Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

By the time of his Ethics, written in Berlin between 1940 and 1943, Bonhoeffer began to see the theological meaning of the political horror unfolding in Germany, and his simple insight amounted by then to a personal revolution: “An expulsion of the Jews from the West,” he wrote, “must necessarily bring with it the expulsion of Christ. For Jesus Christ was a Jew.”22 We will see how this assertion is not as obvious as it seems in the twenty-first century; in the first half of the twentieth century in Europe, home of the Aryan Christ, it was revolutionary.23 The expulsion of Jews meant the expulsion of Jesus—full stop. Only a realization of such magnitude could have then prompted the pacifist pastor’s enlistment in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler: “For Jesus Christ was a Jew.”

Note that Bonhoeffer does not say, as Martin Luther did in the title of the first of his two tracts about Jews, “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew.” Luther’s emphasis belongs on “was born,” since the whole point of the Gospel narrative, once “the Jews” rejected Christ’s teaching and sponsored his crucifixion, is that Jesus became something else—“the firstborn of the new Creation,” the first Christian.24 Bonhoeffer’s life-changing insight, in envisioning Jesus as one of those expelled—“Juden raus!”—is surely what gave rise to the great question he then asked from prison: Who actually is Christ for us today? He had already provided the beginning of the answer. Jesus Christ was a Jew.

Bonhoeffer’s personal reckoning sparks mine. I have outgrown a childish faith in Jesus, but he remains the one to whom my heart first opened when I became aware. What I grasped of him on my small knees before the crucifix in St. Mary’s Church, stripped by now of the dross of dogmatism, remains the pulse of my faith. This book is my attempt to say why Jesus has this hold on me, but the attempt requires a certain historical sweep, a theological scope. I will return to the New Testament, but, fully attuned to our contemporary struggles, I will read those texts through the lens of centuries of total war and corrupted power, trying to see how violence, contempt for women, and, above all, hatred of Jews distorted the faith of the Church I still love.

Yet Jesus is elusive. If he were not, he would be useless to us. An ultimate paradox lies at the heart of Christian belief: Jesus is fully human; Jesus is fully divine. Best to say frankly right here at the outset: Jesus as God and Jesus as man are the brackets within which this inquiry will unfold. It will look at Jesus, the Scriptures, and tradition in the contexts of both history and theology. It will ask how the texts about Jesus were written at the start, how they were interpreted early on, and how they can be understood today. That means keeping in mind at least three distinct time frames—the lifetime of Jesus, the era some decades later in which the Gospels were composed, and the present Secular Age, when faith in Jesus and in the Gospels has become a problem unto itself.

Jesus is fully divine? What can that mean now? Before dismissing such a claim, or diluting it with literary-critical revision to the point of meaninglessness, I post a kind of cautionary declaration against which every assertion in this book must be measured: if Jesus were not regarded as God almost from the start of his movement, he would be of no interest to us. We would never have heard of him. Nothing but his divinity accounts for his place in Western culture—or in my heart: not his ethic, which was admirable but hardly uncommon; not his preaching, which was firmly in line with Jewish proclamation; not his heroic suffering, which was typical of many anti-Roman Jewish resisters; not his wonder working, which was attributed to all kinds of charismatic figures in the ancient world. Nothing but a two-thousand-year-old divinity claim puts Jesus before us today.

And more: if a faith in Jesus as Son of God—a present self-disclosure of God’s fatherly and forgiving disposition, an “incarnation”—does not survive the critically minded, scientifically responsible, properly “secular” inquiry of the kind I aim to undertake, however imperfectly, then Jesus will surely drop back into the crowd of history’s heroes, ultimately to be forgotten.

The God/man affirmation, in other words, need not condemn this pursuit to irrationality or absurdity—or to a separate “non-overlapping magisterium” where normal rules of logic do not apply.25 It can, instead, sponsor a retrieval of the light, depth, and beauty of Christian tradition at its best, even while offering a new way—appropriate to a less credulous time—to say that Jesus is Christ; that Jesus Christ is God. Speaking quite personally, nothing matters more to me than that. For no other reason would I take up this work.

But the words “Jesus” and “Christ” bring us back to Bonhoeffer, for whom, under the pressure of history, the key was Jewishness. For while “Jesus” can be routinely understood as a Jew, “Christ” is taken to be the claim that cuts him off from Jewishness. In fact, on the hinge of this contradiction, as Bonhoeffer saw, turns every question—both those that close off inquiry and those that open into new understanding.

Jesus a Jew 26

That “Jesus” was Jewish can seem an obvious statement today, but in fact, the idea has barely penetrated the shallow surface of Christian theology.27 And we are not just talking here about grossly anachronistic distortions of Jesus into something alien—like the blue-eyed, flowing-haired Northern European who appeared in the picture Bibles, holy cards, and altar murals of modernity.28 No, the anti-Jewish distorting goes deeper than race, ethnicity, or cultural milieu. Lessons of the Holocaust notwithstanding, it perverts the religious imagination of the West to this day.

Christian anti-Judaism springs from the Gospel construct, dating to the late first century, that pits Jesus against “the Jews” during his Passion and death, which occurred early in that century. That construct led to the “Christ killer” slander, which many Christians have declined to repeat since World War II.29 A transformation of mainstream Christian theology, centered in the Roman Catholic reforms of the Second Vatican Council, has mostly transformed the age-old “teaching of contempt” for Jews into a “teaching of respect.” Most Christians routinely, and authentically, renounce anti-Semitism. Christian scholars and religious leaders find in Jews creative and open-minded partners in the momentous project of interfaith dialogue; Jewish scholars and leaders reciprocate.30 Nevertheless, a chasm separates Jewish and Christian perspectives, and the slow plumbing of this chasm will be a main project of this book. The separating gulf begins not at the beginning, but not long after the beginning, with the portrait first drawn of Jesus and then, across time, reified by the Church.

Among Christians, and therefore among everyone else, thinking about Jesus has not really changed much, because, even beyond the most troubling verses (“His blood be on us and on our children,” for example31), the entire structure of the Gospel imagination assumes a cosmic conflict between Jesus and his own people such that, despite the narrative’s taking pains to place Jesus in the line of David, he was hardly portrayed as authentically Jewish at all. This is more than, say, Mark’s pitting him against Pharisees in Galilee and against high priests in Jerusalem; more than the libels of the Passion. As the Christian memory overwhelmingly shapes the story, Jesus is opposed not just to particular antagonists but to the whole culture into which he was born.

In the Prologue to John’s Gospel, we find the theme struck with power: “He came to his own home, and his own people received him not.”32 It’s a basic rule of narrative, older than Aristotle: every story needs a conflict. In history—in about the year 30, the first of our three time frames—the mortal conflict faced by Jesus, like every Jew in occupied Palestine, was with Rome. But the Gospels—dating to that second time frame, between 70 and 100—do not tell it that way. As various historians and theologians point out today,33 the virtues of Jesus (openness, compassion, egalitarianism) are constantly displayed in the Gospels precisely by contrast with his corrupt Jewish milieu, which is rendered as exclusivist, unloving, legalistic, and mercilessly hierarchical. “Jesus” is the name of the manual laborer from Nazareth. Once he began to see himself, or be seen by others, as the exalted “Christ” (from the Greek for “anointed” and meaning “Messiah”), Jesus began to be understood as other than Jewish, even if his declared identity was as a fulfillment of Jewish messianic expectation. His being “Christ,” that is, worked against his being “Jesus,” because his elevation up the pyramid of what scholars call “high Christology”—from peasant Galilean to anointed Christ; then to apocalyptic Son of Man; then to favored Son of God; then to preexisting Logos, or “Word”; ultimately to second person of the Trinity, and “True God of True God”—had the practical effect of obliterating the single most cogent note of his identity as a man.

Judaism, after all, is a religion—a form of mediation between humans and God. Such mediation is necessary because, by definition, humans cannot have direct access to God. If it were otherwise, there would be no need of religion. But because Jesus as the Word of God (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”34) was understood as fully participating in the Godhead, in immediate mystical union (“I and the Father are one”35), the Gospel writer makes it clear that Jesus had no real need of the mediation of religion. He had no real need, that is, of the Jewish rituals of sacrifice, Temple observance, salvation history, metaphors, memory, Book, Law, peoplehood. Jesus underwent the paradigmatically Jewish initiation of circumcision, yes, but early Christians obsessively invented non-Jewish reasons for him to have done so.36 Christian theology, since at least the Council of Chalcedon, in 451, has insisted on the true humanity of Jesus, but by deleting the religious significance of this main fact of his particular human condition, theology has simultaneously undercut his humanity. Belief in the divinity of Jesus as usually propounded, that is, makes his authentic Jewishness not just unnecessary but impossible.

Since well before Bonhoeffer, Christian scholars have known there is a problem here. But ever since Bonhoeffer—and the crisis of the war—theologically minded historians, together with historically attuned theologians, have been driven to do heroic work in addressing that problem. We will see that. But scholarship aside, a complete transformation of popular consciousness and faith has yet to occur. If our reach is toward such a transformation here, still our reckoning with the full Jewishness of Jesus Christ will mark only the start of the story, not its end point. Taking my own case as typical, I thought years ago that I understood the meaning of the Jewishness of Jesus, having been ambushed one afternoon in the Art Institute of Chicago, for example, by the sight of the French-Jewish artist Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion, a large painting of the crucified one draped not with the familiar loincloth but with a Jewish prayer shawl. The cross rises up from a lit menorah, and the figure is surrounded by fugitives dressed in recognizably Jewish garb, terrorized by raging fires. I read, presumably on the artwork’s posted identity card, that Chagall had painted the work in 1938, in response to Kristallnacht. Jesus was a Jewish victim! But that recognition came to me in the tumultuous 1960s, when it seemed the most natural thing in the world to see Jesus, even more dramatically, as a kind of Che Guevara Jew, in rebellion against the corruptions of most fellow Jews and a Jewish establishment that saw to his killing. That perception was a block to what Chagall revealed. Who the victim? The line from Sophocles came to me, first, in this connection: “Who is the slayer, who the victim? Speak!”

The so-called Dead Sea Scrolls marked the start of a scholarly transformation and ultimately, in my case, a personal one—a decisive illumination of the context within which Jesus lived. Having been discovered beginning not long after the end of World War II,37 the ancient texts produced whole libraries of studies demonstrating that in the time of Jesus, there was not one “Judaism,” but a multiplicity of Judaisms. Various Jewish groups of that ancient era vied with one another, sometimes violently, over such questions as: Who is the “true Israel”? What is the Temple’s place? How is the Law to be kept? Given such a context, it can now be seen that Jesus in conflict with fellow Jews over just such questions was not anomalous, but typical. If he was a rebel, it was for the cause of his people. His participation in intra-Jewish disputation—arguing with Pharisees, for example, over what was permitted on the Sabbath—underscored his integrity as a defender of Israel, not its opponent. The Christian mistake—mine—has been to miss that context of intra-Jewish tension. Even today, what is more Jewish than the argument over what it is to be a faithful Jew?

In other words, the post-Holocaust task, deriving from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s rudimentary insight, is to make the Jewishness of Jesus the first lens through which to view him. This means, perhaps, putting aside for a time—and this is rarely done—the viewfinders of the four Gospels, all of which are usually read to locate the heart of his conflict with “the Jews” in his rejection of Jewish cult and Law. Our view of Jesus must come into focus around a new organizing principle: nothing we say or believe about “Christ actually” can be allowed to exclude the authenticity of his profound and permanent participation in the life of Israel.

Twice a day, Jesus pronounced the Shema.38 Every Sabbath, he read the Torah—or, if he was illiterate,39 was present for its reading. He believed that God’s Torah was given to God’s people, Am, to be brought to life in God’s land, aretz.40 As regularly as he breathed in oxygen, he took in God’s saving history. At least once a year, at Passover, his attention turned to the Temple in Jerusalem, for the burnt offerings of animals while Psalms were sung. He observed purity and revered the Temple. And if, as most Jesus historians still assume, he enacted a “cleansing” demonstration of some kind there, it was less likely an attack on the purity system of the Temple, as the story is usually read, than a defense of it. We will see more of that.

Jesus must not be imagined, in sum, as a pretend Jew, any more than he can be regarded as having been a pretend human being. If he preached the good news of love; of the trustworthiness of God, who is like a father; of the Kingdom of God41 present here and now, he did so from within Judaism, not against it. He preached not a New Testament God (of love) in opposition to an Old Testament God (of judgment),42 but one God: the God of Israel, pure and simple.

But for Christians to actually accommodate such an adjustment in their view of Jesus, they would first have to confront the indictment of their own most sacred tradition that is made explicit in the catastrophe of Christian anti-Semitism. Here is why the extensive postwar revisions by scholars—historians and theologians both—have had so little impact on the minds of ordinary Christians. Here is why, in the Catholic context, the theological transformation conceived at Vatican II was all but stillborn.43 This failure to reckon with an essential Christian failure about the Jews, for that matter, is at least part of why the spirit bled from mainstream Protestant denominations in the decades after the failure showed itself. And it is why the only form of Christian belief to actually grow in these years—evangelical fundamentalism—is a faith dedicated to the restoration of the very biblical literalism that put “Christ killer” Jews at risk in the first place. To actually change their understanding of Jesus Christ, that is, Christians would have to far more fully confront the Church’s own ancient and ongoing betrayal of Jesus, the one that makes such change necessary.

It is curious that Christians should find it so difficult to imagine that both ordinary members and consecrated leaders of the Protestant and Catholic churches alike should have grievously let their Lord down in the twentieth century’s Nazi era, since the Gospels emphasize that, in the first century, the entire inner circle of Jesus’ followers abandoned him in his hour of need. Over time, the ubiquity of such failure by “the faithful” was de-emphasized to the point of being forgotten as the Church developed its mechanisms of self-canonization. But, because of sand thrown by history, those mechanisms are stuck.

The history in question, of course, includes not just failures of the followers of Jesus, early and late, but also the counterbalancing glories of sustained intellectual inquiry. That project—faith seeking understanding—steadily promoted new levels of human wisdom, but ultimately, with the coming of rationalism at the time of the Enlightenment, it also undermined traditional notions of nature and the supernatural, a development that had to affect understandings of Jesus. So this book, about belief in the Secular Age—like any work on the topic—has necessarily been provoked by challenges arising from science, but that is not its primary stimulus. Far more gravely, this reflection aims to reckon, for the sake of faith, with the tragic compulsions of human behavior.

There are, to be sure, intellectual obstacles to traditional faith, but many otherwise “modern” believers have accommodated those, if only by leaving critical reflection and historical-mindedness outside when they pass through the door of the church. Yet in the twenty-first century, ethical obstacles to belief have become increasingly difficult to ignore. Moral anarchy has shown itself in sanctuary after sanctuary, whether one considers the descent of strains of Eastern Orthodox religion into Islamophobic brute nationalism (think of the recent Balkans wars, in which genocidal attacks on Bosnian Muslims by Orthodox Serbs were religiously justified); or the ongoing Roman Catholic blasphemy of a power structure protecting priestly child abusers instead of their abused victims; or the evangelical Protestant embrace in America of know-nothing bigotry against immigrants. Whatever Christ is preached by such churches, what Christ can actually be seen through them?

But perhaps the palpable readiness of the faithful to confront this dark character of Christian religion—and abandon it in droves44—does indeed flow, if only unconsciously, from the prior moral trauma that initiated this period of accountability. Bonhoeffer’s death-row recognition was simple, and may yet prove timeless: if Jesus had been remembered across most of two thousand years as the Jew he was, the history of those millennia—and their climax in the crimes of the Thousand-Year Reich—would be very different.

Our search for a believable Jesus necessarily assumes a fresh encounter with the Gospels and the epistles of Paul. Our reading will be informed by a firm grasp of the historical forces to which those writings were responses. Roman violence against Jews overwhelmingly generated those forces, and we will see how. It’s enough here to note that all the writers of the New Testament sought to give their readers the message—and the figure—they sorely needed, just at the time of their writing. The Gospel themes of suffering endured, violence rejected, failure forgiven, and discipleship maintained were directly addressed to the conditions that would surely have defined the experience just then of those who clung to the memory of Jesus. Archetypical were Peter, who, by betraying Jesus, became the exemplar of the forgiven one; Paul, who invented a transforming understanding of Jesus; and “Mark,” the first and paradigmatic Gospel writer. We will see how all of the first Jesus interpreters, working in the second of our three time frames, presented with remarkable freedom the oral and written material that had come to them across the years since the life and death of Jesus. And we will take special note of how this remembering, interpreting, and, finally, writing were all tied to “the Scriptures,” which, of course, meant for those early Jesus people the Hebrew Scriptures.

We will take for granted the largely invented character of the narrative that came of all of this, how it was shaped from various elements, only one of which had a connection to what we might call the historical record. Against the assumption of most Christians today, the Gospel writers aimed less at facticity than meaning. We twenty-first-century readers of sacred texts about Jesus could usefully take this interpretive and presentational freedom as license for our own interpretations, even if by now Paul, “Mark,” and the others are to us what they were not to themselves—which is Bible.

Many of the questions asked by modern believers—and many of the notes of faith dismissed by modern skeptics—lose their bite when it is acknowledged that they were neither questions nor notes of faith for Jesus and his first interpreters. For example, our contemporary way of seeing is bifocal, based on the supposition that all reality is oppositional. To see a thing wholly, for us, is to see its foil, too. Existentially, this can be understood as generated by Descartes: isolated self against all else. Socially and politically, the pattern is associated with Hegel: thesis against antithesis. Our minds are constantly slicing perception, and joining its halves, whether explicitly or not, with the hyphen word “versus”: religion versus politics; natural versus supernatural; faith versus reason; meaning versus fact; now versus then; ethical present versus apocalyptic future; Gospel versus history; fiction versus truth; metaphorical versus metaphysical.

This divided-mindedness may have come into its own in modernity, but it pervades our story, reaching all the way back nearly to the start. For one factor to rise, another must fall. Such a dynamic, in fact, long ago overwhelmed the Christian imagination, which, as we shall see, took its final form from an extreme conflict—not the contentions of doctrinal dispute, but the savagery of violence—that was inflicted on believers, extreme conflict that ultimately set the Church against the Synagogue: the primordial oppositionalism.

But what happens when a mind openly in the grip of such habitual dichotomizing encounters the experience of long-dead strangers who were at first not given to thinking this way? To acknowledge essential ignorance about how precisely those strangers took in reality, and expressed themselves about it, is the beginning of a new sort of understanding. That returns us to our initial and greatest oppositional set: the paradox of Jesus the human who is Christ the divine.

As war in the twentieth century gives us our starting point, war in the first and second centuries will give this account its largest shape. The Gospel writers had an intuition, and it was shared by their readers, that only within the context of meaning provided by Jesus Christ could the extreme disruptive experiences they were undergoing make sense, or be survived. Jesus—as first made available in the drama of his usurping a rival, or mentor, named John the Baptist; and then in the other dramas that brought him to Jerusalem and the “place of the skull,” Golgotha—was the key to the meaning of God’s covenant in the new context of violent strife. Jesus, that is, was the figure in whom the in extremis fulfillment of God’s promise could be seen. God was faithful to Jesus, up to and through death. The Gospel readers, at the mercy of war, desperately needed to know of that faithfulness, and to find it on offer to them.

But God’s “faithfulness,” as the essence of good news, was later replaced in the heart of belief by the “faith” of the Church, as defined by the loyalty oath of creeds. Modern readers of the sacred texts have attempted to enter that distant world of implication with the “doctrinal” Christ at the threshold, but twentieth-century incredulity about doctrine itself slammed that door for many. At another, once promising threshold stood a figure deemed to be the “historical Jesus,” but the impossibility of getting reliably behind the sources kept the academics bickering, and the meaning of Jesus seemed more elusive than ever. And why shouldn’t most laypeople remain indifferent to the contentious work of Jesus scholars?