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November 2 - December 8, 2019
In this book, I have given myself permission to write as a Christian, even as I also write as a scholar.
people intentionally committed to life in the Spirit.
for many Christians, especially in mainline churches, there came a time when their childhood image of Jesus no longer made a great deal of sense.
The foundational claim of this book is that there is a strong connection between images of Jesus and images of the Christian life, between how we think of Jesus and how we think of the Christian life.
The most common image of Jesus–what I call the “popular image”–sees him as the divine savior. Put
Only slightly less common is an image of Jesus as teacher. A
Christian life. That life is ultimately not about believing or about being good. Rather, as I shall claim, it is about a relationship with God that involves us in a journey of transformation.
Jesus is the divine savior in whom one is to believe for the sake of receiving eternal life.
precritical naiveté–
Without realizing it, I was wrestling with the relationship between the omnipresence and transcendence of God.
God could even appear right in this room right now. But of course, most of the time God is not here; rather, God is up in heaven. Unwittingly, my resolution of the perplexity reduced God’s omnipresence to a magical potentiality to be anywhere.
But I couldn’t stop doubting, and so my requests for forgiveness seemed to me not to be genuine.
The inability to overcome my doubt confirmed for me that I had become more of an unbeliever than a believer.
If I could have made myself believe, I would have.
world of matter and energy and its vision of the universe as a closed system of cause and effect,
God, the nature of reality, human nature, evil, atonement, ethics, the relationship between Christianity and other religions, and so forth.
diversity of answers provided by the intellectual giants of the tradition, ancient and modern:
it provided a framework within which I could take my perplexity seriously.
think my journey as described thus far is fairly typical.
My childhood understanding of Christianity had collapsed, but nothing had replaced it. I had become a “closet agnostic,” someone who didn’t know what to make of it all.
I learned that the image of Jesus from my childhood–the popular image of Jesus as the divine savior who knew himself to be the Son of God and who offered up his life for the sins of the world–was not historically true.
As the decades passed, the early Christian movement increasingly spoke of Jesus as divine and as having the qualities of God, a development that within a few centuries was to result in the doctrine of the Trinity.
Thus the gospels are the church’s memories of the historical Jesus transformed by the community’s experience and reflection in the decades after Easter. They therefore tell us what these early Christian communities had come to believe about Jesus by the last third of the first century. They are not, first and foremost, reports of the ministry itself.
well-known scholarly distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith,
That Jesus–the Christ of faith–is spoken of as divine, indeed coequal with God, of one substance with God, begotten before all worlds, the second person of the Trinity.
had also assumed that even as a human being he was the second person of the Trinity and would have known that about himself.
The picture of Jesus in John is clearly quite different from the picture of Jesus in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which are collectively known as the synoptic gospels.
The contrast between the synoptic and Johannine images of Jesus is so great that one of them must be nonhistorical. Both cannot be accurate characterizations of Jesus as a historical figure. The verdict of nonhistorical went to John.
Jesus never spoke of himself as the Son of God, as one with God, as the light of the world, as the way, the truth, and the life, and so forth. Indeed, he never spoke the words of John 3.16–that verse from my childhood that had summed up my image of Jesus.
Indeed, the linkage between John’s gospel and the popular image of Jesus was so strong that I remember becoming angry at John when I first became aware that its account was largely nonhistorical.
I learned of two further consensus positions then dominant in Jesus scholarship. The first was that we can’t know very much at all about the Jesus of history.
Not only was John’s gospel seen as nonhistorical, but it was felt that even within the synoptic gospels it was very difficult to discern the voice of Jesus from the voice of the church.
Midcentury Jesus scholarship was marked by thoroughgoing skepticism, coupled with the claim that only the Christ of f...
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That (and not his own identity or the importance of believing in him) was the content of his message and the basis of his urgent call to repent: the world was soon to pass away; therefore, ground yourself in God. About the nearness of the end he was, of course, wrong.
if Jesus’ message wasn’t about himself as the Son of God whose purpose was to die for our sins, what was his message, and what was he up to?
The central problem was still the collision between God and the modern worldview, between my image of God and the image of reality I had acquired by growing up in the modern world.
The latter had hardened into a taken-for-granted “map” of reality. Indeed, I didn’t even think of it as a map, but simply as the way things are.
William James in his classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience.8
God refers to the sacred at the center of existence, the holy mystery that is all around us and within us. God is the nonmaterial ground and source and presence in which, to cite words attributed to Paul by the author of Acts, “we live and move and have our being”11
God is both everywhere present and “up in heaven”–both immanent and transcendent,
To speak of God as being “up in heaven”–that is, as transcendent–means that God is not to be identified with any particular thing, not even with the sum total of things.
Gradually it became obvious to me that God–the sacred, the holy, the numinous–was “real.” God was no longer a concept or an article of belief, but had become an element of experience.
began to see Jesus as one whose spirituality–his experiential awareness of Spirit–was foundational for his life.
key truth about Jesus: that in addition to being deeply involved in the social world of the everyday, he was also grounded in the world of the Spirit. Indeed, as I shall observe from several perspectives
the post-Easter Jesus as the Jesus of Christian tradition and experience. That is, the post-Easter Jesus is not just the product of early Christian belief and thought, but an element of experience.
The living risen Christ of the New Testament has been an experiential reality (and not just an article of belief) from the days of Easter to the present.
Thus, in the experience, worship, and devotion of Christians throughout the centuries, the post-Easter Jesus is real.
why would the early Christian community out of which John’s gospel comes portray Jesus as saying about himself, “I am the light of the world,” “I am the bread of life,” “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” if Jesus did not speak that way about himself? I now see the answer: this is how they experienced the post-Easter Jesus.
John’s gospel is “true,” even though its account of Jesus’ life story and sayings is not, by and large, historically factual.
postcritical naiveté–a state in which one can hear these stories as “true stories,” even while knowing that they are not literally true.12
