What
does the Bible really say?
(pdf available here)
A
sermon, with period for questions & discussion, at Carrs Lane
URC church, Birmingham, July 2005
What
does the Bible really say? The obvious answer is, read it and see
what it says. But when we ask, What does it say about this or that,
it becomes less obvious. What does it say about God, about God's
nature? In our first reading (Joshua 10: 7-14) God is a violent
tribal deity who fights in battle for one tribe, mercilessly killing
their enemies, even causing the sun to stand still for twenty four
hours so that they could complete the slaughter. But that isn't
the kind of God we believe in, is it? And quite apart from that,
in the ancient world, when they believed that the sun moves round
the earth, the idea of God's making the sun stand still for a while
was conceivable. But now we know that it is the earth that travels
round the sun, and that day and night on earth are caused by the
earth rotating on its axis at about 1,000 miles an hour. If you
were standing on a surface rotating at that speed, even though glued
to it by gravity, and it suddenly stopped, you would be catapulted
into space at quite a velocity! In other words the story is incredible.
Again, the New Testament reading (Revelation 20: 11-18) tells us
that God is a God who has sinners thrown into a lake of fire. Is
that the kind of God we believe in? The fact is that in practice
we all use the Bible selectively.
We can do our selecting on the basis just of our own preferences
and what we have been taught. But it seems better to make use of
the modern historical study of the Bible. Restricting ourselves
to the New Testament, let us start with some basics.
Some of you, I know, are fully aware of all this, but others not.
The first thing to be said is that the scholars differ among themselves
about most things. When we take account of their work we have left
the firm ground of unquestioned certainties, which we all instinctively
prefer, and we've entered the inevitable uncertainties of historical
research, probability, judgment. There is however a central area
of very wide consensus among reputable scholars, although even here
there is always someone somewhere who differs at some point. But
there is nevertheless a broad central consensus that is common to
at least the enormous majority of university New Testament scholars.
What is this consensus? As we hear the Gospels read in church, one
passage at a time on its own, it is natural to assume that this
is an eye witness account, like a newspaper report of what the writer
observed yesterday. But according to the consensus, none of them
was in fact written by an eye witness. The earliest Gospel, Mark,
is believed to have been written shortly after 70 AD, then Matthew
and Luke in the 80's, using Mark as their primary source, along
with other separate sources of their own, and possibly another presumed
unknown common source called Q (which however some major scholars
dispute). And finally John's Gospel comes towards the end of the
century, in the 90's or possibly even later. Matthew, Mark, and
Luke are called the synoptic Gospels because they have so much in
common, in contrast to John, which has a very different character.
In the synoptics, Jesus speaks in his unforgettable parables and
vivid sayings and commands, whilst in John he often speaks in long
theological discourses, and the theology embodied in them is much
more developed in the direction of what became Christian orthodoxy
than in the synoptics.
The Jesus of John's Gospel has, so to speak, a halo round his head
and walks the earth as a consciously divine being. But it is part
of the scholarly consensus that the great 'I am' sayings - 'I am
the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but
by me' (14, 6), 'I and the Father are one' (10:30), 'I am the light
of the world' (8, 120, 'He who has seen me has seen the Father'
(14, 9), cannot be attributed to the historical Jesus but are words
put into his mouth by a Christian writer 70 or more years later
expressing the developing theology of the church. And it is also
part of the scholarly consensus that Jesus himself did not teach
that he was God incarnate, or God the Son, second person of a Divine
Trinity, incarnate. This is not just the opinion of 'liberal' scholars
but equally of conservative ones. Just two brief quotes. The late
Archbishop Michael Ramsey, who was a New Testament professor before
becoming a bishop, wrote 'Jesus did not claim deity for himself'
(Jesus & the Living Past, 1980, p. 30) and Prof. James Dunn
of Durham, possibly the leading New Testament scholar today in Britain,
writes 'there was no real evidence in the earliest Jesus tradition
of what could fairly be called a consciousness of divinity' (Christology
in the Making, 1980, p. 60).
Another feature of the Fourth Gospel is that when it was written
what was originally the Jesus movement within Judaism had separated
itself from mainstream Judaism a generation earlier and was very
much at odds with it. And so in John's Gospel the Jews are seen
as the enemy and are presented in a very hostile but, as we now
know, historically false light - this being the origin of the often
violent Christian anti-Semitism which has stained the history of
the church through the centuries, down to the twentieth. In actual
fact the Jews of Jesus' time, of whom he was one, had a much higher
religion than John's gospel suggests. One famous rabbi summarized
the Law as 'Do not do others what you would not want them to do
to you'. And they stressed the love of God as much as Jesus did.
And so it seems that we have to make the momentous distinction between
the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. It is momentous because
it is so difficult to merge them convincingly into one. And yet
it is the Christ of faith who is central to so much of the language
and ritual of the churches. He is Lord of all, he is the lamb of
God who takes away the sins of the world. By his blood we are cleansed.
He is the saviour of the world. Crown him lord of all.
But surely, Wasn't Jesus not the Son of God, and therefore divine?
Here again modern scholarship comes to our aid. We know now that
'son of God' had long been a familiar metaphor within Judaism. Israel
as a whole was God's son, Adam was God's son (Lk. 3, 28), the angels
were sons of God (Lk. 20, 36), the ancient Hebrew kings were enthroned
as son of God, hence the enthronement formula, 'You are my son,
today I have begotten you' (Psalm 2,7). This, said to a grown man,
was obviously meant metaphorically. And indeed within Judaism any
outstandingly good and pious person could be called a son of God.
A son of God was someone who was close to God, sometimes with a
special mission from God. And the uniqueness that the church has
read into it by restricting it to Jesus as the one and only Son
of God, came as the gospel went out beyond Judaism into the Roman
world, under St Paul's leadership, when 'son of God' became literalised,
so that gradually in the course of the first centuries the metaphorical
son of God was transformed into the metaphysical God the Son, Second
Person of a divine Trinity.
So - this at least is the serious possibility that we have to consider
- the cosmic Christ figure is a creation of the human religious
imagination. And yet, as we all know, this is the Christ of so many
of our hymns and prayers and sermons. And if as a church we one
day come to accept that we need to do some fundamental rethinking,
it will not be easy - and the longer we postpone it the harder it
becomes. It may however rescue the churches from our present ghetto
status in western society, in which we are associated in the minds
of most people's out there with all sorts of unbelievable ideas
and images, not to be taken seriously.
So my suggestion is that we have to re-focus on the historical Jesus,
even though the scholars tell us that we don't know nearly as much
about him as we would like to.
But we do know enough to see the Jesus whom we can be presenting
to the world. He taught in unforgettable parables the love and forgiveness
of God, and he gave teaching about how to live - much of it brought
together in the Sermon on the Mount - which remains as inspiring
and as challenging today as 2,000 years ago. There is endless scope
in Jesus' teaching for great preaching today which can transform
peoples' lives.
People sometimes ridicule the idea that Jesus' message amounted
just to the love of God and the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity.
But this seems to be precisely what he did teach. 'Teacher, which
is the great commandment in the law? And he said to him, "You
shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your
soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment.
And the second is like it. You shall love your neighbour as yourself.
On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets"'
(Matt. 22, 36-40). This was not of course new to the Jews. Jesus
is quoting here from Deuteronomy 6,4 and Leviticus 19,18.
The gospel is that we all live all the time in the presence of God,
who loves us and seeks our answering love, and this is to be expressed
in love of one another. It's very simple, and when - if ever in
this world - if we all do it the kingdom of heaven will have come.
And in so far as we do a little bit to love our neighbours, whom
we know now to include the poor, the starving, the diseased, the
oppressed and exploited round the world, we are bringing the Kingdom
a little bit nearer.
Finally, the words of the Lord's prayer, which we shall be saying
together presently, are some of the most likely to come from the
lips of Jesus himself, and in this great prayer we address God directly
as our Father, not through any mediator, and we directly ask God's
forgiveness, expecting to receive it if we will only forgive one
another, without there being any thought of an atoning sacrifice
being needed. What became the great theological doctrines of Incarnation,
Atonement and Trinity are just not there. But so far from the gospel
without them being too little, it is still more than any of us can
handle. Jesus' teaching, incarnated in his life, in which he identified
with the poor and marginalized, stands before us as a perpetual
challenge, and part of the challenge is that we have to work out
for ourselves what love of neighbour means in our own chaotic and
bewildering age, and practice it - but, I am suggesting, without
concealing it any longer from the world behind a sacred screen of
outdated and untenable dogmas.
©
John Hick, 2005.
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