Category: Books

Continuing the series on Dale Allison’s The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (previous posts here and here).

Despite his defense of the general picture of Jesus offered in the gospels, Allison is not out just to comfort conservatives or other traditional believers. For starters, as we’ve seen, he’s dubious that we can determine with any real confidence that any particular saying or deed goes back to Jesus. Moreover, the historical Jesus revealed by the synoptics, while he has a high enough self-conception to make liberals nervous, can hardly be said to have a Nicene Christology.

During much of Christian history, theologians dedicated a fair amount of effort to explaining away passages in the gospels that seemed to make Jesus too human (e.g., passages about Jesus “advancing in wisdom,” not knowing certain things, saying things that seemed to imply that he was inferior to his Father). While Jesus may have regarded himself as a central figure in God’s plan for ushering in the new age, he almost certainly didn’t regard himself as the Second Person of the Trinity, the pre-existent Son of God.

Going hand-in-hand with this is the unsettling likelihood that Jesus was mistaken about how the end times would unfold. Jesus did not return to usher in the Last Judgment after his death, and many modern people–including many Christians–no longer buy into the mythological apocalyptic scenario which that would seem to entail.

Allison observes that the gospel of John, with its realized eschatology, already seems to be at work “spiritualizing” the apocalyptic elements so prevalent in the synoptic Jesus. But John is projecting this understanding back onto the historical Jesus, whereas we are forced to conclude, Allison thinks, that Jesus did not possess any such de-mythologizing hermeneutic:

[Jesus] envisaged, as did many of his time and place, the advent, after suffering and persecution, of a great judgment, and after that a supernatural utopia, the kingdom of God, inhabited by the dead come back to life to enjoy a world forever rid of evil and wholly ruled by God. Further, he thought that the night was far gone, the day at hand. (p. 95)

Whether or not we see this as mythic imagery containing valuable theological insight (much as the Genesis story contains insight about creation wrapped in mythic garb), Jesus probably didn’t. Coming to terms with that entails rejecting at least certain “high” Christologies.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that Allison is right about this though, there have been efforts to articulate a Christology that doesn’t depend on denying or downplaying Jesus’s humanity. So-called kenotic Christology has maintained, for a century or more, that, in becoming incarnate in Jesus, God divested Godself–in some mysterious fashion–of the divine attributes. This would presumably include omniscience. And Jesus, being fully human, would have thought using the images, categories, and concepts supplied to him by his language, culture, and religious tradition. To think that Jesus could magically access supernatural knowledge about ultimate things and–moreover–express that knowledge in literal, non-mythological or non-metaphorical terms (whatever that might mean) is to fail to take his humanity seriously.

But these Christologies also maintain that God was really present in Jesus in a unique way. It’s possible to think that God’s love, grace, and saving will were enacted in a particular human life without supposing that the life so united to the divine will was anything but human. Allison is certainly correct, I think, that much traditional Christology has been functionally Docetic, but a Christology that takes proper account of Jesus’s humanity doesn’t, for that reason, have to deny his divinity.

As we saw in the last post, Allison thinks that the traditional method of sifting the NT materials to reveal pristine, authentic bits of knowledge about Jesus is doomed to failure. More promising, he argued, is discerning the general picture of Jesus, based on recurring themes.

For example, citing numerous passages in the synoptic gospels, such as Jesus’s prohibition of divorce, his command to love enemies, his admonition not to bury the dead, his enjoining of unlimited forgiveness, and others, Allison concludes that “Jesus made uncommonly difficult demands on at least some people” (p. 63). We can confidently believe this even if the individual units can’t be historically authenticated.

What matters is not whether we can establish the authenticity of any of the relevant traditions or what the criteria of authenticity may say about them, but rather the pattern that they, in concert, create” (p. 63).

We can make similar assertions regarding other recurring patterns: Jesus was an exorcist, he spoke of God as father, he taught in parables, he came into conflict with the existing religious authorities.

More controversially though, Allison thinks that we can be fairly certain that Jesus (1) was an apocalyptic prophet with a high sense of his own role in God’s eschatological drama and (2) was perceived and remembered as a worker of miracles. Both of these conclusions fly in the face, to some extent, of liberal opinion on the historical Jesus. Scholars such as Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan have downplayed Jesus’s apocalypticism and are uncomfortable with the notion that Jesus had an exalted view of himself. And much liberal theology is uneasy with the concept of miracles, period.

Note that Allison doesn’t claim to be doing the scholarly spadework to demonstrate these claims, and he isn’t claiming these are incontestable findings. But he does pose a dilemma for those who would deny them:

If the primary sources produce false general impressions, such as that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet when he was not, or that Jesus was Israel’s redeemer when he had no such thought, then the truth of things is almost certainly beyond our reach. If the chief witnesses are too bad, if they contain only intermittently authentic items, we cannot lay them aside and tell a better story. Given how memory works, how could we ever feel at ease with a Jesus who is much different from the individual on the surface of our texts? Wrong in general, wrong in the particulars. In order for us to find Jesus, our sources must often remember at least the sorts of things he did and the source of things he said, including what he said about himself. If the repeating patterns do not catch Jesus, then how can he not forever escape us? (p. 66)

I have to say this is pretty convincing to my mind. It’s not too different from the conclusion Luke Timothy Johnson comes to in his book The Real Jesus. The gospels, Johnson argues, preserve the pattern of Jesus’s life, even if they don’t get all the historical details right.

Over the holiday I read Dale Allison Jr.’s The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus. Allison is a well-regarded historical Jesus scholar with a number of tomes to his name and a practicing Christian. This book is his attempt to come to terms with how his work as a historian affects his personal faith.

As part of this endeavor, Allison takes a critical look at the various “historical Jesuses” that have been paraded for our acceptance over the last several decades. These are usually reconstructions based, in part, on identifying the supposedly authentic sayings and deeds of Jesus, to the extent that they can be excavated from the overlay of ecclesiastical spin and theological reflection in the New Testament. Taken with various social-scientific theories and an improved knowledge of 1st-century Judaism, scholars have produced a diverse set of “Jesuses”: Jesus the Cynic peasant-philosopher, Jesus the egalitarian social critic, Jesus the mystic wonder-worker, Jesus the apocalyptic prophet, and so on.

Allison, however, is critical of the standard procedure for historical Jesus reconstruction. He argues that trying to isolate particular sayings and deeds as authentic rests on faulty assumptions about the way memory works. Empirical studies suggest that human memory is far better at grasping overall impressions or gestalts of events and much worse at accurately recalling specific details like, say, the precise words spoken by someone or the exact order of a series of events. This casts serious doubt, Allison contends, on the method of trying to identify the “authentic” sayings and deeds of Jesus. Furthermore, the traditional criteria used by scholars to determine the authentic material just aren’t strong enough to render a portrait of Jesus that can resist the theological agenda of the person doing the reconstructive work. It’s no surprise, Allison says, that, a century after years the liberal Protestant scholar Adolf Von Harnack, looking down the well of history, mistook his own liberal Protestant reflection for Jesus, the various historical Jesuses tend to reflect the theological and ideological positions of their proponents.

Moreover, he says, if the primary sources we have for Jesus’s life–the four gospels–are as unreliable in their understanding of who Jesus was as many of the historical Jesus scholars claim, then we are simply reduced to agnosticism. To try and reconstruct an entire personality apart from the impression that person made on other people completely misunderstands the nautre of personhood and memory. Instead, he says, we should focus on the whole rather than the parts: the general impression that Jesus made can be found in the gospels, even if we can’t say with certainty that any particular saying or deed goes back to him:

Given that we typically remember the outlines of an event or the general purport of a conversation rather than the particulars and that we extract patterns and meaning from our memories, it makes little sense to open the quest for Jesus by evaluating individual items with our criteria, in the hope that some bits preserve pristine memory. We should rather be looking for repeating patterns and contemplating the big picture. We should trust first, if we are to trust at all, what is most likely to be trustworthy. (p. 62)

And this implies that the canonical witnesses to Jesus, and the overall picture they paint, is the most reliable source we have. If we were to try and disregard their understanding of what Jesus was like in the attempt to base a reconstruction on some supposedly authentic bits and pieces, we could never produce a reliable picture:

Because the Synoptics [i.e., the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke] supply us with most of our first-century traditions, our reconstructed Jesus will inevitably be Synoptic-like, a sort of commentary on Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Nothing else, however, can carry conviction. If we insist instead on countering in significant ways the general impressions left by our early sources, the pictures we paint in their place will be like sidewalk drawings done in chalk: we may delight in making them, and others may enjoy looking at them, but they will not last very long. (p. 66)

In the following posts I’ll take a look at what kind of Jesus Allison thinks this leaves us with and what he thinks some of the implications are for theology and the life of faith.

I’m not going to offer a blow-by-blow account of the rest of Elizabeth Johnson’s She Who Is, mostly because I don’t think I could do justice to the many nuances and illuminating insights it contains. It’s definitely changed how I think about these issues. Also, it’s a highly readable book for academic theology, and anyone who’s interested should have no trouble getting their hands on a copy. I highly recommend it. But I thought I’d offer a few more thoughts.

The balance of the book contains discussions of, inter alia, the Trinity, Christology, God’s relationship to the world (classical theism vs. pantheism vs. panentheism) and divine power and (im)passibility that are quite good. Johnson’s taken on the last topic, in particular, strikes me as very worthwhile. Some contemporary theologians, in reacting against the classical view of God as omnipotent and impassible, go to the other extreme and define God almost exclusively in terms of weakness, suffering, etc., as though these were good in themselves. But as Johnson points out, a passive, suffering God can reinforce patterns of victimization just as an omnipotent, impassible God can seem like an overbearing and uncaring tyrant. It’s also not clear what the religious value is of a God who is only “fellow sufferer.”

What’s we need, Johnson argues, is a way of thinking about the power and suffering of God that avoids both extremes. She points out that there are different kinds of suffering: some, like the suffering experienced in childbirth, are means to a good end and and can be retrospectively seen as contributing to the wonderful gift of new life. Others, like extreme sexual or physical violence and degradation, are impossible to fit into any scheme in which they can be seen as contributing to some greater good. So we need to be careful in making these distinctions lest the “suffering God” end up valorizing victimization. Johnson even offers a feminist reinterpretation of God’s wrath: “the wrath of God in the sense of righteous anger is not an opposite of mercy but its correlative” (p. 258).

Johnson does affirm that God is present and shares in creaturely suffering. “The compassionate God, spoken about in analogy with women’s experience of relationality and care, can help by awakening consolation, responsible human action, and hope against hope in the world marked by radical suffering and evil” (p. 269). But God is also empowering her creatures to resist violence and victimization, and actualizing possibilities for more bountiful life. The cross and resurrection, in other words, are inseparable. Johnson doesn’t pretend to offer any “solution” to the problem of evil, but if God is thought of more in terms of relationality, both within the triune life and in its relationship to creation, then God’s power needn’t be defined as the unilateral ability to determine everything that happens:

Sophia-God is in solidarity with those who suffer as a mystery of empowerment. With moral indignation, concern for broken creation, and a sympathy calling for justice, the power of God’s compassionate love enters the pain of the world to transform it from within. The victory is not on the model of conquering heroism but of active, nonviolent resistance as those who are afflicted are empowered to take up the cause of resistance, healing, and liberation for themselves and others” (p. 270)

This is more suggestive than fully fleshed out, but it highlights how feminist concerns to counteract a God modeled on the aloof, solitary patriarchal male who is able to impose his will on a recalcitrant world dovetails with contemporary efforts to re-think divine power and action in light of both the problem of evil and a scientific understanding of reality. Developing a new understanding of power and new ways of speaking about God as “almighty” is still an urgent theological task, especially when the all-determining God of classical Calvinist theology seems to be enjoying something of a resurgence in popularity.

The opposite danger, though, is reducing God’s power to a moral example or ideal. While Johnson, I think, would deny that this is her intention, she does say things that seem to point in this direction. For example, she says that speaking of the suffering of God is valuable primarily because it “facilitates the praxis of hope” (p. 271), that is, motivating action by and on behalf of those who are oppressed. While this is certainly an important task for Christians to take up, I’m left a bit uncertain about the role of eschatology in her theology. Doesn’t hope, in the Christian lexicon, ultimately have as its object something that God will bring about? While Johnson mentions the resurrection life in a few places, the resurrection of Jesus doesn’t seem to play a pivotal role in her theology, and she says little to indicate that it’s ultimately God who will bring about the final emancipation of creation, not human efforts to build a just society, necessary as those are. I’m certainly on board with much of the program developed in She Who Is, but Johnson’s strictures about idolatry also apply, surely, to any tendency to annex God to a political agenda, no matter how worthy.

After discussing the role of experience–specifically women’s experience of affirming themselves as fully human and valued by God, equally created in the divine image–Elizabeth Johnson turns to the Bible and classical theology as sources for feminist theological discourse.

It’s no secret that the Bible was written by men in patriarchal cultures and reflects the presuppositions of those cultures. Johnson argues that these aspects of scripture are incidental and don’t pertain to what is necessary for our salvation (just as Vatican II affirmed that historical or scientific inaccuracies in the Bible don’t affect its core message). “It is most emphatically not salvific to diminish the image of God in women, to designate them as symbols of temptation and evil, to relegate them to the margins of significance, to suppress the memory of their suffering and creative power, and to legitimate their subordination” (p. 79)

Moreover, there are “trajectories” in the Bible that allow for speaking about God with female metaphors. Chief among these are Spirit, or Shekina, God’s holy presence with God’s people; Sophia, the personification of divine wisdom; and Mother. All of these images or names are licensed by scripture and all use female metaphors for God. Johnson finds Sophia to be particularly potent, being both explicitly female and invested with divine attributes. Sophia, who looms large in the books Protestants refer to as the Apocrypha, may even represent some healthy borrowing from nearby goddess cults:

The controlling context of meaning remained the Jewish monotheistic faith with borrowings being assimilated to that faith. At the same time, through the use of new categories, Jewish beliefs about God and God’s ways with the world were expressed in a way that matched the religious depth and style of the goddess literature and cult and counteracted its appeal. The wisdom literature, then, celebrates God’s gracious goodness in creating and sustaining the world and in electing and saving Israel, and does so in imagery that presents the divine presence in the female gestalt of divine Sophia. (p. 93)

The importance of the figure of Sophia is further reinforced by the New Testament’s identification of Jesus with divine wisdom (i.e., Sophia). A “wisdom” Christology can, consequently, provide a corrective to a “logos” Christology understood in excessively masculine terms. “Since Jesus Christ is depicted as divine Sophia, then it is not unthinkable–it is not even unbiblical–to confess Jesus the Christ as the incarnation of God imaged in female symbol” (p. 99).

Turning to the tradition of classical theology, Johnson focuses on the divine ineffability and the long tradition in Catholic theology that language about God is, necessarily, analogical. That is, we can’t speak about God in literal terms, but we aren’t left speechless because certain attributes belong to God in a “more eminent” way than they do to creatures. For instance, we apply “good” to God because we first experience goodness in creatures. But “good” must be qualified and even in a sense negated when applied to God. It points us in the right direction, but it doesn’t provide anything like a literal description of what God is like.

For Johnson, a renewed emphasis on the analogical nature of all divine language can loosen the grip that male names and metaphors for God have had on the Christian imagination. Even when the analogical nature of all theological language was recognized, the insistence that male language was the only fully proper language reinforced sexist attitudes. But if we appreciate anew the analogical nature of theological language and recognize the full and equal humanity of women, then we can affirm the appropriateness of female names and metaphors for God, including those drawn from under-appreciated parts of the biblical tradition.

Indeed, Johnson emphasizes the need for many names for God. Because of God’s infinity and incomprehensibility, we need a kaleidoscope of names and images for pointing to that reality. This can prevent certain images from becoming fixed and reified, which can tempt us to idolatry. Paraphrasing Augustine, “If you have understood, then what you have understood is not God” (p. 120).

In part II of She Who Is, Elizabeth Johnson discusses the sources she’s going to use for her project of theological reconstruction, or as she puts it: “resources for emancipatory speech about God” (p. 61). These are women’s interpreted experience, the Bible, and classical theology. It’s hard not to be reminded of Hooker’s “three-legged stool” of reason, scripture, and tradition or Wesley’s quadrilateral of reason, Scripture, tradition, and experience. The idea is that theology and the life of faith draw from multiple sources, though there is debate about which of these, if any, are the controlling factor.

Regarding experience, Johnson writes:

Consulting human experience is an identifying mark of virtually all contemporary theology, as indeed has been the case at least implicitly with most of the major articulations in the history of Christian theology. Listening to the questions and struggles of the people of an era, their value systems and deepest hopes, gives theology of the most diverse kinds an indispensable clue for shaping inquiry, drawing the hermeneutical circle, revising received interpretations, and arriving at new theological insight. (p. 61)

It follows straight away that theology is always, to some extent, provisional. The questions, struggles, values, and hopes of one era and place will be different from others. Theology is always, therefore, to some degree “contextual.” Only an extremely simplistic understanding of the theological task would deny this.

To complicate matters further, though, Johnson points out that there is no simple and universal “women’s experience” to which we can point. Johnson doesn’t take a strong stance on the nature/nurture debate, but it’s clear that women’s experiences and how they interpret them vary widely across social, cultural, religious, and other locations.

However, there are common, if not universal, experiences to draw on. Johnson focuses on what she calls the experience of “conversion,” by which she means “a turning away from trivialization and defamation of oneself as a female person and a turning toward oneself as worthwhile, as in fact a gift, in community with many others similarly changing” (p. 62). Following Karl Rahner, Johnson interprets the self as being in an inextricable relationship with the other, including the Divine Other. Therefore, changes in how one perceives oneself will change how one perceives the other. Consequently, when women come to experience themselves both as victims of oppression and as persons of value with moral agency, this is bound to affect their understanding of religious symbols and language. “The shock of the negative in traditional, internalized devaluations of women, known in the surge of self-affirmation against it, is at the same time new experience of God as beneficent toward the female and an ally of women’s flourishing” (p. 66).

Johnson goes on to discuss some of the implications of feminist thinking for ethics and for the doctrine of the imago Dei. A feminist ethic of relationship and mutuality will have different implications for how we characterize divine perfection than a traditional ethic of rights that defines the self over against the other. The recognition that women are created in the image of God just as men are gives impetus to using female images for God.

One might worry here, as has often been worried about “liberal” theologies, that “experience” becomes an independent source and norm for theology and threatens to crowd out revelation. I think Johnson’s answer is indicated by her statement that “the experience of God which is never directly available is mediated, among other ways but primordially so, through the changing history of oneself” (p. 65). We can’t step out of our own skins to achieve an unmediated experience of the divine. Our theologies are always colored by our experience, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. To the extent that women “reject the sexism of inherited constructions of female identity and risk new interpretations that affirm their own human worth” (p. 62)–and to the extent that men join them–their understanding of God will be affected.

The question comes down to whether the Christian tradition should be thought of as a hermetically sealed ark of salvation, which contains all truth and outside of which is only darkness and chaos, or as a more porous vessel–a tradition that can be nourished by insights originating elsewhere. I think it would be historically dubious to assert that advances in moral thought–not only feminism but abolition, civil rights, animal welfare, and others–owe their success primarily to Christian theological truth. While these movements can certainly claim religious support and sanction, Christianity was often late to the party if not actively resisting. And not only did these movements change Christian moral practice, they often changed the way Christians thought about God.

But I don’t see why this should be particularly worrying. If, as we believe, people are God’s good creation, then we should expect that they are capable of attaining moral and spiritual insight, even outside the boundaries of the church (and sometimes in spite of the church). And rather than distort, these insights may open to us new ways of understanding the tradition, discovering truths that were previously obscured by an equally context-bound interpretation of faith.