Chapter One
The Seven Jesuses I Have Known
I am a Christian because I have a sustained and sustaining confidence
in Jesus Christ. I've lost and rediscovered that confidence a few
times, which is a long and messy story worth simplifying and
boiling down to manageable length in these first chapters.
I know my original attraction to Jesus came as a young
child. In my home and at Sunday school, I heard stories about
Jesus. I remember a children's picture Bible that had a simple but
beautiful picture of Jesus, seated, in a blue and white robe, with
children of all races gathered around his knees. Some were leaning
on him. Some were seated at his feet. Some had their arms around
him. His arms were opened in an embrace that took them all in,
and his bearded face carried a gentle smile a boy could trust.
Looking back, I realize the illustration wasn't historically
accurate. It was influenced more by a popular Sunday school song
that I also loved ("red and yellow, black and white, they are precious
in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world") than by
ancient Middle Eastern realities. But in a way the picture was
even truer than a historically accurate picture would have been; it
probably would have had no red, yellow, black, or white children at
all, but only brown Middle Eastern ones.
The picture Bible was augmented in my imagination by
flannel graph stories about Jesus. Flannel graph was a kind of
1950s high-tech precursor of overhead projectors, laptop video
projectors, videos, and DVDs. The teachers were always kind
women, sometimes even my own mother. Each would tell stories
with an easel behind her. On the easel would be a piece of flannel
cloth with a scene drawn on it with markers-a countryside, a
storm at sea, a courtyard with marble columns, a home, a roadside
with big boulders beside it. As the story unfolded, cut-out figures
backed with felt would be stuck on the flannel background (felt and
flannel being a gentle precursor of Velcro(r))-blind Bartimaeus,
Zacchaeus, a woman near a well, a nameless leper and his nine
friends, a Roman centurion, or a Syrophonecian woman with a
sick child. Through these stories, Jesus won my heart.
When I reached my teenage years, though, I lost that
Jesus as one loses a friend in a crushing, noisy, rushing crowd.
The crowd included arguments about evolution (which seemed
elegant, patient, logical, and actually quite wonderful to me, more
wonderful even than a literal six-day creation blitz), arguments
about the Vietnam War (which made no sense to me-even if
communism was as bad as everyone said, were people better off
bombed and napalmed to death?), arguments about ethical issues
like civil rights and desegregation and a hundred other things. I
wondered if women were really supposed to be submissive to men
and if rock 'n' roll was really of the devil. Were Catholics really
going to burn in hell forever unless they revised their beliefs and
practices to be biblical like us?
After a short foray into doubt and a rather mild (all things
considered) youthful rebellion, my faith in Jesus was revitalized,
largely through the Jesus Movement. For those who were part
of it, especially in its early days, the Jesus Movement was a truly
wonderful thing. There was a simplicity, a childlikeness, a naïveté,
and a corresponding purity of motive that I have seldom seen since.
In fact, this book may simply be an attempt to articulate what many
of us felt and "knew" during those years.
But all too soon the Jesus Movement was co-opted. It was
to a different Jesus that I was gradually converted.
The first new Jesus I met had a different face, a different
tone, a different function. "Jesus was born to die," I was told
again and again, which meant his entire life-including the red,
yellow, black, and white children around his knees . Zacchaeus in
the sycamore tree (which gave me a lifelong love for sycamores) .
Bartimaeus by the road . the one grateful leper returning . the
woman by the well . the caring parents who begged him to heal
their children-was quite marginalized. Everything between
his birth and death was icing at most, assuredly not cake. This
marginalization was unintentional, but in my experience it was
very real. I was losing something but gaining something, too: the
conservative Protestant (or Evangelical) Jesus.
The Conservative Protestant Jesus
For conservative Protestants, the Good News centers on the
crucifixion of Jesus. Jesus saves us by dying on the cross. "Jesus was
born to die," I heard again and again. By dying, Jesus mysteriously
absorbs the penalty of all human wrongdoing through all of history.
The cross becomes the focal point where human injustice-past,
present, and future-meets the unconquerable compassion and
forgiveness of God. Jesus, hanging in agony, says, "Father, forgive
them, for they do not know what they are doing." We are given
confidence that at our worst moment, the moment at which we
humans behave as badly as is possible in this universe by torturing
and killing God's ultimate messenger and representative to us, his
prayer is answered. His innocent self-sacrifice somehow cancels
out human guilt.
At the cross, the powerful horror of human evil and
the more powerful glory of God's mercy meet, and human evil
is exhausted, but not God's mercy. Exactly how this happens is
understood through various metaphors, with the following four
perhaps being most popular.
A legal metaphor: God is judge and humanity is guilty,
deserving the death penalty. Jesus, a perfect representative
of humanity, willingly takes the death penalty deserved by all
humanity. Justice is satisfied, and evildoers can be forgiven. In
this metaphor the forensic language of law, guilt, punishment,
penalty, and justification is all-important. Sometimes the cool,
impersonal guilt pronounced by the law is replaced by the hot
wrath erupting from the Judge, but both styles reflect the same
legal metaphor.
An economic metaphor: God is the good master, and we
are God's servants, but we run away (or are lured away, perhaps
kidnapped) by the Evil One, who makes us his slaves. Jesus offers
himself to Satan as the representative of the human race: "Take me
and let them go," Jesus says, offering himself as a kind of ransom
payment. Satan takes Jesus, and as a result, we are potentially set
free. (And Satan gets double-crossed in the end because after
killing Jesus and thinking he has triumphed, Jesus triumphs by
rising from the dead.) In this metaphor the business language of
selling, buying, price, and payment is paramount.
A governmental metaphor: The human race has rebelled against
the King. To be forgiven and restored as citizens in good standing,
humanity must repent and resubmit itself to God's will. But
humans are so distorted by evil that they are unable to sincerely
repent and resubmit to God. Jesus, through his obedient life
and voluntary death, acts as a representative for all humanity and
enacts repentance and submission to God's will for all humanity.
As the representative of the human race, his perfect obedience and
submission extend to all who will trust Jesus. In this metaphor,
political terms like representation, reconciliation, and citizenship are
essential.
A military metaphor: The human race has been conquered
by an alien power or powers (Sin, the Devil, and Death are the
most common antagonists, although Paul's more ambiguous
"principalities and powers" could also be included). Jesus goes to
battle with the alien power(s), and appears to be defeated in death,
but his death turns out to be the undoing of the antagonist. In
this metaphor, military terms such as battle, defeat, and conquering are
predominant.
Many conservative Protestants develop little analogies to
explain, on a more popular and less technical level, how the death
of Jesus "works" to bring us forgiveness within these metaphorical
contexts. There are well-circulated stories, for example, about
an impending train wreck averted by a man whose son is killed
in the process, a bad boy in school whose punishment is taken by
a good boy, etc. There's a diagram about a chasm and a bridge. I
used to share these diagrams and stories enthusiastically, although
over time each analogy presented logical and ethical problems that
dulled my enthusiasm.
Ultimately, most thoughtful conservative evangelical
Protestants will agree that none of these explanations, metaphors,
or theories perfectly or completely explains how the death of Jesus
brings good news to the world: the full answer includes and yet
eludes all these metaphors, analogies, and diagrams. However
it happens, conservative Protestants agree that by dying, Jesus
opens the door, not just to heaven beyond this life, but to true
communion and relationship with God in this life-whoever you
are, whatever you've done. This Good News captured my heart in
my late teenage years and recaptured my allegiance to Jesus.
In particular, it meant (and means) a lot to me because I
don't think I've ever gone very long without sinning in some more or
less obvious way: pride, lust, greed, untruthfulness (exaggeration,
excuses), ungratefulness-not to mention the subtler ways. This
understanding of Jesus focuses directly, and nearly exclusively, on
the problem of individual moral guilt.
But as precious and indispensable as this perspective is
for me, over the years a feeling grew within me, usually vague but
sometimes acute, that I was missing something, perhaps something
important. Jesus' cross in the past saved me from hell in the
future, but it was hard to be clear on what it meant for me in the
struggle of the present. And more importantly, did the gospel have
anything to say about justice for the many, not just the justification
of the individual? Was the gospel intended to give hope for human
cultures and the created order in history, or was history a lost
cause, so that the gospel only could give hope to individual souls
beyond death, beyond history-like a small lifeboat in which a few
lucky souls escape a huge sinking cruise ship?
And did the conservative Protestant emphasis on the death
of Jesus necessarily marginalize Jesus' life-his wise teachings and
his kind deeds, which had captured my childhood imagination?
Over time I began to feel as though, from my perspective, the
gospel became simply an individualistic theory, an abstraction with
personal but not global import. It became about the solution to a
cosmic legal/business/political problem, real and serious, but a bit
dry, a bit removed from real life. In my heart grew a deep, subtle,
unspoken sense that something was missing, which gradually
opened my heart to search for other ways of seeing Jesus.
I should add that this dissatisfaction with the conservative
Protestant Jesus intensified just last Christmas when one of my
children was home for the holidays from college. I asked him how
he was doing spiritually.
"I'm struggling, Dad," he said.
"Tell me about that," I said.
He replied, "Well, Dad, if Christianity is true, then nearly
everyone I love is going to be tortured in the fires of hell forever.
And if it's not true, then life has no meaning." He was silent for a
moment and then added, "I just wish there were a better option."
My heart was broken. I asked, "Is that the understanding
of Christianity you got from me?"
He replied, "No, but that's the way most Christians think.
They just kind of bottom-line everything to heaven or hell, and
that makes life feel kind of cheap."
My son's insight doesn't apply to the best expressions of
conservative Protestants, but it does, I fear, apply too often to the
most popular ones. He put into blunt and powerful terms exactly
what I felt vaguely and inarticulately when I was his age.
The Pentecostal/Charismatic Jesus
The second Jesus I met in my spiritual journey as a young
adult-back when I was about my son's age-was the Pentecostal or
Charismatic Jesus. If the conservative Protestant Jesus can tend
to become something of an abstraction, necessary for the solution
to my legal problem with God the Judge, but somewhat removed
from daily experience apart from guilt removal, the Pentecostal
Jesus was up close, present, and dramatically involved in daily life.
If the conservative Protestant Jesus saves from a future hell by his
death in the past, the Pentecostal Jesus also saves by his powerful
presence in this present moment.
Sadly, much of my early exposure to the Pentecostal Jesus
was clouded by a technical argument with relational implications.
The argument had to do with whether all those who were truly
following Jesus and therefore "Spirit-filled" had to "speak in
tongues," which was an experience of the earliest Christians on
a Jewish holiday called Pentecost (hence the name of the group
or movement) involving speaking in unknown (some would say
ecstatic) languages. The argument, happily beyond the scope of
our discussion here, doubly forced one to think in terms of "who's
in/who's out." Not only must one monitor who's a Christian or
"saved" or "born again" (a distinction practiced by nearly all
conservative Protestants including Pentecostals), but also one
must be aware of who's "Spirit-filled" or not. I found this constant
judging of in/out, us/them to be fatiguing and distracting from
loving everyone I met as a neighbor, which I was pretty sure should
be primary for Christians.
My Pentecostal friends wanted me to be "in" and share
"the gift." But in spite of my sincere prayers and even tears, for
many years I never received "the gift of tongues" and was made to
feel like a second-class citizen in Pentecostal circles. Even after I
did "receive the gift" (which turned out to be quite anticlimactic
after all the fuss), I never bought into the belief that there were two
easy-to-distinguish classes of Christians: Spirit-filled tongues
speakers and everyone else. I resisted this Pentecostal teaching for
three reasons (not including the fact that I didn't find the biblical
arguments convincing).
First, by that time I had met too many certified tongues-speaking
Christians who were consistently dishonest, weird,
unhealthy, and mean-spirited. Any understanding of being
"Spirit-filled" that didn't include helping people to become
healthy, Christlike, and kind didn't seem to be worth much.
Second, I had met too many non-tongues speakers who were
sincere and Christ-like, radiant and fragrant with the Spirit of
Christ. Third, I didn't want to do to others as had been done to me
by creating a two-tier, in-group/out-group status.
In spite of this rocky start, from the Pentecostals I became
convinced that Jesus is here and now present, active, alive and well,
and that the stories of Jesus that had so won my heart as a child
were not marginalized at all-and even better, they were not over,
either.
Continues.
