Searching for God # 125

 In one of his penetrating, provocative and challenging essays entitled, ‘If Jesus Came Back, Who Would He Confront,’ Jim Palmer, former Episcopal priest and adjunct professor of religion and culture, writes: 

The question is not whether Christianity believes in Jesus. The question is whether Jesus would believe in the Christianity that now bears his name. If that question feels offensive, perhaps it’s worth asking why. 

Here are ten things Jesus would have something to say about. 

1. His vision for a transformed world became an afterlife religion. Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God as a radically different way of living here and now, where justice, compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation reshape human life. Yet much of Christianity redirected that vision toward escaping earth for heaven. The focus shifted from transforming the world to leaving it. I suspect Jesus would ask why so much energy is spent preparing people to die instead of teaching them how to live. 

2. A religion was built around his name instead of a movement embodying his way of life. Jesus did not call people to worship him. He called them to follow him. His concern was never building an institution but forming people marked by courage, mercy, humility and love. Yet Christianity has often become far more concerned with believing the right things about Jesus than becoming the kind of person Jesus embodied. Confession replaced imitation. Orthodoxy replaced transformation. 

3. The gospel became centered on his death rather than the life he lived.  Christianity has devoted enormous effort to explaining what Jesus’ death accomplished, often while neglecting the life that gave his death its meaning. Before there was a cross, there was a way of being human that revealed compassion over condemnation, inclusion over exclusion, and intimacy with God over separation from God. Jesus might well ask why Christians spend more time defending theories about his death than practicing the life he actually lived. 

4. Christianity became more deeply shaped by Paul that Jesus himself. Paul became Christianity’s primary theologian, and his letters came to define much of its language and doctrine. Yet Paul’s concerns were not always Jesus’ concerns. Jesus announced a way of life through stories, encounters, and example. Paul explained that life through theological interpretation. Somewhere along the way, the interpreter became more authoritative than the teacher. 

5. He became so uniquely divine that his humanity ceased to be a model. By placing Jesus beyond ordinary humanity, Christianity often placed his example beyond imitation. If he alone possessed the capacities he displayed, then following him becomes admiration rather than participation. Yet Jesus continually invited others to live as he lived. He came not only to reveal God, but to reveal what human beings themselves are capable of becoming. 

6. Truth became confined to one religious tradition. Jesus consistently crossed religious, ethnic, and social boundaries. He found faith where respectable religion expected none and challenged those convinced they possessed exclusive access to God. Yet Christianity frequently came to claim precisely that exclusively for itself. The man who dismantled boundaries became the justification for building new ones. 

7. Humanity became defined primarily by guilt, wrath, and condemnation. Much of Christian theology begins by declaring humanity guilty before God Jesus repeatedly began somewhere else. He moved toward people with compassion before demanding anything of them. He restored dignity before correction behavior. He forgave before punishment. Jesus would challenge any the9llgy that makes condemnation the starting point of one’s relationship of one’s relationship with ultimate reality. 

8. People began waiting for him to return instead of accepting responsibility for the world. For centuries Christians have waited for Jesus to return and make everything right. Yet Jesus consistently called people to feed the hungry, confront injustice, welcome strangers, forgive enemies, and participate in healing the world themselves. The greatest obstacle to changing the world is believing someone else is coming to do it for us. 

9. His name became treated as possessing supernatural power. Many Christians speak as though power resides in saying, Jesus’ name. Jesus himself placed the emphasis elsewhere. He consistently pointed toward transformed character, courageous action, compassion, forgiveness, and faithfulness. The power was never in pronouncing his name. It was in embodying his life. 

10. His name became associated with institutions of power instead of humanity itself. For millions of people, the name Jesus now evokes churches, politics, theological arguments, culture wars, and religious authority. Yet the Jesus of the Gospels consistently stood with the marginalized, confronted religions power, defended human dignity, and placed compassion about institutional loyalty. The greatest tragedy is not that so many rejected Jesus but that they have encountered Christianity before they ever encountered him.  

The great irony is this: the man who spent his life confronting religious systems became the centerpiece of one. The man who refused to make belonging contingent upon correct belief became the justification for endless tests of orthodoxy. The man remembered for his courage, compassion and humanity became increasingly obscured behind layers of doctrine, institution, and religious certainty. 

Jesus doesn’t need Christianity to defend him. Christianity needs Jesus to confront it. 

Jim Palmer. 

Sports analysts often offer what they call ‘instant analysis.’ To do that here would be a significant disservice both to Mr. Palmer and to the readers in this space. There are, obviously overlaps with some of his assertions and those of Robert Funk in Honest to Jesus, especially the notions of Jesus’ teaching of the Kingdom of God, and placing God as the focus of his teachings, not himself, his irreverence to religious authorities and proforma religiosity, and his generally rebelliousness nature, seen in the paradoxes of his parables, as well as in the manner of his associations, not with the powerful but with the outcasts. 

The question of his divinity has been analyzed, debated and then embodied in creed, while both Palmer and Funk seem to be advocating for perhaps an extraordinary human being, conceived naturally and never even hinting at a return to ‘save everyone.’ Recall Funk’s note on this: 

The question regarding the historic creeds is not whether the plot of the external redeemer is believable—apparently it is for many moviegoers—but whether a hero from another world is salutary religiously, socially and politically. We know that our perceptions of the world arae decisively shaped by our mythic stories....The redeemer hero in this plot comes from beyond and belongs to a reality not our own. The hero is not one with us; he or she is qualitatively different from us. This feature of the redeemed suggests that the created world is basically flawed and must be redeemed from without. In this flawed world, evil is stronger than human powers and cannot be overcome without superhuman aid. Mortal men and women are powerless within the framework of the myth because evil itself has cosmic dimensions. Spectator religion, morality, and politics are the inevitable result. Human beings are pawns in the cosmic drama being played out on a stage wider than their own. Myths in this category tend to tranquilize, to function as escapist fare. (Funk, Honest to Jesus, pps. 307-308) 

With the range and distribution of views similar to those of both Funk and Palmer growing, one has to wonder if and when the institutional church is going to acknowledge such voices, views and the monumental implications for the ecclesial future. Acknowledging the inordinate significance of the creeds, of Paul, of the resurrection, to the dismal dismissal of the life of Jesus of Nazareth has to be a beginning step in the revisioning of Christian theology. There will have to be congresses and courts, doctoral theses and their defense, a replacing of the old wine of the last two thousand years and the imaginative, creative and courageous/compassionate generation of new myths, stories, images and both aphorisms and sayings, ‘loyal to the manner and style of the seriously debased Jesus of Nazareth. 

Will such an institutional and theological metanoia be merely a fantasy of some, or a horizon full of colour, light and hope for the future of Christianity?