TITLE: THE SYMBOLISM OF MYTHIC NARRATIVE IN THE
BIRTH STORIES OF JONAH AND JESUS
SUMMARY
Introduction
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate. ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is
“delivered” by God to do his redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The
confusion of tongues at Babel is reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in
the wilderness; the new Moses likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of
Micah 5:2 and to place him in the same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been
visited by magi in order to fulfill a prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of
[God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels, from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the
myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
29
queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
30
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
31
scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
32
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior
33
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
34
SAVIN G JE SUS FRO M THE CHURCH
are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
ONE Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his
redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is
reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses
likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the
same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a
prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels,
from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect
the story of another royal visitor, the
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queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King
Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the
“interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father
of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of
Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the
Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of
the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at
work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are
always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just
the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration
at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the
metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of
all sins. What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and
diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one
may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a
formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular
time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible
is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is
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shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use
Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10 What we are left to decide is whether
we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of
any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the
universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in
the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith
in God to divide and conquer? If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where
Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of
view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should
compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior
sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers
rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not
contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain? The answer is a very different sort of
truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been
taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading
Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite
unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the
second person of the Trinity.”11 Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a
deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At
one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical
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scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the
teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage.
Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might
look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under
the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but
rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in
stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally. Just imagine listening to Robert Frost
read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of
the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his
harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to
imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed
snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and
deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing? Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a
housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved.
Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American
storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it
happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” It should be humbling for Christians to remember
that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead.
Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,”
and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is
that a member of
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the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the
object of that claim. As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan
philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly
sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it: It is not absurd,
in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he
or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s
objection to Christianity: First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not
long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show,
deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking
its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it
spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate,
reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its
purer form among the ignorant. It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a
virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star,
no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the
question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical
question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
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Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is
vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What
shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could
take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of
scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily
resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the
morning. Now what? By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is
gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to
stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds
are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stainedglass window of the
Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it
aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football
coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who
stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on
his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just
denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.”
They just can’t believe their ears. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed
are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those
who
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are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce
is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear
you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth?
Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not
everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom? They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and
around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and
seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document.
The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move
them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of
their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what
Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived— or how we ought to live. The questions are all
ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.
TWO
FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
To be or not to be: that is the question. —Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
I
n the practice of religion today, faith is so uncritically joined at the hip with the idea of “believing” that
any attempt at separating the two seems radical. In fact, just the opposite is true. Not to separate them is
both unbiblical and, paradoxically, unfaithful. A Galilean sage evolved over time into a divine Savior
because a new way of being in the world gradually morphed into a new way of believing in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian, nor did he come bearing a list of theological propositions.
Peter is reported to have been the first to identify him as the expected messiah, and then the conviction of
the community that he had been raised from the dead and would come again started the process by which
following Jesus would ultimate
