Welcome to the Summer 2006 study for the Koinonia Class of Calvary Baptist Church, Denver, Colorado. We’re looking at the issue of Jesus and Salvation, using the book “Is Jesus The Only Savior” [James R. Edwards, Is Jesus The Only Savior? (Grand Rapids/Cambridge: 2005)]. We encourage each person to buy a copy and follow along.
The Search for an “Acceptable Jesus”
When you see a magazine article or a television program about Jesus (usually at Christmas or Easter) it will almost certainly be a “Jesus” who is acceptable in secular circles—not the Jesus you read about in the Bible. The Jesus of the Bible and of Christian tradition is an affront to the secular multiculturalism and moral relativism which is dominant among opinion leaders in 21st Century America and Europe.
The “acceptable Jesus” will be a wise man, a teacher, a miracle-worker maybe, a social prophet definitely—in short, a man. He may even be married and have children (as in “The DaVinci Code”). He will not be the Savior of the world or the Son of God.
As Edwards says in Chapter One (page 9), “The Jesus who interests the modern world is Jesus as a spiritual personality who is recoverable by scholars, historians, and social scientists, not the Jesus proclaimed from pulpits. The ‘Sunday Jesus’ is suspected of having been tarnished by legend and dogma.”
Over the past 200 years or so there have been three rounds of a “quest for the historical Jesus”-- what was supposed as the “real” Jesus instead of the figure the church came to proclaim as the Christ, the Savior of the world.
The first quest is seen in Albert Schweitzer’s book written about 1910, “Quest of the Historical Jesus”, which summed up the liberal approach in over 100 years of debate. It separates the “Christ of the church” from the “Enlightenment Jesus”—who by the scholars’ methodology was stripped of anything supernatural.
The second quest (taking place in the early to mid 20th Century) tried to get beyond the “myths” that they saw as a projection of the beliefs of the church, and through a study of the forms of oral tradition discover what the church believed. That was because they felt we can’t know anything about who Jesus actually was.
Edwards summarized what the 2nd Quest scholars believed like this: “The early church transposed its views onto Jesus in the four Gospels, and thus the Gospels tell us not who Jesus was, but what the church believed him to be. In so doing, the hypothesis concludes, the early church obscured for the most part the real Jesus from historical recovery.”
The third quest (since the late 1980’s) is seen primarily in the proponents and the critics of “The Jesus Seminar” (which is the subject of Chapter 2, so we’ll get to more of that later). For now, I’ll just quote Edwards (page 20): “The chief invention of the Third Quest is the attempt to understand the historical Jesus through the lenses of the social sciences, cross-cultural anthropology, and the ideology of liberation.” The Jesus Seminar scholars are not as interested in what Jesus taught, as in what the cultural conditions were that influenced Jesus.
The common assumption that led to radical results in all three quests is that of the philosophy of Naturalism. That is, "the rules of the game” require that “all events must be accounted for by natural causes rather than by supernatural ones…”. Reason and Rationalism could supposedly lead us to the truth that faith and religious authority had obscured.
However, there was one problem—the scholars’ reasoning started with an assumption that pre-determined the end result. If the Deistic god of the Enlightenment would not intrude into history, then obviously Jesus could not have come from God. Jesus’ life and his effect on others must be explained away as due to some cause other than what the Bible claimed.
As we shall see in the next chapter on The Jesus Seminar, though, the only way an “acceptable Jesus” can be obtained is to radically excise those parts of the New Testament that don’t fit the desired outcome.
The New Testament (as taught in 2000 years of orthodox Christianity) may not present an “acceptable Jesus”; but Truth often confronts us with what we don’t wish to accept. In the end, though, Truth is more satisfying than political correctness. Truth afflicts the comfortable even as it comforts the afflicted.
No comments:
Post a Comment