The Liberal: Jonathan Clatworthy (pictured) is an English priest who formerly headed the main advocate for liberal theology in the Church of England, “Modern Church.” A recent post, The Word of God and the proposals of humans, struck Obadiah Slope as offering an insight into the thinking at the liberal end of Christianity. Clathwothy advances the argument that we have spent too much time thinking of Jesus as God, and not nearly enough time considering him as human.
“Jesus developed his own style. While recognising the ruling class oppression, he put more emphasis on God’s generosity, and he worked in the villages where people lived rather than taking them to the River Jordan. However, the difference I am focusing on here is one that conflicts with modern images of Jesus.
“Luzia Sutter Rehmann’s excellent Rage in the Belly gives two examples of inaccurate English translations of the gospels. In one, John the Baptist sent disciples to Jesus, asking, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’ Jesus replied:
“‘Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor…’
“English translations usually continue with something like ‘have good news brought to them’. English has active and passive voices, expressing what people do and what is done to them. Greek also has a middle voice describing what people do for themselves. This is the case here. A more precise translation would be that the poor ‘bring good news to each other’, thus matching what the blind, lame, leprous and deaf were doing. While modern Christians want Jesus to be the active healer, Jesus himself credited the suffering communities themselves for their achievements. It was a bottom-up movement.
“The other example is in Mark 6, probably our earliest account of the feeding of the multitude. It contrasts the lavish birthday party for Herod Antipas, where John’s head was brought in on a platter, with the desperation of the hungry people outside. I, and perhaps you, can only imagine what it is like to be desperately hungry and expect to be equally hungry for the rest of our lives. Those peasants had pinned their hopes on John and were distraught.
“English translators usually continue along the lines of the King James Version: ‘there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat’. So why not eat something? The Greek literally means ‘the times were not good for eating’. In other words, there was a famine. Their leader had been killed. They had pinned their hopes on John: now they would pin their hopes on Jesus.
“Mark’s theology lets us down. He seems to have believed Jesus was inaugurating a physically different new age: as well as feeding a multitude, he could walk on water and calm a storm. Later, Matthew and Luke, recognising Mark’s mistake, omitted his theology.”
Now that last paragraph strikes Obadiah as rather unAnglican. It contradicts Article 20 (one of the 39 articles of religion. But liberal Anglicans tend not to take too much notice of the articles.
Article 20 includes this: “And yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain anything contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.”
But Obadiah’s chief concern is how flat scripture has become in the Clatyworthy account. Jesus is the Obama-like community organiser. Don’t get Obadiah wrong here, Community Organisers are great. But Jesus is greater than even Obama.
The evangelical: Here’s a helpful bit of last Sunday’s sermon. Obadiah’s Rector, Alan Lukabyo, is preaching on Jesus healing the blind man in John 9. He tackles the question of what we are to make of this story – did it really happen the way the bible says?
“People have gone in a couple of directions. Some people will say, Look, it doesn’t matter. Maybe this is you tonight. If you’re exploring faith, you wouldn’t necessarily say you’re a Christian believer; you say, ‘Oh, whatever, just tell a story. Let’s just think about what it all means.’ And that’s not a bad approach.
“The difficulty that it runs into eventually is that when we read these biographies of Jesus, we are saying something happened in the real world. These aren’t just stories to reflect on. These things happened in the real world that we are living in now. Somebody really did rise from the dead. We are saying these are real-world things, so we can’t just hold them at arm’s length for too long and say, ‘Oh, well, let’s just not even focus on that question. Let’s just go with it.’
“And the second option is for a long time, it was quite fashionable to say, Look, Jesus was a real historical figure and he was a good teacher, but over the generations, people added these layers of legend on top of him, these supernatural things. And so there’s a real Jesus in there somewhere, but all the miracle stuff is kind of, you’ve got to scrape that away. And the problem with that is this version of Jesus, the version doing miracles, is the very earliest version that we can find from the very start.
“In fact, I’ve got a couple of quotes here for you. One from a historian writing in the first century AD, within living memory of Jesus and his resurrection, and this man was not a Christian believer, no great friend of the Christians, his name is Flavius Josephus. He wrote ‘Around this time, there lived a wise man called Jesus. Indeed, he was a man who performed startling feats.’ Even within the lifetime of people who saw Jesus, this is what he was known for: his amazing, amazing deeds, his amazing feats.
“Or to quote, a more recent biblical and historical scholar, a man called FF Bruce. He says, no matter how far or how far back, we press our researchers into the roots of the gospel story. No matter how we classify the gospel material, we never arrive at a non-supernatural Jesus from day one. The word about Jesus was that he did amazing things, and that’s the only Jesus we really get to decide about the Jesus who did miracles. Yes or no. There’s no alternative. We accept this Jesus or we reject this Jesus.”
Can we accept the supernatural Jesus and take on the social justice implications of following him? Yes, we can, and yes, we must. The John 9 sermon that I quoted followed a series on James, which, as that unsettling book makes clear, the Jesus way of life will challenge privilege. The evangelical accepts the supernatural as essential, which leads (or should lead) to serving others. But in going light on the supernatural aspect of Jesus’ ministry, the Liberal approach seems to me to be a radical missing out.