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The Godforsaken Messiah (Hebrews 12:2)

Mark’s gospel tells us that just before the very end, Jesus cried out from the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" If this is true, how can he be honored as the "pioneer and perfector of our faith" (Heb. 12:2)? Was not his own faith broken in the anguish of the cross?

Some are moved to rationalize that Jesus did not mean what his words imply. We are asked to suppose that he was unbroken to the end. What appears to be absolute dereliction was not really so; Jesus was merely piously quoting the first bit of Scripture that came to his head. These words just happened, quite understandably under the circumstances, to be the searing words of the 22nd Psalm.

Surely such evasions will not do. We cannot both cling to his atoning death and explain away the terrible, spiritually crippling effect of the blows that struck him. He was broken by the blows that would have broken us, had he not been broken for us. He did not shield us with his invincible humanity like some comic-book superhero. His humanity was shattered, and he was left dead and abandoned by both God and humankind. It is sanctimonious ingratitude to fault Jesus for his cry of dereliction, just as it is naïve to seek to deny that he was indeed left derelict.

If we feel compelled to inquire into the question of blame, our gaze ought not to fall upon this innocent lamb. If we must seek those responsible, we had best turn to those who put him on the cross -- the cross which could only break him. His cry of helplessness, his shattered ruin, grew from the fact that on the cross the annihilating wrath of God and the desperate, finite fury of humankind, which up to now had been directed each against the other, were at last united against this solitary victim. His cross was the final culmination of all wrath and fury, divine and human. In it we witness a reciprocity of outrage between God and humankind. The very suggestion that God and humanity were united in the breaking of Jesus fills us with a kind of horror.

Ironically, we can accept the burden of our own guilt with almost a giddiness of heart, for we know that through the instrumentality of his death issues, strangely and wonderfully, our salvation. However, the fact that the Father himself was involved in the suffering that the Son had to bear, that the crucifixion was the result of God’s "definite plan and foreknowledge" (Acts 2:23), inspires in us, if we dare to think about so dreadful a matter, a dizzying terror.

Is God a fiend? Must he preside over the death, not only of sinful humanity, but of this one who knew no sin? Are our impending and inevitable deaths not payment enough for our finite, petty sins? Must even his Son perish before his annihilating wrath? Surely such morbid speculations crowd in upon the dark recesses of our frightened and rebellious hearts from time to time. And surely we must appreciate, if we Christians feel the frightening possibilities of God’s "definite plan," how forbidding a theology of the cross is to many who cannot or will not believe.

Yet it is our faith, and we must testify of the God who willed the cross of Christ, that this selfsame God is love. He will not let the cry of Jesus go unheeded, just as he will not shirk the burden of responsibility for the death of his Son. For he is determined finally and forever to be reconciled with the human race, and the enmity which exists can only be overcome if he takes all wrath -- his as well as ours -- up into himself.

The orthodox substitutionary doctrine of the atonement has a little trouble dealing with the fact that Jesus must bear, in our stead, the punishment due our sin. But it can never answer that nagging question: in slaying Jesus, has not humanity become all the more indebted? All the more guilty? This problem can be resolved only in the realization that in his "definite plan" God has become our accomplice, that he has determined to share our burden and, in sharing it, has infinitely lightened it.

There is another side which is too often ignored. It can be argued that humanity is in part excused for crucifying the Lord of Glory because we were ignorant. Yet at another level the rejection of the Messiah was deliberate. People sensed his lordship and, because they did, called for his crucifixion. Some of the very crowd who on Palm Sunday praised him subsequently called for his death, and every day we Christians repeat the crime. We know that he is Lord, and yet we live like his killers.

We do so not only because we are weak and blind but because we are outraged. With so much suffering in the world, why not eat, drink and make merry? How can we who are so vulnerable be expected to love and trust a God who determines to remain so hidden? The sense of outrage that caused the Christians of Europe to hang their priests during the black plagues (since they could not kill God, at least they could kill his representatives) has touched us all as we view the suffering of the innocent. Jesus was slain because people were blind to his divinity, but also because they were all too well aware of it.

Too often the church has sought to discount and redirect against suffering humanity this outrage against God. Our fury simply further establishes our guilt and the propriety of our suffering. But in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, God answers otherwise. In the resurrection all enmity has been overcome in glory. There can be no further recriminations. God has taken up into himself, through the person of his Son, our human outrage. God himself has turned the other cheek. He has not rejected our outrage; he has endured it and has answered it with the risen Christ.

A Child of His Time (Phil. 4:8)

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think on these thin [Phil. 4:8]



Being Christians does not exempt us from being children of our time. Like Christians of times past, we are inclined to absolutize the values and mores of the age in which we live. Furthermore, unless we live in some Hitlerian society, there is bound to be real worth in the dominant values of any moment in history. Who, for example, can argue with the classical virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance and justice? Of course, the sin-obsessed St. Augustine did so argue, but even he granted that they were “splendid vices.”

If we are honest in confronting our text, the words of Paul seem curiously foreign to the ideals we set for ourselves in 20th-century America. It is not that we oppose what he says; who but an extremely perverse person can be against truth, purity and graciousness? It is rather that our center of values tends to dislocate that of the apostle. Paul thought of ultimate reality in transcendental and eschatological terms. The existence and providence of God were not even a question for him.

On the other hand, much modern thought tends to see all reality as immanent, with the eschaton and God himself so much in doubt that even Christians tend to hedge their bets. We try to be virtuous enough to eke our way into the Kingdom -- should there prove to be one -- but our righteousness is lived so as not to squander this life’s pleasure potential in case there is no Kingdom. We have found a way around Pascal’s wager. Our lives illustrate the hedonistic belief that luxury and creature comforts provide meaning. I state this not as some sort of seering denunciation of sin in modern America, but merely as an acknowledgment of what is obvious. We are all in thrall to consumer values not altogether unlike the way the first century was in thrall to Platonism.

We find that such things as good clothes, a comfortable home, a status-filled career, good food, cars, TV with a video recorder, and a stereo in home and car are worth working for and very fulfilling to own. We can barely fathom Jesus’ statement, “Blessed are the poor.”

Poverty is not only our secular version of hell, but its very presence makes us feel guilty. In the name of Christ, modern Christian social ethics points to an eradication of the very poverty that Jesus blessed. It isn’t that we wish to defy our Lord; it’s simply that we cannot see how loving our neighbors is consistent with blessing their poverty, and so we love our neighbors the way that any materialist might do: we try to find ways that the blessings of plenty might be showered on all.

Were we to try honestly to restate Paul’s exhortation to the Philippians from our own perspective, we would finally substitute our terms of value fir his. Where Paul would say, “Whatever is honorable,” we would better understand, “realistic.” Where Paul would say, “whatever is just,” we would settle for “acceptable.” Where Paul would say, “whatever is pure,” we would rather be “experienced.” Where Paul would say, “whatever is lovely,” we would say “functional.” Where Paul would say, “whatever is gracious,” we would be satisfied with “adaptable.” What Paul commends as “excellence,” we would translate as “cost-efficient.” And for us, what are the things most “worthwhile of praise”? Is not our praise most inspired by popularity and fame? In many ways the differences in fundamental values between the Moral Majority and those of us of a more liberal persuasion are fewer than we think. A neutral outside observer, seeing the similarities in our comfortable lifestyles, might well conclude that we are so alike in our praxis that our differences in theological theory are rendered trivial. This country’s liberals and fundamentalists alike are, after all is said and done, 20th-century American Christians.



In addition to the negative fact that our Christianity is inevitably shaped by the prevalent values of our culture, strong positive arguments can be made for Christian pragmatism, realism and cost-efficiency. Often, hard-headedness is required in order for ethical action to be effective. Further, we all have seen more traditional Christian values twisted in upon themselves. Who has not been outraged by a debased piety that renders truth into smugness, purity into prudishness, justice into the status quo and honor into pride? Are not the values of modernity preferable to the distortions of an obnoxious piety?

The One whose advent we await was a child of his time, conditioned by the relativities of his age. Yet there was in him a light that compels us to seek the transcendent for its source, a light in which all our relativities are themselves relativized. In the brilliance of Immanuel new possibilities are revealed, and even our all-too-human values are recast and given their rightful validations.

What do we demand in our pragmatism but to see the ‘‘true” actualized? Jesus is not an abstract ideal; he is truth in action. By his very example he concretizes the goal of all truth. Jesus makes the “honorable” and realism one and the same. He bore the cross out of his terrible recognition of the fact that God’s honor as well as ours has been stained by evil and sin. And that atonement can be brought about only on Calvary, where simultaneously God and humankind bear the burden of honor’s onus.

Jesus in his gracious self-giving demonstrated that which is truly “just.” True justice cannot be imposed from above; it is achieved only when the fairness of the judgment finally becomes apparent to all. Thus justice that is not full of grace is not justice. Jesus is the gracious justice of the God who is love. Who knows what the “pure” is but the one who experienced the degradation of the tax collectors and sinners and became one with them, yet remained wholly uncorrupted by cynicism and coldness of heart? As “form follows function,” so Jesus, “who had no beauty that we should desire him” (Isa. 53:2), is made lovely in our sight by what he does for us. Jesus was never in doubt as to the cost of the truly “excellent,” but he did not count the cost. In Jesus’ budgeting -- in matters of love -- if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it.

And does this One who is all honor, grace, justice, purity and beauty have the audience appeal to make him manifestly “worthy of praise”? Even those who have not yet come to trust in him and love him will this Christmas hear the clamor at the stable and will in their heart of hearts long for the truth of that which they cannot yet believe. In his still hiddenness, his manifest fame portends.

Finding the Face of Jesus

Throughout the history of Christian art, portrayals of the face of Jesus have been as varied and revealing as the various theologies interpreting his person produced throughout the history of Christian thought. It is curious that none of the evangelists, and certainly none of the great theologians of the church, ever met and conversed with Jesus, yet all have had strong, though differing, views of who he was. Christian artists have produced revealing, incisive portraits of a face no artist has ever seen (visions and raptures aside).

Although there has been no agreed-upon description of Jesus, virtually all portrayals of his face are recognizable as his “likenesses.” This is true largely because any competent artist always invests the portrayal with an unmistakable authority. Yet even here, the sense of Jesus’ authority has differed drastically from age to age and from artist to artist.

Great portrayals of Jesus exhibit a myriad of styles and visions. At one extreme is the Romanesque (11th and 12th centuries) depiction of Jesus’ face, characteristically envisioning him with a masklike visage and a radically expressionistic, transfixing gaze, reflecting a profound sense of the transcendent source of holiness. The human countenance is stricken by a holiness that consumes the merely human. In sharp contrast are Rembrandt’s pictures of Jesus. Although he was equally expressive, Rembrandt nevertheless painted far more naturalistically, showing Christ’s divine authority as emerging from the depths of his human sympathy and suffering love.

“Christian” style is not merely a function of artistic genius and theology. It is also related to the accidents of history, For example, the art called “early Christian,” some of which dates from as late as 400 AD., was stylistically dependent on the art of late antiquity. Jesus was portrayed in the naturalistic manner of Hellenistic, pagan classicism. Christianity, as a sect within late Hellenism, contributed nothing to the development of this style. It simply drew its artistic sustenance from its cultural environment.

All of this changed as the Constantinian era took root and the church’s power became secure. No longer a persecuted minority religion dependent on the culture of an “alien” world, Christianity now itself became a wellspring of culture. Byzantine art was the first mature style born of the new situation. The Byzantine portrayals of Christ were abstract, severe and dematerialized. Such a vision incorporated a theology that looked to our salvation as a work of deification, just as Jesus’ humanity was deified. The stem, commanding face also reflected the awesome sense of regal power vested in the emperor, a power supposedly modeled on Christ’s power.

This change leads to a disturbing question. Does this great variety in Christian styles provide an overwhelming illustration of the way in which we simply foist our own perspectives, ideologies, needs and vanities onto Jesus? Is Christianity the projection of ourselves onto this conveniently obscure figure from the past? Does art graphically illustrate that self-deification which is a bit more difficult to ferret out of the self-glorifying sophistries we call theology (Feuerbach)?

That we do try to make Jesus over in our own images -- in art, in historical research, in theology -- is our sin, our idolatry. But in another sense we have no choice but to project ourselves onto the past in our attempts to interpret Jesus. The study of history entails a measure of self-projection. How can we “see” unless we project ourselves by creative intuition into greater proximity to the factual events we seek to understand? History would be folly if it were done in the vain hope of reconstructing the past as it actually was. Not even those living in that past saw it “as it was.” We do history in order to understand ourselves in relationship to the past. However, the “past” we view is always the past we re-create by projection and intuition. The “facts” anchor speculation, but they do not speak for themselves.

We cannot see Jesus with the “pure” eyes of the first century; but even then Jesus was “seen” as many things by those who actually saw him. Was he the son of God or one in league with the devil? The Messiah or a blasphemer? Even his own disciples drew him after their own nationalistic and vainglorious conceptions of the Messiah. As his contemporaries, they knew what he looked like, but that did not do them much good.

The Gospel of John boldly acknowledges that in order to attain a truer picture of Jesus, in order to achieve a finally more penetrating vision of the historical significance of the historical Jesus, distance, not proximity, is required. “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away the Counselor will not come” (16:7).

The unbridgeable historic gap faced by the Christian artist in portraying Jesus is similar to the perilous chasm faced by theologians or biblical critics in their respective enterprises. All are pointing subjectively toward an objective reality. But critical reconstructions of the historical Jesus and theological interpretations of his being stand no more chance of being objectively “true” than do the countless portraits of Jesus of constituting accurate renderings of his actual visage. The very multiplicity of theologies -- all claiming to be true and all in detail or even in totality contradicting one another -- and the equal multiplicity of higher critical judgments about the ‘‘historical’’ Jesus -- all done in the name of objective historical probabilities and all at odds with one another -- are an indication of how radically interpretive, speculative and indeed projective is all our Jesus talk or picturing.

My comments are not meant to suggest that there is no truth that can be spoken about Jesus, or that any view is as valid as any other. They are, rather, meant to illustrate that any truthful portrayal of Jesus, be it theological, historical or graphic, entails a creative act. Such an act is inspired by the muses of human creativity; however, if it is valid, it is also inspired by the most ancient of all the muses -- the Holy Spirit (Gen. 1:2).



To ask what status in truth a portrayal of Jesus by an artist who never saw him can conceivably have is inevitably to open the door to the wider question: Does anything we claim to know about him, theologically or historically (save perhaps that he once lived), have any great objective validity? The modern world is in an epistemological limbo. We “know” that we know something, but no one can give an account of how we know it that satisfies more than a handful of the likeminded. Nevertheless, there is the Holy Spirit.

As early as the middle of the 19th century Søren Kierkegaard could see the skeptical morass into which higher biblical criticism was leading. In an attempt to reconstruct Jesus’ life historically, various scholars so contradicted one another that its reality seemed to slip away. Kierkegaard met this situation by saying that the only historical facts Christianity needs are that in such and such a year God became man, and that he died. A century later Rudolf Bultmann was to detheologize such a historical reductionism by saying that the only thing of which one can be historically certain is that Jesus died on the cross under Pontius Pilate.

Of course even Bultmann, to say nothing of Kierkegaard, wrote in the conviction that he knew more about Jesus than the mere fact of his death. Bultmann even engaged in theological reflection -- an extremely risky business, it would seem. From a purely naturalistic perspective, what is theology but abstract reflection on the alleged meaning of historical uncertainties? Nevertheless, there is the Holy Spirit, who comforts us in our epistemological uncertainty and who prods us to think, paint and preach, in our hope to find the truth.

The poet Robert Frost once wrote, “Heaven gives its glimpses only to those not in a position to look too close.” I have always regarded this as a profound insight into the situation of Christian revelation. We have, in faith, glimpsed Jesus Christ. However, when the content of that glimpse is portrayed -- verbally, visually or musically -- the vision and the viewer inevitably become one. Though the glimpse is real, we are not “in a position” to sort out where it ends and we begin. Nevertheless, there is the Holy Spirit.

The apostle Paul was bold enough to claim that if we are in the spirit of God, “we have the mind of Christ” (I Cor. 2:16). If this is true, then any supposed necessity of separating ourselves in our subjectivity from the objective reality of Jesus Christ is fundamentally dislocated. So-called “objectivity” -- i.e., detachment from the object of concern -- becomes irrelevant to the highest ideal of Christian theology, scholarship or art. Quite apart from the reality of our philosophic situation, wherein modern skepticism has called into question the very possibility of objective “truth,” there is the overriding theological consideration: objective detachment from the object of faith, which is Jesus Christ, is not one of the gifts of the spirit. It is only out of our subjectivity that we can discover who the real Jesus is, for his mind is actually present in the world. But it is present only in his seekers and followers, as a gift of the Spirit.

To illustrate how an artist, in his or her subjectivity and historical situation, can, through the ministrations of the Spirit, plumb the objective realities of Jesus Christ, I would like to discuss three portrayals: Michelangelo’s Pietà Rondanini, Henri Matisse’s Fourteen Stations of the Cross and Georges Rouault’s 1905 Head of Christ.



Days before his death the aged Michelangelo worked at his unfinished, indeed unfinishable, masterpiece, the Pietà Rondanini. It is the product of many years of brooding artistic reductionism. The present sculpture was carved out of an earlier, very different ensemble. While Michelangelo chipped away much of the earlier work (probably an entombment of Christ), its mutilated traces remain. Most prominent is the powerful, disconnected arm to the right of the figure of Christ.

That this contorted, expressionistic work was achieved out of the wreckage of an earlier, more naturalistic undertaking -- done in a style much closer to that of the high Renaissance, with which Michelangelo is generally associated -- is particularly revealing. During the last 30 years of his long (89 years) life, Michelangelo had grown increasingly convinced that his earlier work, such as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, had been not an authentic witness to the Christian faith but, rather, an exercise in Promethean pride.

The older Michelangelo, though always a Catholic, had not been untouched by the spirit of the Reformation. He had come to a profound sense that salvation is by “faith alone.” More and more, as he brooded over the realities of sin and death, he sensed the hopelessness of his state apart from grace. The great paintings of his maturity, The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, the twin frescos The Conversion of Paul and The Crucifixion of Peter, also in the Vatican, all reflect his deepening sense of absolute dependence on God’s grace.

However, until the very end, he could not totally transcend the humanism of the High Renaissance, which he had helped to create, but then had come to reject. Even though the works of his last 30 years reflected his moving away from this perspective and from naturalism, still, when he drew or sculpted the human figure, he continued to portray it in a glorified, idealized manner. The vast, perfect muscularity of his earlier “Promethean” period continued to appear in his works, even though, as in The Last Judgment, these perfect human specimens were often shown grappling with despair, or, if redeemed, grasping a salvation that came from above.

As long as he idealized the human body, his art expressed a vision that his later theology refuted -- i.e., that idealized humanity can serve as an adequate symbol for communicating the Christian faith. Only in the Pietà Rondanini does he finally achieve a complete stylistic break with the past, a break expressing his Catholic “Protestantism.” To cite the great Michelangelo scholar Charles De Tolnay:

In this work the master superseded at last the Renaissance principles of causality and the representation of the rationally possible. What he achieved is an image contradicting the law of gravity and yet speaking with utmost immediacy to the heart of the beholder. . . . A fully articulated body would here only detract from the essential [Michelangelo: The Final Period (Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 92].

As we’ve observed, Michelangelo destroyed an earlier work in order to bring forth his final Pietà. It is still ‘‘Catholic” in the sense that it still holds out the possibility that representational art can properly testify to the incarnate love of God. However, it is “Protestant” in its profound declaration that Christianity can be proclaimed only in symbols of human brokenness, and in its awareness of the radical tension between nature and grace.

Ironically, the more Michelangelo grew in his spiritual knowledge of Jesus Christ, the less able he seemed to find the face of Jesus -- as his final misty crucifixion drawings and, above all, the Pietà Rondanini witness. In the Pietà, the unfinished face has the look of a tortured search. Michelangelo destroyed his earlier face of Christ in order to find a truer countenance. One wonders if the somber genius would ultimately have whittled the head away to nothing.

Michelangelo confronted a paradox which Luther, in his own way, also encountered. We know God through his revealed word, through Jesus Christ; and having “the mind of Christ,” we must witness boldly to that knowledge. However, in the depths of our knowing, born of the experience of faith, there is also the sense of an abysmal mystery, which Luther spoke of as the Deus Absconditus -- the hidden God. Here is where our faith is most sorely tested. When confronted with a depth of mystery which leaves us gaping in awe, do we not despair of what we know? The terrible awareness of the immediacy of God’s mystery can drive us to despair of God’s promise, to despair of God’s love. Both Luther and Michelangelo struggled with an awareness of this dark side of faith. Ironically, the deeper one’s personal faith, the deeper the sense of devastation in the presence of God. “Woe is me! For I am lost. . . . For my eyes have seen the King, Lord of hosts!”

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) came to do Christian art very late in his life, and even then it was decidedly an atypical subject for the great master of sensation, color and line. I have long admired Matisse and his almost hedonistic celebration of beauty, but I had thought that his foray into Christian art could only fail, since Matisse clearly was not a Christian. I had seen pictures of his great Vence Chapel (in the hills above the French Riviera) but because I was so convinced, a priori, that this could have been only a tour de force, I did not really see what I was looking at. Then I went to Vence, expecting to have my prejudices confirmed. However, even the most rock-bound dogmatist could not help but be overwhelmed by the sheer spiritual delight of the chapel. Utterly severe, all white but for the black murals and the black accent tiles on the floor, the interior was tinted in blues and yellows by the gorgeous late Matisse stained-glass windows. Matisse had created a tiny temple in grateful celebration (he seemed incapable of any other mood) of the beauty of life and creation.

Matisse refused to be converted by the theological enthusiasm of his Christian admirers. He said, “The only religion I have is my love of the work I have to do, my love of creation, and my love of absolute sincerity. I made the chapel to express myself completely and for no other reason. To this disclaimer, however, one must at least reply that it is revealing that, toward the end of his life, in order to express himself ‘‘completely” he chose to do a chapel -- free of cost and with the proviso that his design be submitted to church authorities for approval. He wished to make a religious statement about his love of beauty, and it was a characteristically French statement. I am reminded of the French carol that is translated, “Praise we the Lord who made all beauty for all our senses to enjoy.”

In the Vence Chapel there is an astonishing wall of tiles on which Matisse sketched the Fourteen Stations of the Cross. One critic has observed that the drawing “looks like the urgent notes of an eyewitness to Christ’s passion.” The “witness” is certain that the event is of great significance. Therefore he hastily records the tragic details, lest the memory be lost. However, the witness “witnesses” from a detached perspective, without emotion or interpretation. We know only that he recognizes the importance of the event by the bare fact that he records it. He is like a reporter with instincts for the newsworthy.

Matisse, then, is pure reporter. Do not ask for commentary, for he has none to give. Although he cannot ignore Jesus, he cannot penetrate the question of who he was. Thus there is no face in his drawing, save for the image on Veronica’s veil. This image, without expression and once removed, he can record; but Jesus Christ himself Matisse can view only from afar in detached fascination.

Michelangelo found it increasingly difficult to picture Jesus’ face, precisely because he had faith -- showing us that even in revelation, God remains mystery. Matisse’s stations of the cross stand as a magnificent confession of the faith of modern secular humanity. Many moderns can neither embrace nor ignore Jesus: who he was eludes them; that he was haunts them.



If Matisse witnessed to a Jesus Christ he could not find, his lifelong friend, Georges Rouault, a believing Christian. painted the face of Jesus time and time again. It was the great subject of his art: “My only ambition is to be able some day to paint a Christ so moving that those who see him will be converted.”

Rouault’s mature paintings of Jesus have an iconlike quality. They are works inspired by love, and done to inspire love. These later portraits have an increasingly serene quality. Even in the midst of his suffering, Christ is portrayed as patiently offering himself and his suffering to the beholder. The subject is enhanced by Rouault’s technique of laying thick patches of paint on his canvases, so that undercolors glow through to the surface. He achieves the suggestion of stained glass, eternally lighted from within. It is the stylistic characteristics of this later Rouault with which we are most familiar.

However, Rouault’s mature vision of Jesus evolved out of the intense struggle, indeed anguish, of his earlier work. It is the Christ of the earlier period I want to focus on: the Head of Christ, 1905. There is no serenity here; it is a violently painted face that almost looks as if it had been dripped onto the canvas, à la Jackson Pollock. In this radically expressionistic work, Christ’s huge eyes stare in sorrow and distress, and his ambiguously painted mouth is a shattered grimace.

The Head of Christ was done during the same period in which Rouault painted a great number of carnal, yet pathetic, nudes, often prostitutes; a fiercely drunken woman; sad or debauched clowns; cruel judges, and so on. Most of his works of this time are searing representations of human lust, cruelty, pride and brokenness. They reflect a drastically Augustinian sense of humanity as a “mass of perdition.” Seen in this larger context, the Head of Christ is a powerful statement of Christ’s passion as an atoning event. It declares the substitutionary character of Christ’s death and his desperate loneliness. Interestingly; Karl Barth’s early work sounds almost like a commentary on this painting:

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” People have attempted to absolve Jesus from blame for this utterance by the argument, difficult to substantiate, that it was not an expression of real despair -- and the fact has been quite overlooked that it was not less but more than doubt and despair: as our old dogmatists knew, it was derelictio, a being lost and abandoned [The Word of God and the Word of Man (Harper Torchbook. 1957), pp. 118-119].

Although our century has produced little significant Christian art, its first half witnessed a flowering of Creative theology. Twentieth century theology came into being in a time characterized by a drastic and/or existentialist mood. The two most influential theological portrayals of Jesus in our age have been Albert Schweitzer’s and Barth’s.

Schweitzer radically redrew the liberal conception of the historical Jesus in his 1906 The Quest of the Historical Jesus (done almost contemporaneously with Rouault’s Head of Christ). Schweitzer portrayed Jesus as an imperious first century apocalyptic fanatic, beckoning to us from his own age, as an alien in our own. Although Schweitzer’s case for Jesus’ obsessive apocalypticism was overdrawn, we are nevertheless left with an awareness that Jesus must remain historically alien to us. Estrangement and faith mingle in the brokenness of modern Christian awareness.

Barth’s early indifference to the “historical” Jesus was grounded in his realization that the Jesus of history can, indeed, only be an alien to us; he is “the crater made at the percussion point of an exploding shell, the void. Such a shattering metaphor typifies the existentialist, expressionist mood in which the early Barth -- and with him the preponderance of post-World War I theology -- came to see Jesus. The compatible, gentle Jesus reconstructed by earlier liberals was lost in the ‘void.” The only thing that could clearly be known of Jesus was his suffering, his brokenness and his rejection by the world.

Schweitzer and Barth were far from being theological allies, and Rouault was a French Catholic who probably had no knowledge of Protestant theology. Nonetheless, together they helped to create the modern sense of the person of Christ. The modern experience of faith in the context of radical historical and cultural paradox requires that we cannot see Christ in the more serene light of the late Rouault or the late Barth (if we are ever granted such confidence at all) unless we go through the anguish of Christ’s being crucified anew in our age.

Violent expressionism and existentialism inevitably consume themselves. It is not possible to live permanently at the extremes. Faith must either find some resolution or shatter in the icy air blowing from the void. Yet modern Christianity was born in a sense of the void. Rouault’s Head of Christ is a profound symbol of the wellsprings of modern faith. Perhaps the present poverty of Christian art and thought can be traced to our avoidance of the cross and our consequent deprivation of the joy of resurrection, hindering new creation. We tremble to pray for a renewal of creativity within the church, for we sense that it can come only by way of crucifixion. Would that there could be new life without it!

Jesus’ Death: A Way of Finding (Heb. 12:2)

. . . . looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross

[Heb. 12:2].



The teachings of Jesus confront us with painful tensions. For example, the Gospels report sayings that range from those breathtaking in their tenderness and compassion to others reflecting a violently vengeful apocalyptic fury. Sometimes these juxtapositions occur within a single chapter. Luke 12 contains both the reassuring words “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God. Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not . . .” and the fierce threat, “I came to cast fire upon the earth, and would that it were already kindled.”

Of course, we prefer the gentle Jesus, but how can we ignore that side of Jesus that is white-hot with righteous rage and impatience over the sinfulness and unbelief of the world? Indeed, in the Gospels the harsh sayings outnumber the gentle ones.

Jesus stood in the tradition of late Jewish apocalyptic prophecy. Such prophecy was born of righteous outrage over the brokenness of the world, of brokenheartedness over the failure of God’s reign to be acknowledged on earth. So desperate was the apocalyptic sense of evil that it proclaimed an impending cataclysm. The old creation must be destroyed. Only in a new universe could the righteousness of God be manifest. Granted, Jesus interpreted the apocalypticism of his time in the light of his own unique vision. Nevertheless, his words could be as terrible as any Old Testament prophet’s. Jesus even threatened “eternal punishment” (Matt. 25:46).



Like a lash, certain of Jesus’ words strike out at the accommodations we make for ourselves in this world. At times he even seems to be attacking the natural order of things. “Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division . . . they will be divided. father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against her mother’’ (Luke 12:51,53). We recoil. If even family loyalty is under the judgment of sin, what is left to us? Are all our ethics but exercises in sinful compromise with the world?

“I come to cast fire upon the earth; would that it were already kindled.” Can this be God’s son speaking? Consider our reaction to a modern preacher’s saying. God is going to consume the world in fire and I can’t wait to see you fry!” We would reject out of hand anyone who denounced us as Jesus denounced his contemporaries. How can we blame Jesus’ first century audience for being outraged and mystified -- especially since Jesus can be quoted as expressing opposite sentiments? How could Jesus’ hearers be expected to reconcile his call for fire from heaven with his tolerant, loving command. “Judge not, and you will not be judged”?

I think we can get help in confronting these dilemma: from our Hebrews text, in its inspired description of Jesus as “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” The pioneer in going out into the unknown carries only the essentials. But under the rigors and difficulties of the wilderness trek, his or her conception of what is essential changes. The trails of explorers are strewn with excess baggage. As the weariness of the journey increases and the baggage gets heavier, the pioneer discovers how little is really needed.

Later travelers are aided in following the precursor’s trail, for he or she has left behind so many nonessentials to mark the path. Jettisoning this, discarding that, the pioneer leaves mementos of the first trek. Yet it would be stupid to assume that our reason for following the scout’s trail is to pick up these discards as relics. What Jesus discarded must be left for good.

The further Jesus went on the trek, the lighter was his load. Stripped of more and more encumbrances, he was able to bear the only burden that ultimately mattered, as Hebrews says: “. . . who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross.”

Having finally trekked through wilderness and temptation, incomprehension and hostility, Jesus reached his goal, which was his total demise. It might have seemed, hanging naked on the cross, that he had finally jettisoned everything. His disciples had betrayed or denied him, or were merely left gaping in misunderstanding impotence. His ministry was in a shambles. Even his cloak had been gambled away. Yet he had one encumbrance yet to cast aside. Naked in body, he finally gave up even the covering of his soul; gone in the end was his very theology. He was left with a single concept, the concept of divine abandonment. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Limp, drained; bereft of his world view, his eschatology, in that moment he did not understand what had happened. He was no longer even a man of his time; he was a dead man. The judgment of God had fallen on him, on his teachings, on the first century Judaism that had nurtured and rejected him, the gentiles who in enslaving the Jews had driven them to apocalypticism. Everything that Jesus deemed essential had been rendered null and void. All comprehension, all ethics, all hopes and plans, all anger -- all was dead and gone. There was nothing left but obsolete tokens, strewn on the frontiersman’s trail to oblivion. The fire Jesus called for had fallen on himself and his ministry.



In his return from the grave, he stood vindicated by God. But that vindication did not absolutize his earthly life and sayings. Jesus’ death and resurrection free us to acknowledge just how culturally relative and historically conditioned his teachings were. The Son of God had become human: that is, the son of God thought, taught, struggled and died under the conditions of finitude: ignorance before God, ethnocentrism, psychological ambiguity. Jesus went before us, ‘the pioneer” of a new world, but even the preparer, the son of God, had to go through the refining fire of divine judgment before “the pioneer” became “the perfecter of our faith.”

Jesus did not return from the grave casting his threatened wrathful “fire upon the earth.” In the cross, the fire of divine wrath had already fallen. Transposed by the resurrection, the threat of Jesus became a blessing. Thus, in an astonishing way, he kept his word. Fire was sent -- the fiery tongues of Pentecost: the Holy Spirit.

Having received the Holy Spirit and thus “the mind of Christ,” we are as adequately prepared as human beings can be to interpret the meaning of Jesus’ life and teaching in the light of the resurrection. We have no more assurance of infallibility than did Jesus himself. In our finitude, we emulate his finitude. But he has not left us alone; we are guided in our following after Jesus by the Holy Spirit. It is a blessed paradox of Christian faith that though we wander and stumble through our various wildernesses toward God’s new world, our guide is infallible. The Spirit can make even our being lost a way of finding.

In Praise of Ignorance (Mark 13:31)

But of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. [Mark 13:31]



If we don’t even know what time it is, what do we know? How can Christians speak about the purpose of God -- hence, in some way, God’s nature -- when we have no knowledge of the divine timetable?

Such an agnostic reaction to Jesus’ disclaimer puts the matter too negatively. Jesus’ confession of ignorance, even on so great a subject, is not bad news; it is good news. It confirms how completely Christ in his coming shares our condition, for it is obvious that we are required, by the terms of our existence, to get only glimpses into those larger questions which give our lives their greatest significance.

Jesus was not saying that he knew nothing. He was confessing humility before the Father’s final determinations in the context of his conviction that something was afoot: the Kingdom of God was at hand. Of course he “knew” that his ministry was to be the dividing point; “but of that day or that hour no one knows . . . only the Father.”

The cliché “ignorance is bliss” calls up images of the poor benighted dunce blithely sailing through life, unaware of the perils and ambiguities that surround him. Or the betrayed spouse wanting to assume a fidelity that everyone else realizes is a pathetic delusion. Such ignorance is not blissful; it is merely blind.

There is another kind of ignorance, however: an ignorance that sees. It is the stance of Socrates, who

insisted that his only claim to being the wisest man in Greece lay in the fact that he knew nothing, while everyone else was in the same boat, but claimed to have the truth.



This higher ignorance is not born of a passive skepticism, which in craven tenuousness denies the possibility of certainty beyond the apprehension of the senses. This higher ignorance is born of intellectual daring, the daring to insist that the unseen things that give meaning and significance to life are real. Nevertheless, to “know” such unseen things is simultaneously to admit that one does not, cannot know; it is to understand that that of which one is sure -- be it God or the good, the true and the beautiful -- is also too high and too deep to be understood. Teetering between skepticism and arrogance, the knower knows, and does not know.

Christianity has often been guilty of being embarrassed by Jesus’ demurral and has tried to cover it up, as though it undermined his claim to be the Son of God. “How could he be divine if he didn’t know everything?” The implication drawn from the claim that the man Jesus was infallible has been disastrous. If he was infallible, infallibility becomes a Christian norm; thus we strive for perfect faith, true-to-the-letter Scriptures or absolute doctrines. The illusion of infallibility gives nerve to the persecutor. One can hardly harass others when one realizes that faith and ignorance are the yin and yang of Christian consciousness.

It is not that certainty in faith and the ignorance of Jesus are mutually exclusive. We can be enlightened in matters of the most profound significance: that God is, that God loves, that God creates, that God has become what we are in order that he might make us what he is. But no sooner do we confess these discoveries than we become dumbfounded by the enormity of what we have uttered.



The miraculous wonder of what we have been gifted to comprehend drives us to admit that we know nothing. It contains an almost self-evident, rational proof of the truth of the gospel, this awareness that we know nothing, for a God who could be circumscribed and understood and grasped in a phrase would, because of his very predictability, be a false God, not the God who always astonishes. To know the true God is to wonder.

Consider what the child of wonder knew as he nestled at Mary’s breast: he knew infallibly only where his milk was coming from. This is what is entailed when we confess that the Word, the very reason and wisdom of God, “took flesh and dwelt among us.” True human wisdom, as God’s tiny son demonstrates to us, is not in how much we know; it is in knowing on whom to depend.

The Resurrection: A Truth Beyond Understanding

This Easter, as with Easters past, most churches can expect a “good” attendance. If Easter doesn’t bring Christians to church, what will? Even those whose attendance is relatively sporadic -- the “Easter Christians” -- are aware, however vaguely, of the centrality of the resurrection for faith. Without their faith in the resurrection, the apostles, the original “Easter Christians,” would have come to assess Jesus very differently than they ultimately did judge him. The resurrection was perceived to be God’s vindication of Jesus as the Messiah, reversing God’s apparent repudiation of Jesus in the crucifixion. Without this faith, there would have been no Christianity.

Notwithstanding the vital importance of the resurrection for the church, past and present, it would be naïve to suppose that there is anything approaching a consensus within the church over the objective question: What actually happened on the first Easter?

This Easter, though Christians in many churches will be standing together in the pews and singing in joyful harmony the triumphant anthem “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today, Alleluia,” their interpretations of the resurrection will be radically discordant. Some members of the congregation will be thinking of a relatively straightforward physical event. Certainly more was entailed, but at the very least the resurrection entailed a resuscitation of the body and an empty tomb, with Jesus concretely and empirically manifested.

Others will conceive of the event in a “demythologized” manner. What came forth from death was not a body; the event was not historical but existential. What arose was the apostles’ faith, which impelled them to proclaim the kerygma. In a sense we are celebrating, through the “myth” of Christ’s resurrection, the existential fact of our own resurrection from despair through the proclaimed word of faith.

For still others such Germanic circumlocution is impossible to understand, let alone embrace; they will regard the resurrection in a rationalistic, relatively “old-fashioned” deist-liberal manner as a prescientific way of expressing the timeless content of Jesus’ life and ministry -- his preaching about the love of God and the need for human fellowship.

This latter view is emblematic of a relatively “low” Christology; however, there need be no direct correlation between a belief in a bodily resurrection and a “high” Christology. One church member might affirm the objectivity of the presence of the risen Christ as the first fruits of a new creation and still be entirely agnostic over the question of what occurred in the tomb. What was buried was flesh and blood; what confronted the apostles in the resurrection appearances was a new humanity. Who can know -- and who cares -- what happened to the atoms of Jesus’ body?



This range of opinions does not exhaust the list of possible alternative understandings of the resurrection, but it is enough to indicate that the church is not of one mind on the question of what happened that first Easter. This lack of single-mindedness is surely problematic. If, for example, we Christians testify to the resurrection of Christ but include in that testimony a myriad of self-contradictory caveats, does not the skeptic have some grounds for shaking a finger derisively at what is a perceived hypocrisy and insisting that Christians don’t really believe in the resurrection either? Or do we try to keep our divergent views to ourselves, and though meaning vastly different things when we say that Christ is risen, give the outward appearance of a unified intention?

Such a conspiracy of silence could not be maintained for very long, even if it were not dishonorable. Inquirers in and out of the church have always pressed for answers concerning the meaning and intention of resurrection talk. It does no good to keep repeating, “I believe in the resurrection,” when the question we are asked is what we mean by the word resurrection. The cat has long since been out of the bag; it is an open secret, this fact of the church’s pluralism in its interpretation of the resurrection.

But the church need not be embarrassed by this diversity of understanding. A wealth of interpretations is unavoidable -- given the character of New Testament witness, the difficulties inherent in the doctrine of revelation itself, and the pluralism of our philosophic environment.



Some of those who affirm a bodily resurrection argue that the Scripture is unambiguous, that its literal intention demands a physical interpretation. Consider the empty-tomb narratives, the Pauline insistence on the bodily resurrection, the Johannine episode in which Jesus invites Thomas to touch his wounds, and so on. Surely, it is held, any questioning of the bodily resurrection is a clear departure from the biblical witness. Any questioning of the miracle of the resurrection is a typical modernist failure of faith.

One can affirm a bodily resurrection without such literalistic smugness; however, such a dogmatic insistence on a bodily resurrection is often indicative of a vague grasp of the problems involved. The implication that a physical event guarantees that a divine reality gave rise to that event is an assertion not of the Christian’s faith in the doings of the transcendent, invisible, eternal God, but an attempt to link a particular finite metaphysic and epistemology to the Christian faith.

Even if God in his wisdom and mercy determined to commend the event to faith by the visible sign of a risen body, one could never prove that it was God’s act by looking at that body. Bodies are bodies, visible, concrete and finite. Whenever we perceive physical objects, we can be certain of one thing: we are seeing that which God is not. Revelation faith affirms that God is revealed through finite events in the finite world, but that any linkage between God and concrete historical events is never self-evident. A concrete “act” of God in history can be discerned only by faith -- and faith, as even the most orthodox theology maintains, is the gift of the Holy Spirit; the physical, objective “miracle” or act of God is only an outward indication. The miracle of revelation -- a work in which the Holy Spirit is indispensable, and which alone makes it possible to discern the significance of a concrete event -- can never be known except to faith. Even if a “body” was seen, there are various ways to account for it. For example, it can be regarded as a merely resuscitated Jesus, or even an elaborate hoax by which the apostles hoped to deceive a credulous populace.

On the religious TV shows on which people claim miraculous cures, the claims in many cases are sincere. One doesn’t necessarily suspect fraud. People on those shows insist that they have been healed. As the TV evangelist repeats pious Amens, many of us in the viewing audience are likely to look upon the “cure” as a part of the human comedy that we don’t understand. Jesus’ critics believed that they understood his healings only too well; he performed them by the power of Satan.

Some sightings of UFOs are still unexplained, but few of us are inclined, on the basis of such reports, to join societies whose members scan the skies for creatures from outer space. That which we find strange and inexplicable we are perfectly capable of filing away in our mind’s pigeonhole marked “strange and inexplicable.” Sometimes we file the whole universe away in that pigeonhole as we experience the “ontological shock” of the great mystery that radiates from the universe: Why is there something and not nothing at all?

For the same reason that all the “proofs” for the existence of God that are based on the design or the very facticity of the world must fail, so also must all “proofs” on the basis of “miracle” fail. No physical event can prove anything -- not even the reality of a physical world. Flesh and blood cannot reveal God unto us.



The Apostle Paul’s extensive wrestling with the problem of the bodily resurrection throughout the 15th chapter of I Corinthians is, as always, instructive. Paul does not insist that the salvation of the Corinthian skeptics is dependent on their accepting his view of the resurrection, but he does insist that the resurrection of Jesus Christ was vital to the preaching and witness of the church from the very beginning. The appearances of Jesus to Cephas and the Twelve, to more than 500 brethren, to James and all the apostles, and finally to Paul himself is self-evident proof to Paul that faith entails the resurrection.

Paul’s own Hebraic anthropology makes it all but impossible for him to understand how the Corinthians could believe in a future life without affirming the resurrection of the dead. That anthropology conceived of human beings as a psychosomatic unity, body and soul being inseparably united to constitute a person. For Paul, if there is to be a future life beyond death, it must encompass a resurrection of the whole person. Therefore, up to a certain point, Paul’s anthropology enabled him to make self-consistent sense out of the resurrection appearances. How else could God have revealed the triumph of Christ over death except in a bodily resurrection?

The Corinthians did not deny a life after death, but they conceived of salvation as the liberation of an immortal soul from the body; they were the “demythologizers” of their day. It was not in the name of modern scientific rationalism that they were unable to accept the resurrection of the dead. Their prescientific, quasi-religious anthropological dualism inhibited them. They were Christians, but they hoped for salvation on better grounds than they perceived Paul’s resurrection theology as providing.

Paul’s break with the Corinthian skeptics was therefore based on two major considerations. First, there was the nonnegotiable fact that he and many others had experienced the resurrection. A modern skeptic might argue that the appearances were the result of mass and individual hallucinations induced by grief and guilt; however, one would never convince Paul and the others that this was a legitimate reading of their experience. Second, there were philosophic barriers to mutual accord: Paul’s Hebraic psychosomatic anthropology and the Corinthians’ body-soul dualism.

Though Paul’s anthropology added a real coherence to his resurrection faith up to a point, beyond that point he faced genuine conceptual difficulties. The body terminology born of his Hebraic anthropology becomes increasingly strained when we try to conceive of its relevance for eternal life. Are there bodies in the kingdom of heaven? If “body” is symbol for the whole person, the answer might be Yes; however, our earthly mode of being is surely so different from heaven that eternal life lived in a form essentially like our present one makes no sense. Paul himself tells us that flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. Put another way, wilt the body in which Christ rose from the dead be the same form in which he rules the universe as the Pantocrator?

The bodily resurrection of Christ is basic to Paul’s understanding of eternal life, but this very concrete faith that gives rise to his hope that we will join Christ in a resurrection like his becomes less and less comprehensible the more one reflects on the eternity it promises. Eternal bodies? we ask. This tension is at the root of Paul’s concern in his paradoxical description of “physical” and “spiritual” bodies in I Corinthians 15:35-55.

For Paul, there is a bodily resurrection, but since “flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God,” there must be different kinds of bodies or different sorts of vessels in which we have our humanity. We are perishable, but we will be raised imperishable. We will be like grain that is sown. The bare kernel must die so that it can produce new and fuller life  -- a life not unrelated to the old life, but a life manifoldly increased.

The word “body” is thereby quite remarkably stretched beyond its definitional limits. For Paul, “body” in this context means not an object extended in space but the mode in which we have our being. In the finite mode we are perishable, but it is within the power of God to re-create our lives in an immortal and imperishable mode. This new mode is promised us in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Surely it should be clear that the paradoxical character of the term “spiritual body,” when applied to the resurrected Christ, means that Paul did not conceive of the bodily resurrection as a “proof.” It is a sign that only faith can interpret.

It is not just modern scientific rationalism that leads some Christians to doubt the physical resurrection. Paul’s paradoxes indicate that the resurrection had to be radically rethought in order to make it consistent with its ostensible purpose; i.e., the promise of eternal life. Those who have trouble with the bodily resurrection find some basis for their uneasiness from the New Testament itself.

One does not, however, escape paradox by demythologization. It is hardly valid to argue against the miracle of the bodily resurrection on scientific-rationalist grounds and then stop short of the non-theistic logic of such scientism by continuing to speak of God. If God cannot act, he cannot act existentially; after all, we have our existence in the concrete. If God does not act, God is unknowable. We know God only through his acts.

All this is to suggest that there is no completely adequate conceptualization which, if only we had sufficient ingenuity, we could discover and proclaim to the general satisfaction of Christendom. No basic stance is free of contradictions and limitations. One’s credo is not only a matter of one’s faith, but also a matter of which of the various theological paradoxes one is willing to live with.



Years ago, when I entered the pastorate, I was emerging from a period in my life when I was deeply influenced by the skepticism of David Hume. For some time I had been kept from an atheistic position only by my attraction to Jesus. Even after I had undergone a conversion and affirmed the Lordship of Christ, I had great problems with miracles. Though I was well aware that the resurrection is pivotal to the Christian faith, my own view of it was highly spiritualized -- not to say demythologized.

My first pastorate was rather stormy, and after nearly a year I began reading some of the sermons I had been preaching to see where my ministry was headed. To my surprise I realized that the person who had written these sermons believed in some kind of physical resurrection. The writer, of course, was myself, and the conviction had come upon me almost without my noticing it. When I began to study the 15th chapter of I Corinthians, I felt I agreed with every drastic turn of thought Paul made.

I mention this personal episode not in order to claim that as I became mature in the faith my view of the resurrection became more objective and that therefore all mature Christians should come to the same view. I am well aware that many Christians proceed in the opposite direction; from the “naïve” literalism of their youth they move to a modern, demythologized understanding.

My point is quite the opposite. Although I came to affirm more than 20 years ago that Jesus Christ was raised, I would not want to suggest that I became a Christian only at the moment I accepted the New Testament view of the resurrection. The heart of the Christian faith is Christ. Christ comes to us in the world where we are, where we have been, and where we are going, despite our various metaphysical biases -- certainly never because of them.

Am I more loved by Christ because I become increasingly skeptical of scientism and find myself more deeply appreciative of Plato the older I get? Am I more of a Christian because my fundamental skepticism about the viability of any particular philosophic system allows me to be so eclectic that I can value both Paul and Plato? Or is faith perhaps made too easy for me, precisely because I need not swim against the current of my own thought in order to be a believer? Perhaps the real Christian believing is being done by those modernists whose naturalistic prejudices make faith an enormous intellectual struggle.

All this is not to say that since everyone is in one way or another wrong, theology doesn’t matter. In another context I’d be happy to argue for the Pauline view of the resurrection. What I am saying is simply that when we gather on Easter we should not be dismayed by our differences. We should rejoice that the Easter event is more true than are any of our explanations.

The Creature’s Creation: Is Art ‘Helpful’ to Faith?

Some years ago I encountered a young Jewish art historian who was doing his doctoral dissertation on the sculpture of the great 14th century Romanesque Church of Saint-Pierre at Aulney in France. We were both photographing the church in the golden light of a winter afternoon. It turned out that we shared an obsession. As he put it, “I can’t pass up a church.” If one is traveling in France and is, as he was, knowledgeable about the Romanesque riches so densely scattered throughout the provinces, such an obsession entails a lot of stopping. Later, the young man confessed that the obsession had even led to the breakup of a love affair. He had no patience for anyone who was content to sit in the car while a church lay unknown before them. What if it contained glories!

The next evening we had dinner together, and our conversation was indicative of the peculiar status of Christian art. When my new acquaintance discovered that I was a theologian and that I was particularly interested in studying how Romanesque art and architecture illustrated the Augustinian-Anselmian character of the faith of the early Middle Ages -- with its profound pessimism about the human condition apart from grace -- the conversation sent him into a mood of self-reproach and even to consideration of abandoning his dissertation topic. “You,” he said, “know why you’re here.” But what was he doing there, living in France, becoming more and more of a francophobe, yearning for his homeland but unable to resolve to leave? Putting thousands of kilometers on his unreliable car, he was kept poor and lonely by the compelling fascination he felt for Romanesque, but the faith which the art so profoundly expressed he did not share.

It was a great evening. He was the first fellow Romanesque madman I had met. Late into the night we pored over maps, swapping references, comparing impressions. “Have you seen? Don’t miss . . .” And so on. Though he had been on a three-year pilgrimage, had “devoured” churches like a religious fanatic, his God was the art of an alien religion, and he was not at peace. However, his ambiguous relationship to the art was not merely personal and idiosyncratic; it is endemic to the very nature of “Christian” art itself.

One need not be an Old Testament legalist to be disquieted by the formidable impediment to all visual art established, by the second commandment -- a prohibition not only against graven images but also against the production of “any likeness.” The commandment is troubling, even if a Pauline Christianity can “handle” it with the realization that in Christ “all things are lawful to me.”

The prohibition against art was an attempt by ancient Israel to undercut pagan idolatry, but it was never totally successful. The use of idols at no time completely ceased, at least in pre-exilic Israel; also, it became obvious that graven images were only the symptom of the disease of idolatry -- i.e., the worship of the creature instead of the creator. We don’t need stone idols in order to be idolatrous.

As Paul taught, prohibitions do not eradicate sin; indeed, they often incite it. Just as celibacy is not the answer to the sins of the flesh, so prohibitions against art will not turn human hearts toward the one true God. If we embrace the Augustinian maxim “Love God and do anything you want,” then the decision concerning art will be resolved not by legalism but in freedom. We are not slavishly bound to ancient prohibitions.



Nevertheless, the second commandment, if only because of the unique place of the Decalogue in the faith of Israel, old and new, gives us a solemn warning. Nor can we ignore the fact that crude idolatry has been and is practiced in the Christian church. Wherever the icon or the image is venerated or “revered,” those who do so come close to the practice of idolatry. In Greece, I’m told, many Byzantine icons have been literally “defaced” by the pious who fleck off little pieces of the “holy” object (particularly about the eyes) and keep them as sacred relics.

Nor can we ignore the warning implicit in the iconoclasm that has run deep in church history -- in the thought of Origen, Bernard of Clairvaux, Savonarola, Calvin, Barth and others. “All things are lawful to me” -- but to complete the quote, “not all things are helpful.” This finally is the issue: Is visual art truly “helpful” to faith?

The earliest development of “Christian” art is instructive. We cannot know with certainty on what basis the clearly non-Pauline legalistic Roman church of the late second and early third centuries flouted the second commandment and came to permit religious funerial art. But from the period of the early catacombs on, church art flourished.

The simple, rather naturalistic, impressionistic style of the early catacomb paintings was taken over from the surrounding Roman culture. This cultural dependence is closely paralleled in the style of much of the theologizing of the second century. To the Christian, the catacombs are deeply moving, and one’s feeling for the early church is enriched by these simple wall paintings. However, the “power” of this art is not in the greatness of the art itself, but in its historic association. Moreover, it is ironic that the style of the early catacomb paintings is identical to that of the grossly pornographic wall paintings discovered at Pompeii. The first Christian painters were decorators and illustrators; they did not create a new style to express the radical new faith. Early Christian art often copied purely pagan themes and simply “Christianized” them -- an attempt to put new wine in old wineskins.

With the emergence of Constantine, a new, anti-classical style found official patronage. An expressionistic, abstract and rigidly frontal art, it was apparently Constantine’s preferred style, as the many portraits of him indicate. This nonnaturalistic style provided the “natural” expression of a church whose faith and theology focused not on the world and humanity as they presently appear, but as they will be when the divinizing work of Christ is complete. Early Byzantine art is the art of a transfigured universe. Christ became what we are that we might become what he is (Athanasius). Such art is the art not of mere illustration. With the emergence of early Byzantine art, we are confronted not with crudely charming illustrations which, by virtue of their special place in Christian memory, have a “magic” that moves us; here we have an art of such aesthetic power and genius that it grasps the beholder quite apart from any history-related sentiment we might feel.

To the legalistic objections against Christian art raised by such figures as Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria and Origen, the early church had responded, in effect: Why should we allow another individual’s scruples to inhibit our liberty? The first flowering of this liberty was early Byzantine. As Walter L. Nathan has observed, the art rejected by these three church fathers was not the “entirely new pictorial language” of a mature Christian art but the Christian art of their time, which had “borrowed freely” from the late classical pagan tradition. One could wonder how they would have reacted, for example, to the Byzantine glories of Ravenna in Italy.

It is not surprising that a dispute over the question of art developed in the early church. But especially when a mature Christian art appeared, the question changed from one of whether such an art should be attempted to one of what to make of an art that has, de facto, been produced. Is it to be judged as a valid or an invalid exegesis of Scripture? Or is it, in legalistic fashion, to be denied consideration on an a priori basis?

If we conclude that we will not dogmatically refuse even to view religious art, or we find that we are unable to avoid viewing it, and if in viewing it we are grasped by its beauty and witness, then a posteriori we are compelled to grant that such an art makes a claim. Once we experience the power of Christian art to probe the meaning of faith, then literal obedience to the second commandment will be an obedience we find impossible to render gladly. The second commandment becomes an arbitrary requirement that contradicts our faith experience.

Radical iconoclasm has, in my judgment, a shameful history. Our puritanizing forebears, for example, were often guilty of the willful destruction of art, leaving many magnificent sculptures in Europe terribly mutilated. Such destruction is a grotesque testimony to the ugliness of censorship. Are former generations not to be allowed to speak to us of their faith?

Or perhaps we are to adopt the position that though Christians in the past may have produced examples of art that glorified the incarnate Christ by giving aesthetic concretization to the more abstract words of Scripture, it is regrettable that they did so. We will not destroy anything so beautiful, but let us hope that no one ever creates such work again! Iconoclasm is faced with insuperable problems once a great Christian art makes an appearance. Either it must, in leaden legalism, refuse to look or, having looked, it must show that no Christian art has ever truly glorified God.

Many of my students have told me that it was not until we studied Byzantine or medieval art that they were able to develop a genuine feel for the theology of these periods. A historical theology focusing on periods in which Christian art was a crucial element in the church’s proclamation ignores at its peril a detailed understanding of that art.

To argue that the invisible God cannot be made visible is to ignore the fact that we have seen the glory of God shining in the face of Jesus, that God reveals himself through the concrete, through things that he is not -- i.e., through his acts. If God has become a human being; why should the spoken word be the only means by which we can point to Christ?

Yet there is still that curious fact which we noted at the outset. Great religious art can and does stand on its own, quite apart from its origins in theology, and it has aesthetic power even for the unbeliever. Is this not perhaps the greatest danger in Christian art -- that the art itself has an aesthetic power which may make it a rival to the God it proclaims?

To answer this question adequately would require setting it in the context of an entire theology of culture, but we can briefly indicate the primary points of such a theology and how it would encompass a theology of aesthetics.

As creatures made in the image of the triune God who creates ex nihilo, human beings have the capacity for creativity. Our creativity mirrors the creativity of God. God creates absolutely, from nothing. Human beings, for their part, are capable of bringing into being, from the world that God has given us, new things that did not exist before. That which did not exist before human beings made it we call culture. Of course, we are limited in what we can create by the structures of the world. We can do only what is possible given the nature of the world, but we are privileged to contribute to the richness of our own existence by our creative acts.

Despite sin, we are the creatures ordained by God to Create new possibilities of existence for ourselves. Human beings bring into being, out of innumerable possibilities for human existence, cultural modes that shape our very humanity. We are the only creatures who creatively contribute to our own being.

It is the Christian hope that even though cultures and civilizations rise and fall, what they accomplish will not be lost. As they achieve, in various degrees, the possibilities inherent in their basic stylistic premises, their creative contribution, to the development of humanity is not despised by God. God is not our jealous rival. God loves not only what he creates but also what the creature creates. The Kingdom of God is a cosmopolitan kingdom in which the diverse cultural achievements of humanity will contribute to the richness of its life. The creation of humanity was not completed in the garden; it was barely begun. The completion of humanity will come when God determines that we have finished the work he but started in the garden.

If we are fellow workers with God in the creation of a fully achieved humanity, then the problem suggested above -- that art in praise of God can stand on its own and be beautiful even to the eyes of the unbeliever -- should not surprise us. Nor should it alarm us. The glory of art -- that it can call from us responses far beyond the conscious intention of the artist -- is one of the gifts of God. If there is a “danger” in art, it lies not in the fact that art is somehow corrupting, but in the fact that it is so wonderful. Art is not under the rigid control of its maker; like the creation itself, it has autonomy. A work of art is, in one sense, always ideological; that is, it displays the perspective of the artist and the age. But once created, it stands as a creation which, like God’s creation, reverberates into new possibilities that could not have been foreseen.

Just as secular art in one sense gives glory to God by virtue of its very existence as it contributes to the manifold wonder and glory of creation -- even if the artist does not acknowledge the creator -- so also Christian art which intentionally points to God contributes to the beauty of creation and can be perceived as beautiful even to unbelief. The same is true also of Christian literature, music and architecture, and it is not to be lamented. The possibilities within the created order are radically open.



The success of the Protestant Reformation was due to the fact that reformation was an idea whose hour had come. When Martin Luther first surfaced, there was instant, widespread support for reform, especially in northern Europe. Of course, the motives were not solely theological; political, economic and philosophical factors were also involved. But the basic outline of Luther’s radical Augustinianism appealed to a large audience quite prepared to hear it.

A great artistic flowering of Germanic art took place immediately preceding, and in part continued into, the Reformation period -- the culmination of the so-called northern “renaissance.” It was an art that virtually prophesied Luther. The north produced a remarkable cluster of genius: Bosch (c. 1453-1516), Grünewald (c. 1470-1528), Dürer (1471-1528), (Cranach (1472-1537), and other fine painters of only slightly lesser power. All of these artists shared in a “Lutheran” vision of humankind totally dependent on grace.

Perhaps the most Protestant painting ever achieved is Grünewald’s crucifixion panel on the Isenheim altarpiece, finished in 1515, two years before the Reformation was launched. It is not at all surprising that Grünewald later developed Lutheran sympathies. In this painting the elongated finger of John the Baptist points in naked objectivity from the Scriptures to the mangled, gigantic Christ; the painting bears the inscription, “He must increase but I must decrease.”

In a single image Luther’s Reformation is summarized. The proclamation of the church must not focus on itself but must be grounded in Scripture, must point to the passion and, as the rest of the altarpiece demonstrates, to the incarnation and resurrection. The figures of the Marys contorted by grief, with the Virgin supported by the mourning apostle, reveal an understandable human response to the death of the beloved Jesus. However, the task of the church is not to re-enact their grief; the church’s task is the objective witness of John, symbolized by his impassivity and the pointing finger. It is interesting that Karl Barth, who argued rather unconvincingly against Christian art, expressed great admiration for this painting. The painting’s Protestant power seems to have overwhelmed the theologian’s puritan principles.

It is deeply ironic that the Reformation should have been accompanied by the virtually prophetic painting of the North, and yet the iconoclastic tendency implicit in the very motto Sola Scriptura would close out the era of great Protestant painting before the middle of the 16th century. Writes Charles P. Cutler in Northern Painting (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968):

. . . art as a vital expression of the German spirit came to an end. No effort by Dürer or by any other painter could stem Protestant iconoclasm. When German artistic expression revived over a century later, it took the form of music, which was acceptable to Protestantism as the old modes of painting were not.

The last truly great painter in the Protestant tradition was Rembrandt. Rembrandt’s religious sentiments were Mennonite, quite out of phase with the prevailing Calvinist climate in Holland. Even had the Calvinist iconoclasm of the day not discouraged Christian art, it is unlikely that Rembrandt’s vision of the poor and humble. Christ would have provided an acceptable exegesis to a burgeoning capitalistic Calvinism. Interestingly, after years of obscurity, Rembrandt’s greatness was “discovered” not by the church but by painters and critics who loved him more for his art than for the faith his art portrayed.



In turning toward a fundamentally iconoclastic faith, the Reformation paid a high cultural price, for despite the greatness of Protestant thought, literature and music, these are all profoundly abstract modes of culture. The balance provided by the visual is missing. The lack of the visually beautiful is evident in the way in which so much American church architecture, until it became too expensive, borrowed from European (Catholic) church styles, as witness the many Romanesque and Gothic anachronisms that dot the American landscape.

A context of beauty is a felt need, and since Protestantism has largely failed to produce visual beauty, it has had to borrow. With the exception of the New England meetinghouses which indeed do have a kind of rarefied puritan beauty, Protestantism in America has produced no significant styles of Christian architecture. This is equally true of religious art. We are no longer seriously inhibited by Protestant iconoclasm, but the wellsprings are dry. Protestant art as it has appeared in churches (Sunday school literature, posters, bulletins, Bible illustrations, etc.) has been either derivative or decorative and superficial.

Of course, with or without the support of the churches, great art has flourished since the Reformation. Christian lovers of art are still able, depending on how far one can stretch a point, to see “spiritual” dimensions in an art which is now largely secular. It is unlikely that things will change in the foreseeable future. This situation is not an unmitigated disaster; it is precisely what our iconoclastic Protestant forebears strove for.

If the art lover can find value in Christian art of past eras apart from the God it celebrates, then the believer can give thanks to God for the beauty that the artist (believer or not) discovers and creates. But I must confess that the art my heart loves best is one that praises God directly, an art that holds out the promise that beauty and truth are finally one in the God who is the ultimate source of all beauty and truth.

Ethical Collapse in Higher Education

With commencements at hand, a generational comparison seems in order. Ten years ago the campuses of our colleges and universities were inflamed with idealism and protest. Intellectual passion was all the rage. Could that have been just ten years ago? It seems like a different world now. Students aren’t angrily aggressive anymore. For the most part they are politically passive and seem worried, especially about jobs; they appear to be scared that perhaps they were born one generation too late to continue cashing in on the American Dream.

Maybe much of the idealism of the ‘60s was self-righteous. Maybe the political protests were sometimes inspired by feelings of personal guilt (for evading the draft by going to school) and thus were less “political” than was claimed. In any event, we are out of Vietnam, the protests are over and calm has been restored. Yet in a number of ways American higher education is in greater difficulty now than it was when students were in foment.

I

This observation is underscored with a special pointedness in the 1979 report of the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education, titled Fair Practices in Higher Education and somewhat ominously subtitled “Rights and Responsibilities of Students and Their Colleges in a Period of Intensified Competition for Enrollments.” When the report was recently highlighted in the press, the negative findings, not surprisingly, were given greater prominence than were the positive ones. Though it is probable that the positive indications will have the greater long-term significance for American life, the negative side of the report is so disturbing that it’s not easy to see through the immediate ethical dislocations to the longer view.

For example, among the “positive aspects” is an attitudinal study which shows that 82 per cent of the faculty members and 93 per cent of the students “are committed to developing ethical values in college.” Yet the distressing facts are out of phase with such idealism; the report documents “a significant and apparently increasing amount of cheating by students . . . a substantial misuse by students of public, financial aid. Theft and destruction by students of valuable property. . .”

Or consider the following finding: 76 per cent of undergraduates trust their faculties, and yet this “trust” is surely strained by the “inflation of grades by faculty [as well as by] competitive awarding of academic credit by some departments and by some institutions for insufficient and inadequate work.”

Another supposedly “hopeful” note: “Colleges are improving the state of educational justice.” Many schools are recruiting adults over age 22, along with part-time students and minority or disadvantaged students. Yet there is evidence of “inflated and misleading advertising by some institutions in the search for students.” There is even an eager pursuit of foreign students, who too often are hopelessly unqualified academically.

All this is evidence of the present and intensifying crunch in higher education. With the end of the draft and the yearly decreasing size of the 18-year-old population, the inflated campus enrollments of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s quickly declined. This loss caused many institutions which had overexpanded during this period to suffer painful withdrawal symptoms. Even senior, tenured faculty members lost jobs, and many faculties experienced demoralization.

The survival of institutions in the ‘80s will be linked to their ability to admit and retain students, both in the traditional 18-to-21 age bracket and in the “nontraditional” categories; i.e., anybody who missed out on a college education the first time around. If this situation requires “hucksterism” to attract enrollees, and if it means grade inflation to keep them from flunking out of school, there are certainly those who will resort to such means.

But the pressures on colleges and universities are not caused simply by declining enrollments. The national mania for proper credentials is also corrosive to ethics. The credential-granting institutions have become the “farm system” for commerce and government, for health care and the education profession itself. Credentials are sine qua non for candidates to fill the upper job slots. Despite attacks on the economic practicality of higher education, most students see a college degree as a prerequisite for financial success -- a union card, as it were. The result is that many students go to college with something less than a passion for knowledge. There they are, sometimes “invincibly ignorant”; but they paid their tuition money and “you can’t flunk them all.”

II

It isn’t only the Carnegie report which signals the present moral malaise. A recent editorial in Change, a journal for higher education, reviews not only the Carnegie findings but cites other indications of various breaches of ethics. It discusses the market as one in which the “student is king,” in which some administrators are pressuring faculty to “give students what they want”; i.e., essentially empty though impressive-sounding new programs. There are even rumors that some administrations have hired public-relations firms to design curriculum. There is “plagiarism by both teachers and students,” and “abject submission by the institution to groups that would deny open discourse.”

When a society’s most hallowed institutions stand so seriously accused, we must be concerned. It had always been hoped that educational institutions would leave students at least not more corrupt than when they entered. However, we ought not understand the present dilemmas in too moralistic or simplistic a light. The very fact that these studies with all their disturbing candor come from within higher education itself is a sign of a certain health. Further, though widespread cheating, self-serving grade inflation, theft of books, reneging on debts for educational loans, plagiarism and hucksterism are all too widespread, they are far from universal.

Without attempting to absolve individuals from personal culpability, we should note that many problems plaguing the schools are examples of good intentions gone awry. For example, grade inflation. True, it can be a part of a cynical conspiracy to save professorial jobs, but the phenomenon has roots in nobler motives. Certainly since World War II there has been an accelerating national effort to provide post -- high school educational opportunity to everyone who shows even the least promise of profiting by it. And this has been on balance a noble experiment -- this attempt to make higher education responsive to our democratic ideals. College has long ceased to be the exclusive province of an elite few.

However, when schools open their doors to students of highly diverse backgrounds and interests, rigid grade standards make no sense. Underprivileged and foreign students who are nursed along through their first years often make remarkable strides and justify some of the “gift Cs” they were given early in their academic careers.

Put it another way: if schools admit students and give them a reason to believe that they can survive in college, and the students make a reasonable effort, what right do faculty have to flunk large numbers? If a faculty member sets standards that are higher than those of the school’s admissions policy, does that faculty member not break an implicit contract? Standards must be relative to the ability of the student body.

But there’s the rub. Once one begins to show mercy here and there, it becomes more and more difficult to operate on a standard of strict justice in other cases, and grading becomes an increasingly troubling chore.

III

Colleges have grown large trying to fulfill their responsibilities to the youth of a democratic society. Now we are facing a time of cutback. Originally, higher education grew in order to serve. But with huge plant investments and the nightmare of retrenchment facing educational institutions, the temptation is to see students not as ends for which schools exist, but as means to the economic survival of the institutions themselves. Colleges and universities have prided themselves on their nobility of vision. It is tragic what economics can do to both nobility and vision.

But what are the alternatives? All the “cures” seem to be worse than the disease. No sweeping, all-inclusive program is even in the offing. For the present, higher education is going to have to limp along doing the best it can, cracking down where abuses are rampant. Virtue and knowledge are not, alas, two sides of the same coin. Colleges and universities live in the same world of grays and ambiguities as do all other institutions.

Lest the impression is generated that the ethical failures in higher education are due solely to a democratization process, let me hasten to add that the corruptions of the elite are no less prevalent. Much cheating, stealing, cutting pages out of library books are not the desperate effort of underprivileged kids to survive; such deeds take place at prestige institutions, too. Children of wealthy parents and intellectually gifted students are cheating not to hang on, but to be in a position to compete for the best grad school, the best record, the best job. In short, colleges and universities face ethical difficulties primarily because they are reflections of the moral aimlessness of our society as a whole. Children are mirrors of their parents.

The Possibility of Repentance (Mark 1:4)

John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins [Mark 1:4].



John the Baptist knew that the decisive moment was at hand, and he interpreted that moment in terms of his sense of outrage over sin. However, his proclamation of “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin” strikes most of us, if we are honest, as a call from another world -- a voice from a wilderness that has long since been brought under human control. Even if we are relatively pious, it would be hard to keep a straight face if -- on our way home from church, for example -- we were beset by an itinerant preacher like John who wanted us to “repent.” Such a declaration is born of a moralism too naïve for our modern Sensitivities and insights.

We tend, quite properly, to relativize human frailties in terms of a social and psychological situationalism. People who have suffered great privation might be excused for a certain grasping acquisitiveness born of a fear of want. People who have been psychologically abused because of their race or sex may find it impossible ever to feel reconciled to members of the groups that have caused them torment. Those who have been exposed to violence often respond with violence. Our liberal, social-scientific perspective has made it axiomatic: trace down the empirical roots of human attitudes and actions, and you will understand them, and “to understand all is to forgive all.”

For John, understanding and forgiveness can be reached only by way of “repentance.” Judah was an occupied land, victimized by tyrants foreign and domestic. John, however, did not suggest that the nation’s suffering mitigated its guilt. We cannot but shudder at the ice-cold rectitude of John’s announcement. He knew that the wretchedness of Judah had reached such desperate proportions that a holy God must act, that the very depth of the lowliness of his people called into question God’s honor. John’s genius was flamed by an apocalyptic urgency. God must send the Messiah soon. Nevertheless, for John, the suffering of the nation did not excuse its sin. It stood accused; it needed the baptism of repentance if it were to prepare for a day of reckoning in which one’s only hope was to have already radically turned around.



We for our part, from a distance of almost 20 centuries, stand amazed. What was the nation’s terrible sin? We are overwhelmed with the compassion of those who understand weakness. For us, the wonder is that the faith survived at all. John’s courage against Herod, his martyrdom -- these we admire. However, his usual audiences were the victims of Herod. Was all this doomsday prophecy primarily the afflicting of the afflicted?

Jesus was the fulfillment of John’s messianic hope, and yet Jesus and John were not at one in their understanding of the eschatological moment (Luke 7:19). John was living proof of the fact that God fulfills our hopes in ways that surprise and even confound us. We who follow Jesus today are equally out of phase with him. Jesus confounds us moderns as well.

Jesus did not come in order that he might teach us to understand evil in order that evil be excused. There can be no free forgiveness of sin. Jesus forgives sins, but at a terrible cost. The price is the cross. Nevertheless, Jesus did not come as a fierce, moralistic ascetic either. Eating and drinking are not the problem (Luke 7:34). The problem relates to the demons. Jesus came not to castigate the victims of sin but to cast out demons which bind us in sin -- the demons of despair, of self-righteousness, of vengeance. Jesus did not come preaching repentance; rather he came to overcome the darkness. Unless this victory is won, our repentance is impossible, for we are not free. In an unexpected way, he was the warrior Messiah of first century Israel’s hope, for he vanquished the elemental spirits of the universe; he conquered sin and death. By setting us free, he cast our repentance in a wholly new light.

The Freedom of Necessity (Mark 8:31)

And he began to teach them that the Son of man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed and after three days rise again. [Mark 8:31]



In what sense “must” the Son of man suffer and rise again? There are many things a person “must” do. I must get my hair cut before the weekend . . I must be more considerate of others . . I must die. “Must” can further imply a state wherein I am required by the brute necessities of existence, where quite apart from my choices one way or another, I “must” because I am compelled. Again, I must die.

The suffering and death and resurrection constitute an absolute necessity which faces the Son of man. He must suffer and rise again.

Must? But is he not free? And, if he, is the Son of God, a perfect expression of the love of God, is the love of God not free? Can there be love without freedom? And what of God’s power? Can God be God if God is not free from any and all necessity?

Considerations such as these invite us to offer an innocuous reading of our text, but to state such an interpretation indicates that we are on the wrong course. For example, what if we were to suppose that the necessity (the “must”) implies merely some determination of Jesus to be a martyr, and that his death is not irreversibly God’s will? Perhaps the cross was merely a heroic human choice on Jesus’ part. Are we then to conclude that the necessity of his rising again is also a heroic human choice? Does the promise of his rising again reflect anything less than the “definite plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23)? Is the resurrection, however “mythological” or demythologized our view of it, even remotely an exercise in human heroism? Clearly, Jesus was not a superhero, impervious to death.

The Gospels never suggest that Jesus acted independently of the Father. From Mark we hear nothing of the great man Jesus, only “the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Thus, if Jesus Christ speaks of his destiny out of his sense of God’s will, and if the resurrection is a vindication of Jesus Christ’s sense of God’s will, then the language of necessity that dominates our text cannot be explained away. Jesus Christ suffers, dies and rises again because there is no other way. It is inconceivable that the Father would require, and the Son embrace, so terrible a destiny, were it not a matter of necessity.



Too often when we Americans speak of freedom, we sound as if freedom meant having access to the hedonism of the consumer market, or as if freedom were synonymous with license. If this were the case, logically, perfect freedom would open into a limitless, unpredictable, sensualistic liberty. However, by such a definition of freedom God would not be free, for God is never capricious or arbitrary. It is true that God always surprises us, but this is because we are not prepared for the daring with which he keeps his word. Nevertheless, his freedom is demonstrated in the absolute reliability of his word. Nothing can possibly deter God from keeping his commitments; precisely because God is absolutely free, God cannot default. Nothing could cause God to fail to be what God is. God is love. It is no failure in freedom that God cannot fail to be God. It is to the liberating glory of God that the love of God  -- that is, the being of God -- cannot fail.

Our freedom is not the mere capacity to act on every impulse, to scratch every itch. That is not freedom; it is slavery to each whim, to every fad, to all the urges that beset us. Freedom is the capacity to stand fast in one’s commitments, the capacity to act consistently with one’s true nature as God’s creature.

It is not true that we, at least in theory, need to be able to sin in order to be free. The faithful spouse is free when she or he resists temptation, but spouses are even more free when, because they love, faithlessness is not even an option. The capacity for betrayal has nothing to do with the freedom God exhibits.

Jesus proves that perfect obedience to God is perfect freedom. Sin is not freedom; it is a malignant pollution of freedom. Sin is death. Sin thereby brings the very possibility of freedom to an end.

It is Jesus who teaches us about freedom. In freedom he chose the terrible necessity of the cross because the love of God required it. He who is one with God freely accepted as his own the burden the Father must bear. God’s very being demands that the sin of the guilty as well as the suffering of the innocent be borne by God himself; for God is love.

God would not be God if he presided, as he does, over the death of every human being ever to walk the earth while he himself refused to bear the burden that his creatures must bear, for God would not be love. Love necessitates suffering when the object of that love must suffer.

But the nature of God’s loving sovereignty requires resurrection as well. The Son of Man must rise again. For at the core of all reality is the loving heart of God. God cannot abandon his Christ to oblivion and be the God he is. To say that God is love and to say the Son of man must suffer and be killed, and after three days rise again, is to say one and the same thing.