The “post-Easter Jesus” refers to what Jesus became after his death, and this Jesus is a spiritual reality. Let me underline that for some people that sounds like he’s less than a physical reality, but that’s because of the modern prejudice that the physical is real and the spiritual is questionable. When I say the post-Easter Jesus is a spiritual reality, I mean that he has all the qualities of God. He is “one with God,” in the language of the New Testament. He can be experienced anywhere and in more than one place at the same time. And, unlike the pre-Easter Jesus, he doesn’t have to eat and drink. He’s not 5 foot 1 and 110 pounds. It would be ridiculous to think along these lines.
The reason this distinction matters is that if we don’t make it, we tend to project the divine qualities of the post-Easter Jesus back onto the pre-Easter Jesus, and then he becomes an unreal human being. A lot of Christians think that Jesus was God walking around as a human being, and we even think that that’s orthodox Christian belief.
But to think of the pre-Easter Jesus as God means he’s not one of us. It also raises the question, “What does it mean to say that he is God?” Do we mean that he had the mind of God and that’s why he knew stuff, so you could have asked him what the capital of Kansas was and he would’ve gotten it right? What would it mean to say that Jesus was God? Do we mean he had the power of God, so he could do anything? All of those conundrums obscure how utterly remarkable a human being Jesus was.
The South African Gospel and Jesus scholar Albert Nolan says, “Jesus is a much underrated man.” To deny his humanity to him is to deny his greatness. When I say the pre-Easter Jesus was fully human, not different in kind from you and me, for me that in no way diminishes how remarkable he is. I oftentimes say the pre-Easter Jesus was one of the two most remarkable people who ever lived. Of course, somebody always asks me, “Who’s the other one?” And I always say, “I really don’t care.” I’m simply making the point that what we see in Jesus is a human possibility.
One final way of making this same point: I sometimes speak of the pre-Easter Jesus as St. Francis with an exclamation point. I choose St. Francis because many think of him as the greatest and even the most Christlike of the Christian saints. Is St. Francis a human possibility? Of course. How often does a St. Francis come along? Not very often.
So I do see the pre-Easter Jesus as utterly remarkable. I see him as so open to the Spirit of God that he could be filled with it to a remarkable degree, but he’s not God simpliciter. To say that, I think, creates confusion. To say that the pre-Easter Jesus is God or even simply that he was divine makes it impossible to say that we are to follow him. We as human beings cannot follow somebody who was not fully human himself.
One of your many books is titled The Heart of Christianity. The concept of Christianity and being a Christian has different meanings for different people. Can you explain to us what you consider to be the essence or heart of Christianity, and what it means to be a Christian?
I have a number of shorthand ways of speaking about what it means to be a Christian for me and, I think, more generally too. One of them simply goes like this. To be a Christian is to enter more and more deeply into a relationship with God as known decisively in Jesus.
The first part of that, “to enter more and more deeply into a relationship with God,” would apply to the majority of the major religions of the world. What makes that a Christian statement is the last part, “as known decisively in Jesus”; Christians are people who find the decisive revelation of God in this person. Another way I have of putting it is to say that Christians are people who speak Christian.
I need to explain that a bit. I think of the religions of the world as a little bit like ethnic groups. French people are people who speak French, but it’s not just about speaking French; there’s a French ethos that goes with it. So if I were to become fluent in French, it would not really make me French, because I wouldn’t have been steeped in that whole culture.
Similarly, you could speak Christian and not be Christian, but to a considerable extent being Christian means using Christian language and Christian scriptures to talk about God and our relationship to God and then, of course, following the path indicated by that language.
One final shorthand way of putting it is, Christians are those who live out their lives with God within the framework of the Christian tradition. Muslims are those who live out their lives with God within the framework of Islam. Jews are those who live out their lives with God within the framework of the Jewish tradition. And so on.
For me personally—and this is not about the superiority of Christianity at all; this is just why I am so deeply committed to the Christian journey—I think the Christian message, the Christian gospel, speaks to the two deepest yearnings of most human beings. One of those yearnings is for a fuller connection to what is. I think most people would say the best moments in their lives are those moments when they’ve felt most connected to what is right in front of their face.
I also think that most people yearn for the world to be a better place. These two yearnings are at the heart of the Christian message. The first is the yearning for God. The second is the yearning for a better world that is expressed in the second great commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself. For me, being Christian provides a vehicle, a vessel, a community for living out those yearnings.
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Originally published on ExploreFaith.org, June 2009.
Chapter 14
The Heart and Soul of Christianity
DURING MY INTRODUCTION, I was sitting there thinking about my having written The Heart of Christianity, Huston’s having written The Soul of Christianity, and Huston’s seeing that book as a corrective of mine. I thought perhaps I should just break into song with a few verses of “Heart and Soul”!
Humor aside, I want to begin with a brief tribute to Huston Smith. I need to be careful here, because I could go on quite long. Like many of you, I’ve known about Huston’s work for forty years, probably. But I first met Huston some twenty-one years ago, when he was the leader of a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar here in Berkeley for eight weeks, and I was one of fifteen participants with him. That marked the beginning of what I am pleased to say is a friendship, and it’s such an honor, such a treat, for me to have done a number of events like this with Huston over the years and to be doing yet another one tonight.
I have sometimes said that when I grow up, I want to be like Huston Smith. I figure it’ll take me a few more incarnations to get there, but that’s all right. I also want to say that I’ve learned more from Huston than from any other scholar outside of my area of specialization. I find myself on the same page as him on everything of importance that I can think of. And he has also helped me to find that page.
Let me turn now to what I see as most central to Christianity, what I see as the heart of Christianity. I will develop five main points.
The Reality of the Sacred
First: at the heart of Christianity is a robust affirmation of God or the sacred or Spirit—terms that I use synonymously and interchangeably. I stress “robust,” because I think in Western Christianity over the last few hundred years that affirmation has sometimes been a bit tentative or uncertain. That has happened in what we sometimes refer to as liberal Christianity as well as in conservative Christianity. In liberal Christianity, a whole cohort of seminarians including my generation, and maybe a generation on either side of mine, came out of seminary with a lot of uncertainty about whether God was real. This may have been due to seminary, but it also could have been the times. It wasn’t too long ago that the “death of God” theology was very current.
Conservative Christians in the West have also oftentimes suffered from uncertainty about God, and that’s why there’s been so much emphasis on believing in God. People take it for granted you can’t know God, so when you can’t know something and everything’s uncertain, then of course that’s why it takes faith. So even with those who say they’re most certain about God
because they believe in God really strongly, there’s a kind of tentativeness to that, because it’s primarily about believing in a reality who, from one point of view, may or may not exist. So I want to stress that God should not be thought of as a problematic reality who may or may not exist. As Paul Tillich remarked half a century ago, “If, when you use the word ‘God,’ you are thinking of a being who may or may not exist, then you are not thinking of God.”
For me personally, God is more real than the world is, not because I’ve talked myself into that, but because there have been moments when I feel as though I have sensed—and I mean that quite literally, with the senses—the reality of God. Of course, affirming the reality of the sacred does not differentiate Christianity from the other religions. It shares this in common with all of the other enduring religions of the world, and it is central to what Huston calls the “primordial tradition,” which, reduced to its simplest form, affirms a two-tiered understanding of reality: the visible world of our ordinary experience and a nonmaterial realm charged with energy and power upon which the visible world is dependent for its existence in every moment of time.
Those of you who are Buddhists may disagree. About the statement that Buddhism affirms the reality of the sacred, some Buddhists would say to me, “We don’t believe in God.” Fair enough. But I must admit that I find it difficult to distinguish Buddhist such-ness from Christian is-ness. If that’s opaque to you, you can ask about that.
Sources of Revelation
Second main point: How do we know about God? What are the sources of revelation that are at the heart of Christianity? For Christians, there are two primary sources of revelation, both of them referred to as the “Word of God”: the Word of God as known in the Bible and the Word of God as known in Jesus. Finding the decisive sources of revelation in the Bible and Jesus is what makes Christians Christian and not Jewish or Muslim and so forth.
Now, to say a bit more about these two sources of revelation. The Bible as the Word of God—and notice that it’s capital W singular—is expressed in human words. I want to stress that the Bible is a human product. To think of the Bible as a divine product, in the sense of being perfect, infallible, and inerrant, is basically a modern Christian heresy. Nobody’s pronounced it a heresy, but the first time that the Bible was ever spoken of as inerrant and infallible was in the second half of the 1600s. So we have the Word of God in human words, and the Christian tradition has declared these human words—the Bible—to be sacred revelation. But those words must always be understood as pointing beyond themselves, not as the absolute themselves.
The other source of revelation for Christians is Jesus, as the Word of God embodied in a human person. The Bible, the Word of God expressed in human words. Jesus, the Word of God embodied in a person, in language from the New Testament, the Word become flesh, the Word incarnate. One of the insights that I owe to Huston, and it’s one of those things that, as soon as you hear it, you think, “Of course! Should have thought of that myself,” is that Christianity is the only major religion that finds the decisive revelation of God in a person. That’s not a claim to superiority; it’s a marker of difference.
This leads to the next point about the two sources of revelation: the supremacy of Jesus. For Christians, the meaning of our Christological language—Jesus as Son of God, Word of God, Light of the World, and so forth—is that Jesus is the decisive revelation, disclosure, epiphany of God, more precisely and specifically, what can be seen of God in a human life. There is much of God that can’t be seen in a human life: infinity, omnipresence, omniscience—none of those things can be seen in a human life. What can be seen of God in a human life is the character of God—what God is like—and the passion of God—what God is most passionate about. I suppose the older language for the character and passion of God is the nature and will of God. For Christians, Jesus is the decisive disclosure of God’s character and of passion. And when Jesus and the Bible conflict, as they sometimes do, Jesus is decisive. I sometimes express this colloquially by saying orthodox Christianity affirms that Jesus trumps the Bible. And it’s been so from the beginning.
How do we interpret this revelation? In two words, historically and metaphorically. By historically, I mean we interpret the revelation in its ancient historical context. It doesn’t mean trying to determine how much of what is reported really happened; it means determining what these stories and these texts meant within the ancient communities that told these stories and produced these texts. By metaphorically, I mean the more than literal, the more than historical meaning of these stories and texts. To use a phrase from a contemporary Roman Catholic theologian, David Tracy, from the University of Chicago, a metaphorical reading enables us to get at “the surplus of meaning that the text carries.”
Not only do I think the Bible should be interpreted historically and metaphorically, but so also Jesus should be understood historically and metaphorically. By historically, I mean we need to understand Jesus in his first-century context, or we miss so much of what he is about. By metaphorically, I mean that Jesus and his teachings have a meaning that transcends that first-century context. One might express this in speaking of Jesus as the “parable of God” or the “metaphor of God.” But both a historical and metaphorical approach apply to Jesus as well.
A Path, a Way
Third main point: Christianity is “the way.” I don’t mean that in the sense of Christian exclusivism, but that, for Christians, Christianity is “the way”—it is a path. Let me briefly tell you a story to illustrate this point. I fly a lot. Last week, I hit a million real miles on the airline that I use most. For me, flying is about R and R: it’s about rest and reading. So I assiduously seek to avoid conversations with the person sitting next to me. I try not to be rude, but I try not to give a seatmate much of an inroad, because you can sometimes get a chatty person.
I was actually reading Huston Smith’s book Why Religion Matters on a flight a couple years ago, and the woman sitting next to me looked at the title of the book and said, “Oh! You’re interested in religion!”
I said, “Yeah,” trying to leave it at that.
And she said, “I’m very interested in Buddhism and Sufism, because they’re both about a way, but I don’t have much interest in Christianity, because it’s all about believing.”
I understood her point immediately, even as I silently disagreed with it. For most modern Western Christians, believing is at the very center of what it means to be Christian: either you believe or you don’t. That’s a modern emphasis, once again. The earliest name for Christianity in the New Testament was followers of “the Way” (Acts 9:1). And, of course, the notion of “a way” is a cross-cultural, indeed archetypal image. Buddhism is about a way, Taoism is about a way, and so forth. Christianity is also about a way, a path of transformation.
And that path has two dimensions to it, equally important in the Bible. One is a personal dimension; it’s about personal transformation. New Testament imagery for that is dying and rising with Christ, understood as a metaphor for an internal process of transformation. It’s being born again, entering into a new identity and a new way of being.
Second, this transformation is political. It’s about the transformation of the world, and this is expressed in the New Testament with the central phrase the “kingdom of God.” The kingdom of God is what life would be like on earth if God were king and the rulers of this world were not. The kingdom of God is for the earth. In the Lord’s Prayer we pray, “Thy kingdom come on earth.” Or, to use the most famous verse in the New Testament to make that point, “For God so loved the world.” It doesn’t say “For God so loved me” or “For God so loved us” or “For God so loved the church” or “For God so loved the elect” or “For God so loved Christians,” but “For God so loved the world,” which I hear as not only including human beings, but the nonhuman world as well. Once one sees Christianity as a way, it means that practice—which means paying attention to the reality of God and our relationshi
p with God—practice, not believing, is central.
A last comment as I leave the third point: the way is symbolized within Christianity preeminently by the cross. The cross is a symbol of the path of personal transformation—“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me,” words from Paul (Gal. 2:19–20)—and also the symbol of confrontation with the powers that rule this world. The cross is both personal and political.
Community
Fourth point: at the heart of Christianity is community. Can you be a solitary Christian? Yes. But in an age of individualism, we’ve got to watch that, especially if our motive for being a solitary Christian is that we can’t stand other Christians. But community is utterly central to Christianity, as it is once again to all of the enduring religions. Community of praise, community as nourishment. I’m a flaming introvert, off the scale, and yet the most nourishing thing I can do for my Christian journey is to be part of a worshipping community that sings its heart out. I even find contemplative prayer, which you would think of as the most solitary kind of experience—after all, you’re silent—more powerful when I do it with a group of people than when I do it by myself. I don’t know why, but it underlines community as utterly central.
And then there’s community as a community of formation—Christian community as a community of resocialization into a new identity and way of being. We all, or at least most of us, have been socialized into modern Western culture and most of us into an American form of modern Western culture. I don’t need to trash modern Western culture or the American way of life, but the central values of Western life over the last hundred years are so radically different from anything that is recognizably Christian that to be Christian means to be resocialized into a different vision and a different way of being. Christian community is a vehicle or agent of that resocialization. I once described the three primary values of the American way of life as the three As: appearance, affluence, and achievement. Think of how different those are from anything that is identifiably Christian. That’s, to some extent, what we stand against.
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