Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Disturbing Messianic Behavior: Troubling Images of Jesus in the New Testament

Neo-errantists like to focus on the Old Testament passages concerning violence, and then say that their model for judging those passages is Jesus Himself as He is represented in the New Testament. So let's look at Jesus in the New Testament.

Jesus is depicted as one who turns over the tables in the temple and beats the animals/people? (the reference is vague) with a whip.

He declares that He came to split up families and told His followers to take God's commands and truth more seriously than their most valued relationships with people, including their parents.

He continually labels people with all sorts of insulting names: brood of vipers, white-washed tombs, children of the devil, etc.

He tells His disciples to buy and carry a sword.

He tells Pilate that the only reason why His followers are not fighting in a war against Rome and killing off her soldiers is, not because He's against violence, but because His kingdom is not of this world.

Jesus continually tells us that it is necessary for Him to participate in His own violent bloody death by placing Himself on the cross.

He continually talks about the wrath of God remaining on everyone who does not receive Him.

He says of one of His disciples, Judas, that it would have been better if he were never born.

He implies that God kills off a bunch of people by having a tower fall on them, and then warns that a violent death awaits all of those who do not repent.

He tells everyone that when He comes again He's going to slaughter all of His enemies and throw them into hell (talk about the Canaanite Conquest redivivus). In fact, this is the one image above all others that is repeated of Jesus throughout the New Testament (in the Gospels, in Paul's epistles, in Jude, in the Apocalypse of John, etc.).

If all of this isn't violent enough, He tells us that He is the God as the Old Testament depicts Him, none of which He has come to abolish but rather to fulfill, and that this God is a fuller expression of the God of the Old Testament, not a contradictory expression. That means that Jesus, as God the Son, ordered the slaughter of the Canaanites and their babies. Yikes, that's a much more violent Jesus than that picture of a mild-mannered Jesus petting a lamb at the Christian bookstore.

How do we deal with this violent Jesus? I find that we must critique Jesus with Jesus, and in order to do this, I must judge what is Jesus and what is not Jesus. How do I accomplish this divine feat? Easy, I use my own views and those of my culture to judge what Jesus should be like. Then I can impose that on Jesus, divide the bad and violent Jesus (i.e., the one who doesn't act in a manner acceptable to my thinking) from the good and loving Jesus (i.e., the one that does act in a manner I find acceptable). So you see, I'm simply using Jesus as my standard, and that Jesus just happens to look and act according to me, my ideals. After all, God is really just a more perfect version of me and my ideals.

Some naysayers might say that I'm not using Jesus as a standard at all, or else I wouldn't be able to divide Jesus up this way. They would say that I'm just using myself and not Jesus; but they're just traditionalist meanies who are stuck in their violent (i.e., non conformity to my image) ways. Anyone with the great sensitivity that I have to love would bow down and worship me by emulating me. Anyone who is a horrible human being deserving of my wrath will continue to disregard me and the ideas I value within my culture as the standard to judge what God and Jesus would really do.

In fact, everyone should shun WWJD? and God and Jesus should ask themselves instead WWBD? (What would Bryan do?). Only then can we find what God is really like. Treating the Bible as revelatory that can somehow speak things that are totally foreign to my thinking will inevitably lead to the diminishing of myself and my own ideas and the exaltation of ideas that I, as a sinless omniscient and omnibenevolent being, find to be disturbing.

So you see, Jesus doesn't have to be disturbing if everyone just condemns the biblical portrait of Jesus and follows mine (mine being the product of the Western zeitgeist). My Jesus is the standard because I and my modern sensibilities are the standard. And if you disagree with that, then you should be called violent names and your reputation beaten to a bloody pulp.


4 comments:

  1. "How do we deal with this violent Jesus? I find that we must critique Jesus with Jesus, and in order to do this, I must judge what is Jesus and what is not Jesus. How do I accomplish this divine feat? Easy, I use my own views and those of my culture to judge what Jesus should be like. Then I can impose that on Jesus, divide the bad and violent Jesus (i.e., the one who doesn't act in a manner acceptable to my thinking) from the good and loving Jesus (i.e., the one that does act in a manner I find acceptable). So you see, I'm simply using Jesus as my standard, and that Jesus just happens to look and act according to me, my ideals."

    Sounds exactly like what Randal Rauser, Roger Olson, and what a large number of mainline LibProts and emerger LibProts do.

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  2. That's all neo-errantists can do. I keep trying to impress upon them the fact that they are merely transferring the authority of the Bible to themselves and to their own culture; but they simply say they're getting all of this from Jesus. Of course, it can't be from the Jesus presented and taken in context in the New Testament, so that leaves us with another Jesus of our own making, which inevitably will be one made in our own image. Hence, I am left with a more idealized form of me, which I then call "Jesus." Neo-errancy, then, is nothing but a manifestation of the religion of the world, Self-worship.

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  3. "That's all neo-errantists can do."

    Question: What comes first? Liberalism (theological and/or political) or Neo-errantism?

    My gut feel is that it's their liberalism that drives their neo-errantism.

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  4. Yes, it has to be that way. One must first look to himself as the standard and then judge the Scripture with it--thus concluding that Scripture contains error in its teachings when it conflicts with his own ideas and value judgments.

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