Recently in Jesus Category

Tuesday I began a series of posts looking at Harvey Cox's new book The Future of Faith. Today I would like to look at Chapter 3 - Ships Already Launched. Cox begins this chapter by dismissing the idea that all religions are the same. We all live with mystery, but how we cope varies.

I frequently meet people who, when they discover that I teach religion, assure me that "underneath, all religions are really the same." I used to respond that, during a lifetime of teaching religion it appeared to me that they are not. But since that usually ended the conversation on a disagreeable note, I have recently just let their opinions pass. It is true that we are all responding to the same mystery, the one that confronts us all not just as mortal beings, but as beings aware of our mortality. Still we sense it and cope with the mystery in quite disparate ways. (p. 38)

Cox then begins to describe, as he says, "the ship I found myself on" - the narrative of the Judeo-Christian tradition. And this leads me to the questions for today. 

Are all religions the same?

But a simple answer of no isn't enough.  Most of us consider ourselves Christian (certainly I do) - some will claim that this is this simply the luck of the draw and a matter of birth.  But the Christian is not willing to rest here - the whole NT especially the book of Acts is about God's mission and the proclamation and spread of the good news, inviting others to join The Way. 

Why is the gospel of Jesus Christ good news? What is there that is real, intrinsically worth proclaiming, to which we desire to invite others?

Why is Christianity not simply another way (one among many) of dealing with the mysteries of life, purpose, and mortality?

Thursday evening I flew down to Cincinnati for the National Youth Workers Convention, which everyone seems to call YS -- Youth Specialties. I love speaking to youth pastors, in part no doubt because they are just one step removed from our seniors. At least most of them are. 

James 4:7-10 contains a list of commands and prohibitions, with an occasional promise. Here is the text, and you can read it and see if you think here is a discernible structure:

Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.

Let me define historical Jesus studies as the attempt to get behind the canonical Gospels to discover what the real Jesus was like. Inherent to the historical Jesus discipline is the belief that the canonical Gospels and the Church got Jesus wrong or are biased -- or should I say that the Church believes too much about Jesus and that the real Jesus was less than the Church's Christ. In other words, historical Jesus studies attempt to construct an image of Jesus in distinction from the canonical Gospels and the Church's beliefs.

Example: Is that what you think Jesus looks like? This is what a BBC program sketched for what a 1st Century Jewish male looked like. The jolt of this image with your image is what historical Jesus studies attempt to do.

I participated in this discussion for the better part of 15 years. Much fruit has come of historical Jesus studies, most notably the sharper profile of Jesus in his Jewish context. But the enterprise makes no sense until we see it as the attempt to construct an image of Jesus more accurate than what we find in the Gospels.

Let me say this one more way: Yes, historical Jesus studies try to get back to what Jesus was really like but involved in that is the belief that the real Jesus and the canonical Gospel Jesus are not the same. I know some conservatives conclude that virtually everything is authentic and conclude that the canonical Gospel Jesus is the same as the historical Jesus. But I don't think such studies really are historical Jesus studies. Critique of the Church's belief about Jesus is inherent to historical Jesus studies.

This is a 5-part series we will post this entire week at about this time. It will unpack a "partial preterist" view of Jesus' eschatology. Oddly enough, I was interviewed last week by CBS TV in Chicago about 2012. Evidently, some folks are getting riled up about the imminent return of Christ. (I think the interview will be at 10am Wed or Thurs.) Here goes ...

Because my life's story finds itself wrapped around the various poles of Christian thinking about eschatology, I have in the following allowed my own story to govern the shape of my thinking about eschatology. In short, along with many other theologians, my thinking has moved through several "either/ors": either pre-tribulation or post-tribulation rapture and either literal or metaphorical interpretation of eschatological language. By a strange twist of fate, my own thinking moved to the metaphorical hermeneutic while many popular evangelical preachers were packaging once again the older notion of the pre-tribulation rapture. To adjudicate between the literal and the metaphorical, one needs to examine prophetic language honestly and fairly; furthermore, as will be shown below, one needs a firm grasp of what Jesus was speaking of when he gave the address now recorded in Mark 13 (and Matthew 24 and Luke 21). I have not footnoted the paper but have left it in its original public lecture format.

It is fashionable today to see the Christian religion as a massive cover up and the real story is supposed to have gone something like this: Jesus was a pious, Torah-observant Jew whom Paul got hold of and cranked up...

One of the questions I used to ask students in a Jesus class was "Do you think Jesus made mistakes learning Hebrew or mathematics or Israelite history?" This question, so I learned, was a good way to get students to...

There are two things I really like about Nick Perrin's new book, Lost in Transmission. The first is that Nick gets it when it comes to the level of books the church needs more of. Evangelicals, in the 70s and...

This is the time of the year when many professors are thinking about textbooks for next year, and I've come across one for Jesus of Nazareth classes. I'm wondering, in particular, if anyone out there has used this book in...

... a book comes along and you make a decision about its importance. This book, you decide, ends the need for a dozen or so other books on your shelves. You go to your shelf, pick up those books, put...

Every generation needs to examine for itself the reliability of the Gospels. Is the depiction of Jesus accurate? Can they be trusted? Are they reliable enough for us to anchor our faith in Jesus? There are now "three bears" in...

This has been a good week of conversation about historical Jesus studies, but it is worth our time just to put together some of the leading ideas that need to be kept in mind. Above all and over everything in...

The historical Jesus debate, as we have seen, has three (or four) phases: the old quest (Reimarus to Schweitzer), the no quest of Bultmann and the new quest following Bultmann, and then what Tom Wright dubbed the "third quest" of...

Bultmann unleashed a set of criteria that were used to determine if what is attributed to Jesus in the Gospels really came from him. Now once again let's remind ourselves of something: the historical Jesus quest is about discerning what...

More people say bad things about Bultmann than who have read him (1884-1976). Bultmann was escorted into the theological world in the day of Schweitzer's famous Quest. Bultmann, a faithful church-going organist-playing son of the Lutheran church, knew that one...

Go to your local Barnes and Noble or Borders or any bookshop of fine taste and you will find a section on Jesus, and the books about Jesus make one subtle or not-so-subtle promise: the book will reveal who the...