Tag Archives: Jesus

Reading the Bible as if Jesus matters

6 Replies

A response to: Bradley Jersak. A More Christlike Word: Reading Scripture the Emmaus Way. Whitaker House, 2021. 287pp.

This is a most helpful, even liberating, guide to reading the Bible with Jesus as the center. Bradley Jersak, a theologian and pastor who has traveled a fascinating path from Pentecostal fundamentalist to Eastern Orthodox with a stint among Mennonites, draws on his own evolving experiences with the Bible. Jersak presents us with an approach that walks the line between the authoritarian literalists on one side and the cultured despisers on the other side, and he provides an empowering and enlivening understanding of the Bible as witness to the healing path of Jesus.

The entire Bible witnesses to Jesus

Jersak calls his approach to the Bible “the Emmaus Way,” referring to the story in Luke 24 following Jesus’s resurrection. The risen Jesus encounters two his disciples walking on the road from Jerusalem to the nearby town of Emmaus. They don’t recognize him, taking him as a stranger to the area. They share their grief at Jesus’s death until he finally reveals himself and tells them not to grieve, that what happened was totally in line with message of the Bible. That is, the Bible—all of the Bible—points to Jesus as its center.

So, Jersak presents an approach where we take Jesus at his word and read the entirety of the Bible in light of Jesus’s life, teaching, death, and resurrection. When we do so, we will find the Bible come alive as a life-shaping guide to wholeness, generosity, mercy, and creativity. In harmony with Jersak’s message that the Bible is about joyful living, the writing style of A More Christlike Word is engaging, humorous, accessible, and encouraging. We learn a lot about Jersak’s own checkered journey of moving from a narrow, fearful reading strategy to his present open-hearted, welcoming, and gracious approach.

While the book has a popular, easily understood tone, it is also grounded in serious scholarship and perceptive theological and historical analyses. We learn a lot about the Christian tradition, including strengths and weaknesses of various prominent reading strategies over the centuries. We also learn a lot about the content of the Bible itself. Jersak’s sense of how it all fits together allows for differences within the canon in the context of an overall harmony. And, crucially, this overall harmony gives a positive, generous, life-giving message of God’s mercy embodied in Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection.

Continue reading →

Review of NotMyJesus

2 Replies

Bob Fabey. NotMyJesus: Embracing Our Sacred Role in a Changing World. Author Academy Elite, 2018

Ted Grimsrud—July 31, 2020

Of books about Jesus, there is no end. Personally, though, I’m always happy to encounter new ones. We continue to need fresh ways to understand the story of Jesus and its application for our day. We know, of course, though, that many of these books are not nearly as helpful as they could be.

Bob Fabey, a pastor in Phoenix, Arizona, has given us a lively, accessible, and concise little book that provides some good encouragement and guidance for embracing Jesus’s way of acceptance and compassion toward all people. It’s a quick read, and I have a hard time imagining that any open-hearted reader would not find the book uplifting—at least a little bit.

The book’s title and front cover convey a sense of edginess that is not actually matched by the content of the book. While the writing style is lively, the main message of the book seems to be an exhortation to be kind. This is valuable, certainly. Lingering in the background is an implicit repudiation of the politicized Christian Right.

Fabey does not give us much background on his own ecclesial journey. From the acknowledgments at the end of the book, it appears that he grew up in the Christian Missionary Alliance tradition. At some point he joined with the Anglican movement that has provided a theologically conservative alternative to the Episcopalian church. Continue reading →

Christology and History

1 Reply

Ted Grimsrud

[Sermon preached at Eugene (Oregon) Mennonite Church, July 30, 1989—the second of a two-part series; the first part is here.]

I have more to say about christology. In my comments this morning, I will focus on how our understanding of history, of historical events and how we think of those events. That is, how does our view of history affect our approach to christology, our approach to how we understand the implications of the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and how we understand interpretations of those implications since then?

Why the historical aspect of christology matters

It is an important characteristic of Christianity that it is a historical religion in the sense that it is based on historical events not myths, thought the symbolic aspect is always intertwined. Christianity asserts that what happens in human history is very important. The major act bringing about salvation, according to Christians, is the work of Jesus of Nazareth, a person in history – his life, teachings, death, and resurrection. And for Christians, the effects of salvation are historical too, not an escape from history. Christians look to a transformed world within history, or as the end of history, not to some Nirvana or personality-less bliss totally removed from history.

Because, as I said, the major act of salvation from Christianity, Jesus’ work, occurs in history, we must conclude then that christology is also closely tied to history. The heart of christology is interpretation of the historical events surrounding what Jesus did and what happened to him. In addition, the development of christological interpretations since the time of Jesus (creeds, confessions, systematic theologies, and so on) all also happened in history. No christology, no interpretation of Jesus, happens in a timeless way separate from the historical context in which it occurred.

For example, both in the case of Jesus’s time and in the case of following doctrinal development, historical social and political issues played a central role even in the theology itself. We cannot really understand what happened with Jesus and how it was interpreted in New Testament times apart from understanding something about the history of the revolutionary political ferment among first-century Jews, the responses of Christians to this later in the first century, and the overarching reality of the Roman Empire. As well, in another example, political concerns in fourth-century Rome, governed by the first so-called Christian emperor, Constantine, greatly affected the formulation of the first great christological creed, the Nicene Creed. So, history has a lot to do with christology. Continue reading →

Christology: What It is and Why It Matters

1 Reply

Ted Grimsrud

[Sermon preached at Eugene (Oregon) Mennonite Church, July 23, 1989—the first of a two-part series; the second part is here.]

What is Christology and why does it matter? I suppose for most of us most of the time we do not really think much about this question and hence do not really have an answer. But in reading the pages of the Gospel Herald, in observing the discussion near the end of the Pacific Coast Conference meetings last month, and in seeing that our denomination’s general assembly next month will include a conference on Christology having a registration limit of 600 people, a total already reached – obviously many people in our denomination do believe that Christology is very important. And, as many of you know, I believe that too, and last Fall began a long-term research project on Christology. But I am not sure we all think Christology is important for the same reasons.

Mennonite controversies

Last month, at the Pacific Coast Conference annual meeting, Harold Hochstetler gave his annual report as Conference Minister, which included a summary of the ordinations and ministerial licenses that the Conference Leadership Committee approved during the past year. Following his report, as is customary following all of the reports at the meeting, the audience was asked if anyone had any questions. An older man, a long-time leader in the Conference and retired pastor, stood up to express his concern that the Leadership Committee might not be doing its job carefully enough. That is, he expressed concerned that the Conference might be ordaining or licensing people who are not theologically sound. He mentioned two foundational beliefs that he feels are especially crucial: the virgin birth and the deity of Christ.

Harold attempted to respond by explaining the Leadership Committee’s care in approving credentials for ministers. This did not seem to satisfy everyone, however, as his comments were followed by more expressions of concern, this time by a couple of young pastors sharing the basic perspective of the first questioner. I did not talk with any of these people, but I am pretty sure that they have been influenced by an organization called the Fellowship of Concerned Mennonites which for nearly ten years has been arguing very publicly that the Mennonite Church is experiencing a crisis in its theology. This group has focused its concern on the issue of Christology in recent years, especially since the publication of the book Jesus Christ Our Lord: Christology from a Disciple’s Perspective, written by long-time Goshen College professor Norman Kraus and published by Herald Press, the official Mennonite Church publisher. These Concerned Mennonites think Kraus’s book is heretical. Continue reading →

Boyd Defends His “Cross Thesis” [CWG chapter six]

2 Replies

Ted Grimsrud—June 22, 2017

[This is the seventh in a long series of posts that will work through an important new book, Greg Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross (Fortress Press, 2017). The sixth post may be found here—and an index of the series here.]

Arguments against seeing the cross as central

In chapter six, “Is the Centrality of the Cross Thesis Defensible?” (pages 229–77), Boyd responds to what he sees as the two main objections to his argument about the centrality of the cross both for Jesus’s mission and for the overall message of the Bible. These objections are: (1) that early Christianity did not see the cross as central as evidenced by the lack of the use of the cross as a symbol in Christian art during Christianity’s first four centuries and (2) that not very many theologians in Christian history have recognized the centrality of the cross. Since these aren’t the main questions I have about Boyd’s cross thesis, I read through this chapter fairly quickly. It did raise a few issues for me, though.

A question I do have is whether the main problem with Boyd’s thesis is with regard to how he interprets the New Testament, not whether he’s consistent with understandings of the cross in the history of Christianity. As a pacifist, I am used to having convictions that most Christians don’t have. That early Christian art or that Christian theologians over the past 2,000 years would not share Boyd’s view of the centrality of the cross is not necessarily evidence against Boyd’s argument in my mind.

My question is simply whether Boyd is correct in seeming to understand the main referent in New Testament cross language to be simply to Jesus’s death. Is it not possible that “the cross” and related images more often allude to Jesus’s life, a life that resulted in his being executed by the Romans? A significant point if we think of the cross more broadly would be that along with Boyd’s important emphasis on the cross as conveying a message of Jesus’s self-giving love, it would also convey of message of Jesus’s practice of forgiveness apart from sacrifice, of Jesus’s political radicalism that led Rome to crucify him as a rebel, and of Jesus’s continuity with the OT prophets and his embrace of a prophetic understanding of Torah. If the cross is seen as a symbol of the entirety of Jesus’s ministry, we may make more sense of Jesus’s oft repeated call to his followers to take up the cross in imitation of his life of service, resistance, and courage. As I have mentioned before, I do not mean to suggest that Boyd would necessarily disagree with my comments here about imitating Jesus’s life—but this kind of language is rarely a part of his discussion of the cross.

The NT text I am most familiar with, the book of Revelation, illustrates my point here. Revelation does not speak of the cross overtly very often, but it does commonly use the term “blood,” which I imagine most readers would understand essentially to be a synonym with cross. When Revelation mentions “blood,” we could generally substitute the term “cross.” I believe, though, that Revelation uses the image of blood not to refer to Jesus’s death per se. Rather, blood has to do with the entirety of Jesus’s ministry, with the emphasis on the life he lived. Because this life involved resistance to the political and religious structures, it led to bloody responses. And Jesus did not swerve from his commitment to a life of love and healing even in the face of those responses. So, the message Revelation gives us about Jesus’s cross is a call to discipleship. Continue reading →

More on Greg Boyd’s Insistence on Making the Cross Central [CWG chapter five]

35 Replies

Ted Grimsrud—June 16, 2017

[This is the sixth in a long series of posts that will work through an important new book, Greg Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross (Fortress Press, 2017). The fifth post may be found here—and an index of the series here.]

The cross in the gospels

In chapter five, “The Cruciform Center, Part 2: The Cross as the Thematic Center of the Gospel” (pages 173–229), Boyd has a helpful treatment of the cross as presented in the gospels. His discussion perceptively makes clear how the God of nonviolent love is revealed in the story of Jesus’s crucifixion—and, so importantly, makes clear how this picture of God’s love provides a model for how we ourselves should live.

However, though I greatly appreciate these points that Boyd makes, I still felt that his focus was a bit off. I think this may be an issue of tone more than intended content, though I am not sure. I will continue to reflect on this as I work through CWG. I am concerned that Boyd seems to say that the cross was the point of Jesus’s life rather than being the (not precisely foreseen) consequence of Jesus’s life. Was Jesus’s purpose from the start that he would die a sacrificial death? The NT can seem to suggest this, but I think it is a problematic emphasis.

I believe that the true meaning of the story the gospels tell is to be found in Jesus’s life—and that it is his life that is exemplary for us. The way the Romans (in collaboration with the religious leaders) executed Jesus—and the fact that they executed him at all—followed directly from the way he lived. Whatever meaning the cross has, then, derives from Jesus’s life. It was because he so profoundly embodied God’s love (both in the sense of how he showed mercy toward and practiced solidarity with “the least of these” and in the sense of how he confronted the blasphemies and injustices of those seemingly all-powerful human structures that claimed to act on God’s behalf) that Jesus was executed. The cross, then, reveals the fullness of the Powers’ opposition to God-in-the-flesh. It is not intrinsically revelatory or salvific.

So, I would say that Jesus’s cross is more mundanely (this-worldly) practical than Boyd seems to allow for. Boyd presents the meaning of the cross as having relevance most of all on what we could call the cosmic or theological level, as a necessary sacrifice that makes salvation possible. In doing so, he treats it almost ahistorically, as if the specific context for Jesus being executed is not particularly relevant. I would say, in contrast, that it is precisely the context that is most important. Jesus in his life that ultimately led to his death exposes the idolatrous nature of the political and religious institutions of his day. In doing so, he reveals what kind of life God wants human beings to live and what kind of resistance to the Powers is called for. The central meaning of the cross is for this world and for how we live in this world. Continue reading →

Greg Boyd’s Insistence on Making the Cross Central [CWG chapter four]

5 Replies

Ted Grimsrud—June 12, 2017

[This is the fifth in a long series of posts that will work through an important new book, Greg Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross (Fortress Press, 2017). The fourth post may be found here—and an index of the series here.]

The cross

In chapter four, “The Cruciform Center, Part I: The Cross as the Supreme Revelation of God” (pages 141–171), Boyd begins to explain what he means by what he calls a “cruciform hermeneutic”—his approach to interpreting the entire Bible in light of Jesus’s crucifixion. This doesn’t simply mean saying that the crucifixion is the most important story in the Bible. More than that, Boyd believes that everything else in the Bible (including the OT) must be seen as in some sense pointing to the crucifixion. It will take a lot of writing to explain how this dynamic works. The key purpose of explaining “the cruciform center” here, we will ultimately learn, is that this is how we might resolve the challenge of properly understanding “the OT’s violent portraits of God.”

Boyd asserts that the OT must be interpreted in light of Jesus, never placed alongside him as though it was a supplementary revelation. We should be able to discern how the OT narrative, and how each aspect of it, bears witness to Christ (142), especially Christ’s cross. In contrast, I would tend to take the opposite approach in that I would see the fundamental revelation being the exodus and the gift of Torah. We recognize Jesus as truthful, as the Son of God, because of how he embodies that same revelation.

Boyd suggest, sadly, that for the past 1,600 years theologians have indeed tended to read scripture christologically but they have not rethought the meaning of the OT’s violent portraits of God. This dynamic shows that we need to go a step further and advocate a crucicentric, rather than merely christocentric, orientation (142). By “crucicentric” Boyd means “the nonviolent, self-sacrificial, enemy-embracing love of God revealed on the cross” (142). This is helpful, but I ask why center this notion of self-sacrificial love on the cross rather than on Jesus’s life? I suspect it is because on some level Boyd still accepts the evangelical focus on Jesus’s death as a necessary sacrifice. I will need to monitor this issue as I go through CWG—paying special attention to the problems for nonviolence that belief in a necessary sacrifice raise.

“Wrath” and love

Boyd understands God’s “wrath” not to be an independent characteristic of God’s character. He writes, “If God’s love alone is the one ‘absolute,’ then God’s ‘wrath,’ as well as every other aspect of God, must ultimately be understood to be a manifestation of this love from a particular perspective, including the perspective of those who are hardened against it and thus experience it as ‘wrath’” (146). I think this is a good statement, but I would suggest that if God’s love truly is absolute, God would not turn away and would protect everyone—if God could. That is, I think Boyd’s point bumps up against the idea that God’s love has to be seen to have limits if we accept (which I don’t) that there are people who are excluded from it. I think it’s better to understand the “limits” as intrinsic in God’s actual lack of power to control the world. God simply can’t protect people. More on this in future posts. Continue reading →

Greg Boyd’s Peaceable God as Revealed in Christ [CWG chapter two]

4 Replies

Ted Grimsrud—May 30, 2017

[This is the third in a long series of posts that will work through an important new book, Greg Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross (Fortress Press, 2017). The second post may be found here—and an index of the series here.]

Reading the Bible with Christ as the center

In chapter two, “The True Face of God: The Absoluteness of the Revelation of God in Christ” (pages 35–92), Boyd’s main interest seems to be to establish the validity of his Christ-centered approach to interpreting the Bible. Based on extensive citations from the New Testament, Boyd makes the case that the Christian Bible as a whole should be read in light of Christ on the cross. He asserts that the Old Testament ultimately, for Christians, needs to be read in service to an affirmation of Jesus as Savior. This approach to reading the Bible will be the basis for Boyd’s cruciform reading of the OT violent portraits of God. He will argue that in the end those portraits (and everything else in the Bible) actually support the conviction that God is nonviolent love. More on that conclusion as we work through the rest of the book.

It strikes me that Boyd bases the case for Jesus as the center of the entire Bible more on his doctrinal beliefs about Jesus’s identity than on an inductive front to back reading that weighs the evidence as one goes along. I’m uncomfortable with his approach, though I will grant that he is able to marshal a great deal of evidence that the NT sees Christ as having authority over the OT and sees him to have an exalted identity as Son of God. Still, I am more attracted to an approach that understands Jesus’s authority and identity and his relationship with the rest of the Bible more based on his actions and teachings as presented in the first three gospels (I will call this a “Jesus”-emphasis) than on his crucifixion and exaltation (a “Christ”-emphasis).

A basic question will trouble me throughout Boyd’s book. Is the center of scripture best seem as Jesus’s death in itself or is the center best seen as the love of God shown to the world throughout the story—love that Jesus’s death witnesses to? That leads to a second question more directly tied to the book’s overt focus: How does the cross reveal God’s nonviolence? Is the core meaning of the nonviolence of the cross to be found in Christ (as God incarnate) taking general human sin upon himself or in Jesus’s life of active love that in its nonviolence shows both the character of God and the character of the human institutions who execute him because of his active nonviolence?

Boyd seems to operate with a “high” (or doctrine-first) christology that has as a starting point Jesus’s identity as God incarnate rather than understanding Jesus’s messianic identity as an inductively arrived-at conclusion drawn from the details of his life. The story of Jesus’s way of life does not seem necessary for Boyd’s description of his identity—or at least Boyd does not present it as such. Continue reading →

God’s Healing Strategy: The Core Message of the Bible

1 Reply

Ted Grimsrud

[This essay summarizes the argument of my book, God’s Healing Strategy: An Introduction to the Main Themes of the Bible (Cascadia Publishing House, 2000; 2nd edition, Cascadia Publishing House, 2011). It was originally published as chapter 6 in Ted Grimsrud, Embodying the Way of Jesus: Anabaptist Convictions for the Twenty-First Century (Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2007), pages 73-88.]

In continuity with the Anabaptist tradition dating back to the sixteenth century, present-day Anabaptists understand their faith convictions as being rooted in the Bible. A major one of these convictions is the role of the community of faith in God’s work of bringing healing to creation.

In this chapter, I present an Anabaptist reading of the Bible that sees its central message as the account of “God’s healing strategy”: God has called communities of God’s people together to find healing themselves and to witness of this healing to the rest of the world.

The Need for Healing

Early on, the Bible tells us something has gone wrong. Loving relationships have been broken. Creation has been marred. Salvation is needed. However, God will not simply step in and by force, by coercion, make things right. God’s healing strategy is much more subtle. Love shapes God’s activity, patient, long lasting, persevering love.

The Genesis one creation story concludes, “everything…was very good.” Then, Genesis three tells of a break in the relationship between human beings and God, the rise of “brokenness” among human beings. Genesis 4–11 tells more of brokenness: Cain’s murder of Abel, Noah and the Flood, the Tower of Babel. At the end of Genesis eleven, we read of Sarah’s barrenness.

Something new emerges with Genesis twelve. In the face of barrenness, God calls Abraham and Sarah to begin a community, to be the parents of a great people—and miraculously makes it possible by giving Sarah a child. Thus begins God’s strategy for healing as summarized in the words in Genesis 12:3: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

God establishes a community of people who will know God. Through people of faith living together, face to face, in peaceable community life God will make peace for all the families of the earth. This healing strategy proceeds through the Old Testament and the New, culminating in Revelation 21–22. A desire to be part of the on-going expression of God’s faith community-centered healing strategy animates Anabaptist convictions, from the sixteenth century to the present. Continue reading →

Summarizing John Howard Yoder’s “Politics of Jesus”

6 Replies

Ted Grimsrud—Peace Essays #B.4

[Unpublished paper, July 2008]

Christian pacifism stems directly from the biblical story of God’s revelation to humanity of the normative pattern for human life.  We see this revelation most clearly in the life and teaching of Jesus.  One of our most sophisticated interpreters of this story has been John Howard Yoder.  This essay presents a summary of Yoder’s argument in his classic book, The Politics of Jesus.[1]

The New Testament, centered on the story, presents a political philosophy.  This philosophy has at its core a commitment to pacifism, a commitment based on the normativity of Jesus Christ as the definitive revelation of God and of God’s intention for human social life.  Christians have tended to miss the social implications of the New Testament story because of assumptions about both politics and Jesus.

Christian ethicists and theologians have generally posited that Jesus’ thought as expressed in his teaching and practice could not have intended to speak in a concrete way to social ethics.  Jesus, it has been said, spoke only to the personal sphere or (more recently) he articulated his ethical expectations in the extreme forms he did because he (mistakenly) expected history to end very soon.

Because Jesus does not speak directly to our social ethics, Christian theology has concluded, we must derive our ethical guidance for life in the real world from other sources: common sense, calculation of what will work in a fallen world, non-Christian philosophical sources.

We must ask, though, whether, given Christian belief in Jesus as God Incarnate, should we not rather begin with an assumption that God’s revelation in Jesus’ life and teaching might well offer clear guidance for our social ethics?  We at least should look at the story itself and discern whether it indeed might have social ethical relevance.

Jesus’ identity

We will look first at how the gospels present Jesus, focusing on the Gospel of Luke primarily for simplicity’s sake.  At the very beginning, the song of Mary in 1:46-55 upon her learning of the child she will bear, we learn that this child will address social reality.  He will challenge the power elite of his world and lift up those at the bottom of the social ladder.

This child, we are told, will bring succor to those who desire the “consolation of Israel.” Those who seek freedom from the cultural domination of one great empire after another that had been imposed upon Jesus’ people for six centuries will find comfort.  From the beginning, this child is perceived in social and political terms. Continue reading →