Eyre Lines

There has been a certain amount of fuss on the internet recently arising out of a video by Andy Stanley and a response by Michael Brown. I was not by any means the only person to have mentioned Marcion in criticising Stanley’s position (if I recall, I wrote something like “come back, Marcion, all is forgiven”), and there has been quite a bit of pushback against that label, most recently by my occasional employer Henry Neufeld. There was earlier a rather similar criticism by Jacob Wright (in a set of posts on 14th May). Both of those are people whose opinions I take very seriously.

So, is there any justification in suggesting that Stanley was going in the direction of Marcion (I stopped short of calling him Marcionite, though others commenting didn’t)? Quite clearly, he does not follow Marcion in coming to the conclusion that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures was a different God from the one revealed in or by Jesus, so to that extent he is not Marcionite. However, he does effectively dismiss the whole system of the Hebrew Scriptures, which is what Marcion is most prominently remembered for (Marcion constructed a Bible consisting of the Gospel of Luke, somewhat redacted, and 11 “Pauline” letters, which is fairly widely thought to have been the impetus for the church constructing their own rather wider canon). Indeed, not a few scholars think that Marcion didn’t actually propose “another God”; this was something levelled against him by his critics, so the reliable information is just that he wanted to ditch the Hebrew Scriptures. Stanley probably had in mind Hebrews 10:4, “It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.” But there is, to my mind, a huge problem in taking this approach, and just as Henry goes rather further than Michael Brown, I go further than Henry.

If we take Hebrews 10:4 as saying that sacrifices were ineffective,it suggests that the whole sacrificial system laid out in Leviticus and Deuteronomy was pointless. The snag there is that most of those proposing such a view, or views somewhat less extreme but still dismissive of a huge proportion of the Hebrew Scriptures, also consider those same scriptures to have been divinely inspired (they were, after all, probably the “scripture” which 2 Timothy labels “God-breathed”, while the NT writings were almost certainly not at that point so regarded), and thus they need to ask themselves why God would lay down a very detailled scheme for dealing with sin (though this was not by any means the only explicit purpose of the Levitical sacrifice regime) which was ineffective. I’ve got flak previously for pointing out that Biblical writers seem to have made God tell – well, not the exact truth – but this point of view argues, in effect, that God perpetrated a collossal scam on the Israelites which they were suckered by for their entire history (and most of them still are).

The writer of Hebrews, in fact, has exactly that problem. A little later (Heb. 9:22) is the passage much quoted by those who would like us to think that Jesus’ death was a propitiating sacrifice for the sins of all, stating that “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” (a keen eye will note that the passage says “nearly everything”, not “everything”, which rather negates the thesis). It is, therefore, on the very basis that the Levitical system was effective that at least this New Testament writer expounds his theology (which, to my eyes, is more a “last and final sacrifice” theology written in the circumstances that there was no more Temple to sacrifice in, but I have a lot of friends and acquaintances who think it exactly a support of substitutionary atonement).

He is not alone. Paul, in Romans, spends much time trying to work out how he can say at the same time that the Law (the first five books of the Bible) is a good and necessary thing, but also that it has been pretty much wiped away by his interpretation of Jesus’ death and resurrection (Paul is big on including resurrection, which is an optional add-on to most if not all substitutionary atonement theories). For Gentiles, at any rate. He is, for instance, much quoted as saying that the Law is a “stumbling block”.

Aaron Andrus, in a comment to another piece from Jacob of the same day (see link above), goes so far as to suggest that if we don’t agree with Stanley, we risk being labelled “Judaisers” ourselves – that bugbear of Paul, which seems to have followed him around. The trouble is, I think those who agree wholeheartedly with Henry in saying “There is an earth-shattering change with the incarnation, the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus…” (and, of course, with Jacob, who takes a similar tack “As I have said for years, I believe the Old Testament is the history of a people wrestling with divine revelation through their own many times primitive violent lens, and God worked through this anthropological, social evolution as they projected their often faulty and barbaric human nature onto God, all the while God summoned them to higher ideals of mercy, justice, and inclusion, until we get the full unveiled image of God in Christ who taught God as an Abba who loves his enemies and calls us to emulate him.”) are making a mistake. Jacob, indeed, thinks that we don’t need the Hebrew Scriptures in order to follow Christ, the Gospels will do admirably – and even that, at a push, we can do without the Gospels as well. I take issue with this; it is to my mind impossible fully to understand the Gospels without knowledge of a whole load of earlier scripture on which they depend in part and which they quote-mine shamelessly (not that that’s a bad thing…), and a Jesus shorn of his actual life events is, to my mind, no Jesus at all. You equally cannot understand Paul without similar knowledge of the scriptures he uses (and, were he a modern bible student, one could argue misuses).

“Judaiser”, of course, was specifically used by Paul to complain of those who thought that in order to be followers of Jesus, they first had to convert to Judaism (with all 613 commandments and, for men, physical modification – which Paul’s Gentile audience clearly did not find popular!). I don’t think any of us who have seen shades of Marcion (or at least the Marcion who discounted the Hebrew Scriptures, rather than the one his enemies describe) in Stanley would want to go that far. But I do think that, if we wish to follow the actual Jesus, we should recall that the religion OF Jesus was Judaism, and without understanding that, I find it difficult to see how we could follow him. Those who see an “earth shattering change” are no doubt subscribers to the religion ABOUT Jesus which is what Christianity has mostly become (the contrast is one which I think is owed to John Dominic Crossan); it is to a great extent the creation of Paul (and the writer of the Fourth Gospel, to be fair) who were very much devotees of things being about Jesus. To my mind, this is all to the detriment of Jesus’ lifetime ministry, which was all couched in terms of Judaism, though a Judaism which was being subtly changed in the process. If a wish to follow Jesus as nearly as reasonably possible is “Judaising”, I’ll say that my Jesus trumps your Paul (or possibly that I’m a fundamentalist at heart – so fundamentalist that I regard Paul with suspicion…).

Clearly it’s now impractical to “Judaise” in Paul’s sense of converting to Judaism for Jesus followers – it isn’t possible to convert to Judaism while maintaining a devotion to Jesus these days. Indeed, I see absolutely no necessity for it, unless, perhaps, you’re gripped with an ambition of following Jesus very closely indeed (in which case I fear you will be disappointed; the only option really would be “Messianic Judaism”, which is not really Judaism at all, at least according to every branch of Judaism proper). The stories of the Syrophonecian woman, the Good Samaritan and of the Centurion’s servant strongly indicate that while Jesus may have initially thought his message only for the lost of the House of Israel, his focus had broadened, and needed to include non-Jews, even from the historical enemies, the hated heretics or the brutal occupiers of the homeland. Perhaps if he had had more time to flesh out his ideas, he might have come up with something like the idea of the Noahide Covenant. It is possible that the concept already existed, indeed; certainly there were already in the first century plenty of people regarded as “righteous gentiles”; non-Jewish synagogue-goers were a significant category, indeed, forming the basis for Paul’s missions. Perhaps it’s for this reason that even Paul preserved the possibility that his proto-Christian followers could follow the Jewish Law, even though there was no need for them to do so. I’m with Paul on that point, just as I’m with him in his “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” statement in Galatians (my misgivings about him come from other places…).

I’ll go a step further. What Jesus did in his lifetime is important, what he told us we should do if we want to follow him is vital; this is the real Jesus (at least insofar as the NY writers were not putting their words into his mouth). That gives us the Way of Jesus, which is (even more than was Judaism) the religion OF Jesus. What people later said, about his importance, why he died, why he is still with us in some way, what his relationship is to cosmic principles such as sin and forgiveness – or even God, is not just the religion ABOUT Jesus, it exists in what I tend to call “concept-space”, not in reality. Ideas in concept-space can be very useful, even extremely important to how we are in the world, but they aren’t real. They act on our minds, not on the more tangible “stuff of reality”. They are subject to change without warning, as peoples’ thinking changes. This is how we now have a Christianity in which an imperial power can be thought of as “Christian” and in which people can gasp at the idea that a follower of Jesus could be anything other than a Republican capitalist – neither of which is remotely compatible with what Jesus actually taught his followers. The ideas have changed – and they could change again.

Thus, I’m pretty much in total agreement with a recent piece by Roger Wolsey, in which he says (inter alia) “Jesus didn’t die for our sins. Jesus wasn’t killed instead of us. God isn’t wrathful or vindictive. There isn’t a hell (other than ones that we create here on this earth). Going to heaven after we die isn’t what the faith or salvation is about…  …Jesus’ resurrection didn’t have to be understood as a physical one for it to be a real and meaningful one (Paul and many of the early disciples encountered a spiritually risen Christ).” OK, he also said “Jesus isn’t God”, which I (as a panentheist) would query, but the drift is definitely right.

It follows that I don’t think there was “an earth-shattering change with the incarnation, the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus”. There WAS an earth-shattering change in concept-space which followed those events, and an equally earth-shattering change in human history. What, then, of Jacob’s statement: “Furthermore, I believe it is possible for people to experience and know Christ without reading the Bible at all. This is not to say the Bible is unhelpful or that you should throw it away. Of course not. It is simply to say that Christ is exactly who the Bible says he is – the cosmic Logos who fills and sustains the whole universe, in whom all live, move, and have being, and who is the light that enlightens all coming into the world. His presence is at work everywhere whether they have heard of his historical story or not.”? Well, in a way, I would say that he is right – “the heavens and the earth proclaim the glory of the Lord”, you might say, and (in concept-space) we have equated Christ with God. But there is really nothing there of the Jesus who lived, taught and died in first-century Palestine. I’ve no real problem with that; it’s a heartfelt statement of adherence to God (envisioned as Christ), but it’s departed too far from Jesus for my taste – and, indeed, only the very Jewish Jesus could possibly have been the Messiah, the Christos…

Come to think of it, there’s precious little of the living Jesus in Paul either. And that’s my biggest misgiving about Paul. Where there’s any doubt in my mind, I’ll stick with Jesus rather than Paul.