Conclusion: Authenticity versus accommodation

Conclusion: Authenticity versus accommodation

Introduction: ‘Another Jesus’

The idea of an ‘ecclesiastical’ Jesus at first hearing sounds preposterous. Was Jesus a ‘churchy’ person? Does the church have some kind of monopoly on him? No. What I am concerned with in this second part is rather the ways in which the church has presented him down the ages, and with the sad fact that it has often imprisoned him in its own prejudices and traditions.

Consider the rebuke which Paul administered to the compromising Corinthian Christians: ‘I am afraid that your thoughts may be corrupted and you may lose your single-hearted devotion to Christ. For if someone comes who proclaims another Jesus, not the Jesus whom we proclaimed...you manage to put up with that well enough’ (2 Cor. 11:3–4, NEB).

‘Another Jesus’. The very expression is provocative and unacceptable. For there is only one authentic Jesus, and that is the Jesus of the apostolic witness in the New Testament. There is no other. Similarly, there is only ‘one Lord’, as there is only ‘one faith’, ‘one hope’ and ‘one baptism’ (Eph. 4:5). Again, although there are many so-called ‘gods’ and many so-called ‘lords’ claiming people’s allegiance, ‘yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live’ (1 Cor. 8:5–6).

Yet the fact is that down the centuries of the Christian era hundreds of different Jesuses have been on offer in the world’s religious supermarkets. Some resonate with contemporary culture, but only by manipulating Scripture. Others are biblically faithful but culturally alien. Yet others in differing degrees succeed in relating to both Scripture and culture. In contrast to the ‘one Lord’ of the diverse yet united witness of the New Testament, the church has displayed a remarkable ingenuity in adapting, shaping and presenting its own images of Christ.

As in Part I of this work I attempted a survey of the New Testament in its variegated testimony to the one Jesus, so, in Part II, I will attempt a survey of church history in its amazingly versatile witness to him.

Mind you, church history is not as amenable to survey treatment as is the New Testament. For the story of the church over two millennia has included too vast a variety of people and movements to encompass them all. All I have been able to do is choose twelve examples of how Jesus has been presented by churches and church leaders down the ages.

Readers may well ask on what basis I have made my selection, since it will seem arbitrary to some. My answer is that, because a comprehensive survey is impossible, I have tried to assemble some of the main movements of thought in the church, and their representatives.

We begin in the second century AD, in the immediate post-apostolic period. One of the firm convictions of the early church at that time was that with Jesus something wonderfully new had begun. He had inaugurated the kingdom of God. He had ushered in the new age. His first recorded words when he began his public ministry were: ‘The time has come; the kingdom of God is upon you’ (Mark 1:15, NEB). Similarly, Paul wrote: ‘When the time had fully come, God sent his Son...’ (Gal. 4:4). And yet in another sense the new beginning was not new, because it had been predicted and promised for centuries. What had happened was the fulfilment of promise. So there was a vital continuity between the so-called Old and New Testaments.

1. Christ the complete fulfilment: Justin Martyr

The prophets and the philosophers

The church father who expressed this sense of fulfilment most forcefully was probably Justin Martyr (c. 100 – c. 165). Justin was born of pagan parents in Samaria. Intellectually precocious, his search for the truth began during his youth. He delved successively into the philosophies of the Stoics, Aristotle, Pythagoras and Plato. But he found neither truth nor peace. Then one day, in God’s good providence, near the sea at Ephesus he met an old man, who introduced him to the Old Testament prophets, and so to Christ.

After his conversion he continued to wear the philosopher’s robe, travelled on foot to a number of leading cities to teach, and founded a Christian school in Rome.

Justin became the greatest Christian apologist of the second century. He resolved to reconcile faith and reason, to harmonize Hebrew scripture and Greek philosophy, and to defend Christianity against misrepresentation and slander. His First Apology was addressed to Emperor Antoninus Pius, and to his adopted son and his successor, Marcus Aurelius. His Second Apology, addressed to the Roman senate, is a short appendix to the First, and was prompted by the unjust persecution of Christians. Justin’s third and longest work is his Dialogue with Trypho a Jew, who was a learned Rabbi. It has been described as ‘the first elaborate exposition of the reasons for regarding Christ as the Messiah of the Old Testament, and the first systematic attempt to exhibit the false position of the Jews in regard to Christianity’.¹ With courtesy and patience Justin witnessed to Christ in all the Scriptures (though resorting sometimes to fanciful allegory), proclaiming the gospel of Christ crucified and risen. He concluded with a moving appeal to Trypho and his friends to believe in Christ: ‘Say no evil thing, my brothers, against him that was crucified...Assent, therefore, and pour no ridicule on the Son of God.’²

In about AD 165 Justin was denounced as a Christian, he refused to offer sacrifice to the gods, and went to a martyr’s death with calm and courage.

‘Jesus Christ the complete fulfilment’ is the phrase I am suggesting as a summary of Justin’s theology. In his First Apology he marshalled many Old Testament prophecies (with a particular fondness for Moses, the Psalms and Isaiah) which pointed to Christ. His knowledge of the Old Testament was phenomenal. But he also believed that at least to some extent Christianity is the embodiment of all that is best in Greek philosophy. So at his conversion, although he renounced paganism, he did not renounce philosophy. How is it, then, that the philosophers came to know the truths they knew? It was partly that (so he claimed) Plato borrowed from Moses and the prophets. But it was also that the divine Logos, who had been in the world from the beginning and became fully incarnate in Jesus Christ, was distributed by the divine Sower everywhere. Thus ‘there seem to be seeds of truth among all men’.³ For example, the Stoics’ moral teaching was admirable ‘on account of the logos spermatikos (rational seed or seed of reason) implanted in every race of men’.⁴ This applies to all the philosophers. ‘For all the writers were able to see realities darkly through the sowing of the implanted seed that was in them.’⁵ In consequence, ‘those who lived in accordance with reason are Christians, even though they were declared godless [in relation to the pagan gods], such as among the Greeks Socrates...and among the barbarians [i.e. non-Greeks] Abraham...Elijah...and many others’. For ‘those who lived by reason, and those who so live now, are Christians...’,⁶ that is, Christians before Christ.

Thus the prophets and the philosophers, though in differing degrees, bore witness to Christ, and what they wrote finds its fulfilment in Christ. One is filled with admiration for the breadth of Justin’s vision, for his determination to claim for Christ everything that is true, wherever it might be found, and for his gracious and generous spirit.

Perhaps then it is ungenerous and ungracious of me to add that I wish he had developed a more obviously biblical basis for his theme. His references to logos (‘word’ or ‘reason’) could well have led him to the Prologue to John’s Gospel. For John 1:9 seems to summarize Justin’s conviction: ‘The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.’ That is, before he ‘came’ in the incarnation, he ‘was coming’, and is coming still, giving light to everybody. It is not saving light (as Justin knew), yet it is light, so that everything beautiful, good and true, wherever found, originates in the Logos, ‘the true light’, Jesus Christ.

2. Christ the unique God-man: the early councils

The importance of Christology

Justin Martyr emphasized that the New Testament was continuous with the Old, and that therefore the gospel was not a novelty. On the contrary, Jesus was the fulfilment of both Scripture and philosophy.

But still Jesus of Nazareth needed to be understood. So for a century and a half during the fourth and fifth centuries church leaders were engaged in serious Christological debate.

Progress towards agreement was charted by what came to be acknowledged as the first four ecumenical councils. They are perhaps best seen in two pairs. Thus the Council of Nicea (325) secured the truth that Jesus is truly God, while the Council of Constantinople (381) secured that Jesus is truly human. Next the Council of Ephesus (431) secured that, although both God and man, Jesus is only one person, while the Council of Chalcedon (451) secured that, although one person, he had two natures, divine and human.

It was a complex development, often marred by unseemly displays of anger, jealousy, malice and political intrigue. Yet at the same time one can detect the patient work of the Holy Spirit, who was enabling the church to get its mind clear on its Christology.

First came the Council of Nicea (325). What made it necessary was the teaching of the presbyter Arius. He was saying that Jesus was not God, although the first and finest of all God’s creatures. He was not eternal, since he had a beginning (‘once he was not’) and even came into being out of nothing. So the Emperor Constantine called a council in order to promote unity and peace. More than two hundred bishops attended, mostly from the east, and many were maimed and scarred from the recent persecutions. The Council condemned Arius, and issued the creed of Nicea (not to be confused with the Nicene Creed), which affirmed that our Lord Jesus Christ was ‘begotten not made’, ‘of the same substance (homoousios) with the Father’. Although some bishops expressed hesitation over this term, since it was not biblical, most accepted it, and the Council won a memorable victory for the full deity of Jesus.

Secondly, the Council of Constantinople (381) was convened by the Emperor Theodosius. The background to this council was the teaching of Apollinarius, who denied that Jesus had a human mind or soul. So now, having reaffirmed against Arius that Jesus was fully God, the Council also affirmed against Apollinarius that he was fully human. But how, in this case, could he be one person? This was the next question.

Thirdly, the Council of Ephesus (431) was called to consider the teaching of Bishop Nestorius of Constantinople. Nestorius was accused of dividing Christ into two persons, namely God the Word and Jesus the man, and of declaring that the man was indwelt by the Word. He was opposed by Cyril of Alexandria who insisted on the incarnation (in distinction to an indwelling). The Word actually became flesh, uniting himself fully with human nature.

Fourthly came the Council of Chalcedon (451), attended by some five hundred bishops, and called to deal with the teaching of Eutyches who fused the humanity and deity of Jesus, so that he had only one nature, the divine. These were the Monophysites (‘one nature’ people); they continue as members of the Coptic Orthodox and Ethiopian Orthodox Churches today. They were opposed by Pope Leo the Great, who was Bishop of Rome 440–461. His famous Tome refuted Eutyches, and was read and approved by the Council. The Council produced the so-called ‘Chalcedonian Definition’, which emphasized that, although one person, Jesus has two distinct natures. It included the following:

We confess with one voice that the one and only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, is perfect in Godhead and perfect in humanity, truly God and truly human...He is of one substance (homoousios) with the Father as God, and also of one substance (homoousios) with us as man...He was begotten of his Father before the ages as God, but in these last days and for our salvation, he was born of Mary the virgin...This one and the same Christ...is made known in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation...

Some Christians today are impatient with what seems to them an argument over words. But several points may be made in response.

First, the church fathers, uncontaminated by our post-modern culture, were profoundly concerned about God’s truth, and saw the need to combat false teachers like Arius, Apollinarius and Eutyches. Would that we had the same zeal for the truth today as they had!

Secondly, they saw that debate about Christology was debate about salvation, for only a Saviour who is fully divine and fully human could represent both sides and reconcile us to God.

Thirdly, they did their work so well that it has lasted. The sixteenth-century Reformers, for example, who engaged in controversy with the Church of Rome over the supremacy and suffiiciency of Scripture, and over justification by faith alone, saw no need to alter the Christological statements of the early centuries. Instead, they endorsed them. Thus the second Anglican Article (1563) reads:

The Son, who is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlasting of the Father, the very and eternal God, and of one substance with the Father, took man’s nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin, of her substance, so that two whole and perfect natures, that is to say, the Godhead and the manhood, were joined together in one person, never to be divided, whereof is one Christ, very God and very man...

Fourthly, the reason why the Reformers were able to endorse this teaching is that they recognized its strong biblical basis. As B. B. Warfield of Princeton wrote: ‘The Chalcedonian Christology...is only a very perfect synthesis of the biblical data.’⁷

Fifthly, although we admire the careful balance of the church fathers in the work of definition, we also acknowledge that we ourselves are finite and fallen, that God in his infinite perfection is altogether beyond us, and that the incarnation is a mystery we shall no doubt continue to explore throughout eternity.

Sixthly, it is both wise and humble to accept the ultimate antinomy without supposing that we can resolve it. Pope Leo wrote in his Tome: ‘Christ is God and Christ is man. The two natures co-exist. Neither nature diminishes anything or adds anything to the properties of the other.’

Nobody has put it better than the great Charles Simeon of Cambridge, who was vicar of Holy Trinity Church for fifty-four years at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and profoundly influenced generations of students. This is what he insisted on: ‘The truth is not in the middle, nor in one extreme; but in both extremes.’⁸ Simeon was speaking about divine sovereignty and human accountability. But his principle is equally applicable to the person of Jesus Christ. He was neither God pretending to be human, nor a human being with divine faculties, nor semi-divine and semi-human, but fully human and fully divine, the unique God-man.

3. Christ the perfect monk: St Benedict

Two questions about monasticism

Mark 8:34 has always seemed to Christians a fundamental and defining text. It is Jesus’ message to would-be disciples: ‘If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.’ Moreover, it is plain that ‘denying self’ and ‘following Christ’ are complementary aspects of the same relationship. In order to follow Christ, we must deny ourselves. But what does this self-denial entail? Does it inevitably involve a monastic life?

The monastic ideal did not originate with Christianity. Hindu ashrams date from before the Christian era, and there were Jewish communities too. It was not surprising, therefore, that some Christians, determined to take Jesus’ teaching seriously, should have experimented with diffierent styles of living as hermits and monks.

It was not until the sixth century, however, that the Christian monastic lifestyle was regularized by St Benedict of Nursia in central Italy (480–550). Sent to Rome to study as a teenager, he was horrified by the degenerate morals of the city, and in reaction withdrew into a cave at Subiaco. Later he founded twelve monastic communities, each with twelve monks and a prior, and ultimately established his own monastery at Monte Cassino between Rome and Naples, where he remained until his death. Here he developed, out of the embryonic rules of other groups, his full-scale ‘Rule of St Benedict’, which won him the epithet ‘patriarch of western monasticism’ and which has been called ‘one of the most influential documents of western civilization’.⁹

One is immediately struck by two qualities possessed by the author of the Rule. First, he had an extremely tidy mind, for the Rule is divided into seventy-three short chapters, each on a diffierent topic, and contains an additional seventy-three one-sentence Christian duties.

Secondly, the author knows his Bible very well, for the Rule is saturated with Scripture.

Its contents cover a wide variety of practical matters, including instructions for the abbot as well as the monks. The abbot is responsible for the discipline of the community, ‘mingling gentleness with severity’ (chapter 2). As for the monks, the emphasis is on humility and obedience. The ‘vice of private ownership’ (chapter 55) is totally rejected, and the monks’ necessary food and clothing are assigned to them by the abbot. The Rule prescribes a not-too-rigorous schedule of worship and silence, reading library books, and manual labour in kitchen or cellar, laundry, garden or bakery. Other duties range from the development of their artistic gifts, the practice of hospitality to strangers, the education of the young, and the care of the sick, the elderly and the poor.

The basic conditions of a monastic life have always been the three vows of poverty, chastity (meaning celibacy) and obedience (to the abbot). And all three, it is claimed, are modelled on Christ who may be regarded as the perfect monk. He lived in poverty, having ‘no place to lay his head’ (Matt. 8:20); he never married; and he said he had come not to do his own will, but to do (i.e. obey) the will of his Father who had sent him (John 6:38).

There is no doubt that we owe a large debt to the monastic tradition. First, it was a radical protest against a wicked world and a corrupt church. It was an expression of the Christian hunger for holiness and of the Christian commitment to self-denial.

Secondly, it kept alive the Christian vision of scholarship, and preserved through its valuable libraries, even in times of barbarism, a distinctively Christian culture.

Thirdly, the medieval monks were missionaries, committed to both evangelism and social concern for the poor. Some of the finest missionaries, like Francis Xavier, were monks. In these respects they maintained a necessary witness. Father Zossima, in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, was right to say that the monks of the Russian Orthodox Church in their solitude ‘keep the image of Christ fair and undefiled’.¹⁰

At the same time, having expressed a genuine appreciation of the gains of monasticism, I feel obliged to ask some questions. Is it either accurate or helpful to depict the Lord Jesus as the model monk? Is it correct to paint the Christian ideal in monastic terms? Because one admires the commitment, zeal and self-denial of Christian monks, one is hesitant to criticize them. Yet we must do so, if we are to be true to the New Testament picture of Jesus.

First, monasticism glorifies withdrawal from the world. Of course, just as Jesus withdrew from his busy public ministry into the mountains to rest and to pray, so his disciples must also, and still do. It is healthy for all Christians to maintain the rhythm of involvement and withdrawal. But a temporary withdrawal from the world, with a view to returning to it, is one thing; a lifestyle of seclusion is another. The essence of the incarnation is that the Son of God entered our world, refusing to remain aloof from it. He also made it clear that he wanted his followers similarly to identify with the world. ‘My prayer’, he said to his Father, ‘is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one’ (John 17:15). Then he said further: ‘As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world’ (John 17:18). So we must not glorify retreat from the world, except temporarily; it could be a denial of the incarnation.

Secondly, monasticism sets up a double standard. It implies that there are two kinds of Christian, first class and second class, or two moral standards, one good and the other better. A supposed biblical basis for this is Matthew’s version of what Jesus said to the rich young ruler: ‘If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor...’ (Matt. 19:21). From this saying was developed the distinction between ‘commandments’ (which are binding on all Christians) and ‘counsels of perfection’ (which are binding on monks). But what the New Testament sets before us is not two standards, one higher or better than the other, but a variety of vocations and ministries, equally good, but diffierent from one another. Some Christians are still called to total voluntary poverty, like the rich young ruler in the Gospel, and like the late Mother Teresa and her sisters today. But the majority of Christians are called to be conscientious and generous stewards of their possessions. As the apostle Peter said to Ananias about his property: ‘Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal?’ (Acts 5:4). Neither of these vocations (poverty and stewardship) is higher than the other.

Or take celibacy. Without doubt, a minority of Christians are called to singleness. Jesus said so (Matt. 19:11–12). So did Paul (1 Cor. 7:1–7). It is not that singleness is superior to marriage, however, or that marriage is superior to singleness. Both are charismata, gifts of God’s grace (1 Cor. 7:7), but some are called to the one, some to the other. This verse 7 is the key to understanding the whole chapter.

To sum up, the Christian paradox applies to all Christians. Only if we serve, will we experience freedom. Only if we lose ourselves in loving, will we find ourselves. Only if we die to our own self-centredness, will we begin to live.

4. Christ the feudal debtor: Anselm

Medieval atonement theology

For several centuries, since Origen in the third century and the Cappadocian Fathers in the fourth, the ‘ransom’ theory of the atonement held sway, namely that sin had put the human race into bondage to the devil, and that Christ has redeemed us by the payment of a ransom-price to the devil. This unacceptable theory was not seriously challenged until Anselm’s great book Cur Deus Homo (‘Why God became Man’). He argued that the debt was payable to God, not the devil.

Anselm was born in Italy in about the year 1033, sojourned for many years in Normandy, came to England after the Norman Conquest in 1066, and succeeded Lanfranc as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093. He was a man of profound learning, clear thinking and personal piety. Cur Deus Homo, his book on the cross, was one of the most influential books about the atonement during the Middle Ages; it changed the church’s thinking. James Denney went so far as to say that it is ‘the truest and greatest book on the Atonement that has ever been written’.¹¹

Anselm began his thinking with the human condition. Sin is ‘not rendering to God what is his due’.¹² It is therefore to ‘take away from God what is his own’ and so to dishonour him. But why should God not simply forgive us, without the necessity of the cross? As the nineteenth-century cynic Heine put it, ‘Le bon Dieu me pardonnera; c’est son métier.’¹³ ‘After all’, an objector might continue, ‘we are required to forgive one another. Why can’t God practise what he preaches and be equally generous?’ Anselm’s reply was straightforward: ‘you have not yet considered the seriousness of sin’.¹⁴ Nor, we might add, have we yet considered the majesty of God. When we have seen God in his holiness, however, and ourselves in our rebellion against him, the appropriate question to ask is not why God finds it difficult to forgive us, but how he finds it possible.

Anselm rejected the patristic ransom-theory on the ground that ‘God owed nothing to the devil but punishment’.¹⁵ Instead, man owed something to God, and this is the debt which had to be repaid. Yet we cannot pay it. The first book ends: ‘Man the sinner owes to God, on account of sin, what he cannot repay, and unless he repays it, he cannot be saved.’¹⁶ So there is only one way out of the dilemma: ‘There is no-one...who can make this satisfaction except God himself...But no-one ought to make it except man; otherwise man does not make satisfaction.’ Therefore ‘it is necessary that one who is God-man should make it’.¹⁷ ‘It is needful that the very same Person who is to make this satisfaction be perfect God and perfect man, since no-one can do it except one who is truly God, and no-one ought to do it except one who is truly man.’¹⁸ Hence the incarnation of God in Christ, who gave himself up to death freely for the honour of God. He is the only Saviour, since in him alone were the ‘man should ’ and the ‘God could ’ united.

The great merits of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo are his strong emphases (1) on the seriousness of sin as inexcusable disobedience to God; (2) on the impossibility of self-salvation; and (3) on the necessity of the incarnation, since no-one ought to make satisfaction except man (who has defaulted) and no-one can except God.

Understandably, however, Anselm has also had his critics. First, he was a medieval scholastic, attempting to reconcile philosophy and theology. Although he was anxious to be submissive to Scripture, his over-riding concern was that his teaching should be ‘agreeable to reason’.¹⁹ Sometimes, therefore, he indulged in speculation, and always he seems to have been governed by cold logic. One misses the fire which Peter Abelard kindled in the twelfth century when he contemplated the love of God in the cross of Christ.

Secondly, Anselm reflects throughout his treatise the feudal culture of his day. Feudalism was a medieval social system of land tenure and personal relationships which involved balancing rights and obligations on the part of both the lord and his vassals. The lord invested the vassal with his fief (land or fee) and undertook to protect him. In return, the vassal did homage to his lord and undertook specific services. A breach of duty by a vassal was regarded as such a heinous offience as to be a felony, and satisfaction would have to be done to his lord’s offiended honour. Is it appropriate, however, to portray God as a feudal overlord who demands honour, and Christ as a feudal debtor who makes satisfaction in our place?

If only we could add Abelard’s passion to Anselm’s logic! If only we could transform Anselm’s image of God from being a feudal overlord, satisfying his personal honour as if he felt offended, into the Holy One who is resolved to satisfy personally his own inner being of love and justice! Then our balance would be more compatible with Scripture itself.

5. Christ the heavenly bridegroom: Bernard of Clairvaux

Christian mysticism

Christian mysticism came to full flower in Europe between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries. It focused on Jesus Christ as the lover, indeed the bridegroom, of the Christian soul, and Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) was the most popular exponent of it.

In spite of a natural shyness, and his constant ill-health due to his austere self-discipline, Bernard was a born leader, endowed with many and varied gifts. He preached and wrote with considerable eloquence, and was strongly committed to the reform of the monasteries. He was nevertheless drawn into ecclesiastical politics and exerted an enormous influence on successive popes, bishops and councils, and on the whole church. During the last two turbulent decades of his life he was widely regarded as ‘the conscience of all Europe’.

At the same time, he was a diligent student of Scripture and an orthodox theologian. Indeed, his Christ-centred message was an essential aspect of his protest against an over-emphasis on the intellect and against the institutionalism and nominalism of the medieval church.

Bernard’s best-known work is probably his Sermons on the Canticle of Canticles. He was by no means the first scholar to develop an allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs. Defending its inclusion in the Old Testament canon, the celebrated Jewish Rabbi Aqiba said: ‘all the Scriptures are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies’.²⁰ There had also been Christian commentaries on the Song by early church fathers, one by Origen in the third century, and another by Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth. But Bernard’s sermons were the most widely read and cherished.²¹ He was known as ‘the mellifluous doctor’, and in Luther’s opinion ‘Bernard surpasses all the other doctors of the church’.²²

During the last eighteen years of his life (1135–1153) Bernard preached eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs, although even then he covered only the first two chapters of the book. In no sense was he writing a commentary, but rather a series of meditations for advanced believers who were ‘ripe for the mystical nuptials of the Heavenly Bridegroom’.²³ His first eight sermons all had the same text, which is the second verse of the Song, namely: ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.’

Needless to say, his treatment of it was a fanciful allegorization. For example, he elaborated three kisses (of the feet, the hand and the mouth), which symbolize three stages of the soul’s progress towards perfection. To kiss Christ’s feet is to prostrate ourselves before him in humble penitence, like Mary in the gospel story. This is the beginning of conversion. To kiss Christ’s hand is to acknowledge that he is the giver of all good gifts, and that our relationship to him is based on his mercy, not on our merit. Few, however, reach the third kiss. This is ‘the supreme kiss’, when with fear and trembling we venture to raise ourselves ‘to that divinely glorious mouth’ and so enjoy the kiss of loving union with God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.²⁴ Summed up in the declaration that ‘my love is mine and I am his’ (2:16), it expresses the ultimate union of the soul with God for which the mystic longs.

Many of us have probably been brought up to believe that Bernard’s personal devotion to Christ was best expressed in his hymns. I am thinking specially of the following: ‘Jesus, the very thought of thee / With sweetness fills the breast’, and ‘Jesus, the very thought is sweet / In that dear name all heart-joys meet’, and

Jesus, thou joy of loving hearts,

Thou fount of life, thou light of men,

From the best bliss that earth imparts

We turn unfilled to thee again.

Although these hymns have been attributed for a long time to Bernard, hymnologists are now telling us that there is no evidence for this attribution. They are content to say simply that the hymns’ Latin originals go back to the twelfth century. But at least an authority like Archbishop Trench could write that, if Bernard did not compose them, ‘it is not easy to guess who could have written them’, for ‘they bear profoundly the stamp of his mind, being only inferior in beauty to his prose’.²⁵

Before we leave Bernard of Clairvaux and his mystical attachment to Christ, we need to ask two questions.

First, what is the nature of Christian mysticism? Because the language of mysticism is used in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Neoplatonism, Judaism and Islam, as well as in Christianity, it is too readily assumed that to be a ‘mystic’ means the same thing in all religions. But this is not so. To be sure, everybody means by ‘mysticism’ some rather ill-defined experience like ‘union with the ultimate’. But there is at least one fundamental difference between eastern mysticism and Christian mysticism. The objective of eastern mystics is to lose their individuality through absorption in the divine, like a drop of water becoming dissolved in the ocean. In Christian mysticism, however, the individual believer retains his or her identity. For God has created us with our own unique individuality, and has redeemed us so that we may become even more, not less, our true selves. Our destiny is not to lose ourselves, but by losing ourselves to find ourselves. To be ‘in Christ’ (a favourite expression of Paul’s) is to be so intimately and organically united to him as to share his life. Jesus prayed that his followers might be ‘one’ just as he and the Father are one (John 17:21–23). But the three persons of the Trinity, although one, are yet eternally distinct.

The second question which needs to be asked is whether it is legitimate to use the Song of Songs as an allegory of the love between Christ and the Christian soul. In general, it is legitimate to use allegory to illustrate, but not to substantiate, a truth. That is, if a doctrine or duty is already established by the plain meaning of a biblical passage, then it is legitimate to use allegory to illustrate this truth. Thus Scripture teaches plainly and often that God and his people are committed to each other in a covenant of love. Therefore it is legitimate to use the Song of Songs, which expresses the love of bridegroom and bride for each other, in order to illustrate this truth.

In particular, the Song of Songs has been individualized too often and made to set forth the private and personal love which unites God and the individual. By contrast, the two prophets of divine love (Hosea and Jeremiah) paint a picture of God’s love for his covenant people. For example, promises like ‘I will betroth you to me for ever’ are not spoken to individuals but to the unfaithful nation (Hos. 2:19). Similarly in the New Testament Paul writes that ‘Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her’ (Eph. 5:25). True, Paul could also write that ‘the Son of God...loved me and gave himself for me’ (Gal. 2:20, my emphasis), but such flashes of individualism are rare, perhaps because of the risk of spiritual eroticism, a risk which – at least in language – the Christian mystics have not always managed to avoid.

6. Christ the ethical exemplar: Thomas à Kempis

An ascetic imitation of Christ

In Thomas à Kempis’s book The Imitation of Christ, immensely popular and universally recommended, we see the late medieval church presenting Christ as the supreme model of Christian discipleship.

Thomas à Kempis was born in 1379 in Kempen (hence his name) in Germany. In 1400, aged twenty-one, he entered an Augustinian convent in the diocese of Cologne and was ordained in 1413. He remained in the same convent all his life, dying as its Superior in 1471, at the age of ninety-one.

He is said to have been shy and studious. He spent his time reading, writing, copying and praying.

In the Foreword to a new English translation of The Imitation of Christ, Dr L. M. J. Delaissé wrote that it ‘has established itself in the course of the centuries, next to the Bible, as the most influential religious book of Christendom’.²⁶

The book’s appeal is probably due to its combination of asceticism and mysticism. Its first two books or sections are devoted to the development of an ascetic holiness. Recurrent themes relate to uprooting vices, resisting temptation, despising worldly vanities, having a humble opinion of oneself, not believing or thinking evil of others, bearing adversity and ‘crosses’, avoiding rash judgments, and preparing for the approach of death.

The third book, however, takes the form of a dialogue between ‘the voice of Christ’; and ‘the voice of the disciple’, in which Thomas sometimes breaks out into passionate expressions of love for Christ. Here is an example from chapter 21:

O thou most sweet spouse of my soul Jesus Christ, thou most pure Lover, Lord of all creation! Who wilt give me the wings of true liberty, that I may fly to a final rest in thee! O when will this spiritual grace be granted unto me, that in quietness of mind I may see how sweet thou art, O Lord my God? When shall I become one with thee? When, because of my ardent love will I no longer be conscious of self, but of thee alone...?²⁷

Then a little later in the same chapter he bursts forth again:

O Jesus, thou brightness of everlasting glory, thou comfort of the pilgrim soul...how long doth my Lord tarry ere he come? Let him come unto me, his poor servant, and make him joyful...Come, O come! for without thee there can be no blissful day or hour; for thou art my joy, and without thee my table is empty...²⁸

Let others seek what they please instead of thee; but as for me, nothing else doth nor shall delight me, but thou only, my God, my hope, my eternal salvation.²⁹

Although Thomas’s love for Jesus and longing for holiness are on the whole kept apart in his book, there are certainly some passages in which the two are integrated. For example, ‘Blessed is he who understandeth what it is to love Jesus, and to despise himself for Jesus’ sake. It behoveth the lover to forsake all things for the Belovèd...’³⁰ Again, ‘when Jesus is present, all is well, and nothing seems diffiicult; but when Jesus is absent, everything is arduous’.³¹ And ‘the noble love of Jesus inspireth us to do great things, and ever impelleth us to long for perfection’.³²

So the goal and the motive are clear – to seek holiness out of love for Christ. It is summed up in one of Thomas’s epigrams: ‘he doeth much that loveth much’.³³ These emphases win our strong support, our profound admiration. Would that all of us who claim to follow Jesus Christ both hungered and thirsted after righteousness, as Thomas did, and were on fire with devotion to Christ, as Thomas was!

It seems churlish and patronizing even tentatively to enter any caveat. Yet it is necessary at least to ask some questions. Was the church right in the late Middle Ages to present Jesus Christ as supremely an ethical exemplar, and the Christian life as an imitation of Christ? Certainly Jesus said ‘follow me’, and Paul wrote: ‘Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ’ (1 Cor. 11:1). So what was missing in Thomas à Kempis’s classic volume? I ask four further questions.

First, had Thomas grasped the essence of the gospel invitation, which is not to do good works in imitation of Christ, but first to put our trust in Christ crucified as our Saviour? He does not seem to have had any assurance of God’s acceptance of him, for he lives in continuous fear of judgment, purgatory and hell. Moreover, his references to the love of Christ are almost entirely to his love for Christ rather than Christ’s love for him. He never quotes the great affiirmations that ‘Christ’s love compels us’ (2 Cor. 5:14) and that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ (Rom. 8:35–39).

Secondly, had Thomas grasped the way of holiness, which is not by imitation of Christ but through union with Christ? It is not I living like Christ, so much as Christ living in me. As James Stalker put it, ‘St Paul’s whole teaching revolves between the two poles of righteousness through the death of Christ for us and holiness through the life of Christ in us.’³⁴

Thirdly, had Thomas grasped the context of Christian ethics? His context, to quote Stalker again, was ‘the little monotonous world of the cloister’.³⁵ But the New Testament context of the Christian life is the noisy, busy, challenging arena of the workplace and the marketplace. True, we are ‘strangers and pilgrims’ on earth (a phrase from 1 Peter 2:11, KJV, which Thomas quotes many times), but this does not necessitate withdrawal, as Thomas assumes. ‘Desire the fellowship of God alone’, he writes, ‘and of his holy angels; and shun the acquaintance of men.’³⁶ Again, ‘flee the press and tumult of the world as much as thou canst’.³⁷ He sees Christians as ‘completely immersed’ not in the world but ‘in God’.³⁸ For in his view ‘the greatest saints avoided the society of man, choosing rather to live unto God in solitude’, and he added ‘as did Jesus’.³⁹ But there is a serious disagreement or misunderstanding here. Jesus did indeed seek solitude for rest and prayer, as we saw when considering monasticism, but only in order to return fortified to the demands of his public ministry.

Fourthly, had Thomas grasped the implications of imitation? The Imitation of Christ is the appealing popular title given to his book, and probably accounts for much of its popularity. But when one begins to read, one is immediately disappointed by his failure to handle the theme as the New Testament does. Virtually the only following of Christ to which Thomas refers is the charge to take up our cross and endure suffiering in imitation of Christ. Where, then, is any reference to imitating the humility of Christ in his incarnation and death (Phil. 2:5–8); to loving others as Christ loved us (Eph. 5:2) and forgiving others as God in Christ has forgiven us (Eph. 4:32); to purifying ourselves as he is pure (1 John. 3:3); to following in his steps in bearing unjust suffering without retaliation (1 Pet. 2:18–21); or to going out into the world in mission, just as he had been sent out by the Father (John. 17:18; 20:21)? These great New Testament themes, which elaborate what it means to imitate Christ, are absent from Thomas’s book, to its considerable impoverishment.

One wishes that Thomas had kept more closely to the teaching of the New Testament and had held together Christ the Saviour and Christ the example (1 Pet. 2:21, 24), Christ for us and Christ in us, and the call to follow Christ both in withdrawal and in involvement.

7. Christ the gracious Saviour: Martin Luther

Justification by faith alone

It is hard for us to grasp in our day the heavy burden of sin and guilt under which medieval church people laboured. They were brought up to concentrate on the wrath of God, the awfulness of judgment and the pains of purgatory and hell. They lived in fear, striving to secure God’s favour by good deeds of righteousness. For this was the teaching of the church.

The early Martin Luther was no exception. Born in 1483, his father was ambitious for him and sent him to both school and university. But all the time he was overwhelmed by a profound spiritual turmoil. Seeing a friend struck dead by lightning, he became gripped with the fear of death and of judgment. So he offered himself without reserve to the service of God and entered an Augustinian monastery, confident that here surely he would be able to save his soul. He prayed and fasted, and adopted other extreme austerities. ‘I was a good monk’, he wrote later. ‘If ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery, it was I.’⁴⁰ But his ascetic regimen tended to increase rather than diminish his torment. He made his confession and did penance. He took the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. He plunged into his theological studies. He was ordained priest. He made a pilgrimage to Rome; and crawled on his knees up the twenty-eight steps of the Scala Sancta. But it was all to no avail. He became disillusioned with the church, convinced that it had lost the keys of the kingdom.

In 1512 Luther became Professor of Bible at the University of Wittenberg. At first his doubts and fears persisted. He determined to appease God, but could find no peace. ‘When I looked for Christ’, he once said, ‘it seemed to me I saw the devil’.⁴¹ This shocking statement reveals the false image of Jesus Christ that he was harbouring, owing to the intensity of his moral struggle. To him at that time Christ was angry not friendly, menacing not merciful, his judge not his saviour. Where might he find a gracious God? That was his anguished cry.

Now Luther turned to the Scriptures. In preparation for his university lectures, he studied the Psalms in 1513–15, and the epistle to the Romans in 1515–16. He became disturbed by the prayer in Psalm 31:1, ‘deliver me in your righteousness’ and by the statement in Romans 1:17 that the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel. If God’s righteousness is his justice, he asked himself, how can it bring salvation or be part of the gospel? Luther wrestled with this question, because he still understood ‘the righteousness of God’ as expressed in punishing the unrighteous. That does not sound like good news!

Night and day I pondered until...I grasped the truth that the righteousness of God is that righteousness whereby, through grace and sheer mercy, he justifies us by faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before ‘the righteousness of God’ had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gateway to heaven.⁴²

Thus Luther’s theology and experience came together. Through the clarified gospel of justification by grace alone in Christ alone through faith alone, Luther discovered that acceptance with God which he had been desperately seeking for years. He had not become an antinomian, as his critics sometimes suggest, declaring that good works do not matter, for he insisted that they are the fruit of faith. Nor was Luther an innovator; he had rather recovered the original apostolic gospel which the church had temporarily lost. He wrote in his commentary on the letter to the Galatians: ‘This is the truth of the gospel. It is also the principal article of all Christian doctrine, wherein the knowledge of all godliness consisteth. Most necessary it is, therefore, that we should know this article well, teach it unto others, and beat it into their heads continually.’⁴³ It is this doctrine, he added, ‘which maketh true Christians indeed’,⁴⁴ for ‘if the article of justification be once lost, then is all true Christian doctrine lost’.⁴⁵

In every generation, therefore, the church needs to re-recover the doctrine of justification. Paul called it ‘the gospel of God’s grace’ (Acts 20:24; cf. Gal. 1:6), and grace is the unmerited, unsolicited love of God. It was seen in its fullest splendour on the cross. It offers salvation to sinners as an absolutely free gift. It therefore leaves no room for human boasting. It gives glory to Jesus Christ alone – to Jesus Christ our gracious Saviour.

8. Christ the human teacher: Ernst Renan and Thomas Jefferson

Enlightenment scepticism

The so-called ‘European Enlightenment’ or ‘Age of Reason’, which flourished during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, constituted a frontal assault on the church’s traditional beliefs. Its avowed intention was to declare the autonomy of the human mind, and so to replace revelation with reason, dogma with science, the supernatural with the natural, and a pessimistic view of the human condition with confidence in both the fundamental goodness of human nature and the consequent inevitability of social progress.

In this general attack on orthodox Christianity, the person of Jesus was not left unscathed. The Enlightenment presentation of him was of a merely human teacher. The most outspoken expression of this is to be found in the ‘Lives of Christ’ which were published from the end of the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries, some eighty of which Albert Schweitzer documented in his famous book, whose English title was The Quest of the Historical Jesus. The radical authors of these ‘Lives’, Schweitzer wrote, ‘were eager to picture him as truly and purely human, to strip from him the robes of splendour with which he had been apparelled, and clothe him once more with the coarse garments in which he had walked in Galilee’.⁴⁶

The most famous Life of Jesus was written by David Friedrich Strauss, and published in two volumes and 1,480 pages when he was only twenty-seven in 1835–36. Schweitzer devotes three chapters to him and declares that, although he was neither the greatest nor the deepest theologian, ‘he was the most absolutely sincere’.⁴⁷ He found that, as a matter of integrity, he could not preach what he had previously believed. He goes through the gospels in great detail, incident by incident and parable by parable, applying his concept of ‘myth’ to them or pronouncing them to be purely legendary, although he did believe in Jesus’ messianic self-consciousness. He became an instant celebrity at the centre of a theological storm, which ruined his career.

Better known to English readers is probably La Vie de Jésus by Ernst Renan (1863). As with Strauss, so with Renan, an outburst of dismay and anger greeted the publication of his Life. With Renan, however, criticism came from both sides. To the orthodox he was a heretic, but to liberals not liberal enough. Yet of his liberalism there is no doubt. Near the beginning of his book he wrote: ‘That the Gospels are in part legendary is evident, since they are full of miracles and of the supernatural.’⁴⁸ Although Jesus believed he was the Messiah, he was no incarnation of God; the gospels are ‘full of errors and misconceptions’;⁴⁹ and instead of a real resurrection, ‘the passion of one possessed [d’une hallucinée, referring to Mary Magdalene] gave to the world a resuscitated God’.⁵⁰

But the reason why Renan’s Vie has also attracted appreciative readers is the evident admiration and even devotion which its author had for Jesus. Renan writes of ‘the sensitive and kindly heart of Jesus’⁵¹ and of ‘his gentle and penetrating genius’.⁵² He writes even of Jesus’ ‘divinity’; but he does not mean it. After recounting his death Renan addresses Jesus personally. ‘Rest now in thy glory, noble initiator. Thy work is completed; thy divinity is established.’⁵³ ‘For thousands of years the world will extol thee...Between thee and God men will no longer distinguish.’⁵⁴

Yet we must not be deceived by this kind of rhetorical tribute. He says so himself. ‘This sublime person...we may call divine, not in the sense that Jesus has absorbed all the divine...but in the sense that Jesus is the one who has caused his fellow-men to make the greatest step towards the divine.’⁵⁵

But in the end he was only a man. ‘Let us place, then, the person of Jesus at the highest summit of human greatness.’⁵⁶ For among the ‘uniform mediocrity’ of mankind, ‘there are pillars that rise towards the sky’. ‘Jesus is the highest of these pillars’.⁵⁷

Here is Renan’s conclusion:

Whatever unexpected phenomena may rise in future, Jesus will not be surpassed. His worship will constantly renew its youth, the tale of his life will cause ceaseless tears, his sufferings will soften the best hearts; and all the ages will proclaim that among the sons of men there is none born who is greater than Jesus.⁵⁸

A particularly striking example of Enlightenment thinking was Thomas Jefferson, chief architect of the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and the third President of the United States (1801–1809). A man of genius, he was simultaneously inventor, architect, farmer, philosopher, statesman, diplomat and founder of the University of Virginia. At the same time he was a freethinker and a deist. Although he revered Jesus for his benevolence and ethical teaching, he rejected miracles as incompatible with nature and reason, and all mysteries like the Trinity. So he was determined to reconstruct a Christianity without dogma and a Jesus without miracles. He wrote:

When we shall have done away the incomprehensible jargon of the Trinitarian arithmetic, that three are one, and one is three...when, in short, we shall have unlearned everything which has been taught since his [Jesus’] day, and got back to the pure and simple doctrines he inculcated, we shall then be truly and worthily his disciples.⁵⁹

Consequently, using scissors and paste, Jefferson twice produced his own edition of the gospels, from which all miracles and mysteries had been eliminated. The first was the work of only two or three nights in the White House, and was entitled The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth (1804). It contained only his moral teaching, grouped in topics. The second so-called ‘Jefferson Bible’ appeared in 1820 and was called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. It contained an outline of his life, ending abruptly with his burial: they ‘rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed’. Those are the last words. There is no mention of the resurrection.

Jefferson claimed that his work was the product of common sense. As with the ‘self-evident’ truths of his Declaration of Independence, so in the teaching of Jesus he regarded it as a simple matter to abstract ‘what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried...the diamond from the dunghill’.⁶⁰ But his mood was one of unwarranted self-confidence, and his criteria largely subjective. While Jefferson’s two reconstructions have perished, the gospels themselves live on.

9. Christ the tragic victim: John Mackay

Good Friday without Easter

Jesus the ethical exemplar belonged to the Middle Ages, Jesus the gracious Saviour to the Reformation, and Jesus the human teacher to the eighteenth century Enlightenment. All three were European. It is time therefore to consider another ecclesiastical portrait of Jesus Christ, which began in Spain but then developed its own indigenous shape throughout Latin America.

In this examination I shall rely on a famous book published in 1932, entitled The Other Spanish Christ. Its author was a Scot, John A. Mackay, who, after studying in Spain and discovering the Iberian soul, spent twenty years as a Presbyterian missionary in Lima, Peru (where he was the first Protestant to hold the Chair of Philosophy in Peru’s National University), in Montevideo, Uruguay and in Mexico City. Later, from 1936 to 1959, John Mackay became the distinguished President of Princeton Theological Seminary.

Mackay’s classic book The Other Spanish Christ: a study in the spiritual history of Spain and South America retells the terrible story of the Spanish conquistadores, who vanquished and colonized the continent’s native peoples by brute force at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

What was the picture of Jesus which Spanish catholicism introduced into Latin America? The Christ who came to Latin America, Mackay replies, was a figure of tragedy. ‘Christ stands before us as the tragic victim.’⁶¹ Spanish religious artists depicted Christ as ‘bruised, livid, bloodless and blood-streaked’, ‘twisted Christs that struggle with death, and recumbent Christs that have succumbed to it...They are the quintessence of unrelieved tragedy’.⁶²

Of one particular picture Mackay writes: ‘he is dead for ever. He has become the incarnation of death itself...This Christ...does not rise again’.⁶³ He then quotes the early twentieth-century existential philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno: ‘this corpse Christ...lies horizontal and stretched out like a plain, without soul and without hope, with closed eyes facing heaven’.⁶⁴ Mackay comments: ‘In Spanish religion Christ has been the centre of a cult of death,’⁶⁵ ‘a Christ known in life as an infant and in death as a corpse, over whose helpless childhood and tragic fate the Virgin Mother presides’.⁶⁶

Similarly, the creole Christ ‘appears almost exclusively in two dramatic roles – the role of the infant in his mother’s arms, and the role of a suffering and bleeding victim. It is the picture of a Christ who was born and died, but who never lived’⁶⁷ and (we might add) never lived again, that is, never rose.

It is surely very striking that about fifty years after John Mackay was in Peru, the late Henri Nouwen paid it a visit, and that both men – the Presbyterian missionary and the Roman Catholic priest – came to the same conclusion. Henri Nouwen wrote in his journal that in Lima’s downtown churches ‘the manifold representation of the suffering Christ became an overwhelming impression’.⁶⁸ ‘But most haunting of all’, Nouwen continued,

was a huge altar surrounded by six niches in which Jesus was portrayed in different states of anguish: bound to a pillar, lying on the ground, sitting on a rock and so on, always naked and covered with blood...Nowhere did I see a sign of the resurrection, nowhere was I reminded of the truth that Christ overcame sin and death, and rose victorious from the grave. All was Good Friday. Easter was absent...The nearly exclusive emphasis on the tortured body of Christ strikes me as a perversion of the Good News into a morbid story that intimidates...people but does not liberate them.⁶⁹

In drawing attention to this popular Latin American portrayal of the impotent Christ, I am not of course suggesting that this is the only picture known to Latin American Christians. For Mackay’s book is deliberately entitled The Other Spanish Christ, in order to show that there is an alternative tradition, even if it has been almost lost. It is the tradition of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystics, whose precursor was the noble Raymond Lull.

Raymond Lull was born in Mallorca in 1236, and as a young man was a pleasure-seeking courtier and soldier. After his conversion, however, three life-goals formed in his mind: (1) to write a definitive book to prove that Christianity is true and Islam false, (2) to found colleges in which the missionary languages could be learned, and (3) to die as a martyr for Christ. He then made three missionary visits to North Africa, when he was fifty-six, seventy and eighty years old. On each occasion he had the courage to proclaim Christ publicly in Arabic in the city square. On the first two occasions he was arrested, imprisoned and banished. On his third visit an infuriated crowd dragged him to the seashore and stoned him to death.

Here is one of his most memorable statements: ‘The image of the crucified Christ is found much rather in men who imitate him in their daily walk than in the crucifix made of wood...He who loves not lives not. He who lives by the Life cannot die.’⁷⁰

Then came the sixteenth-century Spanish mystics, of whom the most famous were San Juan de la Cruz and Santa Teresa de Avila. St John of the Cross is best known for his poems ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’ and ‘A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul’, while St Theresa is remembered for The Way of Perfection and The Interior Castle. Both were ‘great solitary souls’,⁷¹ expressions of Iberian individualism. Both were passionately devoted to Christ, and St Theresa combined the Mary and the Martha. ‘The Lord walks among the pots and pans’, she was fond of saying to her nuns. She regularly wrote of Christ as ‘His Divine Majesty’. Both John and Theresa in their different ways were also rebels against the establishment. Their tradition has been carried on into the twentieth century by Don Miguel de Unamuno, whom Mackay called a ‘saintly Christian rebel’,⁷² and Ricardo Rojas, President of the University of Buenos Aires in the 1920s, author of the provocative book El Cristo Invisibile (1927), and radical critic of Latin American catholicism.

If John Mackay had been writing about Latin America in the second rather than the first half of the twentieth century, he would without doubt have included substantial sections on the rise of liberation theology and on the phenomenal growth both of the pentecostal churches and of the charismatic movement within the mainline churches. These developments are further aspects of The Other Spanish Christ. We will consider pentecostalism now and liberation theology later.

Being now a worldwide phenomenon, pentecostalism must surely be attributed to the work of the Holy Spirit. At the same time, his activity is usually not direct but through current social circumstances. The best analysis is probably still Professor David Martin’s book Tongues of Fire: the explosion of protestantism in Latin America. Against the background of rapid, threatening social change, pentecostalism offers shelter, or what has been called a ‘haven for the masses’, reproducing the closeness and protection of the hacienda (the Latin American ranch). Pentecostalism has four main characteristics: (1) Latin authenticity: it is indigenous (whereas the Roman Catholic priesthood is mainly foreign), enthusiastic and emotional; (2) active participation: it is lay and egalitarian, involving people who were previously voiceless, powerless and marginalized; (3) material blessing: it promises economic betterment, physical healing and freedom from anxiety; and (4) a surrogate family: pentecostalism ‘creates a protective network and reproduces some of the solidarities and the structures of authority found on the hacienda’.⁷³

To sum up, in the disorientation caused by the movement from hacienda to mega-city, and by modernization, pentecostalism offers ‘a hope, a therapy, a community and a network’.⁷⁴ It provides an affirmation of personal worth and dignity, and so the discovery of a new identity.

We have seen, then, in the churches of Latin America, both that there are several different portraits of Christ and that they need each other. We must beware of imbalance. We have no liberty to proclaim the baby Jesus without the life to which his infancy led, nor his life and death without his glorious resurrection, nor the objective historical Jesus without personal devotion to him, nor the traditional, liturgical, respectable worship of him without any charismatic joy or spontaneity. Nor may we overlook the portrait of Jesus the liberator, with his clarion call to liberation, to which we now come.

10. Christ the social liberator: Gustavo Gutierrez

Good news for the poor

Jesus is presented to us in the New Testament as the world’s supreme liberator. There can be no question about this, for he said so himself. ‘If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free’ (John 8:31f.). And Paul wrote to the Galatians: ‘It is for freedom that Christ has set us free’ (Gal. 5:1). So in every era of the church’s history ‘salvation’ has been interpreted in terms of some kind of ‘freedom’.

A quarter of a century ago, however, in the 1970s, the so-called ‘liberation theology’ was developed in Latin America. Its best-known exponents were Rubem Alves (A Theology of Hope, 1969), Gustavo Gutierrez (A Theology of Liberation, 1971) and Hugo Assmann (Oppression-Liberation: a Challenge to Christians, 1972). Orlando Costas distinguished between them by suggesting that ‘if Alves is the prophet of the movement, and Assmann is the apologist, then Gutierrez is the systematic theologian’.⁷⁵

The background to Gustavo Gutierrez’ seminal book, which is sub-titled History, politics and salvation, is the social reality that Latin America is an oppressed continent. Although delivered at the beginning of the nineteenth century from the colonial rule of Spain and Portugal, the Latin American republics were still in political and economic bondage. Professor José Miguez Bonino, who delivered the first London Lectures in 1974 under the title Christians and Marxists: the mutual challenge to revolution, began his later book Revolutionary Theology Comes of Age ⁷⁶ with a brief historical analysis. He pointed out that Christians entered Latin America in two distinct but equally oppressive stages, namely ‘Spanish colonialism (Roman Catholicism) and North Atlantic neo-colonialism (Protestantism)’.⁷⁷ Not that the domination has been entirely from outside, however. Dom Helder Camara, formerly Roman Catholic Archbishop of Recife in North-East Brazil, kept protesting against ‘internal colonialism’, that is, continuing political and economic oppression by Latin America’s own right-wing oligarchies and military governments.

There can be no doubt of the sincere compassion which Gutierrez and his fellow liberationists feel towards the oppressed. He calls the church to ‘a more evangelical, more authentic, more concrete and more efficacious commitment to liberation’.⁷⁸ Several times he quotes with approval Marx’s famous dictum that ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world...the point however is to change it’.⁷⁹ Gutierrez sees the process of liberation and transformation as ‘a quest to satisfy the most fundamental human aspirations – liberty, dignity and the possibility of personal fulfilment for all’.⁸⁰

Defined thus, all Christians should surely be equally committed to liberation. Indeed, those of us who are Protestants may well feel ashamed that we were not in the vanguard of the liberation movement, and that we did not develop an evangelical liberation theology. For we believe that God made man male and female in his own image; that human beings, being God-like beings, have an intrinsic value, on account of which they must be served, not exploited; and that we should set ourselves in Christ’s name against all dehumanizing tendencies, against anything and everything which impedes human freedom and fulfilment.

This raises an immediate question. The original liberation theology was addressed to socio-political and economic oppression. But since then other liberation theologies have arisen. There is Dalit theology, addressing the issue of caste among India’s ‘untouchables’; black theology in the United States and Africa, addressing the issue of race; feminist theology, addressing the issue of gender; and the theology of gay liberation, addressing the issue of sexual orientation.⁸¹ Political correctness insists that they are all equally valid, and that no discrimination should be permitted in regard to caste, race, gender or sexual orientation.

The Christian perspective, however, is different. True, as Paul wrote, ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal. 3:28). This text is a charter of Christian freedom, but it must be carefully and conscientiously interpreted. It affirms that, in our relationship to Christ by faith, ethnic, social and sexual distinctions are irrelevant. We are equal in value and dignity before him. These distinctions have not been abolished, however. Our ethnic origin is still an essential part of our identity. Also men are still men, and women women, and have different sexual functions and roles.

So we need to redefine liberation. It is intended to secure our freedom from anything and everything which inhibits human beings from being what God by creation and redemption intends them to be – which will include marriage as the heterosexual, monogamous, loving and lifelong partnership which God instituted and Jesus Christ endorsed.

Another notable feature of liberation theology is its emphasis on praxis as ‘a new way to do theology’.⁸² The first step in ‘doing theology’, Gutierrez maintains, is not to open the Bible, but to make a serious commitment to the struggle for liberation. Thus the first text to be studied is not a biblical but a social text, namely the surrounding reality and our experience of it. Only then are we ready for the second step, namely biblical study. Theology is therefore defined as ‘a critical reflection on Christian praxis in the light of the Word’.⁸³ And the essential context for taking both steps is ‘base ecclesial communities’, that is, grassroots groups of ordinary Christians.

Without doubt many have found this process both illuminating and challenging. Nevertheless, it may be questioned whether the two steps must invariably be taken in the same order, provided that the Word and the world engage creatively with one another. Indeed, it may be that by beginning with a serious study of social reality, the serious study of the biblical text has been neglected. Andrew Kirk complains of this: ‘None of our authors has undertaken an exegetical study of the (popular) passages...Most of them make no attempt to verify exegetically the correctness of either their method or their use of the text.’⁸⁴

This is particularly clear when one considers the liberationists’ use of the exodus theme. They regard it as a paradigm for any and every rescue from oppression, with no adequate recognition that the exodus of Israel from Egyptian bondage was sui generis. Not only was it a mighty act of God (by his ‘strong right arm’), but it took place in fulfilment of God’s remembered covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Exod. 2:24) and in preparation for its renewal at Mount Sinai (Exod. 19:4–6).

The same hermeneutical looseness is seen in relation to the vocabulary of salvation. Gutierrez does acknowledge the difference between salvation (from sin and death) and liberation (from poverty and oppression), but probably not clearly enough. One complaint about this has come from an unexpected source, namely Bishop K. H. Ting of Shanghai, for many years President of the China Christian Council. When introducing liberation theology to the students of Nanjing Seminary in 1985, he said: ‘Liberation theology is such a good thing that it hurts us not to be able to endorse it in its entirety.’ But ‘the eternal theme of Christianity and its theology should not be political...but should rather be reconciliation of humanity with God...Reconciliation between God and humanity is the eternal theme of Christian theology’.⁸⁵

Further clarification of this issue remains crucial. William H. Lazareth, who wrote the Introduction to Bonino’s book Revolutionary Theology Comes of Age, found it necessary to ask these questions:

The decisive issue for liberation theology is the relation of Christian freedom to political liberty. By what apostolic authority may we conflate liberation from sin, death and the demonic with liberation from injustice, oppression and poverty? In more personal terms, how do we relate the first-century activities of Jesus and Paul with the twentieth-century activities of Che Guevara and Camilo Torres? Are they similar, repetitious, distinguishable or unrelated?⁸⁶

For myself I am glad that the Lausanne Covenant (1974) spoke forthrightly about this matter. Here is paragraph five entitled ‘Christian Social Responsibility’:

We affirm that God is both the Creator and the Judge of all men. We therefore should share his concern for justice and reconciliation throughout human society and for the liberation of men from every kind of oppression. Because mankind is made in the image of God, every person, regardless of race, religion, colour, culture, class, sex or age, has an intrinsic dignity because of which he should be respected and served, not exploited. Here too we express penitence both for our neglect and for having sometimes regarded evangelism and social concern as mutually exclusive. Although reconciliation with man is not reconciliation with God, nor is social action evangelism, nor is political liberation salvation, nevertheless we affirm that evangelism and socio-political involvement are both part of our Christian duty. For both are necessary expressions of our doctrines of God and man, our love for our neighbour and our obedience to Jesus Christ...⁸⁷

We must now return to Jesus the liberator, and to the conviction of idealistic young people that he is the champion of the poor and the oppressed. When Salvador Allende, the Marxist President of Chile, fell in 1973, a large mass for Marxist students was held in Quito, Ecuador. The preacher was Leonides Proaño, Bishop of Riobamba, who, although known as obispo rojo (the red bishop), was not in fact a Marxist, for he insisted that the motivation for his ministry was not Karl Marx but Jesus Christ, who identified with the poor. So at the mass for Allende he proclaimed the authentic and compassionate Jesus, Jesus the critic of the establishment, the radical Jesus of the gospels. During the question-time which followed, the students responded: ‘If we had only known this Jesus, we would never have become Marxists.’

11. Christ the Jewish Messiah: N. T. Wright

Exile and exodus

One of the first heretical movements to arise in the early church was Docetism, the belief that the humanity, sufferings and death of Jesus were only apparent (from dokein, to seem) and not real. Based on the Greek view that matter was evil, docetists denied the genuine humanity of Jesus, and therefore both the incarnation and the atonement. The apostle John saw the seriousness of this teaching and confronted it in both his gospel and his letters. ‘Many deceivers have gone out into the world’, he wrote, ‘who do not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh; any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist!’ (2 John 7, REB).

Some people in our day are guilty of the same heresy without realizing it. They know that nowadays it is more often the deity than the humanity of Jesus which is denied. So they give their time and energy to marshalling the evidence for his deity until in the process he is no longer an authentic human being.

Since Jesus was a human being, however, he was also a historical figure, who lived at a particular time in a particular place and within a particular culture. These particularities were all part of his historical reality. To deny them would be to reject some essential aspects of his identity.

In 1937 the Harvard scholar Henry J. Cadbury produced his book The Peril of Modernizing Jesus. He pointed out that the great Italian and Dutch masters ‘plainly can make no claim to Palestinian verisimilitude’. They do not even try. Instead they modernize their figures. Thus, Adam is depicted in a luxuriantly Flemish Garden of Eden, Delilah cuts off Samson’s hair with embossed silver shears, and Mary Magdalene wears a Flemish headdress, while all the time the background is either ‘the Italian campagna or the polders of Holland’.⁸⁸ In contrast, writes Cadbury, the aim of his book was ‘to minimize the modernness of Jesus’, while at the same time recognizing his originality and not going to the opposite extreme, so that we ‘over-archaize him’.⁸⁹ His third chapter is entitled ‘The Jewishness of the gospels’, in which he emphasizes the Jewishness of Jesus himself. For our tendency is to forget Jesus’ first-century Palestinian context and to create a Jesus in our own likeness and to our own liking. We do to him what Pilate’s soldiers did when they stripped him of his own clothes, put on him a scarlet military cloak, and mocked him. ‘The soldiers put on Jesus their own kind of clothes.’⁹⁰ We tend to do the same thing in our day. We clothe him with ‘our own thoughts’.⁹¹

It is in relation to the Jewishness of Jesus that I would like to refer to the work of a contemporary theologian, Dr Tom Wright.⁹² He is a New Testament scholar of great ability, who has written both academic and popular books. He is also a doughty champion of Christian orthodoxy over against (for example) the radical reductionism of the ‘Jesus Seminar’.

Dr Wright’s main emphasis is that Jesus must be located within his context of first-century Palestinian Judaism; and his main hypothesis is that Israel’s Babylonian captivity (beginning in 587 BC), although it ended geographically later in the sixth century, was continuing theologically in the first century AD. Israel was still under foreign domination. But now, at long last, the Messiah would rescue them in a new exodus, which would be the climax of history.

So Jesus, in proclaiming the arrival of the kingdom, was also announcing the end of the exile. His message was quite different from the popular options, however. These were (1) the Qumran option of separatism and quietism, (2) the King Herod option of political compromise, and (3) the Zealot option of violent revolution.

Instead of these, as Jesus walked from village to village, he summoned the people to repent (i.e. to reject the other options) and to accept his radical counter-agenda (i.e. the kingdom way of non-retaliation, mercy and love for the enemy). Thus Israel was being redefined and reconstituted, with the twelve apostles as its nucleus, and with Jesus as its centre.

Jesus’ gift of forgiveness showed that the exile (the penalty of sin) was over. His healing miracles, ridding people of the disabilities (blindness, deafness, etc.) which would have excluded them from the Qumran community, showed that the kingdom community would be characterized by a basic inclusiveness. His welcoming of social outcasts and eating with them showed that the messianic banquet had begun. Further, his kingdom people must give up their preoccupation with their own identity and accept instead their vocation to be the light of the world. Through Jesus Israel would be renewed; through renewed Israel the world would be blessed.

Did Jesus then believe himself to be the Messiah? Yes, according to Dr Wright, who goes into great detail about the messianic implications of various texts. In particular he stresses two complementary symbolic actions, which Jesus performed deliberately, and ‘which encapsulated his whole work and agenda’.⁹³

First, Jesus cleansed the temple, indicating both that the present corrupt system was ripe for judgment and that he would replace it, so that in future God’s personal presence would be found wherever he and his people were.

Secondly, the last supper was the new Passover meal, the kingdom-feast celebrating the end of the exile, the true exodus and the new covenant.

But the Messiah was also expected to fight the final battle against the enemy. This expectation Jesus also transformed. He would overthrow evil not by violence but by non-violence, by turning the other cheek. He saw the cross as the climax of his vocation to identify with Israel, to take upon himself the judgment that was threatening the nation, and to bear Israel’s sufferings as her representative. He was vindicated as Messiah by the resurrection.

Did Jesus also believe that he was in some sense divine? To this question Dr Wright gives an ambivalent answer. At one point he writes bluntly ‘I do not think Jesus “knew he was God”.’⁹⁴ But this statement comes in the middle of a section about different kinds of ‘knowledge’. He goes on to write that Jesus ‘believed he had to do and be, for Israel and the world, that which according to Scripture only Yahweh himself could do and be’.⁹⁵ Thus, in the new exodus he was not merely the new Moses but the pillar of cloud and fire, leading the people to freedom; and now his last journey to Jerusalem, culminating in the triumphal entry, seems to have been a staged fulfilment of the expectation that one day after the exile Yahweh would return to Zion. In claiming to be the new temple, Jesus was implying that he was the Shekinah⁹⁶ in person, the presence of Yahweh among his people. Jesus also claimed a teaching authority superior even to Torah, making him ‘not a new Moses but, in some sense or other, a new Yahweh’.⁹⁷ Or summing up, Dr Wright says: ‘Jesus...would embody in himself the returning and redeeming action of the covenant God.’⁹⁸ How could he advance these claims to divine authority and action, and not believe that he was God?

It is no doubt absurd to attempt to summarize in a paragraph or two the closely reasoned argument of several books. I am also conscious that I have not expressed sufficient appreciation of the comprehensiveness, freshness and reverence with which Dr Wright has developed his thesis. Yet not all scholars have felt able to accept his reconstruction. The debate will certainly continue. I have only a few questions to ask:

First, is it certain that the exile-exodus theme was central both to first-century Palestinian Judaism and to the understanding of Jesus?

Secondly, we are not told how Jesus came to learn who he was. Nor can we pry into his self-consciousness. But is it necessary, in the interest of maintaining his real humanness, to hold back from saying that he knew who he was? He certainly claimed divine authority to forgive, to teach and to judge.

Thirdly, fine things are said about the crucified Messiah as the representative of Israel, and about the cross as the truest window into the very heart of the loving God. Dr Wright also distinguishes clearly between ‘historical’ and ‘theological’ answers to the question why Jesus died. Nevertheless, I miss more than a passing glance at the crucial ransom-saying (Mark 10:45).

Fourthly, Tom Wright alludes many times to the climax and consummation of history. But he reverses the direction of Christ’s ‘coming’ from ‘a downward cloud-borne movement’ to his exaltation from earth to heaven, involving his vindication.⁹⁹ Does this mean that the personal, visible and glorious parousia of Jesus Christ has been completely dissolved into apocalyptic imagery?

To conclude, I appreciate Dr Wright’s determination to break down the barriers between the academy and the church, and his passionate commitment to mission. He writes of the opportunity for ‘serious and joyful Christian mission to the post-postmodern world’.¹⁰⁰

It is to the topic of mission that we turn next.

12. Christ the global Lord: Mission in the twentieth century

From Edinburgh 1910 to Lausanne 1974

It was the risen Jesus who made the great claim that all authority had been given to him in heaven and on earth (Matt. 28:18). In consequence, the church has always borne witness to his universal lordship. For God has super-exalted him, and given him the name above every other name (that is, the rank beyond every other rank), in order that every knee should bow to him and every tongue confess him ‘Lord’ (Phil. 2:9–11). This is the fundamental basis of the world-wide mission of the church, as has been well illustrated in the twentieth century.

In 1910 the World Missionary Conference was convened in Edinburgh, under the chairmanship of John R. Mott. It had been carefully prepared for over a period of eighteen months by eight international commissions, whose printed reports had been read in advance by the 1,200 or so delegates. John Mott himself claimed that in its plan, personnel, spirit and promise it was ‘the most significant gathering ever held in the interest of the world’s evangelization’.¹⁰¹

John Mott’s book, The Decisive Hour of Christian Missions, exudes the euphoria that had been generated during the conference. In the light of spiritual awakenings in South East Asia, mass movements in India, the rapid progress of the gospel in Africa, the weakening hold of other religions and ‘the rising spiritual tide in the non-Christian world’,¹⁰² Mott wrote of ‘abundant ground for hopefulness and confidence’.¹⁰³ Indeed, ‘the way is unmistakably being prepared for the acceptance of Christianity by large masses of the people in many lands’.¹⁰⁴ And using what we would regard as an unfortunate military metaphor, Mott continued: ‘On the world-wide battlefield of Christianity...victory is assured...’¹⁰⁵

The delegates left Edinburgh elated and inspired. They were under no illusions about the immensity of the task. They knew that there were still about 1,000 million non-Christians in the world, no more than one-fifth of whom had heard clearly about Christ. But they were determined. They agreed with John Mott that ‘it is the church’s duty to see that this long-standing reproach is completely removed’.¹⁰⁶ Also, ‘it is high time that the church deliberately and resolutely attack some of the hitherto almost impregnable fortresses’.¹⁰⁷ They believed (somewhat naïvely) that under the influence of Christ other religions would gradually disappear, like the old gods of Greece and Rome.

Who could have guessed that within the next few years this missionary emphasis would have evaporated almost entirely? There were two main reasons. First came the horrors of the First World War in 1914. Not only were Christians divided by the conflict, but almost all international enterprises were put on hold. And when post-war reconstruction began, the world had changed and moved on.

Secondly, the spread of liberal theology between the wars called into question the content of the gospel and undermined people’s confidence in it. This was very evident at the next two missionary conferences – at Jerusalem (1928) and Tambaram outside Madras (1938). Whereas at Edinburgh the mood had been confident, at Jerusalem and Tambaram it was largely diffident and hesitant.

At Jerusalem (1928) a comparatively small group of about 200 gathered, although it was notable that about fifty of them belonged to what were now called the ‘younger’ churches. Their broad agenda therefore included relations between the older and the younger churches, in addition to such topics as race relations, urban and rural questions, religious education and the menace of secularism. Theologically, relativism reigned. Christianity could no longer be regarded as either unique or final. William Temple saved the conference from disaster by drafting the ‘Message’, which included the epigram about the gospel that ‘either it is true for all, or it is not true at all’.

The World Missionary Conference at Tambaram (1938) brought about 500 delegates together, and the representatives of the younger churches were equal in numbers to, and on an equal footing with, those from the older churches. But the most noteworthy feature of Tambaram was the sharp encounter between William E. Hocking and Hendrik Kraemer. Hocking was Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. His book Re-thinking Missions had been published in 1932, so that conference participants had had time to peruse it. In it the old missionary certainties had gone. So had any exclusive claim for Christ. Seeking conversions was frowned upon, and should be replaced by seeking the best in all religions. The ultimate goal of mission was said to be the emergence of a world fellowship of faiths.

Hocking’s sparring partner at Tambaram was Hendrik Kraemer, a Dutch Reformed layman and seasoned linguist-missionary in Indonesia. He had been invited to write a book for the conference. It was published in 1938 under the title The Christian Message in a non-Christian World. Influenced by Karl Barth (whose assault on liberalism in his commentary on Romans had appeared in 1919), he defended what he called ‘biblical realism’. He maintained that there was a radical discontinuity between God’s unique revelation in Jesus Christ and all human religion.

This debate continues today and has by no means been resolved. A year after Tambaram, the Second World War broke out, and again ecumenical relationships were largely suspended until it was over. Then in 1948 the first assembly of the World Council of Churches took place in Amsterdam, and in 1961, at its third assembly in New Delhi, the World Council of Churches and the International Missionary Council were amalgamated. Assurances were given that the merger would bring mission to the forefront of the World Council’s agenda. But this has not happened. Instead, the World Council has continued to drift away from the biblical gospel.

Not that all conciliar leaders have followed. For example, Visser’t Hooft, the first General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, wrote in his book No Other Name: ‘It is high time that Christians should rediscover that the very heart of their faith is that Jesus Christ did not come to make a contribution to the religious storehouse of mankind, but that in him God reconciled the world to himself.’¹⁰⁸

More striking still is this forthright statement by the late Bishop Lesslie Newbigin:

The contemporary embarrassment about the missionary movement of the previous century is not, as we like to think, evidence that we have become more humble. It is, I fear, much more clearly evidence of a shift in belief. It is evidence that we are less ready to affirm the uniqueness, the centrality, the decisiveness of Jesus Christ as universal Lord and Saviour, the Way by following whom the world is to find its true goal, the Truth by which every other claim to truth is to be tested, the Life in whom alone life in its fulness is to be found.¹⁰⁹

The fact is that during the last quarter of the twentieth century the missionary initiative passed from the World Council to the Lausanne movement, which was launched by Dr Billy Graham. The International Congress on World Evangelization was held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974. Some 2,700 participants (50% from the developing world) came together from 150 nations, and after nine days of hectic activity endorsed the Lausanne Covenant which, according to a theologian from Asia, may prove to be ‘the most significant ecumenical confession on evangelism that the church has ever produced’. It is all the more important because its background is that of ‘pluralism’ which insists on the equal legitimacy of every religion.

The Covenant consists of fifteen paragraphs, and I quote here from the third paragraph on ‘The Uniqueness and Universality of Christ’. This is how the church proclaims ‘Jesus Christ the global Lord’:

We affirm that there is only one Saviour and only one Gospel...We recognize that all men have some knowledge of God through his general revelation in nature. But we deny that this can save, for men suppress the truth by their unrighteousness. We also reject as derogatory to Christ and the Gospel every kind of syncretism and dialogue which implies that Christ speaks equally through all religions and ideologies. Jesus Christ, being himself the only God-man, who gave himself as the only ransom for sinners, is the only mediator between God and man. There is no other name by which we must be saved...Jesus Christ has been exalted above every other name; we long for the day when every knee shall bow to him and every tongue shall confess him Lord.¹¹⁰

Conclusion: Authenticity versus accommodation

We have made a rapid – and inevitably selective – survey of church history, considering a dozen of its influential movements and their leaders. Have you not been astonished by the church’s extraordinary versatility, as it has painted and repainted the portrait of Jesus?

In doing so, the church’s motives have been mixed. It is good to present Jesus in the best possible light, so as to commend him to the world. But it is not good, in order to do so, to eliminate from the portrait everything that might offend, including the offence of the cross. This is to pander to Christianity’s ‘cultured despisers’, as Schleiermacher called them. There is always a price to pay for this kind of feeble-minded accommodation. Jesus is wrenched out of his original context. He becomes manipulated and domesticated, and what is then presented to the world is an anachronism, even a caricature.

How can we avoid making this mistake ourselves? How can we present Jesus Christ to the world in a way that is simultaneously authentic and relevant? A double discipline seems to be needed, negative and positive. The negative is to rid our minds of all preconceptions and prejudices, and resolutely to renounce any attempt to force Jesus into our pre-determined mould. In other words we must repent of Christian ‘procrusteanism’. Procrustes, in Greek mythology, was a brutal robber who compelled his victims to fit the dimensions of his iron bed. If they were too short, he stretched them. If they were too long, he chopped off their feet. The Christian ‘Procrustes’ exhibits a similar inflexibility, forcing Jesus into his way of thinking and resorting to ruthless measures in order to secure his conformity. From Procrustes and all his disciples, good Lord deliver us!

The positive counterpart follows. We have to open our minds and hearts to whatever the biblical text gives us, and to listen to the witness of the whole New Testament to Christ, as we tried to in Part I. For the authentic Jesus is the original Jesus, the Jesus of the apostolic testimony in the New Testament. Much as we may admire the creative versatility of the church’s many presentations of Jesus, we must keep returning to the New Testament pictures as the norm by which the church’s portraits must be judged.

C. S. Lewis saw an analogy here with the appreciation of art. He wrote: ‘We must look, and go on looking, till we have certainly seen exactly what is there. We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.’¹¹¹

This double discipline is never more necessary than in evangelism. For often it is not that people have rejected Christ, but that they have rejected a pseudo-Christ. Dr Peter Kuzmic, President of the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Osijek, Yugoslavia, has put it in this way:

We must renew the credibility of the Christian mission. Missions and evangelism are not primarily a question of methodology, money, management and numbers, but rather a question of authenticity, credibility and spiritual power...In going out to evangelize in Yugoslavia, I frequently tell our seminary students that our main task may be simply to ‘wash the face of Jesus’, for it has been dirtied and distorted by both the compromises of institutional Christianity through the centuries and the antagonistic propaganda of atheistic communism in recent decades.¹¹²

So by close attention to the witness of the New Testament, and in the interest of authentic evangelism, hopefully our vision of Christ will continue to clarify. At all events, however blurred and distorted our image of him may still be now, we have been promised that when Christ appears in glory ‘we shall see him as he is’ (1 John 3:2), the authentic, the incomparable Christ.

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