DET (Die Evangelischen Theologen) is the theological version of a digital news magazine. The DET authorial team provides insightful, thought-provoking content on a wide range of theological, religious, and even political subjects from current events and culture as well as from the Christian and other religious traditions.
Paradigm 1. Jesus as the proclaimer of the kingdom.
One line of thought holds that Jesus is the key messenger who proclaims the kingdom in life and deed. He might, for example, be best understood in the mode of a Hebrew a prophet. Like Amos, called away from his farming gig, Jesus receives a specific prophecy that may not have much to do with his personal characteristics or previous vocation. In his prophetic vocation, Jesus' message points beyond the messenger to a greater, more encompassing reality, whether that reality is understood primarily in ethical, socio-cultural or eschatological terms. The message itself is what matters; the messenger, not so much. So too if Jesus' significance rests exclusively in his roles as preacher and teacher.
Anonymous Cynic Philosopher
Though this attempt to draw a strong distinction between message and messenger seems fairly marginal in the history of Christian thought, such accounts have been more frequent since the Enlightenment. A fairly straightforward and dramatic example of this approach would be Thomas Jefferson literally snipping out the miracle stories from the Gospels and retaining what he understood to be Jesus' core ethical teachings. Recent years have seen new, revisionist proposals for interpreting Jesus primarily in terms of his example, teaching and praxis. John Dominic Crossan, a leading voice in the Jesus Seminar, provides a fascinating and provocative portrayal of Jesus as a radically egalitarian, counter-cultural and peripatetic teacher analogous to a wandering Cynic sage. My interest here is not in that portrait per se but rather in Crossan's clear rejection of the notion Jesus proclaimed himself as the gateway to the kingdom: Crossan sees Jesus' kingdom as a radically anti-institutional and anti-hierarchical form of liberated human social existence available, in principle, at any time or place. He writes:
The Kingdom of God was not, for Jesus, a divine monopoly exclusively bound to his own person. It began on the level of the body and appeared as a shared community of healing and eating -- that is to say, of spiritual and physical resources available to each and all without distinctions, discriminations, or hierarchies (p. 113).
Further, Crossan writes, anticipating my typology beautifully:
The historical Jesus was a peasant Jewish Cynic....And lest he himself be interpreted as simply the new broker of a new God, he moved on constantly, settling down neither at Nazareth nor at Capernaum. He was neither broker nor mediator but, somewhat paradoxically, the announcer that neither should exist between humanity and divinity or between humanity and itself.
Now, Crossan's unwashed peasant agitator may seem a far cry from Jefferson's enlightened moralist, but what interests me here is the formal similarity vis-a-vis how Jesus relates to the kingdom. Whatever form it might take, if we accept this paradigm -- we might call it, following Kierkegaard, "Jesus as small-t teacher" -- most traditional christological problems simply dissolve in its wake. Accessing the meaning of such a Jesus doesn't require us to wait for Constantine to convene the bishops at Nicea.
From the standpoint of historical scholarship, the question becomes: How does the interpreter account for the personal veneration Jesus himself receives throughout the New Testament witness and subsequent history of Christian belief and worship? Rudolf Bultmann offers the classic formulation of this hermeneutical problem: "He who formerly had been the bearer of the message was drawn into it and became its essential content. The proclaimer became the proclaimed--but the central question is: In what sense?" (p. 33). Crossan and other like-minded scholars who make liberal use of the hermeneutic of suspicion tend to read the development of ideas of Jesus' dignity and uniqueness largely as a process of wish fulfillment that occludes and distorts the Nazarene's original radically socio-political message. However one sorts out these challenges, it is clear that constructive christology has much more than a merely historical interest riding on them.
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Works Cited:
Bultmann, Rudolf, Theology of the New Testament: Complete in One Volume (New York, Prentice Hall, 1970).
Crossan, John Dominic, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994).
Every now and then I am asked for advice about studying Karl Barth. So, I thought that I would share some of my standard advice here. But, before I do that, let me just say that I am by no means a Barth expert as compared to the people whose books I will mention below. I would be thrilled to find myself in their league one day, but as of yet that remains a distant dream. Still, I have been reading Barth for long enough, and under the supervision of a number of the scholars that I will mention below, that I think I can provide a decent orientation. I have never read Karl Barth before. Which of his books should I read first? Barth’s most famous work is the monumental 13-volume Church Dogmatics . Reading the CD with understanding is not an easy thing, so you definitely do NOT want to start here. Luckily, there are two smaller works by Barth that serve as helpful introductions to his work. Evangelical Theology: An Introduction - Based on the lectures that Barth delivered duri
"I fear that Christians who stand with only one leg upon earth also stand with only one leg in heaven." "The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from everyday Christian life in community…may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; for in the poor sister or brother, Christ is knocking at the door." "Since ethical thinking in terms of realms is overcome by faith in the revelation of the ultimate reality in Jesus Christ . . . there is no real Christian existence outside the reality of the world." "People who reject their bodies reject their existence before God the Creator." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer Prelude Andreas Steinhoff [Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons I envisioned having a lot of time for blogging this summer, but that simply has not been the case - the last month has been a crazy one, to say the least. For two weeks, I was working at a theology summer camp of sorts, the Duke Youth Academy, and s
“You Wonder Where the Spirit Went”: Jenson and Barth on the Hiddenness of God By Peter Kline I am entering into a conversation that Jenson has already begun with Barth. In a constructive essay on the hiddenness of God (Jenson 2000), Jenson considers Barth’s position on the matter only to find it lacking. I want to explore why Jenson has problems with Barth on this issue, as well think critically about his constructive alternative. I will suggest that Jenson is only partly right in his diagnosis of Barth; he in fact overlooks the heart of Barth’s teaching on divine hiddenness. The reason is that he looks in the wrong place for Barth’s pneumatology. Jenson can’t find the Spirit in Barth not because the Spirit isn’t there, but because the Spirit is hidden . These considerations will open out into a comparison of Barth and Jenson on the logic of revelation. By “logic” I mean: what is discourse about God’s revealedness and hiddenness supposed to accomplish? Part I Jenson focuses his a
On the Monstrosity of Christ : Karl Barth in Conversation with Slavoj Žižek & John Milbank By Paul Dafydd Jones For a while, I hoped to frame this conversation in terms of a dramatic interchange – something along the lines of “A Slovenian philosopher, a British theologian, and a Swiss dogmatician walk into a bar…” Alongside an eye-wateringly hip assemblage of cinematic references, literary allusions, and comedic scenes – my early favorites being when Barth imagines a young adult novel, entitled Are you there God? It’s me, Žižek , and when Milbank waxes poetic about the Twilight movies – I wanted to engage some topics that would likely receive attention, were the authors to meet for drinks. Primarily, I envisioned an intense discussion of the logos asarkos and the logos ensarkos , with Milbank talking up the former category, Barth emphasizing the latter, and Žižek asking whether recent debates are but symptoms of secret puzzle, embedded in the Church Dogmatics – a puzzle that
You know, all the most interesting topics. Although Barth often confessed that he didn’t find these questions particularly interesting. At best they might draw sideways glances, as it were, as one travels the theological road. But I found a number of places in the records of Barth’s later conversations that I thought folks might find interesting, so I’ve collected them here. And if you aren’t familiar with the term “florilegium,” here you go ! All these texts are from the first volume of Barth in Conversation , with pages numbers given in parentheses along the way. As usual, italics are in the text and bold is mine. Hell “Now we come to hell. You shouldn’t laugh! There is nothing to laugh at! What does hell mean? I think hell means to be in the place where you are once fore all damned and lost without ceasing to exist, without losing the image of God, being what you are but being damned and lost, separated from God, whose creature you are, separated also from your neighbor, from
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