Make the gospel weird again

 

     The “gospel” – whether proclaimed in the first-century Roman world or in any “secular” contemporary context – is irreducibly strange.  You have heard that it was said, “The truth is stranger than fiction”, but I say to you that the gospel makes “madmen” of those who are embraced by it (cf. 1 Cor. 1.20-21; 2.2-5; 4.9-10).

“…‘Where did God go?...We have killed him – you and I! We are all his murderers! But how did we do this?...What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun?...Where are we heading? Away from all suns? Are we not constantly falling? Backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below?...God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we, the most murderous of all murderers, ever console ourselves?...Must we not become gods ourselves, if only to appear worthy of it?’...”[1]

     Nietzsche’s madman, as it happens, is an unwitting evangelist, proclaiming the death of God in the marketplace to a crowd of both bewildered and baptized people.  Indeed, to the 19^th-century Lutherans among whom Nietzsche had grown up, such a message could only be proclaimed by a crazy person, or perhaps by an apostle.  The fact is, though Nietzsche appears to have intended his parable as a tongue-in-cheek critique of his nominally Christian contemporaries who had abandoned religious practice (i.e. killed God) all the while continuing to betray their continued belief by their behaviour (or at least, by their guilt), he was in fact restating the core of the original “gospel” as proclaimed by Paul (cf. 1 Cor. 2.7-8).[2]  As counterintuitive as it still sounds, the gospel was always an irreligious message.[3]  Paul’s gospel cut across the religious (and skeptical) sensibilities of both Jew and pagan (cf. 1 Cor. 1.18-25).[4]  What’s more, the gospel was never presented by Paul as a “religious option”; rather, it was for Paul the unique, apocalyptic revelation of the Creator, who had thereby both judged and saved the world.  So shocking was the cross of Christ – in light of his resurrection – that Paul had to undergo an “epistemological conversion” before he could begin to grasp its ramifications.

     Simply put, Paul’s gospel was weird.  As Robert Barron says,

“…[Christianity] seemed to me the strangest, most exotic, surprising, and uncanny of all of the religious paths I had encountered.  For at the very center of it is…a God who comes after us with a reckless abandon, breaking open his own heart in love in order to include us in the rhythm of his own life.  Christianity, I saw, was…God’s relentless quest for us – even to the point of death…Whatever you think of that last statement…the one thing it is not saying is what everyone else is saying.

And friendship with God…entailed, I discovered, a giving of self that mirrored the radicality of God’s own gift of self in Christ.  The point of the Christian life is to be holy with the very holiness of God, and this means conformity with a love unto death.  On both the human and divine side, therefore, there is a radical, even disquieting extremism about Christianity…”[5]

     Or, in the words of Nick Spencer, “There can be no serious doubt that Jesus Christ is the single most important figure in…world history, his minor movement creeping through and transforming the ancient world like some kind of metaphysical plague, which was pretty much what ancient and modern critics claim that it was.[6]  All on the foundation of a crucified Messiah.”[7]  The New Testament – this “tabloid” of the ancient world – shows itself to be an imaginative, subversive collection of documents which sustained a powerless community which, within three centuries, would non-violently and successfully transform the Roman empire into what Augustine of Hippo called (the beginning of the earthly manifestation of) the City of God.[8]

     We sometimes make the mistake of thinking that the content of the gospel message is basically “sensible, logical[9] – perhaps even self-evident”[10] (and that resistance to it can be chalked up either to willful ignorance or to God’s pre-destining of certain people to damnation), and that imaginative apologetics serve merely to facilitate people’s embrace of an otherwise believable message; however, many contemporary thinkers are drawing our attention to the fact that, for the apostle Paul, the irreducible content of his gospel demanded that his audience undergo what Richard B. Hays has dubbed “a conversion of the imagination”.^[11]  But it wasn’t only the “pagan hordes” whose imaginations needed to be baptized; it was first and foremost those of the people of God.  The cross and resurrection of Jesus provided a new hermeneutical key with which to unlock the meaning of the Scriptures (cf. Lk. 24.13-27).[12]  In light of the risen Jesus, the promises to Abraham no longer pointed to a safe-and-secure Israel, comfortably nestled atop “the nations”, marinating in a blissful self-righteousness (like Jonah under the vine overlooking the doomed city of Nineveh)[13], but rather issued a challenge to the people of God (which they had long ignored) to undertake a vocation to make herself vulnerable to the world’s misunderstanding and violence and therefore reveal the love of the Creator and make the redemption of the nations possible (cf. Gal. 3-4; Rom. 4).  Jesus had embodied Israel’s vocation to be “a light to the nations” and the renewed people of God of which Paul found himself to be the “father-mother/midwife”[14] was called to imitate the self-giving God revealed by Christ (e.g. Eph. 5.1; Phil. 2.1-11).

     Richard Hays describes Paul’s rationale in writing to the Corinthians thus:

“…Paul is seeking to redefine their identity…within an apocalyptic narrative that locates present existence in the interval between cross and Parousia (cf. 1 Cor. 11.26).  Within that interval he calls the Gentile Corinthians to shape their behavior in accordance with Scripture’s admonitions, to act like the eschatological Israel he believes them to be.”[15]

     As Paul’s (Jewish) understanding of the Scriptures was deconstructed-and-reconstructed by the cross-and-resurrection of Jesus, so he calls the Corinthians to imaginatively inhabit the cruciform narrative of the Hebrew Bible – a narrative that continues until the Parousia of the One whose first advent the Scriptures cryptically foretold.  For Paul, all “evangelism” and “apologetics” were imaginative, as they should be for us as well.  The good news of Jesus was never expected[16], or deducible from previous knowledge.  From the pagan point of view, what “good news” could come from the Jews, never mind from a crucified Jew?  For first-century pagan ears, this was surely the absurdissimum.  Paul’s gospel issued a devastating challenge to everything a normal pagan assumed about the cosmos.  Once again, that unwitting (?) 19^th-century prophet:

“Modern men…no longer feel the gruesome superlative that struck a classical taste in the paradoxical formula ‘god on the cross’.  Never yet and nowhere has there been an equal boldness in inversion, anything as horrible, questioning, and questionable as this formula: it promised a revaluation of all the values of antiquity.”[17]

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[1] Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Joyous Science, UK: Penguin Random House, 2018 [1887], pp. 133-34.

[2] Though Nietzsche would never have countenanced (in print) the possibility of the resurrection.

[3] Rutledge, Fleming, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015, pp. 1-3, passim.

[4] Cf. the 2^nd-century words of Melito of Sardis: “Painful it is to say…He who suspended the earth is suspended, he who fixed the heavens is fixed, he who fastened all things is fastened to the wood; the Master is outraged; God is murdered”, quoted by Rutledge, Fleming, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015, p. vii.

[5] Barron, Robert, The Strangest Way: Walking the Christian Path, Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2002, p. 11 (emphasis added).

[6] Cf. Beard, Mary, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, New York & London: Liveright Publishing, 2015, pp. 516-20.

[7] Spencer, Nick, “Jesus Christ, Game Changer” in Holland, Tom, ed. Revolutionary: Who was Jesus?  Why does he still Matter? London: SPCK, 2020, pp. 85-86.

[8] With all of the ambiguity that went along with that; cf. Pelikan, Jaroslav, The Excellent Empire: The Fall of Rome and the Triumph of the Church, San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1987; Richard A. Horsley, ed. In the Shadow of Empire: Reclaiming the Bible as a History of Faithful Resistance, Louisville: WJK Press, 2008; Saint Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, London: Penguin Books, 2003 [1467, 1972, 1984].

[9] I.e. in its original context.  Throughout subsequent Christian history, manifold ways of simplifying (=distorting) the message have been employed.

[10] E.g. who in their right mind would deny being a “sinner” in need of a saviour?  Solution: the cross, where our sin is imputed to Christ, and his righteousness is imputed to us.  Problem solved!  Though this “soteriological syllogism” has echoes of certain elements of Paul’s rationale, put this way, it assumes an interlocutor who is the product of a culture that has a consensus view of the salvific efficacy of Jesus’ death…

[11] Hays, Richard B. First Corinthians, Louisville: John Knox Press, 1997, pp. 11-12.

[12] Cf. Hays, Richard B. The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel’s Scripture, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005.

[13] This was simply ancient Israel’s instantiation of the “universal” human (tribal) instinct to think of people as divided into “us” and “them”: cf. Harari, Yuval Noah, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Canada: Signal, 2016 [2011], p. 190; however, Israel’s Scriptures consistently urged a vocation upon Israel that would embrace all nations.  Some 20^th-century Jewish intellectuals, such as Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (1948—2020), pointed out this universal import of biblical Judaism.  (Christian) NT scholar N.T. Wright sums up the “theology” of second-temple Jews with the triple-belief in monotheism, election and eschatology, i.e. one God, one people of God, and one future for Israel and the nations.

[14] Cf. 1 Cor. 4.15; Gal. 4.19; Paul was apparently comfortable with “transgender” imagery!  Cf. Westfall, Cynthia Long, Paul and Gender: Reclaiming the Apostle’s Vision for Men and Women in Christ, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016, pp. 45-60.

[15] Hays, Richard B. The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel’s Scripture, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005, p. 21.

[16] Though perhaps it was dreamt about; cf. Lewis’ notion of the God-given “good dreams” that pagans had, during the centuries before Christ, of dying-and-rising gods.

[17] Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil, New York: Vintage Books, 1989 [1886], p. 60.