a remarkably gifted man. He was a healer, a preacher, an excellent storyteller--one who believed the end of the world (as he and his friends knew it) was coming soon, as the kingdom of God takes over from on high. Some began to believe he might be God's messiah who would overthrow the Romans and inaugurate God's kingdom on earth. Many of his stories--vivid parables recounting situations quite familiar to all his hearers but each making a distinctive point about the coming kingship of God--were long remembered and eventually recorded in the New Testament Gospels. His sermons were sprinkled with teachings about God's love for humankind, especially the poor, the sick, and the outcast; and he called for similar love and forgiveness among humans. Some of his teachings--as recorded in the Gospels--were very radical and quite puzzling, especially to those who thought he might be preparing to overthrow the Romans:
"You have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a toothf But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well .... "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" (Matt. 5:38-40, 43-45)Jesus was obviously a very creative charismatic person, a great exorcist and healer, and he attracted considerable attention wherever he went in Palestine. When the Jewish and Roman authorities arrested him as a troublemaker who might be planning an insurrection, he--in keeping with his teachings--made no effort to resist. And when one of his disciples "put his hand on his sword, drew it, and struck the slave of the high priest, cutting off his ear .... Jesus said to him, 'Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword' " (Matt. 26:51-52). After being questioned by the Jewish authorities and Pilate, he was crucified. And that should have been the end of the story and the end of his influence in human affairs; one more death of a creative innocent man.
But that event was, in fact, not the end of the story of Jesus but instead the beginning of a new and quite different sequence of events with, as it turned out, enormously creative consequences of a sort not expected by anyone. Had these strange events--quite difficult even to imagine--not occurred, we today would never have heard of Jesus, his ministry and his comportment in life, his death, his provocative teachings. After Jesus' death and burial some of his disciples began to speak of his continuing appearances to them, and they (and others) came to believe he was alive again: God had resurrected him from the dead and through him had begun inaugurating his kingdom on earth. A new story about Jesus was being created. It soon began to spread rapidly and the Jesus-movement grew incorporating many Gentiles as well as Jews. This alone might have been of significant historical importance, but the creativity in this movement was not limited simply to growth in size: over the next decades it also produced substantial rethinking of who or what God really is and what God requires of humans, how humans are to live. These significantly transformative changes were summed up compactly toward the end of the first century c.E. by the writer of 1 John:
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him .... No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. (4:7-9, 12; emphasis added)Cliristology is the area of Christian thinking that deals with the understanding of Jesus--Jesus as a human being and Jesus' special relationship to God. In this book I am developing a Christology that is in keeping with the interpretation of God as creativity. After briefly sketching in chapter 1 a conception of Jesus as thoroughly human in all respects (a central emphasis of Jesus-trajectory2), l presented an outline, in chapter 2, of Jesus' normativity for today his normativity for our human existence and also for our understanding of God--that is, our understanding of creativity. Creativity is not to be thought of any longer as simply the bringing into being of just anything and everything. However true that vague and general definition might be, those groups and individuals who regard Jesus as providing normative meaning for human life have reason to take the image/ story of Jesus as bearing significantly on their understanding of creativity As the disciples sought to make sense of what they called the resurrection of Jesus, it gradually became clear to them that in and through Jesus, God--or in our terms, creativity--was doing something new and decisively different from what had been understood in the past: a new vision of what the human strand of life was all about, and what it might become, was being created. Moreover, this vision was so strikingly different from what had previously been taken for granted about human life and its possibilities that it implied God (creativity) also must be significantly different from what had previously been understood. During the first Christian century (as discussed in chapters 1 and 2) a great change took place in the conception of God held by at least some of Jesus' followers. They began preaching this gospel to all who would listen, and they themselves sought to live out the new pattern of life that the gospel called for. They believed they stood in a distinctive, indeed unique, relationship to God: they were the vehicle through which this “new creation" (as Paul put it) was coming into being. To put this in our twenty-first-century language: they believed that the creativity on planet Earth, the creativity (God)that had brought forth life in general and later on human life, had also brought forth Jesus of Nazareth and his ministry and message of love, forgiveness, and redemption. And it was to this further creativity (this act of God) that Jesus' disciples and other followers believed they were responding as they spread this gospel and lived out this new life of love wherever they went. Many Christians over the centuries have also heard this call by God and responded affirmatively to it. All of this (as we noted in chapter 2) tells us something about creativity (God) that we would otherwise not know. It tells us that creativity is not just a vague and general appearance of something new and transformative, anywhere and everywhere: it may also manifest itself in and through events as specific and distinctive as the image and story of Jesus.
We need to consider further now what can be said about Jesus and creativity. Three distinctly different points--can be made. There was Jesus' own creativity in his ministry healings, and teachings; then there was also the amazing creativity that occurred after his death: first the resurrection appearances of Jesus, and following on these the several decades of reconceiving--in decisively new ways--God, the kingship of God, and how humans were to live out their lives; finally there has been the striving by committed followers of Jesus over the centuries to live within this new creative pattern of human life, a mode of creativity continuing all the way clown into the present. We know very little about how all this creativity got under way. With respect to the creativity of Jesus before his death, there was of course the influence of John the Baptizer in the desert and Jesus' joining John's company of disciples, as well as the fertile consequences of Jesus' own strong hope and expectation that God was about to bring in (or was already bringing in) a New Age. With respect to the creativity immediately following upon jesus' death, we can say a few things, but it is all very murky Obviously the vivid memories of Jesus' ministry death, and teachings, and the disciples' great disappointment following his crucifixion, must have been important factors. But we can only speculate about how these were related to the resurrection appearances, which then led to the disciples' creative attempts to understand the meaning of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, and eventually to the strikingly new vision of God as love, as well as to the missions that spread abroad that remarkable message. The powerful ongoing historical momentum of the Jesus-movement, a momentum still under way was thus coming into being.
The most important evidence of this new creative thinking of the disciples is found largely in the Pauline and Johannine documents in the New Testament. But the earliest of these, some of Paul's writings, were not written until about a generation after Jesus' death; and Paul must have had important creative predecessors about whom we know little. The Johannine texts were produced much later, probably toward the end of the first century C.E., or even after that. By the end of that century the story of Jesus was on its way to becoming a worldwide phenomenon. Jesus was going to be one of the most influential figures of history one whose story would continue to transform lives creatively one who would inspire religious and cultural creativity of many sorts. An enormous stream of human social, cultural, artistic, and intellectual creativity has followed upon his life, death, and resurrection. (Perhaps the only comparable examples have been the creativity that followed upon the lives of the Buddha and Mohammed.) Human existence around the world has obviously been greatly enriched by this Jesus-stream of creativity. It must be granted, however, that this creativity has also been the fountain of some very destructive historical movements and events: one thinks of the long history of Christian intolerance of other religions (as well as of other Christians, in all too many cases!), and especially of the anti-Semitisrn during much of Christian history culminating in the Holocaust of the twentieth century. One thinks also of the patriarchal oppression of women throughout Christian history; of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the slave trade, modern colonialism, and modern mass warfare carried on by each side in the names of Jesus and/ or God; and so on. Today we live in a historical period in which there is still a very wide Jesus-stream, but the ambiguity of that stream's creativity is obvious.
There are, of course, many churchgoers who are basically nominal Christians but who do not let their religion interfere with "the good life"--a frenetic pursuit of "American values," such as a "high standard of living" with plenty of money entertainment, and other pleasures. The creativity to be found in this stance would seem to have little connection with jesus. Then there are those far»right Christian fundamentalists (especially in the United States) who seem to be all too creative in their willingness to use almost any kind of instrumentalities (including mass media brouhaha, political "dirty tricks" of many different sorts, some forms of "brainwashing," even modern warfare) as they spread their version of "the Gospel" and combat those they regard as "Gods enemies" (atheists, secularists, jews, Muslims, and many others--including other Christians) in their effort to create a "Christian America." And there are faithful ordinary Christians for whom jesus presents the most compelling model of how We humans ought to live, but--finding it impossible to order their lives in terms of his extreme demands--who are simply good, decent people. Then there are those who seek to order their lives by creatively responding to jesus' most radical teachings about love, caring for the poor and needy and practicing forgiveness, reconciliation, and peacemaking. And there are those who think that although one ought to lead one's personal life in terms of the radical teachings about forgiveness and love, these teachings do not apply to the wider social and political order. There are those who are convinced that jesus' teachings require us to create a new social, political, and economic order in which all will be cared for in justice and peace. And so on and so on. The Jesus-stream has long since lost its creative cutting edge--or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it has spawned many quite different cutting edges, in confusing contradiction with each other--and it is hard to know just what we should make of this enormous ambiguity.
Some may think it is time to acknowledge that jesus can no longer help us much, either in identifying the problems with which we humans must today come to terms or through inspiring creative address to those problems. But where else should we turn for truly creative inspiration? lt is clear that the radicality of jesus' preaching and teaching (as we find it in the New Testament) simply cannot be lived out in any legalistic Creativity is Good News! 97 way--and this accounts for some of the diversity and ambiguity just noted in the many different responses to jesus in today's world. But it should also be clear that the radicality of jesus' demands may startle our minds into fresh thinking about how we humans need to reorder our lives and our world? Perhaps only a powerful dramatic vision of what human life can and should be--such as jesus' radical vision of life under God's kingship--is capable of inspiring us to break through today's barriers and create new forms of human existence.jesus' radicality, that is to say may still inspire us to strive toward creating a new and better world. And for just this reason, it seems to me, it is precisely this radicality of jesus to which Christians should be attending as they seek to move creatively into what will undoubtedly be a complex and difficult future. Other Christians, of course, may feel there are good reasons to opt for other features of the jesus-story And non-Christians would likely move in some entirely different directions as they seek creative ways to identify and address the major problems to which we humans today must direct our energies--though doubtless some who do not claim to be Christian at all might (as has often been the case) continue to turn toward the radical jesus for inspiration.
It is not obvious that the jesus-stream in the contemporary world still has the resources either to identify or to creatively address the major problems that we humans are increasingly facing as we become a single, highly interdependent--though still quite pluralistic--humanity. Can Christian churches find ways--other than the exercise of dominative power (which they have not hesitated to employ in the past)--to help bring a new creative peace and order into today's pluralism, with its many divisive socio»cultural dimensions? Can the Christian spirit find sufficient inspiration--in its notes of nonviolent and nonresistant love even of enemies--to put aside its idolatrous claims to be the sole truly redemptive force in human history? Can it learn to rejoice in the creativity manifest in other religious and secular movements and begin to work more cooperatively with them? Can Christians--moving beyond their traditional anthropomorphic/anthropocentric god, and standing in awe of the creativity (God!) manifest throughout the universe as well as in human affairs--begin to order their activities more fully in terms of what will be good for all of life on planet earth, not simply human life? All Christians who commit themselves to versions of the Jesus image/story that emphasize what I have called the radical character of his vision and message would, I hope, be able to say yes to all of these questions.
II
In chapter 3 we explored briefly the understanding of humans as fundamentally biohistorical beings, a conception that enables us to connect such valued features of human existence as agency creativity freedom, and love with our complex biological and historical grounding. Obviously we are biological beings, products of a long evolutionary development of life here on planet Earth, but we are not ordinary animals. We are "incomplete or unfinished animals" (Geertz), which, through a long, slow process of emergence from our biological origins, have become beings who cannot survive unless we are "completed" by the humanly created cultures into which we have been born. As beings created in part by the sociocultural setting in which we have grown up, we have acquired capacities to act self-consciously responsibly and creatively and we are thus able to participate actively in the transformation of our biohistorical world. Though we have been decisively shaped, and continue to be nourished, by the biological and sociohistorical pasts from which we and our forebears have come, it is the problems confronting us in the present with which we must come to terms, if human life is to continue and to flourish in the future ahead of us. Past, present, and future are bound together in our lives, each playing its own distinctive part in our biohistorical existence. Today our local sociocultural worlds are changing very rapidly as a global society is coming into being, and there are many enormous problems that need to be addressed.
The picture of our human situation that I have been presenting here is a naturalistic/ humanistic one. In this picture there is no creator-God on high ruling all of these developments, a God we can be confident is bringing humanity to a glorious final consummation. But it is not the case, either, that the predicaments we humans face will be overcome simply by our human decisions and actions. A mysterious creativity (God) has been manifest throughout the universe all the way back to the very beginning of things. And the human biohistorical trajectory was a Creativity Is Good News! 99 serendipitous product of this creativity; we humans did not create the world in which we find ourselves, nor did we create ourselves. Our forebears, however, gradually began to play a role in the creativity through which humanity emerged from ordinary animality as the mysterious creativity in the universe brought into being a human offshoot (so to speak). For many generations this specifically human role in these creative developments--though gradually increasing in significance--was very small. By several millennia ago, however, human creativity was playing an important part, and in the modern era it has had a significant role in the creative transformation of both human existence and the surface of the earth. The Wider creativity manifest throughout the universe--God--has, of course, always had the larger part in these matters: certainly the fundamentally biohistorical character of human existence, as well as its happening here on planet Earth, was not the result simply of human decisions and actions. What the future will bring is, very likely partly in our hands; but the final outcome (unless we destroy ourselves, which now seems possible) is not in our hands at all. Ultimately thus, we must put our trust in that wider creativity--deeply mysterious, but also surprisingly beneficent--as we humans play out our own creative role in addressing the problems we face.
This, of course, is how it has always been with God. Faith in God was born initially in ancient Israel, as the Israelites came to believe that what God (Yahweh) had done for them in the past--especially in the escape from Egypt and the invasion of Canaan--provided grounds for hope about what he would do in the future. Despite this hope, however, what God was believed to be actually doing always turned out to be in many respects quite unpredictable and incomprehensible--a profound mystery. The situation remains the same today. The human story and its context to date (as we now understand these) can provide grounds for hope respecting the future; from its very beginning this story is about a trajectory of serendipitous creativity and its effects--a creativity that was deeply beneficial to the gradually emerging human life. This creativity made possible both the emergence of humans and their distinctive development. As we look backward down our human trajectory we can see that the creativity working in and through these evolutionary and historical processes did not move forward every which way; rather, it built upon what was already in place, extending it and expanding it as it moved on into the future. That is, this creativity adapts itself so to speak, to the possibilities for growth and development in each new stage, and this enables the trajectory to move onward. (Without this adjustment, the trajectory might well die.) Even though this has been a long, slow evolutionary-historical development requiring hundreds of thousands of years and much tragedy and pain, it can still provide a basis for hope that the creativity here on planet Earth will continue opening up new possibilities for the human trajectory as it moves on into the future. We can and should place our confidence respecting that future in this ongoing creativity--this creativity that, as I have been arguing, we should understand to be God.
It is difficult for us to grasp all that is involved in this sort of judgment unless we bracket our ordinary human timescale--measured basically in days and years and generations--and think in much larger terms.6 The creation of the new in the world often comes quite slowly and it was only through very gradual changes that the emergence of humankind, as we know it, came about. It was, for example, a considerable achievement--taking many generations to accomplish--for emerging Homo sapiens to begin taking into account the most minimal of moral considerations, such as rules restricting vengeance. We find such a rule in Exodus, shortly after a summary of the Ten Commandments: "You shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot" (21:23b-24). This rule equalizing the punishment with the crime may seem rigid and harsh to us today; nevertheless, it represents a significant moral advance over the practice of Lamech, the father of Noah, who bragged to his wives: "I kill a man for wounding me, a young man for a blow. Cain may be avenged seven times, but Lamech seventy-seven” (Gen. 4:23b-24; 5:28-29 NEB). And it took many generations more, as can be seen from the record in the Hebrew Bible, to develop such values as mercy justice, and kindness--strongly emphasized by the eighth-century B.C.E. prophets--and to begin ordering human life by them. In other cultures, similar developments were also occurring--sometimes, of course, going in quite different directions. Even given the deep and rich moral consciousness being serendipitously created in Israel's culture, it took another eight centuries for a quite new vision to appear in the ministry and preaching of jesus--a vision of human life ordered and oriented by love and forgiveness.
The image/story of jesus brought forth possibilities for human existence heretofore unimagined: a vision and hope that Christians (and some others) have believed could guide humans creatively into a new future. Of course, the jesus-story can also lead us into despair: to what extent, after all, has it really changed the human condition in the last two thousand years? I have claimed above that it has been very creative in many ways, but one cannot help but wonder whether its creativity may now be largely spent. Other historical forces clearly dominate human life today and the manor churches and movements that claim to be Christian seem to be thoroughly compromised in many respects: very little is heard these days about what I have been calling the radical character of the image and story of Jesus. Perhaps its time is over?
A judgment of that sort takes for granted our ordinary human timescale, and (as we have just been noting) this may be quite misleading when considering the kind of issues with which we are here concerned. If it took thousands of years for Homo sapiens to move beyond bare animality and begin to acquire--to create--an elemental moral consciousness; and even with that new sensitivity in place, it took hundreds of years more for such basic moral ideals as justice, kindness, and mercy to become widely affirmed in cultures and religions, we should not be so surprised and disappointed that these norms are so often still violated around the world (think of recent and ongoing outbreaks of massive genocide, brutal dictatorships, wars, to say nothing of the all-too-frequent incidents of everyday ordinary meanness). We need to remember that our basic human physiology after all--including our limbic system, nervous system, and brain--was formed in times when humans had to fight for their lives against ferocious predators (see, e.g., Ehrenreich 1997 and Ashbrook and Albright 1997). That underlying equipment is still with us, along with--in nearly every culture--practices, traditions, and institutions that encourage violent aggression against, and violent responses to, enemies believed to be threatening. Human morality has to temper, tame, and discipline all of this in each new generation so it should not be surprising that progress toward cultures of reconciliation, peace, and goodwill has been painfully slow--and with many reversals. It is difficult for us humans to sustain even such obviously wise ordinary moral standards as the ones just mentioned. Why would anyone expect, then, that the radical vision of Jesus ought to be taken seriously? It is clearly an impossible dream.
But perhaps the time for that impossible dream has come. We humans are today in a different situation than we have ever been before. This new situation was ushered in at the end of World War II with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Theologian Henry Nelson Wieman realized almost immediately that for the first time in history humans had available a kind of power that could bring the human story to an end, and this meant that the human situation on Earth had changed decisively:
The bomb that fell on Hiroshima cut history in two like a knife. Before and after are two different worlds. That cut is more abrupt, decisive, and revolutionary than the cut made by the star over Bethlehem . . . more swiftly transformative of human existence than anything else that has ever happened. The economic and political order fitted to the age before that parachute fell becomes suicidal in the age coming after. The same breach extends into education and religion. (Wieman 1946:37)For the next few decades--with stores of atomic implements of war building up on both sides of the Iron Curtain--there were worldwide fears that we humans might be about to destroy ourselves. But what we were actually doing during that period was learning a precarious way to live with our newfound weapons. Now; sixty years after Hiroshima and with the 'cold war" decades behind us, we continue to worry about atomic weapons. Moreover, though we have learned to take the bomb for granted, another new situation--much more difficult to manage--is increasingly coming to our attention (though many in high positions in the United States are unwilling to acknowledge it): we are in the midst of an ecological crisis. Like the danger of nuclear war, it is a crisis very likely brought on largely by our own behavior: our population growth on planet Earth, our wasteful use of energy and other resources to power our "high" standard of living in North America and Europe, our unthinking destruction of the habitat of many species of life that are as a result becoming extinct, our contribution to the global warming that is rapidly changing our moderate climate, and so on. Above all in this list, we must note our own unwillingness to discipline ourselves sufficiently to address these and many other ecological problems in an effective way.
The dangers of environmental breakdown to ongoing human life are not new. They have been a factor throughout human history and failure to adjust human activities intelligently to environmental changes has often been a major factor in the collapse of civilizations in the past (see Diamond 2005). But heretofore these were always local failures, and the human project was able to continue because it was carried on elsewhere. Today we are facing worldwide environmental changes, at least partially caused by human failures to care properly for the environment; and there no longer are other places to which our population of six billion humans can go to continue the human story Either we today learn how to accommodate our living to the ecological requirements around the globe, or the human story is likely to come to an end.
None of the great world religions anticipated this state of affairs; that we humans would at some time have the power to destroy the entire human project, and that we might exercise that power. So Wieman was correct that in the middle of the last century we humans moved into a completely unprecedented (and unexpected) historical situation. In these circumstances what is needed above all is truly imaginative creativity. Actually this is the kind of creativity that we humans possess. There is no reason to expect that the wider creativity manifest throughout the universe (God) will intervene here in our behalf (as may be hoped by some devotees of the traditional anthropocentric God); as far as we know this is not the way in which that creativity happens. Our human creativity however--alone in the universe in this respect?--can be guided to some degree by our human imaginings, our human desires, our human intentions. The dilemma with which we are here concerned is one that we humans have (unexpectedly) produced as we enthusiastically exercised our own increasingly developing creativity and power--and we are the ones who must address it.
So what is now required of us humans most of all is (1) creativity imaginative creativity deliberately directed toward addressing this very dangerous situation; and (2) the moral and political will to hasten disarmament (nuclear and otherwise) and take whatever steps are necessary to reverse our growing environmental destruction. This is a large and difficult agenda, an agenda politically quite unpopular, at least here in the United States--the worst offender in the world on these matters. In this country today we do not seem to have in our culture and political leadership--or in our religious consciousness--either the moral resources or the imagination to grasp the enormity of this problem. We are myopic lemmings running toward the sea as we spread the gospel of corporate capitalism around the globe and (mis)manage affairs at home with a politics of fear. And instead of seeking to understand and appreciate cultures and religions and languages different from our own, we put our hope in a Fortress America that will keep out poverty-driven people led by "evil terrorists."
There may however, be an ironic feature in this picture. We are living in the midst of a new globalism that is breaking down isolationist boundaries of many sorts around the world. From the time Homo sapiens left Africa and began to travel around the globe, humans took up abode in many different, often quite isolated, locations; and further development of the human biohistorical line occurred in each of these separate settings. Since each society and culture developed its own way to live--as it adapted itself to its geographical setting--diverse human societies, cultures, languages, religions, practices, and values were created in these different places. The human story thus became many quite distinct and separate stories. Some of these groups evolved into manor civilizations; others became quite isolated and remained small. Although there have been--all the way down to the twenty-first century--many political and military attempts to bring some order into this thoroughly pluralistic situation, no empire has succeeded in bringing all these diverse groups together and ruling the world. Modern technology, however, has made possible increasing interchange among civilizations around the globe during the past several centuries; and during the last decades of the twentieth century something truly new has begun to happen.
With the creation of the worldwide electronic Web, instantaneous moving of information of all sorts everywhere around the globe is now in place; and we are rapidly becoming one world economically industrially and scientifically. There is also much social interchange and cultural mixing. So the many distinct human stories in our pluralized history are becoming one overall story; it will likely remain very pluralistic and complex well into the future, but there is going to be a unified human story once again. Unfortunately however, we remain politically divided into so-called sovereign nation-states (though the European Union is taking important steps to overcome that); and with a weak United Nations, it is still much too easy for powerful arrogant nations to make highly destructive warfare against weaker powers. A third world war, if it should occur, would be among nations with weapons of mass destruction, and therefore might be virtually the end of the human story. If we manage to avoid such a war, we will, of course, still have the ecological crisis to deal with, so either way the human future at present looks dark.
Our most important human task today therefore, is to see that we avoid both of these disasters. We must continue to move as rapidly as we can into one, largely democratic, political world; and we must make major progress on our environmental problems. Is there any chance for both of these to happen? It surely will not be easy since there is not even agreement in the major civilizations that we should put these objectives high on our agendas. To make the necessary sharp turn in the roads we are presently following will require a great deal of quite imaginative creativity and that right soon.
III
In short, what is needed is a worldwide conversion--a religious-like conversion!--to a new and quite different way of ordering our societies, our institutions, our cultures, our religions, our families, our individual lives. Throughout the Whole long history of humankind, in all its many different sociocultural and religious strands, it has been taken for granted that we humans should largely live out of the authoritative traditions and practices of the past. We are, of course, biohistorical beings, shaped by the past--indeed, we have been given our very humanness by the past--and in all cultures we have been taught and have learned that we must respect, honor, cherish, and pass on this past to the future. But as historical beings we are not only created and nourished by our past: We actually live in the present, and we must, therefore, come to terms with the major problems we now face if the human race is to survive into the future and flourish in that future. As we have noted, we have inherited powerful biohistorical momentums from our human pasts, momentums that are today driving us toward self-destruction; these must be changed. Those basic patterns of orientation in life--which divide us from each other and into groups suspicious of each other and often fighting, enemies seeking to destroy each other instead of living peacefully together in communities and societies ordered justly; and which lead us to neglect care of our environment, continuing to exploit it for our own short-term pleasures and gain--must be drastically transformed. We no longer dare to live out our lives and carry on our activities in our politics and economics, our cultures and religions, our sciences and technologies, our personal relations and friendships, in the terms largely specified by these historical momentums, however effective and valuable they may have been in the past. For we are living in a new present, qualitatively different from any of our human pasts, a present in which these patterns of orientation and ordering that enabled us to live and flourish throughout our long human history are now threatening to destroy us and the entire human future. Unless we change these inherited ways of living and acting, believing and hoping, we may commit species suicide. We have no alternative, therefore, (1) to learning how to live together in some kind of lasting peace and justice, in which (2) we cooperatively find ways to deal effectively with the ecological crisis. A massive religious-like conversion is needed.
Does this mean that we must become members of some new religion that displaces and wipes out the cherished values and meanings and standards by which our lives have heretofore been ordered? That is a self-contradictory idea, not even imaginable, for it would involve destroying what makes us human in order to make us more human. Nevertheless, it is a religious-like conversion that is needed, for what is called for here are changes in very deep-lying patterns that at present orient and order most of human life worldwide. They are patterns partially grounded in the biological side of our human nature, grounded in features inherited from the prehuman and early human stages of the evolutionary developments through which humanity emerged; and they are also grounded in long-standing historico-cultural patterns. From early on, of course, developments in the historical side of our humanness often involved (or led to) significant transformation of some aspects of our strictly biological inheritance;8 and, as Sigmund Freud saw this gave rise to major enduring tensions in human selfhood between what he called the "superego" and the "id." As we noted above, it took many centuries for moral (and other) constraints on the id to become sufficiently effective to enable large-scale societies to emerge. And in today's world, of course, there continue to be breakdowns of many different sorts in this order. I am not suggesting here that it is necessary for the constraints of the superego to be tightened still further today--even if that could be accomplished, the consequences might be explosive. Rather, I suggest that, as is often the case in religious conversions, these constraints be creatively transformed into new configurations more appropriate to the situation in which humanity now finds itself.
What might these new configurations be? And how could they be brought about? I cannot give a general answer to either of these questions. That would require massive knowledge of the religio-moral and secular-humanist patterns that presently orient and order human existence around the globe, as well as proposals for transforming each of these patterns in an appropriate new direction. This important religio-cultural task--a task of worldwide proportions--needs to be undertaken from within each of the manor civilizations and religio-cultural groupings that presently order humanity around the globe; it cannot be imposed from without.
Actually however, changes of the sort we are considering here may already be getting under way serendipitously: many persons and groups in countries around the globe seem to have become aware of our ecological problems, and the problems rooted in situations of extreme poverty; and they are becoming more and more insistent that governments and other agencies take appropriate action. Worldwide conferences have been held for a number of decades, and such achievements as the Kyoto Protocol represent a beginning cooperative step forward with regard to the environmental situation--the outstanding exception to making this step being the United States. Establishment of the International Court of justice is also a major cooperative step toward necessary legal standards for ordering world affairs. The United Nations is, of course, the major international institution--however weak it may be--that must move us forward on these matters; but other institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are also beginning to wake up to the need for manor changes in the way international economic and ecological problems are handled. Moreover, some large worldwide corporations have obviously seen the handwriting on the wall and are attempting to mend their ways accordingly. We may hope, thus, that some beginnings of important transformations in the ways we humans have been ordering and orienting human life for hundreds of generations are already under way. There is, of course, resistance in many quarters to the decisive changes now required in our familiar patterns of ordering our affairs--defenders of "national sovereignty" being an obvious example, with advocates of international corporate capitalism a close second, and religious institutions and traditions unwilling to respect each other and work together cooperatively an important third; and we may not make the changes as rapidly as is necessary. But the worldwide religious like conversion in our thinking and our feelings, about the way we humans have heretofore ordered our affairs, does appear to be under way to some extent. The creativity that brought our human trajectory into being and enabled it to go forward over many millennia is, perhaps, opening up some new possibilities as we move into the future. And it can be hoped that, as we slowly learn how to make some of these moves cooperatively we may begin to move forward more confidently and thus more rapidly.
I am not qualified to suggest the ways in which our many religious and humanist traditions need to reorient themselves, nor can I speak for all Christians. I can, however, suggest what I think is appropriate for the version of Christian faith that I have been presenting in these pages. We are concerned here about a human world that is beginning to be forced by economic, industrial, ecological, and humanitarian forces to come together again, after being separated into distinct cultures, religions, languages, and civilizations for thousands of years. It is a world in which these disparate traditions have usually been quite suspicious of each other; have fought wars with--and often sought to completely destroy--each other; have seldom lived in any kind of deep respect for each other. A11 of this must now change as we become a single world-wide society--a society doubtless remaining pluralistic in many respects but in which the major groupings are increasingly interconnected and thus interdependent. If this new world is actually to be created, many of the long-standing practices, prejudices, beliefs, values, attitudes, ways of living and interacting of our nations, our cultures, our civilizations, our religions, our political institutions, our large corporations, and other social groupings must be transformed into much more cooperative and trusting patterns. For if we do not succeed in moving forward into a new global society char can effectively address the problems we humans now face, utterly destructive breakdowns may bring the whole human story to an end.
IV
I would like to suggest now what a Christian perspective and faith, of the sort to which I have been alluding, have to offer in this crucial historical moment. The kind of transformative changes needed--in our cultures, our practices, our attitudes, our institutions, our ways of living--will undoubtedly require very considerable human creativity. At present we do not know how to bring about these changes; we do not even know what the necessary first steps should be. New insights into the problems we face, new proposals on how to address these problems, fresh thinking and imagining of ways to proceed--in short, a new willingness to acknowledge the seriousness of our enormous problems and a new willingness to be open to radical changes in the orientation and the ordering of our inherited ways of living must all be created.
In the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, creativity has always been a central mark--indeed the dining mark--of God. In the theology with which we are working in this book, creativity is God, God is creativity--the creativity that has brought all that exists into being, the creativity that continues to be active throughout the universe, the creativity that has brought us humans into being and is manifest world-wide in and through our own human creativity. God-as-creativity is not to be thought of as in any respect a sectarian god, largely connected with, say only the Abrahamic religions. The God of which I am speaking here is the creativity manifest throughout the cosmos, the creativity evident in all human practices and traditions, the ongoing coming into being of the new to be seen everywhere in the universe. When I say then, that creativity will be required if we are to address effectively the worldwide problems we humans today face, it is not some parochial Western or Christian kind of creativity to which I am referring and appealing. It is the universal creativity--the coming into being of the novel and transformative wherever and whenever that happens--the creativity known of and manifest in the lives and cultures of all peoples.
It is on this creativity that our hopes for the human future should be placed. The creative changes that are needed around the world must come about in ways appropriate to each tradition and culture, not just changes that we in the Abrahamic religions or we in the West might desire and hope for. The new world that we hope to help create must be one to which peoples of all cultures, religions, and languages contribute, and in which they can all feel at home.
The creativity required to bring about this new order may well go beyond the creative inspiration we humans are able to provide: we must hope and expect and believe that the wider creativity (God) will continue to engender a context in the world roundabout that will enable us, indeed encourage us, to move forward. In view of all that this wider creativity has done for us humans--bringing us forth in the world over countless generations--it is fitting that we continue to have faith in it as we move forward into an unknown future. Doubtless as we attempt to address the large problems we humans now face, there will be many differences in our judgments about which insights we should regard as truly creative and therefore pursue; so we will need to learn how to search together for creative ways to move beyond these differences, and that will often be difficult. However, it is worth noting that throughout the Whole of humanity today there appear to be serendipitous pressures that, after all those past centuries of divisions and separateness, are beginning to pull us humans together again in spite of ourselves. Is God--the creativity manifest in the wider context in which we humans live--now nudging us forward? It is important that we accede to these pressures and do everything we can to facilitate this transformation.
As We have been observing throughout these pages, the Christian message is not only about God, the wider creativity. It is also about Jesus, a very creative figure of two thousand years ago. As might be expected, those of us who are Christians will turn to the mission and message of jesus for help in addressing the massive problems that we humans today confront, problems about which there is much disagreement. Jesus' creativity--in his ministry his comportment, his healings, his teachings, and especially in the manner in which he went to his crucifixion--inspired those around him. And following upon his alleged resurrection from the dead, his mission and message were carried around the Roman world and beyond, and it inspired many others to become his disciples and followers--a movement that continues to grow. We Christians need to ask ourselves, Do the life and death of this Jesus in any way significantly bear on the complex of problems with which we humans must now come to terms? Does this Jesus have anything to say that might illuminate these problems in some significant way?
Jesus believed that the kingdom of God was beginning to break into human history; and he regarded his own healings of sickness and suffering, and his forgiveness of sins, as signs that this kingdom was coming soon. He believed that humans should love not only both God and their neighbors but their enemies as well, "so that you may be children of your Father in heaven" (Matt. 5:44-45). And this love was understood in a very radical sense. It required, for instance, repeatedly forgiving the offenses of others against us (according to Matt.18:22, Jesus told Peter that those who had offended him should be forgiven "seventy times seven"); going out of our way to help other human beings who are suffering (as the story of "the good Samaritan" suggests, Luke 10:29-37); going "the second mile" and turning "the other cheek" (Matt. 5:43-47). I am not suggesting that followers of Jesus are duty-bound to obey literally these prescriptions. I am suggesting that the life to which Jesus called his followers involves a reversal of ordinary social and political, cultural and--all too often--religious standards, according to which power over others signifies one's importance, and serving others is regarded as demeaning (Mark 10:43-44). All this was brought into sharp and unforgettable focus by the final events of Jesus' life: he refused to defend or protect himself from his enemies, and he accepted meekly the whips and curses and finally the suffering of a violent death at their hands.”
Jesus was obviously a very creative figure: he imagined a world decisively different from the one he lived in--this present world governed by relations of power and violence, this world of injustice, disease, and ugliness; and he announced that this new world of reconciliation, love, and peace was soon coming here on Earth. And so, in keeping with that expectation, he called for new and quite different human behaviors--even in this present world--behaviors driven by a love that sacrifices itself without reservation to the needs of others; that ministers to the sick, the weak, the poor; that refuses to fight back against those who have done harm but instead forgives.
This vision of the possibilities of human beings--of the potentiality of humankind--is certainly one of the most radical ever set forth. Jesus' belief; and his enactment of that belief in his own life and death--that human existence should (and could!) at all points radiate agape love--captivated his followers and powerfully motivated them to change their lives. Virtually every writer in the New Testament affirms the importance of love in one way or another. Paul and John, the two great theologians of the New Testament, both emphasized love's centrality and its glory: Paul, especially in his great hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13, in which he very straightforwardly affirms that of the three basic Christian virtues--faith, hope, and love-- "the greatest of these is love" (13:13) a Johannine writer, especially in his daring pronouncement that “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them" (1 John 4:16). This radical vision of the human potential may help us see more clearly what will be required if we are to move past the hatreds and aggressiveness,`the misplaced loyalties, the defensive ideas of duty and honor and patriotism, and the like, to an openness that welcomes other peoples, cultures, and religions; and a willingness to forgive and forget past injuries and crimes. The radical love and forgiveness advocated by Jesus can transform destructive human practices and lives, thus helping to break down long-standing barriers of hatred and fear that make it impossible for peoples and nations, ethnic and religious groups, to live together and work together cooperatively for a better human world, The apostle Paul had something like this in mind when he laid out his vision of the meaning and power of love: "Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it . . . rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends" (1 Cor. 13:4-8). Christians were being transformed by this gospel of love, and they had been given the commission to spread it around the world. It was because of the transformative power of this love that Paul was able to declare that "if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything . . . has become new! A11 this is from God" (2 Cor. 5:17-18).
In the New Testament, of course, this vision of humankind's potential presupposed a supernaturalistic world»picture: God was doing all these things in connection with bringing human history to its climax and goal, the perfect kingdom of God in and over the human world. Perhaps only in a context of this sort could such an implausible vision of the human potential ever have been created--human existence being what, for the most part, it has been. However that may be, as new generations of Christians came and went, and it became increasingly apparent that the apocalyptic expectations of Jesus, Paul, and the others simply were not happening as anticipated, the new vision of the possibilities of human existence as a life of "love, joy peace, patience, kindness, generosity faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control" (as Paul described it in his letter to the Galatians, 5:22-23) did not die away. Instead, it became the hoped for quality of ongoing human existence, a quality much desired in Christian communal life. And so it has remained through the centuries of Christian history. It is to be emphasized that this was not just a vision of what Christian communities should be: it was a vision of what humanity could become. We need to ask ourselves now have we come to that moment in history when this vision of what human existence could be is in fact most needed?
If we are now at the point at which humankind must find some way of growing together into a unified though still thoroughly pluralistic humanity; might this vision provide us with some insight into what we humans must do and become if our more unified peaceful world is ever to come about? At this portentous moment in history; more than ever before, we need visions of the human and understandings of history that will facilitate our movement toward an ordering of life char is at once humane and universal, an ordering in which the integrity and significance of each tradition and each community are acknowledged, and the welfare of every individual is respected. It is important that We lift up into full view every insight and every vision--no matter from what tradition or culture it comes--that might throw light on how to move forward from the ugly inhumanities in which we seem to be trapped toward reconciliation of contending peoples, nations, cultures, religions. New cultural patterns of association and cooperation must be developed, new institutions must be invented, new ideologies that are at once universalistic and truly pluralistic must be created. For these sorts of things to come about, a spirit of self-sacrifice for the well-being of the whole of humanity--and indeed the well-being of the rest of life on planet Earth--will be widely needed, a spirit that can subdue the instincts for self-preservation and self»defense (perhaps among the strongest that we possess) that so dominate our communal and national, as well as our personal, lives. It is images and stories of communities of reconciliation--in which all recognize that they are "members one of another" (Rom. l2:5) and that they "are all one" (Gal. 3:28), with no discrimination among groups, classes, or sexes--that can focus our attention and our lives on the sorts of commitments We must make and loyalties we must keep if We are to align ourselves with those cosmic and historical forces (whichever ones they may be) that move us creatively (God!) toward a more humane World. Within this context of hopes and dreams, the image of the self-sacrificial Jesus, who gives himself completely so that all may have "abundant life" (John 10:10), stands out in its full pertinence to today's human world. We have here a vivid emblem of the radical transvaluation of our present values that is required if our world of violence and aggressive self-assertion is to become more truly humane and thus more human.”
I make no claim that the image/ story of Jesus and his early followers is the only one that can inspire the creativity that is needed if we humans are to address effectively the large problems We face today." However, I do want to remind the reader that the history of the many sorts of creativity evoked by this story and image over the last two thousand years is quite remarkable. Some of that history I admit, has been enormously destructive; creativity can go in many different directions, some of them quite unfortunate, as we have seen. It is with this in mind that I am suggesting that, above all, it is the radical themes in the image/story of Jesus, demanding the transvaluation of our generally accepted values, that are most likely to inspire new models for the creativity that we humans must now cultivate. Some, of course, continue to invoke the names of Jesus and God to authorize terrible wars and further exploitation of the environment--behaviors clearly opposite to those that can bring peace and reconciliation, love and hope, into our human world. Creativity inspired by the radical jesus should be healing, redemptive, reconciling in our suffering world. The self»giving agape»love that Jesus advocated and exemplified during his life will inspire us, we can hope, to find ways that will help create a more truly humane world for the future. The creativity of jesus continues ....
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