[Dialogue] 11/28/19, Progressing Spirit: Brian McLaren: Why do we use Christ as a synonym for Jesus?; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Nov 28 04:55:32 PST 2019
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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv1903795420 #yiv1903795420templateBody .yiv1903795420mcnTextContent, #yiv1903795420 #yiv1903795420templateBody .yiv1903795420mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv1903795420 #yiv1903795420templateFooter .yiv1903795420mcnTextContent, #yiv1903795420 #yiv1903795420templateFooter .yiv1903795420mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } I’ve been pondering this question too … for decades!
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Why do we use Christ as a synonym for Jesus?
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| Essay by Brian McLaren
November 28, 2019
This week's essay is in response to a question we received from Janet:
I wonder who “Christ” is. I know when people use the term, they are referring to Jesus. But Christ didn’t walk on water, Jesus did. So why does Christianity so often use the word Christ for Jesus; I find it confusing and incorrect. Some say there is a “Christ event;” so what is/was that event? Is that when Jesus became the Christ? “Christ” is the equivalent of Messiah, “anointed one.” Saul was a messiah; so was David as well as others. So why do we use Christ as a synonym for Jesus–or are they not one and the same?
Janet - thanks so much for this question. I’ve been pondering this question too … for decades! As you may know, Fr. Richard Rohr recently wrote a book on the subject, called the Universal Christ, and the former Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, recently wrote a book called Christ, The Heart of Creation. So if you’re wondering about the meaning of Christ, you are not alone!
Let’s start by saying the obvious: Christ isn’t Jesus’s last name. It’s a title, like doctor, reverend, president, or governor. It’s the Greek translation for the Hebrew word for Messiah, and both words mean “smeared,” as in smeared or anointed with oil. In ancient times, scented oils were smeared on people being honored, named, or recognized for a special role, much like placing an Olympic medal on an athlete, or giving an important person the keys to a city, or putting a crown on a prom queen. In passages like Isaiah 61, this oil of anointing was associated with the Spirit of God.
In the Jewish tradition, a powerful spiritual, theological, and political movement developed around the idea of the Messiah. For centuries, the Jewish people were oppressed and occupied by one foreign power after another, and they dreamed of a mighty liberator or freedom fighter who would unite them, rally them, and lead them into war to overthrow their oppressors so they would be free at last. Various would-be-messiahs arose and staged uprisings, but one after another were crushed. For some, the dream of a messiah died, but for many, with each defeat, the hope would become even more fervent.
You can think of it this way: there were kings over Israel who were puppets or accomplices of Caesar in Rome. They were not liberating kings. They were oppressive, corrupt, complicit kings. Someday, the people dreamed, God will send us a new leader who will be both a spiritual leader and a powerful political and military leader; he will be anointed as our liberating king.
Some years ago, I participated in a new translation/paraphrase of the New Testament called The Voice. I was assigned the books of Luke and Acts, and my assignment was to try to render the Greek and older English texts into contemporary terms that would make the meaning as clear as possible to people today. I struggled with how to translate the word Christ, and with this background in mind, I decided to use the term Liberating King. Today, I might simply render it Liberator instead.
Many of Jesus' contemporaries dared to believe that he might be their liberator, their long-awaited Christ. Yet he refused to fulfill their expectations. They wanted him to unite and revive the people spiritually so they would go to war against their Roman oppressors. But Jesus wouldn’t comply, because he wanted to liberate people, not simply from violent oppression, but also from violence itself. “My kingdom is not of this world,” he once said. “If it were of this world, my disciples would fight.” So he dared to proclaim an alternative kingdom that would be planted nonviolently, like seeds in the middle of the existing one. He was flipping the script on what it meant to be “smeared” or anointed as the Messiah.
Paul, when he was still called Saul, preferred the violent Messiah, and in fact he used violence to suppress the fledgling Jesus movement. Eventually, when he had a spiritual experience that convinced him that Jesus was in fact the Messiah or the Christ, it turned his life around.
One of his favorite terms came to be “in Christ.” Just as “in the kingdom of God” is one of the key phrases in understanding Jesus, “in Christ” is one of the key phrases in understanding Paul. Think of it like this: in Jesus, Paul encountered the Christ, the Messianic or Liberating Spirit, moving in the world of his day. But the life of Jesus radically redefined his understanding of what Messiah or Christ meant. The way of the Christ was not a way of violence (as he once thought), but the way of nonviolent love. By repenting (having a paradigm shift, rethinking everything, having his whole world turned upside down), he came to see himself as part of this new liberation movement. Now, he was “in Christ,” in the Messiah, in the Spirit, a citizen, an ambassador, and an agent of God’s kingdom, a member of the body of people in whom the liberating work of Jesus continued, now in many human bodies instead of just one.
Paul traveled around the Mediterranean world inviting people to join him “in Christ,” as part of the Spirit’s movement for justice, peace, and joy (see Romans 14:17).
Paul’s vision, as I understand it, was that the world would be transformed as more and more of us offered our “bodies as living sacrifices,” meaning opening our lives so that the Christ, the Messianic Spirit, the Spirit of liberation and love, could fill us, transform us, and empower us to do what the Christ manifested in Jesus: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self control.
In-Christ people would be messianic people, people being healed and liberated so they could be sent out to heal and liberate the world through love. The in-Christ people would learn to live a new way of life with a new code and a new vision and a new identity (which is what a kingdom is).
Jesus was filled with the Spirit, and anointed (smeared, marked as messianic) to preach good news to the poor, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberation to captives and freedom for prisoners. When we join that movement of love and liberation, when we enter “in Christ” (in the messianic movement), we become participants in the ongoing embodiment of Jesus, which is why we can be called “little Christs” (the literal meaning of Christians).
Sadly, this meaning of Christ and Christian has been largely lost. Now, to be a Christian means little more than to belong to an institution or assent to a list of beliefs. (Some so-called Progressive Christians still understand Christian identity as a matter of beliefs. They just uphold different beliefs than their conservative counterparts. They’ve changed their beliefs, but not their fundamental understanding of Christian faith as a way of life rather than a system of beliefs.)
This helps explain why the behavior of so many, if not most Christians, is so far from messianic. Nobody ever actually explained the real good news to them, the real good news that the Spirit of love and liberation is at work in the world, and if we will rethink everything — our values, priorities, purpose, even our politics — we can join the liberation movement!
When we “get” the original understanding, I think we quickly discover that the messianic Spirit, the Spirit of love and liberation, doesn’t care about labels. As Jesus said (in John 3 and 4), the Spirit blows and flows where it will, and is happy to work with any willing people, whatever their label.
If all this is true, then a number of other insights follow.
For example, if “the Christ” means the presence of the Spirit of love and liberation, and if this is another name for God, then we would expect, as Richard Rohr says, to be able to see Christ “in every thing” through the universe, and as Rowan Williams says, we would expect to see Christ “at the heart of creation.”
And if the Spirit of Christ, the Messianic Spirit, the Spirit of love and liberation is not the wholly owned subsidiary of one person or one culture or religion (as the story of Pentecost surely indicates), then we should expect to see the Christ showing up everywhere … even in us, and even in our neighbor!
In that light, just as Moses didn’t want to hoard his spiritual power and role, but said, “I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets” (Numbers 11:29), we can see why Jesus didn’t want to hoard the title “Christ.” Jesus was happy to share it and spread it far and wide. Just as he said "I am the light of the world," he also said, "You are the light of the world." As my friend Doug Pagitt explores in his excellent new book, Outdoing Jesus (Eerdman’s, 2019), Jesus wanted his disciples to be like their teacher, and to even do greater things than he did. He wanted us all to be filled with the messianic Spirit. He wanted us all to be embodiments or incarnations of the Spirit of love and liberation. As he was in the world messianically — for its nonviolent liberation, so he sends us.
So your question, Janet, isn’t just a theoretical one. It’s one that invites us all into the movement of love and liberation in our world today. Imagine what that could mean for the planet, for the poor, for peace, and even for politics … if more and more of us join God’s ongoing movement to liberate the world from all that steals, kills, and destroys, and to fill it instead with justice, joy, and peace!
~ Brian McLaren
Read online here
About the Author
Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. A former college English teacher and pastor, he is a passionate advocate for “a new kind of Christianity” – just, generous, and working with people of all faiths for the common good. He is an Auburn Senior Fellow and a member of the faculty of the Center for Action and Contemplation. He works closely with Vote Common Good, the Center for Progressive Renewal/Convergence, the Wild Goose Festival, and the Fair Food Program‘s Faith Working Group. His most recent projects include The Galapagos Islands: A Spiritual Journey and an illustrated children’s book (for all ages) called Cory and the Seventh Story. Other recent books include: The Great Spiritual Migration, We Make the Road by Walking, and Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? (Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World).
Brian has been active in networking and mentoring church planters and pastors since the mid 1980’s, and has assisted in the development of several new churches. He is a popular conference speaker and a frequent guest lecturer for denominational and ecumenical leadership gatherings around the world. He has written for or contributed interviews to many periodicals, including Leadership, Sojourners, Tikkun, Worship Leader, and Conversations.
A frequent guest on television, radio, and news media programs, he has appeared on All Things Considered, Larry King Live, Nightline, On Being, and Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. His work has also been covered in Time, New York Times, Christianity Today, Christian Century, the Washington Post, Huffington Post, CNN.com, and many other print and online media.
Brian is married to Grace, and they have four adult children and five grandchildren. His personal interests include wildlife and ecology, fly fishing and kayaking, music and songwriting, and literature.
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Question & Answer
Q: By Ed
I fundamentally agree with your theology (Progressing Spirit) but need a clarification. I once considered myself an atheist (after FINALLY abandoning a strict Southern Baptist brainwashing). However I now consider myself an ‘a-theist’ vs an ‘atheist’. This to me means I have abandoned the Biblical personal God. However, I cannot pull away from ‘Universal Mystery’; especially when I see a real merger of that Mystery with modern Quantum Mechanical concepts. Just wondering if you too have ‘a hole in your soul’.
A: By Rev. Brandan Robertson
Dear Ed,
Thank you so much for sharing a bit of your spiritual journey with us. I want you to know that your spiritual journey is very common. I bet that many, if not most readers of Progressing Spirit, feel the same way that you do.
During the season when I was leaving the evangelical Christianity of my youth, I too jumped to an atheist position. This was primarily a result of my belief that the Church, or its leaders, had access to or represented God; and if their God was supposed to be the real one, there was no way I could believe in him. But as my journey continued, as I have studied science, anthropology, and learned about the evolution of human consciousness - I became utterly convinced that there was a Divine Life that animates and is at work in the Universe. I never feel this more acutely than when I stare into a star-filled night sky and contemplate the reality that we are here, on this ball of dirt, floating in an expansive cosmos. This seems to be the most ridiculous and unlikely reality - and yet, here we are. And as I stare into the sky, contemplating the mystery that is existence, I can’t help but think that such beauty was created for a purpose. That there is some sort of design behind this all. That some consciousness, somewhere has carefully crafted the Reality that we experience.
I think science is overwhelmingly beginning to point in this direction, and the indigenous spiritual traditions of our ancestors have, in many ways, always pointed our gaze away from ourselves into the expansiveness of the Universe, and invited us to wonder at the majesty of it all. In those transcendent moments, I feel that “hole in my soul” fill up for just a moment. And then I return to my rational, modernistic thinking and have all sorts of questions about the validity of religious claims, and I become skeptical of theism altogether once again.
This rhythm of profound awe and deep skepticism is, I think, part of the spiritual rhythm of progressive people of faith. Rather than fearing or judging it, I think we are better served to accept it as a gift, to be honest about our experiences, and to continue walking this journey with others who are traversing similar terrain. I hope you can find that where you live, and I hope that you know that this community here on Progressing Spirit is on this same journey of skepticism and awe with you!
~ Rev. Brandan Robertson
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Brandan Robertson is a noted spiritual thought-leader, contemplative activist, and commentator, working at the intersections of spirituality, sexuality, and social renewal and the author of Nomad: A Spirituality For Travelling Light and writes regularly for Patheos, Beliefnet, and The Huffington Post. He has published countless articles in respected outlets such as TIME, NBC, The Washington Post, Religion News Service, and Dallas Morning News. As sought out commentator of faith, culture, and public life, he is a regular contributor to national media outlets and has been interviewed by outlets such as MSNBC, NPR, SiriusXM, TIME Magazine, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Associated Press.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Origin of the Bible, Part VIII:
The Priestly Revision of the Jewish Sacred Story (B)
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
June 18, 2008
While the first wave of Jews entered the Babylonian Exile around the year 596, a second wave came in 586 after a rebellion was put down by the Babylonians and all of the identifiable descendants of King David were executed. Both groups of captive people carried with them their sacred story, which at that time consisted of the merger of the Yahwist strand from the dominant land of Judah, the Elohist strand produced by the breakaway Northern Kingdom and the book of Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic revisions of the entire text carried out probably by Jeremiah and the Deuteronomic writers with the encouragement of King Josiah. When they left their Babylonian captivity, which they did in waves from 50 to 150 years later, that text had been completely rewritten and greatly expanded by a group of priestly writers, one of whom appears to have been the prophet Ezekiel.
Now the Jewish sacred story reflected two things: the Jewish struggle for survival, which they had accomplished by making isolation from their captors a primary religious requirement, and a new understanding of their ultimate mission in this world, which was to return someday to their sacred soil, rebuild their capital city of Jerusalem and restore their ordered life of worship centered, as it had previously been, in the Temple. It was the stated mission of the priestly writers to create such a deep sense of what it meant to be Jews that their identity would never again be compromised individually or corporately. This could only be done by asserting that their sacred scriptures were in fact the absolute law of God, that these scriptures expressed the will of God for them and that their obedience to the Torah must be total and complete. So the priestly writers edited the sacred text of the Jews to illustrate that the story of their ancestors included the mandates of Sabbath observance, kosher dietary laws and the absolute requirement that all of the males of the tribe be circumcised. They also wrote into the Torah rules that were to govern every aspect of their common life. Representing a monumental revision, the priestly writers set about to accomplish this literary task, and accomplish it they did.
The opening segment of the Torah was rewritten to reflect God’s command at the beginning of the world that all Jews must obey the Sabbath. This was a new creation story, actually modeled on a Babylonian story of God creating the world in a specific number of days. It suggested that creation was accomplished in six days so that God could obey the Sabbath by resting from the divine labors on that day, thus setting the pattern for all Jews to follow. This creation narrative moved from the idea of the spirit of God brooding over the chaos of darkness to bring forth life to the story of how light was separated from darkness on the first day. On the second day a firmament to be called “heaven” was made to separate the waters above the earth, from whence the rains came, from the waters below that presumably at that time covered the entire planet. On the third day the waters of the earth were gathered into one place and called the seas, and thus separated from the dry land which was to be called the earth. This enabled the dry land to bring forth grass, herbs, fruit trees and vegetables to be used for food as soon as living things arrived. On the fourth day God created the sun to light the day and the moon to light the night, dividing day from night and creating both seasons and years. God was also said to have made the stars on that day. On the fifth day the fish of the sea and the birds of the air were created and ordered to fill the sea and the air. On the sixth day God made the beasts of the fields and “everything that creeps in the earth.” Finally, on that same day as the last divine act, God made the man and the woman, together, instantaneously, both in the image of God. These human parents were also ordered to be fruitful, to multiply and to fill the earth. The work of creation was now finished and God pronounced it to be complete and good. So on the seventh day God inaugurated the Sabbath of rest, blessed it and hallowed it; enjoining its observance upon the subsequent generations of the Jewish people as their sacred duty. This whole creation story was the product of the priestly school in the Babylonian Exile and was designed, not to inform people about what happened at the dawn of creation, but in order to make observance of the Sabbath the original and defining mark of Judaism. It was the opening salvo of the priestly writers’ campaign to reshape the sacred story of the Jews in order to aid their goal of tribal survival as a distinct group of people living in and through a critical experience. Once that purpose in the creation story is understood, then the other priestly editorial changes can be noted and understood.
In the story about God providing manna to the hungry Jews in the wilderness on their original trek from slavery in Egypt to what they believed was their Promised Land, the priestly writers inserted new details to reinforce the Sabbath. The manna from heaven was said now to have fallen only on six days of the week so that neither God in sending, nor the people in gathering up this heavenly gift had to work on the Sabbath.
When the priestly writers came to the story of the Ten Commandments being given by God at Mt. Sinai, they added their creation story motif to the Sabbath Day Commandment as commentary. The earlier reason for the Sabbath (see Deuteronomy 5) was that the Jews were to remember from their days of slavery in Egypt that even slaves are entitled to a day of rest. It had nothing to do with a creation story since that story had not yet been written. Now, however, that was the reason the Commandments gave for a strict observance of the Sabbath.
The priestly writers then sought in their revision to locate each of the distinctive marks of Judaism in the earlier narratives in order to attribute them all to Moses. So the kosher dietary laws were written into the Book of Leviticus as the commands of God through Moses. Circumcision was placed into the stories of both Abraham and Moses as something mandated by God. The elaborate rites of Jewish worship were spelled out in detail and adapted to their exile status, so that they could be observed even in captivity.
Synagogues, as local teaching centers, were established to compensate for the loss of the Temple. Even the story of Noah was adapted so that Noah would have on board sufficient animals to carry out all of the required ritual sacrifices without jeopardizing the future of any species of which there was supposedly only a single pair that made it into the ark.
The revision process of the sacred story went on for perhaps as long as 200 years. It was thus not the product of a single author or even of a single generation, but it accomplished its stated purpose. It stamped an identity on the Jewish people that became indelible. The Torah or Sacred Scriptures of the Jews was now the Jahwist-Elohist-Deuteronomic-Priestly version. The text had more than doubled in size. Great chunks of new material had been added, mostly to govern worship and behavior. Priestly additions included almost all of the Book of Exodus after the story of Sinai (Exodus 20), all of the Book of Leviticus and significant parts of Numbers, as well as editorial revisions of the entire text. It may not have come into its finished form until as late as the fourth century BCE. There is a narrative in the Book of Nehemiah (Chapter 8) in which a group of the Jewish people, having returned from the Exile and having rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem, were gathered “before the Water Gate.” There upon orders from the Governor, Nehemiah, Ezra the priest had brought to him “The book of the law of Moses” and he proceeded to read it to them in its entirety. This reading occurred, we are told, on the first day of the seventh month of the Jewish year. That was the day on which the New Year or Rosh Hashanah was to be celebrated and the people covenanted to be bound by this law. What Ezra read on that day was in all probability pretty much the substance of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible.
Two results of this new text of the law of God through Moses would soon affect the pattern of Jewish history. First, the passion to keep separate from Gentile infiltration in order to survive as a recognized people in exile got interpreted, when they returned to their homeland, to be a passion for ethnic purity. Genealogies were kept so that people could demonstrate their blood lines and prove their unpolluted Jewish heritage. This led to purges of those husbands, wives and children who were not demonstrably full blooded Jews, as well as to the judgment, found in New Testament times, that Gentiles were by definition unclean and thus to be avoided. It also led to the violent prejudice against those who came to be called Samaritans. These were the descendents of the people who had been brought in to resettle the land after the Jews had been exiled to Babylon, who had intermarried with those few Jews who had been left behind. Not only was their Jewishness compromised, but their religion was also corrupted by foreign and thus pagan elements. This meant that prejudices went deep and were justified by appeals to the “word of God” found in the Law of Moses. In time this prejudice against both the unclean Gentiles and the heretical Samaritans would reach such high levels of intensity that it produced protest books like Jonah and Ruth that somehow managed to remain in the Jewish Scriptures. Jonah expressed God’s concern for Gentiles and Ruth suggested that even King David would not have passed the racial purity test.
The other result was the elevation of the Torah into the status of being the “Holy of Holies” in the Jewish Scriptures and this led to the synagogue practice of requiring the Torah to be read in its entirety on the Sabbaths of a single year in the stricter observing congregations and over three years in those less strict. The essence of Judaism was said to be the “law and the prophets.” The Torah was the law. We will turn to the prophets when this series continues.
~ John Shelby Spong
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