2. History and theology
INTRODUCTION
1. The centrality of Jesus
‘Regardless of what anyone may personally think or believe about him, Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of western culture for almost twenty centuries.’ So wrote Jaroslav Pelikan at the beginning of his wide-ranging book Jesus through the Centuries.1
It seemed appropriate, therefore, that the millennial London Lectures in Contemporary Christianity should be concerned with Jesus Christ, since it is his birthday (whatever its precise date may have been) that we have been celebrating. Consider his dominance in three spheres.
First, Jesus is the centre of history. At least a large proportion of the human race continues to divide history into BC and AD by reference to his birth. In the year 2000 the world population reached 6,000 million, while the estimated number of Christians was 1,700 million or about 28%.2 So nearly one third of the human race professes to follow him.
Secondly, Jesus is the focus of Scripture. The Bible is not a random collection of religious documents. As Jesus himself said, ‘The Scriptures...bear witness to me’ (John 5:39, RSV). And Christian scholars have always recognized this. Jerome, for example, the great church father of the fourth and fifth centuries, wrote that ‘ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ’.3
In the sixteenth century, it is noteworthy that both Erasmus of the Renaissance and Luther of the Reformation emphasized the same centrality of Christ. The Bible ‘will give Christ to you’, wrote Erasmus, ‘in an intimacy so close that he would be less visible to you if he stood before your eyes’.4 Luther similarly, in his Lectures on Romans, was clear that Christ is the key to Scripture. In his gloss on Romans 1:5 he wrote: ‘Here the door is thrown open wide for the understanding of Holy Scripture, that is, that everything must be understood in relation to Christ.’ And later he wrote ‘that the entire Scripture deals only with Christ everywhere’.5
Thirdly, Jesus is the heart of mission. Why is it that some Christians cross land and sea, continents and cultures, as missionaries? What on earth impels them? It is not in order to commend a civilization, an institution or an ideology, but rather a person, Jesus Christ, whom they believe to be unique. This is particularly clear in the Christian mission to the world of Islam. ‘Our task’, wrote scholarly missionary Bishop Stephen Neill, ‘is to go on saying to the Muslim with infinite patience, “Sir, consider Jesus”. We have no other message...It is not the case that the Muslim has seen Jesus of Nazareth and has rejected him; he has never seen him...’6
But those who do see Jesus and surrender to him, acknowledge him to be at the centre of their conversion experience. Take as an example Sadhu Sundar Singh. Born in 1889 into an affluent Sikh family in India, he grew up to hate Christianity as (in his view) a foreign religion. He even expressed his hostility at the age of fifteen, by publicly burning a Gospel. But three days afterwards he was converted through a vision of Christ, and later, though still in his teens, he determined to become a Sadhu, a wandering holy man and preacher.7 On one occasion Sundar Singh visited a Hindu college and was accosted rather aggressively by a lecturer who asked him what he had found in Christianity that he did not have in his old religion. ‘I have Christ’, he replied. ‘Yes, I know’, continued the lecturer impatiently, ‘but what particular principle or doctrine have you found that you did not have before?’ ‘The particular thing I have found’, replied Sundar Singh, ‘is Christ’.8
But which Jesus are we talking about? For the fact is that there are many Jesuses on the overcrowded shelves of the world’s religious markets. Already before the end of the first Christian century the tendency had begun for teachers to create an image of Jesus according to their own whim and fancy. So Paul had to remind the Corinthian Christians that he had betrothed them ‘to one husband, to Christ’, in order that ultimately he might present them ‘as a pure virgin to him’. But he was afraid, he added, lest their minds should be led astray from their ‘sincere and pure devotion to Christ’ (2 Cor. 11:2).
My plan, therefore, is to investigate (in Parts I and IV of this book) the Christ of the New Testament witness, and to consider in church history how some people have presented him (Part II) and how others have been influenced by him (Part III).
To elaborate this, my concern is to ask and answer four basic questions about Christ.
First, how does the New Testament bear witness to him? I hope to show that its testimony to Jesus, although admittedly rich in its diversity, is at the same time recognizedly a united witness. I am calling Part I ‘The original Jesus’.
Secondly, how has the church portrayed Jesus Christ down the centuries? I am calling Part II ‘The ecclesiastical Jesus’, because I want to consider how the church at different times, now faithfully, now unfaithfully, has presented Christ to the world.
Thirdly, what influence has Christ had in history? This third part is complementary to the second, as we move on from the church’s presentation of Christ to Christ’s challenge to the church. Our perspective now, however, will not be the successive stages of church history, but rather the successive stages of Christ’s career, and how each stage (with its different emphasis) has inspired different people. I am calling this part ‘The influential Jesus’.
Fourthly, what should Jesus Christ mean to us today? In Part IV we will remind ourselves that Jesus Christ is not only historical (indeed, a figure of distant history) but eternal (in fact ‘the same yesterday, today and for ever’), and therefore also our contemporary. He confronts every new generation, century and millennium in his roles of Saviour, Lord and Judge. The context for this fourth and final study will be the New Testament’s last book, the book of Revelation, the Christian apocalypse. For in its very first verse it claims to be not primarily a prophecy but ‘the revelation of Jesus Christ’. We will focus on the ten main visions of Christ in the book of Revelation.
This book, therefore, will be a blend of Scripture and history. We will consider the church’s presentation of Christ and Christ’s influence on the church, against the background of the New Testament in general and the book of Revelation in particular. In this way the biblical portrait of Christ is seen to be normative. He is the authentic Jesus by whom all the fallible human pictures of him must be judged. My hope is that these studies in the Bible and church history will be seen to justify my title, The incomparable Christ. There is nobody like him; there never has been, and there never will be.
2. History and theology
Many would advise us to begin our New Testament survey with the letters, not the gospels, since the letters came first. Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians was written from Corinth in or soon after AD 50, only twenty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus, whereas the gospels were published at least a decade or two later. Bishop Paul Barnett has mounted a sustained critique of this tendency to begin with the gospels. ‘The flood of literature attempting to recover the “historical” Jesus has limited its field of enquiry to the Jesus of the gospels; the letters and the early church have generally been ignored.’9
And yet, in its wisdom the early church put the gospels first because, although published later, the events they record took place earlier. Moreover, if read first, we are immediately confronted by the historical figure of Jesus. But is his portrait in the gospels authentically historical?
The twentieth-century emphasis among theological scholars was on the quest of the historical Jesus. The so-called ‘first’ or ‘original’ quest is associated with Albert Schweitzer, whose book of this title was published in 1906.10 It is a monumental survey of all the romantic nineteenth-century ‘Lives of Jesus’. Schweitzer himself portrayed Jesus as an eschatological prophet, whose expectation of an imminent end was never fulfilled. This quest, initiated by Schweitzer, concluded with Bultmann, who belongs to the twentieth century and who claimed that to demonstrate the historicity of Jesus was neither possible nor (if it were) necessary for faith.
So after the Second World War, the new quest of the historical Jesus began. It is usually dated from an address given in 1953 by Ernst Käsemann, a former disciple of Bultmann, entitled ‘The Problem of the Historical Jesus’. He expressed himself dissatisfied with Bultmann’s extreme scepticism. He and other ‘post-Bultmannians’ urged a more positive view of history and tended to regard Jesus as a teaching sage, a religious genius or a social revolutionary – constructions which present Jesus as too tame either to provoke his crucifixion or to launch the worldwide Christian movement.
And now, since the 1980s, some scholars have been heralding the birth of the third quest of the historical Jesus.11 One of its most significant features is that the Christian and Jewish scholars who are involved in it are stressing both the Jewishness of Jesus and his mission to vindicate and restore Israel. This third quest expresses a greater confidence in the reliability of the gospels’ portrait of Jesus.
Such confidence is by no means universal, however, as is evident from ‘The Jesus Seminar’ in the United States. Jointly founded in 1985 by Robert W. Funk and John Dominic Crossan, its seventy-five or so ‘fellows’ have been meeting twice a year in order to assess the authenticity of all the sayings attributed to Jesus. They have used a colour-code, namely red for undoubtedly authentic sayings, pink for those which are probably so, grey for sayings which are not authentic but close, and black for those which are not authentic at all but a later tradition. Their book The Five Gospels: what did Jesus really say? (the fifth being the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas) concluded that in their view ‘82% of the words ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels were not actually spoken by him’. Now they have turned from an examination of the words of Jesus to his works. Their study is not likely to be any more profitable, however, as their criteria are largely subjective.12
Before looking at the gospels ourselves, we need to report a significant shift of emphasis among scholars from history to theology. Whereas ‘form criticism’ was preoccupied with the concerns of the early church, ‘redaction criticism’ is preoccupied rather with the concerns of the individual gospel authors. However strong our conviction may be that they are conscientious historians (as Luke claims in 1:1–4), it is also important to hold that they are evangelists, consciously proclaiming the gospel, and theologians, developing their own distinctive emphasis. This being so, it is clear that the process of divine inspiration did not smother the personality of the human authors. For this is the double authorship of Scripture, that God chose to speak his word through human words. The Holy Spirit selected, fashioned, prepared and equipped the human authors in order to communicate through each a message that is both appropriate and distinctive.