Engaging the Word, A
Mystical Pagan
Hermeneutic
Introduction
This essay theologically analyzes a text from the "New
Church's Teaching Series," Michael Johnston's Engaging
the Word. (1) Its subject matter is hermeneutics, the
science of interpreting Scripture.
The "Church's Teaching Series" has been one of the
primary ways in which the Episcopal Church educated its members
in the fundamentals of the Christian faith. It has been in
existence for over fifty years, and the Church has officially
approved past editions. Johnston's text does not belong to the
old series, but to the "New Church's Teaching Series."
Although its title incorporates the old title, it has not
received official sanction. In Johnston's words,
I intend to show that this text, produced by "scholars and pastors meeting and talking informally together," promotes a form of mystical paganism masquerading as an enlightened version of Christian truth. Among other things, I shall contrast this pagan hermeneutic with aspects of an orthodox understanding of Scripture, that of Athanasius and the Creed.This new series differs from the previous two in significant ways: it has no official status, claims no special authority, speaks in a personal voice, and comes not out of committees but from scholars and pastors meeting and talking informally together. (2)
For the purposes of this essay, I will focus on the Nicene Creed. It has been accepted by the Church universal, East and West, and rehearsed each Sunday throughout Christendom. It lays the groundwork for understanding two principle doctrines: the one God as Trinity, and Jesus Christ as fully God and fully man. Further, it starts with creation, associated with God the Father, focuses on the Incarnation, associated with God the Son, and ends with the "life of the world to come," associated with God the Holy Spirit. This triune pattern, with incarnation at the center, formed the pattern for interpreting Scripture for the early church.Neither the Rule of Faith nor the creed was in fact a summary of the whole biblical narrative, as demonstrated earlier in The Art of Performance. They provided, rather, the proper reading of the beginning and the ending, the focus of the plot and the relations of the principal characters, so enabling the "middle" to be heard in bits as meaningful. They provided the "closure" which contemporary theory prefers to leave open. They articulated the essential hermeneutical key without which texts and community would disintegrate in incoherence. (3)
Johnston's
Perspective
Johnston's theological perspective can be envisioned as an
equilateral triangle. At its apex is an Ineffable God of
multiple images. The two base angles can be labeled experience
and community. This triangle image depicts Johnston's belief
that the ineffable God is revealed in experience and community as
they mutually condition one another. In the center of the
triangle is the word "stories," referring to Johnston's
conviction that stories mediate God, experience, and community in
mutual and dynamic interactions.
As I shall show, Johnston believes that "God" is
ultimately indescribable, and therefore, to account for the
ineffable and sublime nature of this god, one must include the
full range of images taken from the whole of experience. These
images then form and are formed by the community. For lack of a
better name, I shall call Johnston's deity the "multiple
god," or the "ineffable god."
In regard to experience, Johnston understands the world as
process. As this process unfolds, the community makes sense of
itself, its experience, and the multiple god by means of stories.
These stories are repeated, and as they are repeated, they are
modified in light of new experiences, new manifestations of the
multiple god, and new understandings of the community. This
interactive process continues throughout history -- life ever
changing, the community ever transformed, the multiple god ever
re-imaged, the stories ever-evolving. As this happens, the four
aspects of the diagram -- the ineffable god, experience,
community, and story -- mutually create, modify, and form each
other. Here are two quotations:
The founding myths shift as the lives of the people shift. In fact, the experiences that a community goes through shape its people's stories, just as the stories they hear and pass on shape them. Or, to phrase it another way, the sacred community assembles its texts as much as the sacred texts assemble the community. This is by no means mere expediency, however, because the community of faith is always in dialogue with its sacred story, and experience is one party to the conversation.
In the first quotation, the "founding myths" are interactively related to the community so that stories and community mutually create each other. As a result, the "sacred community assembles its texts as much as the sacred texts assemble the community." In the second quotation, Johnston's "God" (the "multiple god") reveals itself in "concrete and diverse situations," namely, in diverse experiences. But, since the "divine and the human are both involved in the ongoing work of creation," it turns out that "God makes us up as we go along as much as we make up God." In other words, the community and the multiple god mutually create each other as they interact in experience.I prefer to think that God's variety, ambiguity, nuance, and contradiction come honestly from people's authentic experience of God in concrete and diverse situations. In this incarnational stance the divine and the human are both involved in the ongoing work of creation, so God makes us up as we go along as much as we make up God. (4)
Multiple
"God," Community,
Story
Johnston's first task is to redefine the biblical revelation
according to his mystical pagan vision. He starts this process
in chapter one, entitled "Telling the Story."
When Johnston reads Scripture, he notices that the biblical
people experienced the world, themselves, life, and the divine,
and that they expressed their experiences in stories. These
stories take a religious form, that of myth. A myth is a story
that forms communal and personal identity, gives meaning to the
world, and relates the community to the heavenly realm. One
feature of myths, and this includes biblical stories, is that the
details, the facts, or the particulars of the myth, are not the
real story. Rather, the details or "facts" of the myth
function to disclose the deeper truth that the myth illumines.
For this reason, Johnston understands Scripture, as well as
doctrine and the Creeds, as expressions of deep
"truths" which lie beyond or behind the text. This is
the mystical move which leaves behind the objective text of
Scripture in order to contemplative the mystical One.
Since Johnston understands Scripture as a compendium of mythic
stories, he does not conceive of it as the Word of God speaking
directly to us. Of course, he uses the term, "Word";
the title of his book is Engaging the Word. But the term
"Word" does not mean God speaking, but mythic stories
told by communities to make sense of their experience. Of
course, it may well be possible to experience God speaking, but
as I shall show, this is peripheral to Johnston's perspective.
This will have far-reaching implications.
As a result, Johnston begins by making two implicit claims in
regard to Scripture. First, Scripture is primarily an assortment
of stories told by ancient communities to define themselves and
make sense of their experience. Secondly, the meaning of these
texts is not directly given in their verbal content, but lies
behind the text, beneath the surface. Here are a few typical
quotations:
Believing communities are fundamentally communities assembled around sacred texts. The word "assembled" connotes more, however, than a simple gathering to hear the tales told, for these are the stories that tell us who we are. They give us our identity. We find in them the myths and deep mysteries that constitute the truest rendering of where we have come from, how we ought to be, and where we are going.
The bible is authoritative because our experience tells us that its stories best explain who we are as a believing people and provides a record of our timeless relationship to God.
These stories have a hold on me because they are my stories, just as they are your stories, and they are the stories of the family and the community to which we belong. They make sense out of our lives, our relationships, our world, and our God.
But whatever you bring to the Bible or require of it, the Bible always invites you to read below its surface as well, because the mystery of God is not found simply on the page, or within the text, but behind it.
The Exodus was both a single historical event and a larger historical movement. As event, it was an action of God in history recorded first in Exodus 3-14 and then recapitulated in the songs of Moses and Miriam in chapter 15. This single action was, of course, the delivery of the Hebrew people from their bondage in Egypt. It was their founding experience, and the memory of that experience has served throughout the centuries to define Jewish identity.
Notice that Johnston refers to the biblical stories as "deep mysteries," pointers to our "timeless relationship to God." This is because God is beyond words, so that the "the Bible always invites you to read below its surface as well, because the mystery of God is not found simply on the page, or within the text, but behind it." In this view, the biblical words are like a mask which must be stripped off to reveal the indescribable One beyond all language. For this reason, one does not so much as hear, reflect upon, and obey the biblical words. Rather, one resonates to their deep mysteries so that "just the sound of those words never fails to strike deep chords within me."Again and again I hear and tell these same stories, captured by them, held hostage to them, as thought I were hearing for the first time: "On the first day of the week, while it was still dark, came Mary Magdalene early to the tomb" (John 20:1). Just the sound of those words never fails to strike deep chords within me. (5)
Joshua begins the ceremony by reciting the events of Israel's salvation history starting with the era before Abraham, when "your ancestors -- Terah and his sons, Abraham and Nabor -- lived beyond the Euphrates and served other gods" (Joshua 24:2). He recounts the journey of Abraham and his family from Ur of the Chaldeans, around the arc of the Fertile Crescent, and down into Egypt. He summarizes the Exodus in roughly three verses, skips quickly through the wilderness sojourn, brings his hearers across the Jordan river at Jericho, ...
Let me ask the reader to read Joshua 24. Notice certain features of this biblical text. First, the people "presented themselves before God." That is, God was objectively present in a particular time and place. Secondly, Joshua begins by stating, v. 2, "This is the word of the Lord the God of Israel." He then continues speaking in the first person singular, with the "I" of the narrative being God himself. As described by Johnston, however, the narrator is Joshua, not God. From there, it is a logical step to say that the "ancient story" "assembles a new community," rather than God assembling the community. Of course, Johnston mentions that the narrative depicted "God's mighty acts," but his real emphasis is the story depicting the community's experience, rather than God acting or speaking as portrayed in Joshua 24.The Hebrews of Shechem are incorporated into the ancient story; the ancient story, told again, assembles a new community. The Mosaic covenant is not so much being remembered as the Exodus story is being re-membered. Retelling the story to new hearers is always meant to do precisely that. (6)
The Christian faith, of course, is derived from a Person. But this person revealed himself in his words and deeds. His words and deeds were not a window through which one looked to mystically glimpse the Ineffable One beyond his words and deeds. No, the person of Christ is given in his words and deeds as recorded in the Bible. Johnston, however, falsely sets the Bible against the Person of Christ. Further, he seems unaware of the fact that the Bible repeatedly announces itself as the Word of God, with Joshua 24:2 being one of many instances.Likewise, we need to remember that the Bible does not announce itself as the Word of God; that is our attribution. So our sacred texts are not the final word on God's preferred behavior for us. In fact, our behavior, like our faith, draws from a Person, not a Book, however sacred that Book has come to be. (7)
Further, when Athanasius analyzes a scriptural text, he places it in a narrative context, beginning with creation in Genesis, centering in Jesus Christ, ending with the final eschatological age. This can be seen throughout his writings, but is especially apparent in his two treatises Against the Heathen and On the Incarnation. In these texts he starts with Genesis, discusses fall, goes forward to Jesus Christ who reverses the fall, and ends with the blessings of heaven. When analyzing a text, he understands it in that context.If Divine adoration was neither due to Him [Jesus Christ], nor paid Him, until after His death, how is it that Abraham worshipped Him in His tent (Gen. xviii), Moses in the bush (Ex. iii), and Daniel saw thousands upon thousands of angels ministering unto Him? (8)
Passing On the
Story
Once Johnston has marginalized the concept of God's Act or Word,
and claimed that Scripture is a collection of community stories,
his next step is to show how stories are reformulated and passed
on in communities. This is the theme of his second chapter,
"Passing on the Story." As an example, he uses the
gospel of John.
As Johnston tells it, the community that wrote John's gospel
reformulated its sacred stories (the Old Testament) in light of
its experience of Jesus Christ. The result was the gospel of
John. This gospel made sense of Christ by reassembling Old
Testament texts for a new story. As this happened, community,
story, and experience interactively shaped each other.
Similarly, communities today can reshape their inherited stories
(Scripture), in light of new experiences, just as the community
of John reshaped their story of the Old Testament.
In fact, the experiences that a community goes through shape its people's stories, just as the stories they hear and pass on shape them. Or, to phrase it another way, the sacred community assembles its texts as much as the sacred texts assemble the community. This is by no means mere expediency, however, because the community of faith is always in dialogue with its sacred story, and experience is one part to the conversation.
From this point of view, Scripture is not so much content as method. It shows how ancient peoples, the community of John for example, reassembled their Scripture (the Old Testament) in light of their new experience (Christ), and therefore, how we can reassemble our story (Old and New Testament) in light of our new experiences so that a "new story can reassemble a new community for a richer life in God."We are always transforming the text so that the text will transform us. When that kind of transformation occurs, reflectively and prayerfully, it is not a tampering with the text but the movement of the Holy Spirit... The sacred story has always invited an interpretive conversation between itself and the people it shapes, so that a new story can reassemble a new community for a richer life in God. (9)
Johnston's
Hermeneutic
Once Johnston has redefined Scripture as the stories of an
ancient people, and shown how these stories are continually
reassembled according to fresh experiences, he is now ready to
introduce his method for interpreting Scripture.
Johnston's hermeneutic occurs in three steps. First, one begins
with the literal sense, strict attention to the words of a text,
their syntax and their meaning. This is invaluable and affirmed
by the hermeneutical tradition.
Secondly, and this is the heart of the matter, the student of
Scripture goes behind the text to the history of the text and the
history behind the text. By the former Johnston means how the
text arose, the history of its conversion from event or speech to
oral tradition to written text. The history behind the text is
found by reconstructing the social, economic, religious, and
social conditions of the person and communities that wrote the
text.
Finally, once one understands the text in its original historical
and social context, one then arrives at the prophetic or
spiritual meaning. This is what the text says today, or how it
illumines the "action of God" in our lives.
We may first note that this three-step hermeneutic isolates a
given text by removing it from its place in the biblical
narrative. One simply reads the text, goes to the community
behind it, and then discerns the meaning. This allows each
individual text, in and of itself, to become a discrete
revelation of God, without showing its unity and relation to
Scripture as a whole. Further, the text itself no longer becomes
a revelation of God speaking, but a revelation of the community
behind the text. In this way God, as the primary actor in the
biblical drama, is simply eliminated. This justifies Johnston's
belief that contemporary communities can be sources of
revelation, equal to if not superseding Scripture.
Imagine for the moment that Scripture is like a play in which God
is the principle character. Over the course of the play the word
and deeds of God give unity to the play, and by interaction with
others, establishes God and the other characters as credible.
What remains after the words and deeds of God are removed from
the play? The play decomposes into a series of vignettes without
any overall unity in which the various characters appear as
partially developed persons. The real meaning of Scripture is
utterly lost. The vignettes become independent units, each a
window into the ineffable. In short, the pagan form, reality as
the revelation of a multiplicity of gods emerges.
The
Hermeneutic in
Action
In his next chapter, "Breaking Open the Word," Johnston
applies his hermeneutic to two biblical texts. I will consider
his first example, his interpretation of Mark 5:1-20, the story
of the Gadarene demoniac.
On the basis of scholarly reconstruction, Johnston claims that
the community that wrote Mark's gospel was a Gentile Christian
community struggling to maintain its radical values in a
Roman/Greek cultural milieu. In contrast to the hierarchical and
exclusive social life of the Romans, the Marcan community
practiced a radically egalitarian and inclusive ethic.
In regard to Mark 5:1-20, Johnston reaches this conclusion on the
basis of a number of clues. For example, he notes that the
demons name themselves "legion," a Roman military term
denoting a band of soldiers. Casting out the "legion"
would then symbolize the eradication of the oppressive social and
economic structure maintained by Roman military power. From
there, Johnson views the exorcism of the Gadarene demoniac as the
proclamation of a social program. In other words, the text has a
hidden meaning, a social program found by reconstructing the
social world behind Mark's gospel and seeing the text in that
context:
Mark's gospel is rather like a richly nuanced cryptogram, encoding in its story world the details of Mark's social world. And Mark's Jesus, in turn, wipes the Palestinian landscape clean of its dominant politics and its prevailing piety in order to establish an alternate social reality -- what he will call, as the gospel moves forward from these stories, the "kingdom of God."
From there, it is but a short step to the spiritual or prophetic meaning of the text, the call to social justice:Building the kingdom of God involves "wiping the landscape clean" of economic exploitation and class oppression, political domination and colonial occupation. (11)
This is called "breaking open the Word," an apt metaphor because one cracks open the text like breaking open a nut. One then discards the shell but eats the meat within.Where is the demoniac of economic exploitation in the neighborhoods or our urban poor? Where do we collude with the demons of oppression in our political process? Where is the shackling of the mind in our schools and of the spirit in our churches? And where are our "swineherds" who anxiously oppose the unmasking of the powers of darkness? Mark's gospel draws sharp attention to our dependence on, indeed, our addiction to, habits of economic entitlement and personal power. These are our stalwart twentieth-century Western demons, but we dare not name the truth of them for fear of wreaking havoc on all hat is comfortably familiar in our social world. (12)
What is the immediate, overwhelming, interpretation of Mark 5:1-20 given by the church fathers? -- that God acted in the words of Jesus to liberate a possessed man from the power of the demons. Their interpretation of the text is as obvious as the text itself. There is no cryptogram here. It is a witness to the act of a sovereign God. Further, the fathers claimed that God the redeemer continued to do the same in their day as well. Gregory the Great (540-604), for example, reflected on the passage by saying that a "legion of demons has been, as I believe, cast out of me." (14) It is well known that the early church exorcised its catechumens for months prior to their baptism. It was believed that this power to heal led to a qualitatively new form of life superior to any other.It was for the greater good of attesting God's power and eliciting faith that the swine were slain by the agency of demons. (Jerome, Chrysostom) The glory of humanity made in the image of God had freely fallen to the depths under the power of unclean spirits. (Prudentius) These fallen spiritual creatures were first to recognize the Son as holy, sovereign, God. (Athanasius, Peter Chrysologus, Prudentius) It is one who is truly man and truly God that the demons instantly recognize with dread. (Gregory Nazianzen) Even if a whole army of demons takes up residence in a single body, the redeemer can transform human misery into soundness. (Lactantius, Ephrem the Syrian) Limited powers are temporarily permitted to the demonic to test faith. (Tertullian) The church continues to petition God to deliver the faithful from demonic powers. (Apostolic Constitutions, Ephrem the Syrian) The demonic powers are not originally and directly willed by God but are only permitted by God under the conditions of sin, and as a consequence of taking freedom seriously, they play a role in drawing forth the greater good. They are already being bound up by the anointed one. (John of Damascus) The faithful today attest the same cleansing grace. (Gregory the Great) (13)
For it is plain that if Christ be dead, he could not be expelling demons and spoiling idols; for a dead man the spirits would not have obeyed. But if they be manifestly expelled by the naming of his name, it must be evident that he is not dead; especially as spirits, seeing even what is unseen by men, could tell if Christ were dead and refuse him no obedience at all. But as it is, what irreligious men believe not, the spirits see -- that he is God -- and hence they fly and fall at his feet, saying just what they uttered when he was in the body: "We know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God," and "Ah, what have we to do with thee, thou Son of God. I pray thee, torment me not." (15)
Furthermore, the patristic interpreters of Mark 5:1-20 placed this text in a wider biblical and theological context. They did not go behind the text to a reconstructed "Marcan community," but read it in the context of the entire biblical witness. The statements that the "glory of humanity made in the image of God has fallen to the depths," or that "limited powers are temporarily permitted to the demonic," or that "the demonic powers are not originally and directly willed by God but only permitted by God under the conditions of sin," or "these fallen spiritual creatures," are all statements indicating an awareness that God created the world good, that there was a fall, and that the Redeemer reversed the conditions of the fall. The sweep of biblical history, from Genesis to Revelation, lies behind these statements and gives them their true narrative and theological context.Or how, if he [Jesus Christ] is no longer active (for this is proper to one dead), does he stay from their activity those who are active and alive, so that the adulterer no longer commits adultery, and the murderer murders no more, nor is the inflicter of wrong any longer grasping, and the profane is henceforth religious. Or how, if he be not risen but is dead, does he drive away, and pursue, and cast down those false gods said by the unbelievers to be alive, and the demons they worship? For where Christ is named, and his faith, there all idolatry is deposed and all imposture of evil spirits is exposed, and any spirit is unable to endure even the name, nay, even on barely hearing it, flies and disappears. But this work is not that of one dead, but of one that lives -- especially of God. (16)
Johnston's
"God"
Once Johnston has eliminated the concept of God's act, placed
experience ahead of Scripture, defined biblical interpretation in
terms of community story, and turned ethics into a progressive
realization of abstract norms, he is ready to discuss the nature
of God as found in Scripture. That chapter is entitled "Who
is the God of the Bible?"
The Christian response to that question is that the God of the
Bible is the Father of Jesus Christ. That is the most important
affirmation in the whole of Scripture. Without that, there is
nothing. But Johnston doesn't make that claim. He is wondering
about the God of the Old Testament, and he doesn't really connect
that God to Jesus Christ.
To begin with, Johnston notices that the Old Testament is filled
with multiple images of God. There is a reason for this.
Israel, like her pagan neighbors, found a wide variety of images
in creation. Among these images, only certain ones were applied
to God. But unlike her neighbors, these images were welded
together in a narrative stream of God's acts which placed them in
a new interpretative context. It was this specific narrative
stream of God's acts that distinguished the Hebrew God from the
pagan deities. (18)
Johnston, however, reverses the process. He picks texts out of
the biblical stream, isolates their images, and proclaims that
these multiple images reveal "God." In this way the
narrative meaning centering in Jesus Christ is lost.
"God" then becomes a mystic one beyond all images, yet
including and harmonizing all of them. Since the source of these
images was originally creation, they reproduce the pagan
form.
Further, since Scripture is really the product of communities
telling "their" stories, and since the divine is given
in the stories, it follows logically that "God ... makes us
up as we go along as much as we make up God." (19)
Athanasius, of course, would consider this blasphemy. Here is
Johnston:
There is no single metaphor, nor complex of metaphors, that serves fully to define the ineffable character of God. No single revelation can exhaust all that is to be revealed. In fact, the more adept you become at the kind of critical Bible reading I have tried to suggest in these pages, the more you begin to see that the God of the biblical tradition is not a single reality at all, but a multiplicity of realities, a diversity, more a plurality than a unity -- and often uncomfortably so.
I prefer to think that God's variety, ambiguity, nuance, and contradiction come honestly from people's authentic experience of God in concrete and diverse situations. In this incarnational stance the divine and the human are both involved in the ongoing work of creation, so God makes us up as we go along as much as we make up God.
Johnston calls his stance "incarnational." By this he does not mean the Incarnation of the Word in Jesus Christ. Rather, everything is "incarnational," meaning that creation's diverse images all contribute to the sense of the ineffable god. Implicit, though not stated, is the idea that those who hold to Jesus Christ as the definitive image of God have a limited and restricted view of incarnation. Similarly, when he gets to Jesus and the incarnation, he will expand the valid images for Christ so as to include present experience and avoid what he calls a "boxed-in Jesus."God may be a single, comprehensive reality in heaven, but the God we find in most of the biblical texts -- who actually seems to have some "shadow" sides as well -- is busy and restless, an innovative Creator who is working some very strange sides of the streets of the world. (20)
Here we have a slight change. In previous passages Johnston had located the sense of complexity in the "variety, ambiguity, nuance, and contradiction come honestly from people's authentic experience of God in concrete and diverse situations." In other words, the "divine" multiplicity lay outside God. Here, however, he moves the complexity into God, with the single term "God" referring to an abstract catchall that contains the full panoply of diverse and scarcely related images. This divine One is wholly "other! other! other!", meaning that it transcends yet requires each and every metaphor. Since creation's images contradict each other, some good and some evil, this "other! other! other!" will manifest itself in contrary qualities existing side by side. Love exists right along with some "rather bad behavior," which makes for "ambiguity, contradiction, and incongruity." We knew this about ourselves, now we know it about God.In the end, Isaiah probably got it right: Yahweh is other! other! other! Which is just another way of make the point of this chapter: God has a rich and diverse interiority that no single reading can exhaust. But I think it is also a joy and comfort -- really Good News -- that the God of the Bible has some scandalous dimensions as well. Alongside wisdom and justice and love and compassion and peace, we discover ambiguity, contradiction, and incongruity -- as well as some rather bad behavior. We know these things to be true about ourselves, but we did not know them about God. Once having made that discovery, however, we are set free to read the stories of our own lives without having to omit specific verses that look as if they should not belong in our personal texts. It turns out what we may be more in the image of our Creator than we had ever thought. (24)
Johnston's
Jesus
Once Johnston has eliminated God's act, turned Scripture into a
series of community stories, subordinated Scripture to
experience, ignored God's ethical command, and defined
"God" through a pantheon of images united in a mystical
one, he is ready to introduce the subject of Jesus Christ. This
occurs in his chapter, "Who is the Jesus of the
Bible?"
Johnston is quite consistent. First, he does not connect Jesus
Christ to the whole of Scripture so that Jesus Christ is the
central revelation of the God of the Bible. Further, he does not
think there is one Jesus Christ in Scripture, the one
"incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary"
and "crucified for us under Pontius Pilate." Rather,
just as the God of the Bible was multiple, so is Jesus. Each
biblical Jesus was the product of an original Jesus history,
transformed and augmented by different communities on the basis
of different experiences. Finally, just as the biblical people
created four gospel versions of Jesus, communities today can
create their own version of Jesus on the basis of their own
unique experience.
Johnston's begins by reading the gospels as a three-layered
composite. First, there is the Jesus of history. This is what
you would get if you followed Jesus around with a video camera.
But the early church didn't have video cameras. They had stories
about Jesus that circulated orally. This original layer of oral
stories is called the "Jesus of history." As these
stories were circulated they were embellished and transformed,
with material added or subtracted according to the varied
circumstances and interests of different communities. This is
the second layer. Finally, various communities reflected
theologically on the stories. They added their theological
reflections to the stories. This produced the third layer. The
latter two layers are called the "Christ of faith."
This process of transformation took place in different
communities, each arriving at different stories of Jesus.
Finally, various communities wrote down some of the transformed
stories. Four accounts were later preserved as authoritative, the
four different gospel accounts of Jesus.
This process can be illustrated by applying it to Mark 5:1-20, the story of the Gadarene demoniac. Originally, there may not have been any miracle at all. A strange and unkempt man may have recognized something startling about Jesus, and in his excitement, frightened some pigs and they ran into a lake. As the story circulated, however, it became exaggerated. The man was described as possessed. He was fierce, he broke his chains. These details entered the story at level two. Even more, as the early Christian community felt the holy in this story of Jesus, they came to sense he was the Son of God. Therefore, the story picked up that title, placing it in the lips of the possessed man through whom the demons recognized Jesus. The title, "Son of God," thus belongs to level three, the level of theological reflection.The Jesus of history belongs to the first layer, the Christ of faith belongs to the second and third. This is not to say that the first is the only authentic layer while the other two are somehow invalid. Quite the contrary. Just as we discovered with the God of the Hebrew Bible, redaction of the Jesus material functioned to assist revelation. In short, the gospels are not journalistic recitations of the life of Jesus; he left behind followers who were thinkers, not merely scribes, and who believed the Christ of faith was still with them in the Holy Spirit, teaching and leading them into new truths. (25)
And thus when there was need to restore to health Peter's wife's mother who was sick of a fever, our Lord's hand touched her, but His Godhead cured her (S. Matt. viii. 14). It was not the spittle and the clay, but Christ's Almighty Power that gave sight to the man that had been born blind from his birth (S. John ix. 11). The voice of man called Lazarus out of the grave, but it was the Word of God which raised him from the dead (S John xi. 43). And our Lord, by acting in this manner, gave evidence of His manhood, and prevented any suspicion if His being only an apparition or phantom. (27)
Once Johnston has separated the life of Jesus into four gospel portraits, and once each gospel has been separated into layers, he then compares the first layer of each against the first layer of the other three. Essentially, he comes up with nothing. There is nothing there because a primary actor in the story, God acting, has been eliminated, allowing the residue to fall into a heap of sand. This heap can be variously interpreted, and from my reading, contemporary scholarship appears to drift from one hypothesis to another. Johnston describes the state of current scholarship with these words:For his charging evil spirits, and their being driven forth, this deed is not of man, but of God. Or who that saw him healing the diseases to which the human race is subject, can still think him man and not God. For he cleansed lepers, made lame men to walk, opened the hearing of deaf men, made blind men to see again, and in a word drove away from men all diseases and infirmities: from which acts it was possible even for the most ordinary observer to see his Godhead. (28)
What do we have here? We have six versions of how Jesus could have been a human being. Not one of them makes the claim that Jesus was fully human, yet fully divine, and that a primary significance of the human nature was that it revealed God's mighty acts.Depending on what you read, the Jesus of current scholarship is an eschatological prophet, an itinerant Cynic sage, a social revolutionary, a teacher of unconventional wisdom, a founder of a religious movement, or a shaman -- that is, a mystical holy man. (29)
This claim, the claim that the Spirit can redefine the truth is nothing new. One of its first proponents was the heretic Montanus, followed by the spiritual Franciscans, the radical Anti-Baptists, the enthusiasts of Hooker's time, and those today who feel they can rewrite Scripture as they please. As Hooker states:Thus, we are left at the end of this chapter with the question I posed at the beginning still unanswered: "Who is the Jesus portrayed in the Bible?" But perhaps that is not the most urgent question; it is really only another way to ask, "Who do people say that I am?" That question seems peripheral, especially if we focus only on the literal and historical Jesus. But when we attend to the prophetic Jesus as well, what is primary and crucial is not the Jesus of record but the Jesus of experience and promise. He is ultimately assembled out of the lives and hopes of believing communities and faithful individuals. Who do you say that he is? (32)
Johnston does not believe that Christ was "one person," but "many," created by those who have the "said quality," that is, the "Jesus of experience and promise," by virtue of the fact that resurrection means that they are "regenerated or endowed with the said quality; ..." And this text, "Engaging the Word," is an attempt to show that "Scripture everywhere speaketh in the favour of that sect."When they of the family of love have it once in their heads that Christ does not signify any one person but a quality whereof many are partakers; that to be raised is nothing else but to be regenerated or endowed with the said quality; and that when separation of them which have it from them which have it not is here made, this is judgment; how plainly do they imagine that the Scripture everywhere speaketh in the favour of that sect. (33)
Endnotes
1. Michael Johnston, Engaging the Word. The New Church's
Teaching Series, Volume 3. Cambridge: Cowley Publications, 1998.
All quotations of Johnston are from this text.
2. Johnston, pp. ix-x.
3. Frances M. Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of
Christian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997, p. 21.
4. Johnston, pp. 25, 97.
5. Johnston, pp. 12, 12-13, 23, 4, 19, 23.
6. Johnston, pp. 20, 22.
7. Johnston, pp. 94-95.
8. Athanasius, Against Arius. I, 38.
9. Johnston, pp. 25, 37.
10. In regards to the phrase "from the Holy Spirit and the
Virgin Mary and became man," the 1979 Episcopal Book of
Common Prayer inserts a word not found in the original Creed.
That word is "power." It reads "by the power of
the Holy Spirit" rather than "from the Holy
Spirit." This weakens the original conception. Men and
women in the Old Testament did things by the power of the Holy
Spirit, but the Creed is saying something much stronger -- the
divine Son became "incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the
virgin Mary." This was a unique event without Old Testament
parallels.
11. Johnston, pp. 60-61, 61.
12. Johnston, p. 62.
13. Oden, Thomas C. and Hall, Christopher A., eds. Ancient
Christian Commentary On Scripture, New Testament II:
Mark." Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998, pp. 66-67.
This text is one of a series on the patristic interpretation of
Scripture. The series is in process, and it is invaluable.
14. Oden and Hall, p. 71.
15. Athanasius. On the Incarnation of the Word. The
Library of Christian Classics, Volume III: Christology of the
Later Fathers. Hardy, Edward Rochie, and Richardson, Cyril C.,
eds. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954, p. 86.
16. Athanasius. On the Incarnation of the Word, pp.
84-85.
17. While I cannot go into detail here, I have been involved in
a ministry of deliverance for more than thirty years, and have
seen first-hand the astonishing things that happen in the name of
Jesus Christ. Over and over again I have known people to be
delivered in ways that absolutely amaze me, as much now as when I
first began so many years ago.
18. A good analysis of how this happened can be found in Frank
Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1973
It wasn't the fact that Yahweh
revealed himself in history that made him unique. Pagan deities
could act in history. Rather, Yahweh revealed himself in a
specific history, with a specific people. This is what
distinguished Yahweh from other gods. Ultimately, God is unique
because he has revealed himself in a specific person, Jesus
Christ, and not just persons in general.
19. Johnston, p. 97.
20. Johnston, pp, 99-100, 97, 97.
21. The term "shadow" is taken from the analytical
psychology of Carl Jung. For Jung, wholeness occurs when good
and evil, light and dark, female and male, spirit and matter,
unite to form the "coincidence of opposites," the
divine one behind all finite phenomena.
22. Johnston, p. 99.
23. Johnston, p. 99.
24. Johnston, pp. 114-15.
25. Johnston, pp. 119-20.
26. It is rarely recognized that one of the decisive turning
points in the development of Karl Barth's theology was his
encounter with the Blumhardts. The Blumhardts, father and son,
carried out a ministry of healing and exorcism, and Barth visited
them quite early in his ministry. There he saw God act
miraculously. This experience, together with WWI and what he
called the "Strange New World of the Bible," led him to
see that Scripture was concerned with God's deeds, and not simply
the history of religious experience.
It was only after his reading of Anselm in the late 1920s,
however, that Barth was able to formulate in trinitarian and
christological terms the meaning of God's act or Word. This
analysis forms the prolegomena of his Church
Dogmatics.
But he did not forget the Blumhardts, nor did he forget that a
decisive moment in their ministry occurred when a demon was cast
out of a young women. As it left, it uttered "Jesus is
Victor." Among other places, Barth speaks of the Blumhardts
in a section of the Church Dogmatics entitled "Jesus
is Victor":
27. Athanasius, Against Arius, III, 32.That Jesus conquers was not stated nor known, and certainly not "settled" in this way among the contemporaries of Blumhardt, whether extra or intra muros ecclesiae, whether in the world of Goethe or Hegel, whether in official circles, pietistic groups or theology, whether by the Rationalists, Supranaturalists and Pietists of the 18th century or the Romantics, Speculatives, Biblicists or theologians of the Awakening of the 19th century. To be sure, many important things were then seen and said concerning Jesus the God-man of the early dogma, Jesus the supreme vehicle of eternal reason, Jesus the friend of humanity and Teacher of ethics, Jesus the Saviour of souls, Jesus the centre of Christian piety, and, after the fabulous discovery of D. F. Strauss, Jesus the mystical personage. If we turn to any secular or Christian book of the period, and among the Christian books it makes little difference whether it is a work of scholarship or edification, the two words said about Jesus in this declaration, namely, that He "is Victor," could be put on the outer margin of any of them, but they could not have the decisive and comprehensive significance, the emphasis, which they have for Blumhardt. ... The only question which is finally relevant in relation to the incident is the spiritual one whether or not we will hear this saying. (Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV, Part Three, first half, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961, p. 171.)
The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D.
robertsanders@iglide.net
Copyright, May, 2002.
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