T He S Earch For J Esus
THE SEARCH FOR JESUS
In the 1980s, I attended a lecture given jointly by Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop, the former surgeon general of the United States. At that talk, Schaeffer made a comment that caught me by surprise. He said that the day was coming in the West when the name of Jesus would not be recognized by the average young person; and if it were recognized, not a single historical fact about him would be known. At the time I found his statement a bit hard to swallow and wondered if he had said it just to be provocative. But a generation later, it is appearing to be quite true. I find it rather amazing that the name of Jesus is used quite regularly in profanity not just in the West, but no one would dare use the name of Muhammad in the same way. And of course, no Hindu I know would use the name of any one of their deities with such disrespect.
Why has Jesus met with such response, especially in a culture that has benefited so much from his teaching and ought to know better? The sad reality is that there seems to be very little understanding today of who Jesus is and of what he taught. It is said to be better that a speaker not make an appearance at all than to show up and deliver a bad talk. So it is with knowledge: It is better to have none at all than to have a distortion or perversion of what is a fact. In this slippery slope of the New Spirituality, the numerous voices that have added to the cacophony have created more of a flea market than a reservoir of knowledge. Actually, if many of those within the movement who go under the same banner were to compare their beliefs, they would mutually destroy one another’s assumptions. Odd, isn’t it, that with all their stress in the power of the “now,” they defend it with “ancient wisdom”?
In like manner, there are so many versions of Jesus being offered up that one has to marvel at the numerous possibilities. If one accepted all the plots and machinations of fiction writers creating stories about Mary Magdalene, she would have had to have been supernatural in order to be in all the locations she has been placed, all at the same time. The Jesus of the New Spiritualists is a Jesus of myth, not of fact.