Stealing Jesus: how fundamentalism betrays Christianity

by Bruce Bawer

  Our daily life in office and home, in cars and airplanes, at parties and conferences, while reading magazines and watching television, while looking at advertisements and hearing radio, are in themselves continuous examples of a life which has lost the dimension of depth. It runs ahead, every moment is filled with something which must he done or seen or said or planned. But no one can experience depth without stopping and becoming aware of himself Only if he has moments in which he does not care about what comes next can he experience the meaning of this moment here and now and ask himself about the meaning of his life. As long as the preliminary, transitory concerns are not silenced, no matter how interesting and valuable and important they may be, the voice of the ultimate concern cannot be heard.

  These things were true of American life when Tillich wrote his essay in the 1950s, and they are even truer now. America is often called deeply religious; in reality, however, it is a very horizontally preoccupied nation—one in which success is almost invariably defined in coarsely materialistic terms, in which it is very difficult to step away from the horizontal hubbub and experience the vertical, and in which native-born theological concepts (of which there have been many since the Pilgrims climbed off the Mayflower) tend to be extremely earthbound. As I sit at the restaurant table thinking about the evangelist, I realize that, however misguided his message, he brought to our table a reminder of the vertical orientation—the "dimension of depth" from which most of the talented, busy, ambitious men at our table have long been distracted by politics. The evangelist intruded into our worldly talk with words that bespoke "ultimate concern": Jesus loves you!

  And yet I realize that the kind of Christianity that the evangelist represents is not, in its essentials, a truly vertical phenomenon.

  The vertical line is the line of spiritual experience; the horizontal line is the line of doctrinal orthodoxy. Experience, doctrine. Love, law. Jesus made it perfectly clear to his disciples which element in each of these pairings he was essentially about. In the Gospel according to Luke (10:25), a lawyer asks him, "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?"

  "What is written in the law?" Jesus replies. "How do you read?"

  In response, the lawyer brings together two separate directives—one from Deuteronomy, the other from Leviticus: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself."

  Jesus tells him that he has answered correctly But the lawyer has a further question: "Who is my neighbor?"

  The question is a simple one, and the answer that Jesus gives, in the form of a parable, is also simple. Yet that parable takes us to the very heart of what it means—or is supposed to mean—to be a Christian.

  What Jesus talks about in this parable is a road. He specifies which road it is—it's the one between Jerusalem and Jericho, two cities that lay in the heart of Judea. On that road, a man is beaten by robbers and left half-dead on the roadside. Since the temple was in Jerusalem and since many religious leaders lived in Jericho, it's not surprising that the first two passersby are Jewish religious leaders, a priest and a Levite. Both ignore the dying man. But a Samaritan—a native of Samaria, ■whose people were despised by the Jews of Jesus' day—comes along the road, sees the man dying, binds up his wounds, takes him to an inn, cares for him, and pays for his lodging.

  Which of these passersby, Jesus asks, proved himself a neighbor to the man? And the lawyer gives the obvious answer: the Samaritan.

  In a widely read 1994 book entitled Crossing the Threshold of Hope, each chapter, like the story of the good Samaritan, takes the form of a question posed and an answer given. In this case, the questions are asked not by a lawyer but by an Italian journalist named Vittorio Messori, and the answers are given not by Jesus but by Pope John Paul II. In one chapter, Messori asks the pope a question not very different from the lawyer's question about eternal life. The journalist's question is "Do heaven, purgatory, and hell still exist?"

  The pope answers as follows: "Please open the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, to chapter seven, which discusses the eschatalogical character of the pilgrim Church on earth, as well as the union of the earthly Church with the Church in heaven."

  Period.

  The replies given by Jesus and John Paul II to their questioners could hardly be more different. The pope refers his questioner to dogma—indeed, to a work of doctrine written in theological jargon that would perplex all but the most educated Catholic readers; Jesus, by contrast, talks about an experience on a road, and does so in such a way that anyone within earshot can understand his message. The pope refers his questioner to an inflexible set of general propositions about spiritual reality—about the vertical plane—that exist apart from the particulars of any human situation and to which the faithful, whatever the nature of their own spiritual experiences, are obliged to declare their assent as they go about their lives in the horizontal plane. Jesus does exactly the opposite: He tells a story in which people (the priest, the Levite, the Samaritan) are confronted by a specific, unexpected, and challenging set of horizontal circumstances—as all of us are from time to time—and are required by those circumstances to make a choice that testifies to the degree of genuineness of their experiences of the vertical plane. The pope upholds law, which is the very essence of the horizontal plane; Jesus underscores the fact that no law is as important as the law of love, which is the very essence of the vertical plane.

  It's important that Jesus' interlocutor here is a lawyer. Picture Johnnie Cochran, if you like, or F. Lee Bailey. The lawyer is not a student humbly asking Jesus for instruction. When he asks how to gain eternal life, he's baiting Jesus, testing him, asking a question to which he himself—as someone who is schooled in the law, and who knows that his question is essentially a question about the law—already knows the answer.

  Jesus replies accordingly. "What is written in the law?" he asks. He knows the law, and he knows that the lawyer knows it too. Yet what Jesus' parable demonstrates is that for him, the commandment to love God and one's neighbor transcends all other laws. The lawyer, like the priests and Levites of Jesus' time, is horizontally fanatical, one might say, in his devotion to the letter of the law—to every last verse, that is, of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, some of which, as we know, were chillingly brutal toward those who violated the strictures regarding ritual purity.

  That's why it is important that the traveler is left "half-dead." Looking at him, the priest and the Levite can't tell if he is dead; and because the letter of the law forbids them, as holy men, to touch the dead— an act which, like combining fabrics or having homosexual intercourse, was deemed a violation of the code of ritual purity, whose purpose was to keep the Jewish people distinct from other peoples in the region—they think it more important to cross to the other side of the road and avoid touching him, and thus avoid possible defilement, than to walk over to him and see if he needs care. By contrasting their actions with those of the Samaritan, Jesus compels the lawyer to recognize the Samaritan's love as superior to the rule-book mentality that the lawyer shares with the priest and the Levite.

  It's important, then, that Jesus' questioner is a lawyer and that the victim is left half-dead. It's also important that the man of mercy is a Samaritan. No ancient people had a relationship to the Jews quite like that of the Samaritans, whose land lay sandwiched between Judea and Galilee. The Samaritans worshipped the Hebrew God and, like the Jews, regarded the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) as holy writ. Yet they were syncretists, which means that they combined Judaism with elements of other faiths; among other things, they believed that the expected Messiah would be a reincarnation of Moses. For centuries they'd had their own temple and lived in tension with the Jews, who considered them foreign, inferior, and semi-pagan. To the Jews, their religion was a mere cult.

  The Samaritans were particularly despised in that era because of an incident that had taken place at Passover
around the time of Jesus' birth. On that occasion, some Samaritans had defiled the court of the Jerusalem temple by strewing dead men's bones about the place. So for Jesus to suggest to a Judean lawyer that a Samaritan might attain eternal life, while a priest or Levite would not, was rather like telling a devout Roman Catholic in New York City, in the wake of the disruption of a mass at Saint Patrick's Cathedral a few years ago by the radical gay activist group ACT UP, that a member of ACT UP might be a better Christian than, say, New York's John Cardinal O'Connor.

  The fact that the story of the good Samaritan has become a cliche makes it difficult for most of us to recognize how revolutionary a message it bears. Certainly for a Jewish lawyer in Jesus' day to accept this message would have required a radical leap of understanding. Any good Jew would have considered a Samaritan to be utterly outside of God's kingdom. For the lawyer—as for the rabbis—it went without saying that the word neighbor could refer only to fellow Jews. In the same way, if that Samaritan could be lifted up out of Jesus' story and set down among us today as an actual living person, practicing the same virtues that he does in the story and the same syncretist faith that an ancient Samaritan would have practiced, many Christians who purport to accept this story as a lesson in what Christianity means would insist that despite his virtues, this man's failure to confess Christ as his lord and savior condemns him to hell.

  Yet the very point of this story is that in the only sense of the word that would have mattered to Jesus, the Samaritan is a Christian. He's a model of what it means to lead a Christlike life. He hasn't been baptized, he doesn't go to church. What he does is simply this: He loves his neighbor—and he recognizes that a neighbor is not just somebody who lives next door, or looks like him, or shares his beliefs and prejudices. A neighbor is simply another human being—any human being.

  Those who belong to oppressed, despised, or disenfranchised groups may well read this story and recognize themselves in the figure of the Samaritan. They may feel affirmed by the fact that it is not the priest or the Levite, those symbols of the social and religious establishment, who prove to be good neighbors, but the Samaritan, the outcast. Jesus' message to his Judean audience—that a member of a group you despise may be a better neighbor to you and a better model of neighborliness for you than those whom you most respect—is one that many outcasts of our own time can hear with gratification.

  But the story also offers those who are outcasts something more than mere affirmation. It presents them with a powerful challenge—a challenge to live in a world where many people despise them as fervently as first-century Jews despised Samaritans, and to love them anyway. It's a challenge not just to say that they love those who hate them; it's a lesson that tells them that to love is to act with love. It is to do. As the former Southern Baptist Convention president Jimmy Allen has written, "love in action is the only kind of love there is." To say this is not to abandon Protestantism's strong stand against what is called "works righteousness," the Roman Catholic doctrine that good works win us divine Brownie points; it's simply to say that real love—and real experience of the love of God on the vertical plane—always expresses itself in some kind of action on the horizontal plane. And that action— that acting out of love—is, as Jesus tells the lawyer, how you win eternal life. It's how you attain the kingdom of God, for the two terms are synonymous.

  "Love the Lord . . . and your neighbor as yourself." What does it mean to be commanded to love? Can anyone love on command? It's a tall order, certainly; in some cases, a seemingly impossible one. In fact it is nothing less than a challenge to struggle constantly to overcome egotism, suspicion, and self-protectiveness, and to think in an entirely new way about one's relationship to others.

  And it is a challenge that none of us meets perfectly. Is there, after all, a single person on earth who can act with love all the time, toward everyone? I doubt it. Nor do I think we're expected to. We are expected, however, to hold selfless love before us as the highest ideal— love, not the law.

  The lawyer, of course, speaks of eternal life, of the kingdom, as if it were a payment in the afterlife for some specific deed or deeds in this life. Yet the story of the good Samaritan points to a radically different understanding. It cautions us not to disdain and disregard this present life when we seek the kingdom of God. The lawyer's question comes freighted with certain assumptions; Jesus turns those assumptions completely upside down. Loving your neighbor, he explains, is not an unpleasant burden that you take on in order to win some glorious prize beyond this life. The love, the shouldering of the burden, is itself the prize; in that love itself is the experience of the kingdom.

  It's a great and a profoundly mystical truth, a truth conveyed by a simple story whose simplicity is its very point. It's a truth that many ordinary people have understood and embraced but that many highly sophisticated and theologically educated people—perhaps including a few popes—have failed to grasp. It's a truth that confounds those who think the whole point of Christianity is to win a happy afterlife for themselves by embracing this or that specific doctrine about God and his creation. Such self-centered, quid pro quo conceptions are the very essence of a horizontal mentality. Those of us who are Christians are expected to "die to self": What is this but another way of saying that in order to truly experience God and his love, we must let go of horizontal preoccupations and cease imagining eternity as a mere continuation of our own personal day-to-day existence?

  The good Samaritan story is a classic example of the way Jesus taught. To be sure, the Gospel according to John presents Jesus as performing plenty of miracles, as speaking of himself continually in the first person ("I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life"), and as teaching by direct statement rather than by parable. Yet John's Gospel, which focuses less on the particulars of Jesus' earthly ministry than on abstract statements about the cosmic significance of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, differs dramatically in these respects from the three other Gospels, which plainly are closer than John's to the actual story of Jesus' life and which are called synoptic because their accounts parallel one another in many respects. Of the Jesus that we encounter in those Gospels, we can say unequivocally that he rarely if ever taught by proffering theological statements of the kind in which organized churches have specialized for centuries. On the contrary, the synoptic Gospels depict a Jesus who taught through parables, who performed few miracles, and who never made public statements about himself. Jesus could have spent his ministry spelling out doctrines and telling his followers that they had to profess belief in these doctrines in order to attain eternal life; but the Jesus of the synoptic Gospels didn't do that at all. Instead, he served up parables, paradoxes, metaphors, and similes:

  The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.

  The kingdom of heaven is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till it was all leavened.

  Such similes drew on his listeners' experience of the real world— the horizontal plane—but they don't appeal at all to most people's horizontal values. Mustard seeds? Leaven? These are homely, mundane images. To be sure, they are both images that imply growth—the growth of a plant and of a loaf of bread, respectively. But they do not necessarily imply desirable growth. As the biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan has noted, the mustard plant, far from being welcome in most gardens, is a "pungent shrub" that "starts small and ends big," constantly threatening to "get out of control" and "take over where it is not wanted"; it is "something you would want only in small and carefully controlled doses—if you could control it." As for leaven, Crossan notes that it was in Jesus' time "a symbol of moral corruption"; in Jewish culture, where unleavened bread was part of sacred meals, leaven symbolized "the unholy everyday."

  Why did Jesus employ these mundane images that bore connotation
s of bitter taste, rampant weedlike growth, and unholiness to convey the nature of what he called the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven or eternal life—terms which, by contrast with the mustard seed and the leaven, reach for the grandest concepts in space (kingdom) and time (eternity) that his listeners could grasp? He did so in order to challenge, to shock, to shake his listeners up and force them to look for the spiritual elsewhere than in the places where they had been accustomed to seek it out. Kingdom as mustard seed? Eternity as leaven? Though he drew his images from the ordinary daily life of his listeners, he sought in his teaching to convey, by reference to that ordinary experience, the nature of a mystery far beyond the quotidian—a mystery involving remarkable growth of a kind that was, in a sense, perfectly natural but that some might find repugnant, disturbing. Central to the effectiveness of these similes is that his listeners struggle in mind and heart and spirit to find their way to that experience.

  What was Jesus' purpose? If John's Gospel is to be believed, Jesus answered this question himself: "I have come that they may have life, and may have it in all its fullness" (John 10:10). There is nothing here about heaven, hell, or substitutionary atonement—that is, the belief, first promulgated by Augustine early in the fifth century, that Christ's death on the cross took place because God the Father demanded that God the Son sacrifice his life in order to pay for the sins of humankind. When Jesus speaks of the purpose of his Incarnation, he refers to life, and does not draw a sharp distinction between this life and any other.