Who is Jesus? The academy vs. the Gospels.

From the start, Christianity has been rooted in the paradoxical claim that a human being executed as a criminal is the source of God's life-giving and transforming Spirit. From the start, this "good news" has been regarded as foolishness to the wise of the world.

Christianity has never been able to "prove" its claims except by appeal to the experiences and convictions of those already convinced. The only real validation for the claim that Christ is what the Creed claims him to be, that is, light from light, true God from true God, is to be found in the quality of life demonstrated by those who make this confession. The claims of the gospel cannot be demonstrated logically. They cannot be proved historically. They can be validated only existentially by the witness of authentic Christian discipleship.

Christianity has credibility, both with its own adherents and its despisers, to the degree that it claims and lives by its own distinctive identity. This means, at a minimum, recognizing that Christianity is not measured by cultural expectations but by the experiences and convictions by which it lives. The church must bear witness to the reality of a God who transforms suffering and death with the power of new life. A church that has lost a sense of boundaries--that is, a grasp of its self-definition--can only recover them by reasserting its character as a community of faith with a canon of Scripture and a creed.

It is not at all obvious how Christians can recover some sense of community, canon, and creed. The present polarization and distrust between conservative and liberal tendencies within Christianity make the recovery more difficult. But a start might be the simple recognition that whatever the church's discourse is, it should not be the same as the academy's, nor should it be subject to the same rules or the same criteria of validity. It is time for a return from the academic captivity of the church.

The church's crisis has been dramatically exposed in the current historical Jesus debate. There has been no clear sense of where "the church" stands as a community concerning the historical Jesus. One reason for this lack of consensus has Luke Timothy Johnson teaches New Testament at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University. This essay is adapted from The Real Jesus by Luke Timothy Johnson. Copyright [c] 1995 by Luke Timothy Johnson. Reprinted by arrangement with Harper Collins San Francisco, a division of Harper Collins Publishers. been the loss within the church of any sense of how the Scripture can function as a basis for debate and decision making in response to crisis. This loss, in turn, is in considerable measure due to the hegemony of the modern historical-critical method of biblical scholarship. Several generations of scholars and theologians have been disabled from direct and responsible engagement with the texts of the tradition in their religious dimension by an uncritical acceptance of the epistemological assumptions of that method. Even more obvious has been the disappearance of the Creed as a meaningful framework for reading Scripture and undertaking theological discourse within the community.

Allow me to speak as a teacher of New Testament in a nondenominational seminary. Shouldn't we communicate to students that the church is not really only an institutionalized form of racism, sexism, and speciesism, but is a place in the world where the power of resurrection life can be realized and enacted? Shouldn't we treat the canon of Scripture as something more than the arbitrary or ideologically motivated preemptive suppression of variety in the ancient church by patriarchal bishops, and show students how the fundamental issue of the character of God's gift in the crucified messiah, and therefore also the character of discipleship in response to that gift, was and is at stake in the question of which documents are to be read authoritatively in the church? Shouldn't we be willing to assert with students, as every Christian theologian before us was willing to assert, that Jesus is Son of God made flesh, before engaging the question of how that paradoxical statement can be intellectually engaged?

Most of all, we need to understand the primary task of theology not to be the reform of the world's social structures, nor the ideological critique of the church as institution, nor the discovery of what is false or distorting in religious behavior, but the discernment and articulation of the work of the living God. Within the Christian community, this means the discernment of the ways in which the transformative power of the Spirit of the risen Christ is present and active, as well as the ways it is resisted and impeded. It means articulating the implications of God's work in human experience for the response of the church in obedience and service. And by such theological activity, the story of Jesus comes alive both within the texts of human experience and in the texts of the New Testament.

Those of us who are entrusted with the formation of Christianity's ministers and leaders ought, I think, to take less seriously the judgment of our academic colleagues and more seriously the judgment of God, "before whose judgment seat we all shall stand" (Rom. 14:10). We need to ask not only what we are teaching but also what we are failing to teach. We can begin by affirming what is positive in the gift of God in Jesus Christ and what is of astonishing and transformative power in the story of Jesus, before asking what is lacking in it and how it might need supplementing from other traditions. We should, in a word, ask of each other before and during our criticism of the Christian tradition an explicit and exquisite loyalty to it.

If such loyalty is to be an authentic expression of faith, however, it must also be critical. Ultimate human loyalty is appropriately directed to the living God rather than to community memory. The task of theology in the church is not only discernment of God's word and praise of God's work, but also critical reflection on the received tradition and the adequacy of the human response to God.

Biblical scholarship can play a key role in such critical reflection. It has failed to play that role adequately because it has for too long attached itself to a narrow construal of "critical." In biblical scholarship, "critical" has tended to be identified with "historical." The "historical-critical method," furthermore, has tended to be overly critical of the tradition and insufficiently critical of itself. For biblical scholarship to play its appropriate critical role within Christian theology--and my argument here concerns only its function within the church as distinct from the academy--it requires a broader and more comprehensive model for the apprehension of the

New Testament writings as such, and requires as well a more inclusive sense of "criticism." New Testament scholars need a model that enables them to approach the texts in as many ways as the texts approach us. At least four aspects of the New Testament texts should be taken into account.

1. Anthropological: These writings are thoroughly human in the process of their composition. Appeals to divine inspiration are claims about the ultimate origin of the texts and their authority. Inspiration is not a key to interpretation. The texts are the result of real human persons interpreting their experience, and seeking to understand their experience with available cultural symbols. The anthropological perspective recognizes that religious literature is generated by real experiences and convictions, and not simply by aesthetic concerns.

2. Historical: The writers of the New Testament were not Trobrianders. They were Jews of the first-century Mediterranean world. Their experiences and convictions, therefore, were necessarily interpreted within a symbolic framework specific to that place and time. If the anthropological dimension establishes connections between readers and these texts, the historical dimension demands coming to grips with the cultural "otherness" of the writings. Recognizing the historical dimension is not the same as using the texts for the kind of historical reconstruction engaged in by the Jesus Seminar [a group of scholars who, since 1985, have voted on the authenticity of passages in the New Testament].

3. Literary: The canon of the New Testament consists of compositions that are diverse in their literary fashioning, perspectives, and purposes. The meaning of texts is inextricably connected with their literary construction. Gaining access to such meaning demands of the interpreter, therefore, a genuine engagement with the literary complexities of the respective compositions. One of the great deficiencies of the historical-critical model has been its disregard for this dimension, leading to the fragmentation of the texts into smaller pieces that can be used as historical sources. It is certainly true that some New Testament compositions were complex in their construction and did make use of earlier sources. But the final literary form of such texts was canonized, and only attention to this given literary dimension can accurately be called the interpretation of the "New Testament." It is striking that most of modern historical Jesus research begins with the elimination of the literary structure of the Gospels.

4. Religious: Members of a religious movement produced these compositions for other members of that movement. More than that, specifically religious experiences and convictions generated the writings. To read these compositions in terms simply of the historical information they provide is to miss the most important and most explicit insight they offer the reader, namely, how the experience of the powerful transforming Spirit of God that came through the crucified Messiah Jesus created not only a new understanding of who Jesus was but, simultaneously, a new understanding of God and God's way with the world.

A more adequate model for reading the New Testament, then, can be called an "experience/interpretation" model. The model takes seriously the deeply human character of the writings, the experiences, and convictions that generated them, and the cultural and historical symbols they appropriate. It enables the scholar to apprehend the historical dimensions of the New Testament texts without forcing them to perform a task for which they are ill-equipped, namely, to serve as sources for a reconstruction of Christian origins. Best of all, the model for understanding how the New Testament came into existence also provides a framework for interpreting these compositions within the life of the church.

New Testament scholarship within the church, then, should be critical first of all by being self-critical. Because so much of the work done within the framework of the historical-critical perspective lacked such self-examination, its hidden normative assumptions remained untested. The development of "ideological criticism" among contemporary scholars begins with the recognition that literature and art are not neutral, but always have an interest. Some of this criticism has focused on the ideological interest of the New Testament writings (for example, their patriarchalism), without also taking into account the ideological agenda of the interpreter.

The more recent tendency in scholarship to identify and name the ideological commitments of the interpreter is a positive step. Other critics can then evaluate fairly the extent to which such an ideological starting point enables readings and the extent to which it suppresses readings. They can also test the degree to which readings are consistent with declared perspectives.

It is entirely appropriate for an interpreter to declare an allegiance to the traditional Christian code as the ideological starting point for interpretation. The readings generated by such an interpreter can then fairly be tested by reference to that code. It would be equally appropriate for those who detested and despised traditional Christianity and sought to destroy it by means of undermining confidence in its normative texts to state their commitment clearly, so that their efforts also could be fairly evaluated by their chosen standard.

Biblical scholarship can also be "critical" of the New Testament texts themselves in ways that the "historical-critical" model did not allow. It can be challenged morally, religiously, and theologically for its adequacy, consistency, and cogency. Do the texts of the New Testament, when taken at face value, support a structure of society in which women are oppressed? Such texts can best be criticized, not by constructing an imaginary, alternative history of early Christianity in which women enjoyed equality, but on the basis of theological convictions that God's Spirit has brought to maturity within the church. Does the New Testament's inherited monotheism bring with it a virus of intolerance toward diversity that has infected Christian attitudes and behavior? These texts can best be criticized, not by inventing a history of Christianity that was non-Jewish, but by invoking other moral and religious principles within the text to counter the virus of intolerance.

Such an ecclesial hermeneutics begins with the premise that God's Spirit is working in the world to transform humans into the image of the "real Jesus." The discernment of human experience is brought into conversation with the complex and often conflicting voices of the normative texts of tradition, and the diversity of voices in the canon is allowed to converse with the diverse voices of contemporary experience. Contradictions in the scriptural texts can be exploited to provide new insights into the "mind of Christ" by which the church seeks to live. Biblical scholarship need not be "historical" in order to be "critical."

Finally, "critical" can mean allowing the texts to criticize the practices of the church and the assumptions of the tradition. This is obviously a legitimate and important function of scholarship within the church. It is what was originally intended by Luther's principle of sola scriptura. Luther recognized that without a dialectical relationship to the texts, in which they were given their own authority over the church, tradition could swallow them up and manipulate them to its own ends.

The historical-critical method inherited this perspective. A mistake was made, however, when the critical function was given to historical reconstruction rather than to the texts themselves. In truth, the sort of criticism of the church intended by Luther is located in the texts and not outside them. Here is where contemporary historical Jesus research has most seriously missed the point. The much-publicized Jesus Seminar, for example, declared its animosity toward a Jesus purveyed by televangelists. It regarded this Jesus as too much shaped in the direction of the divine by later doctrine. It saw this Jesus as too much the figure of eschatology.

But what the seminar failed to understand was that these images--if they are, indeed, seen as negative would best be criticized from within the Gospel narratives themselves, not by constructing an "alternative fiction," or an image of Jesus recoverable only by dismantling the texts. If the Jesus Seminar is concerned about Christianity's preoccupation with Armageddon, then there are more than sufficient texts within the canon to challenge that obsession. The attempt to create a "noneschatological Jesus" not only distorts history, it is bad tactics. Those who consider the end of the world to be the gist of Jesus' message are convinced that it is found in the text. Only the demonstration that the texts themselves do not support such an overemphasis, and indeed combat such an emphasis, can be convincing.

In The Five Gospels (Macmillan), the Jesus Seminar warns against looking for a comfortable Jesus. That is sound advice. However, the truly uncomfortable Jesus, the genuinely "countercultural" Jesus, is not the one reconstructed according to the ethos of contemporary academics--whether it is John Dominic Crossan's politically correct revolutionary Jesus [Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, 1994], or Marcus Borg's charismatic founder Jesus [Jesus: A New Vision, 1987], or any of the others--but the one inscribed in the canonical Gospels. The Jesus who truly challenges this age, as every age, is the one who suffers in obedience to God and calls others to such suffering service in behalf of humanity. This is the Jesus that classical Christianity has always proclaimed; this is an understanding of discipleship to which classical Christianity has always held.

The Jesus to whom Saint Francis of Assisi appealed in his call for a poor and giving rather than a powerful and grasping church was not the historical Jesus but the Jesus of the Gospels. One must only wonder why this Jesus is not also the "real Jesus" for those who declare a desire for religious truth, and theological integrity, and honest history.

Luke Timothy Johnson teaches New Testament at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University. This essay is adapted from the Real Jesus by Luke Timothy Johnson. Copyright[C] 1995 by Luke Timothy Johnson. Reprinted by arrangement with HarperCollinsSanFrancicso, a division of HarperCollinsPublishers.