Pondering the Birth/Death of Jesus, the Slave

During the Christmas season, we sing/hear many hymns/carols. In the New Testament, though, there are few hymns. Philippians 2:6~11 is most likely one of those hymns, and there Jesus is referred to as a doulos, the Greek word for slave.

“The Christ Hymn”

The words of Philippians 2:6~11 are often called “the Christ Hymn,” and they are a significant summary of the nature of Jesus Christ’s existence. Verses 6~8 emphasize Jesus’ humiliation and verses 9~11 highlight his exultation.

Even though most English versions of the Bible translate the word doulos (in v. 7) as servant, its primary meaning is slave. And Jesus, the slave, ends up being crucified, which according to Black theologian James Cone is the equivalent of slaves and, later, their descendants during the Jim Crow years being lynched.

Those of us who grew up in evangelical churches, and those who are evangelicals today, see the first three verses mainly as linked to Jesus’ death on the cross as the means of providing atonement for sinful human beings.

Be that as it may, Jesus was crucified as a common criminal by the usual Roman means of capital punishment. Moreover, the Jews of Jesus’ day knew that the Hebrew Bible states that “anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse” (Deuteronomy 21:23).

The last half of “the Christ hymn” emphasizes the inexplicable exaltation of the crucified Jesus. Certainly, both Jesus’ humiliation and his exaltation must be recognized and affirmed. Most of us, though, perhaps fail to grasp the full impact of the ignominy of Jesus’ being “lynched” as a dissident slave.

“The Gospel according to Mary Brown”

In July, a youngish blogger in California posted a long and thought-provoking blog article titled “The Cross and The Lynching Tree by Dr. James Cone.”

On pages 6-7 of his post, the blogger introduces W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Gospel According to Mary Brown” and provides this link to the “Xmas 1919” issue of The Crisis magazine with, scrolling down, to Du Bois’s brief three-page story.  

Du Bois co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909 and long served as the founding editor of The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP.**

In that 101-years-ago issue of The Crisis, Du Bois took the conventional Jesus story and brought it to his Black readers living in the Jim Crow South. He replaced Jesus with Joshua, a black baby born to a single mother (Mary Brown) sharecropping in the rural South.

That re-telling of the narrative about Jesus was consistent with a central point Du Bois had made in his The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and other essays. He condemned “white religion” as an “utter failure.”

As Cone points out in his book mentioned above, for Du Bois, true Christianity is defined by “the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth and the Golden Rule.” But, Du Bois emphasized, “the white church’s treatment of blacks was “sadly at variance with this doctrine” (Cone, pp. 103-4).

As we celebrate Christmas this year—in ways far different from usual because of the covid-19 pandemic—let’s celebrate not only the birth of Jesus as the Savior but also the one who came “to liberate the oppressed” (Luke 4:18, CEB).

In Du Bois’s story of Joshua, “the White Folk” were offended by what he said. They complained, “What do you mean by this talk about all being brothers—do you mean social equality?”

And they also said to Joshua, in Du Bois’s words, “What do you mean by saying God is you-all’s father—is God a nigger?"

These White Folk finally brought Joshua before a judge from the North—but he “washed his hands of the whole matter.” The White crowd then seized Joshua and lynched him.

Since in our land today 100 years later there are still problems of discrimination and oppression because of race and/or class, perhaps this is the “Christmas story” we need to hear and to ponder this week. What do you think?

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** My 9/15/18 blog post was written in honor of Du Bois (1868~1963).

What about the Jefferson Bible?

The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth was written/extracted by Thomas Jefferson and completed in 1820. Long known as “the Jefferson Bible,” a book by that title was published earlier this year to mark the bicentennial of Thomas Jefferson’s 84-page book. 

The Purpose of Jefferson’s Bible

In spite of what many contemporary conservative evangelical Christians emphasize about the early years of the United States, not all of the “forefathers” were pious evangelical Christians.

In particular, many of Thomas Jefferson’s contemporaries thought that he was anti-Christian and perhaps even an atheist.

It seems clear that Jefferson disliked evangelicalism. But it is also clear that he liked Jesus of Nazareth, at least the teachings of Jesus, which he called “a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man” (in a 10/31/1819 letter to William Short, his lifelong mentee).

It is somewhat of a misnomer to refer to “the Jefferson Bible,” for it contains only what Jefferson extracted from the four canonical Gospels.

Jefferson’s intention was to separate “the diamond from the dung hill,” that is, to free Jesus’ lustrous words from the “dross of his biographers.” The resultant book is a short one of seventeen chapters, beginning with Jesus’ birth and ending with his death and burial.

Jefferson’s purpose was to present the teachings of Jesus unencumbered with anything “supernatural.” Thus, for example, there is no inclusion of Jesus’ “virgin birth,” his miracles, or his resurrection.

In passing, it is interesting to note that in 1902 Tolstoy, about whom I posted a blog article on Nov. 20, published The Gospel in Brief, a book similar to Jefferson’s “Bible”—and similarly deleting the “supernatural” elements surrounding Jesus.

The Value of Jefferson’s Bible

As there are many people—and, no doubt, a far higher percentage today than in Jefferson’s time—whose “scientific worldview” prevents them from considering anything that is unproven/unprovable by natural science to be true or real, Jefferson’s Bible can be commended to such people.

Upon recently reading The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth for the first time, I was impressed not by how much was deleted from the canonical Gospels but rather by how much was included from them.

(In spite of hearing about “the Jefferson Bible” for many years, I was happy to purchase a Kindle copy of it, for only 99 cents, and seeing firsthand what it included. The Introduction is by Cyrus Adler, who in 1895 purchased Jefferson’s book for the Smithsonian and published it for the first time.)

The Problem of Jefferson’s Bible

The Jefferson Bible: A Biography, the bicentennial book mentioned above, is by Peter Manseau, a current curator at the Smithsonian. This smallish book by Manseau (b. 1974) is both scholarly and quite readable.

I found “The Quest for the Jeffersonian Jesus,” the third chapter, to be of greatest interest. There the author says that Jefferson rejected “the supernatural, the miraculous, anything suggestive that Jesus might believe the divine things said about him” (p. 66).

Consequently, in Jefferson’s Bible we have “what Jefferson believed to be the words of Jesus, but no real sense of why anyone would have listened to him. With miracles hinted at but never delivered, forgiveness discussed but never offered . . . .”

Manseau then remarks that Jefferson’s book “often has the feeling of a series of jokes without their punch lines” (p 72).

As is true for so many other people and so many other issues, Jefferson was right in what he affirmed (the great significance of Jesus’ teaching) but wrong in what he denied (the “supernatural” referent to Jesus’ life and teaching).

Further, there is little evidence that Jefferson actually sought to live in any marked manner according to the teachings of Jesus included in his book. He certainly did not do that to the extent that Tolstoy did—but that is the same for most of us, even those of us who claim to believe the canonical Gospels.

Should Jesus Be Demoted?

“We must begin by giving Jesus a demotion. He asked for it, he deserves it, we owe him no less.” These words by Robert W. Funk are cited at the head of Chapter Seven of my book The Limits of Liberalism, which I am currently updating and slightly revising. So, what about it? Should Jesus be demoted?

The Traditional/Orthodox Position

Jesus of Nazareth has been a problematic person to many ever since he walked the shores of the Sea of Galilee and was crucified outside the city walls of Jerusalem and, according to his followers, resurrected.

Jesus was a problem for the Jewish religious leaders who thought he was guilty of blasphemy. Jesus was a problem for the Roman political leaders who thought he was probably a dangerous insurrectionist.

Jesus soon became a problem for Christian thinkers as well. There were some who espoused Docetism, the view that Jesus was a divine being who only appeared to be human. That idea was explicitly branded as a heresy by Ignatius (A.D. c.35~107).

Then there was Arius (256~336), who propounded that Jesus was neither fully God nor fully human but rather a type of demigod. His view was labeled a heresy at the Council of Nicaea (325), which concluded that Jesus Christ was both “true” God and a “true” human being.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church  states clearly the orthodox view, which is also held by most traditional Protestants: “He [Jesus] became truly man while remaining truly God. Jesus Christ is true God and true man” (1994 ed., 464). 

The Liberal Position

The traditional view of Jesus has long been called into question by various Christian thinkers.

In contrast to the view of the Catholic Church as well as the Protestant Reformers and most of their followers through the centuries, according to which the primary message about Jesus is his death and resurrection which brings about the atonement of sinful humans, the liberal position emphasizes the life and work of Jesus before his death.

Liberal Christians follow Jesus not because he was “God incarnate,” but because he was and remains an exceptional and exemplary human being. And according to many liberal theologians, the human Jesus was “promoted” to divinity by the faith of the early church.

Robert W. Funk, cited at the beginning of this article, was the well-respected New Testament Scholar who founded the Jesus Seminar in 1985. Funk (1926~2005) made that striking proposal in “Jesus for a New Age,” the epilogue of his book Honest to Jesus (1996, p. 306).

Funk, and many other liberals, seem to think that a choice has to be made: either Jesus Christ must be acknowledged as an eternal divine being or as a “humble Galilean” sage who lived some 2,000 years ago.

But why does it have to be either/or?

The Paradoxical Position

Last week I happened to run across an article by Daniel P. Horan, a youngish (b. 1983) Catholic theologian. His fine piece is titled “The heresy of oversimplified Christianity.”

Horan says well what I have said and taught for decades—but maybe not so clearly. For example, he explains that heresy results from “mistaking part of the truth for the whole truth in a matter of faith or doctrine.”

He then asserts that this explanation “reveals what is so appealing about heresies and why so many Christians inevitably fall for them.” Heretical positions are usually oversimplified and reductionistic statements.

Thus, and these are my words, heresies are always appealing because they are easier to understand and to affirm than the traditional/orthodox position.

To quote Horan again, “The truth is that Christianity is not a religion for those who seek easy answers or black-and-white thinking.” He goes on to assert that “false Christianity promotes ‘either/or’ approaches to faith and morals” whereas “true Christianity has always been a ‘both/and’ tradition.

That is why in Chapter Seven I insist that we don’t have to take an either/or position with reference to Jesus Christ as Funk and many liberals do. As I say there, “Surely our minds can expand to the extent necessary to affirm and embrace a paradoxical view of Jesus Christ as both human and divine.”

TTT #3 God is Fully Revealed in Jesus, but the Christ is not Limited to Jesus

This third article in the series “Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now” (TTT) presupposes the content of the first two articles, but reading those previous pieces about God are not prerequisite for reading this one.

How Can We Know God?

One of the basic assertions of Christianity, especially in its traditional Protestant understanding, is that knowledge of God is not due primarily to human effort. Rather, our knowledge of God results from God taking the initiative to reveal Godself to us humans.

God’s self-revelation took place primarily through Jesus of Nazareth, Christians claim. This means that the universal (God) is known primarily through the particular (Jesus) – an assertion that is sometimes called "the scandal of particularity."

This in stark contrast to the ancient spirituality of India—or to late 20^th century New Age spirituality—which emphasizes that God, or some alternative designation such as the Absolute or the Eternal, is universally available to all persons and which, it is often avowed, exists in all persons.

Is there any way that the emphasis on the particularity of traditional Christianity and the universality of Indian religiosity can be brought together?

Perhaps that is possible by realizing that God is fully revealed in Jesus but that the Christ is not limited to Jesus.

Knowing God through the Logos

The first chapter of the Gospel according to John begins with the affirmation of Jesus as the eternal Word. That term is the English translation of logos, a term pregnant with meaning.  

Greek word logos.

In the Greek world before and during the time of Jesus, logos was considered in somewhat the same way as tao (dao) was in China and dharma in India.

So the first chapter of John begins with this statement of great significance: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

What is most significant, and problematic for many people, is the assertion that follows in verse fourteen: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

From this passage we are told that the universal is known in the particular, the eternal is known in the temporal, and God is made known through a single human being.

Further, John 1:18 states, “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” God is fully revealed in Jesus.

Knowing God apart from Jesus

Is the logos, which can be legitimately called the cosmic Christ, limited to Jesus, though? Probably not. Even in the first chapter of John, there are the enigmatic words about the logos being both life and light, the “true light, which enlightens everyone” (v. 9).

Yes, the Word (Christ) became flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, but that Word is the eternal logos, understood, for example, as the tao in China and as the dharma in India.

The light of the logos/Word has enabled the Chinese to speak of Heaven, the Asian Indians to speak of Brahman, the Native Americans to speak of the Great Spirit.

If the Word is the true light that enlightens everyone in the world, there must be some (or considerable) knowledge of God which is not directly related to Jesus of Nazareth—although indispensably related to the eternal logos/Christ.

Not only is God greater than we think, or even can think, by means of the logos knowledge of God is also broader than most traditional Christians have thought through the years.