Garry Wills, professor of history emeritus as Northwestern University and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Lincoln at Gettysburg, tackles the life of Jesus in a new (though relatively short) work. What Jesus Meant is written to defend a fairly orthodox theological spin on what the Bible is (influenced by N.T. Wright in places and highly critical of the Jesus Seminar throughout) and to weigh in on the debate over the appropriate role of the Christian faith in politics (Wills argues that Jesus was non-political). "This is not a scholarly book but a devotional one," writes Wills (Garry Wills, What Jesus Meant (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. xxx.). You won't find me arguing with how Garry Wills professes his faith. I'm a fan of his body of work. However, I find that in this book there are sharp differences between my understandings of Jesus and how Wills presents Jesus. Jesus was political (in the best sense of that word and not in the partisan fashion we now think of) and the historical critical approach to biblical hermeneutics (the approach used by the fellows of the Jesus Seminar) provides great insight into Scripture.
Wills begins What Jesus Meant with a frontal assault on the Jesus Seminar. The Jesus Seminar, founded in 1985, is made up of over 200 biblical scholars. The fellows of the seminar debated and then voted on which sayings of Jesus seemed to them authentic. Few serious scholars would argue that every word or incident reported in the Bible literally happened and the search for the historical Jesus is the attempt to separate what Jesus actually did and said from how later Christian communities interpreted his words and deeds. Such an endeavor is critical for understanding the roots of Christianity. Wills, however, disagrees. "This is the new fundamentalism," he writes. "It believes in the literal sense of the Bible - it just reduces the Bible to what it can take as literal quotation from Jesus (Ibid., p. xxv.)." Wills unfairly misrepresents both what the Jesus Seminar has been about and the positive impacts their research has brought.
Many people have left the Christian faith because numerous churches require adherence to orthodoxy of some sort or another. You'll be told in these churches that to be Christian you must believe that Jesus said and did everything recorded in the Bible (and for that matter everything else in the cannon - which cannon depends on whether or not you're Roman Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox... each have slightly different canonical texts). What the Jesus Seminar asserts is that there are literal truths about Jesus, metaphorical Scriptural truths, and truths about how the early Christian community evolved to understand Jesus after his death. Wills writes that those involved with the Jesus Seminar "work from a Jeffersonian assumption that anything odd or dangerous or supernatural is prima facie suspect. That disqualifies the Resurrection from the outset (p. xxv)." Thomas Jefferson (yes, that Thomas Jefferson) once published a Bible with the miracles edited out. Is Wills' charge correct? Do those involved with the Jesus Seminar reject such basic Christian beliefs as the Resurrection? Some might but not all of the fellows are practicing Christians. Let me provide two examples, however, of people who are: Stephen Patterson, professor of New Testament studies at Eden Theological Seminary (one of my seminary professors) and Marcus Borg, professor at Oregon State University.
Patterson, who professes a belief in the Resurrection, writes in The God of Jesus that it is entirely understandable as to why people would question the Resurrection as an historical event given the sometimes contradictory accounts in the Gospel stories. But he goes on to say that:
Resurrection is not about the resuscitation of a corpse, that one great miracle that proves we are right after all. It is about the resuscitation of hope in the face of cruel realities. There is so much in our world that points in the direction of despair: war, hunger, racism, human degradation and abuse, fallenness. History easily suggests that if there is a God, if there is a reality that runs through and beneath it all, this reality is surely not a benevolent God. Resurrection is about the resuscitation of hope against all odds that there is indeed a God, and that God loves us beyond all our furthest imaginings. This is the God Christians claim to have met in the life and preaching of Jesus of Nazareth. If one cannot summon the faith and hope to believe that there is such a God, an ancient claim about one more savior rising from the dead will not be able to convince one that there is such a God after all.
The assumption that it could is perhaps that greatest error of Christendom. It is often argued today be evangelical theologians that without the miracle of the resurrection, it would be impossible to account for the rise and spread of Christianity, or even its survival past Good Friday. But this is precisely what differentiates those first followers of Jesus from his latter-day worshipers: they really believe that Jesus was right. They were convinced by what he said, excited about what he did, and chose to give themselves over to this person whom they experienced as gospel, completely. And they did all of this before Jesus' death. That is why they proclaimed the resurrection in the first place. For the earliest Christians the resurrection depends on whether or not Jesus was right about God. For latter-day Christians, that Jesus was right depends on whether the resurrection is a historical event. This shift is crucial, for it involves a shift in first commitments: from message to miracle, from gospel to power. John the evangelist, who writing near the end of the first century, had inherited from the tradition a host of miracle stories and resurrection tales, understood the danger this shift posed to authentic Christian faith. And so, after dutifully including many of these stories, he refuses to allow them to stand as the source and starting point for Christian faith. To Thomas, who demands proof of the resurrection before he will believe, John's Jesus offers the final word: "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe" (John 20:29) (Stephen Patterson, The God of Jesus (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1998), p 239-240.).
Borg has written more generally about the subject saying that the "way of Jesus - the way of repentance and return from exile - involves dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being. Taken literally, it is the path of martyrdom, which may have been an issue when Mark was written. Taken metaphorically, it refers to the internal process at the center of the way of Jesus and the life of discipleship (Marcus Borg, Reading The Bible Again for the First Time (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2001) p. 195.)."
Wills claims that the "only Jesus we have is the Jesus of faith (p. xxvi)" and that "the `historical Jesus' does not exist for us (Wills, What Jesus Meant, p. xxviii)." Rather than use this opportunity to illuminate and explore the debates and questions raised by the Jesus Seminar (and previous explorers of the historical Jesus) Wills has written a book that unfairly stereotypes scholars and dismisses the practice of historical research as it relates to Christianity. You would think that a history professor would know better. His intent escapes me.
Our nation (and the world for that matter) is racked by debates over the appropriate role of religion in public life. There are those who would argue that the United States is and always has been a Christian nation and that our government should be run on Christian principles. Some in the Religious Right would replace America's historical respect for religious pluralism and democracy with a theocracy. Are the teachings of Jesus a guide in this debate? "To put it boldly: compassion for Jesus was political," writes Borg. "He directly and repeatedly challenged the dominant sociopolitical paradigm of his social world and advocated instead what might be called a politics of compassion. This conflict and this social vision continue to have striking implications for the life of the church today (Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1994), p. 49.)." Wills could not disagree more:
Many would like to make the reign of Jesus belong to this political order. If they want the state to be politically Christian, they are not following Jesus, who says that his reign is not of that order. If, on the other hand, they ask the state simply to profess religion of some sort (not specifically Christian), then some other religions may be conscripted for that purpose, but that of Jesus will not be among them. His reign is not of that order. If people want to do battle for God, they cannot claim that Jesus has called them to this task, since he told Pilate that his ministers would not do that.
Jesus, unlike other Jews of his time, renounced theocracy. That involves religion in state violence, and he never accepted violence as justified. He specially renounced political opposition to the Roman oppression, saying "Caesar's matters leave to Caesar" (Mk 12.17). He did not oppose paying the Roman tax, though he was accused of do that (Lk 23.2). But then people ask how there can be a Christian politics if Jesus renounces "Caesar's matters." The answer is that Jesus did not some to bring any form of politics (Wills, What Jesus Meant, p. 55.).
Wills argues that Jesus did not intend to influence political structures, as Borg would argue, or come to start a church.
If Jesus did not come to establish a church, why did he come? He said it over and over, from the outset. He brought us heaven's (or the heavens') reign. "The announced time is fulfilled, God's reign impends. Turn back, and trust in the revelation" (Mk 1.15, like Lk 10.9-11). The word for "reign" (basileia) is normally translated "kingdom," but that is a misleading term. It suggests a place or a political structure. The Christian reign is the personal presence of Jesus. (Ibid., p. 84.)
Patterson would, I suspect, debate the conclusion draw by Wills on the meaning of "basileia." I'll let his words make the argument:
....how would an ancient person listening to Jesus have heard this term basileia? When this word appears in a nonbiblical text from the ancient world it is usually translated as "empire." It is a very political term. It is the word ancients used to refer to empires, or more precisely in Jesus' day, the empire: Rome. There was only one empire in Jesus' world, and that was Rome. Jesus took this very political term and attached it to the words "of God." This was unusual. As Burton Mack has pointed out, the term "Empire of God (Kingdom of God), contrary to common assumptions, does not appear very often in the literature of the Roman imperial period. But this is understandable. To speak of "empire" is to speak of Rome. And why speak of an "Empire of God," that is, an empire as God would run it, if one does not have something critical to say about the empire as "you know who" runs it. To speak of an Empire of God would have been risky, to say the least. But Jesus chose this very political, very risky concept as the central metaphor for expressing what he was about (Patterson, The God of Jesus, p. 60.).
The issues Jesus concerned himself with, as Paterson points out, were not just matters of spiritual concern but were also matters of political concern. Jesus did not raise an army (something we can learn from) but worked to create social change on behalf of the oppressed of his time. `The heavenly reign, though it undercuts the earthly reign's claim to be more than what it is, does not exempt Christians from the duties of all human beings to be just to others, according to the rules of temporal conduct. But it goes far beyond those rules," writes Wills. "It treats the lowest person, the outcast person, as if he were Jesus (Wills, What Jesus Meant, p. 88.)." Wills doesn't seem to understand it but he is articulating a form of political resistance in the midst of empire. Jesus is killed by the Romans for his efforts. My own faith claim is that Jesus called his followers to be active in the world - to resist empire. The United Methodist Church Social Principles speak better to the appropriate role for Christians to follow in modern society than any other:
The United Methodist Church believes that the church has the moral imperative to act for the common good. For people of faith, therefore, there are no political or spiritual spheres where their participation can be denied. The attempt to influence the formation and execution of public policy at all levels of government is often the most effective means available to churches to keep before humanity the ideal of a society in which power and order are made to serve the ends of justice and freedom for all people. Through such social action The United Methodist Church generates new ideas, challenges certain goals and methods, and help rearrange the emphasis on particular values in ways that facilitate the adoption and implementation of specific policies and programs that promote goals that are congruent with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This task of the Church is in no way in contradiction with our commitment to a vital separation of Church and State. We believe that the integrity of both institutions is best served when both institutions do not try to control the other. Thus, we sustain with the first amendment to the Constitution that: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" We live in a pluralistic society. In such a society, churches should not seek to use the authority of government to make the whole community conform to their particular moral codes. Rather, churches should seek to enlarge and clarify the ethical grounds of public discourse and to identify and define the foreseeable consequences of available choices of public policy.
My respect for Wills is what draws me to write such a lengthy post reviewing his book. Over the years I have come to rely on his insights on a great many historical and contemporary issues. On the "political" issues of our day we have a great many similarities. However, I feel deeply that on many of the issues addressed in What Jesus Meant his distaste for historical perspective as it relates to matters of faith produces an inaccurate picture of who Jesus was.