Will the Real Jesus Stand Up?

(This is a significant revision of “Imagining a New Way to Be Christian,” posted six months ago when this blog and I were both younger. I wish to thank my long-time –and equally-aged–friend Greg Cusack for his excellent critique and editing of the earlier version)

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“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and search for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy… Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.”

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“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God from the beginning….He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children not born of natural descent, nor of human descent or a husband’s will, but born of God. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

Both of these passages from the New Testament refer to Jesus, the first one claiming to be his words and the second a theological description of who Jesus was.  If you claim to be a follower of Jesus, which of these passages best reflect your understanding of who Jesus was or is?  Think about this. (If you finish this essay, you will know my answer to this question.)

Like many areas of our lives in the twentieth-first century, the Christian religion, at least in the United States, suffers from growing division, even perhaps polarization.  Probably most of you who consider yourselves “Christian” – or, at the least followers of Jesus’ teachings – find this state of affairs somewhat unsettling.  How can there be such divisions among people who claim to follow the same person – Jesus of Nazareth?

Actually, though, deep differences of opinion about Jesus seem to have existed from the very beginning!  In Luke’s Gospel Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do the crowds say I am?” and then, after they give him varied responses, he says, “But you…who do you say I am?”  Despite Peter’s assertion that he considered Jesus to be “The Christ of God” we know that the apostles struggled with this question apparently until Jesus’ resurrection.

Some twenty-five years to thirty years after Jesus’ death we find St. Paul admonishing various members of Christian communities over their doubts and disagreements, too.  And in the letters of “John” – whom many scholars believe to be the same person who authored John’s Gospel – we find him warning of the presence of “anti-Christs,” persons who had left his community and were now teaching what he regarded as falsehoods.

And this was just the beginning!  For, as we know, down through the centuries that followed Christians have disagreed with each other, sometimes over the most fundamental and serious questions about Jesus’ nature and his teachings.  Those who lost out in those struggles were called “heretics,” and many of them suffered the ultimate punishment for their beliefs.

It should be no surprise, then, that similar differences in belief and practice have also been part of the American experience from the very beginning.  Many among the first colonists, fleeing religious persecution in their homelands, attempted to establish “purer” communities here, but soon found dissenters among themselves!  Perhaps in no other country in the world has there been such ongoing fractionalization among Christians as here.

And so today’s circumstances – in which many Roman Catholics and most Evangelical Christian denominations (notably Southern Baptists, Church of Christ, Church of God, and some Pentecostal groups) consider themselves and/or are considered by others to be “traditional” or “conservative” in their theology, while many “mainline” Protestant denominations as well as some Catholics see themselves as theologically “progressive”—is not unusual at all, although we who are living through this time may find it unsettling.

Personally, I find such terms such as “progressive” or “conservative” more limiting than useful. 

I regard, rather, many of the interesting and challenging changes in theological thinking in recent centuries to be building toward what I call “Incarnational Christianity,” an awareness of both the immediacy of Jesus and of the centrality of his teachings to realizing the potential of our human nature.

Rethinking Our Way of Being Christian

Below are some of these key ideas marking this new way of being Christian  As you consider them, ask yourself which ones you agree or disagree with—and why you feel the way you do:

1. Believing that God is somehow “outside” or separate from creation” denies what Jesus and millennia of mystics have told us – that God is, instead, all around and within each of us.  Thomas Aquinas taught that all of creation was sustained by “the breath of God;”

2. If “God is in all creation” then our earthly life is at least as important as any “afterlife,” and all non-human aspects of creation are truly sacred;

3. Since God is within us and all creation offering us each and all the grace necessary to be forgiven, then ‘substitutionary atonement’ — the belief that it was necessary for Jesus to die if our sins were to be forgiven and also that it was the only way God’s wrath at Adam’s sin would be wiped out – is not only unnecessary, but wrong and offensive.  God is the “God of love,” not of vengeance!

4. Jesus is a “disclosure of God” rather than a “pre-existent divinity” [Gospel of John] sent to save us “by his blood” only; this helps us understand Jesus as a human being manifesting a high degree of divinity or “God-consciousness”;

5. The Bible is a library of injunctions, history and stories reflecting attempts by many authors over a period of centuries to understand God and how God works in our lives.  It is meant to be reflected upon, understood in context, and honored for its wisdom. It is not a book of history or one necessarily to be taken literally as one might a historical record;

6. Salvation is a process in which we participate with God’s grace rather than as an event through which we become passive or one-time recipients of that grace by accepting Jesus as our Savior;

7. Relationships are necessary components of salvation; being saved and seeing God in others are intimately related; “sin is thinking of ourselves—individually or collectively—more highly or less highly that we ought to think. Sin is the excessive valuing or disvaluing of any element, group, or portion of the creation in relationship to the rest.” [Delwin Brown]

8. The teachings and life of Jesus, including his death and resurrection (however we understand these events), as well as his love for justice and for the poor and oppressed, are central to explaining how God loves us; it suggests as well that creeds and theological pronouncements are less important; what we do is more important that what we say we believe.

9. Our understanding of God can be enhanced rather than diminished by the findings of modern science, and religious and scientific ways of understanding truth may overlap or even converge;

10. The message of Jesus asks us to balance emphasis on the unique individual as an expression of God and the importance of community as both a support for the individual and a way to support and aid God’s action in the world;

11. God is not the source of evil. We should grow beyond a dualistic either/or theology (good vs. evil) and toward a theology of Oneness (both/and); God permeates and sustains everything (Aquinas).; creation is of the “stuff’ of God and things or persons we disliked are also encompassed by God.

I am aware that not all thoughtful Christians may be comfortable with all of these ideas. I ask only that you consider them thoughtfully and not dismiss them because they are not what you were once taught.

Crucifixion and Atonement: A Fresh Look          

As an example, the third and fourth items in this list could be read to suggest that Jesus was being stripped of his divine character and of his role in saving us by sacrificing his life on the cross. Most of us have been taught that Jesus was more than just a “disclosure of God,” and that his death on the cross was both the keystone of his life and also “necessary” for our salvation. 

But doesn’t this limit our understanding of what “salvation” means?  Saving us from the consequences of our sins, certainly, but is not salvation also discovering the full richness of living life as the Creator intended?  And did not Jesus model this Way – as well as teach it – throughout his life?  Why do we single out the end of his life as being more important than all that went before?  Is it the crucifixion or the resurrection that represents the fullness, the true meaning of who Jesus was? 

Difficult questions for us to ponder, certainly, since the idea that salvation consist mainly of the idea that Jesus died for our sins is deeply embedded in Western Christianity.

The NRSV “red letter” version of the Bible includes in its introduction a statement naming two of the great doctrines of the church, Incarnation and Atonement.”. The first, of course was that “God became a human being. God was incarnate—in the person of Jesus.” The second, the Atonement, is “the recognition of Jesus’ death on the cross as the saving act of God. In this death God does what is necessary to restore our relationship with God and to heal our relationship with other people.” This doctrine, the author of this translation of the Bible proclaims, is “found all through the New Testament.”

But this view is not held by all.

In fact, atonement as a belief or doctrine finds its first glimmerings in the writings of Paul, not in any words of Jesus.

See, for example, Romans 5: 8-9: “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since we have been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him!” Also in Ephesians 1:7, Paul writes that in him [Jesus] we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace….”

Atonement is linked to a notion of incarnation that generally limits the meaning of this term to God entering humanity in the person of Jesus only.  It flows from Paul’s deep immersion in Jewish Scripture (which we call the Old Testament) and is based upon the idea that God was so deeply angered by the sin of our first parents—Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden—that nothing less than a perfect sacrifice would restore the breach between humanity and God. Humans were incapable of this.

However, atonement theology argues that Jesus, by being both man and God, could make a “perfect” sacrifice of his life on our behalf to satisfy the anger of his Father over the sins of Adam and Eve. This is the story that has dominated most of Christian thinking since the sixth century CE, and especially since this notion was popularized by Anselm of England in the tenth century.

Some supporters of the atonement interpretation, however, note that John’s Gospel seems to support it.  As careful readers will note, John’s gospel — with his exalted and cosmic theology – is unique in many ways, not least of which is that John’s Jesus makes many claims to being a divine savior… .and even there Jesus says that “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” But his act of giving his only son includes all of Jesus’ life, not just his death.  Jesus came to teach us what life in “the kingdom” was supposed to be.

There is nothing in John’s Gospel about death as the preferred method of salvation. Even the comment in chapter 10 where Jesus says he is the good shepherd who “lays down his life for his sheep,” there is nothing in this text that refers to atoning for Adam’s sin.  John the Baptist called Jesus “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29) without explaining how this is to happen.

Maybe the writer of the Gospel of John assumed that his readers didn’t need to have the sacrificial death of Jesus and his atonement for sin explained because Paul had already “established” that fact. Some scholars believe that as early as Mark’s gospel, Paul’s notion of Jesus’ atonement for our sins had slipped into Christian understanding in Mark’s comment that Jesus gave his life as “a ransom for many” and in the statement that the blood of Jesus “was poured out for many” (John 10:45 and 14:24). Yet “ransom” refers to the freeing of a slave from bondage—it is not necessarily a statement of freedom from sin, according to New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan.

Keeping all of this in mind, it is nonetheless crucial to recognize that God’s alleged wrath at Adam’s sin is not announced by Jesus himself in the gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, or even John.  In fact, the concept of an angry God, let alone one seeking vengeance or blood price, is alien to Jesus’ teachings.  His view of the one he called “Father” was radically different; just recall the parables of the Good Samaritan, the Good Shepherd, and the father pictured in the story of the Prodigal Son.

A New Understanding For a New Time                                 

What I have come to believe is that these two traditional Christian doctrines—Incarnation and Atonement—however venerable their history and their acceptance by traditional Christians—do not reflect how God is best understood nor the teaching or life of Jesus. We have isolated Jesus’ death from his life and teachings. The  salvation he brought us, however we might define salvation, was the truth about the way of life necessary to find and live in “the kingdom,” here and now and not only in a heaven after death.

Moreover, the medieval notion of Jesus sacrificing himself in this way distorts the meaning of the word “incarnation” in a most significant way. These facts must be confronted if Christianity is to survive and the real message of Jesus heard and spread.

Incarnation Without Original Sin

It is necessary, first of all, to pull out the word “incarnation” from the limited meaning it has had for over a thousand years of Christian history and give it a second look.

Please note that I put the word “incarnation” in quotation marks to indicate that I am using it in a way different from its most common definition, one that says that incarnation only describes the act by which God becomes human in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

While this meaning is blessed by centuries of historical usage, it is not the only way in which modern Christian thinkers understand this term.  Franciscan Richard Rohr, for example, argues that God became “incarnate” [took on flesh or became materially real] at the time of Creation. That was the first incarnation; the birth of Jesus with his unique form of divinity was the second. Furthermore, Rohr asserts in The Universal Christ (2019) that Jesus therefore, “came out of an already Christ-soaked [or Divine] world. The second incarnation flowed out of the first, out of God’s loving union with physical creation.”

More specifically, Rohr questions the whole “original sin” theology found in Genesis 3 and suggests we replace it with the alternative version of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 in which all that God created was proclaimed to be “good” or “very good.”

We are told in Genesis 1:27 that “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” There is no story of woman being created from man’s rib until chapter 2 and no temptation and fall from grace until chapter 3.  Why did Christian thinkers decide that the first chapter of Genesis was less important?

The answer, for Augustine of Hippo in the fourth century and those following him in sustaining the theory of salvation through the blood of Jesus on the cross, was that the third chapter of Genesis helped explain the existence of evil in the world and, not incidentally, gave the Christian church a key role in distributing the grace earned by Christ’s death as a way of saving us from that evil. The Pope’s claim to control and distribute the grace earned by the death of Jesus was one of the things that sparked Martin Luther’s rebellion in the sixteenth century.

Why should Christians accept the idea that the only way we can be saved is by the death of Jesus instead of by his teachings and his life, punctuated by his death and the promise of new life that followed it?  Why, for that matter, do many Christians accept the idea that salvation means only “getting into Heaven? Doesn’t the Lord’s Prayer ask that God’s will be done “on earth as it is in Heaven?’ What about the Sermon on the Mount or the many references to the poor and oppressed found in the gospels? Why do we so often act as if judging others is more important than loving them, as God does, no strings attached?

These are some of the questions asked by those of us wanting to find a better way to follow Jesus, build God’s kingdom, and live the Christian life. We are convinced that somehow, with the help of God’s grace and in community with each other, we can realize our full humanity only when we truly feel the spirit of God or Divinity within each of us and within all creation.

For this reason, let us rename what has been called by some “progressive” Christianity as Incarnational Christianity, a term that focuses clearly on the idea that God’s love and forgiveness is already within us and also surrounds us in the world, whether we are experiencing joy or sorrow, health or suffering, loving our neighbors or judging them. Whatever we do we are loved by God.

Then with greater self-acceptance and divine reassurance, it will be easier for each of us to avoid sin. If sin is “an offense against the law of God,” for which we could be sent to Hell, as my childhood Catholic catechism stated, sin can also be seen as a mistaken way of life that rejects our neighbors and the rest of creation. This broader definition is also more precise.   Unless we are sociopaths or otherwise mentally ill, we know when we sin and need forgiveness.

If this definition of sin as separation has merit, then so does the idea of salvation or redemption as a reunion with or a reconnecting with the incarnate divinity with and around us.  These words—sin and salvation—are ones that I have heard many of my more conservative Christian brothers and sisters argue we should take more seriously.  Too often we use the word sin to describe the behavior of others and to demand more attention to judgment from our priests and preachers. We seldom ask that we be judged sinful and therefore unworthy of salvation but that “the other person” should be more careful not to risk God’s wrath.

And for that matter, the idea of a wrathful God found in the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy, the idea that our suffering is due to our sins, fades as we see the consistent refusal of Jesus to condemn those sinners he encountered. “Go and sin no more,” was one response. If God is indeed incarnate in us and in our world, God does necessarily suffer with us and increasingly with the planet we are destroying.  Finally, the term incarnational Christianity conveys  the exciting idea that we are called upon to co-partner with God to create “the  kingdom” here and now. The poor should be fed and loved now, the sick should be loved and healed now, the individuals or institutions that harm us and our planet, should be forgiven now but challenged to change. Whatever bliss we shall encounter after death can wait! Loving each other in the present is the best way we can honor and make manifest the incarnate God within us. We all yearn for “a better future.” But such a future can only happen if we live incarnationally today.

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