I Like My Jesus Not Yours
It is common now to hear and read that people really like Jesus but not the church, or even , they like Jesus but not Christians. In an interview with Rev. Bill Hybels, Irish rocker Bono says, “I never had any problem with Christ but Christians were always a bit of a problem with me. . . . Christians can be very judgmental. . . . I grew up very suspicious of Christians but determined to know more of Christ.”
This is the same perspective the emerging church is hearing and the need they are trying to meet in our postmodern world. Karen Ward of Church of the Apostles in Seattle says that a poll taken in her area “found that 95 percent of the nonchurched have a favorable view of Jesus . . . . It is the church they dislike.”
Barry Taylor of Sanctuary in Santa Monica says his church “focused on the humanity of Jesus and lost all the categories of church history.” Sanctuary adopted the Jesus of popular culture, not the church. Taylor says, “I needed to stop reading Paul for awhile and start focusing on Jesus.”
One can understand disappointment with Christians as we are often disappointed with ourselves. We can also understand the interest in Jesus. However, there is a problem in letting the culture interpret Jesus for us. The 95 percent of the nonchurched who have a favorable view of Jesus, have a favorable view of their understanding of Jesus. Is their understanding correct? Should we stop reading Paul and focus on Jesus? Who do we think Paul was focusing on?
It is true that the Gospels have their own themes and Jesus was all about the Kingdom entering the world, while Paul was more interested in interpreting the cross and resurrection. But, to see the two as mutually exclusive is to ignore the continuities in New Testament theology and to give a very selective, incomplete, skewed or false understanding of who Jesus is . The apostles were all about interpreting Jesus.
We do have to start where people are but staying there is not discipleship. Building a ministry on an incomplete view of Jesus is not fair to those who find an initial attraction to our Savior.
posted by FWG at
1:08 PM
4 Comments:
The problem as I see it is not that the culture interprets Jesus as it sees fit but that the church, despite all of its resources like the letters of Paul, has done a demonstrably poor job of, to paraphrase Paul, being Jesus in the world.
It is more surprising to me that the culture has such a favorable impression of Jesus at all. Taylor is not advocating a complete denial of the writings of Paul but instead a return to the person of Jesus as our primary focus.
Merold Westphal in the introduction to his book, Overcoming Onto-theology, wrinting about the French Philospher Derida, argues that Derida was not against anything having "meaning" so much as he was saying, "no human meanings are ultimate and there is a ceratin (unavoidable) hermeneutical violence involved in imposing any system of construals, factual, and normative". Taylor and others are sensitive to the fact that what the church has done historically is privilaged its interpretation of a contextualized interpretation (e.g. Paul's writings) and try to control and normalize those understandings.
The battle lines end up being drawn as some thinkers then, inaccurately, argue that what postmoderns ultimately want is the removal of all boundaries. While this may be true for some postmoderns it is not true for all of them. Many Christian postmoderns are not for some epistemological or metaphysical free for all so much as they are for a dynamic discipleship that includes more than just regurgitaiton of accurate doctrine. They want to actaully follow Jesus.
But the institutional Church, one could argue, stopped following Jesus and substituted doctrine and protective fences for the person of Jesus some time ago. The postmodern believer, or emerging church is seeking to re-engage the living Jesus we talk about in our doctrine and hymns but fail to actually live with. That Jesus is not afraid of the world nor angry at the world but loves it and comes to it "not to condemn..." and that Jesus says in his Prayer for believers that he desires not for them to be taken from the world but be kept safe within it. I think the institutional church, as a whole, has chosen a path that ignores the Jesus it is supposed to embody and that is the reason that the church has been marginalized. I also believe that it is a desire to truly incarnate Jesus in the world that is driving the emerging church movement.
2:54 PM
As a follow up I found a quote from Barry Taylor and Craig Detweiller's book a Matrix of Meanings that demonstrates that Taylor is not advocating a truncated picture of Jesus...
"Rather than a systematic or historical theology, we advocate a practical contemporary theology—practical because theology needs to deal with lived life, not just propositions and abstract ideas, and contemporary, because theology needs to speak to today’s world…..While theology must be faithful to tradition and rooted in scripture, it also must speak to the times, not just vernacularly but in emphasis and focus. (pg 295)"
3:28 PM
I'm confused by the reference to Derrida. We cannot have it both ways--Derrida (there can be no single meaning), and yet against an epistemological/metaphysical free-for-all.
I agree the church has failed in many ways taking Jesus to the world or being Jesus in the world, but propostional truth and doctrine is where we start so we can take the correct Jesus to the world.
It seems we agree when you quote that a contemporary, practical presentation of Jesus must be based in tradition and Scripture (paraphasing of your quote).
My problem is if/when we bend the Jesus of Scripture to fit the non-churched culture's understanding of Jesus. Too often we hear that Jesus is love but the church is judgmental. No doubt the church needs to be more loving, but what happens when the non-churched discover there is a judgmental side of Jesus?
6:34 PM
Maybe the situation is Paul speaks most often to the church, and Christian living, with the cross, and the work of Jesus asa backdrop. Jesus, lived the life, and was the ministry.
A typical pitfall is to think that Jesus was a demi-god. A kind of God Jr. What we witness in Jesus is God. The character and nature of God in manifest in that of Jesus. A bit too much focus is put on behavior modification, in a general sense, rather than Christians imitating Christ, as seen in the gospels. Often the focus of judgement attests to this perspective as well. It's human-devised. What we find is that God is not at all fair.
Good thing too! He is gracious. We can all be happy about that. There will be consequences to choosing our own way, but it's not as if anyone will truly be ignorant of that.
3:48 PM
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