Why I Think That Historical-Critical Jesus Scholarship Enriches Rather Than Diminishes the Value of Jesus for Our Spirituality by Charles Bledsoe, May 31 post at BSA.
The following is his very insightful post and the follow-up comments.
I [Charles] should say up front that I have a particular outside-of-the-mainstream theological and philosophical point of view, I subscribe to a Whiteheadian process theology in which gods are symbols and models of an ultimate actuality, they aren’t ontologically real in themselves but they function to help us structure and comprehend our intuition and notion of a veridical, actually-existing religious ultimacy, our relation to and experience of it, and our experience of existence in relation to it.
And in my heterodox Christology, a Christology based upon the above perspective, Jesus, or Christ, although called “Son of God” by Christians; although Christologized as a person of a triune deity, and as true man as well as true God; although distinguished from God while being identified with God; although originally a historical human figure, an apocalyptic preacher executed for being a troublemaker, is actually a model of God.
According to my view, the creative Christologizing done by his Jewish disciples when they needed to rationalize his execution and failure to measure up to the traditional job description of a Jewish messiah; by Paul working out his own issues; and by patristic theologians and creed-formulating councils working with the categories of Greek philosophy, yielded not merely orthodox Christology, its set of doctrines about Christ, but rather a new paradigm for conceiving and relating to divinity that transcends both the historical Jesus and orthodox Christology.
That is, Jesus as God’s paradigm features understandings of God that run deeper than the facts of the man from Galilee, or a literal rendering of Nicene orthodoxy, an understanding of God as: immanent, as internally related to us rather than absolutely transcendent; as love, as agapeically involved in aiding and enhancing our well-being, rather than an authority figure keen on “His” sovereignty and defined by relations of power and domination; as gentle rather than coercively controlling; as vulnerable, a fellow-sufferer rather than impassible; as redemptive, a force for the renewal of life and its flourishing after our life-negating and destructive choices and actions, rather than retributively righteous.
What’s the relation of the historical Jesus to this divine model? The historical Jesus was a germ of inspiration for all of its reconceptualizations of God. Jesus’ intimacy, and resonance with God inspired the immanentism of the Christic God model. He espoused and exemplified a love ethic that primed Christians to develop an agapeic vision of divinity. The notion of his divine Sonship led to his gentleness and vulnerability being attributed to his “Father”. The dissonance-reducing rationalization of his death on the cross by his followers as an act of self-sacrificial love, and their resurrection belief contributed to a theological model that stresses both God’s loving and salvatory nature.
This Jesus-inspired, Christic model of God is not static, however. It has continued to evolve, and morph into new Christologies. But the best versions all share in common that they structure and comprehend our intuition of God in ways that emphasize, and enable us to relate to God as immanent, loving, gentle, and redemptive.
Historical-critical biblical scholarship, and the quest for the historical Jesus has refuted much that literalistic readers of the Gospels, and adherents of orthodox Christology erroneously hold to be true about the historical Jesus. It has also called into question how perfectly Jesus actually understood and represented God’s love, pointing out that his vaunted love ethic is interwoven with an apocalypticism that envisions an eschaton in which God not so lovingly annihilates those who don’t follow the love command; and feminist scholarship also charges Jesus with a misogyny (I’m thinking of a book by scholar Jill Hicks-Keeton) that to my mind significantly detracts from his impeccability as a model of the divine. But as far as I’m concerned that’s all right, it doesn’t diminish Jesus as a divine paradigm because theologically paradigmatic Jesus has a life of its own, which is ongoing and evolving post-the earthly life of Jesus, and which doesn’t stand or fall based on what we know of Jesus the man.
That is, the historical Jesus doesn’t define the Christic God model. Historical-critical scholarship then is no threat whatsoever to Jesus as divine metaphor, and to metaphorical Jesus’ ability to help us realize a relationship with an immanent, loving, gentle, and redemptive God. If anything, seeing the historical Jesus more clearly, de-literalizing him, and the doctrines and creeds that theologians have constructed about him, helps us to better get to the core of his meaning for our spirituality, and makes him a more effective model of the divine. I could flesh this out better, but the post is already long-winded enough, and I’m sure that anyone who has endured its long-windedness gets my drift, so I’ll stop here, and extend my welcome to any feedback that anyone may care to offer.
I need to re-read this a few more times and digest it a bit longer, but I wanted to share something that I’ve often thought about over the years when trying to decipher which parts of something are true and which obscure the truth, for example, which parts of my religious upbringing are things I truly believe and which are just doctrine. (Please forgive me, I grew up in the Harry Potter generation, and I’m one of the ones who knows those stories just as well as, if not better than, the Biblical ones I grew up hearing.)
In Book 6 of the series (The Half-Blood Prince), the Defense against the Dark Arts professor that year was Professor Slughorn, a prideful man who liked to mentor whom he viewed as gifted students, like Harry. Harry is able to flatter and coerce him into giving him access to an important memory of his (I won’t go into how that works here) that they need for the current line of their quest. When Harry is in the memory, everything seems normal while he is watching the scene, until it gets to a part that is particularly shameful for Slughorn. Apparently, Slughorn was able to bypass or obscure that part of the memory, and the room Harry is in seems to fill with gray smoke while a deeper version of Slughorn’s voice says something appropriate and important, more aligned with how he would like to be perceived. Spoiler, it was not what really happened, which comes out later.
All that to say, ever since I read that story, I thought of things that obscured the truth as having that different sound and color. It doesn’t mesh with the rest of the surroundings. It’s a dead giveaway because it sticks out like a sore thumb. So when you were talking about how the love ethic is interwoven with apocalypticism and annihilation, it seems to fit into that paradigm – the dark and sharp proclamations of theological Jesus vs the message of the earthly Jesus.
Thanks for sharing, what an interesting read!
Charles Bledsoe – Sarah Martin Thanks for your reply. I agree that Jesus’ love ethic being entangled with his apocalyptic vision is problematic. My first post here at BSA was on that topic. Here’s a link to it:
A Critical Perspective on Jesus’ Ethic of Love
Hmm, I just skimmed that post and was surprised to find that I somehow remissly neglected to mention that the cruelty of an apocalypticism that envisions the annihilation of the unrighteous is at odds with a full-orbed love ethic, a serious flaw in Jesus’ version of a love ethic. And, what’s more, conceptualizing God as love and envisioning God as destroyer of the unrighteous makes for a seriously schizophrenic God. I don’t know how I failed to include these thoughts in the post.
So Jesus as person only was conflicted, complex, contradictory, and confused. Or the Gospels were. Or some sort of intermixture. Jaspers believed that the only way to make sense of his love-ethical teachings is in direct relation to his apocalyptic outlook. Completely out of reach unless you absolutely believe the end was near.
Being that the NT was written around the time of the Temple Destruction it makes some sense as this event rocked to the core Jewish life and beliefs. And the Way was still very much a sect of Judaism.
1. Jesus was complicated.
2. Distorted biographies of Jesus.
3. His message intertwined with the turbulence of the times.
4. Offered hope and communal sense of belonging in an egalitarian, loving environment.
Joseph Warren I would agree that on the level of historical-critical scholarship Jesus is indeed “conflicted, complex, contradictory, and confused”. To my mind the historical Jesus’ theological vision, a vision of God that is both apocalyptic, that envisions an eschatological scenario in which God destroys the unrighteous; and that is also agapeic, that conceives God to be perfect love, and practicing a love ethic to be the way to be in right relationship with God is seriously contradictory.
But ultimately Jesus’ complexity and contradictoriness isn’t a problem for my theological perspective which views him as plural and multivalent. That is, I hold that there are multiple compossible Jesuses, there’s the human, historical Jesus, who had contradictions and flaws but who was for the most part in tune with God’s agapeic mode of being; there’s the Christologized Jesus, the theologically rationalized Jesus of the creeds; there’s the Jesus of faith, who plays a role in people’s faith lives and spirituality, the Jesus with whom believers have a personal relationship; and there’s the ethically and spiritually idealized Jesus, a process (that began in patristic theology and continues today in liberal theology) of his evolution into a vehicle for theological insights, the insight that God is immanent, loving, gentle, and redemptive. To my mind these Jesuses aren’t mutually exclusive; rather, they make up a pluri-unity, a single meta-Jesus, as it were, with distinct but interrelated dimensions.
When doing critical scholarship one can legitimately focus on the contradictions between these dimensions; and, when engaging with ultimate concern in a devotional fashion one can focus on the common theophany, as it were, in each of them, in the historical Jesus’ resonance with God’s love nature (even if it was marred by his apocalypticism), and in the Christological, devotional, and idealized Jesuses who all channel and carry this theophanic resonance, potentially into one’s heart and life if one is open to it. The “conflicted, complex, contradictory, and confused” proposition that Jesus presents us with doesn’t have to be problematic. One can allow oneself to get stuck on the contrariness, or roll with the multivalency.
Craig Wells – Charles Bledsoe, this is one of your best & most insightful comments! Thanks
