The Jesus of an Impoverished Theology
By Shayne Looper
When I brought in the mail last week and saw the cover of Newsweek’s Easter edition, I thought, I’m going to hate this. The cover art featured a contemporary, white-Anglo-Saxon Jesus walking through the streets of New York in a plaid cotton shirt, a blue jacket and a crown of thorns. The title read: “Forget the Church, Follow Jesus.” As someone who believes the Church and Jesus are inseparable, I was ready to dislike Andrew Sullivan’s feature article before I opened the magazine. Tina Brown’s commentary, “Holy Smoke! God save us from the godly,” didn’t exactly help. Yet, I appreciated Sullivan’s article –– and Sullivan, himself, for that matter. I appreciated the inside look the article provides into its author — a man who believes in Jesus’ divinity and resurrection and has pondered the incarnation all his life. He reads theology and grapples with what it means to be both God and human. I also found his comments about the Church instructive. His criticism says more, I think, about Andrew Sullivan than it does about the Church, but it is helpful to see the Church (and myself as part of it) through someone else’s eyes. Sullivan’s condemnation of Catholics and Evangelicals is scathing. He accuses the Catholic Church of “an international conspiracy to abuse and rape countless youths and children.” Evangelicals are anti-intellectuals obsessed with wealth and characterized by fear — indeed, panic — over the future. Only mainline Protestant Churches escape condemnation. He merely observes that these proponents of “religious moderation” are in serious decline. But Sullivan’s picture of the Church is painted with too broad a brush. No one would guess by reading his article that there are hundreds of thousands of Catholic priests, almost all of whom love children and protect them. Nor would an uninformed reader imagine the depth and vitality of contemporary Evangelical scholarship. Still, Sullivan’s charges are not without truth. The Church has too often looked everywhere but to Jesus for salvation. Her outlook has at times been more influenced by political parties than by the Holy Spirit. She has focused “on politics rather than prayer” and concerned herself more “with the sex lives of others ... than with the constant struggle to liberate ourselves from what keeps us from God.” My main dispute with Sullivan has to do with Jesus. Who is the Jesus he wants us to follow? He is a scholarly caricature from the last century. After snubbing the canonized Gospels as “copies of copies of stories told by those with fallible memory,” Sullivan finds himself instead with the Jesus of an impoverished and outdated theology. The persistent error of that theology lay in its repeated attempts to divorce Jesus from his message. It’s the same error that Sullivan’s patron saint, Thomas Jefferson, made. He dissected the New Testament, cut out the biblical Jesus but kept his teaching. But remove the teacher from his teaching and Jesus ends up looking more like a Greek philosopher than a Jewish rabbi. New Testament scholar Ben Witherington is surely right: such a Jesus “could never have ended up on Golgotha nailed to the cross.” There are many reasons why separating Jesus from his message is doomed to failure, but chief among them is this: Jesus is himself the subject of his message. He identified himself as the judge of humanity, “one greater than Jonah ... greater than Solomon,” and called himself the “bread of life” and “the Lord of Sabbath.” Sullivan is right: Follow Jesus. But make sure he’s the Jesus worth following. Shayne Looper is the pastor at the Lockwood (Mich.) Community Church. He can be reached at salooper@frontier.com. His column appears each Saturday.
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