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Resurrection Faith: N. T. Wright Talks About History and Belief

New Testament scholar N. T Wright, who has taught at Cambridge, Oxford and Montreal, recently became the canon theologian at Westminster Abbey in London. He is both a vigorous investigator of the historical Jesus and an effective communicator of the gospel. His scholarly works include a two-volume project on the origins of Christianity: The New Testament and the People of God (1992) and Jesus and the Victory of God (1996). More popular works include The Original Jesus: The Life and Vision of a Revolutionary (1996) and Luke for Everyone (2000), which is part of a series of "New Testament Guides for Everyone distributed in the U.S. by Pilgrim Press. Tom Wright is also well known for carrying on a lively public debate on Jesus with the American scholar Marcus Borg, which led to their joint book The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (2000). We recently spoke with Wright about his life as a historian and believer.

You once wrote: "Authentic Christianity has nothing to fear from history." Why is that?

Well, it’s a slightly polemical remark, directed at those Christians who think Christianity is simply a matter of the community of faith telling its own story, and who don’t even want to discuss issues of the historical Jesus because they think the Bible and the tradition have told us all we need to know. That seems to me profoundly wrong. The Gospel writers think they’re talking about things that actually happened. If they didn’t happen, then I’ve got other things to do with my life. If, for example, Jesus died of influenza at the age of 25 and everything about the crucifixion was made up, then something pretty significant about Christianity is lost. Of course, the primary issue here is the resurrection. I am not going to stay up nights sweating about such matters as whether Jesus walked on water.

One of the underlying issues here is that of miracles. Does the postmodern context, with its suspicions of rationalism, open up the issue of miracles in a way that it hasn’t been open since the 18th century?

I think that’s true. When Marcus Borg and I debate each other on these topics, we don’t use the word "miracle" because we both agree that the term is too infected by post-Enlightenment debates. It is accompanied, especially in America, with the idea that God exists outside natural processes and sometimes reaches in and does something and then pushes off again. That is how a lot of people think of miracle, though that view is more part of the superman myth of God than part of Christian theology and history.

In any case, I think God can do whatever God wants. I don’t think we know what the limits are. And our discussion of the limits is too much shaped by the terms of modern philosophy.

Can’t we talk about empirical limits, however? We know certain things, such as the laws of gravity -- and that human beings cannot walk on water.

I’ve been told that in some Muslim fundamentalist circles people are taught to walk on water as a spiritual exercise. I’m prepared to believe it. I do think there are all sorts of odd things that happen in the world. And there are several stories in the Gospels -- the resurrection is the main one -- which have the flavor of people saying: Look here, you’re not going to believe this, but this is what happened.

How do you, as a historian, approach the resurrection?

Well, we know quite a lot about first-century Jewish movements, many of which ended with the leader’s death. I’ve tried to imagine myself in the world of someone like Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian. He hears about the demise of a messianic leader or prophetic leader, and is told that this leader has been raised from the dead. He is going to ask: What do you mean he’s been raised from the dead? And he will not be satisfied if the answer is: Well, I had this vision, or I felt my heart warmed, or I felt that God had forgiven me for letting the leader down. He would say, "Well, fine, I’m glad you had that experience. But why did you say he’s been raised from the dead?" My point is that resurrection is something that had a quite clear meaning at that time. It was something that every pagan knew doesn’t happen. And a lot of Jews (the Sadducees and some others) believed it doesn’t happen. Those who did affirm the resurrection did not think it was just away of saying, "He is Lord."

The historian has to offer a plausible hypothesis of why the disciples used the language of resurrection. My hypothesis is that there were two things: an empty tomb and sightings of Jesus. An empty tomb by itself doesn’t mean that much, nor do visions -- many people have had visions, particularly after somebody they love has just died. Given the accounts of the empty tomb and of the sightings, however, I think the historian is faced with two parts of an arch with the piece in the middle -- the resurrection -- missing. The question is: Are these just two isolated phenomena?

The historian cannot prove the resurrection in the same way that one can prove that Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 AD. But I think the historian can say: Here are the plausible explanations. And there is an extreme implausibility of virtually all the rival suggestions, such as the one that James, the brother of the Lord, was walking around in the garden at the same time, and because he looked rather like Jesus, the women saw him in the half light. That story is not going to last more than an hour or two.

What is at stake for you in the issue of resurrection? Or to put it another way, what’s at stake in the argument between you and Marcus Borg, who would not be that concerned over whether the resurrection happened, who would he content to say "Jesus is alive today regardless of whether the tomb was empty."

Resurrection is hugely important as the beginning of the new world God has already started -- which is how Paul talks about it. Resurrection is also the foundation of Christian ecological action and political action, for God has actually launched the new mode of being into the world. On this point Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan make what I think is a very modernist complaint. They say that the resurrection of Jesus would not be fair -- If God raised Jesus, why only Jesus? Why didn’t God do it for everybody? I understand that view, but it completely misses the point that the resurrection is a beginning. It is a seed being sown, a tune being composed which everyone now gets to sing.

And the resurrection is the sign that death is defeated. That’s the point of I Corinthians 15. Many Christians talk about death in a way that suggests it isn’t actually so bad after all. But if Christians allow death to rule in the realm of physicality, then ultimately the doctrine of creation is in jeopardy -- the doctrine that God remains the good creator who loves the world that God has made and who is not going to abandon it.

You’re saying that the resurrection of Jesus introduces something really new in the history of the cosmos and that this new thing is connected to a historical event. By contrast, Borg and others would say that something can be truly new, but it can arise from a story or myth, not from a historical event.

Yes. The myth of a new beginning was around for centuries. The Jews weren’t expecting it to take the form of a young, would-be Messiah executed by the pagans followed three days later by news of a resurrection. They were thinking in terms of something happening to all God’s people at the very end of time. Resurrection was as much a shock for them as anyone.

The resurrection, seen as a "new beginning," has always raised a question: Why is the new beginning so slow to take shape? Why is the reign of God delayed?

The problem of the delay of the parousia is a modern myth. The problem is caused by liberal Christianity’s no longer believing in the resurrection, which means that the weight of God’s activity is pushed forward in time. There’s not much evidence that the early church was anxious about this. First-century Christianity didn’t see itself so much as living in the last days, waiting for the parousia, as living in the first days of God’s new world.

We are still awaiting the final outworking of what God accomplished in Jesus, but there are all kinds of signs to show that, though the situation is often bleak, we are in fact on the right road.

You have engaged in dialogue with Dominic Crossan and others in the Jesus Seminar, which has famously issued statements on the unreliability of the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings. Though you have generally reached different conclusions from major figures in the seminar, do you think its work has been fruitful?

It has alerted a large number of people to the fact that there really is historical investigation into the first century, and that the world of the first century is not the same as ours. But the way it has done that -- with the rhetoric of "We, the scholars, will tell you, the ordinary people, the truth" -- has been singularly unhelpful.

I would add that any work that makes available major new editions of relevant noncanonical texts, like the Gospels of Thomas and Philip, is very valuable.

Can you say something about your own life of faith?

I was raised in the Church of England and at various times questioned it, but saw no reason to jump ship. My parents are devout middle Anglicans. The evangelical emphasis, which is still very important to me, came through attending camp. When I started doing my doctorate on Paul, one of the small but quite stunning things that happened was my realizing that Paul by no means legitimates the evangelical worldview. That is, the big question about justification for Paul was not How do I find gracious God? but How do Jews and gentiles who believe in Christ share table fellowship?

You have made your own scholarship accessible to the church and the wider public, as in the television series you’ve worked on for the BBC on Jesus and the Middle East and your new series of "New Testament Guides for Everyone." Is this work part of how you understand your vocation?

C. S. Lewis once said that if you can’t translate stuff into the vernacular, you either don’t understand it or you don’t believe it. Another Lewis-ism is this: we must never underestimate people’s intelligence even as we mustn’t overestimate their information. In other words, if you lead them step by step, most people can catch on. Just don’t assume that they know who Josephus was or that they know what happened in AD. 70.

Fortunately, being in a church position, not an academic one, I’ve been able to write what I want to write. And I’ve always wanted to write both popular and scholarly articles. Also, I come from a family that isn’t particularly academic, and I’m married to a woman who certainly isn’t an academic, and I have four children whose regular comment is, "Dad, you’re going to have to say it clearer than that in order to get hold of me."

Finally, by temperament I’m a big-picture person as opposed to a details person. Most biblical scholars are detail people. The problem with people like that is that when they are put in front of a class of first-year students, they will start talking about the textual problems in Romans 2 when students have no idea who Paul is.

How do you make the figure of Jesus come alive for people these days?

One way is to urge people to become a character in the story: You are on the edge of a crowd listening to Jesus. And the sacraments are important. When scripture and sacrament meet, people are driven to the intimacy of prayer and the life of discipleship.

It seems that people these days are more open to spirituality. Do you find they are also open to the spirituality of the church?

Under secularism, people felt embarrassed even to mention their religious hunger. And now, people are happy to talk about it. The church needs to be able to say, Yes, we do actually know a certain amount about prayer and meditation -- these are things deeply rooted within our tradition. We should be running schools of prayer. We should advertise them as such.

However, if that’s all we did or if that was the main thing we did, we might be in danger of, as it were, pandering to a split-level world, treating spirituality as a private hobby. So simultaneously the church has to be speaking and acting in political, public and social ways. That’s terribly difficult, and it’s always going to be risky. But that’s one of the reasons that my political understanding of Paul is helpful. To say that Jesus is Lord means that Caesar isn’t. Jesus is Savior, therefore Caesar isn’t. The rhetoric about the Roman Empire in the first century has astoundingly close resonances with the rhetoric of empire surrounding the U.S. today.

I recently read George Steiner’s book Errata, and it struck me that he illustrates the modern spiritual situation when, at the end of the book, he’s struggling with the question of God. He isn’t sure that he believes in God, but he believes in original sin because of the existence of child torture, abuse of animals, and all the absurdly evil things that happen. He knows that this is not what creation was meant for. That is a profoundly Jewish and Christian reaction. Steiner is in effect rejecting the existential philosophy of Sartre without embracing theism. And it seems to me that is where postmodernism at its best gets us: it preaches the doctrine of original sin to arrogant modernism.

But suppose there is somebody who has taken this torture, this meaningless, absurd evil, onto himself. That is God’s project. The Christian mission as I conceive it is poised between the unique ministry of Jesus and the final new heaven and new earth. Our task is to implement the first and thereby to anticipate the second.

The Public Meaning of the Gospels

In his new book, The Great Awakening, Jim Wallis describes how as a young man growing up in an evangelical church, he never heard a sermon on the Sermon on the Mount. That telling personal observation reflects a phenomenon about which I have been increasingly concerned: that much evangelical Christianity on both sides of the Atlantic has based itself on the epistles rather than the Gospels, though often misunderstanding the epistles themselves.

Indeed, in this respect evangelicalism has simply mirrored a much larger problem: the entire Western church, both Catholic and Protestant, evangelical and liberal, charismatic and social activist, has not actually known what the Gospels are there for.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are all in their various ways about God in public, about the kingdom of God coming on earth as in heaven through the public career and the death and resurrection of Jesus. The massive concentration on source and form criticism, the industrial-scale development of criteria for authenticity (or, more often, inauthenticity), and the extraordinary inverted snobbery of preferring gnostic sayings-sources to the canonical documents all stem from, and in turn reinforce, the determination of the Western world and church to make sure that the four Gospels will not be able to say what they want to say, but will be patronized, muzzled, dismembered and eventually eliminated altogether as a force to be reckoned with.

The central message of all four canonical Gospels is that the Creator God, Israel's God, is at last reclaiming the whole world as his own, in and through Jesus of Nazareth. That, to offer a riskily broad generalization, is the message of the kingdom of God, which is Jesus' answer to the question, What would it look like if God were running this show?

And at once, in the 21st century as in the first, we are precipitated into asking the vital question, Which God are we talking about, anyway? It is quite clear if one reads Christopher Hitchens or Friedrich Nietzsche that the image of "God running the world" against which they are reacting is the image of a celestial tyrant imposing his will on an unwilling world and unwilling human beings, cramping their style, squashing their individuality and their very humanness, requiring them to conform to arbitrary and hurtful laws and threatening them with dire consequences if they resist. This narrative (which contains a fair amount of secularist projection) serves the Enlightenment's deist agenda, as well as the power interests of those who would move God to a remote heaven so that they can continue to exploit the world.

But the whole point of the Gospels is that the coming of God's kingdom on earth as in heaven is precisely not the imposition of an alien and dehumanizing tyranny, but rather the confrontation of alien and dehumanizing tyrannies with the news of a God--the God recognized in Jesus--who is radically different from them all, and whose inbreaking justice aims at rescuing and restoring genuine humanness. The trouble is that in our flat-Earth political philosophies we know only the spectrum which has tyranny at one end and anarchy at the other, with the present democracies our dangerously fragile way of warding off both extremes. The news of God's sovereign rule inevitably strikes democrats, not just anarchists, as a worryingly long step toward tyranny as we apply to God and to the Gospels the hermeneutic of suspicion that we rightly apply to those in power who assure us that they have our best interests at heart. But the story that the Gospels tell systematically resists this deconstruction--for three reasons having to do with the integration of the Gospel stories both internally and externally.

First, the narrative told by each Gospel--yes, in different ways, but in this regard the canonical Gospels stand shoulder to shoulder over against the Gospel of Thomas and the rest--presents itself as an integrated whole in a way that scholarship has found almost impossible to reflect. Attention has been divided, focusing either on Jesus' announcement of the kingdom and the powerful deeds--healings, feastings and so on--in which it is instantiated, or on his death and resurrection. The Gospels have thus been seen either as a social project with an unfortunate, accidental and meaningless conclusion, or as passion narratives with extended introductions. Thus the Gospels, in both popular and scholarly readings, have been regarded either as grounding a social gospel whose naive optimism has no place for the radical fact of the cross, still less the resurrection--the kind of naiïveté that Reinhold Niebuhr regularly attacked--or as merely providing the raw historical background for the developed, and salvific, Pauline gospel of the death of Jesus. If you go the latter route, the only role left for the stories of Jesus' healings and moral teachings is, as for Rudolf Bultmann, as stories witnessing to the church's faith, or, for his fundamentalist doppelgängers, stories that proved Jesus' divinity rather than launching any kind of program (despite Luke 4, despite the Sermon on the Mount, despite the terrifying warnings about the sheep and the goats!).

Appeals for an integrated reading have met stiff opposition from both sides: those who have emphasized Jesus' social program lash out wildly at any attempt to highlight his death and resurrection, as though that would simply legitimate a fundamentalist program, either Catholic or Protestant, while those who have emphasized his death and resurrection do their best to anathematize any attempt to continue Jesus' work with and for the poor, as though that might result in justification by works, either actually or at the existentialist meta-level of historical method (Bultmann again, and Gerhard Ebeling and others).

The lesson is twofold: (1) Yes, Jesus did indeed launch God's saving sovereignty on earth as in heaven; but this could not be accomplished without his death and resurrection. The problem to which God's kingdom-project was and is the answer is deeper than can be addressed by a social program alone.

(2) Yes, Jesus did, as Paul says, die for our sins, but his whole agenda of dealing with sin and all its effects and consequences was never about rescuing individual souls from the world but about saving humans so that they could become part of his project of saving the world. "My kingdom is not from this world," he said to Pilate; had it been, he would have led an armed resistance movement like other worldly kingdom-prophets. But the kingdom he brought was emphatically for this world, which meant and means that God has arrived on the public stage and is not about to leave it again; he has thus defeated the forces both of tyranny and of chaos--both of shrill modernism and of fluffy postmodernism, if you like--and established in their place a rule of restorative, healing justice, which needs translating into scholarly method if the study of the Gospels is to do proper historical, theological and political justice to the subject matter.

It is in the entire Gospel narrative, rather than any of its possible fragmented parts, that we see that complete, many-sided kingdom work taking shape. And this narrative, read this way, resists deconstruction into power games precisely because of its insistence on the cross. The rulers of the world behave one way, declares Jesus, but you are to behave another way, because the Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom for many. We discover that so-called atonement theology within that statement of so-called political theology. To state either without the other is to resist the integration, the God-in-public narrative, which the Gospels persist in presenting.

Second, the Gospels demand to be read in deep and radical integration with the Old Testament. Recognition of this point has been obscured by perfectly proper post-Holocaust anxiety about apparently anti-Jewish readings. But we do the Gospels no service by screening out the fact that each of them in its own way (as opposed, again, to the Gospel of Thomas and the rest) affirms the God-givenness and God-directedness of the entire Jewish narrative of creation, fall, Abraham, Moses, David and so on. The Old Testament is the narrative of how the Creator God is rescuing creation from its otherwise inevitable fate, and it was this project, rather than some other, which was brought to successful completion in and through Jesus. The Gospels, like Paul's gospel, are to that extent folly to pagans, ancient and modern alike, and equally scandalous to Jews. We gain nothing exegetically, historically, theologically or politically by trying to make the Gospels less Jewishly foolish (or vice versa) to paganism and hence less scandalous, in their claim of fulfillment, to Judaism.

Third, the Gospels thus demonstrate a close integration with the genuine early Christian hope, which is precisely not the hope for heaven in the sense of a blissful disembodied life after death in which creation is abandoned to its fate, but rather the hope, as in Ephesians 1, Romans 8 and Revelation 21, for the renewal and final coming together of heaven and earth, the consummation precisely of God's project to be savingly present in an ultimate public world. And the point of the Gospels is that with the public career of Jesus, and with his death and resurrection, this whole project was decisively inaugurated, never to be abandoned.

From the perspective of these three integrations, we can see how mistaken are the readings of both the neo-Gnostic movement that is so rampant today and the fundamentalism that is its conservative analogue. Indeed, if an outsider may venture a guess, I think the phenomenon of the religious right in the U.S. (we really have no parallel in the United Kingdom) may be construed as a clumsy attempt to recapture the coming together of God and the world, which remains stubbornly in scripture but which the Enlightenment had repudiated, and which fundamentalism itself continues to repudiate with its dualistic theology of rapture and Armageddon.

It is as though the religious right has known in its bones that God belongs in public, but without understanding either why or how that might make sense; while the political left in the U.S., and sometimes the religious left on both sides of the Atlantic, has known in its bones that God would make radical personal moral demands as part of his program of restorative justice, and has caricatured his public presence as a form of tyranny in order to evoke the cheap and gloomy Enlightenment critique as a way of holding that challenge at bay.

The resurrection of Jesus is to be seen not as the proof of Jesus' uniqueness, let alone his divinity--and certainly not as the proof that there is a life after death, a heaven and a hell (as though Jesus rose again to give prospective validation to Dante or Michelangelo!)--but as the launching within the world of space, time and matter of that God-in-public reality of new creation called God's kingdom, which, within 30 years, would be announced under Caesar's nose openly and unhindered. The reason those who made that announcement were persecuted is, of course, that the fact of God acting in public is deeply threatening to the rulers of the world in a way that Gnosticism in all its forms never is. The Enlightenment's rejection of the bodily resurrection has for too long been allowed to get away with its own rhetoric of historical criticism--as though nobody until Gibbon or Voltaire had realized that dead people always stay dead--when in fact its nonresurrectional narrative clearly served its own claim to power, presented as an alternative eschatology in which world history came to its climax not on Easter Day but with the storming of the Bastille and the American Declaration of Independence.

Near the heart of the early chapters of Acts we find a prayer of the church facing persecution, and the prayer makes decisive use of one of the most obviously political of all the Psalms. Psalm 2 declares that though the nations make a great noise and fuss and try to oppose God's kingdom, God will enthrone his appointed king in Zion and thus call the rulers of the earth to learn wisdom from him. This point, which brings into focus a good deal of Old Testament political theology, is sharply reinforced in the early chapters of the Wisdom of Solomon.

Psalm 2 also appears at the start of the Gospel narratives, as Jesus is anointed by the Spirit at his baptism. Much exegesis has focused on the christological meaning of "Son of God" here; my proposal is that we should focus equally, without marginalizing that Christology, on the political meaning. The Gospels constitute a call to the rulers of the world to learn wisdom in service to the messianic Son of God, and thus they also provide the impetus for a freshly biblical understanding of the role of the "rulers of the world" and of the tasks of the church in relation to them. I have three points to make in this regard.

First, it is noteworthy that the early church, aware of prevailing tyrannies both Jewish and pagan, and insisting on exalting Jesus as Lord over all, did not reject the God-given rule even of pagans. This is a horrible disappointment, of course, to post-Enlightenment liberals, who would much have preferred the early Christians to have embraced some kind of holy anarchy with no place for any rulers at all. But it is quite simply part of a creational view of the world that God wants the world to be ordered, not chaotic, and that human power structures are the God-given means by which that end is to be accomplished--otherwise those with muscle and money will always win, and the poor and the widows will be trampled on afresh. This is the point at which Colossians 1 makes its decisive contribution over against all dualisms which imagine that earthly rulers are a priori a bad thing (the same dualisms that have dominated both the method and the content of much biblical scholarship). This is the point, as well, at which the notion of the common good has its contribution to make. The New Testament does not encourage the idea of a complete disjunction between the political goods to be pursued by the church and the political goods to be pursued by the world outside the church, precisely for the reason that the church is to be seen as the body through whom God is addressing and reclaiming the world.

To put this first point positively, the New Testament reaffirms the God-given place even of secular rulers, even of deeply flawed, sinful, self-serving, corrupt and idolatrous rulers like Pontius Pilate, Felix, Festus and Herod Agrippa. They get it wrong and they will be judged, but God wants them in place because order, even corrupt order, is better than chaos. Here we find, in the Gospels, in Acts and especially in Paul, a tension that cannot be dissolved without great peril. We in the contemporary Western world have all but lost the ability conceptually--never mind practically--to affirm that rulers are corrupt and to be confronted yet are God-given and to be obeyed. That sounds to us as though we are simultaneously to affirm anarchy and tyranny. But this merely shows how far our conceptualities have led us again to muzzle the texts in which both stand together. How can that be?

The answer comes--and this is my second point--in such passages as John 19 on the one hand and 1 Corinthians 2 and Colossians 2 on the other. The rulers of this age inevitably twist their God-given vocation--to bring order to the world--into the satanic possibility of tyranny. But the cross of Jesus, enthroned as the true Son of God as in Psalm 2, constitutes the paradoxical victory by which the rulers' idolatry and corruption are confronted and overthrown. And the result, as in Colossians 1:18-20, is that the rulers are reconciled, are in some strange sense reinstated as the bringers of God's wise order to the world, whether or not they would see it that way. This is the point at which Romans 13 comes in, not as the validation of every program that every ruler dreams up, certainly not as the validation of what democratically elected governments of one country decide to do against other countries, but as the strictly limited proposal, in line with Isaiah's recognition of Cyrus, that the Creator God uses even those rulers who do not know him personally to bring fresh order and even rescue to the world. This lies also behind the narrative of Acts.

This propels us to a third, perhaps unexpected and certainly challenging reflection that the present political situation is to be understood in terms of the paradoxical lordship of Jesus himself. From Matthew to John to Acts, from Colossians to Revelation, with a good deal else in between, Jesus is hailed as already the Lord of both heaven and earth, and in particular as the one through whom the Creator God will at last restore and unite all things in heaven and on earth. And this gives sharp focus to the present task of earthly rulers. Until the achievement of Jesus, a biblical view of pagan rulers might have been that they were charged with keeping God's creation in order, preventing it from lapsing into chaos. Now, since Jesus' death and resurrection (though this was of course anticipated in the Psalms and the prophets), their task is to be seen from the other end of the telescope. Instead of moving forward from creation, they are to look forward (however unwillingly or unwittingly) to the ultimate eschaton. In other words, God will one day right all wrongs through Jesus, and earthly rulers, whether or not they acknowledge this Jesus and this coming kingdom, are entrusted with the task of anticipating that final judgment and that final mercy. They are not merely to stop God's good creation from going utterly to the bad. They are to enact in advance, in a measure, the time when God will make all things new and will once again declare that it is very good.

All this might sound like irrationally idealistic talk--and it is bound to be seen as such by those for whom all human authorities are tyrants by another name--were it not for the fact that along with this vision of God working through earthly rulers comes the church's vocation to be the people through whom the rulers are to be reminded of their task and called to account. We see this happening throughout the book of Acts and on into the witness of the second-century apologists--and, indeed, the witness of the martyrs as well, because martyrdom (which is what happens when the church bears witness to God's call to the rulers and the rulers shoot the messenger because they don't like the message) is an inalienable part of political theology. You can have as high a theology of the God-given calling of rulers as you like, as long as your theology of the church's witness, and of martyrdom, matches it stride for stride.

This witness comes into sharp focus in John 16:8-11. The Spirit, declares Jesus, will prove the world wrong about sin, righteousness and judgment--about judgment because the ruler of this world is judged. How is the Spirit to do that? Clearly, within Johannine theology, through the witness of the church, in and through which the Spirit is at work. The church will do to the rulers of the world what Jesus did to Pilate in John 18 and 19, confronting him with the news of the kingdom and of truth, deeply unwelcome and indeed incomprehensible though both of them were. Part of the way in which the church will do this is by getting on with, and setting forward, those works of justice and mercy, of beauty and relationship, that the rulers know ought to be flourishing but which they seem powerless to bring about. But the church, even when faced with overtly pagan and hostile rulers, must continue to believe that Jesus is the Lord before whom they will bow and whose final sovereign judgment they are called to anticipate. Thus the church, in its biblical commitment to "doing God in public," is called to learn how to collaborate without compromise (hence the vital importance of common-good theory) and to critique without dualism.

In particular, as one sharp focus for all this, it is vital that the church learn to critique the present workings of democracy itself. I don't simply mean that we should scrutinize voting methods, campaign tactics or the use of big money within the electoral process. I mean that we should take seriously the fact that our present glorification of democracy emerged precisely from Enlightenment dualism--the banishing of God from the public square and the elevation of vox populi to fill the vacuum, which we have seen to be profoundly inadequate when faced with the publicness of the kingdom of God. And we should take very seriously the fact that the early Jews and Christians were not terribly interested in the process by which rulers came to power, but were extremely interested in what rulers did once they had obtained power. The greatest democracies of the ancient world, those of Greece and Rome, had well-developed procedures for assessing their rulers once their term of office was over if not before, and if necessary for putting them on trial. Simply not being reelected (the main threat to politicians in today's democracies) was nowhere near good enough. When Kofi Annan retired as general secretary of the United Nations, one of the key points he made was that we urgently need to develop ways of holding governments to account. That is a central part of the church's vocation, which we should never have lost and desperately need to recapture.

All this, of course, demands as Well that the church itself be continually called to account, since we in our turn easily get it wrong and become part of the problem instead of part of the solution. That is why the church must be semper reformanda as it reads the Bible, especially the Gospels. Fortunately, that's what the Gospels are there for, and that's what they are good at, despite generations of so-called critical methods which sometimes seem to have been designed to prevent the Gospels from being themselves. Part of the underlying aim of this essay is to encourage readings of the Bible which, by highlighting the publicness of God and the gospel, set forward those reforms which will enable the church to play its part in holding the powers to account and thus advancing God's restorative justice.

The Historical Jesus and Christian Preaching

I hear very few sermons about Jesus. Perhaps this is because of the kinds of churches I have most frequently attended (Lutheran, Presbyterian, Episcopalian), though I think it is probably the same for most mainstream churches. True, sometimes a parable or saying or healing act of Jesus may be preached on, but I seldom hear a sermon about Jesus, except at Christmas or in Holy Week (though not always then), and occasionally on other festivals which celebrate his divine identity.

Scarcely ever have I heard a sermon about what Jesus was like as a historical figure, or about his purpose as he saw it, or about the way he related to the society of his own time. If, as we affirm, the Word became flesh in Jesus, then surely the historical life of Jesus discloses something about that Word. Paul’s recognition that "we no longer know Jesus according to the flesh" should not be construed to mean that Jesus’ historical life is irrelevant.

I suspect this lack is because neither the popular image of Jesus nor the dominant scholarly image learned in seminary provides a gestalt of the historical Jesus suitable for mainstream preaching. The popular image -- popular in the sense of most widely held -- pictures Jesus identity and purpose with great clarity: he was the only begotten Son of God, whose purpose was to die for the sins of the world. Christians and non-Christians alike share this image, drawn from the Gospels (especially John) and creeds, carried through the history of the West. and nurtured by our culture’s celebrations of Christmas and Easter. Christians are those who believe the image to be true, while non-Christians are those who do not.

The popular image of what Jesus was like continues to thrive in fundamentalist and much conservative preaching, but for those of us schooled in mainstream seminaries or divinity schools, that image died as part of our educational process. There, if not before, we learned that the popular image does not correspond to what Jesus was like as a figure of history. Rather, we saw that the popular portrait came about by projecting the church’s later beliefs and images back into the ministry itself. We learned that in all likelihood Jesus did not speak as he does in John’s Gospel; that even the synoptic Gospels are a complex mixture of historical memory and post-Easter interpretation; that the image of Jesus as one who deliberately gave his life for the sins of the world is the product of the church’s sacrificial theology; and that Jesus probably did not proclaim his own exalted identity, or even think of himself in such terms. In short, we came to see that the popular image was the product of Christian theology and Christian popular culture. The image of Jesus as one who proclaimed his identity in the most exalted terms known to Judaism, who asked his hearers to believe his claims, and whose purpose was to die for our sins itself died.

In part this conclusion resulted from the dominant scholarly understanding of Jesus that did emerge from the withering fire of historical criticism: that Jesus was the eschatological prophet who believed that the final judgment was coming in his generation. Originating with Bernhard Weiss and Albert Schweitzer around the turn of the century, this understanding (in a stripped-down version) was propounded by Rudolf Bultmann and his successors. Moreover, according to it, Jesus’ conviction concerning the coming end was not simply an odd, adventitious belief which he held, extraneous to some more important conviction, but was central to his sense of who he was and what his mission was. He himself was conscious of being "the eschatological prophet"; the crisis that runs throughout his teaching was the imminent end of the world; his historical purpose was to warn his hearers to repent before it was too late and to invite them to ground their existence in God, for the world was soon to pass away.

This view does yield some powerful existential insights that can readily be made the subject of Christian preaching. But as an image of the historical Jesus, it is very difficult to incorporate into the life of the church. For, according to it, Jesus was a mistaken preacher of the end; he was wrong about the most central conviction which animated his mission. It is difficult to imagine this tenet forming part of a sermon; I cannot recall a preacher ever saying, "This text tells us that Jesus expected the end of the world in his own time; he was wrong of course, but let’s see what we can make of the text anyway. Indeed, I suspect that most pastors have held the dominant scholarly understanding at arm’s length largely because of its unhelpfulness for Christian preaching and teaching. It is not only a speculative scholarly construction, but an unattractive image of what Jesus was like as a historical figure.

And so we in the mainstream churches believe we cannot know much about Jesus, and what we do know does not compel our imaginations. No wonder we are left with so faint an image.

First, Jesus was vividly in touch with the world of Spirit. Whatever else he was, he was a "holy man," to use a semitechnical term from the history of religions. The word "holy" here is not an adjective pointing to righteousness or purity, but is used in the sense made famous by Rudolf Otto: as a noun, pointing to the numinous, the mysterium tremendum, the awesome reality and power at the heart of existence. A holy man is a person who experiences the holy vividly and frequently, who is experientially in contact with the power of another realm, the power of the Spirit.

Such persons, known in many cultures and including both women and men, are delegates of the tribe to the other realm, to use an anthropological characterization. As such, they are mediators between the realm of the Spirit and this world, entering the former realm in order to mediate power from that world to this one, especially in deeds of healing. To state the two defining characteristics of such people as compactly as possible, they are mystics and healers.

Such figures are known not only worldwide, but specifically within the history of Israel. Moses and Elijah are the two great holy men of the Old Testament, both known for their direct encounters with the other world and for their deeds of power. The classical prophets of ancient Israel regularly report seeing into another world (cf., for example, the opening verse of Ezekiel: ‘‘The heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God"), though they are without the healing powers characteristic of the holy man proper. Contemporary with Jesus are several Jewish holy men, especially Honi the Circle-Drawer. Hanina ben Dosa and, slightly later, St. Paul.

That Jesus belongs within this charismatic strand of Judaism is evident. According to the Gospel accounts. his ministry began with an experience of "the heavens opening" and the Spirit descending upon him; he applied to himself the words, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me"; and he spoke of the Spirit as active through him. He practiced spiritual disciplines common to holy men: fasting, solitude, long hours of prayer (presumably contemplative), even an ordeal in the wilderness. He called God "Abba," clearly reflective of an experiential intimacy with the holy. To his contemporaries, both friend and foe, he was known above all as a healer and exorcist, as one who mediated the power of the Spirit. Whatever else he was, he was a holy man.

There is a second feature of the historical Jesus which can significantly inform the life of the church today: his relationship to the society of his time. He was deeply involved in the historical life of his own people. Specifically, he saw them headed on a course toward historic catastrophe, flowing out of their loyalties and blindness; he called his hearers to a radically different understanding of what faithfulness to God meant, an understanding which was to be embodied in the life of a community in history.

This connection to the life of his own time can be seen in his roles as prophet and renewal movement founder. As recent scholarship has emphasized, Jesus founded a renewal movement within Judaism which competed with other Jewish renewal movements for the allegiance of his contemporaries. Each had a different vision of what the people of God should be, each with different historical consequences. Jesus sharply denounced the path on which his people had embarked, including the ways advocated by the other renewal movements. He warned of catastrophic consequences -- war, the destruction of Jerusalem and of the Temple -- if their blindness continued.

Jesus’ connection to the historical crisis of his time was obscured throughout much of this century by the portrait of him as the eschatological prophet. In that role, he was not seen to be concerned about historical matters. The crisis that he announced was the end of the world, not a historical crisis in the life of his people.

But almost without realizing it. recent scholarship has undermined the eschatological understanding of Jesus. That view was founded on the "coming Son of man" sayings as authentic to Jesus; yet New Testament scholars now routinely (and, I think, correctly) deny that the "coming Son of man" sayings go back to Jesus. For the most part, however, the undermining goes unnoticed; the portrait of Jesus as eschatological prophet remains, despite the disappearance of its foundation.

But if the crisis that Jesus announced was not the imminent end of the world, what was it? It was a coming historical catastrophe, probably not yet inevitable, which would result from the combination of Rome’s imperial needs and insensitivity with the cultural direction of his own people. Like an Old Testament prophet (to whom he was compared by his contemporaries), Jesus criticized the present path and threatened destruction if it did not change.

As a prophet and renewal movement founder, Jesus called his hearers into "an alternative community with an alternative consciousness," to use Walter Brueggemann’s illuminating phrase (The Prophetic Imagination [Fortress, 1978]). The marks of his renewal movement stand out sharply against the background of his time. His acceptance of the outcasts -- one of his most radical acts -- pointed to an identity defined by one’s relationship to God rather than by cultural standards of performance. He proclaimed the way of peace instead of war, both in his teaching and in the deliberately dramatic manner in which he entered Jerusalem on an animal that symbolized peace rather than war, an action very much in the tradition of prophetic acts in the Old Testament The Jesus movement was the "peace party" within Judaism, as Gerd Theissen puts it (Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity [Fortress, 1978]).

In place of ‘holiness" as the imitatio dei followed by the other renewal movements ("You shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy," Lev. 19:2), Jesus substituted a different blueprint for the life of the community: "Be compassionate as your heavenly father is compassionate" (Luke 6:36). Moreover, this directive was intended for the earthly life of the people of God. Jesus’ intention was the transformation of his people in the face of a historical crisis.

These are potent themes for our own times. They invite us to take very seriously the two central presuppositions of the Jewish-Christian tradition. First, there is a dimension or realm of reality beyond (and beneath) the visible world of our ordinary experience, a dimension charged with power, whose ultimate quality is compassion. Second, the fruits of a life lived in accord with the Spirit are to be embodied not only in individuals, but also in the life of the faithful community. In short, God cares about the shape and texture of historical communities -- and sometimes "hands them over" to the consequences of their own blindness.

Yet these themes are also threatening to us. The first threatens our sense of normalcy. What if it is true, as Huston Smith argues, that the world of our ordinary experience is but one level of reality, and that we are at all times surrounded by other dimensions of reality which we commonly do not experience? (See his Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition [Harper & Row, 1976], where he sketches the multidimensional model of reality and the self which he finds to be virtually a cultural universal, attested to by the collective experience of humankind prior to the modern period). Such a view challenges the practical atheism of much of our culture and church. The claim that there really is a realm of Spirit is both exciting and oddly disconcerting.

The second theme threatens our comfort within contemporary culture. The historical Jesus, with his call to a counter community with a counterconsciousness (including consciousness of another realm), challenges the central values of contemporary American culture. Increasingly, our understanding of reality is one-dimensional, even within the church; our quest for fulfillment seeks satisfaction through greater consumption; our security rests in nuclear weapons, and our blindness and idolatry are visible in our stated willingness to blow up the world, if need be, to preserve our way of life. We are called to become the church in a culture whose values are largely alien to the Christian message, to be once again the church of the catacombs.

Images of Jesus give content to what loyalty to him means. The popular picture of Jesus as one whose purpose was to proclaim truths about himself most often construes loyalty to him as insistence on the truth of those claims. Loyalty becomes belief in the historical truthfulness of all the statements in the Gospels. The absence of an image -- the most common fruit of mainstream theological education -- leaves us with no clear notion of what it means to take Jesus seriously, no notion of what loyalty might entail, no rudder for the life of discipleship. But the image of Jesus as a man of Spirit, deeply involved in the historical crisis of his own time, besides being more historically adequate than either the popular or dominant scholarly image, can shape the church’s discipleship today.

Death as the Teacher of Wisdom

Many Christians are vividly reminded each year at the beginning of Lent of their own mortality. As their foreheads are ritually marked with ashes, the accompanying words make the meaning of Ash Wednesday clear: "Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return."

The ritual expresses one of the central convictions shared by various religious traditions of the world: the importance of being starkly aware of one’s own finitude. Intense awareness of one’s own eventual death can be the teacher of wisdom about how to live.

Such awareness is difficult to attain in our culture, however. As numerous studies demonstrate, contemporary mainstream American culture is deeply death-denying. To some extent, this attitude of denial has come about because of changes in our society in this century: the marked decrease in the number of deaths at an early age; the development of specialized professions for the care of the dying and the dead; the emergence of geographical mobility, with the consequence that most of us live at some distance from aging and dying relatives, including parents; the growth of separate communities for the aging, not only nursing homes but retirement communities. More and more, the aging and the dying do not live among us. Increasingly, we are insulated from death.

There is considerable evidence that we are not only unfamiliar with death, but deeply uneasy about it. We are uncomfortable around the dying and the grieving, not knowing what to say. Often even the family of a dying person. as well as the attending medical staff, do not openly acknowledge what is happening; an atmosphere of denial and pretense prevails. Our language is filled with euphemisms about death: somebody passed away, or "we lost Uncle Ned"; if a husband and wife discuss life insurance, one typically hears, "If something should happen to me . . . ," not, "When I die. . ." Graveyards became cemeteries and then memorial gardens, the corpse has become the remains (and a cremated corpse the cremains) , burial has become interment, and the death certificate the "vital statistics form." Our language betrays much about us; we are as uncomfortable with the words ‘death "‘ and "dying" as an earlier generation was with the language of sexuality.

The daily display of violent death on television only confirms the diagnosis. Commentators such as anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer have noted that our preoccupation with video violence is a manifestation of the "pornography of death." Out of touch with death as a natural and universal phenomenon, we become fascinated with the display of death in unnatural forms.

The "thanatological revolution" of the 1970s called our attention to our widespread denial of death and had an impact on tens of thousands of people, many of them in the helping professions. Yet there are signs that the growth in death awareness has run its course; a textbook published just last year refers to the revolution in the past tense. Of course, that movement was and is a hopeful development, and it is important to nurture and deepen it. But’ to this point it has left popular culture largely untouched.

To some extent, the church participates in this denial. In teaching a course on death and dying during the past decade, I have required students to attend a funeral and to write a brief commentary on it. They report that the great majority of the funerals, most of them conducted by clergy, strongly express our culture’s denial of death. Frequently the funerals are brief, hurried events, or they are marked by our culture’s euphemistic language, or, with an almost shrill confidence, they proclaim an afterlife (often "complete with cigars," to use C. S. Lewis’s sarcastic phrase) while simultaneously failing to acknowledge the reality of death, loss and grief.

In an atmosphere of denial sustained by both church and culture, it is not surprising that most of us have serious difficulty not only in relating to the dying and grieving but also in imagining our own mortality. Yet historically, the religious traditions have assigned tremendous importance to the awareness of one’s own death.

In addition to Ash Wednesday, the Christian tradition has liturgical seasons and observances whose purpose is at least in part the contemplation of death: Lent, Advent, All Saints’ Day. One of Buddhism’s most powerful practices is meditation in a cremation ground amid still-smouldering corpses. Socrates’ counsel to "know thyself" meant above all to know one’s self as mortal. What is at stake in these urgent admonitions to be aware of one’s own death, and what do we miss by living in an ethos of denial?

Styled as a funeral meditation "at the side of a grave" and dedicated to Kierkegaard’s dead father, the essay speaks of death as the "master teacher" who can teach us how to live. But it can do so only if we become "earnest" about death. Earnestness means making the connection between death and me, to know that I will die. It is much more than the intellectual knowledge that we will all die. All of us know that; none of us would get that wrong on a true/false test. To realize that this consciousness will one day cease, to see myself dead, to see the coffin closed upon me -- that is earnestness.

Concerning death in relationship to one’s self, it is important to perceive three things. First, death is decisive in its finality -- when it comes, there is not one moment more; "it is over." Furthermore, death is decisive in its absolute certainty and equality: not only does it come to all, but it makes all equal, obliterating the distinctions that we make so much of in life. And death is decisive in its radical uncertainty: I do not know when (or how) I will die, whether today, next month or a generation from now. The radical uncertainty in its timing, coupled with its absolute finality and certainty, gives death its teaching power to one who will listen.

If one truly grasped all of this, what would the consequences be? Nothing less than the life of a saint or a Zen master (though Kierkegaard does not refer specifically to either) : the earnest thought of one’s own death liberates one from all that mars our lives. The radical uncertainty of death ("Perhaps today") makes the moment precious, and therefore beautiful. It can free us from procrastination, the illusion that we have an infinite amount of time, that we can put off living until some future time -- after graduation, or after career and financial security are obtained, or after a particular project is finished, or after a special relationship is established.

Earnestness about death can also liberate us from the weight of culture. The equality of death exposes the ephemeral character of the cultural standards by which we judge ourselves, whether we are puffing ourselves up by virtue of our achievements or being crushed by our failure to measure up. It can free us from an identity based on distinctions and comparisons. For the same reason, the equality of death arouses compassion in us, for it teaches us about our essential equality before God and about the artificiality of the comparisons by which we typically assess people.

Finally, earnestness about death can teach us about the wise use of time, about the difference between what Kierkegaard calls "accidental" and ‘essential" activities. In the context of his aforementioned essay, "accidental activities" are not intrinsically meaningful; "goal-oriented," their meaning depends entirely on their being completed. "Essential" activities are those which are valued in themselves, in which the process is meaningful in itself and does not ultimately depend on completion for its meaningfulness or enjoyment. One who is earnest about death will minimize the former and maximize the latter: "And so earnestness comes to consist in living each day as if it were the last, and at the same time the first in a long life" (p. 107)

The notion is capable of being misunderstood. Earnest thought about one’s own death does not make one fearfully or morbidly preoccupied with death, for earnestness makes one realize that time is too precious to be spent being morbid. It does not lead to a giving up of plans or projects, though it does change the mental frame of reference within which they are chosen and worked on. It does not mean that one lives every day simply as if it were one’s last -- a kind of crazy living "for the moment" rather than living "in the moment," to use a distinction made by the dying poet Ted Rosenthal in his book and movie bearing the same title, How Could I Not Be Among You? To live "in the moment" means to be gracefully present to the simplest and most complex joys and tasks. It means to value the "dailiness of life," as one of my students put it.

Thus death emerges as the teacher of wisdom -- indeed, as the liberator of the psyche. For the earnest thought of death can liberate us not only from procrastination, but also from our typical pursuit of an identity based on cultural distinctions. Death also plays a liberating role in the thought of another 9th-century radical Christian: In ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich," Leo Tolstoy describes with harrowing detail a successful middle-aged man who is suddenly confronted with a terminal illness. The encounter with death finally enables Ivan to see that he has lived the life of an "automatic cultural person," to use Ernest Becker’s apt phrase for a life lived in accord with the messages of culture. Ivan’s liberation comes only a few hours before his death; Kierkegaard and Tolstoy would have us reach that realization and liberation sooner.

Who would not want to live in this liberated way? Yet such an internal state is difficult to experience and sustain. "It is so easy," Kierkegaard writes, "so very easy, to acquire a true opinion; and alas, it is so difficult, so very difficult, to have an opinion, and to have it in truth" (p. 11). The "true opinion" which is easy to acquire is the intellectual knowledge that one will die; the opinion which is hard to have "in truth" is the application of that knowledge to one’s life.

Until recently the Christian tradition knew both the importance and the difficulty of this awareness. For this reason, Christian culture sought to provide frequent reminders of death. Besides the conditions of society itself, under which family and friends had primary responsibility for the care of the dying and the dead, memento mon were spread throughout culture: in the church’s art, in morality plays like Everyman, in drinking songs, in the ordinary artifacts of everyday life (e.g., in Austria a towel hanger portraying a human form split down the middle: one half a beautiful young woman, the other a skeleton) To be sure, the specter of death (and judgment) has been used as a form of social control. When this happens, the fear of death becomes the ultimate enforcer of the culture’s (church’s) messages.

But the distortion of the message should not blind us to its essential truthfulness -- a truthfulness attested by the experience of many. Shortly after the famous psychologist Abraham Maslow suffered a near-fatal heart attack, he wrote in a letter: "The confrontation with death -- and the reprieve from it -- makes everything look so precious, so sacred, so beautiful, that I feel more strongly than ever the impulse to love it, to embrace it, and to let myself be overwhelmed by it. My river has never looked so beautiful. . . . Death, and its everpresent possibility, makes love, passionate love, possible." (quoted by Rollo May in Love and Will [Dell, 1969], p. 98)

It is death that enables one to see this ephemeralness, according to Ecclesiastes. It is death that exposes the insubstantial quality of all distinctions based on culture (see 2:14-16) And it is death that can teach one how to live:

It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting; for this is the end of all men, and the living will lay it to heart. . The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning [7:2-41.

This emphasis appears most dramatically in the book’s famous closing speech (12:1-7) Its opening line is commonly translated as "Remember your creator in the days of your youth"; yet as almost every commentary notes (including the footnote in the Oxford Annotated Bible) , the correct translation is almost certainly, "Remember your grave [or death] in the days of your youth." (No doubt the persistence of the common translation is due to its sheer familiarity, so often has this portion of Ecclesiastes been anthologized.) In short, it is the contemplation of one’s own grave that can teach one how to live.

And how is that? For the author of Ecclesiastes, it is the same life of simplicity spoken of by Kierkegaard and others. "Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart. . . . Enjoy life with the wife whom, you love, all the days of your life. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might. . . . Eat and drink and find enjoyment in your work" (9:7-10, 2:24, 3:12-13, 5:18) It is the counsel of one who knows death.

The wisdom of Ecclesiastes needs to be tempered with the passion of the prophets (and Jesus) : some things do matter. But the message of Ecclesiastes and the church’s traditional wisdom about death need to be heard, especially in our death-denying culture (and especially in Lent, though not exclusively then) The memento mon are gone -- from our lives, from our culture, from the church in our time. Even Ash Wednesday as a reminder of death is no longer ritually observed by the majority of Protestant Christians. We do live our lives largely on the basis of what Herbert Marcuse called "the performance principle" and the ‘postponement principle." in which our well-being is the product of measuring up to cultural standards, and fulfillment is postponed until some goal is reached. (For an insightful use of Marcuse’s terms in an exposition of Paul’s understanding of "life under the law," see Robin Scroggs, Paul for a New Day [Fortress, 1977], pp. 9-14.) We frequently do lose our lives in procrastination, preoccupation, performance and postponement.

The importance of being aware of one’s own death is not a popular message. I do not much like it myself, though I find it compelling. People may need to be convinced that it is important. It is not typically heard as "good news."

Of course, the Christian tradition has other things to say about death in addition to reminding us that each of us will die. In the end. after Christ has delivered everything to God, "God will be everything to everyone" (I Cor. 15:28) As theologian Hans Kung remarked in a recent lecture: "What else do we need to know?"

But the message of eternal life in God should not be proclaimed in such a way as to obscure death as the teacher of wisdom. In our time the church needs to tell us about death, and not simply about life. For our tradition unambiguously affirms that the encounter with death is one of the vehicles whereby God instructs us in the way of wisdom. "Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return."

Spirituality and Contemporary Culture

I want to begin with a Dom Crossan story. A year ago this March, Dom was the featured speaker at a weekend event at Trinity Cathedral in Portland. He gave an opening lecture Friday evening and then a series of talks on Saturday. Saturday morning, he began his first presentation by saying, "I want to tell you a story about something that happened last night. Last night after my lecture, while I was signing books, a student from the local seminary . . ." (Footnote: There’s only one seminary in Portland. It is the Western Conservative Evangelical Baptist Seminary, and all of those adjectives matter. And so, the audience immediately knew that he was talking about a conservative student.) "This student," Dom continued, "said to me, ‘I told my professor that I was coming to hear you tonight.’ And my professor said to me, ‘You’re going to hear Crossan!?!? Why, why he’s to the left of Borg!’" That’s not the punch-line, though. Crossan continued the story, and he said, "So I said to the student, ‘Please give my best regards to your professor. And tell him that the real problem is that both Borg and Crossan are to the right of Jesus. And rumor has it that Jesus is to the right of God.’"And I start with that, partly because I love telling the story, of course, but also to suggest that whatever we do hear will still be to the right of Jesus, who is to the right of God. And whether that’s good news or bad news, I leave that up to you to figure out.

I’ve already mentioned that I’m very pleased to be here. And, in part, I’m pleased to be here because I love doing this kind of thing – namely, talking to religiously-minded people about things that matter. I’m very grateful for how my life has turned out. And I’m pleased to be here because of the importance of what you’re doing, and when I say you, I mean you as a group of people at an event sponsored by The Center for Progressive Christianity. You and the Center are part of a crucial process going on in the Church in North America today – a shaking of the foundations and a rebuilding of the foundations – and that leads me to the theme of my talk.

We live in a very interesting and important time in the life of the church. It is a time of a major paradigm shift. I planned to say this before I heard Bob Keck last night, but it is a time of a major paradigm shift going on in the minds and hearts of millions of Christians in North America. The shift is from an older and very widespread way of seeing Christianity, to a way of seeing Christianity again. Now this older, conventional way of seeing Christianity was dominant for hundreds of years. And, in an important sense, it worked. It nourished the lives of millions of people. But over the last thirty to forty years, it has become unpersuasive to millions of people in our culture. The newer way of seeing Christianity has been in the process of being born for a couple of hundred years, but until recently, it was known primarily in the academic study of religion, including what happens in many mainline seminaries. What is new about our time, is that this way of seeing Christianity again is now occurring at the grass-roots level of the mainline church. Over the past twenty years or so, large numbers of laity as well as clergy have been moving in this direction. And in this movement lies the hope and the future of the mainline denominations.

My own phrase for naming this development is that "a major re-visioning of Christianity is happening." Now when I use the word, "re-visioning", I mean seeing again. I do not mean what the word revision sometimes means, as when we speak of a manuscript or a term paper needing a revision – implying that there is something seriously wrong with it, and that it really needs to be redone. Rather, by revision, I mean, "to see again". And, importantly, it is not that the older way of seeing Christianity IS the tradition, and the newer way, the revisioning and abandonment, or reduction of the tradition. Rather, both are ways of seeing the tradition. I want to claim the tradition for our side, if that’s not too polemical a way of speaking. The evidence that this paradigm shift is happening at the grass-roots level, is persuasive and impressive. I’ll give you three quick pieces of evidence.

The first is from my own area of specialization, namely historical Jesus scholarship. There is enormous public interest in the quest for the historical Jesus. Seven different books by Jesus scholars have been on Publisher’s Weekly ten best-selling lists in the 1990's. The major news weeklies each have run several cover stories on the quest for the historical Jesus in the 1990's. And at Easter, 1996, all three of the major weekly news magazines had the quest for Jesus as the cover story. There have been television specials on it, on A&E, on PBS, and again (I guess this is an advertisement, but maybe not) Monday evening, June 19th, Peter Jennings Prime Time is doing a two-hour documentary on the quest for the historical Jesus. This will be prime-time on a major national network. Again, a barometer of the level of interest in the historical study of Jesus and Christian origins. And what is true of Jesus scholarship, is true of biblical scholarship generally. There has never been so much public interest in works of biblical scholarship.

The second piece of evidence comes from my own experience, and also reflects the experience of Dom Crossan, Joan Chittister, and many other people like us who are on the lecture circuit. Most of us get far more invitations than we can accept. I do about twenty-five trips a year, speaking to about forty different Christian groups on those twenty-five trips, and I have to turn down two or three invitations for each one I accept. Dom Crossan has the same experience. Joan Chittister is scheduled two years out. And the people inviting us in are Christian groups – clergy conferences, yes, but also congregations of mainline denominations. And an experience that I frequently have on one of those trips is that the people will basically love what I am presenting. (They wouldn’t invite me otherwise, right?) But they also will be saying things that suggest that they feel very much alone. They’re bemoaning the fact that there aren’t more people out there who see things the way they are coming to see things. And I can say to them, as I say to you, there are hundreds, and I would guess, thousands, of congregations across the country that are deeply involved in this process of seeing Christianity again.

The third piece of evidence is the enormous resurgence of interest in spirituality in the church today, in protestant churches as well as in Catholic circles. What is fascinating about this, is that spirituality (I’ll have more to say about this briefly later in this lecture and then again tomorrow) is really the experiential side of religion. Spirituality is not very much concerned with beliefs or doctrines. But spirituality is about entering experientially into life with God. Spirituality cuts across denominations. It cuts across religious traditions. And it is part of this re-visioning of Christianity going on in our time.

That’s all very good news. Not surprisingly, it is also a time of conflict within the churches. Not everybody thinks this re-visioning is a good idea, and so there is also considerable resistence to it. So what I will be talking about, this morning in particular, is two different ways of seeing the Christian tradition, of seeing Christianity. The older conventional way of seeing Christianity, and the newer way of seeing the Christian tradition that has been coming into view for some time. Both visions are present in the Church today. They are visible in the great divide between mainline denominations, and fundamentalist and conservative evangelical churches – what one of my colleagues calls, I think non-pejoratively, the "fundangelicals". But the conflict is also present within the mainline denominations themselves. I think every mainline denomination has a [usually] minority movement that stands against the direction the denomination as a whole is taking. The conflict is also present within individual congregations. These are two comprehensively different ways of envisioning the Christian tradition, and what it means to be a Christian at the beginning of the third millennium.

To provide you in advance with a shorthand way of comparing and contrasting these two ways of seeing Christianity: The older one emphasizes believing. It leads to a believing understanding of what it means to be a Christian. It sees Christianity as something to be believed in. Versus the newer way, a relational and sacramental way of seeing the Christian tradition – a relational understanding of the Christian life, and a sacramental understanding of the Christian tradition itself.

My central claim, both today and tomorrow, is that being a Christian is primarily about a relationship with God lived within the Christian tradition as a sacrament – a claim to which I will return at the end of this talk. I will be exploring and developing this theme of re-visioning Christianity. And now to provide you with a road map for the rest of my first talk, in good Trinitarian fashion (I noticed Bob Keck was following this last night, too, with his three periods of human development) there will be three parts to my talk. Part 1: I will do a brief sketch of the older way of seeing God and the Bible and the image of the Christian life that went with it. Part 2: Some comments about why it’s become unpersuasive to many. Part 3: which is really the second half of my talk, Seeing God and the Bible again. As I do this, I will speak as clearly and simply as I know how. The risk in doing that is that I may be telling you things that you already know. But my purpose in being simple, direct, and clear, is to talk about all of this in such a way that it can be immediately useful for your own thinking, teaching, preaching, and living the Christian life. My concern is, how do we communicate this in such a way that it invites people in, rather than perplexing them, or frightening them away? How do we do, not simply the task of deconstruction, but the task of reconstruction? So if what I say makes sense to you, I invite you to borrow shamelessly.

Part 1 – The Older Way

I turn to Part 1– the older way of seeing God and the Bible and the vision of the Christian life that went with it. This older understanding is what I, and I suspect many of us, grew up with. It was common or conventional Christianity as recently as a generation ago, and it is still the common understanding among our fundamentalist and conservative Christian brothers and sisters. I will describe this with three main points.

The first is how it saw God. There were two primary elements in this older conventional Christian way of seeing God.

The first is that God was seen as a supernatural being out there separate from the universe. The shorthand phrase for this way of thinking about God is supernatural theism. This way of thinking about God sees God as another being, to use Karen Armstrong’s phrase, in addition to the world of beings, in addition to the universe. Supernatural theism is what you get if you literalize or semi-literalize the personal imagery for God in the Bible, so that God becomes a person-like being.

The second element in this older way of seeing God is an interventionist way of thinking about the relationship between God and the world. From out there, God occasionally intervenes in the world or the universe, especially in the more dramatic events recorded in the biblical tradition, and above all, in Jesus. In shorthand, one might call this a supernatural interventionist understanding of God.

The second main point about this older way of seeing God and the Bible is how it saw the Bible. In shorthand, the Bible was seen as a divine product. For this way of seeing, the Bible is the unique revelation of this interventionist God. It is thus unlike any other book, for it comes from God, directly or indirectly, as no other book does. Now it’s easy to see why most Christians have thought this through the centuries. We regularly speak of the Bible as the Word of God, or as inspired by God. And very importantly for this older view, this is why the Bible has authority. We can take it seriously because it does come from God. The authority of scripture and its divine origin are linked.

Third, the way of seeing Christianity that goes with this older way of seeing God and the Bible I’m going to describe briefly with six adjectives, expanding each with a couple of sentences.

It was, in hard or in softer forms first, quite literalistic. Now the hard form of literalism is, of course, fundamentalism. But there’s also a softer form of literalism, namely, taking the Bible literally unless there are obvious reasons not to. It was this softer form of literalism that I grew up with. My Lutheran family and the Lutheran congregation in which I grew up were never very concerned about defending the literal truth of the Genesis stories of creation. We had no trouble expanding those days to geological epochs, and so forth. I never had to struggle against the dinosaurs or the fossil record. But, we took it for granted that the more important things reported in the Bible pretty much happened as they are described. At the time of the Exodus, the sea really did part to let the Israelites pass through. Jesus really was born of a virgin, really did walk on the water, really did multiply loaves, and so forth. That’s what I mean by soft literalism.

Secondly, that older understanding was quite doctrinal. Being a Christian meant believing the central theological teachings of The Church. If you grew up in a denomination in which the creeds were said with any regularity, it meant being able to say the creed without crossing your fingers during any of the phrases, or remaining silent.

Thirdly, that older understanding was quite moralistic. By this I mean two things. It was taken for granted, first, that being a Christian meant trying to be good. And being good meant trying to live in accord with the ethical teaching of scripture, whether that was understood as a narrow and highly specific code of righteousness, or more generally as following important principles such as the golden rule, loving your neighbor as yourself, and so forth. Secondly, by moralistic, I mean, we weren’t very good at being good. And so this older form of Christianity was pervasively centered on sin, guilt, and the need for forgiveness. By the way, it is utterly amazing to me how central that is. This came home to me with real force a couple of summers ago, when I was at a week-long event in a liberal Christian institution. Each day there was a chapel service at nine in the morning, attended by several hundreds of people – a liberal Christian institution. That chapel service every day began with a confession of sin. And I thought to myself, its nine o’clock in the morning, and we’ve already been bad.

Fourthly, that older understanding was patriarchal – not only in its use of masculine language for God and human beings but also in its hierarchical vision of human life, socially and within the family.

Fifthly, that older understanding was quite exclusivistic, in both hard and soft forms. The hard form of Christian exclusivism is, of course, the insistence that Jesus is the only way of salvation. A softer form might mean experiencing some discomfort with that, but feeling that’s been such a central part of the Christian tradition, one is not sure that it’s okay to let go of it.

Sixth and finally, this older understanding was afterlife oriented. Indeed, so central was the issue of the afterlife, in the form of the Christianity that I learned growing up, that if you’d been able to convince me at age twelve or so that there was no afterlife, I would have had absolutely no idea why I should be a Christian, or why I should be religious. Maybe being a Christian was about many things, but heaven was what it was really about. If I had to put this older understanding into a single sentence, it would go like this: Be a Christian now for the sake of salvation later. Or, the same thought expressed only slightly differently: Believe in Christianity now for the sake of heaven later.

It is this way of seeing Christianity that has come undone for many people. There is in our time, for many, a crisis of confidence about the Christian tradition. And Christians have responded to that crisis in a variety of ways. Many have left the church, of course, becoming what Jack Spong calls, "The Church Alumni Association". Over that same period of time, the last thirty to forty years, as you all know, there’s been a major decline in the membership of mainline churches. That’s no accident. The decline in the persuasiveness of this older view and the decline in church membership have gone hand in hand. Other Christians vigorously defend the older understanding, and even argue that the reason the mainline denominations have declined is because they’ve grown soft about it. It is a time of conflict within the church, as I’ve already mentioned. Still other Christians remain in the church, or on its margins, but are looking for a way of being Christian that makes persuasive and compelling sense to them.

Part 2 – Why the older way has become unpersuasive

So I turn to Part 2. Why? Why has this older way of Christianity ceased to make sense for so many people? The simple answer is, because of whom we have become. So I turn to the second main point in my talk: who we are in the year 2000. And by "we", I mean us, those of us gathered here today, and also people who are part of mainline denominations, and part of the demographic groups from whom the mainline has typically drawn its membership. Indeed, I really mean most of us in Western culture, and so I will be making cultural generalizations about us on a grand scale. The summary generalization, which I will then unpack, goes like this: Culturally, we live on the boundary between modernity and post-modernity. We are modern people, in the process of becoming post-modern people. I will develop this generalization in two stages.

I begin with modernity. We are modern people. By this I simply mean that we live during the period of modernity – that period of Western cultural history that began with the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and continues into the present. Modernity has two central characteristics that are most important for our purposes. First, modernity is marked by scientific ways of knowing. Indeed, it was the development of the scientific method and science that marked the birth of modernity. And secondly, modernity is marked by a material understanding of reality. This is sometimes called the modern world-view, or the Newtonian world-view. It is that image: reality is made up of tiny little pieces of stuff, all of it acting in accord with natural laws. It is that image: reality is constituted by matter and energy and the space-time universe. That understanding has already been superceded in theoretical physics, which I will also return to briefly, but that image of reality is still dominant at the level of cultural consciousness.

Though I am a critic of modernity, and will soon make two important criticisms of modernity, I am not one of those theologians who trashes modernity, as some of my colleagues do. So before I turn to those criticisms, let me briefly honor the genuine contributions to human and religious understanding made by modernity, and I provide you with only a partial list.

One of these contributions is the historical-critical method, which is applied not only to the study of the Bible, but also to the study of theology. It is a real treasure.

A second contribution is an awareness of historical and cultural conditioning – that how we see and think is pervasively shaped by the time and place in which we live, by culture, that there is no absolute vantage-point outside of culture or time. This means that there is no absolute knowledge. It is all relative, all conditioned. In a really important sense, we don’t know what the hell this is.

Modernity has also been marked by an awareness of religious pluralism and, among some Christians, an affirmation of religious pluralism. The exclusivistic claims of the Christian tradition have become deeply suspect to many of us. The notion that the creator of the whole universe would choose to be known in only one religious tradition, which just fortunately happens to be our own, strikes us as impossible. Indeed, if I thought that being a Christian meant saying that Christianity was the only way of being in right relationship to God, I couldn’t be a Christian.

Modernity has also seen significant progress in human rights: in democracy, in race relations, in women’s rights, in gay and lesbian rights.

Now in all of these areas there continue to be issues, conflicts, and resistance. But who can doubt that we are better off in these areas than we were a hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, even twenty-five years ago? I don’t intend that as a complete list of modernity’s contributions. Rather my purpose is to affirm that modernity has highly important and abiding positive accomplishments.

I turn now to modernity’s limitations, its shortcomings. In particular, I have two criticisms of the effects of modernity upon the religious life, and upon Christianity in particular.

The first. Modernity has made us skeptical about spiritual reality. If one thinks of reality as constituted by matter and energy in the space-time universe, if one has basically a material understanding of what is real, then the reality of God, a nonmaterial reality (allegedly) becomes very problematic. It’s no accident that death of God theology emerged in the modern period. The question of God, along with the question of the Bible, is, it seems to me, the central theological question in the Western church today.

Secondly, modernity has made us preoccupied with factuality, with scientifically verifiable facts and with historically reliable facts. Indeed (and it seems to me this is a very important statement about us), we live in the only culture in human history that has identified factuality with truthfulness. And by that I don’t mean the U.S. I mean modern Western culture. We have become, in a useful phrase that I owe to Huston Smith, "fact-fundamentalists". Within the church, both biblical fundamentalists and liberals have been preoccupied with factuality. For fundamentalists, the Bible must be factually true in order for it to be true at all, and hence all of this concern with defending the factuality of scripture. Fundamentalists are profoundly modern. They identify truth with factuality.

We liberals have tended to follow a different strategy. We have tried to save a few facts from the fire. But both fundamentalists and liberals during the period of modernity have agreed: facts are what matter. This is what I mean when I say, we, fundamentalists and liberals alike, are fact-fundamentalists. This has had a pervasive and distorting effect on how we see scripture and tradition, indeed religion itself. During much of the twentieth century, Christians and much of Christian theologies was caught between the two sterile choices of literalism (in harder or softer forms) or reductionism – either defending the factual accuracy and uniqueness of the Bible, or reducing the Bible to what makes sense within the modern world-view. And this has had a further result. Christianity in the modern period has been preoccupied with the dynamic of believing or not believing. Believing iffy things to be factually true became the definition of being a Christian, and if you can’t believe, then you’re not a Christian.

I turn now to my second statement in Part 2: We live on the boundary of post-modernity. By this I mean we live on the frontier-land of a new age, a new period of cultural history that is dawning. We don’t know what to call it yet, so we simply call it post-modernity, meaning it’s what comes next. And post-modernity is marked by a number of things. I will mention only three that are of importance for our theme.

First, a realization that modernity itself is a relative historical construction: that someday the Newtonian world-view, and that material image of reality, will seem as quaint as the Ptolemaic world-view does to us, as it already does amongst theoretical physicists, that reality undermines modernity’s skepticism about God.

Secondly, post-modernity is marked by the turn to experience. In a time when traditional teachings have become suspect, we are learning to trust that which can be known in our own experience, and hence, for example, that remarkable resurgence of interest in spirituality that I mentioned in my introduction. Spirituality, as I said, is the experiential side of religion.

And thirdly, post-modernity is marked by the movement beyond fact-fundamentalism, to the realization that stories can be true without being factually true. This movement is reflected in contemporary theology’s emphasis on metaphorical theology. To say the obvious (but it has so often been lost during the period of modernity) metaphors can be profoundly true, even if they aren’t literally or factually true. This realization is foundational for the re-visioning I will be suggesting.

Part 3 – Seeing God and the Bible again

So I turn to Part 3, the first foundational element in the re-visioning, seeing God and the Bible again. In the rest of this talk, I focus on the Bible, in part because the Bible is foundational to how we see Christianity, and because I think confusion and conflict about the Bible is the central issue in the church today.

There are three main points that I will develop. The first concerns seeing God again. And here I have two statements I will make.

The first has to do with how we conceptualize God, how we think of God’s being and of God’s relation to the world. For many people, the supernatural, interventionist God is dead. It is for me. I simply don’t believe in that God. I can’t believe in that God. It is not even an act of will. I cannot! Now let me add immediately, that I have no problem with personifying God, and speaking of God as if God were a person. That is the natural language of worship and devotion. But when we literalize or semi-literalize those personifications, then we get the God of supernatural theism, and vis-a-vis that God, I am an atheist. But I’m also utterly convinced that God is real. In my own journey, I have been led from supernatural theism to seeing God as the encompassing Spirit, from seeing God as another being out there, to seeing God, or the Sacred, or the Spirit (terms which I use synonymously and interchangeably) as a nonmaterial layer or level of reality all around us, more real than the world of our ordinary, visible experience. Seeing the sacred as right here, as well as more than right here, a movement from supernatural theism to what a number of theologians, including myself in my book on God, call panentheism. Now, seeing God as the encompassing Spirit, instead of as a person-like being out there, is actually the recovery of something very ancient. It goes all the way back to the beginnings of the biblical tradition. Karen Armstrong very helpfully points out in her book, A History of God, that these two ways of thinking about God – God as another being and God as the encompassing Spirit in which everything that is, is, – run side by side throughout the long histories of the three Western religious traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This is not something new. This is something very old.

Secondly, about God. I have become convinced that God, or the sacred, can be experienced. I take very seriously the history, and varieties, of human religious experience. People in every culture known to us have had experiences that seem overwhelmingly to them to be experiences of the Sacred. God can be known, not just believed in.

This leads me to my second statement. I see religion, in general, and the Bible, in particular, as human cultural responses to the experience of the Sacred. I see each of the enduring religions as emerging as a human response to the experience of God. The immediate implication of this, which is really my second statement in shorthand form, is that the Bible is thus a human product, namely, the response of two ancient communities to their experience of the Sacred. Now when I say it’s a human product, of course I have a contrast in mind, and to make that contrast explicit, I mean, not a divine product. Rather, the Bible is a product of two ancient communities – the Hebrew Bible being the product of ancient Israel, the Christian Testament the product of the early Christian movement. As a human product, the Bible tells us about their experiences of the Sacred, about how these two communities saw things. It tells us about how they told their stories, and what they thought life with God was about. When we are not completely clear and candid about the Bible being a human product, we create the possibility of enormous confusion. I want to provide you with two quick illustrations of the difference this makes. My point is not to try to convince you of these two positions. I think you are already there. Rather, my purpose is to illustrate the difference it makes to see the Bible as a human product rather than as a divine product.

The first illustration concerns the Genesis stories of creation. If we think of the Bible as a divine product, then these are God’s stories of creation. And if they are God’s stories of creation, they can’t possibly be wrong. You don’t have to go very far down that road before you start thinking about creation science or scientific creationism, or get involved in school board squabbles about whether Genesis should be taught alongside of evolution in high school biology courses. I mean, why would you ever dream of thinking that? Only if you’re thinking that the Bible is a divine product, and therefore these stories can’t be wrong. But if you see the Bible as a human product, then the Genesis stories of creation are ancient Israel’s stories of creation. We realize that ancient Israel, like virtually every culture known to us, had its stories of creation. If we ask, "What are the chances that ancient Israel’s stories of creation contain valid scientific information?" The answer is about zip! And if they did, it would be pure coincidence. Now I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I think these stories are profoundly true, but I hear them as, profoundly true as metaphorical narratives, as symbolic narratives, not as factual reports.

A second illustration is about the difference it makes. This concerns the laws of the Bible. Now if we think of the Bible as a divine product, then the laws of the Bible are God’s laws. This is certainly the way I was taught the ten commandments. These are the laws of God. Let me illustrate the difference it makes with one of the hot-button issues in the contemporary church, this is the single law, and there is only one, in the Hebrew Bible prohibiting homosexual behavior amongst men. The law is found in Leviticus 18:22. I think most of you know it pretty well: "If a man lies with another man as with a woman, it is an abomination." Then two chapters later in Leviticus 20:13, the penalty is specified, and of course the penalty is death. Now, if we think of the Bible as a divine product, then the ethical question becomes: "How can one justify setting aside one of the laws of God?" Of course, this is exactly how our conservative brothers and sisters see it. Some of them will even say, "I’m not against homosexuality, but its one of the laws of God." Bullshit – that they’re not against homosexuality! Now, I think there are some who can genuinely be in that place. I can grant that. But if we think of the Bible as a human product, then this is not one of the laws of God, but one of the laws of ancient Israel. And it tells us that within ancient Israel, homosexual behavior was considered unacceptable.

Then the ethical question becomes: "What would be the justification for continuing to see things as ancient Israel saw things?" – especially when, as most of you would know, the law prohibiting homosexual behavior is imbedded in a context in Leviticus in the holiness code, the purity code, as it’s sometimes called, which also prohibits the planting of two kinds of seed in the same field, or the wearing of garments made of two kinds of cloth. Now how many of you have blends on this morning? I mean, why aren’t we bent out of shape about that? So, anyway, the Bible is a human product. We need to be utterly candid about that, and not out of a misplaced sense of reverence or respect say, "Well, I really think it comes from God somehow." We just make it enormously confusing when we say that. The Bible is the response to the experience of God, but as the response to the experience of God, it is a human product.

This leads me then to my third point, which is how we might hear the Bible again. Hearing the Bible again. I am going to speak about a historical-metaphorical-sacramental approach to scripture. That’s a mouthful so let me repeat it. A historical-metaphorical-sacramental approach to scripture. I need all three adjectives. By historical approach, I mean, the historical-critical approach. By metaphorical, I mean, recognizing and affirming the richness of metaphor and metaphorical narratives in scripture. And by sacramental, I refer to a primary function of the Bible in the Christian life. I will develop this last section with four statements.

The first: The Bible is a combination of history and metaphor. To say the same thing only slightly differently, a combination of history remembered and history metaphorized. Or one more time, a combination of historical memory and metaphorical narrative. By history remembered, I mean simply, some of the things recorded in the Bible really happened. By history metaphorized, I mean that the way the story of those things having happened is told, often gives them a metaphorical meaning as well. I also think there are some narratives that are purely metaphorical narratives, with no particular historical event behind them, such as walking on the water, the virgin birth, and so forth. It’s a very important distinction. It’s also really illuminating, I think, to realize that very early on our ancestors, meaning the people who created scripture, metaphorized their history, and we have often then historicized their metaphors. Or to make the same point, our ancestors mythologized their history (nothing wrong with that; that’s the way you spell out its meaning), and then we have very often literalized their mythology.

Second statement: The Bible has stories about the divine-human relationship. Now of course the Bible contains more than story, but a surprisingly large amount of the Bible is stories about the divine-human relationship. I mean not just stories about the relationship in the past, though that’s of course where the stories originate. There are stories about Israel’s perception of her relationship with God and the early Christian movement’s perception of her relationship with God as known in Jesus. They are also stories about the divine-human relationship in the present, in our present. My favorite way of illustrating that is with the way the story of the Exodus is told in the context of the Jewish celebration of Passover each year. Those of you who have been to a Passover Seder will recall that there are words that go along with the eating of the meal, a liturgy, if you will. At one point in the evening, the following words are spoken (a close paraphrase, not direct quotation): "It was not our Fathers and our Mothers who were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt but we, all of us gathered here tonight, were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt. And it was not just our Fathers and our Mothers whom God led out of Egypt with a great and mighty hand, but we, all of us gathered here tonight, were led out of Egypt by the great and mighty hand of God." The Exodus story is understood to be true in every generation. It’s not simply that we were in the loins of our ancestors, that we have their DNA or something like that, but rather, a perennial feature of the human condition is that we are in bondage to one pharaoh, one lord or another, and we stand in need of liberation. And it is the will of God that we be liberated from that which holds us in bondage. It’s a story that is true about us.

Third statement: A major need within the church today, for ourselves, and those we teach and those we talk to is (and the sentence contains some semi-technical language that can sound jargony, but it’s illuminating, so stay with me): to help people move from pre-critical naivete, through critical thinking, to post-critical naivety. A great sermon title to put on your bulletin board on Sunday morning. But they are very illuminating notions. Let me briefly explain each.

Pre-critical naivete is that early childhood stage in which we take it for granted that whatever the significant authority figures in our lives tell us to be true, is indeed true. I think, for example, of how I heard the Christmas stories as a child. I took it for granted they really happened that way, that there really was a magic star, that the holy family really did journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, that Jesus really was born in a stable and laid in a manger, that wise men came to visit, that angels sang to the shepherds in the night sky. And, very importantly, it took no effort on my part. It didn’t take faith. I had no reason to think otherwise. It never occurred to me to say, "Now are these historically factual reports? Or is this a metaphorical narrative?" It didn’t take faith! (I want to underline that.) Critical thinking begins in late childhood and continues through adolescence, of course, and into adulthood. And you don’t have to be an intellectual to get into critical thinking. You don’t have to go to college. Everybody enters this stage unless there is something seriously wrong with them, and there aren’t many people for whom that’s true. Critical thinking is simply that stage where we make decisions about how much of what we were taught as children we are going to carry with us. Is there a tooth fairy? Are babies really brought by storks? Does anybody say that anymore, by the way? In the modern period with its emphasis on factuality, critical thinking is deeply corrosive of religion in general, Christianity and the Bible in particular. When we first enter critical thinking, it can seem like a liberating stage, though it is often attended by epistemological anxiety. But when I say a liberating stage, I mean, realizing that all that stuff we learned as kids is up for grabs can be wonderfully liberating. But if you remain within the framework of critical thinking decade after decade after decade, and you can stay in it your whole life, it becomes a very arid place in which to live when it’s wedded to the framework of modernity, and it becomes a desolate place, T.S. Eliot’s wasteland.

So what’s post-critical naivete? Post-critical naivety is the ability to hear these stories. I’m thinking of the biblical stories in particular here. It’s the ability to hear these stories once again as true stories, even as you know that they may not be factually true. Their truth does not depend upon their factuality. Post-critical naivete is not a return to pre-critical naivete. It brings the critical with it, but integrates it into a larger paradigm. So it can bring the historical critical method with it. Post-critical naivete is the ability to hear the Christmas stories once again as true stories, even though you’re pretty sure that Jesus was born in Nazareth and not in Bethlehem, even as you’re pretty sure that the magic star and the wise men themselves come from an exegesis of Isaiah 60, rather than reflecting historical memory. You know all of that, but you’re still able to hear these as true stories, as metaphorical narratives using ancient archetypal language to make, among other affirmations, that Jesus is the light coming into the darkness, to make the affirmation that the Herods of this world constantly seek to destroy that which is born of God. The struggle between the kingdom of Herod and the kingdom of God as known in the Lordship of Christ goes way back to the beginning. You hear all of that as true. My favorite shorthand way of speaking about what post-critical naivete is with a single line from a Native American storyteller, which I quote in a footnote at the end of Chapter 1 of Meeting Jesus Again for The First Time, so you may be familiar with it. This Native American storyteller is in charge of telling his tribe’s story of creation. Each time he begins that story, he says, "Now I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true." That’s post-critical naivete. That is being able to hear metaphorical narratives as truthful stories.

My fourth and final statement under historical-metaphorical-sacramental approach to scripture also leads to my conclusion, seeing the Bible as sacrament of the sacred. I move into this by very briefly contrasting Bible as sacrament, with two ways of seeing the Bible that dominated modernity. I’ve spoken about these. The first is that the Bible is a divine product, and that is why it matters. The second option within modernity was, it’s a human product, and thus, nothing special. And this is what I think many fundangelicals fear: that if one lets go of the Bible as a divine product, the Bible then becomes just another ancient text. There is a third option, and that is the one I want to conclude with: the Bible as sacrament of the sacred. I’m going to illustrate this with a story, which then leads to my conclusion.

Each year at Oregon State, part of my teaching load is an introductory level course on the Bible. It’s mostly lower division students who take it. From teaching that course for about twenty years at Oregon State, I know that roughly twenty percent of the students who sign up for it, come from a conservative Christian background. The reason they sign up for it (probably not true of all of them, but for many of them) is they think it is just wonderful that you can get academic credit for reading the Bible. Of course they’re horrified before they’ve been in there very long. Because I know that, I take the whole of the first class period each term that I teach that course (a one hundred minute class period) to tell them about the perspective from which the course will be taught. I explain that it’s taught from the vantage-point of the academic discipline of biblical scholarship. I talk about the birth of the discipline in the enlightenment. I talk about how it sees scripture as a human product, just as I’ve spoken about that to you today. I do the best dog-and-pony show I know how to do, not only to make that point of view as clear as I can but exciting with vignettes from the history of biblical scholarship, the conflicts, and so forth. I tell them that I’m spending all this time doing this the first day of class, so that they can drop the course if they want to because it doesn’t sound like their cup of tea. By the way, to their credit, over the years I don’t know of a single conservative student who has dropped out. I admire them for that. I also tell them they don’t have to change the way they see scripture, but they have to be willing to enter into this way of looking at it for the sake of the course. In spite of all that careful explanation, the first two weeks of every term typically involve a lot of squabbling back and forth between me and the more articulate and bold of the conservative students. One year, I happened to have in the class a senior engineering student, a Muslim from the Middle East (not a North American Muslim) and a really nice guy, a really bright guy. He was taking the course because he needed one more humanities course for graduation, and it met at the right time. One day, about two weeks into the course, after having observed all of this squabbling going on back and forth, he came up to me after class and said, "I think I’m beginning to understand what is going on here." And he continued, "You’re saying (meaning me) that the Bible is like a lens through which we see God. And they’re saying (meaning the conservative students) that it’s important to believe in the lens." I said to him, "Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying." Now, obviously I liked the metaphor very much, and of course it’s like that famous Buddhist metaphor, which is also great in this context. This Buddhist metaphor speaks about Buddhist teachings being the finger pointing to the moon, meaning, by extension, all religions of the world are as fingers pointing to the moon. Some people make the mistake of thinking it’s about believing in the finger.

I used that story in one of my classes at O.S.U. this year. The students got the point. There were about ten seconds of silence, and then a hushed voice said, and I could tell it was being said with the flush of discovery, "And even the moon is only reflected light."

But to go back to the lens and the finger, metaphor – finally, those metaphors aren’t wholly adequate for me. For I see the Bible not simply as a lens through which I see God, but I also see it as a sacrament. Here I’m using the word sacrament in the broad meaning that it has in religious studies. A sacrament is a mediator of the sacred, a means whereby the Spirit comes to us. In this broad sense of the word sacrament, virtually anything from time to time can become a sacrament. Nature can become a sacrament. Another person can be a sacrament. A sacrament is a mediator of the sacred. I see the Bible as a means whereby the Spirit of God continues to address us, to speak to us in this day most obviously in the devotional and meditative use of scripture, but also sometimes in the use of scripture in public worship. To relate this to seeing the Bible as the "Word of God", I don’t think Word of God refers to the origin of scripture. If we meant that scripture comes from God, we would speak of scripture as the Words of God. We’ve always said it was the Word of God, so I don’t think Word of God refers to the origin of scripture, but it refers to the function of scripture – the sacramental function of scripture whereby scripture becomes the means whereby God addresses us to this day. I’ll make a whimsical contrast, and then I’ll close.

You know how we say at the end of a lectionary reading in some churches, "The Word of the Lord"? When I speak about the Bible as a human product, I have sometimes thought we should say at the end of a lectionary reading, "Some thoughts from ancient Israel." But perfectly expressing the sacramental view of scripture is what is said after the lectionary reading in the New Zealand Book of Common Prayer: "Hear what the Spirit is saying to the church."

My suggestion as I close is a vision of the Christian life that is not very much about believing at all. (I’ll say more about that tomorrow.) But rather, the Christian life is about a relationship with God, as mediated to us by the Christian tradition as a whole. The Bible, of course, is foundational to that tradition. But the Christian life is not about believing. It’s about living within this tradition and letting it be a mediator of the sacred – letting this tradition, critically, have its way with us, shaping our identity, shaping our sense of what is real, shaping our sense of what life is about. It is a relational, a sacramental vision of the Christian life. Ultimately, to me, it is both very simple and very orthodox.

Re-Visioning Christianity: The Christian Life

My topic, as you know from the program, is, "Re-Visioning the Christian Life", and my question is, very simply, "Within the re-visioning that I am suggesting, what does the Christian life look like?" For that older conventional way of seeing Christianity that I sketched in my talk yesterday, believing was central to the Christian life. Indeed during the period of modernity, being a Christian meant, to a large extent, believing in Christianity, and Christian faith meant, to a large extent, believing. How does the Christian life look within this framework of seeing Christianity again?

I’m going to develop the response to my own question in two main parts to this lecture: In Part 1, I’m going to talk about Jesus and the Christian Life, and in Part 2, I’m going to talk about Faith and the Christian Life.

Part 1 - Jesus and the Christian Life

I’ll develop this under two main statements. And I begin with some comments about the central meaning of the Christological language of the early Christian movement, or put more simply, with what I see as the central meaning of the early church’s Christology. Let me begin with the Christological metaphors that emerged within the early Christian movement in the decades after Easter. It is that collection of exalted titles that the early movement used to speak about Jesus. It’s a very familiar list of terms, words like – Jesus is: The Word of God, The Lamb of God, The Wisdom [Sophia] of God. Jesus is: Messiah, Son of God, One With God, Lord.

All those and more are what I mean by the Christological language of the early Christian movement. Now let me mention in passing – though it’s an important pass – that in my judgment, as well as the judgment of most mainline scholars including the Jesus Seminar, none of this language goes back to Jesus himself. We think it’s unlikely that he thought of himself as The Son of God or as The Messiah, and certainly he did not think of himself as The Light of The World, The Bread of Life, or The Way, The Truth and The Life, and so forth. Rather, all of this language, again in the judgment of the majority of mainline scholars, is the voice of the community, not the voice of Jesus. As I have sometimes remarked, I find this even more impressive as the voice of the community than if I thought of it as the voice of Jesus. It is the community that is saying, "We have found in this person the Word made flesh. We have found in this person the spirit of God embodied in a human life. We have in this person the Messiah, the Light of the World."

All of this language initially comes from the Jewish tradition. Some of the phrases, some of the metaphors, come to have resonances associated with the Hellenistic world as well, but all of it initially comes from the Jewish tradition. Which means that Jesus, after his death, was spoken of in the most exalted language known in his own religious tradition. And that is an extraordinary testimony, both to what he was like as a historical person, as well as to the impact that he had upon his community of followers.

Where I want to get, as I remind you of the Christological language of the early Christian movement, is to a compact statement of what I see as the cumulative meaning of all of this language. It will be a somewhat abstract statement. Let me add that it’s important to keep all of the individual metaphors, because the individual metaphors each have their own rich resonances of meaning. If we ask, "What does all this language add up to? What is its cumulative meaning?" I would put it like this: "Jesus is, for us as Christians, the decisive disclosure of God." Or, if you prefer the word "revelation" instead of "disclosure": "Jesus is, for us as Christians, the decisive revelation of God." That is what all of this language, in various ways, is affirming. More fully and precisely: "Jesus is, for us as Christians, the disclosure of a life full of God." Obviously, Jesus does not show us God’s omniscience or God’s omnipresence, and he does not really show us God as creator, but he shows us what can be known of God in a human life. He shows us what a life full of God looks like.

I want to add that we can say: "Jesus is, for us as Christians, the decisive disclosure of God," without saying, "He is the only one." I’m talking, when I use the language of "decisive for us as Christians," about what it is that makes us Christians. Christians are people who see the decisive disclosure of God in Jesus, just as Muslims are people who see the decisive disclosure of God in the Koran, and Jewish people are people who see the decisive disclosure of God in the Torah.

I want to put this early Christian affirmation and its meaning one other way, because that’s the bridge to what I’m going to say about Jesus and the Christian life. Thus, the early Church’s central Christological affirmations about Jesus mean: "Jesus is a model for the Christian life." Jesus shows us what a life full of God looks like.

The part of the Christian tradition out of which I come, has most often hesitated saying that, or even resisted saying that. In part there’s been a fear that if we say, "Jesus is a model for the Christian life," that it turns the Christian life into Works, and not Grace. In part, it’s because the divinity of Jesus has sometimes been emphasized to such an extent that, "How could he possibly be a model for a human life?" And in part it’s because there’s been a fear that if we say, "Jesus is a model for the Christian life," that it turns the Christian life into just ethics. But I think all of these apprehensions are, finally, without adequate ground. I think these objections ignore that the early Christian movement was saying, "In Jesus we see what a life full of God looks like." I also think that the apprehension that it turns following Jesus into Works or Ethics neglects the fact that taking Jesus seriously means that we would take the Spirit with utter seriousness as being at the center of Jesus’ life. And if you take the Spirit with utter seriousness, then Grace is also at the center of the Christian life.

So this leads me to part 2 of my first part. If in Jesus we see what a life full of God looks like, if we see in Jesus a model of the Christian life, what does such a life look like? What I will say builds upon the five-stroke sketch that I develop of the historical Jesus in my books. I will simply remind you, without exposition, of what that five-stroke sketch was. He was a spirit-person, or a Jewish mystic. I use those two phrases synonymously. He was a healer. He was a wisdom-teacher. He was a social prophet. And he was a movement founder.

If we take what we see in Jesus seriously, as a "disclosure of what a life full of God looks like," what does that life look like? I will describe that life with two pairs of words, and the two pairs are spirit – wisdom on the one hand, and compassion – justice on the other hand. I begin with the first pair. It will be a life centered in spirit and wisdom, and I will now talk about spirit and wisdom separately.

When I speak about a life centered in the spirit of God, I am referring, of course, to my strong sense that Jesus, historically speaking, was a Jewish mystic. Now a mystic, very simply, is a person for whom God, or the Spirit or the sacred, are an experiential reality. Mystics are people who have vivid, and typically frequent, experiences of the sacred. I think, contrary to what some of my colleagues would say, the evidence that Jesus was a Jewish mystic is early, widespread, and persuasive. Thus for Jesus as a historical person, his relationship to the Spirit was utterly central, or foundational, to everything else he was. Jesus, I am convinced, knew the immediacy of the sacred in his own experience. He knew the reality of an unbordered relationship with God in his own experience. And, very importantly, he invited his followers into a relationship with the same Spirit that he knew in his own experience. At the risk of repeating myself, and to put it as simply as I know how, a life full of God is a life centered in the Spirit of God. If we take this seriously, it means that spirituality will be one of the two focal points of the Christian life.

The other focal point will be compassion in the world of the everyday. That’s what I’ll talk about under compassion and justice, of course, but it means that spirituality will be one of the two focal points of the Christian life. I define spirituality myself very simply as: becoming conscious of, and intentional about, a deepening relationship with God. Let me expand that briefly by commenting upon three words. Conscious. What I have in mind there is that we are all already in a relationship with God and have been from the very beginning. Spirituality is about becoming conscious of that relationship that already exists. Intentional. Intentional means paying attention to that relationship. There is nothing terribly mysterious about the relationship with God. It is analogous to human relationships. The more you pay attention to it, the more it deepens. Relationship. When I speak about the third term I want to unpack, it’s about a deepening relationship with God. Spirituality is not very much about believing, at all. You don’t have to believe a thing to begin the practice of spirituality. Some people say, "Well, don’t you have to believe in God before you can start doing this?" No! Of course you don’t. Sometimes belief precedes. Sometimes belief follows. It’s about a relationship with that Mystery (capital "M") within which we live, and move, and have our being.

Now, if we take spirituality seriously as one of the two focal points of the Christian life, this leads immediately to a way of thinking about one of the major purposes of our life together as "church." I say one, because I don’t want to say it’s the only one. I try to speak about one of the major purposes of our life together as ‘church’ with the twin metaphor, the double metaphor, of open hearts and thin places.

That spirituality, or the Christian life, is ultimately about the opening of the heart, the opening of the self at its deepest level, to the reality of God. To be even more metaphorical about that, Allen Jones of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, in one of his books, speaks of spirituality as for the hatching of the heart. It’s a wonderful image, because it suggests that our hearts, ourselves at the deepest level, typically have a shell around them. If the life that is within is to come into full life, that shell must open. Christianity, the spiritual life in Christian form, is about the opening of itself at the deepest level to God.

The phrase "thin place" is a metaphor that I owe to Celtic Christianity, that form of Christianity that flourished in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales beginning in the late fifth century and continuing on for a number of centuries. It’s still a strong undercurrent in those parts of the world. Within Celtic Christianity, a thin place is any place where the border or the boundary between nonmaterial reality and material reality becomes very thin, virtually transparent, porous, malleable. A thin place is any place where we experience the sacred. A thin place is a place where the veil momentarily lifts, and we behold, experience, the Spirit within which we live, and move, and have our being. Within Celtic Christianity, many places can be thin places. Nature can be a thin place. Geographical locations like Iona, or places of pilgrimage like Jerusalem and Rome, can be thin places.

Also, I’m suggesting to you, the purpose of many of our Christian practices, especially worship practices, is that they are to become a thin place, where we momentarily glimpse the reality of the sacred. If you have any role in the design of worship, or the choice of music for use in congregational worship, or if you are sleeping with somebody who does, think very seriously about what would it mean for the design of our worship services if we took seriously that one of the major purposes of worship is to become a thin place where our hearts are open. It would make a lot of difference in worship design. Worship would cease being primarily about listening to talking heads. I don’t mean that sermons don’t matter. They are one of the few teaching opportunities within the church, and a good sermon can become a thin place. But when a worship service is dominated by long, spoken pastoral prayers, and long, recited in unison confessions, and readings, and all that, with maybe two or three inaccessible hymns thrown in, I mean it’s no wonder people have better things to do on Sunday morning.

So, spirituality, a relationship to the same Spirit that Jesus knew in his own experience, would be one of the centers of a life that saw Jesus as a model of the Christian life.

The second word in my first pair of words: wisdom. Taking Jesus seriously as a model of the Christian life means taking the wisdom teaching of Jesus seriously. Here Greg [Jenks], and the Jesus Seminar as a whole for that matter, and I are all on the same page. The wisdom teaching of Jesus is utterly central to who he was. So a Christian life that takes that seriously would be a life lived by the alternative wisdom of Jesus. The alternative wisdom of Jesus is a "way". Wisdom teachers always speak about a way, which means a path. It’s a way or a path that leads beyond convention. "Convention", of course, is another word for culture. For a culture is most taken-for-granted understandings of what is real, of what life is about, of what’s good and what’s bad, of what’s worth pursuing. Convention is what everybody knows in a particular culture. Convention is cultural consensus about how you should live your life. The wisdom of Jesus leads beyond convention.

To use another phrase for the wisdom of Jesus that I see as saying the same thing as "a way that leads beyond convention", the way of Jesus is Robert Frost’s phrase that became the title of M. Scott Peck’s best-selling book. (which was on the New York Times bestseller list for over 600 weeks! My God!): "the road less traveled". Or to use the language that Jesus himself used, it’s the narrow way, as contrasted with the broad way of convention. Or to use a phrase I have sometimes used, it is a subversive and alternative wisdom. By subversive I mean a wisdom that undermines or subverts taken-for-granted notions. The central positive content of the alternative wisdom of Jesus is that it is a radical centering in God, and not in culture, not in tradition, not in convention. I’m convinced that in his own spiritual experience as a Jewish mystic, Jesus knew the immediacy of access to God. In his wisdom teaching, Jesus taught the immediacy of access to God – apart from convention, apart from tradition, apart from institution – a way that is as open to the marginalized as it is to the respectable, and maybe even more open to the marginalized than to the respectable, because the marginalized know that convention hasn’t gotten them anywhere.

The central symbol for the alternative way of Jesus in the New Testament as a whole (and we find it in the Gospels as well) is death and resurrection. It’s the cross as a metaphor for an internal, psychological spiritual path. It is dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being. It is dying to an old identity, that identity conferred by culture and convention, whether it’s an identity that puffs us up or burdens us down. It is being born into an identity in God, in the Spirit, or for the post-Easter community, an identity in Christ. This central symbol of death and resurrection is a metaphor for the internal, psychological spiritual path means that the born-again experience is at the very center of the Christian life.

I think it’s unfortunate that we in the moderate to liberal wings of the church have virtually let our conservative brothers and sisters have a monopoly on born-again language. One of the reasons we’ve done that, I think, is that all of us have known at least one person who was born-again as a jerk. I know that’s whimsical and light, but the element of seriousness in it is that if the born-again experience leads to an even more rigid sense of righteousness, and to an even more rigid judgmentalism, then it’s not the born-again experience. Or it has an awful lot of static in it.

To go back to the main point, dying to the world of convention – dying to those identities conferred by culture, dying to the values of culture – is utterly central to the way of Jesus.

Finally, the wisdom of Jesus, the way of Jesus, is very similar to the way of the other great wisdom teachers of the world’s religions. Except for differences of language, I can’t see any difference between the wisdom teaching of Jesus and the wisdom teaching of Lao Tsu or the wisdom teaching of the Buddha. And I could name others. I think that rather than being threatened by seeing the similarity between the way of Jesus and the way of these other great wisdom teachers, we should see the similarity as something to be celebrated and proclaimed. The Christian preoccupation with the uniqueness of Jesus, when you think about it, is just weird. If we find a commonality in the religious traditions, it seems to me, that adds to the truth and the validity of the religious traditions rather than somehow threatening the truth of our own.

I turn to my second pair of words, all still under the topic of Jesus as a disclosure of what a life full of God looks like, and therefore of Jesus as a model for the Christian life. The second pair of words is that it would be a life centered in compassion and justice. I need both of those words. I need them both because compassion without justice, especially in a culture like ours, can too easily be individualized and sentimentalized. So I need the word justice as well. But justice without compassion easily sounds only political. So I need both.

I began with a few comments about compassion. Because I’ve written a lot about this in my works on Jesus, I’ll be very brief here. I want to underline that for Jesus, compassion was the central ethical paradigm, the central ethical virtue of life with God. When Jesus sums up theology and ethics in a six-word sentence (which was not his way of doing things – he commonly spoke aphoristically in a much more perplexing kind of way), the six words in English go like this: "Be compassionate as God is compassionate" (Luke 6:36 and the parallel in Matthew, therefore early material from Q). The central quality of God is that God is compassionate. Therefore, you be compassionate. Here let me add that a lot of English translations let us down at this point. Many English translations of that verse use the word "mercy", i.e., "Be merciful as God is merciful." The New English Bible has it right. I think the Scholars Version has it right. And so I say to you, almost always, when you run into the words "mercy" or "merciful" in the Bible, you should translate "compassion". Unless the context is manifestly a legal context, to be merciful implies a relationship of a superior to an inferior. It also presupposes a situation of wrongdoing, which is what I mean by a legal context. You’re merciful to somebody to whom you have a right to be something else. Compassion is very different from that. The meaning of compassion is suggested in part (again this will be familiar to you from my books and from other books) by its linguistic association, in both Hebrew and Aramaic, with a word for "womb". To be compassionate is to be like a womb. For Jesus, God’s central quality is that God is womb-like. You, therefore, should be womb-like.

Metaphorically, what does that mean? There are many resonances. To be like a womb is to be life-giving, to be nourishing, possibly to be sort of encompassing. Moreover, compassion in the Hebrew Bible is associated with the feelings that a mother has for the children of her womb. What kind of feelings does a mother have for the children of her womb? I should ask a bunch of you, and if we were doing a workshop, I might do that. But, obviously, those feelings include tenderness, concern, willing their well-being. Those feelings can also be fierce, as when a mother sees the children of her womb being threatened by something, which means that compassion as a quality of God and as a quality of the Christian life is not simply a soft virtue. It can sometimes have an edge to it. Then, of course, compassion is the deeds that go with those feelings. Feeling the feelings of another at a level below your head, feeling the feelings of another in your loins. Compassion is located in the bowels for a man in the Hebrew Bible, in the womb for a woman. (The only reason it’s in the bowels for us guys is we don’t have wombs.) That means to be moved by those feelings at a very deep level of one’s being and to act in accord with them.

Finally, compassion is very different from other potential core values, or ethical paradigms, for the Christian life. A very quick example of an alternative: Suppose one thought that the Christian life was about being righteous as God is righteous, and that one understood righteousness as not being about justice (as it frequently is in the Hebrew Bible) but being about morally pure. That leads to a very different vision of the Christian life, as if the Christian life is about making sure that I am pure, rather than about being compassionate as God is compassionate.

I turn to the second word in that pair of words, justice. Here I want to point out how central justice is to the whole biblical tradition as well as to Jesus. It is, of course, central to the story of the Exodus, which is about liberation from economic and political injustice, as well as about religious liberation. It is utterly central to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, and it is utterly central to the teaching and activity of Jesus. Jesus, like the great social prophets of the Hebrew Bible, was a God-intoxicated voice of religious, social protest. He, like they, protested against and did a radical critique of the domination system of his day, just as they did of the domination systems of their day. Indeed, if one wants to ask the historical question, not "Why did Jesus die?" but "Why was he killed?", the answer is, he was killed because of his passion for justice. He was killed because of his critique of the domination system of his day. This is the political meaning of Good Friday, the passion of Jesus is about Jesus’ passion for the justice of God.

Let me immediately acknowledge that it’s very difficult to communicate this passion for justice and what justice means in our cultural climate. It’s not only that there’s resistance to it. It’s just that the word doesn’t mean what it means in the biblical tradition. I became aware of this when I was teaching that introductory biblical studies course that I mentioned yesterday. When I was an undergraduate, one of the most electrifying moments in my whole undergraduate schooling was when a political science professor, talking about political philosophy, included the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. He talked about Amos’s passion for justice. He had us read Amos in a political science course. It just blew me away. It was the most exciting thing I’d ever run into in the Bible, and probably outside of it. So when I would get to the unit on the prophets in this introductory biblical studies course, I would be up there ranting and raving about justice, and the passion for justice, and my students would be sitting there not looking excited at all, taking notes, wondering what was going to be on the exam. Finally, I stopped, and I said, "I want to see if I can figure out what’s going on here. When I say the word "justice", what do you think of? What does that word mean to you?" There’s about thirty seconds of silence, which is fine. I don’t have problems with a class becoming a Quaker meeting. Finally, one of the students said, "Well, I think of the criminal justice system." And I thought, of course. Think of it for a moment. Who’s the head of the Justice Department in the United States? The attorney general. Who is the Attorney General of the United States? The nation’s chief law enforcement official. If you just talk about justice, either people are not going to have a clue as to what you’re talking about, or they’re going to think you’re talking about God being passionate about criminal justice, as chief prosecutor, or something like that. So, it’s become very important for me to talk about the meaning of the word "justice".

There is justice in the sense of the criminal justice system, and it’s important, of course, for that to be done as well as possible. Secondly, there is procedural justice. This, Robert Bella argues in his book, Habits of The Heart – a study of the central values of the American middle class – along with criminal justice is the central meaning of justice in the states. Procedural justice means the fair enforcement of the rules so that the rules are the same for everybody – impartial enforcement of the rules. It’s basically this preoccupation with procedural justice, which goes with a highly individualistic society (we are all individuals competing; the rules have got to be the same for all of us) that accounts for the revolt against affirmative action. People who are against affirmative action have lifted up procedural justice (usually without realizing it) as the primary meaning of justice.

Then there’s a third meaning of justice in addition too criminal and procedural. It’s harder to give a shorthand name for the third meaning of justice. I think the best shorthand name is substantive justice. The meaning of substantive justice, obviously, has to do with substance, something substantial. But the meaning of substantive justice is perhaps best suggested by: "It’s a justice that is discerned by its results." It’s a results-oriented justice. Does a given system produce just results? That’s what substantive justice is about. I’ll try to illustrate it this way. It’s possible to imagine (it didn’t happen, of course, but it’s possible to imagine) that the laws of Nazi Germany would have been, could have been, enforced with absolute impartiality, with absolute fairness, with completely impeccable procedures. It’s possible to imagine that. Would we then say, "There was a just society?" Well, no. Because we also, at some level of our being, know that justice has to do with results and not just procedures.

The justice that is at the center of the biblical tradition is substantive justice. I want to say, of course, criminal justice and procedural justice are important. They’re about human rights. All of that matters. But the notion of justice that is most lacking in North American society, and in the consciousness of Christians today, is substantive justice – justice that is judged by its results. I don’t have to do a litany of that. I could start with health care. I could start with income distribution. We have a radically unjust society in many ways. Now, if we take Jesus seriously as a model for the Christian life, it means that not only will compassion be the primary ethical virtue, but also a passion for justice will be part of what discipleship means, of what taking Jesus seriously means. I think consciousness-raising within the church about this is one of the most important, even as it is one of the most difficult, tasks today. I think the way to do consciousness-raising in the church about justice is to try to get people in touch with the way in which systems effect individual lives. Within an individualistic society, it’s oftentimes hard to get people to see this, but you can get there.

You can talk about how systems of convention, and I’m thinking of conventional labeling here, negatively impact the lives of people. Think, for example of how conventional attitudes about unmarried mothers affected the lives of so many women as recently as forty or fifty years ago. In the town that I grew up in, in North Dakota, if a young woman got pregnant out of wedlock, and if the guy wouldn’t marry her, she basically had no future in that town. It’s not that she would have been tarred and feathered, but she had no future in that town. Her only chance for a life, really, would be to move to a city, to give the baby up for adoption, and to start over in a fairly anonymous kind of context. Now there is a clear example of where system, meaning here conventional attitudes, negatively affect the life of a person.

Or, take the way in which older unmarried women were regarded. Now by older, I don’t mean 80; I mean 28. Think. When I was growing up, they were called old maids! Spinsters! Now, one might say, "Well, so what? You know, names can never hurt me." What is it like to carry around the identity of an old maid or spinster?

Beyond those examples, of course, one can talk about the way in which our present economic system negatively affects the lives of so many people. There are wonderful statistics. Wonderful? They’re horrifying! There are horrifying statistics, but they’re wonderful for making the point that it’s the structures of society that are responsible for so many people in our own culture being economically so desperately bad off -- with all of the existential angst, and all of the burden of the everyday that goes with constant money worry. It’s not because the poor aren’t working as hard as the middle class or the well-to-do. How many of the working poor get to have a two-hour lunch with white wine? But to try to get people to see the way that systems affect the lives of people.

Let me conclude this point by saying, "Why is the God of the Bible so passionate about justice? Why was Jesus so passionate about justice and such a critic of the domination system?" The simple answer is this. When you think about it, the single greatest source of unnecessary human misery is systemic injustice. Can you think of anything else in human history that has caused so much unnecessary human suffering as unjust economic structures? Unjust political structures? Structures of convention that negatively impact the lives of people? The God of the Bible – the God of the Exodus, the God of the prophets, the God of Jesus – cares deeply about suffering and thus is passionately against that which is the source of unnecessary human social misery. So, a life that takes Jesus seriously is what a life full of God looks like. It would be a life filled with compassion and a passion for justice – a life growing in compassion and growing in a passion for justice.

Part 2 – Faith and the Christian Life

I move now to part two, which will not be as long as part one, even though it is also important.

Namely, I want to conclude this talk and my contribution to this event, by talking about the meaning of faith. I do this because faith, the word itself and the notion behind it, has been utterly central to Christianity, especially in its protestant forms, though not only in its protestant forms. I am going to talk not simply about the meaning of faith, but the meanings of faith. I use the plural deliberately, for in the Christian tradition, the word "faith" has had four primary meanings. They are quite different from each other, even though they can be complementary. One of these meanings has become dominant in the modern period, with distorting effects on the Christian life. The other three are all rich understandings for our time so I am going to describe these four meanings of faith. In each case, I will use a Latin term to name the meaning because it shows the antiquity of these notions within the tradition. These terms come from the middle ages. Also in each case, I will describe the meaning of faith with a short English phrase. Then I will talk about the opposite of each, for that is also illuminating.

So I begin with the first meaning of faith. The order here is somewhat arbitrary. It’s not that this is the first one to emerge, just the first one on my list. The Latin word, faith as assensus. The meaning of it is suggested by the English word that is closely connected to it, faith as assent, as mental assent. Or the short English phrase that I’ll use for this: faith as "believing that", faith as believing that something is the case, believing that something is true, giving one’s intellectual agreement to a claim, or a statement, or a proposition, or a doctrine. This is faith as believing the central claims of the Christian tradition to be true. This understanding of faith, though it’s very old, has become dominant in the period of modernity. Indeed, I think for most people it’s the most common meaning of faith. I hear this amongst my students, even amongst my nonreligious students. There are some things they know. There are other things they can only believe. Believing is what you turn to when knowledge runs out. And for some people, believing is what you do when knowledge contradicts something. You believe it to be true in spite of the fact that your head knows there’s a whole lot of problems with it. Although this has become dominant in the modern period, it was only with the enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth century that this distorted view of faith came into use.

To see how modern this distortion is, think of what faith as assensus would have meant in the Christian middle ages in Europe. The central Christian claims, the Bible itself, were part of the conventional wisdom of the time. Nobody had to turn to faith to believe the Genesis stories of creation. Everybody thought that’s the way it happened. Faith as assensus was effortless in the Christian middle ages, for the most part. When faith as assensus becomes effortful, there is probably something weird going on. And yet, as I’ve said, this has become the dominant understanding of faith in the modern period.

The opposite of faith as assensus, of faith as "belief that", is of course, doubt, or disbelief. If you think that what God wants from you is faith as "belief that", then of course doubt and disbelief are experienced as falling away from God, or even as sinful. It becomes something to be avoided, something to confess, even. But this whole notion that Christian faith is about "believing that" puts the emphasis in the wrong place. It almost suggests that what God most wants from us is correct belief. Some of the fights within modern Protestantism about doctrine suggest that it is desperately important that, "We get this right!" God could care about some things, yes, but about infralapsarianism vs. superlapsarianism? That’s a trivial example, but faith as "believing the right things" is very strong in the modern period of Christianity. It’s not only that it leads to a distortion of faith, but when you think about it, faith as "belief" is really quite impotent. You can believe all the right things and still be a jerk. You can believe all the right things and still be in bondage. You can believe all the right things and still be miserable. Faith as "belief" is relatively impotent.

Now, having trashed faith as assensus, let me briefly comment about its truth. The truth of faith as assensus is that, finally, I don’t think we can give our hearts to something that our heads reject. I realize that I have spent a very large part of my life trying to come up with a version of Christianity to which I can give both my heart and my head. So faith as assensus finally has a role. But when it’s emphasized as the primary meaning, or when it becomes believing in spite of all the reasons you have for thinking this is nonsense, then it’s been profoundly distorted.

I turn to the second meaning of faith. I can do the second and third more briefly. They are equally as important. The fourth will take a little more time.

Second Latin word -- faith as fidelitas, like the English word, fidelity, but with an "as" at the end instead of a "y". The close equivalence of the English word fidelity to fidelitas suggests the central meaning of this notion of faith. This is faith as "fidelity to". And to put the same point only slightly differently, this is faith as "faithfulness to". To what? To the relationship with God. Not faithfulness to statements about God – that’s just assent coming in through the back door – but faithfulness to the relationship with God.

And its opposites? The most obvious one, of course, is infidelity to the relationship with God. To suggest to you how central this notion is to the biblical tradition – one of the central biblical metaphors for infidelity to the relationship with God is adultery. Most of the time when the prophets of the Hebrew Bible talk about adultery, they are not talking about human sexual relationships. They are talking about infidelity to God, lack of faithfulness to God. They are talking about whoring after other Gods. And those other Gods are typically not statues. That’s a trivialization. Those other Gods are other central values, other central concerns in life. In the biblical tradition another metaphor for infidelity, like adultery, is the metaphor idolatry. Idolatry is about being centered in something other than God. Idolatry is about faithfulness to a relationship with something instead of God.

Third meaning of faith, the Latin word – faith as fiducia. Here there is no good English equivalent. "Fiduciary" is as close as we come. It really doesn’t illuminate, but it helps you to remember the spelling of fiducia. In the short English phrase, this is faith as "trusting in", faith as radical trust in God. Again, not trust in statements about God. That’s assensus coming in through the back door once again. But faith as radical trust in God. Faith as radical trust in God, like fidelitas, is not very much concerned with beliefs at all.

We perhaps see the meaning of faith as trust most clearly when we look at its opposite. What’s the opposite of faith as trust? Of course it’s mistrust, but that doesn’t get us very far, so let me use another opposite of faith as trust. The opposite of faith as radical trust in God is anxiety. You can see this in a Q passage, found in Matthew’s sermon on the mount, and then in Luke 12. It’s that famous passage where Jesus says to his followers, "Consider the lilies of the field and how they grow. Consider the birds of the air." Five times in that passage, he says to his hearers, "Why are you anxious, O people of little faith?" "Little faith" and anxiety go together. Jesus invites his followers in that passage to a trust in the cosmic generosity of God. Why be anxious? So the opposite of faith as trust is anxiety. The barometer of how much faith as trust there is in your life is how much anxiety there is in your life. I mention that, not to give you yet one more thing with which to beat up upon yourselves, but rather to make the positive point. Think of how wonderful your life would be if there were little or no anxiety in it. The Peace of God that passes all understanding. The freedom you would have. The ability to be present that you would have. This is faith as trust.

Fourth and finally, faith as the Latin word – visio, like the English word "vision", but without the "n". The short English phrase is "a way of seeing". Visio has to do with seeing, faith as a way of seeing slightly more fully, faith as a way of seeing the whole, of seeing reality – with reality being used in a comprehensive sense for what is, the sum total of what is. For my development of this point, I am indebted to the mid-twentieth century North American theologian, H. Richard Niebuhr. The last of his books, actually published after his death but based on lectures and a manuscript he was developing shortly before his death, is The Responsible Self. In this book, Niebuhr speaks about three ways that we can see the whole. By the way, he doesn’t think there are fourteen ways, and he’s going to talk about only three. He intends this as a comprehensive list of possibilities. Very importantly, and this connects to the title of his book, The Responsible Self, he argues that each of these ways of seeing reality is correlated with a way of responding to reality, or responding to life. So what’s at stake in these three ways of seeing is how we will live our lives.

The first way you can see the whole is that it is threatening and hostile. You don’t have to be paranoid to see reality this way. When you think about it, it’s going to get us all. We’re all going to die. And everybody we love is going to be swallowed up into that pit, which might be a pit of nothingness. And not only us as individuals, and those we love, but according to cosmologists, five billion years from now even the earth and the solar system itself will be vaporized in the final explosion of the dying sun. By the way, has that happened before? How do they know that’s a five billion-year interval? I mean what, when? Tomorrow? You don’t have to be paranoid to see it this way. Niebuhr comments, if you do see reality as hostile and threatening, of course what you will try to do, then, is to protect yourself as much as you can from this hostile and devouring force that’s going to get us all. You’ll build up your systems of security. Very provocatively, and Niebuhr is a Christian theologian making the next point, he says that the most common forms of Christianity basically do see reality as hostile and threatening. God is the one who’s "gonna getcha" if you don’t believe the right things, offer the right sacrifices, purify yourselves, whatever the condition might be. If you do the right things, maybe this threatening power that’s going to get everybody else will spare you and your community from the eternal fire.

The second way you can see reality: you can see it as indifferent to us. This is probably the most common secular perception of the whole. It’s not that reality is out to get us, really, but it’s indifferent to human purposes and ends. It simply goes on its way, and we’re here for a while. If you do see reality as indifferent to us, you probably won’t be quite as desperate in building up systems of security. But still the natural way to respond to life is to enjoy what you can of it, and try to protect yourself at least against the perils and dangers that can be easily warded off. Have a good pension plan, all those things that we do to take care of ourselves and those who are most important to us. It’s possible to live a more heroic kind of life within seeing reality as indifferent, but that is the typical response.

Finally, the third option is you can see reality as life-giving, as nourishing of human life. The theological term for this is: you can see reality as gracious – not as hostile, not as indifferent, but as gracious. Niebuhr obviously advocates this position, but he’s not being polly-anna here. He knows about the Holocaust. He knows about the horrible things we do to each other. He knows about the horrible things that can happen to us. He’s not denying any of that for a moment. He’s saying, even in the midst of that, if we see reality as gracious, life-giving in some ways that we do not understand, it makes possible a different response to life, a response of gratitude – but also a response of not needing to be primarily concerned about defending the self against either an indifferent or hostile universe. Not being primarily concerned about building up what little systems of security we can. It makes possible what another theologian calls "the self-forgetfulness of faith". It makes possible what yet another thinker has called "a willingness to spend and be spent in the service of an over-arching vision". It makes possible the kind of life that we see in Jesus, that willingness to spend and be spent. The kind of life we see in Jesus is also the kind of life we see in the saints, whether they be known or unknown. When I say "unknown", I think there are a lot of Christians throughout the centuries whose lives aren’t known about beyond their own family, and maybe community, who have reached this place of being willing to spend and be spent in the name of this vision of reality.

Now this is faith as visio, as a way of seeing the whole. It has nothing to do with believing that in addition to reality, there’s a supernatural being out there. It has nothing to do with believing Christian doctrines to be true in some absolute sense. It has nothing to do with believing in the Bible as the infallible word of God. It has to do with a way of seeing. Finally, I think in many ways, the question of God is the question of how we see this. This connection of faith as visio – faith as a way of seeing, this connection to seeing – leads me back to a theme I announced yesterday, namely metaphorical theology – hearing the Bible as metaphor and metaphorical narrative, as well as history remembered. Because metaphor has everything to do with how we see. Metaphor means to see as.

So I conclude by returning to this theme of Christianity as a sacrament of the sacred – as a tradition that mediates the reality of God to us – and the Bible as a collection of stories that invites us to see in a particular way, to see reality in a certain way, and to see our own lives in a certain way. Ultimately this leads to a vision of the Christian life as a relationship with God as mediated through the Christian tradition as sacrament. That relationship is a transforming relationship. It will not leave us unchanged.

Let me conclude by quoting one of the nuggets of Paul, one of those passages that should be put up in needlepoint, or in neon, in the midst of a lot of dross that’s also there in Paul. I’m not a trasher of Paul, either. I don’t want to do a separate talk on that right now, but I want to conclude with this absolutely marvelous passage from II Corinthians 3:18. It’s a very mystical section of the book of II Corinthians. Here Paul writes, "And we all, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the likeness of Christ, from one degree of glory to another." And then Paul concludes almost breathlessly, "And this comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit." Let me do that whole thing again, because it’s dense. But it’s relationship. It’s mystical. It’s transformative. It’s taking Jesus seriously as what a life filled with God looks like. "And we all, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the likeness of Christ, from one degree of glory to another. And this comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit."

The Light in the Darkness

Tom Wright and I see the birth stories quite differently. I do not think they are historically factual, but I think they are profoundly true in another and more important sense. For reasons I will soon explain, I do not think the virginal conception is historical, and I do not think there was a special star or wise men or shepherds or birth in a stable in Bethlehem. Thus I see these stories not as historical reports but as literary creations. As the latter, they are not history remembered, but metaphorical narratives that use ancient religious imagery to express central truths about Jesus' significance.

There are three primary reasons why I do not see these stories as historically factual. First, the tradition that Jesus had a remarkable birth is relatively late. The stories of his birth are found only in the first two chapters of Matthew and Luke, both written near the end of the first century. Earlier writers (as well as the rest of the New Testament) do not refer to a special birth. Paul, our earliest writer, does not. Neither does Mark, the earliest Gospel. Moreover, though the Gospel of John is probably later than Matthew and Luke, John does not mention it either.

At the very least, this indicates that it was possible to write a gospel without mentioning the birth of Jesus. There are two possible explanations. The tradition of a special birth was old, but these authors either didn't know about it or didn't deem it important enough to include. Or the tradition didn't develop until quite late, and that's why most New Testament authors do not mention it --the stories did not yet exist. The second option seems more likely to me, to a considerable extent because of the next two reasons.

The second reason is the striking differences between Matthew's birth story and Luke's birth story. Without being comprehensive, I note the following differences between them.

Both Matthew and Luke trace the genealogy of Jesus -- back through Joseph to King David and beyond. But the genealogies differ significantly. Matthew takes Jesus' ancestry back to Abraham, the father of Israel; Luke takes it back to Adam, the father of the human race. Moreover, the genealogies differ even when they are covering the same period of time. From David forward, Solomon and the kings of Judah are the ancestors of Jesus in Matthew; in Luke, the lineage goes through the prophet Nathan, not King Solomon.

In Luke, Mary and Joseph live in Nazareth, but because of the census they travel to Bethlehem, where the birth occurs in a stable. They go back home to Nazareth after the birth. In Matthew, Mary and Joseph live in Bethlehem and the birth occurs at home (not in a stable). The family then moves to Nazareth after spending time in Egypt. Matthew mentions no trip to Bethlehem. In Matthew, "wise men from the East" follow a special star to the place of Jesus' birth. Luke has neither wise men nor star, but angels singing in the night sky to shepherds who then come to the manger. In Matthew, Herod the Great orders the killing of all male infants under the age of two in Bethlehem. The family of Jesus escapes by fleeing to Egypt. Luke's story has neither Herod's plot nor a trip to Egypt. Both Matthew and Luke use the Hebrew Bible extensively, but they use it differently. Matthew uses a "prediction - fulfillment" formula five times in his birth story: "This took place to fulfill that which was spoken by the prophet." Luke, on the other hand, echoes language from the Hebrew Bible without treating it as fulfillment of prophecy, especially in the great hymns which he attributes to Mary (the "Magnificat") and Zechariah (the"Benedictus").

There are other differences as well. But these are enough to make the point that we have two very different stories. Though some of the differences can perhaps be harmonized, some seem irreconcilable.

Third, the stories look as if they have been composed to be overtures to each Gospel. That is, the central themes of each birth story reflect the central themes of the Gospel of which they are a part. For example, for Matthew, Jesus is "the king of the Jews," and so his ancestry is traced through the kings of Judah. For Luke, Jesus is a Spirit -- anointed social prophet, and so his ancestry includes prophets. For Matthew, Jesus is "one like unto Moses," and the story of Herod's plot calls to mind the story of Pharaoh ordering the death of all newborn Hebrew boys in the time of Moses. Luke emphasizes the spread of the gospel into the gentile world (especially in the Book of Acts), and so the ancestry of Jesus is traced back not simply to Abraham the father of the Jewish people, but to Adam, the father of Jew and gentile alike. In short, the stories look like the literary creation of each author.

Among these differences, there are some similarities. These include the names of Jesus' parents, his birth while Herod the Great was still king, and the tradition of Jesus growing up in Nazareth. Beyond these details, there are two major similarities: conception by the Spirit and the birth in Bethlehem. I will leave the first until later and comment about the second now. How does one account for the common emphasis upon Bethlehem? One possibility, of course, is that Jesus really was born in Bethlehem, even though the two stories disagree about why Mary and Joseph were there.

A second possibility is that Jesus was born in Nazareth, but the story of his birth in Bethlehem arose because of Bethlehem's significance in the Hebrew Bible. It was the ancestral home of King David, and there was a tradition that the great and future king of Israel would be descended from David. This is the point of the famous passage in Micah 5:2: "But you, 0 Bethlehem ... from you shall come forth one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days." By the time of Jesus, many thought of the great and future Davidic king as the messiah. On this view, the early Christian conviction that Jesus was the messiah and Son of David created the story of Jesus being born in "the city of David." Certainty is impossible, but I think the second option is more likely.

What then is left historically from these stories? Jesus was born before the death of Herod the Great, and thus probably not later than 4 B.C.E. His parents were Mary and Joseph. He was probably born in Nazareth, not Bethlehem. He was born into a marginalized peasant class.

Thus I do not see the basis of the birth stories as history remembered. Yet I think these stories are true. To use familiar terminology, I see these stories as history metaphorized, that is, as metaphorical narratives. And the history that is being metaphorized is not the birth itself but the Jesus story as a whole. With beauty and power, these symbolic narratives express central early Christian convictions about the significance of Jesus.

Light shining in the darkness is a central image in the birth stories. It is most obvious in the star of Matthew's Gospel, shining in the night sky and leading the wise men of the gentiles to the place of Jesus' birth. Luke makes use of the imagery as his story of "shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night." The "glory of the Lord shone around them" as an angel told them of the birth of Jesus, and then "a multitude of the heavenly host" filled the night sky, singing, "Glory to God!"

The symbolism of light and darkness is ancient, archetypal and cross -- cultural. It has many rich resonances of meaning. Darkness is associated with blindness, night, sleep, cold, gloom, despair, lostness, chaos, death, danger and yearning for the dawn. It is a striking image of the human condition. Light is seen as the antidote to the above, and is thus an image of salvation. In the light, one is awake, able to see and find one's way; it is associated with relief and rejoicing that the night is over; in the light one is safe and warm. In the light there is life.

Many texts in the Hebrew Bible use this symbolism. Light is associated with creation: "Let there be light" is the first of God's creative acts in the Book of Genesis. Light is a metaphor for God's illumination of the path: "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." In texts from the Hebrew Bible often read in churches during the season of Advent, light is associated with God's acts of deliverance:

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness -- on them has light shined.

Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and God's glory will appear over you. Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.

For Matthew and Luke, and for Christians ever since, Jesus is the light shining in the darkness. The author of John's Gospel makes the same affirmation with compact perfection: "The true

light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world." Jesus is the light who brings enlightenment; indeed, he is "the light of the world." This is the truth of this theme of the birth stories. And it is true independently of their historical factuality.

The conflict between two lordships runs through the birth stories. In Matthew, the conflict is between rival claims to be "king of the Jews." Herod the Great saw himself as the king of the Jews, and indeed was the reigning king. But for Matthew, Jesus is "the King of the Jews." Moreover, by portraying Herod as acting like Pharaoh, Matthew calls to mind Israel's story of the ancient conflict between the lordship of Pharaoh and the lordship of God. Jesus, not the Herods and Pharaohs of this world, is the true King and Lord.

Luke presents this conflict differently. For Luke, the conflict is between the lordship of Caesar and the lordship of Christ. Luke signals this view most clearly in the words spoken by the angel to the shepherds and in the chorus sung by the heavenly host:

I bring you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah the Lord ....

Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom God favors.

Much of this language was also used about Caesar, the emperor of Rome. In an inscription from 9 C.E. found in Asia Minor, Caesar is spoken of as "our God" and as a "savior" who brought "peace" throughout the earth, and whose birth was "good news" to the world. In other texts, he is also spoken of as divine and as descended from a divine/human conception. By echoing language used about the Roman emperor, Luke affirms that Jesus, not Caesar, is the Good News, the true Savior and Son of God who brings peace.

The theme of two lordships is powerful and central to the biblical tradition as a whole. Explicitly, the birth stories affirm that Jesus is the true lord. Implicitly, they leave us with a question: where are you going to see your lord? In the power and wealth of Herod and Caesar, of kingship and empire? Or in this Galilean Jewish peasant who saw things very differently? Where are you going to see the decisive manifestation of God? In the domination system? Or in Jesus who was executed by the domination system?

Thus, like Easter itself, the birth stories affirm the lordship of Christ. His lordship has both existential and political dimensions. Existentially, we are in bondage to many things, and the lordship of Christ is the path of personal liberation. Politically, the lordship of Christ challenges systems of domination in the name of God's passion for justice. It is no accident that the rulers of this world, both at the beginning of Jesus' life and at the end, seek to destroy him.

What is the truth of the story of a virginal conception? Two related claims seem most important. First, the theme of remarkable births is part of the tradition of Israel. According to the Book of Genesis, Abraham the father of Israel was given the promise that he would have many descendants. Yet he and his immediate descendants (the patriarchs of Israel) all had difficulty having children. Sarah and Abraham, we are told, were 90 and 100 years old when they finally conceived Isaac. Isaac married Rebekah, and they also were infertile until their old age, when they conceived twins, Esau and Jacob. Jacob became the child of promise, but he and his beloved wife Rachel also had difficulty conceiving. The theme continues in the stories of the conception of Gideon and Samuel. Both were deliverers of Israel in a time of crisis, and both were born to barren women. This repeating theme suggests that the people of God come into existence and are sustained in their existence by the grace of God. Humanly speaking, it was impossible that God's promise would be fulfilled, but by God it was.

Matthew and Luke are both playing this theme. Just as God had acted in the history of Israel to create and sustain the people of God through remarkable births, so also God had now acted in the birth of Jesus. Just as Israel came into existence through the grace of God when -- humanly speaking -- it was impossible, so the early Christian community as the continuation of Israel came into existence through the grace of God. This is one dimension of meaning in the story of the virginal conception of Jesus.

There is a second nuance as well -- namely, the story of Jesus being conceived by the Spirit affirms that what happened in Jesus was "of God." The activity of the Spirit of God in his life was projected back to the beginning of his life. What happened in Jesus was not "of the flesh," but "of the Spirit." The story of Jesus' virginal conception affirms that Jesus was "born not of blood or the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God." It is a metaphorical affirmation of Jesus' identity and significance. Like the voice in the transfiguration story, it affirms, "This is my beloved Son; listen to him."

Thus I do not see the story of the virginal conception as a marvel of biology that, if true, proves that Jesus really was the Son of God. Rather, it is an early Christian narratival confession of faith and affirmation of allegiance to Jesus. To say that "what happened in Jesus was of the Spirit" is not a factual claim dependent upon a biological miracle, but a way of seeing Jesus that immediately involves seeing him as the decisive disclosure of God. He was not possessed by another spirit, as some of his critics said, but animated by God's Spirit. This is the truth claim in the story of Jesus' conception by the Spirit of God.

The truly important questions about the birth stories are not whether Jesus was born of a virgin, or whether there was an empire -- wide census that took Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, or whether there was a special star leading wise men from the East. The important questions are, "Is Jesus the light of the world? Is he the true Lord? Is what happened in him 'of God'?" Answering these questions lays claim to our whole lives.

Much more could be said about the meanings of these stories for Christians. Like all good stories, their resonances are many. But I will conclude by noting one more dimension of meaning, which I owe to Meister Eckhart, a Christian mystic, theologian and preacher from the 13th century. In one of his Christmas sermons, Eckhart spoke of the virgin birth as something that happens within us. That is, the story of the virgin birth is the story of Christ being born within us through the union of the Spirit of God with our flesh. Ultimately, the story of Jesus' birth is not just about the past, but about the internal birth in us in the present.

Ethics and Evangelism: Learning from the Third-Century Church

A number of years ago, I enrolled in a "preacher-boys" class at a fundamentalist university in the South. The only requirement of the course was to witness to seven people every week and write a brief report on each contact. The teacher of the course—and the founder of the university—was an old-time Southern evangelist who wanted his preacher-boys to be evangelists.

The teacher’s method of evangelism had three steps: tell people they are sinners, tell them about Christ, and lead them to salvation. This approach may have converted some people, but statistics would probably show that many of those conversions didn’t stick—which is one of the reasons mainline churches are not attracted to hit-and-run evangelism. Mainline churches are, however, becoming increasingly interested in practicing evangelism. The recurring question for such churches is, What kind of evangelism? In response, I would recommend a liturgical approach to evangelism, one that is based on the evangelical practices of the church in the third century. Liturgical evangelism, which is being revived in the Catholic Church, is also an evangelism that emphasizes the ethical side of the gospel. It is this kind of evangelism that will, I believe, take hold in many mainline Protestant churches.

Third-century liturgical evangelism consisted of seven steps—four stages and three rites of passage. This process was designed to bring the converting person to Christ and into the church through a series of seven successively deeper commitments. These stages can be described under the headings of inquiry; rite of entrance; catechumenate; rite of election; purification and enlightenment; rites of initiation; and mystagogy. The ethical content of evangelism appeared in all seven stages.

Here is how it worked: A person who evidenced interest in the gospel was brought to the pastor and elders of the church. An inquiry into or a formal presentation of the gospel took place which emphasized not so much belief in this or that doctrine but the converting person’s willingness to adopt the Christian lifestyle—to take up the cross of Jesus and to follow him. If this kind of commitment was made, the convening person went through the rite of welcome, a rite that brought the person into the fellowship of the church as a catechumen.

During the catechumenate, which could last up to three years, the converting person was given time not only to learn the faith, but to live it. When the converting person was able to demonstrate clearly a commitment to the ethical demands of the gospel, he or she entered the period of purification and enlightenment via the rite of election. During the period of purification and enlightenment, which corresponded with Lent, the converting person underwent a time of intense spiritual preparation for baptism. The focus of the preparation was on being purged of the power of sin and on preparing for the rites of initiation into the church. A final renunciation of the power of evil was made in baptism as the converting person stood in the waters. Finally, during the mystagogic period, the convert received teaching regarding the Christian life and the doing of good works, as he or she was integrated into the church.

This form of evangelism in the early church must be viewed in its cultural context, the paganism of the Roman Empire. The people of the Roman world were steeped in an amoral way of life: accustomed to belief in many gods, reliance on magic, and faith in the stars. Consequently, evangelism had to confront people both in the sphere of belief and the realm of lifestyle. Because converts were steeped in paganism, the church needed time to wean them away from their former lifestyle and to teach them the Christian lifestyle.

Inquiry was the initial stage of this process. In inquiry, the good news of salvation was presented and the qualities of life demanded by the gospel made clear. Fortunately, the details of the inquiry have been summarized for us by Hippolytus in The Apostolic Tradition, a document written in Rome about 215.

The central issue of inquiry was making the commitment to a new lifestyle, even if that meant changing vocations. Vocations that were related in any way to the powers of evil—such as making idols, being a heathen priest, a user of magic verses, an enchanter, astrologer, diviner, soothsayer, juggler, mountebank or amulet-maker-had to be abandoned, and any lifestyle that led one into immorality was to be rejected. Also, anyone in a job that led to killing—such as that of a charioteer, gladiator, soldier, military commander or civil magistrate with power over people’s lives—was required to give it up.

In brief, the period of inquiry was a weeding-out process. Those who came to the church for the wrong reason would not remain. And those who had begun a genuine conversion had to commit themselves to the next phase of the journey. The emphasis was on saying No to the kingdom of evil, which has been overcome by the power of Christ exhibited in his death and resurrection. Those who are to be baptized into his death must learn to "walk in newness of life" (Rom. 6:4). One who claims to follow Jesus and becomes baptized, yet lives in darkness according to the course of this world, is no better than Simon Magus (Acts 8:9-24), whose soul, according to Cyril of Jerusalem, "was not buried with Christ, nor did it share in his resurrection."

It was not enough in the third century to have a subjective experience of faith. Faith was to result in works, for "faith apart from works is dead" (James 2:26). Far from assuming a position of works righteousness, the inquiry recognized that commitment to a Christian lifestyle has the effect of producing faith. Behavioral modification produces an inner experience of the external habit. But this transformation does not occur without intention; the convert must intend to adopt the new lifestyle. This act is not an instant accomplishment, taking place in the secret chambers of the heart, but, as the inquiry suggests, a lifelong public commitment.

The ethical emphasis of the inquiry continues throughout the six succeeding steps. For example, in the rite of entrance, a formal repudiation of the old lifestyle takes place in a ceremony of renunciation. In the catechumenate, a weekly prayer of exorcism occurs for the candidate following instruction in the Sunday liturgy. In the rite of election, the sponsor of the converting person must testify to her or his conduct as well as faith. In the period of purification and enlightenment, special emphasis is placed on equipping the converting person to wrestle against the principalities and powers of evil. In the rite of baptism, the convert renounces Satan and spits in the direction of the West, a symbol of the repudication of the old lifestyle. Finally, in mystagogy, the convert is encouraged to continue to do the good works that characterize the Christian.

The emphasis on ethics in evangelism is viable today because, as in the third century, our cultural context is essentially pagan. In Russia, China and other countries where the government maintains an avowedly atheistic stance, a commitment to a Christian world view and lifestyle clearly separates one from society. There, a price is exacted from those in the church, and that price is higher the more deeply one is involved: it is one thing to attend church, another to be baptized, and still another to commune at the Table of the Lord regularly. Each step distances Christians from an attachment to earthly powers, and each step intensifies their relationship with Christ and the church.

The paganism of American culture is less obvious, for we do not have to contend with a government that suppresses religious freedom or harasses religious leaders. Churches must therefore exert themselves more to distinguish themselves from the pagan values of the surrounding culture—values that often sneak into our churches themselves.

One such value is that of a fervent, messianic Americanism. Much of our recent nationalistic fervor has gone beyond healthy patriotism into the belief that capitalism and democracy are the saviors of the world. Even many religious leaders are adopting the "America saves" slogan. America, many television evangelists are telling us, is God’s answer to the problems of the world. They are propagating a secular salvation which the church must oppose. Another Western value is materialism: the goal of life is more money, larger houses, bigger cars, longer vacations, fancier clothes. Come to God, our religious hucksters tell us, and he will bless you with riches beyond your imagination. To this the church must answer, "Nonsense, bunk, heresy!"

Another Western value that has crept into many of our churches and pulpits is the emphasis on success. Climb the ladder, get to the top, be authoritative, aggressive and commanding. The sign of God’s approval is big budgets, huge programs, masses of people.

The ethical emphasis in liturgical evangelism calls these secular values into question. It asks people to see the world as Jesus saw it, from the underside. It calls for a world view and a lifestyle that do not buy into the secular salvations of nationalism, materialism and success.

What kind of congregation will welcome a liturgical evangelism that emphasizes the ethical side of the gospel?

First, it must be a church that seeks to be the church rather than a mere institution or social club. It must recognize the pagan nature of its surrounding culture, and seek to become God’s alternative community. It must be a community of people willing to define itself by God’s standards rather than by the prevailing standards of our culture.

Second, it must be a congregation committed to evangelism. Many Christians are not involved in evangelism because their local church neither encourages it nor has an effective program for dealing with the new convert. What is needed is a two-sided thrust in evangelism, one side encouraging Christians to share their story of faith with neighbor and friend, and the other side providing a program of inquiry as a formal way of dealing with people genuinely interested in converting to Christ. Church members will be more likely to take the first steps of evangelism if there is a support group in the church to carry converts through the various stages of conversion. To bring a person who shows an interest in the gospel into a church that has no program for helping the convert to grow, organize and deepen his or her experience of Christ is self-defeating.

Third, it must be a congregation willing to actualize the mothering role of the church. In general, most Western churches are a collection of individuals who go to church rather than a community of people who are the church. This is a perversion of the meaning of the church as it was experienced in the early communities of faith and advocated by the Reformers. John Calvin, for example, had the mothering instincts of the early church in mind when he said, "There is no other way to enter into life unless this mother conceive us in her womb, give us birth, nourish us at her breast, and lastly, unless she keeps us under her care and guidance."

Finally, a church that emphasizes ethics and evangelism is confident that its leaders are able to model conversion. In the ancient church, each converting person had a sponsor who was a spiritual director and a living example of what it means to be a Christian.

As we have seen, evangelism in the third century began with the hearing of the gospel and the call to a new lifestyle. The converting people were led step by step to reject their former way of life and enter the new life in Christ as shared and experienced by the Christian community.

A revival of third-century evangelism is required at the end of the 20^th century for several reasons. First, the recovery of the relationship between ethics and evangelism is a biblical task. Jesus’ message was less about a belief system and more about a lifestyle. He did not say, "Believe the right things about me," but, "Take up your cross and follow after me." While certain doctrines about Jesus and his mission were developed by the early church, the emphasis still remained on Christian lifestyle. This is evident, for example, in the primitive baptismal catechesis we find in the Letter to the Ephesians.

Second, evangelism that stresses the ethical dimension of the Christian faith is most relevant to our culture, which is pagan and amoral. To reject materialism, greed, sensualism, militarism, power, status and the American way of life, and to affirm peace, justice, the unity of all peoples, the sanctity of human life, human rights and equal economic opportunity, is to be radically different in world view and action from the world around us.

Third, in liturgical-style evangelism, the third-century church transcended individualistic evangelism and stressed the salvation found in the community of the church. This makes it an evangelism particularly suited to the local church. Through its stages of ever-deepening commitment, and its rites of passage that symbolically represent the conversion journey, liturgical evangelism brings the converting person into a supportive community.

The recovery of the type of evangelism practiced in the third century, adapted to 20^th-century circumstances, could meet the evangelistic needs of the mainline church. Here is a model of evangelism that can involve the whole congregation both in calling other people to Christian discipleship and in strengthening the ethical commitment of the faithful.

An Evangelical and Catholic Methodology

I approach the question of the authority of the Bible in the dual role of one who is a committed evangelical Christian and one who does historical theology. As an evangelical, I regard the Scriptures to have the place of supreme authority in the life and practice of the church. I believe the church as well as the individual Christian owes no ultimate obedience to any earthly authority, whether government, reason, conscience, or custom.

As one who does historical theology, I believe evangelicals who commit themselves to Scripture as the ultimate authority in faith and practice cannot afford to separate Scripture from the whole circle of theological concerns and the history of the church of which it is a part. The Bible does not stand alone. It is not a book of rational propositions which can be scientifically analyzed and systematized into a universally accepted textbook of theology. It is a dynamic book related to specific historic events, characterized by a central religious message, and, although divine in nature, the product of circumstances with a human side. Further, it belongs to the church as its unique possession and ought not to be interpreted today apart from the experience given to it in the history of the church's liturgy, creeds, confessions, interpretation, and the common faith of two thousand years of believers.

Thus the Scripture belongs to a community -- a community their education and preparation for ministry because worship is, a field of study in its own right. Indeed it is an interdisciplinary study demanding expertise in biblical, historical, and systematic theology as well as the arts, practical expertise, and personal spiritual formation. Thus worship, or more properly liturgics, must be regarded as one of the most vigorous and demanding of the seminary disciplines. It must be taken off the back burner and given its rightful place in the seminary curriculum.

But what is the methodology by which this renewal in worship can be accomplished? It is, I believe, threefold: we must simultaneously strip away our false conceptions, re-learn the meaning of worship, and apply the newly acquired principles of worship to our contemporary evangelical communities. In this paper, I intend to sketch out the context of this threefold method in a preliminary way.

Stripping Away False Conceptions of Worship

The method by which I propose stripping away false conceptions of worship in the evangelical community is through a historical examination of Protestant-evangelical worship from the Reformation to the present. My own study in this area yields two general theses. The first is that there is a radical difference between the worship of our sixteenth-century evangelical forefathers and contemporary evangelical practice. The second is that Protestant-evangelical worship has followed the curvature of culture rather than being faithful to the biblical, historical tradition of the church. A brief examination of these two theses is in order.

First, the gap between present evangelical worship and the practice of the Reformers can easily be seen through an examination of the Reformation liturgies. Pick up any of the liturgies such as Martin Luther's Fortnula Missae Of 1523, Martin Buber's Strasbourg Rite Of 1539, John Calvin's Form of Church Prayers of 1542, or something as late as Richard Baxter's The Reformation of the Liturgy of 1661, and the difference can readily be seen. I find, for example, the five following characteristics in these liturgies: (1) an affinity with the liturgies of the ancient church; (2) an order that follows the pattern of revelation and Christian experience; (3) a significant emphasis on reading and hearing the Word of God; (4) a high degree of congregational involvement; and (s) a view of the Lord's Supper which affirms its mystery and value for spiritual formation.

By contrast my experience in many evangelical churches is as follows: (1) a radical departure not only from the liturgies of the ancient church but from those of the Reformation as well; (2) confusion about order; (3) minimal use of the Bible; (4) passive congregations; and (s) a low view of the Lord's Supper.

Historical research must ask: How did this change occur? What are the cultural, social, religious, and theological factors which contributed to these changes? How has the actual character of worship changed over the last several centuries? What do these changes mean for the corporate life of the church today?

It is not my intention to answer all these questions. Indeed, considerable historical work must be done in the evaluation of Protestant worship during 1600 - 1900 before a full and adequate answer is available. However, my preliminary work in this area leads me to assert the second thesis, namely, that evangelicals have followed the curvature of culture. A few illustrations will illuminate this point.

As the meaning of worship became lost among various groups of Protestant Christians, the shape of worship was accommodated to the overriding emphasis within culture. For example, the first significant shift occurred with the introduction of the print media through the Gutenberg press. Protestantism, which can be characterized as a movement of the word, led the way in the shift from symbolic communication of the medieval era to the verbal communication of the modern era. Because words were regarded as higher and more significant vehicles of truth than symbols, images, poetry, gesture, and the like, all forms of communication other than the verbal became suspect. Consequently, Protestant liturgies were not only word centered but attached great religious importance to the verbal content of worship.

A second shift occurred as the result of the Enlightenment. The concern for rational, observable, and consistent truth, which grew out of the empirical method, gradually influenced worship. The essential feature of worship was the sermon. All else sank into relative unimportance. In Puritan circles sermons were sometimes three hours in length with a break in the middle. They were often exegetical and theological dissertations that would be considered beyond the grasp or care of the average lay person today.

Another shift in worship can be observed as a result of the rise of Revivalism. The field preaching of the evangelists gradually replaced the morning service, making Sunday morning a time for evangelism. Although preaching still played a central part, one focus shifted from information directed toward the intellect to an emotional appeal aimed at the will. The climactic point became the altar call to conversion, rededication, consecration to ministry, or work on the mission field.

Today another shift is taking place resulting from the current revolution in communications. The entertainment mentality which thinks in terms of performance, stages, and audiences has been making its appearance in local churches. Consequently, evangelical Christianity has produced its Christian media stars. Unfortunately many churches are following the trend by "juicing" the service with a lot of hype, skits, musical performances, and the like, which will attract the "big audience."

My concern is that this kind of evangelical worship represents not only a radical departure from historic Protestant worship but also an accommodation to the trends of secularization. Thus, worship, which stands at the very center of our Christian experience, having been secularized, is unable to feed, nourish, enhance, challenge, inspire, and shape the collective and individual life of our congregations in the way in which it should. Consequently the whole evangelical movement suffers.

How will change be brought about? While that is not an easy question to answer, it does seem that the second step toward worship renewal ought to be a concerted effort within our seminaries to recover the biblical-theological meaning of worship and to trace its historical development from Pentecost to the Reformation.

Restoring a Biblical-Theological and Historical Perspective of Worship

As evangelicals we must acknowledge that the true character of worship is not determined by people but by God. Much of contemporary evangelical worship is anthropocentric. The biblical-theological view of worship, however, is that worship is not primarily for people but for God. God created all things, and particularly the human person, for his glory. Thus, to worship God is a primary function of the church, the people who have been redeemed by God.

The meaning of the Greek word leiturgia is work or service. Worship is the work or service of the people directed toward God. That is, we do something for God in our worship of him. We bless God, hymn him, and offer him our praise and adoration. But worship is not without reason. We do this because God has done something for us. He has redeemed us, made us his people, and entered into a relationship with us.

Consequently the biblical rhythm of worship is on doing and responding. God does. We respond. What God does and is doing happened in history and is now told and acted out as though it were being done again. The unrepeatable event is being repeated, as it were. And we are present responding in faith through words, actions, and symbols of faith.

There are two parts to this biblical-theological view of worship that need to be examined. First, worship is grounded in God's action in Jesus Christ which, although it occurred in the distant past, is now recurring through the Holy Spirit in the present. The point is that worship is rooted in an event. The event character of worship is true in both the Old and the New Testament. In the Old Testament the event which gives shape and meaning to the people of God is the exodus event. It was in this historical moment that God chose to reveal himself as the redeemer, the one who brought the people of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob up out of their bondage to Pharaoh with a strong arm. They then became his people, the qahal, the community of people who worship him as Yahweh. Thus the Tabernacle and, later, the Temple, the feasts and festivals, the sacred year, the hymnic literature and psalms of thanksgiving revolve around the God who brought them up out of Egypt and made them his people.

The same is true in the New Testament. In the Christ event God is shown to be the loving and compassionate one who came to free humankind from the kingdom of evil. In the birth, life, death, and rising again of Christ Satan was vanquished. Christ was demonstrated as the Victor over sin, death, and the domain of hell. Consequently the worship of the primitive Christian community was a response to this event. Hymns, doxologies, benedictions, sermons, and symbols of bread and wine all flow from this event and return to it in the form of proclamation, reenactment, remembrance, thanksgiving, and prayer.

The second biblical-theological part to Christian worship is the understanding that the church as the corporate body of Christ is the response to the Christ event, and thus the context in which the Christ event is continuously acted out. Thus the phenomenon of the Christ event does not stand alone. There is another event which happened simultaneously with it, an event which is intricately connected and inextricably interwoven with the Christ event. It is the church, the new people of God, that people through whom the Christ event continues to be present in and to the world. The church is the response to the Christ event. It is that people whose very essence cannot be described or apprehended apart from the Christ event. These are the people in whom Christ is being formed and without whom the fullness of Christ cannot be made complete. It is the ekklesia, the worshiping community.

Therefore, the two fundamental biblical-theological axioms of worship which are basic to worship renewal are rooted in the Christ event which the church, as the unique people of this event, is called to celebrate. These axioms are radically evangelical, yet I dare say they have been lost to our churches that have turned worship into a time for teaching, evangelizing, entertaining, or therapy. Methodologically worship renewal must begin with a fresh rediscovery of Christus Victor and of the church as the community in whom the Christ event is celebrated to the glory of God.

The second methodological concern has to do with the recovery of that rich treasury of resources handed down to us by the experience of the church. I find American evangelicalism to be secularized in its attitude toward history. There is a disdain for the past, a sense that anything from the past is worn-out, meaningless, and irrelevant. There seems to be little value ascribed to what the Holy Spirit has given the church in the past. It is all relegated to tradition and dismissed as form. At the same time, no critical examination is directed toward present distortions which have been elevated without thought to a sacred position. Evangelicals who want to restore true worship must therefore abandon their disdain of the historical and return to a critical examination of the worship of the church in every period of history.

It must be recognized that there is a normative content to worship that is found in the worship experience of the church everywhere, always, and by all. This is the content of word, table, prayer, and fellowship (see Acts 2:42). The public worship of the church cannot happen without these elements, and it is preferable that they all be present in public worship. Further, in the same way that the church has wrestled with its understanding of Christ and the Scripture through creeds, commentaries, systematic theologies, and the like, so also the church has developed ways to do its worship. These include structural forms, written prayers, hymns, rules for preaching, the church year, the lectionary, and numerous symbolic ceremonies. Interestingly, in the early church these resources were being developed at the same time that creedal statements were coming into being. Yet, we evangelicals who affirm the Nicene and Chalcedon creeds and boast that we remain faithful to their intent are profoundly neglectful of the liturgical forms and theological perception of worship shaped by some of the same Church Fathers.

Specifically we need to recognize that those who have gone before us, those who have wrestled the meaning and interpretation of the faith in creeds and liturgy, were women and men of faith. To accept the creeds, on the one hand, and reject the liturgies by inattention that often expresses itself in disdain, on the other, is contradictory and unwise. For orthodoxy was primarily given shape in the liturgy, and the creeds were originally part of the larger liturgical witness. We recognize that the early church was unusually gifted with the spiritual leadership of Justin, Irenaeus Tertullian Athanasius John Chrysostom, and Augustine. Yet we neglect to study the worship of the church which reflects their faithfulness to Chris and the orthodox tradition.

Nevertheless the Scripture is still the judge of all liturgies. To be sure, there are liturgies which fail to hand down the orthodox tradition. For example, liturgies which reflect an Arian Christology or those medieval liturgies which clearly reflect a sacrificial notion of the Eucharist must be judged by the orthodox tradition. But the task of critical evaluation of the older liturgies sharpens our ability to offer constructive and critical evaluation of contemporary worship. For, without a knowledge of the worship experience of the church throughout history, we are left without adequate tools for either critiquing contemporary worship or reconstructing a worship that is faithful to the Christian tradition.

In terms of tradition we must be able to distinguish different levels and, thus, to attach a corresponding scale of values to them. If we think in terms of a series of concentric circles, the apostolic traditions must be central. The apostolic tradition in the word, table, prayers, hymns, benedictions, doxologies, and the like, as that content which proclaims both the Christ event and the relationship which the church sustains to God. A second concentric circle includes those traditions which are universally accepted and practiced by Christians. Such things as creeds, confession, the kiss of peace, the Lord's prayer, the gloria in excelsis Deo and the church year belong here. In a third concentric circle we may place those traditions which are peculiar to a particular grouping of people such as the Orthodox Church in the East, the Catholic Church m the West or one of the many Protestant denominations. Matters such as vestments (or no vestments), bells, architectural style, inclusion of the little entrance or the great entrance, musical tones, and issues regarding kneeling, standing, or raising hands during prayer are all matters of cultural and stylistic preferences. And, finally, in a fourth circle one may place those specific customs that are peculiar to a local congregation. Certainly, when we recognize the original impulses from which these ceremonies derive, we may see them for the most part as expressions of faith, witnesses to the importance attached to Christ and his redeeming work. Our task is not to be judgmental in a manner of spiritual superiority but to dig beneath the traditions to recover the spirit that originally animated them, so that we too may share in the original dynamic that enlivened the telling and acting out of the Christ event in another time and another place or among other Christians who expressed their response to the Christ event in a way foreign to our experience.

In sum, the methodological approach to worship renewal needs to be rooted in a thoroughgoing biblical-theological and historical understanding of Christ and the church. Now the question is: What kinds of changes may occur in evangelical worship as a result of this methodological approach?

Applying the Biblical-Theological and Historical Methodology

Changes do not come easily in any aspect of the church. Worship is no exception. Nevertheless I foresee the methodology which I have proposed challenging evangelical worship in at least six areas.

First, it will challenge the understanding of worship. I find that evangelicals frequently exchange true worship for the sub mentioned in the first section. Those evangelicals who are thinking about worship tend to think almost exclusively in terms of worship as expressing God's worth. While it is essential to recover worship as directed toward God, it is equally important to rediscover the content of that worship. That content may be summarized this way: In worship we tell and act out the Christ event. In this action God is doing the speaking and acting. Consequently we respond to God and to each other together with the whole creation to offer praise and glory to him. (This is a basic definition of worship which needs to be unpacked for a full appreciation of its content.)

Second, evangelicals will be challenged in the area of structure. Evangelical services lack a coherent movement. There seems to be little, if any, interior rhythm. Historical worship, on the other hand, is characterized by a theological and psychological integrity. Theologically, worship is structured around God's revelation in word and incarnation. This accounts for the basic structure of word and table. Psychologically, the structure of worship brings the worshiper through the experience of his or her relationship with God. It follows the pattern of coming before God in awe and reverence, confessing our sins, hearing and responding to the Word, receiving Christ in bread and wine, and being sent forth into the world.

Third, evangelicals will be challenged in the matter of participation. I find evangelical worship to be passive and uninvolving. The worshiper sits, listens, and absorbs. But seldom does the worshiper respond. As in the medieval period, worship has been taken away from the people. It must be returned. Participation will be recovered as the dramatic sense of worship is restored. Further, the participation of the people can be enhanced through the use of lay readers and preachers, congregational prayer responses, Scripture responses, antiphonal readings, affirmations of faith, acclamations, the kiss of peace, and increased sensitivity to gestures and movement.

Fourth, a study of the past will sensitize evangelicals to the need to restore the arts. One of the great problems within the evangelical culture is a repudiation of the arts in general-more specifically, the failure to employ the arts in worship. This disdain toward the arts is deeply rooted in a view that consigns material things to the devil. The pietistic and fundamentalistic backgrounds to modem evangelicalism are addicted to the erroneous view-dualism-that sets the material against the spiritual. Consequently, art, literature, music, and the like, are frequently seen as the vehicles of evil, as means through which people are lured away from spiritual realities to mundane physical attachments.

The repudiation of the material is in direct contradiction to the incarnation and to the stand taken by the church against Gnosticism. Consequently, the visible arts as well as theatre, the dance, color, and tangible symbols have historically had a functional role in worship. Space, as in church architecture, is the servant of the message. The design and placement of the fumiture of worship, such as the pulpit, table, and font, bespeak redemptive mystery. The use of color, stained-glass windows, icons, frescos, carvings, and the like, is a means by which the truths we gather around in worship are symbolically communicated. Worship not only contains elements of drama but also is a drama in its own right. It has a script, lead players, and secondary roles played by the congregation. (Neglect of these matters within our evangelical seminaries and churches have weakened worship and the message it conveys. Consequently a program of liturgics must take these matters into consideration.)

Fifth, evangelicals will be challenged to reconsider their view of time. We practice a secular rather than a sacred view of time. The restoration of the church year and preaching from the lectionary are vital to worship renewal. The church year provides an opportunity for the whole congregation to make the life of Christ a lived experience. It is not merely an external covering of time, but the very meaning of time itself During the church year we enter fully into the anticipation of Advent, the joy of Christmas, the witnessing motif of Epiphany, preparation for death in Lent, participation in both the resurrection joy of Easter and the reception of Pentecost power. Surely it is an evangelical principle to live out the life of Christ. Practicing the church year takes it out of the abstract and puts it into our day-to-day life in the world.

Sixth, a recovery of true worship will restore the relationship between worship and justice. Worship affects our lives in the world. It is not something divorced from the concerns of the world. Because Christ's work has to do with the whole of life, so also worship which celebrates that life, death, and resurrection relates directly to hunger, poverty, discrimination, human suffering, and the like.

Conclusion

In this paper I have attempted to outline a methodology for worship renewal. My concern is that evangelicals who are now beginning to rediscover the theme of worship will offer a superficial approach to worship renewal. This fear arises from my understanding of the ahistorical nature of evangelicalism. Our disdain for the past will prevent us from being open to the rich treasury of the historical understanding and practice of the church. This we must change.

Methodological Reflections

Since my approach to worship betrays a dependence on early church tradition, it is incumbent upon me to defend my use of tradition in relationship to the Scripture. Do I set tradition above Scripture or even alongside of Scripture? Can I use tradition and still claim to be evangelical? Why is the tradition of the early church any better than any other tradition? In order to answer these questions I will formulate and answer three questions in particular: (i) How can I call myself an evangelical when tradition plays an important part in my theological method? (2) Does my method elevate tradition over Scripture? (3) Why choose the tradition of the early church over that of another era?

How Can I Call Myself Evangelical when Tradition Plays an Important Part in My Theological Method?

In the first place, it is necessary to define the word "evangelical." The word is used in four ways: (i) linguistic; (2) historical; (3) theological; and (4) sociological. Linguistically the word evangelical is rooted in the Greek word evangelion and refers to those who preach and practice the good news; historically the word refers to those renewing groups in the church which from time to time have called the church back to the evangel; theologically it refers to a commitment to classical theology as expressed in the Apostles' Creed; and sociologically the word is used of various contemporary groupings of culturally conditioned evangelicals (i.e., fundamentalist evangelicals, Reformed evangelicals, Anabaptist evangelicals, conservative evangelicals). Each group has its own ethos, its own "popes" and authoritative methods of interpretations. The question really is: how can I as a member of the Wheaton community and conservative evangelicalism make a break with the fathers of neoevangelicalism (i.e., Carl F. H. Henry) and advocate a method contrary to the authority they exercise over the evangelical subculture of which I am a part?

My answer to this question is somewhat complicated. Let me attempt to make it clear. It arises out of my method of doing theology, which consists of the following fourfold criterion of judgment:

1. Is it rooted in the Scripture?

2. Does it enjoy historical verification?

3. Is it theologically consistent with orthodoxy?

4. Does it have contemporary relevance?

In my opinion the conscious or, in some cases, the unconscious method of most evangelicals follows the same fourfold criterion as I have set forth above. The difference between us is located particularly in questions two and three. While my point of reference historically and theologically is the early church, most evangelicals make their historical and theological criterion in a much later time, say with the Reformation, with seventeenth-century orthodoxy, with Wesley, or with nineteenth-century Princetonian theology.

My contention is that theological thinking about apostolic uninterpreted truth is filtered through a system of thought (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Scottish Realism, existentialism, Whiteheadian physics, etc.) and that the system of thought itself is gradually treated as authoritative. Thus, the difference between theologians is not always over truth but is often over the system that delivers the truth.

I do not believe theology is an exact science. It is neither an inductive nor a deductive science, as some may argue. Rather, theological thinking is a discipline which involves concept formation and the development of a conceptual scheme. Theology makes use of conceptual models which may be drawn from extra-biblical sources.

Theology may therefore be defined as human thinking about truth. Truth is Jesus Christ specifically and the Bible more generally. People, synods, councils, and the like, who reflect on Christ and the truth, give us theology. Consequently theologians such as Aquinas, Calvin, Luther, and Barth give us systematic thinking about truth which we call theology.

If this is true, it follows that the most conservative method of doing theology is to go back into history to a time when the tradition of faith carries the least amount of cultural baggage. Further, it means that all systems and persons who seek to be faithful to the original deposit are evangelical in the linguistic and theological sense. Consequently, I can affirm the evangelical nature of any one of the many different sociological groupings of twentieth-century evangelicals, the evangelical nature of the Reformers, and the evangelical basis of Catholic or Orthodox theology. The only groups within Christian history that are not evangelical at bottom are those who deny apostolic Christianity or those who so thoroughly reinterpret it through their conceptual grid (i.e., Gnostics, anti-supernatural liberals) that it ceases to retain integrity with apostolic intent.

In worship this means that any Christian group that uses the Word, prayer and the table at least has the basic elements of worship. However, when these elements of worship are filtered through contemporary cultural grids, such as educational, evangelistic, entertainment, or psychological purposes, the apostolic intent of worship may become lost. Consequently, the historical point of return to uncover apostolic intent is most likely not Wesley, Calvin, or Aquinas. Rather, it is best to get as close to the original source and intent as possible, namely, the Church

Fathers who sought faithfully to deliver the apostolic order, intent, and meaning of worship. Thus a return to the tradition of the early church cuts through later accretions and developments, exposing the ways in which they have departed from apostolic intent while at the same time reviving the current practice of worship through the rediscovery of the apostolic intent preserved by the Fathers. I believe this method is truly evangelical, in the best sense of the word. I advocate this method, not over minute issues of interpretation, but with regard to the big questions-theological matters such as the canon, major doctrinal issues, ethics, and liturgy.

Does My Method Elevate Tradition over Scripture?

The original meaning of the word tradition is a key to understanding the relationship between Scripture and tradition. The Greek word paradosis is used throughout the New Testament to mean "hand over" (see for example Mark I:I4; Eph. 4:19; 5:2; Acts 15:26, 40; i6:4; Matt. 25:14; Luke 4:6; i Cor. 15:24). In terms of Christian belief it is used by Paul when he directed the Thessalonians to retain hold of the "traditions" which he had taught them by word or pen (2 Thess. 2: 15); it refers to the faith content of his preaching in Corinth as evidenced in his comments in I Cor. 11:2, 23; 15:3. He had "handed over" to the Corinthians various "traditions" which had been entrusted to him by others. Further, according to Luke original eyewitnesses had "handed over" information to him (Luke 1:2), and according to Jude the faith could be described as that which had been "handed over" to the saints. Finally, the notion of "handing over" the faith through the centuries was expressed by Paul when he admonished Timothy to "hand over" the tradition of faith which he had received from Paul's teaching (i Tim. 2:2). This sense of "handing over" the truth which had been passed down from the Apostles became prominent in the second century battle with the Gnostics. It accounts for the development of the earliest form of apostolic traditions and apostolic succession among the early Church Fathers, particularly in Irenaeus' Against Heresies.

In doing theology, it is important to develop a phenomenological description of the way in which a Christian truth or practice may have developed in the primitive Christian community and on into the second century and beyond. Part of the theological task is to reconstruct this development in search of the apostolic faith and practice which was "handed over" to the next generation. In broad strokes the unfolding of the tradition may be outlined as follows:

1. The tradition of the Christian faith is Jesus Christ who was born, lived, died, and was resurrected.

2. Oral and written accounts about Jesus Christ began to appear immediately. Some were true; others were false.

3. The church, which is Christ's body, was given the responsibility of handing Jesus Christ over from generation to generation.

4. The Apostles, as authoritative leaders in the church, were faced with the immediate responsibility of interpreting Christ and handing him down accurately.

5. The context in which this interpretation was initially forged out was mainly in the worship of the church. The primitive Christian hymns, creeds, doxologies, benedictions, catechetical literature, and apostolic interpretations belonged to the liturgy of the church. Thus, worship was the context in which Christ became a lived experience and a confessional reality.

6. The Scriptures, which came later, were the written product of this process. They contain the authoritative accounts of Christ together with the apostolic interpretation of Christ. Thus, Scripture is tradition; that is, it hands over Jesus Christ.

7. The development of theology in the early church is intricately related to the development of Scripture as the church's authority. For, fundamental Christian thought (as articulated in the ecumenical creeds) and foundational Christian practice (such as worship and ethics) are more detailed reflections of apostolic teaching and practice. Early Church Fathers were not creating something new. Rather, they were extracting and expanding apostolic teaching. In the fourth century Athanasius sums up this process in these words: "The actual original tradition, teaching, and faith of the Catholic church, which the Lord conferred, the apostles proclaimed, and the Fathers guarded" (Ad Seraph. I.28).

In brief, the process above applies to worship in the following manner. The Holy Spirit gifted the Apostles with an understanding of Christ. This understanding was proclaimed and acted out in worship. The material of worship, such as hymns, creeds, benedictions, baptism, Lord's Supper, and catechetical material, became part of the Scripture. The order and practices of worship, which are somewhat hidden within the Scripture, are more clearly elucidated in the writings of the Fathers. Thus, insights into worship provided by the Didache, Justin, Tertulhan, Hippolytus, and others are rooted in apostolic authority. Consequently the major outline and understanding of worship developed by the Fathers constitute an authoritative guide for worship renewal today.

What may be observed here is a process of authority related to tradition. It is the apostolic witness that is authoritative. The Bible is authoritative because it preserves and hands down this witness. The description of worship by the early Church Fathers is authoritative insofar as it remains faithful to the apostolic authority preserved in the Scripture. Thus, the Scripture is the judge of early Christian thought and practice as well. The task of the liturgist who must be conversant with both biblical and patristic sources is to discern where, when, and how early Christian worship expands scriptural teaching and thus becomes normative. The liturgist must also be able to discern where, when, and how worship practices become extra-biblical and, thus, relegated either to the realm of adiophora or erroneous practice.

In conclusion, the importance of early Christian worship for worship renewal today is in direct relationship to the degree in which the early church remained faithful to the apostolic tradition preserved in Scripture. If we assume that critical reconstruction of ancient worship demonstrates its form and content to be faithful to the apostolic practice in the main, ancient worship becomes an authoritative guide for worship renewal today. In this way the New Testament concept of tradition as that which is "handed over" is maintained and preserved.

Why the Early Church over That of Another Era?

It must be stated that the Fathers of the early church era were just as subject to its cultural milieu and conceptual systems as we today are subject to ours. The theology of the early church was forged out in the context of the mystery religions, polytheism, Gnosticism, cults such as Manichaeism, and the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Stoicism and neo-Platonism. To assume that the early Fathers were immune from these influences or that traces of this cultural milieu are not to be found in the writings of the Church Fathers would be naive indeed.

However, I would join those who argue that the ancient church, being in such close historical, geographical, linguistic, and conceptual proximity to the New Testament era and to its parent religion, Judaism, is characterized by a sustained attempt to remain faithful to the apostolic tradition. Consider, for example, the following six ways in which this may be demonstrated.

First, the early church was responsible for summarizing the general doctrines of the faith in creedal form such as the rule of faith, the later Old Roman Symbol, and finally the Apostles' Creed. To this day the whole church frequently confesses its faith in God within the liturgy by reciting the Apostles' Creed.

Second, we recognize the early church's part in the development of a canon. This was a process occurring after the apostolic age and one which took several centuries. Yet, in more than fifteen hundred years since the affirmation of this canon it has not been repudiated even though it has been the subject of controversy and continual scrutiny.

Third, the early church's ecumenical creeds have given definition to a trinitarian concept of God (Nicene Creed) and to an affirmation of the human and divine natures in the person of Christ (Chalcedon Creed). While these creeds are written in the Greek language and use Hellenistic concepts, they preserve and even expound on the biblical kernel of truth they seek to explain. In spite of our contemporary questions they remain models of theological thought and methodological inquiry.

Fourth, the ancient church has provided foundational thought on ecclesiology, ministry, and sacraments. While less binding on the thinking of all Christians than are the Nicene and Chalcedon creeds, this thought has nevertheless become foundational for all future thinking on these subjects.

Fifth, the ethical approach of the first three centuries to war, abortion, infanticide, marriage, and numerous other subjects and its thinking about the church's relationship to society in general and to the state in particular have shown how penetrating early Christian thought is in the social, political, economic, and psychological areas of human existence.

Finally, during the same era, the church was wrestling with its worship. The form of worship, together with the approach to baptism, eucharistic prayers, sacred year, architecture, the lectionary, and ceremony, was being developed at the same time as were the creeds, canon, and ethics.

My argument is that the early church has defined the theological issues and set out the limits of orthodoxy. Anyone who defends the canon, subscribes to the Apostles' Creed, advocates the Trinity, or adheres to the full humanity and divinity of Jesus is already more than a New Testament Christian by virtue of having passed over into the fuller definition given to orthodoxy by the ancient church. Orthodoxy is a tradition developed by the early church that stands in apostolic continuity. Nevertheless, as an extension of the biblical principles, these areas of theological thought as defined and expanded by the early Church Fathers represent a movement beyond that conceived by the New Testament church. Further, the work of the Fathers represents foundational Christian thought which has been the subject of interpretation, reinterpretation, and debate throughout the history of the Christian church. Thus the importance of the Fathers and ancient Christian thought is difficult to question. I agree with Paul Tillich who once said that no one should dare to wrestle with modern Christian thought until after having mastered classical Christian thought.

Finally, let it be stated that the value of early Christian thought finds expression in contemporary renewal, especially in the areas of liturgy and the rites of initiation (baptism, confirmation, Eucharist). The cutting edge of contemporary thought in these areas is historical thinking. The architects of Vatican II went back to the early church to discover its heart. We would do well today to do the same. This period represents the common roots of all Christians. Thus, to give more weight to this period of theological thought is to be orthodox, evangelical, and ecumenical.

Conclusion

I have attempted to illustrate and defend an evangelical and catholic method of doing theology. My argument is that the evangelical content of Christianity is rooted in the apostolic interpretation of the Christ event which, in the developing sources of the church, is contained in Scripture. The theological themes of Christianity have been further defined and elucidated in the creeds and practices of the ecumenical church of the first six centuries. This catholic interpretation which, as Vincent of L6rins stated, is believed "everywhere, always and by all" constitutes orthodox thought and practice. It is the tradition (that which has been handed over) of the church which has been transmitted through the centuries in a variety of conceptual models and injust as many social, cultural, and political milieus. Our theological task today is not to invent new theologies and practices but to remain faithful to that which has been handed over as we seek to hand it over today through the grids of our time and place.

The Holiness Churches: A Significant Ethical Tradition

To many outsiders, the world of "conservative" Christianity no doubt seems an undifferentiated mass. But the uniformity and agreement often claimed by advocates of "evangelicalism" are to great extent a myth. The groups that compose conservative Christendom are marked by distinctive theological stances and sociological dynamics as significant as those that distinguish other church traditions or those that separate evangelical groups from mainline denominations.

For example, the major ecumenical body in conservative circles, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), comprises more than 30 member denominations, which fall into three natural groupings. About one-third are "Pentecostal"; these denominations have become better known since the rise of the "charismatic movement." A second third are the sort of "evangelicals" represented by Christianity Today and the dominant conservative seminaries. The third group, the "Holiness" churches, is the one least noticed or understood by those outside the conservative tradition.

Holiness groups have often been caricatured as "holy rollers," or confused with snake-handling cults. Not only are such images for the most part false, but they hide from view one of the most significant traditions of ethical and social witness in all of Christendom. Indeed, it was not until the 1960s that certain values pioneered by Holiness groups found widespread acceptance in American culture. I myself was drawn back toward the church in which I was reared, in part by the discovery that at least the history (if not always the present reality) of the Holiness churches was a most significant incarnation of values that I had discovered in the student movements of the past decade.

Holiness churches claim to stand in the direct succession of John Wesley and "original" Methodism. But the movement is perhaps best viewed as a synthesis of Methodism with the revivalism of Charles G. Finney, as it found expression in pre- Civil War America in a reaffirmation of the doctrine of "Christian perfection. In this period at least three major strands of the movement developed. Early Oberlin College, with Finney as professor of theology, but especially under the influence of President Asa Mahan, moved toward perfectionism in the 1830s. Two groups -- the abolitionist Wesleyan Methodists (1843) and the ethically "rigorist" Free Methodists (1860) -- split from Methodism and adopted "perfectionist" planks. Finally, and perhaps most important for later developments, there were the circles that clustered around lay evangelist Phoebe Palmer in New York city.

It was the Revival of 1857-58 that in many ways propelled perfectionist ideas into broader acceptance in Baptist, Presbyterian, Quaker and other circles through varieties of "higher Christian life" movements. The extension of these currents into England produced the Salvation Army and the Keswick movement of the 1870s, both of which were brought to America before the turn of the century. In this country the major agency of propagation was the National Campmeeting Association for the Promotion of Christian Holiness, founded in 1867. Out of this movement grew innumerable Holiness papers, local camp meetings and associations, missions and colleges; by the turn of the century these began to coalesce into new denominations -- the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) and related groups, the Church of the Nazarene, the Pilgrim Holiness Church, and so forth. In the late 19th century certain Quaker and Mennonite bodies were swept into the movement.

Charles Jones’s Guide to the Study of the Holiness Movement (Scarecrow Press, 1974) identifies some 150 groups produced by the movement. Many of these have been absorbed into various amalgamations, but a large number still maintain separate existence. Perhaps a score of these identify today with the Christian Holiness Association (CHA) -- a Holiness counterpart to the National Association of Evangelicals that has its roots in the National Campmeeting Association. At least as many much smaller bodies work with the Inter-Church Holiness Convention, which comprises groups that have been formed largely in protest against post-World War II socialization of the dominant Holiness churches (this is the so-called "radical" or "conservative" Holiness movement). About a dozen Holiness churches were swept into Pentecostalism to form the "Holiness-Pentecostal" churches. Beyond this are a number of independent, separatist groups extremely difficult to identify.

It is almost impossible to estimate the constituency of these denominations. American membership of CHA affiliates is over a million. "Holiness-Pentecostal" churches comprise another million. One can also identify a few hundred thousand other adherents. But these figures would still be deceptive. While most church membership statistics are inflated, the opposite obtains for Holiness groups. Because of strict membership requirements and vigorous evangelism, attendance is often much higher than membership. It is common for Sunday school attendance, for example, to be double the size of membership. As a result, Holiness churches claim several million adherents -- a sizable sector of American Protestantism.

The major concern of the "mainline" or CHA Holiness churches has been the doctrine of "Christian perfection" or "entire sanctification." This doctrine encourages the seeking of a "higher Christian life" of "victory over" or "cleansing from" intentional or voluntary sin. This is usually achieved in a "second blessing" or a crisis experience subsequent to conversion. In the, more classically Wesleyan expressions of the doctrine, this crisis is embedded in a gradual process of sanctification or growth. In the late 19th century such an experience was called the "baptism of the Holy Ghost," a terminology still preserved in such groups as the Church of the Nazarene. It was this development that eventually led to Pentecostalism, but most Holiness churches have shied away from this "Pentecostal" language for fear of identification with glossolalia movements. (Interestingly, in view of their own history, ethos and theology, the Holiness people are among the strongest critics of classical Pentecostalism.)

The ethos of Holiness churches reflects American revivalism and the spirit of the camp meeting -- though attenuated, of course, over the years. There has been an affinity for the "gospel song," combined with a tradition of classical Wesleyan hymnody and Methodist ritual. The movement has produced some 200 colleges, at least half of which are still in existence. Two small 100,000-member denominations, the Wesleyan Church and the Free Methodist Church, each support half a dozen colleges, including such thriving institutions as Houghton College (New York) and Seattle Pacific College. Four seminaries (Asbury in Kentucky, Anderson School of Theology in Indiana, Nazarene in Kansas City, and Western Evangelical in Portland) serve the movement.

The Holiness movement differs from fundamentalism and evangelicalism in that it is more oriented to ethics and the spiritual life than to a defense of doctrinal orthodoxy. Indeed, one of the distinctive features of the Holiness traditions is that they have tended to raise ethics to the status that fundamentalists have accorded doctrine. This theme was certainly explicit in the early abolitionist controversies and has consistently re-emerged since. The emphasis given the doctrine of sanctification has led naturally in this direction.

The Holiness ethic has been described as the "revivalist" ethic of "no smoking, no drinking, no cardplaying, no theatergoing." Such themes have, of course, characterized the Holiness movement -- as have large doses of anti-Catholicism and anti-Masonry. Some of these concerns are still worth some defense, but the Holiness churches have been slandered by observers who fail to penetrate beneath these themes.

III

The earliest issue of the Holiness movement was abolitionism. The early editors of the Guide to Holiness were abolitionists. Oberlin College went so far as to advocate "civil disobedience" in the face of the fugitive slave laws (leading to the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue Case -- an important event in the history of American civil liberties). The Wesleyan Methodist Church was explicitly abolitionist at its founding, and much early literature of the denomination has recently come back into print for "black studies" programs. One meaning of the "free" in Free Methodist was that church’s abolitionism. Holiness people find some vindication in William Gravely’s recent study Gilbert Haven: Methodist Abolitionist (Abingdon, 1973). Haven, a Methodist bishop claimed as well by the Holiness movement, was an ardent reformer, abolitionist and feminist who went so far as to advocate interracial marriage and who maintained his concerns into the era of Reconstruction when many abolitionists were moving on to other issues. Gravely’s book suggests that Haven’s positions, actually a century ahead of their time, have finally come into their own.

Just as in the 1960s, in Haven’s time agitation on the race issue led to concern for the role of women. In addition to erasing the color line, Oberlin College became the first to attempt coeducation; the school graduated a number of the most vigorous and radical feminists of the era. The first women’s rights convention was held in the Wesleyan Methodist Church of Seneca Falls, New York. Antoinette Brown, the first woman to be ordained in an American church, was a graduate of Oberlin, and at her ordination Wesleyan Methodist minister Luther Lee preached on "Woman’s Right to Preach the Gospel" (1853). Wesleyans themselves began to experiment with the ordination of women in the 1860s. Catherine Booth, who with her husband, William, was cofounder of the Salvation Army, was also an ardent feminist; she insisted on radical equality for women in the new organization. In a book published in 1891, B. T. Roberts, founder of the Free Methodists, argued in favor of Ordaining Women, though his denomination did not capitulate until 1974.

Phoebe Palmer defended the right of women to preach in The Promise of the Father (1859). Her book became the fountainhead of innumerable writings that argued that "Pentecost laid the axe at the root of social injustice." Acts 2, relying on a prophecy in the book of Joel, affirms that "in the latter days . . . your sons and your daughters shall prophesy." By the turn of the century this Scripture passage constituted the standard Holiness defense of the practice. An early constitution of the Church of the Nazarene specifically provided for the ministry of women. Seth Cook Rees, a founder of the Pilgrim Holiness Church, insisted that "nothing but jealousy, prejudice, bigotry, and a stingy love for bossing in men have prevented women’s public recognition by the church." Alma White, founder of the Pillar of Fire, claimed to be the first female bishop in the history of Christianity. For years her denomination published a periodical, Women’s Chains, which fought for the right to vote, advocated total participation of women in society (including Congress and the White House), and suggested imprisonment for the inventors of the high-heeled shoe.

Another recurrent theme in Holiness churches has been involvement with and ministry to the poor and oppressed." Early abolitionist literature has striking parallels to today’s "liberation theology." The "free" in Free Methodist also stood for opposition to church pew rentals, which served to exclude the poor. Such concerns were held to be required by a proper reading of the Scriptures. Sociologists have told us that Holiness churches are "churches of the poor"; they are more nearly the product of the turning of certain church people to the poor. Like Wesley, such men as Phineas Bresee, the dominant figure of the Church of the Nazarene, and A. B. Simpson, founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, left socially elite churches to minister among the poor of the inner city slums. The Salvation Army was perhaps the profoundest expression of this theme. The "rescue mission" movement and related programs were largely the product of Holiness effort. An early Church of the Nazarene paper, titled Highways and Hedges, protested against "the steeple house church . . . too busy chasing dollars" and expressed a pledge to go "into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor and the maimed and the halt and the blind."

From today’s perspective it is difficult to appreciate the vitality and creativity of these movements. They were much more than just "relief" efforts. Norris Magnuson has shown in a recent dissertation, "Salvation in the Slums" (University of Minnesota, 1968), how close contact with the poor moved the "mission workers" toward new social and political positions that favored the oppressed. Some adopted various forms of social radicalism. W. T. Stead, in his biography of Catherine Booth, described her as a socialist and something more," one who was "in complete revolt against the existing order."

Peace was another common theme. Thomas Upham, one of the more mystically inclined of early Holiness teachers, wrote in 1836 the important Manual of Peace, opposing the military chaplaincy, advocating "tax resistance," and calling for the abolition of capital punishment. Almost totally ignored in the literature of pacifism are the several "peace churches" produced by the movement. Also of significance are the Holiness witness against ostentation in life style, the concern for simplicity, and the affirmation of radical equality expressed in avoiding honorific titles in favor of "Mr." or "Brother."

Somewhat ironic -- in view of this history -- is the fact that the past generation or so has seen great dilution of these values -- and this just at a time when many of these values were receiving wider vindication in the larger cultural and church life! Prevailing social forces, a generation or two of "progressive" leadership, and a desire on the part of many to avoid identification with the caricatures of the movement have effected profound changes. Many contemporary Holiness leaders have come to think of their tradition as a variety of "evangelicalism" with a slightly different belief structure. The result has been the development of patterns of church life much like those against which the founders originally rebelled.

But the earlier ethos remains subliminally present and is breaking out again, especially among the younger generation. Those working with college students report that students from Holiness colleges respond more quickly to "discipleship" demands than some "evangelicals" who are more conditioned to responding with verbalization or doctrinal formulation. As an officer of the NAE Social Action Commission recently put it, "Holiness people still have an ear for ethical issues."

Current stirrings of social concern among conservative Christians have found reception in the CHA constituency. June 1973 saw an ecumenical conference on issues of war and peace under the auspices of the CHA. Though the NAE would not touch it, the 1974 CHA annual convention endorsed the "Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern" without hesitation (though one member of the resolutions committee feared that endorsement would imply that CHA had not held these values all along). Ron Sider, though he has worked primarily among the "evangelicals," is from a CHA church; he was the major force behind the "Chicago Declaration" and the earlier "Evangelicals for McGovern." (Senator McGovern himself was the product of a Wesleyan Methodist parsonage.) And Free Methodist Gilbert James of Asbury Theological Seminary has been one of the strongest voices for social conscience within conservative Christendom. Over a quarter of a century ago he was editing a paper on race relations and social legislation. More recently he has created Chicago’s "Urban Ministries Program for Seminarians," which provides "urban action training" for a coalition of seven midwestern conservative seminaries.

Also worth noting is the Holiness attitude toward ecumenism. This is a curious dialectic of "schismatic" and "unitive" tendencies. Early Holiness leaders delighted in the "nonsectarian" and interdenominational character of their meetings. Some even hoped that the new movement would produce unity in Christendom. Such hopes were, of course, doomed to failure; what resulted was more a redrawing of denominational lines as the Holiness movement spread beyond Methodism. But the separations that did take place were as much the result of being "put out" as "coming out" of the established denominations. The Wesleyan Methodists did not leave Methodism until the bishops began to use their arbitrary power to crush even the discussion of abolitionism. Free Methodists were actually expelled from the Methodist Episcopal Church (though the credentials of B. T. Roberts were later returned to his son with something of an apology). The National Campmeeting Association fought hard for loyalty, but the influx of non-Methodists, an increasing radicalization of Holiness bodies, and an increasing polarization led ultimately to schism.

But the main thrust of the formation of Holiness churches has been "unitive." Turn-of-the-century Holiness churches were formed by the gradual coalescing of missions and local organizations. The Church of the Nazarene and the Pilgrim Holiness Church brought together perhaps 30 antecedent organizations. These forces are still at work. The year 1969 saw the emergence of the Missionary Church in the Mennonite wing of the Holiness movement. In 1966 the Wesleyan Methodists absorbed the Reformed Baptists and two years later merged with the Pilgrim Holiness Church to form the Wesleyan Church. The merging General Conference voted to begin negotiations with the Free Methodists (these are still in progress). The Christian Holiness Association even attempted "confederation" in the mid-1960s but had to settle for a more loosely organized program of "cooperative ministries" in such areas as publishing and evangelism. It is still possible that we will see the merging of these groups into a major denomination.

Reaction to all these currents has left the "mainline" Holiness churches somewhat at sea as they struggle for new ways to express an updated identity. The process has been complicated by a new intellectual and theological maturity. Seminary programs expanded rapidly in the 1960s. The founding about ten years ago of a Wesleyan Theological Society (it now has about 700 members) and an associated academic journal has been another force. During the 1960s a sizable number of Holiness students entered the most prestigious graduate schools in the country. Unlike an earlier generation of students, most of these are retaining identification with the movement.

This new generation of theological teachers is faced with two major theological problems. The first of these is to re-express the distinctive doctrine of the Holiness movement with some fidelity to Scripture and history in a manner that speaks to the modern age. This is no easy task. In some parts of the movement the doctrine has fallen into disuse. Such persons often tend to move toward the style and ethos of the Christianity Today constituency. Others have moved in the direction of the Keswick Movement and a doctrine of a "victorious Christian life." Even those who have remained most faithful to the doctrine have modified some of the cruder forms of the "second blessing" theology by reaffirmation of the more subtle classical Wesleyanism, with its themes of growth and process in sanctification. But new interpretations are beginning to appear. Recent years have seen the emergence of existential, relational, phenomenological, and even process interpretations of Holiness theology! The most recent of these has been Love, the Dynamic of Wesleyanism (Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1972), by Mildred Bangs Wynkoop, immediate past president of the Wesleyan Theological Society.

The other theological problem that leaders and theologians of the Holiness movement face is the sorting out of the relationship between the Holiness movement and modern fundamentalism. Holiness bodies were deeply influenced by fundamentalism during the fundamentalist/modernist controversy. Lacking a developed apologetic and a theologically sophisticated intellectual tradition, many Holiness leaders adopted the fundamentalist apologetic and doctrine of Scripture. The CHA was reorganized and the Wesleyan Theological Society formed in the wake of the emergence of NAE and the Evangelical Theological Society. Early CHA and WTS doctrinal statements were modeled on NAE and ETS counterparts. Such men as Stephen Paine, until recently president of Houghton College, brought NAE motifs into Holiness bodies. Under Paine’s influence, for example, the Wesleyan Methodist Church rewrote its articles of religion in the 1950s to incorporate the fundamentalist doctrine of Scripture.

But the Wesleyans were the only body to go that far. The larger CHA bodies prefer to see themselves as "conservative" rather than "fundamentalist" or "evangelical." Remnants of earlier reformist "postmillenialism" kept many from complete capitulation to fundamentalist chiliasm. Restrained forms of biblical criticism have found acceptance among Holiness scholars -- so much so that many do not find themselves at home in the Evangelical Theological Society. Recent years have seen struggles to move to a more inclusive doctrinal statement. Both the CHA and WTS creeds have recently been reformulated with the express purpose of avoiding the characteristic expressions of the "evangelical" doctrine of Scripture, as well as the endless specification of particular doctrines.

What will finally come out of all these currents remains to be seen. But there is little doubt that we are witnessing the emergence into wider dialogue of what will prove to be an increasingly important theological and ecclesiastical tradition.