Home » Posts tagged 'Christology'

Tag Archives: Christology

A Remix of TobyMac and Luke’s and John’s Churchy Jesus

March 21, 2013 10:03 pm / 3 Comments

One of the current mantras in American theological education is globalization, and rightly so.  Globalization should be built into the DNA of every congregation of followers of Christ.  The world of Jesus was a world replete with views of globalization.  Alexander the Great had created a world of globalization from Albania to Afghanistan and the Romans from the Thames to the Tigris (for Roman globalism see Oster, Seven Congregations in a Roman Crucible, pp. 29-40).

Roman Emperor Holding the Whole World in his Hand

Roman Emperor Holding the Whole World in his Hand

In fact, globalism was an integral part of Roman politics and theology and contributed to the Roman State’s hostility and aspersions toward the church’s geopolitical Jesus.  Buddhist “missionaries” had come to the Mediterranean before the time of nascent Christianity.

There exists a Greek navigation guide from the mid-first century AD, Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, that demonstrates Roman sea trade into sub-Saharan Africa as far south as Tanzania and as far east as Sri Lanka and eastern India.  In addition, the very presence of silk garments in the Roman world testified to the existence of China and the famous Silk Route, since it was not until centuries later, when China lost its monopoly on silk, that the West could produce its own silk.

When Dr. James Allan Francis, a Baptist minister, presented his essay (eventually) called One Solitary Life, he could not have known that it would become a Christmas classic.  Nor did later believers realize the profound accuracy and significance of his words,

He never went to college.

He never put his foot inside a big city.

He never traveled two hundred miles from the place where he was born.

Map of Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, Wikimedia Commons

Jesus’ provincial travel resume of “he never traveled two hundred miles from the place where he was born” stands in stark contrast to Paul and his co-workers, the itinerant Jewish exorcists of Acts 19, the tens of thousands of pagans and Jews who sailed in and out of the Herodian port at Caesarea, the first century AD, Lycus Valley merchant, Titus 
Flavius Zeuxis who made 72 journeys from his hometown of Hierapolis to Rome on business (according to his epitaph preserved in Hierapolis).

Had it been within the purview of Jesus’ divine calling to reach out to pagan sinners, it would have been relatively easy for him to travel the less than 30 miles from Nazareth to the major port city of Caesarea Maritima and to catch one of the many ships that would take him to Alexandria, Corinth, Ephesus, Athens, or Rome.  What God did through Jesus to ignite the fuse of the Abrahamic Great Commission (Gen. 12:1-3) apparently required that Jesus not wander too far from home, which meant Christ, unlike Paul and virtually all Diaspora Jews, had little opportunity to mix and mingle with those who represented the seamy underbelly of pagan life and idolatry.

It is the uniform theological outlook of the New Testament that Jesus did exactly what he was supposed to do by his ministry primarily among the Jews in the Land of Promise and that the church did exactly what it was supposed to do by both declaring a divine globalism and living in a way that was commensurate with its declaration.  It is certainly significant for us that neither the Gospels, nor Acts, nor Paul, etc. see a need, either doctrinally or missionally. to re-locate Jesus in the world of the Diaspora.  If all of the canonical writers were at peace in confronting their own world of paganism with a Christ that never rubbed shoulders with true paganism, then, perhaps we could also.

TobyMac and Luke’s and John’s Churchy Jesus

March 17, 2013 10:20 pm / 14 Comments

A disclaimer is in order: First, I don’t think TobyMac is the Antichrist, a member of the Illuminati, or guilty of any other nefarious associations or behavior, and I think it is clearly helpful to the Christian movement worldwide that he won the Best Contemporary Christian Album at this year’s Grammy Awards.  I also find many of his lyrics to be on target spiritually.

 I must, however, take umbrage at one of his comments that shows up in interviews and was quoted in an article cited in Huffington Post.  I am referring to an article entitled “Christian Music Bounces Back With TobyMac, Chris Tomlin, Lecrae And More.”  According to this article, “Jesus didn’t hang out in the church,” the artist [TobyMac] said. “He hung out with the people, where they were. And that’s to me where Christian music should be.”  Since everyone knows there was no Christian church in existence in the days of Jesus’ earthly ministry, this statement is designed for its rhetorical impact, rather than its historical accuracy.  Sometimes, though, rhetorical statements have a life of their own, and hearers forget the limitations of rhetoric.  More probably the rhetoric of this statement was meant to emphasize the viewpoint that Jesus did not spend time associating with religious/Jewish organizations or hanging out in Jewish meeting places or chillaxing with the officialdom of Jewish religion.  A fact-check of this viewpoint led me to conclude that it did not represent the whole story of Jesus.

This anti-institutional view of Jesus has a long history, but it stands in stark contrast to the picture of Jesus given us by the major writer of the New Testament, Luke, and also by John the prophet.  Let’s look at a few facts.  There was a very small nucleus of Jewish people for whom God pulled back the curtain to allow them to see and understand the historic and spiritual realities associated with the nativity story.  This nucleus found in the birth narratives of Luke 1-2 includes:

1.  the priest and temple functionary, Zechariah, and his wife Elizabeth

2.  Simeon who was guided by the Holy Spirit into the Jewish Temple (the epicenter of Jewish officialdom and pious folk) rather than into a local tavern to encounter there Mary, Joseph, and Jesus

3.  and, finally, the prophetess Anna who would have only left the Temple if she were dragged out screaming and kicking (Lk. 2:37, “She never left the temple.”)

There were of course Jesus’ parents who had to be from the line of David and could not be priestly, but who seemingly went to the Temple at every ordained time.  It seems that none of those chosen by God to be insiders into the miracle of Jesus’ birth felt compromised or dragged down by “hanging out in church” in their own day.

Then, of course, there is the 12 year old Jesus (Lk. 2:41-48), who had clearly broken away from the typical obedient child model and who began to establish his own spiritual identity.  To establish his identity and mission early on, he chose to go to the center of Jewish formality and regulations. Since Jesus chose to be at the Temple discussing theology with Jewish teachers and theologians at the age of 12, he was about as churchy as a Jewish boy could be.  When the frustrated parents of Jesus finally discovered him and questioned him about his behavior he replied (Lk. 2:49, The Message), “Didn’t you know that I had to be here, dealing with the things of my Father?”  It would be difficult to construe this response into an anti-institutional statement by Jesus; in fact, it shows Jesus’ preference for hanging out at “Jewish church!”  The words recorded next in Scripture preserve the response of Jesus’ mom and dad, but they also could have come right out of the mouths of many modern Christians who have been persuaded by the hip/hop-pop picture of Jesus, “But they had no idea what he was talking about” (Lk. 2:50, The Message).

To be sure, the validity of Christian ministry is determined by the authenticity of its message and accompanying lifestyle and not by its location.  Bars and brothels are certainly within the purview of modern Christian ministry, but we need to be clear that this was not the fundamental approach used by Jesus.  Most of Jesus’ time was spent in synagogues, in travel through the Jewish countryside, and in Jewish homes.  It does not seem to have been an erratic choice when Jesus decided to give his inaugural teachings in synagogues (Lk. 4:14-15).  There were inns and taverns in the Roman world and apparently in the social knowledge of Jesus’ audiences (Lk. 10:34-35), but based upon the historical record preserved in the Gospels, it does not seem possible to place Jesus in them for the purpose of reconstructing his public ministry.  Moreover, many of the “outcasts” and “sinners” that Jesus encountered were in fact Jewish.  For example, we might remember Zacchaeus regarded as the “chief tax collector” and known by the crowd in Luke 19 as “one who is a sinner.”  Even though Zacchaeus was a tax collector and sinner, according to Jesus, Zacchaeus was “a son of Abraham” (Lk. 19:9).  From a Lukan theological perspective, this spiritual reclamation of Zacchaeus, the back-sliding “son of Abraham,” is seen as a clear  manifestation of Jesus’ missional identity as the “Son of Man who came to seek out and to save the lost” (Lk. 19:10).

For sake of space, let me encourage you to read through Luke’s second volume, Acts, to see whether most of the gentile converts came from religious settings and religious buildings or from the bars and brothels of the Roman world.  When Paul (if I may leave Acts of the Apostles for a moment) refers to saints in Corinth as former “fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, and robbers” (1 Cor. 6:9-10), there is no reason to exclude these converts out of paganism from the “outsiders or unbelievers” that would have heard the truth of God when they attended the church’s worship services in Corinth (1 Cor. 14:23-25).

Now let’s turn to Revelation.  Admittedly John is not concerned primarily with evangelism and outreach, but his view of Christ, believers, and the church seems to have a different flavor than the idea that “Jesus didn’t hang out in the church.”  In the mind of some, the statement that “Jesus didn’t hang out in the church” might leave the impression that one could love Jesus and ignore the church, for example.  That outlook would strike John as unacceptable, based upon what Jesus told him in the beginning of the book of Revelation.  For the seven congregations in Revelation the defining picture of Jesus was not, as many might expect, the sacrificial Lamb of God (which does not show up until chapter 5:6), but instead the Son of Man.  John’s message for his contemporary Christians did not focus on Jesus on the clouds (Rev. 1:7), contrary to the belief of some fundamentalist millenarians and evangelicals.  Rather, for the Christians of his own day, John the prophet’s focus was upon Jesus “in the midst of the lampstands” (Rev. 1:13), the very lampstands Jesus himself identifies as the seven churches to whom John wrote (Rev. 1:20).  For John the prophet, the Enthroned Christ lives and moves among the congregations of God.  As I noted in my commentary, (Seven Congregations in a Roman Crucible. A Commentary on Revelation 1-3, p. 89),

From first to last the Christ of Revelation is an ecclesiastical Jesus, a Jesus for the congregations of God. Whether seen under the rubric of the 144,000 sealed on their foreheads, or the Bride of the Lamb, or the city he loves, or the great multitude that no one can count, or the saints, or the witnesses of Jesus, or the New Jerusalem, the Jesus Christ that John knows and proclaims is one for the collective people of God, the congregations of Roman Asia. The prophet John’s identity is inseparably linked with congregations (ekklēsiai, ἐκκλησίαι, 1:4); the identity of Jesus is inseparably linked with seven congregations (epta ekklēsiai, ἑπτὰ ἐκκλησίαι, 1:11); and the significance of the book of Revelation is inseparably linked with congregations, “It is I, Jesus, who sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches” (epi tais ekklēsiais, ἐπὶ ταῖς ἐκκλησίαις, 22:16).

We contemporary believers just might need to reconsider whether we want to recapture apostolic belief by acknowledging and confessing “that Jesus is not a parachurch Messiah” (p. 89), but a churchy Jesus, notwithstanding all the abuses and heresies propagated by his ostensible followers, both past and present.  It cannot be doubted that Jesus of Nazareth, Luke, and John the prophet all knew very well the abuses and unspeakable atrocities engendered by God’s people over the centuries, but it never seemed a viable spiritual choice for them to dishonor God in response to the lamentable behavior of his people.

Now, go and watch the official music video for TobyMac’s “Eye on It.”  http://tobymac.com/videos/eye-it-official-music-video

Graeco-Roman Antiquities & the New Testament

October 12, 2011 11:18 pm / 4 Comments

GRANT
Graeco-Roman Antiquities & the New Testament
There are things you can tell about an entire ocean even if you have only one cup of water from it.  Naturally a scientist would like to have as many cups and as broad a sampling as possible, but even a single cup is of some help.  The same is true when investigating the world of the New Testament.  You can learn something even from one ancient document, though the explorer of the ancient world would like to have as many documents as possible. 
I hope once a week to present a small sample of information that mirrors some aspect of the ancient world surrounding nascent Christianity.
 

 

 
“Two Things Awe Me Most, the Starry Sky Above Me and the Moral Law Within Me”
Immanuel Kant 
         -
Early Roman Empire; Julius Caesar
with nativity star/comet above head.
Used with the kind permission of
Millennia before the writings of the 18th century European philosopher Immanuel Kant, humans were in awe of celestial marvels.  They both delighted in and were terrified by meteorological phenomena.  The Romans were no exception to this outlook.  When it was thought that Julius Caesar became  a deity after his death [i.e., apotheosis] a comet appeared in the skies over the city of Rome for some days and was immediately regarded as a nativity star/comet.  It celebrated the birth of Caesar becoming a god.  It did not take long for the portrait of Caesar to be accompanied by a star/comet above his head.
Students of Scripture know that there were similar thoughts about a star and divine nativity in Matthew’s Gospel.   In that narrative certain Persian astronomers/astrologers are looking for the King of the Jews.  According to non-Christian authors of that time period, “Ruler of the world” expectations abounded in the Middle East during the early Roman period.  Thus, we are not surprised to learn of oriental astrologers searching among the Jews.  Looking back upon the 1st century AD, the late 1st century–– early 2nd century AD Latin biographer Suetonius reports, 
There had spread over all the Orient an old and established belief, that it was fated at that time for men coming from Judaea to rule the world. This prediction, referring to the emperor of Rome, as afterwards appeared from the event, the people of Judaea took to themselves; accordingly they revolted” (Suetonius, Lives of the 12 Caesars; “Life of Vespasian” IV.5).
 
According to the 1st Gospel, “Magi from the east came to Jerusalem  and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him. . . .  After they had heard the king [Herod the Great], they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was.  When they saw the star, they were overjoyed.  On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh” (Matt. 2:1-2, 9-11).
 
It makes sense that the book of Revelation might use sideral iconography to depict divine truths, whether of God’s divine punishments (6th seal; Rev. 6:12-17) or of the grandeur of one’s elevated status from God (Rev. 1:16-17).   The intersection of the prophet John’s starry symbolism and the symbolic language in the religious atmosphere of that 
Aureus coin minted during the reign of Domitian.
Used only for educational purposes.
culture is clearly seen in John’s depiction of the Son of Man in Rev. 1:16. 
In particular, a coin minted during the reign of Domitian depicts the divinized son of Domitian sitting on the globe of the earth, surrounded by 7 stars and with hands looking like stars.  Unlike the other components of the imagery of the Son of Man in Revelation one, this  sideral imagery cannot be located in the Hebrew Scriptures like it can in the propaganda of the imperial cult.  In part, this aspect of John’s imagery is a response to the imperial cult and its idolatry.
  
Immanuel Kant probably did not have the celestial Messiah in mind when he associated personal awe with the “Starry sky above me,” but the prophet John experienced a terrifying awe when he contemplated the celestial image of the Son of Man who could hold 7 stars “in his right hand” (Rev. 1:16-17). 
 
 
 

A REALLY UGLY JESUS

October 8, 2011 11:33 pm / 9 Comments

Whether you look at Albrecht Dürer’s (1471-1528) famous woodcut of Jesus Christ which he based upon the picture given in Rev. 1:12-16 or at other less famous attempts to capture John’s iconography, it is clear that John had no interest in making Jesus aesthetically competitive with the other gods and goddesses of the Graeco-Roman world.  There is a grotesque nature to John’s portrait, which in turn reflects upon the way that the Alpha and Omega desired to be revealed.  Since John mentions that he receives this revelation on the Lord’s Day (Rev. 1:10) it is not even hard to hear liturgical overtones in the context of this appearance of Christ.  Our liturgies, our Bibles, our Christian artwork all resonate with images of Jesus, but I don’t ever remember seeing any picture of Jesus being as deformed looking as this one that John experiences during his period of worshipping on the Lord’s Day.

 

To make this Revelation of Christ (Christophany) appear even more shocking aesthetically, it should be remembered that John and his readers lived and worked in cities and regions renowned for beautiful religious art work and sculpture.  Beauty and aesthetic excellence were to be seen everywhere in the monuments, temples, and altars of a metropolis like Pergamum.  The temple to the Ephesian Artemis was regarded as one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, in part because of its sheer beauty and magnificence.  
It is noteworthy that Jesus has to resuscitate the prophet John from death or perhaps a near death experience (Rev. 1:17), apparently because his own image was too scary and frightful for John to tolerate.  We all know that real art expresses truths that words can hardly grasp.  John’s picture is of a frightful Jesus that the modern American church is hardly able to grasp, much less depict.  There is a dullness and monotony about many of the modern visual depictions of Jesus; these Jesus icons barely challenge believers spiritually and so prosaic they often leave the outsider experiencing no qualms about Christ, this messenger of God.  


Although it shines a very disturbing light on the American churches, John’s “ugly Jesus” and “scary Jesus”  contain a truth that totally subverts the dominant Christologies and feel good religious impulses that generally characterize current Christianity.  It should not be overlooked that John does not reserve this frightful picture of Christ for a scene when Jesus conquers the beast and false prophet or for Revelation 20 when God’s eschatological judgement of the world is seen.  Rather, this grotesque Christ is revealed by God for the churches of John’s own day.  John is not primarily warning the churches that they will meet this Christ on Judgment Day if they misbehave in the present.  Rather, he tells them that this is the Christ with whom they must deal in the present, and, furthermore, he is the one that will be dealing with them in the present.  Since some of these early Christians were probably in denial about having to deal with this ugly Jesus in the present, just like the modern church often is, John begins almost every one of the 7 letters with a direct reference back to the Christ of Rev. 1:12-16.  John did not want the churches to focus on any other picture of Jesus than the one that caused John to drop dead from fear.

If you think this Jesus seems pretty ugly on paper, just wait until you see what he does to congregations that “refuse to repent” or “to wake up spiritually” or choose to stay “lukewarm.”  It is an ugly sight.
 

GEOPOLITICAL JESUS

September 24, 2011 11:46 pm / 3 Comments

Emperor Hadrian
Forget what you learned in elementary school, what Hollywood has depicted, and perhaps what your Bible Professor might have implied about “flat earth” theories in antiquity.  Folks living at the time of the New Testament did not believe the world was flat and had four corners.  The prophet John and his contemporaries knew the world was a sphere.  In fact, though they may not have known the name of the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes who correctly calculated the circumference of the earth, the people of John’s era lived in a world with projected lines of latitude and longitude.  
The repeated depictions of the globe became a natural part of the visual propaganda of Roman imperialism.  This globe icon suggested world domination and was disseminated by means of the artwork on coins, jewelry, sculpture, and architecture.  This symbol was exploited for the sole purpose of making visible the reality of the Roman doctrine of manifest destiny.  The marketing department of the Roman Empire was putting into icons its confidence in the divine blessings of the god Jupiter who had promised “I have given to Rome rule without limit.”
John’s Christology was intentionally crafted to create an alternate perspective of reality, one contrary to  the geopolitical orthodoxy of Roman manifest destiny.  John’s audacious pronouncement that Jesus is the “ruler of the kings of the earth” (Rev. 1:5) is intended to help overthrow and eradicate Rome’s idolatry of geopolitical dominion.  There was often intrigue and hostilities among Roman rulers, the Roman Senate, the Roman military, and the Roman people about who would become the next “ruler of the world,” but not a one of them imagined that Jesus was a candidate for that position.  Certainly the doctrine of Roman hegemony would not have allowed there to be a “ruler” over the Roman Emperor.
There was originally a statue of the Emperor Trajan with
this globe at his feet.
Those of us witnessing the so-called “Arab Spring” starting in December 2010 have seen ruler after ruler begin with a dismissive attitude toward his opponents, followed by defiance, then increased repression, but in the end retreating.  Rome’s domination of great geographical distance, stretching basically from the Thames to the Tigris, had met more than its match in the early Christian mission.  Roman culture was dismissive and then repressive toward Christianity, but in the end it would retreat from a World Ruler who truly holds the planet in his hand.  And to make matters worse, this King of kings proclaimed by the subversive prophet John does not even have a Latin name–a reality that John’s opponents could never have imagined.
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 54 other followers

%d bloggers like this: