Stealing Jesus: how fundamentalism betrays Christianity

by Bruce Bawer

  In reply to those who argued over the question of life after death, Jesus said, "God is not God of the dead but of the living; in his sight all are alive" (Luke 20:38). One can feel Jesus struggling to get his listeners to transcend their narrow, timebound way of understanding earthly existence and afterlife and to recognize human life instead as something that is always, inextricably, and mysteriously tied to God and that thus exists, in some ultimate sense, outside of time and space.

  Today, legalistic Christians are taught to think about heaven in a very different way from that which Jesus intended. Many of them carry around in their minds an image of heaven that draws extensively on the visions described in the Book of Revelation. For more than a few of them, this image has been brought into focus by the depiction of heaven in Hal Lindsey's insipid—and disastrously influential—1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth, which presents heaven as a perfect vacation spot in the sky, where the saved will not only be eternally happy but will also have their appearances enhanced by the divine equivalent of plastic surgery. (I am not joking.) Legalistic theology of this sort, far from inviting Christians to enter into an intellectual and imaginative struggle toward a genuine vertical experience, demands instead that they assent blindly to an essentially horizontal set of propositions in order to gain entry to a heaven that is imagined in completely horizontal terms. Instead of embracing Lindsey's picture of heaven, it would be more spiritually edifying for legalistic Christians to look to Jesus' similes. This, however, calls for imagination and a capacity for mystical experience. It also fails to satisfy the desire for unequivocal answers to life's questions—and for concrete reward—that underlies many people's attraction to legalistic Christianity.

  It is important to stress that Jesus didn't establish a doctrinal system or make theological demands. The relatively small number of verses attributed to him (mostly by John) in which he does say things that can be read as creedal statements, or in which he speaks of divine judgment and punishment, are philosophically and tonally at odds with everything else that he says and does, and have come to be recognized by many biblical scholars as later interpolations (though fundamentalists, of course, do not accept anything in the Bible as being inauthentic). In any event, most of the doctrines that are widely seen as essential to Christian belief were never mentioned by Jesus. At no point in the Gospels, for instance, does he describe himself as having been born of a virgin. Saint Paul, at the beginning of his letter to the Romans, describes Jesus as being "on the human level ... a descendant of David," which can mean only that Paul (whose letters predate the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke) regarded Joseph as Jesus' biological father. At no point, moreover, does Jesus even hint at the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. Yet these two doctrines—the virgin birth and substitutionary atonement—are key tenets for virtually all legalistic Christians; not to accept the veracity of both is, in their eyes, not to be a real Christian at all, and thus not to be truly saved.

  As a boy, I was perplexed by a story in Luke's Gospel. Luke told how Jesus, at twelve, traveled with his parents to Jerusalem for Passover, and stayed behind when they returned to Nazareth with a large group of friends and relatives. Recognizing after a day's journey that Jesus was not in their party, Mary and Joseph went back to Jerusalem and, after three days, found him in the temple surrounded by the teachers, listening to them and asking questions. "And all who heard him," wrote Luke,

  were amazed at his intelligence and the answers he gave.

  His parents were astonished to see him there, and his mother said to him, "My son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you."

  "Why did you search for me?" he said. "Did you not know that I was bound to be in my Father's house?"

  But they did not understand what he meant.

  Didn't understand? This confused me. How could Mary and Joseph not understand? We had just finished reading Luke's nativity narrative, in which an angel tells Mary that her son had been conceived by the Holy Spirit and would be called the Son of God. Mary then delivers the prayer called the Magnificat, which begins, "My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior." When she gives birth, shepherds appear and tell her that they have just heard about her from an angel who described the child as "the messiah, the Lord." And what of Matthew's Gospel, in which a star hovered over the manger, and wise men brought gifts, and Herod put a contract out on Jesus, forcing his parents to flee with him to Egypt? After all this, how could Mary be puzzled by Jesus' actions at age twelve? Had she forgotten everything? I was confused—but I didn't ask my Sunday-school teacher about any of this, for somehow I understood even then that one wasn't supposed to inquire about such things.

  Years later, in my early twenties, I fell away from Christianity; I returned in my early thirties, still questioning my religion's truth claims. I didn't feel compelled to take the virgin birth literally; plainly this doctrine had been cooked up by ancient men who idealized female virginity. But the Resurrection was different. It was Christianity's central tenet, and for me it was a sticking point. I felt compelled to believe that Jesus had come back to life in exactly the way described in the Gospels. That wasn't easy. If honest with myself, I had to admit that a lie detector would register a lie if I said I believed in the Resurrection in that sense. I wondered if that was true of other people. Was it true of my rector? Of Billy Graham? Of the pope?

  I struggled incessantly to believe that Jesus had walked out of his tomb and talked with his disciples. I felt I had to, because everything else about Christianity, as I understood it, made beautiful sense to me. Every Easter morning, my church would be so crowded, and the music and liturgy so glorious, and the congregation's shout that "The Lord is risen indeed!" so fervent—every aspect of the worship service, in short, would come together so sublimely to proclaim the all-transcending love of God and the profound significance and promise of human love—that for a precious instant it seemed impossible that such beauty and devotion could exist unless the stories of the Resurrection were literally true. In that moment (or so, at least, I told myself) I actually did believe. But during the rest of the year, the struggle to maintain that feeling was exhausting—and, usually, doomed. I knew that the Gospel according to Mark, which was probably the earliest Gospel, doesn't even contain any accounts of the post-Resurrection Jesus, and the accounts of the risen Christ in the other Gospels contradict one another in major ways. In a number of churches over the years, I heard sermons in which ministers defended the argument that Jesus had indeed returned to life after the Crucifixion. Look at those details, they would say. Don't they seem authentic? Besides, why would Matthew lie? Why would Luke? When I read in a book about the historical Jesus that his body had almost certainly ended up being devoured by birds, the image horrified me. I knew that deep down I believed this—and I didn't want to believe it.

  Then I read works by Christian men and women who wrote about the Resurrection in ways that resonated with me very strongly The important thing about the Resurrection, they pointed out, was that something extraordinary had happened after the Crucifixion to provide Jesus' demoralized followers with a profound illumination that turned their picture of things completely around and made them spend the rest of their lives preaching his Resurrection with all the fervor in the world. What form that illumination took ultimately doesn't matter. What matters is that it opened the disciples' eyes to the truths implicit in the way Jesus had lived and the things he had taught.

  Jesus had been as deeply and remarkably human as anyone his disciples had ever known; and at the same time he had been touched by God in a way that seemed to them utterly without precedent. The two things—his profound humanity, and his intense closeness to God— were bound together inextricably, and at the heart of the mystery of that bond was love, a light that never went out. Jesus' execution horrified his disciples; yet in its wake they reflected on the man and his ministry. He had preached eternal life, which he had t
alked about in a mystical way and as a present reality; his teachings about God's kingdom were strange and new, and yet his words about that kingdom seemed to beckon them toward a truth that was powerfully afHrmed in their hearts. As long as the eternal God existed, how could Jesus die? After the Crucifixion, something made them realize beyond a doubt and to the depths of their hearts that, in some mysterious sense, he couldn't die. And neither could they, in whose hearts he lived.

  Understood simply as a miraculous physical reappearance, the Resurrection makes Jesus' life and teachings ultimately irrelevant; it is as if Jesus, during his ministry, had just been killing time until the Main Event. Understood as an illumination that grew directly out of everything Jesus had taught through his words and actions, however, the Resurrection became filled with meaning.

  Certainly this was true for me: Clicking into this new understanding of the Resurrection, I felt as if a weight had fallen from me. Belief was no longer a struggle; now it all made sense. No longer did I worry about what this or that illustrious Christian really believed or didn't believe. I realized now that Christianity was not a matter of playing wearisome, dishonest, psychologically unhealthy mind games with oneself, or of leaning on the stronger beliefs of people in authority. It was a matter of truly having God within me. It was a matter of recognizing that faith is about dying to self-—about totally, and joyfully, forsaking self-regard—and about striving toward a less earthbound and more God-bound mental posture in which one is freed from morbid, solipsistic preoccupation with one's own postmortem fate. It was a matter of recognizing in love a pointer to the fact that we all live in everlasting communion with a loving God who exists outside of our universe with its one temporal and three spatial dimensions, and that eternal life is accordingly not a matter of being transported after death to some other place but of sharing, in some mysterious way, in something external to space and time for which human language can have no words and toward which the human mind and heart can only reach in prayer, meditation, and love. It was a matter of realizing that salvation, paradoxically enough, is a matter of finding one's way to a psychological and spiritual place at which one can triumphantly and joyfully put one's own individual existence into the "Resurrection perspective."

  This is, of course, not easy. Like believing in the literal Resurrection, it, too, is a struggle—but it is an honest struggle, a struggle to embrace something worthy and true. We might well fall to our knees and pray these words: "Lord, please take me out of my self; help me to be content that my love lives in others' love, my joy in others' joy, my thoughts in others' minds, as I know that the emotions that feel to me unique in their miraculousness have been felt and will be felt, as strongly and truly, by a billion others as worthy as I."

  Tillich's concept of "God beyond God"—his recognition that there is something humanly unknowable beyond all theological doctrines— is a useful insight that made immediate sense to me when I first ran across it. Why can't we simply accept with humility, whatever our doctrinal differences, that we don't know all there is to know about God, and that we may actually be wrong about some things? Why must there be such powerful pressure from so many quarters to pretend that we know everything about God? Why can't we simply acknowledge that none of us is omniscient, and that above and beyond the various faith statements to which we subscribe is a single God who knows our hearts, understands our limitations, and loves us anyway?

  Over the centuries, countless theologians and preachers have exhaustively discussed the things that Jesus said and did. Less attention has been paid to what he didn't say and do. His encounters with men and women in the Gospels are striking for the absence of any spelling out of theological specifics or any overt attempt at conversion. Except in John's Gospel, there is no mention of Jesus baptizing anybody; and John's implication that Jesus did baptize is unaccompanied by any suggestion that baptism was viewed by him or anyone as distinguishing insider from outsider. He presents the good Samaritan as a model, even though the Samaritan, at the end of the story, remains a Samaritan. The story of the good Samaritan, like other Gospel passages that cut to the heart of the Gospel message, makes it clear that for Jesus, evangelism was plainly not about bringing people into doctrinal conformity with himself or anyone else; it was about making people feel close to God and loved by God. It was about bringing people to a vertical experience—not about pressuring them, with threats of punishment or promises of reward, into accepting this or that horizontal dogma.

  Huston Smith, the distinguished authority on religion, has written perceptively about this subject. "Instead of telling people what to do or what to believe," Smith writes in The World's Religions,

  he invited them to see things differently, confident that if they did so their behavior would change accordingly. This called for working with people's imaginations more than with their reason or their will. If listeners were to accept his invitation, the place to which they were being invited would have to seem real to them. So, because the reality his hearers were most familiar with consisted of concrete particulars, Jesus began with those particulars. He spoke of mustard seeds and rocky soil, of servants and masters, of weddings and of wine. These specifics gave his teachings an opening ring of reality; he was speaking of things that were very much a part of his hearers' worlds.

  But having gotten them that far, having roused in them a momentum of assent, Jesus would then ride that momentum while giving its trajectory a startling, subversive twist. That phrase, "momentum of assent," is important, for its deepest meaning is that Jesus located the authority for his teachings not in himself or in God-as-removed but in his hearers' hearts. My teachings are true, he said in effect, not because they come from me, or even from God through me, but because (against all conventionality) your own hearts attest to their truth.

  This passage offers a fair description of the way in which many non-legalistic Christians, down to the present day, understand Christianity. We turn to Jesus because something in us tells us to. We recognize, as did his disciples, that in Jesus, in some mysterious and sublime way, humanity encountered divinity. The seemingly paradoxical doctrine that Jesus was at once entirely God and entirely man—a doctrine that was defined at the Council of Chalcedon in a.d. 451—can be understood as an effort on the part of fifth-century Christians to express their powerful sense of Jesus as a unique bridge between Creator and Creation. This way of understanding Christianity could not be further removed from that of Pat Robertson, say, who encourages his followers to be suspicious of the testimony of their own minds and hearts. Today many legalistic Protestants are taught to see becoming a Christian as involving what Soren Kierkegaard called a leap of faith: One decides to believe, and, hurdling a chasm of doubt, establishes oneself in a fortress of faith, defending it ever after, without question or pause, from every violation of law, doctrine, and authority. Yet many nonlegalistic Christians balk at such an approach, which seems uncomfortably close to the ways in which Nazism and Stalinism operated; under these systems, as under every variety of totalitarian ideology, one was expected to defend the "faith" against any act or statement that contradicted it, however good that act or true that statement. To many nonlegalistic Christians, a Christianity that is understood in the same way seems a violation of what Jesus was really about.

  'Jesus went about doing good," writes Smith. "He did so with such singlemindedness and effectiveness that those who were with him constantly found their estimate of him modulating to a new key. They found themselves thinking that if divine goodness were to manifest itself in human form, this is how it would behave." As for the Crucifixion and Resurrection, these were not interpreted by early Christians according to the theology of today's legalistic Christians—for whom the cross is, quite prosaically and selfishly, about substitutionary atonement, and for whom the Resurrection (which is conceived in a totally literal fashion) is about the promise of an afterlife. These events were, rather, understood in a much more beautiful, meaningful, and selflessly spiritual sense. As Smith
puts it, the "claim" of the Resurrection "extended ultimately to the status of goodness in the universe, contending that it was all-powerful. . . . The resurrection reversed the cosmic position in which the cross had placed Jesus' goodness. Instead of being fragile, the compassion the disciples had encountered in him was powerful; victorious over everything, even the seeming end of everything, death itself."

  Nothing could be more antithetical to the legalistic Christian understanding of Christianity; for legalists, Christianity is about declaring one's acceptance of Jesus as savior (in much the way that a soldier swears allegiance to his king) and in return being granted eternal life. For legalists, suggesting that Christianity is ultimately about being good is not only misguided—it is, quite literally, a teaching of the Devil. Yet many people today become Christians (of the nonlegalistic variety) for no other reason than that they respond to the Jesus that they find in the Gospels—and in the sermons of a few special men and women— in precisely the way that Huston Smith describes.

  I know that I did. For many years I thought I had no need for any kind of religion. Then something happened: I experienced an extraordinarily powerful love for another person. I experienced it as a mystery, a miracle, that was above and beyond all other human experiences. It seemed to me to give meaning, shape, and dimension to my life, and it seemed also to point toward the way in which my life connected to the lives of other people and to some greater entity—a conscious, feeling entity—that subsumed all of us. That experience of love, in short, challenged my whole understanding of the cosmos, for such love had no place in the banal, mechanistic universe that I had imagined myself to be living in.