by Steve | Jan 15, 1994 | Archive - 1994
Archive: Wither the Seminaries?
by Riley Case
The School of Theology at Claremont: Chung Hyung-Kyung, an Asian theologian who integrates Buddhism, Shamanism, Taoism, and Confucianism into a new Asian understanding of Christianity, receives a creative ministry award. Drew University, the Theological School: Communion is offered in the name of Sophia, goddess of wisdom. Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary: Professor Rosemary Radford Ruether writes liturgies for women that celebrate the cycles of the moon. Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University: A seminar on witchcraft is held during Women’s Week.
Welcome to United Methodist seminaries, where what has historically been called paganism is now celebrated as diversity and multi-culturalism. From these campuses, students are sent forth to be the spiritual leaders of United Methodist churches.
Is there any hope? That question is frequently asked. Is there hope that the disintegration of faith within the mainline churches might eventually be reversed, or that seminaries might some day be known for their defense of the faith rather than their questioning of the faith? Is there hope that the seminaries might sometime be associated with clear teaching on the authority of Scripture, the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, and the importance of holy living? Is there hope that the evangelical perspective on Christian faith might have an honest hearing on the seminary campuses, or that commitment to Jesus Christ might not have to be sacrificed in the pursuit of academic excellence?
Whither the seminaries? Is there any hope? To understand the present situation it is helpful to reflect upon early Methodism in America.
Methodists originally came from among the common people. A good percentage were black, most were poor. Until 1784 they were little more than a sect, existing without benefit of clergy. Their leaders, such as they were, were hardly from America’s aristocracy—no graduates of Yale, Princeton, or Harvard. Francis Asbury had only a few years of formal training, and many of his preachers had less.
Nevertheless, what Methodists lacked in wealth, education, and refinement they made up with zeal. The story of Methodism is the story of revival, church planting, and a willingness to sacrifice all for the sake of Christ. From a handful of followers at the time of the first Christmas conference in 1784, the Methodist movement exploded with such power and growth that by the time of the Civil War it is estimated that one-third of all Americans identified themselves as part of one of the Methodist bodies. The movement was optimistic, reformist, and creative, taking on issues of temperance, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery. It contributed to a positive sense of values in American culture and helped define the nature of American evangelism.
With success came respectability, and respectability brought a desire for learning; hence colleges, books, and ever more stringent ministerial qualifications. While many Methodists applauded the increased emphasis on education, others expressed concern that head knowledge might be substituted for heart knowledge. The wrong kind of education would open the door to worldly and skeptical influences which would undermine rather than strengthen the church in the long run.
It was in this context that the first “Biblical Institutes” were founded. They were called Biblical Institutes because the phrase suggested Bible training rather than the stuffiness, formalism, and spiritual coldness associated with some of the existing seminaries. The Evangelical Association and the United Brethren Churches rejected all efforts to establish seminaries before the Civil War. When the idea of seminaries finally gained acceptance, Methodist bishops were given limited oversight, including the approval of faculty hiring, in order to safeguard the integrity of the faith. However, seminaries then, as now, did not wish to be safeguarded. They were much more attracted to German “higher criticism” than to camp meeting preaching. They preferred the distinction of impressing the academic world over the ministry of encouraging the Wednesday night prayer meeting. It was a time of the emerging social gospel, Darwinism, and the thoughts of William James.
The inevitable calls for accountability, investigations, and heresy trials soon followed. Several professors were actually removed from positions, thus becoming martyrs in the sacred cause of academic freedom. The momentum at the turn of the century was, however, hardly on the side of orthodox Christian faith. The surge of Methodist respectability and liberalism in the 1890s had already led to the exodus of numbers of populist preachers and camp meeting evangelists into the newly forming Holiness denominations. There were no major orthodox intellectuals to stem the tide.
At the 1908 General Conference of the northern Methodist Church, the responsibility for approving professors at seminaries was taken away from bishops. Ever since that time the seminaries have pursued their own direction without control from the bishops, the General Conference, doctrinal or confessional standards, public outcry, or, presumably, the angels themselves. Professor Otto Baab assessed the situation: “At last we have been emancipated from the literalism and fundamentalism of our fathers, set free from bondage to bibliolatry and proof text theology.”
What had always been known simply as Christianity was now negatively labeled: fundamentalism, literalism, and bibliolatry. Within the period of a very few years there was a quick and complete capitulation to modernism—a movement to preserve the respectability of the faith by accommodation to modem thinking. In a study of the theological commitment of Protestant seminaries conducted by Ministers Monthly in 1925 it was revealed that every Methodist seminary of both the southern and northern churches viewed its orientation as modernist. Of all the major denominations, only Methodism could identify none of its seminaries as orthodox or even “mixed.” (United Brethren and Evangelicals combined, listed three seminaries as orthodox.)
With the wholesale commitment to modernism in its seminaries, Methodism was poised to make its claim as the major religious force in America. In the Methodist seminary communities it was the day for kingdom building, for extolling the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man.
It was about this time that the number of Baptist churches in America surpassed the number of Methodist churches.
Methodist seminaries between the 1930s and the 1950s found themselves caught up in whatever theological or cultural fad emerged on the scene. Personalism, pacifism, socialism, process philosophy, neo-orthodoxy, existentialism, situation ethics, or Freudian psychology—all were pursued with breathless enthusiasm. Evangelical theology, usually translated as fundamentalism or literalism (terms of derision), was viewed as an indication of cultural lag, soon to be eclipsed by cultural and academic progress. As one of my seminary professors explained, “In another generation we won’t have to worry about it.” When some students asked if Billy Graham might be invited to speak on campus, Dr. Dwight Loder, then president of Garrett-Evangelical Seminary, dismissed the request with the remark, “We don’t wish to be identified with that brand of Christianity.”
About this same time, membership in the Baptist churches in America surpassed membership in the Methodist churches.
It was in part because of the frustration with the seminaries that Good News was founded in 1967. The trigger for the beginning of Good News was an article by Charles Keysor in the Christian Advocate which asserted, among other things, that despite everything the seminaries were about, and despite the stifling brand of liberalism that prevailed among the boards and agencies of the church, there were a great number of Methodists—Keysor used the term “The Silent Minority”—who believed the Bible and held to the historic doctrines of the church. Furthermore, this group wanted to be a part of Methodism’s future.
In their more grandiose dreams, the leaders of Good News hoped to steer the giant ship called Methodism away from a course set toward apostasy and disaster. There were danger signs that Methodism was facing the future with a hollow core, even when membership was at its high point. It was becoming evident that widespread reform was needed in the seminaries and in other places of power. At more realistic moments, Good News leaders hoped at least to be a rallying point for those evangelical Methodists who sometimes felt like aliens in their own churches. They hoped also to provide a forum where spiritual and theological issues might be discussed honestly and openly, implying that such forums did not otherwise exist.
The seminaries and the denomination in the late 1960s had plenty of problems to deal with (not to mention Good News, which they characterized as a movement of right-wing reactionism motivated by fear): the supposed “Death of God,” the secular city, Black Power, Viet Nam, nuclear proliferation. This was a time of anti-establishment sentiment and mistrust of institutions.
Seminaries, in their zeal to be relevant, were attracted to the avant garde faddishness of the day. “Let the world set the agenda,” was a frequently heard slogan. And so the world did. Student activism at the seminaries differed little from student activism at major secular universities. After a series of demonstrations, sit-ins, and an invasion by the Weatherman—a radical student group—Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary literally shut down. In many schools, chapels were largely unattended, or became opportunities for political maneuvering, rather than for worship.
About this time, despite the increased United Methodist membership resulting from the Methodist merger with the Evangelical United Brethren, the number of members in just one Baptist denomination, the Southern Baptists, surpassed the number of United Methodists.
In the 1970s and 1980s it became increasingly apparent that, despite all the emphasis on relevance on the part of the seminaries and denominational leaders, Americans were abandoning the mainline denominations in droves. One often-given reason: seminary trained pastors were biblically illiterate, couldn’t preach, couldn’t relate to youth, and didn’t believe anything!
Seminaries wanted to study culture and public policy, not theology and the Bible. The pressure on students and faculty to conform to politically correct ways of speaking and thinking (no male pronouns for God) were a betrayal of the spirit of openness, liberalism, and academic freedom the seminaries supposedly sought to project. The causes of the cultural left: women’s issues, mysticism, Native American spirituality, peace programs, Marxist analysis, environmental ideology, and liberal politics—were advanced, often with unrestrained zeal. But there were few takers in the churches. Those groups that seminaries viewed as their special burden: ethnics, the poor, and the intellectually elite, were particularly disinterested in what the seminaries had to offer.
What about the 1990s? The story is not totally discouraging. The resurgence of evangelical faith in America and the world over has led to the enrollment of more conservative students in seminaries. A sprinkling of evangelical professors has now taken place in several seminaries. A Fund for Theological Education, an organization funding evangelicals for advanced academic degrees has prepared a number of persons for teaching. Chairs of evangelism have been funded for several seminaries.
Serious problems still exist however. Seminaries worship at the altar of academic freedom, and seem to be proud that no religious tests are required of any professor hired to teach. The University Senate, the agency in the UM Church responsible for church-institution relationships, is noted for its aggressive policies of affirmative action, which translates into legalistic requirements about the number of female professors, but not the first question about whether anybody believes in God. Values esteemed by the seminaries—inclusiveness, relevance, relativity, tolerance, and modernity—are advanced in such a way that evangelical faith with its strong assertions of truth is viewed as exclusivistic, irrelevant, absolutist, intolerant, and antediluvian.
Despite the continued claims by seminary spokespersons that evangelical faith is affirmed, treated with respect, and heard with integrity, the testimony of evangelicals is otherwise. Not only is evangelical faith rarely advanced, frequently it is not even understood.
What can be done? The Ministerial Education Fund (MEF) pours hundreds of thousands of apportionment dollars, with no strings attached, into the seminaries. One suggestion is to give the funds directly to students in the form of vouchers which can be used at any accredited seminary. This would not only provide freedom of choice for students, it would produce a market-driven situation where seminaries would need to offer balanced, quality education to attract students.
In addition, the church might insist that the seminaries be accountable to the doctrinal perspective as outlined in the Book of Discipline, paragraphs 67-69 (the doctrinal standards). At every General Conference for the past 20 years a number of petitions from individuals, churches, and annual conferences have made this or a similar request. To most ordinary people in the church, it seems only logical that seminaries funded by the church and entrusted with the responsibility to train the church’s ministers would be committed in some way to the doctrine of the church. Without exception, these petitions are opposed by persons connected with the seminaries. They warn darkly of witch hunts and heresy trials. One individual at the 1992 General Conference expressed it this way: “If the church were to control the seminaries in this way we might end up with the same tragic situation that exists in the Southern Baptist Church.”
Within a few years, the Southern Baptists will have doubled the membership of the United Methodists.
Riley B. Case is pastor of St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Kokomo, Indiana. He is also a Good News board member and a contributing editor to Good News magazine.
by Steve | Jan 9, 1994 | Archive - 1994
Archive: Confessions of a Grieving Seminary Professor
By Thomas C. Oden
January/February 1994
Lay persons are increasingly demanding the right to know why their parish pastors are so often going astray like lost sheep — with political indiscretions, sexual escapades, and ideological binges. I hate to be the bearer of rotten news, but after a lifetime of teaching in a tradition-deprived seminary ethos, I am nearly convinced that its present system is practically irreformable.
My hypothesis is: That form of education for ministry which has attached itself like a leech to modernity is dying as modernity dies. The seminary that weds itself to modernity is already a widow as we enter the era of post-modernity. Here is the dreary list of characteristic symptoms of rapid depreciation:
1. The tenure principle which was designed to protect academic freedom has become so exploited that it now protects academic license, absenteeism, incompetence, and at times moral turpitude. Once tenure is offered, it is virtually impossible to dismiss a professor. It requires many strata of grievance procedures before the tenured professor can even begin to be challenged, regardless of the offense.
Whenever the seminary faculty feels or imagines that it is being subjected to review by anyone, the battle-cry goes out: Safeguard academic freedom! Yes, the seminary has a duty to defend its faculty from unjust challenges that would inordinately invade the sanctuary of the classroom and dictate to faculty what they are to teach. I do not want the KKK or the neo-Nazi party to tell me what I should be teaching and the textbooks I should be using. But neither do I want liberal dogmatists or ideological advocates of someone’s ideas of political correctness to be dictating what textbooks I should be using.
It simply will no longer do for seminaries to continue avoiding dialogue with church constituencies by claiming that professors have the freedom to teach whatever they please. If they teach apostasy, the believing church has no moral obligation to give them support or to bless their follies.
When academic freedom becomes a strategy by which the seminary sidesteps every critic, then academic freedom itself has been prostituted. When the Wesleyan tradition and doctrinal standards – standards clearly defined in every Book of Discipline since Wesley – can no longer be implement in the seminaries, then the United Methodist governing bodies do not have a responsibility to protect the freedom of a faculty to disavow that solemnly pledged doctrinal tradition.
2. Once a tradition-deprived faculty has been fully tenured, its members have the unique privilege of cloning themselves with look-alike colleagues in the future. The tenured f acuity has learned well the fine art of cloning itself politically, repeating ever anew its own ideological biases, making sure that no one comes in who might upset the prevailing ideological momentum.
3. The wall-to-wall redefinition of an entire field of study and its subsequent renovation is the fervent dream of many tenured radicals, whose chief peer group is the professional society that meets once a year in an elegant hotel to talk about oppression.
4. It is a common practice to offer teaching appointments in counter-traditional seminaries without reference to any experience whatever in the actual practice of ministry. If those who had extensive church experience applied, it might even tend to be a negative factor in their selection. Candidates are preferred who have not been contaminated by a strong church tradition. This is analogous to someone who had never drawn up a contract for a client teaching about contracts in a law school.
5. Seminarians ordinarily do not become angry until their last year, as they belatedly realize that they are leaving seminary with heavy debts; yet may not be deemed by their annual conferences as ready to preach, administer sacraments, or take on actual tasks of pastoral care. When they are appointed to a parish, they recognize how little of their theological education they can use, and how much of it they must hide.
6. The disciplines of the seminary have become a playground of competing methodologies thar bicker constantly for recognition, sanction, and approval, especially through scientific methods of inquiry. It is as if the disciplines were constantly combatting for higher status in a rigid pecking order. In the evaluation-methods employed at the higher end of the pecking order, there is little or no room to accept Scripture as the Word of God or divine revelation as a serious intellectual premise.
7. Each discipline of theological education, now awash in anti-supernatural assumptions, finds itself desperately seeking an alternative to the premises of orthodox Christian reasoning: incarnation, resurrection, and scriptural revelation. Each discipline feels compelled to legitimize its teaching by some form of empirical data-gathering that would only grudgingly be acceptable in a chemistry laboratory. The so-called scientific study of religion has gradually flooded the seminary.
8. Under these conditions, theological inquiry may pretend to proceed, but almost entirely without reference to the worshipping community, its laity, its historic apostolic mission, its classical texts. The critics who mean most to modern scholars are only those who have written during the last 20 years, or 50 at most. They often do not include the theologians of the previous 1900 years. The serious study of Christian thought is assumed to begin with Paul Tillich or, at the earliest, with Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of theological liberalism. It is easy to see how this premise affects the study of classical Christi.an texts. Its modem chauvinism constitutes an attack on premodern wisdom.
9. The fact that their theology has no grass roots support or lies with a worshipping community is considered a badge of honor.
Now you see why I have trouble even accurately describing the depth of the problems of the liberated seminary. My leading hypothesis: Modernity has belatedly triumphed in the seminary just as it was dying out in the real world. The triumph of modernity is most decisively felt in the special hothouse arena of a fully tenured and fully liberated seminary faculty.
The Consequent Moral Dilemma
This problem presents me with serious moral difficulties: Should I even remain in a seminary system that I think has gone so far toward corruption? The major reason for staying is: if I leave, along with others who are like me, doesn’t that simply risk abandoning the seminary tradition into the hands of its most creative deconstructers and articulate detractors?
My personal dilemma: If I stay, I cooperate with a corrupted and corrupting system. Yet, if the few remaining classic Christians in leadership positions leave the present seminary system, they leave behind the legacy, the bequests, the institutions, the resources that have been many generations in the building. Walking away may have stickier moral impediments than hanging in.
I am pouring out my heart about a broken love affair. This is so difficult because, on the one hand, I love the people who suffer in the institutions served by prodigal theological education, and in many ways I love the institutions – like loving the feel of an old shoe. This, after all, is where I have spent my life. Modern theological education has given me a home, defended my right to teach according to my conscience, paid me well for my labors, given me enviable job security, protected me against critics who would limit my range of operation, given me guarantees that my life and livelihood would not be threatened by capricious charges – how could I now be so irascibly ungrateful as to bring the troubles of telling the truth to my own community?
I have been a serious defender of the tenure principle during most of my adult life, on the grounds that this is the best way to underwrite academic freedom has been challenged, the system shielded me. But now I wonder if I can in good conscience accept any longer its safety, defense and smug invulnerability.
It seems absurd for me to probe the vulnerabilities of an institution – one that I love – that has put bread on my table, a university with an enviable reputation and colleagues with whom I have worked amiably for many years. I do not want to be read as implying that there is nothing good left in liberated theological education. But there remains a question of proportionality. Do its present corruptions outweigh its potential promise?
The Temptation to Jump Ship
So what is ahead for the next generation of seminarians? Is the seminary as it now stands virtually irreformable? Probably.
Should we then abandon the present seminary structure? I doubt it, even though that may seem inconsistent with the premise of irreformability. Why not vacate the premises, concede defeat, and capitulate to inevitability?
It seems unthinkable to abandon, without further prayers for special grace, an institution to which so many of the faithful have both committed themselves and provided support from their personal and often sparse resources over so long a time. The libraries and endowments and alumni cannot simply be abdicated. But can the institution be significantly reshaped? Not without an elementary reversal of tenure abuses. I see no way both to continue the present tenure system and reform the tradition-impaired seminary. And there is virtually no hope for reforming the tenure system. I wish it were otherwise. The dilemma: A clean sweep seems both necessary and impossible.
But can the tenure system be even slightly or moderately or gradually amended? Realistically, it cannot be abruptly abandoned; except by a strongly organized and intentional laity who, with astute leadership, enters directly into and dismantles the present abuses with determination. Might tenure be incrementally redefined? In a reasonable world that is what one might think ought to happen, but during the course of a multi-decade attempt at the gradual amendment of tenure policies, what would be happening to the suffering church? Who, but the laity, would have to abide faithful during those slow decades – the laity who have trusted the clergy for the transmission of the apostolic tradition and for sufficient remedies when that does not occur. A cruel hand as been dealt the long-suffering laity.
Those who love the church, but have endured its undermining by permissiveness, would like to see some reform in their institutions before the millennium ends. If you approach the reform of seminary education by the slight or incremental modification of tenure, then you are talking about the hundred years that it might take the present institutions to die, and the present theological faculties to redesign themselves into an academic society which would, in turn, study the collapse of Christianity. This is why the prognosis is dismal.
The Lust for Academic Takeovers
Well-educated, innovation-addicted young Ph.D.s lust after fiscally healthy institutions to swarm and take over, because they offer job security, even if they do not have Princeton-like prestige. This is why relatively well-funded United Methodist institutions of higher education have been special targets of shrewd, liberated Machiavellians who couldn’t make it at Harvard or Yale. Since these United Methodist institutions were desperately seeking upward academic mobility and lusting to join the Ivy-League look-alike elite, they have been willing to pay for academic stars, and have suffered most from the academic version of statutory rape.
Where tenured faculties have been formed so as to systematically block out ancient ecumenical teaching, they cannot expect evangelical or moderate support. Funds may need to be withdrawn if the pattern persists. That may be the only available mechanism by which defiant faculties can be taught that they must become accountable to their actual constituencies and to the apostolic faith.
The Complete Absence of Heresy
It seems worth noting that the modern seminary has finally achieved a condition that has never before prevailed in Christian history: heresy simply does not exist. Church teaching, after long centuries of struggle against heresy, has finally found a way of overcoming heterodoxy altogether, by banishing it as a concept legitimately taught within the walls of the institution.
Doing entirely away with the concepts of apostasy and infidelity is a triumphal achievement of latitudinarianism, a term Wesley used to describe those who were so broad-minded that they lacked a firm commitment to Christian essentials. This is an unexcelled accomplishment in all the annals of Christian history. It seems to give final expression to the quest for the flawless community.
No heresy of any kind exists any longer. You cannot find one anywhere in the liberated seminary – unless, perhaps, you might consider offenses against inclusiveness. There can be absolutely no corruption of Christian teaching because, under the present rules, all notions of corruption are radically relativized. There is not only no concept of heresy, but also no way to raise the question of boundaries for legitimate or correct Christian belief where absolute relativism holds sway.
The very thought of asking about heresy has itself become the new arch-heresy. The arch-heretic is the one who hints that some distinction is required between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, good and evil. Such a person, if untenured, is subject to suspicion and abrupt termination by a cloned faculty-majority magnanimously composed of both absolute relativists and relative relativists.
And yes, all this was accomplished by modernity. But what an untimely event it is; because modernity is dead, and now they have post-modernity to deal with.
Surely I must be exaggerating! But if you doubt my accuracy, ask any recent seminary graduate who still defiantly holds on to belief in the incarnation and resurrection. Far from exaggerating, I have been holding back my fire concerning certain vulnerabilities that are even more difficult to talk about publicly – especially sexual experimentation and ideological harassment.
How do institutional processes guarantee that the next generation will not systematically destroy everything they have fought and worked for? That is precisely the dilemma of apostolic Christians. That is the reason why a serious view of the transmission of the apostolic tradition has always been a prime concern of the church and its laity-and an unresolved problem for Protestant liberalism.
Author’s note: This article, which is a brief abstract of a portion from a book-length argument, is not rightly interpreted if directed to my own Seminary or its leadership. It is directed rather to the problems of seminary education generally, of which my institution is only an incidental example, and by no means the worst.
by Steve | Jan 4, 1987 | Archive - 1987, Archive - 1994
Archive: What Are We To Make of Jesus Christ?
By C.S. Lewis
What are we to make of Jesus Christ? This is a question which has, in a sense, a frantically comic side. For the real question is not what are we to make of Christ, but what is He to make of us. The picture of a fly sitting deciding what it is going to make of an elephant has comic elements about it. But perhaps the questioner meant what are we to make of Him in the sense of “How are we to solve the historical problem set us by the recorded sayings and acts of this man?”
This problem is to reconcile two things. On the one hand you have got the almost generally admitted depth and sanity of His moral teaching, which is not very seriously questioned, even by those who are opposed to Christianity. In fact, I find when I am arguing with very anti-God people that they rather make a point of saying, “I am entirely in favour of the moral teaching of Christianity”—and there seems to be a general agreement that in the teaching of this Man and of His immediate followers, moral truth is exhibited at its purest and best. It is not sloppy idealism, it is full of wisdom and shrewdness. The whole thing is realistic, fresh to the highest degree, the product of a sane mind. That is one phenomenon.
The other phenomenon is the quite appalling nature of this Man’s theological remarks. You all know what I mean, and I want rather to stress the point that the appalling claim which this Man seems to be making is not merely made at one moment of His career.
There is, of course, the one moment which led to His execution. The moment at which the High Priest said to Him, “Who are you?” “I am the Anointed, the Son of the uncreated God, and you shall see Me appearing at the end of all history as the judge of the Universe.”
But that claim, in fact, does not rest on this one dramatic moment. When you look into His conversation you will find this sort of claim running through the whole thing. For instance, He went about saying to people, “I forgive your sins.” Now it is quite natural for a man to forgive something you do to him. Thus if somebody cheats me out of £5 it is quite possible and reasonable for me to say, “Well, I forgive him, we will say no more about it.” What on earth would you say if somebody had done you out of £5 and I said, “That is all right, I forgive him”?
Then there is a curious thing which seems to slip out almost by accident. On one occasion this Man is sitting looking down on Jerusalem from the hill above it and suddenly in comes an extraordinary remark—I keep on sending you prophets and wise men.” Nobody comments on it. And yet, quite suddenly, almost incidentally, He is claiming to be the power that all through the centuries is sending wise men and leaders into the world.
Here is another curious remark. In almost every religion there are unpleasant observances like fasting. This Man suddenly remarks one day, “No one need fast while I am here.” Who is this Man who remarks that His mere presence suspends all normal rules? Who is the person who can suddenly tell the school they can have a half-holiday?
Sometimes the statements put forward the assumption that He, the Speaker, is completely without sin or fault. This is always the attitude. “You, to whom I am talking, are all sinners,” and He never remotely suggests that this same reproach can be brought against Him. He says again, “I am begotten of the One God, before Abraham was, I am,” and remember what the words “I am” were in Hebrew. They were the name of God, which must not be spoken by any human being, the name which it was death to utter.
Well, that is the other side. On the one side clear, definite moral teaching. On the other, claims which, if not true, are those of a megalomaniac, compared with whom Hitler was the most sane and humble of men.
Without a parallel
There is no half-way house and there is no parallel in other religions. If you had gone to Buddha and asked him ” Are you the son of Bramah?” he would have said, “My son, you are still in the vale of illusion.” If you had gone to Socrates and asked, “Are you Zeus?” he would have laughed at you. If you had gone to Mohammed and asked, “Are you Allah?” he would first have rent his clothes and then cut your head off. If you had asked Confucius, ” Are you Heaven?” I think he would have probably replied, “Remarks which are not in accordance with nature are in bad taste.”
The idea of a great moral teacher saying what Christ said is out of the question. In my opinion, the only person who can say that sort of thing is either God or a complete lunatic suffering from that form of delusion which undermines the whole mind of man. If you think you are a poached egg, when you are looking for a piece of toast to suit you, you may be sane, but if you think you are God, there is no chance for you.
We may note in passing that He was never regarded as a mere teacher, He did not produce that effect on any of the people who actually met Him. He produced mainly three effects—Hatred—Terror—Adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.
What are we to do about reconciling the two contradictory phenomena? One attempt consists in saying that the Man did not really say these things, but that His followers exaggerated the story, and so the legend grew up that He had said them.
This is difficult because His follower were all Jews; that is, they belonged to that Nation which of all others was most convinced that there was only one God—that there could not possibly be another. It is very odd that this horrible invention about a religious leader should grow up among the one people in the whole earth least likely to make such a mistake. On the contrary we get the impression that none of His immediate followers or even of the New Testament writers embraced the doctrine at all easily.
Another point is that on that view you would have to regard the accounts of the Man as being legends. Now, as a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are, they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing. They are not artistic enough to be legends. From an imaginative point of view they are clumsy, they don’t work up to things properly.
Most of the life of Jesus is totally unknown to us, as is the life of anyone who lived at that time, and no people building up a legend would allow that to be so. Apart from bits of the Platonic dialogues, there are no conversations that I know of in ancient literature like the Fourth Gospel. There is nothing, even in modern literature, until about a hundred years ago when the realistic novel came into existence .
In the story of the woman taken in adultery we are told Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with His finger. Nothing comes of this. No one has ever based any doctrine on it. And the art of inventing little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more convincing is a purely modern art. Surely the only explanation of this passage is that the thing really happened. The author put it in simply because he had seen it.
Then we come to the strangest story of all, the story of the Resurrection. It is very necessary to get the story clear. I heard a man say, “The importance of the Resurrection is that it gives evidence of survival, evidence that the human personality survives death.” On that view what happened to Christ would be what had always happened to all men, the difference being that in Christ’s case we were privileged to see it happening.
Not a ghost
This is certainly not what the earliest Christian writers thought. Something perfectly new in the history of the Universe had happened. Christ had defeated death. The door which had always been locked had for the very first time been forced open. This is something quite distinct from mere ghost-survival. I don’t mean that they disbelieved in ghost-survival. On the contrary, they believed in it so firmly that, on more than one occasion, Christ had had to assure them that He was not a ghost. The point is that while believing in survival they yet regarded the Resurrection as something totally different and new.
The Resurrection narratives are not a picture of survival after death; they record how a totally new mode of being has arisen in the Universe. Something new had appeared in the Universe: as new as the first coming of organic life. This Man, after death, does not get divided into “ghost” and “corpse.” A new mode of being has arisen. That is the story. What are we going to make of it?
The question is, I suppose, whether any hypothesis covers the facts so well as the Christian hypothesis. That hypothesis is that God has come down into the created universe, down to manhood—and come up again, pulling it up with Him. The alternative hypothesis is not legend, nor exaggeration, nor the apparitions of a ghost. It is either lunacy or lies. Unless one can take the second alternative (and I can’t) one turns to the Christian theory.
No question
“What are we to make of Christ?” There is no question of what we can make of Him, it is entirely a question of what He intends to make of us. You must accept or reject the story.
The things He says are very different from what any other teacher has said. Others say, “This is the truth about the Universe. This is the way you ought to go,” but He says, “I am the Truth, and the Way. and the Life.” He say , “No man can reach absolute reality, except through Me.”
“Try to retain your own life and you will be inevitably ruined. Give yourself away and you will be saved.” He says, “If you are ashamed of Me, if, when you hear this call, you turn the other way, I also will look the other way when I come again as God without disguise. If anything whatever is keeping you from God and from Me, whatever it is, throw it away. If it is your eye, pull it out. If it is your hand, cut it off. If you put yourself first you will be last. Come to Me everyone who is carrying a heavy load, and I will set that right. Your sins, all of them, are wiped out, I can do that.
“I am Rebirth, I am Life. Eat Me, drink Me, I am your Food. And finally, do not be afraid, I have overcome the whole Universe.” That is the issue.
“What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ?” from God in the Dock, copyright ©1970 by C.S. Lewis, Pte Limited. Reproduced by permission of Curtis Brown Limited, London.
