Heart Too Small? Try Jesus.

This may pertain to this blog: "A spirited explorer of religion's role," appearing in The Baltimore Sun over this past weekend, tells of the new book by religion elucidator Huston Smith, The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition.

How can we recover the core teachings of Christianity, Smith, in his book, seems to be asking, so to heal the rift between conservatives and liberals in the faith today?

Smith, author of the well-known survey The Religions of Man, updated as The World's Religions, disparages the conservative Christian outlook on grounds that it "ignores the contexts that give words their meaning — different contexts, different meanings." Failing to compensate for the very different context in which Jesus preached and then the changed one in which the evangelists wrote leads many of us today to misinterpret the words, giving them meanings that were never intended. We can thereby become "narrowly dogmatic and chauvinistic," as we find ourselves "in constant danger of slipping into disastrous political agendas."

Liberal churches, meanwhile, lack "a robust, emphatically theistic worldview to work within." Their "rallying cries to be good" are simply not enough. Without firm commitment to a belief in "a two-story universe: this world, and another world that is greater and more important than this," they wither on the vine.


Smith accordingly undertakes "a re-examination of the life and language of Jesus." In doing so, he of necessity "returned to first-century Palestine, where [says the Sun article] those he encountered would have found both to be utterly alarming." This sounds like exactly what Albert Nolan in Jesus before Christianity has done as well.

In a side article available here, we learn that Smith, a lifelong Methodist, also "returns [in his book] to the early church — the community of believers before the Great Schism of 1054 divided Catholic and Orthodox, before the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century further split the faith." The failure to say much if anything about the early, 2nd-century/1st-millennium church mars Nolan's work, I feel, quite badly. We need to see what Jesus meant in his day, and we need to see what he meant, and why, to the unsplintered early church, that vital bridge between the original Jesus movement and now.


"In all, a wind of freedom blows through these teachings," Smith is quoted from his book in the Sun review, "that frightens the world and makes us want to deflect their effect by postponement — not yet, not yet! H.G. Wells was evidently right: Either there was something mad about this man, or our hearts are still too small for his message."

That resonates, sad to say. I know my heart to be way too small to put me squarely among, per Smith, "the happy people ... those who are meek, who weep, who are merciful and pure in heart."

But I'm working on it.

Chapter 15, "The Temptation to Violence"

I've been reviewing Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity in chapter-reverse order, seeking greater understanding of a message of universal compassion and solidarity that often gets hidden in formal church theology and doctrine today. Having covered Chapter 16, "The Role of Suffering and Death", I turn now to a tiny chapter with a big message.

"The Temptation to Violence," chapter 15 of the book, posits that Jesus refused to be crowned Messiah-king of the Jewish people in first-century Palestine — a throne which was offered to him by nationalists seeking an end to Roman dominion — for one simple reason. "The power of force" could never remedy his people's woes, absent "a widespread change of heart" on the part of the Jewish people themselves (pp. 134, 135).

As Nolan puts it:

To have accepted the kingship over a people who had not transferred their allegiance to the "kingdom" of God and to lead such people in battle was to play into the hands of Satan. (p. 135)

The truly important thing was to bring the people to compassionate solidarity, based on faith in God's own compassion. That's why "Jesus was angry with Peter" in Mark 8 and parallel passages in other Gospels. Peter was urging Jesus to seize the opportunity he had been offered to become Messiah-king, first, and only then preach the "kingdom" of God. "Get behind me, Satan!" said Jesus to Peter, "... the way you think is not God's but man's" (see p. 134).

According to Nolan, Jesus was no pacifist, except in those specific circumstances. He was willing to entertain — but reject — the use of force. Jesus' "injunctions to turn the other cheek and not to resist evil ... do not exclude violence as such, they exclude violence for the purpose of revenge," says Nolan. A "practical and realistic man," Jesus forbade a Jewish coup d'etat on his behalf, not out of pacifism, but out of recognition that "to draw the sword was plain suicide" under those particular circumstances:

A war with Rome could only end in a wholesale massacre of the people. This was indeed the catastrophe which Jesus feared and which he felt could be averted only by a widespread change of heart. (p. 135)

Still, even if Jesus was willing to commit violence under some circumstances, clearly he preferred "individual conversion" as a master strategy (see p. 133). Only a "change of heart," he preached, could usher in a "kingdom" of God in which there was no earthly potentate whatsoever.

After the coming of this "kingdom":

Messiahship would then not have been a title of honor, prestige and power but a form of service, and the Gentiles [such as the Romans and the non-Jewish peoples of the area] would then have been brought into the "kingdom" not by the power of the sword but by the power of faith and compassion. ... The "kingdom" of total liberation for all people cannot be established by violence. Faith alone can enable the "kingdom" to come. (p. 136)


There are several interesting points which emerge. One which I'll not comment on further, for the nonce, is that Nolan quite clearly is a proponent of "liberation theology." Another has to do with Nolan's sophisticated method of exegesis. Nolan holds that Jesus absolutely rejected being named Messiah or king, forbade his followers to call him such, and was firmly the source of the "so-called Messianic Secret" spoken of by biblical exegetes (see p. 132).

That claim goes right against a surface reading of several Gospel verses which Nolan lists in an endnote (endnote 4 for chapter 15, p. 182). For example, Mark 9:41 reads: "For truly, I say to you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ, will by no means lose his reward" (RSV). "The name of Christ" is how the word "Messiah" was rendered in Greek. So, if this verse and similar ones can be taken at face value, it would seem Jesus did call himself Christ or Messiah.

Such interpolations are, says Nolan, however, "obviously the words of the evangelists" — the writers of the Gospels, well after Jesus was gone — "who were all convinced that Jesus was the Messiah" (pp. 131-2; italics mine). Accordingly: "What was originally a 'temptation'" — for Jesus to accept the Messiahship, that is — "became for the early Christians a 'confession of faith'" (p. 134).

And that change in outlook is absolutely key. The church as we now know it, with the Christian system of beliefs that we today inherit, passes Jesus' actual life and original teachings through an optic that to a great extent filters out the specific historical circumstances which Jesus coped with and the strategic approach Jesus consequently used.


This is a fact which leads me to one of my few major criticisms of Nolan's book. Although he writes (p. 134), "How that [distortion of Jesus' original message] can have happened, we shall see later," I don't feel that Nolan actually comes close to dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's in this regard, in subsequent parts of the book.

True, Nolan's Jesus could be — despite the emphasis placed by the book on his humanity and his historicity — called divine. (See Chapter 19, "Faith in Jesus," Part 2 and Chapter 19, "Faith in Jesus," Part 1.) In Jesus the truth about faith and compassion, and about the coming of God's kingdom, were "made flesh." The core truth about life radiated from his every word and act. No wonder his followers "were convinced that they had seen him alive," says Nolan, after his death. "He was on a par with God" (pp. 164, 165).

That having been said, however, there still remains the question of how to square all the developments in the post-resurrection church, as embodied in the Gospels and other New Testament writings, with the teachings of Jesus as elucidated by Nolan. I don't feel Nolan fills us in adequately on that. And it's important: Most Christians today invest their faith squarely in our post-resurrection notions of Christianity, and feel at least some congnitive dissonance when confronted by Nolan's pre-resurrectionist exegesis. Two salient points, along these lines:

• Was Jesus really, in bodily terms, resurrected? Most Christians today would say, emphatically, yes — that's how we know he was divine. All Nolan says is:

Some of those who had known him and had seen him before he died (especially the twelve [apostles]) were convinced that they had seen him alive again after his death and that he had instructed him again as he had done before. The women who discovered the empty tomb, followed by the other disciples, proclaimed that Jesus had risen from the dead. (p. 164)

• Did Jesus really perform miracles? Nolan explains the "miracle of the loaves and fishes," Mark 6:35-44, with its parallels in other Gospels, in everyday terms: "... the event itself was not a miracle of multiplication; it was a remarkable example of sharing" (p. 64).

The only "miracle-stories" Nolan accepts as such, in the Gospels, are the ones in which Jesus did in fact "exorcise and heal people in a quite extraordinary manner" (p. 43). The others, he says, were the result of "embellishment and exaggeration" in the oral tradition that Mark and the other evangelists relied on in writing the Gospels. Or they were "not originally miracles or extraordinary marvels" — as with "the walking on the waters, the multiplication of the loaves, the cursing of the fig tree and the changing of water into wine."

For Mark "wished to correct [what he felt was a] one-sided picture": "the portrait of Jesus as a teacher which was current in the Church at the time. Those who had not known Jesus ... came to know him principally through his sayings and parables. ... [But Mark knew] miracles were a particularly easy and convenient way of convincing his readers" (p. 42). So we today inherit Mark and the other evangelists' exaggeration of the importance of miracles.

That fact is abetted by the concept we now have of natural laws which miracles presumably violate. But Nolan points out that no such concept existed in biblical times; there was no necessary distinction as yet between otherwise-explicable events and astonishing wonders and marvels, to be experienced as signs of God's power and might.

Today, many people want or even need to believe in miracles that defy science's insights. It's hard for us to cast our minds back to a time before the scientific method had even been invented. It's not easy to see the Bible through the eyes of the people it was originally intended for. And it's even more difficult to strip away 2,000 years of teachings, predilections, and assumptions to resurrect the actual "historical Jesus" in our own consciousness.

In that way, Nolan's approach can be said to (ahem) "do violence" to some of our most cherished beliefs.

Chapter 16, "The Role of Suffering and Death"

Now, more on how Albert Nolan reads the gospels in Jesus before Christianity. I've been reviewing the book's chapters in reverse order in a search for greater understanding of a message that often gets hidden in formal church theology and doctrine today.

In previous posts up to and including Chapter 17, "The Man Who Emerges", I've established what Nolan makes explicit in chapter 16, "The Role of Suffering and Death": "Jesus was determined to destroy ... the sufferings of the poor and oppressed, the sufferings of the sick, the sufferings that would ensue if the catastrophe were to come" (p. 138). That was his main purpose: to awaken faith in the kingdom of God which would come instead of the catastrophe (the predicted expulsion of Jews from their sacred homeland and the destruction of their Temple) if enough people had enough compassionate faith.

The poor, the downtrodden, and the oppressed would be first to enter the new kingdom, Jesus preached, ushered in by a solicitous and merciful God. But what of everyone else? Here, in this chapter, is where Nolan takes up "the paradox of compassion," for Jesus showed that "in order to enter the 'kingdom' with the poor and the oppressed ... one must deny oneself ... and be willing to suffer (p. 138; italics mine).

At the extreme, "a willingness to die for all people" is required, the ultimate "expression of universal solidarity" as preached by Jesus (p. 139; again, italics mine). "As [Jesus] understood it," writes Nolan, "one should be willing to give up one's life for exactly the reason as one gives up possessions, prestige, family, and power, namely for others."

And that's what Jesus did, in the end: gave up his life in service to others. Faced with two equally inappropriate alternatives of remaining in hiding after the incident in the Temple courtyard or coming out of hiding to be crowned secular Messiah-King, Jesus discerned the third — and right — option. He could make of his own execution "a service ... rendered to all people" (p. 139; italics Nolan's). His death would be "a ransom ... given to redeem or liberate others" and to awaken in them faith in the coming kingdom of God.


Jesus knew at that point that "there was no other way of saving people from sin, suffering and the catastrophe to come ... of enabling the 'kingdom' to come instead of the catastrophe." He found himself in "circumstances in which [he] could serve the world better by dying for it than by continuing to live for it. ... The only alternative was to die. ... Jesus died so that the 'kingdom' might come" (pp. 140-141; italics Nolan's).

When Jesus in the gospels predicted his own end to his disciples, "each of the three main '[passion] predictions' is followed by instructions about self-denial, the willingness to die, being a servant and taking the last place" (p. 141). And we are back to the riddle of riddles: "Anyone who saves his or her life will lose it; anyone who loses his or her life will save it" (p. 139; italics Nolan's). In other words:

The paradox is that the person who fears death is already dead, whereas the person who has ceased to fear death has at that moment begun to live. (p. 139; italics mine)

Accordingly, we who are not poor and oppressed gain the kingdom of God by our willingness to suffer with and even die for the downtrodden, where that will serve to ease or curtail their suffering. That realization is tantamount to the awakening of faith. For, as Nolan states in an endnote:

... the awakening of faith also makes God's forgiveness effective in a person. ... It follows that one of the results of Jesus' death would be the forgiveness of sin. This is the sense in which Jessus' death may be called an atonement for sin. Jesus did not have to placate an angry God who was unwilling to forgive. God is always willing to forgive and to forgive unconditionally. Jesus' death reveals this and awakens our faith in it, thereby allowing God's forgiveness to transform our lives. (endnote 11, p. 183; emphasis mine)


Thus is self-denial linked, albeit paradoxically, to the coming of the compassionate kingdom and to the soul-transforming effectiveness of forgiveness. I, for one, find that notion a bit difficult to take ... not really because it's so paradoxical, though it is, but because I have never been particularly keen on self-denial as a concomitant of my religious faith.

That I may be able to count myself now ready for more self-denial than I 've been accustomed to manifesting in the past 58 years is — if it's real and lasting — a function of increased spiritual maturity on my part, or so I imagine.

The idea of spiritual maturity is not one we hear preached in every sermon, from every pulpit, but I would say the Christian journey is ever one of "putting away childish things" — something I've had an exceptionally hard time doing.

In fact, when I talked about the crucial distinction between the "beast" and the fully humane human in Chapter 17, "The Man Who Emerges", what I had in mind was in part the notion that "childish things," in this usage, betokens not just the innocence of the infant but also the "beastliness" of much childhood behavior — an aggressive, self-centered, me-me-me tendency which, if you believe in evolution, comes from our red-in-tooth-and-claw, pre-human heritage.

One of my favorite spirtual gurus, Fr. Ron Rolheiser, speaks of "crucifying the ego" as the prime Christian desideratum. This would seem to be synonymous with "caging the beast" — the "beast" within us all, that is. This "beast" is the voice in our skulls which says don't be a sap. Don't even think about giving up possessions, prestige, family, power, and even your life for others. Don't for one moment imagine that such foolishness will bring you any lasting joy or peace.


"Crucifying the ego" or "caging the beast," clearly, demands spiritual maturity of us. Otherwise, we might have a tendency to "go off the deep end" and make useless sacrifices simply to prove to ourselves that we would and could. That's just another form of egoism, cleverly disguised.

So Nolan's version of the gospel message of Jesus demands that we accept "on faith" what our ego tells us is crazy: that our true mission in life is compassionate solidarity with and service to others. That's the real "role of suffering and death" in our lives: to vouchsafe our compassion, our solidarity, and our service.

Chapter 17, "The Man Who Emerges"

The kingdom of heaven will come on earth as the triumph of human solidarity, unbounded compassion, and unstinting fellow-feeling, founded on the faith that all our sins and trespasses will be — by one another, as by God — forgiven. Jesus, the man from Nazareth, presented that truth to us so authentically that, after his crucifixion, he was understood to be divine; death could not contain him.

This is how Albert Nolan reads the gospels in Jesus before Christianity. I've been reviewing the book's chapters, in reverse order, in a search for greater understanding of a message that often gets hidden in our formal church theology and doctrine today.

Nolan has it that, to Jesus, the Lord God in heaven, whom he called Father or Abba, had changed! God had relented with respect to his erstwhile intentions to judge and punish sinners. The "signs of the times" were manifest: God's mercy was at hand. That was shown by the great number of healings that were happening, all around Jesus, in first-century Palestine.

Jesus preached faith: the power of forgiveness and compassion to unify humanity and avert looming catastrophe. But if faith was not strong, or forgiveness not universal, dire catastrophe would come instead of the kingdom of God. In his time, the pending catastrophe Jesus prophesied was the turning out of Jews from their homeland at the hands of the conquering Romans, and the fall of the Temple. That actually transpired, a mere few decades later.

Even so, Nolan says, Jesus also preached that the kindgom of heaven would eventually come to, and on, our earth. Even if there wasn't enough faith and compassion in men's hearts to head off catastrophe in the short term, there would be enough in the long term to make the kingdom one day come true.


In Chapter 17, "The Man Who Emerges," Nolan makes the point that Jesus conspicuously "spoke and acted without authority" (p. 148, Nolan's italics). He would accept no titles. He declined even the accolade "good," saying that such an honor was to be reserved for God alone (Mk 10:18; Lk 18:19).

If he was in any sense a "king," his would be a metaphorical kingship only ... for the "kingdom" was specifically one in which the highest in society would serve the lowest. There would be no authority figures, no wielding of power in its literal sense.

From Jesus the man shone forth the truth expressed in 1 Jn 4:7-8: " ... everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love." Or, as Nolan puts it:

We know that [Jesus] was moved to act ans speak by a profound experience of compassion. And we know that the Abba-experience was an experience of God as a compassionate Father. This would mean that Jesus experienced the mysterious creative power behind all phenomena (God) as compassion or love. (pp. 151-152)

The "kingdom of God" is therefore a reign of compassion and love.


The only "title" Jesus gave himself was Son of Man. Nolan shows that it is mistaken of us to read it as a title.

For one thing, it can be taken as an idiom along the lines of how we sometimes use "yours truly": "If you want to know what yours truly thinks, you have only to ask."

For another — and this is the really important thing — "son of man" was understood by Jesus' contemporaries as synonymous with "human being." Per Nolan, that expression "could be used to underline the human as opposed to the bestial" (p. 145).

I think that interpretation is key. In so saying, I am treating what for Nolan is a mere "matter for conjecture" (p. 146) as fact: "Jesus' frequent and emphatic use of the term 'son of man' was his way of referring to, and identifying himself with, human beings as human beings" (p. 145, italics mine).

Nolan cites verses from the Book of Daniel, the Old Testament prophet, in this regard. For my purposes verses 11 through 14 from chapter 7 give the flavor of it:

I watched, then, from the first of the arrogant words which the horn spoke, until the beast was slain and its body thrown into the fire to be burnt up.

The other beasts, which also lost their dominion, were granted a prolongation of life for a time and a season.

As the visions during the night continued, I saw One like a son of man coming, on the clouds of heaven; When he reached the Ancient One and was presented before him,

He received dominion, glory, and kingship; nations and peoples of every language serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not be taken away, his kingship shall not be destroyed.

The contrast is drawn between the "beast" or "beasts" whose time has come and gone and "a son of man" whose "dominion" or "kingship" shall never cease.

Nolan quibbles (p. 145) about whether Jesus actually claimed to be this particular "son of man" or not, inasmuch as the "son of man" passages in the Gospels were possibly "not formulated by Jesus himself but by the very early Christians." But, really, his hypothesis about Jesus is strengthened by assuming that Jesus did claim this non-title, Son of Man, but never exclusively.

Rather, as Nolan in a page or so asserts:

Jesus must have been aware of the fact that he was fulfilling the prophecies and expectations of Scripture but it does not seem to have mattered to him who was fulfilling them. When according to the gospels, John's disciples ask [Jesus] whether he is the one to come, he does not answer the question directly, he simply points to the fulfillment of Scripture in what is now happening: "The blind see again and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed ... and the good news is proclaimed to the poor" (Mt 11:4-5).

He does not say, "I give sight to the blind, I am proclaiming the good news to the poor." What matters is that this kind of thing is being done, people are being liberated and saved. Who does it is irrelevant. He wanted his disciples to go out and do the same as he had done. It never occurred to him to stop anyone, even complete strangers, from participating in the work of liberation (Mk 9:38-40 par). Jesus' only concern was that the people be liberated. (pp. 147-148)


Putting this all together, we can deduce that the divine Jesus was, and wanted to be seen as, the embodiment of all that makes us human (and humane) beings, not beasts. Love and compassion are our birthright, he told us, and once we come fully and communally into our inheritance, the kingdom of God will arrive for us. We will be liberated, all of us together, from the beast within. Jesus just knew that ... and he made others know it and manifest it too.

That's the kind of God-man he was.

Whither Personal Morality?

Herein, a break from my backwards, chapter-by-chapter review-in-depth of Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity. Before moving on, I have something I want to discuss further. In the installment I called Chapter 19, "Faith in Jesus," Part 2, I mentioned that:

... the evangelists who wrote the four New Testament Gospels "apocalyptized the message," according to Nolan. They "adapted [it] to other situations or indeed to any and every situation," by using it "in typical apocalyptic fashion, for moralizing purposes and as a threat concerning the individual rather than society ... laying great emphasis on the judgment day and upon the apportioning of reward and punishment" (pp. 108-109).

I find that a key passage which raises a question I can ask but don't think I can answer: if we take Nolan's version of Jesus' teaching to heart, whither personal morality? If traditional Christian moral teaching rests on a "threat concerning the individual" — on the "apportioning of reward and punishment," come judgment day — what does Nolan have to say about it?

Not a lot, it would seem. For, aside from the above-cited passage of his book, Nolan makes few if any other references to moral issues as we would customarily tend to think of them. I may be reading too much into what he does say about these matters, but it appears to me that Nolan's emphasis on boundless mercy and unquestioning forgiveness as a pathway to compassionate solidarity among all humans suggests he is "soft on morality."


I think of the "sins" traditional Christian morality abhors as falling in two groups: sins of aggression and sins of appetite. The former group is pretty much self-explanatory. Blind hostility, gleeful violence, brutal mayhem, homicide, genocide, thirst for vengeance — all are sins of aggression.

Sins of appetite include, of course, sexual sin (misused genital appetite). They also include such things as gluttony (exaggerated appetite for comestibles) and sloth (overweening appetite for ease).

Nolan gives short shrift to such sins in his exegesis of Jesus' teachings. He seems to imply that Jesus considered sins of alienation and aspersion more key than those of aggression and appetite. There is little mention of sins of appetite in Nolan's book whatsoever — except to say that Jesus' enemies accused him of immorality by virtue of his willing association with known drunkards, gluttons, and prostitutes.

Nolan does take up the question of whether violence is always forbidden, a topic I'll cover in depth when I deal with Nolan's chapter on "The Temptation to Violence." The short answer: "Jesus was not a pacifist in principle, he was a pacifist in practice" (p. 136). "Unlimited compassion" for the poor and oppressed could, under just the right circumstances, justify "violent indignation" — as when Jesus ousted the money-changers from the Temple courtyard.


It is possible to read Nolan, therefore, as "soft on morality." Or, rather, to read Nolan's Jesus as way too permissive.

In fairness, one must admit that for Nolan to take up such questions would have cluttered up his exposition fatally. He wants to show that Jesus' main thrust was to wipe out the sins of alienation and aspersion which were fragmenting his people and inviting the historical catastrophe which did in fact occur within the lifetime of many who had known Jesus.

Furthermore, it would be foolish to fail to note that Nolan wrote in the mid-'70s, a time when the air was filled with angst over unjust war, environmental desecration, apartheid, impending nuclear doom. Meanwhile, the sexual revolution was in full stride. Those of liberal mindset were apt to consider the latter small potatoes by way of contrast with the former.


Reading the signs of today's times is, however, a different matter.

Religious conservatives say they are embroiled in a culture war. Depending on which pundits you believe, the 2004 presidential election was or was not decided on "moral values." The country debates abortion rights and gay marriage. It is generally understood that a big chunk of the populace wants to re-enshrine traditional Christian assertions about sins of appetite.

Oddly, that same chunk seems willing to turn a blind eye to Abu Ghraib and other sins of aggression against the "enemies" whom Jesus said we should love. But, never mind.

Inevitably, it comes time for full disclosure: I myself am quite torn about such things. Especially sins of appetite, since I've long since been able to get my aggressive instincts under some semblance of control. Or, at least, I think I have.

I'm, it seems, half Puritan and half libertine. Mostly, the Puritan rules my life, the libertine my X-rated imagination. It likely is the libertine in me that most resents religion when it clamps down on sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, and the like. But it is definitely the Puritan in me that turns up its nose, of late, at the manifest coarsening of our culture.

So there are admittedly dueling agendas in my soul ... a fact which I feel disqualifies me from making any for-all-time pronouncements about traditional Christian morality. When I read the signs of today's times, I'm apt to come to different conclusions depending on which lobe is in charge at the moment: the rigid Puritan or the relaxed libertine.


Yet it seems clear to me that the religio-cultural warriors of today are much more in the mode of worrying about the threat to individual souls come judgment day than about the threat to the community posed by, say, marginalizing gays who won't recant. These warriors seem to me to take an apocalyptizing, moralizing view of the Gospel message ... not the "de-apocalyptized" prophetic view Nolan prefers.

Many Christian conservatives — though surely not all — think we are approaching the "end times." Witness the vast popularity of the Left Behind series, with its instant "rapturing" of the faithful into heaven, followed by tribulation for those remaining on earth.

If that's not using the Bible message "in typical apocalyptic fashion, for moralizing purposes and as a threat concerning the individual rather than society ... laying great emphasis on the judgment day and upon the apportioning of reward and punishment," I don't know what is.

As I say, I don't feel qualified to resolve such tensions, but I also feel I would be remiss in not mentioning them. There does seem to be a rift between conservative outlooks of the moment and Nolan's take on Christian morality, in which sins of alienation and aspersion far outweigh those of appetite and aggression.

Chapter 18, "On Trial"

I now continue my investigation-in-reverse- chapter-order of Albert Nolan's spiritually challenging book Jesus before Christianity. My last installment, Chapter 19, "Faith in Jesus," Part 2, found me at a loss to figure out how to fit Nolan's central motif of compassion-vs.-catastrophe into today's reality. Before I discuss the next-to-last chapter of his book, "On Trial," I'd like to take another crack at that.

Nolan's central thesis is that Jesus preached a radical change of heart as the only thing which could ward off a looming catastrophe, in his time, and lead instead to the kingdom of God.

The catastrophe which Jesus prophesied was the Jews' eviction from their homeland as well as the fall of their Temple in Jerusalem.

The radical change of heart which was needed among the Jews of that time to avert this pending catastrophe, Jesus preached, was compounded of faith, hope, and compassion. Compassion for and solidarity with not only those who are like us but also those who are not — the poor, the afflicted, the marginalized, all of whom are called sinners; and our so-called enemies — would make God's kingdom come instead of the prophesied destruction. That this was so was a matter of faith and hope: faith had the power to justify our hope and bring about the kingdom of heaven.

The kingdom didn't come, though. Destruction did. In an earlier chapter of the book Nolan asserts:

Jesus had not been mistaken; he had failed, or rather the people had failed him. A unique opportunity had been lost. But it was by no means the end. There would be another chance and still another because the "kingdom" of God will come in the end — God will have the last word. (p. 108)

Another chance, and another, and another ... and today we still have a choice between the compassionate kingdom and the coming catastrophe. But how?

In my previous post I suggested the coming catastrophe has to do with Islamic terrorism, but it escaped me how a change of heart on our part might help to avert it. On further consideration, however, various ways present themselves. I'll discuss some of them after I deal with the "On Trial" chapter, inasmuch as it seems we are presently on trial.


On its face, Nolan's chapter 18 appears to be about the trial of Jesus at the hands of the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, with the collaboration of Caiaphas and the leaders of the Jewish Temple. But it turns out that those who were really on trial include Pilate, Caiaphas, Jesus' disciples ... as well as us Jesus, and Jesus.

The chapter divides into two halves. In the first, Nolan seems to delve into pointless minutiae about exactly which of a raft of possible charges were actually laid against Jesus, by whom, and according to what ulterior motives. Who was more to blame, Pilate and the Romans or Caiaphas and the Jews? What were their respective intentions?

And what were the intentions of the Gospel writers who documented the trial of Jesus? Their combined accounts of Jesus' persecution today seem to us "muddled and confused" (see p. 153). Says Nolan of the Christian evangelists:

Their intention was not to deceive or to twist the historical facts. Their intention was to help the reader to understand what really happened despite all appearances. (p. 154)

Today, we might call this "investigative journalism," but it was more. The early Christians were committed to a "despite-all-appearances" worldview, since "appearances" had it that Jesus was dead. And so:

On the surface of it the Romans were to blame but the truth of it was that the Jews were more guilty. There is no anti-semitism here, nor is there a prejudice in favor of Rome, only disappointment. The truth of the matter is that Jesus appealed to a particular nation [the Jews of Palestine] at a particular time [the 1st century] and that nation rejected him as most other people might well have done in the circumstances. (p. 154)


Accordingly, Nolan pores over the evidence in the Gospel accounts to try to see, in effect, "What did Pilate and Caiaphas know about Jesus and when did they know it?" Answer: unclear. Each of Jesus' accusers probably knew something about Jesus before acting as he did ... but only just enough to recognize his threat, not his truth.

For Pilate, the threat was to his power. He was apparently a control-mad sadist, genocidally jealous of any challenge to his hegemony. He didn't understand that Jesus' challenge was not one of armed insurrection, à la the Zealots and other whom he also persecuted. But he knew Jesus' movement was a danger to Roman rule.

For the high priest Caiaphas and his associates, the challenge was to their status as privileged collaborators with Pilate. If they did not eliminate Jesus, Roman reprisals would destroy their sinecure. Out of expediency, says Nolan, either they initiated Jesus' persecution on their own, or they responded to Pilate's call to (in modern parlance) extradite Jesus.

Thus were two false gods, power and status, implicated in Jesus' betrayal. There was also a third, money. The Romans extorted taxes and tribute money from the Jews. And the priests had a cozy arrangement with the profiteering money-changers in the Temple courtyard.


So Jesus was brought to trial before Pilate ... and the second half of Nolan's "On Trial" chapter begins. In it Nolan shows how Jesus, basically by remaining silent and offering no substantive reply to any of the charges, ended up "putting everyone else to the test" (p. 160).

Their words were turned back at them, and they condemned themselves out of their own mouths. Pilate, firstly, was found ... guilty of a lack of interest in the truth ... . Caiaphas and his associates were even more guilty [for not having] gone to the trouble of finding out more about Jesus ... . (pp. 160-161)

But also being put to the test of their "willingness to die with him for the sake of humankind" (p. 161) were Jesus' disciples themselves. "But Judas betrayed him, Peter denied him and the rest fled."

And Jesus himself was put to the test:

He sweated blood over it ... [and] alone was able to accept the challenge of the hour. It set him above everyone else as the silent truth that judges every human being. Jesus died alone as the only person who had been able to survive the test. Everyone else failed and yet everyone else was given another chance. (pp. 161-162)

So, implicitly, we today are also the ones being put to the test:

The history of Christianity is the history of those who came to believe in Jesus and who were inspired to take up the challenge of his death — in one way or another.

Seeking not to be put to the test is, per Nolan, "the literal meaning of the prayer: 'Lead us not into temptation'." The temptation or ultimate test is not something that Jesus wanted for anyone: "He had always taught his disciples to hope and pray that it would not come to this [i.e., Jesus' persecution], that God would not bring them to the test or trial" (p. 161).


In fact, it seems paradoxical to claim that, by God's grace, such tests might be avoided, and also to realize that this particular test of Jesus' trial and execution was (at least in hindsight) inevitable.

The only imaginable resolution to the paradox is to recognize that the other catastrophe Jesus predicted, the imminent fall of the Jewish nation, could have been averted by people's faith in the coming of the compassionate kingdom of God. That was the core of what Jesus taught his fellow Jews.

Projecting Jesus' message for Jews onto the world at large: universal solidarity among all humans is the way to avert the test, so as not to be "led into temptation."


Thus do the Gospels give us a template, as it were, for understanding our current situation. Before I attempt to elaborate on that notion, I'd better first warn that what I'm about to say is sketchy and intuitive. I feel quite the inadequate prophet, having, as I do, nothing like the clarity of vision Jesus had when he predicted the fall of his nation and its Temple.

It seems to me that the catastrophe we face is much more murky. It has something to do with terrorism abroad, emanating mostly from Islamic sources — I can see that much, but I have no idea how it might manifest itself as a specific, definitive catastrophe.

As I said in Chapter 19, "Faith in Jesus," Part 2, nor can I give chapter and verse on how any sort of compassion-favoring change of heart on our part would help. Yet in general it seems clear that compassion — fellow-feeling for all our "neighbors" — is the basis for social solidarity. We obviously will need solidarity to ward off the terrorist threat.

How might that work? Well, with greater solidarity we might be able to summon up the political will to do certain things that pundits and commentators across the ideological spectrum have called for, but bemoaned the difficulty of passing.

For example, voices from the left, center, and right have been raised in favor of undertaking to make the U.S. "energy independent," thereby weaning it from foreign oil. It would take a lot of planning — à la what we did in the 1960s to get to the moon — and a lot of sacrifice. Yet few doubt it could be done ... if our leaders led us in that direction and we followed.

At the same time, such sensible proposals are (having been made) typically immediately pronounced D.O.A. Why? Because it seems the necessary political solidarity isn't available.


The very same thing happens when the subject of re-instituting a military draft is brought up. A lot of smart people think a draft is needed to get enough troops into the armed forces while not busting the budget and ballooning the deficit. Plus it would (if implemented properly) distribute the burden of fighting in places like Iraq more fairly among ethnic groups and economic strata. Yet almost no one thinks such a sensible proposal stands a ghost of a chance in today's sacrifice-averse political climate.

A third example of where we need greater willingness to abandon expediency and face the truth concerns proposals made by reputable, knowledgable experts to the effect that the Senate ought to reassert its constitutional prerogative and actually require American wars to be declared, by the Senate itself, as in the distant past. Having the legislative branch vet a President's war-making intentions in advance would help us stay together, politically, after the fighting begins. If it begins, that is — the Senate would have to step up to the plate and deny the President his or her war, if it looks to be a hopeless muddle in the making.

None of this will happen in exactly the way it should, however, if we don't stop sniping at one another and take back the moral high ground of "love thy neighbor." If cynics say plans for energy independence are excuses to fatten the coffers of privileged corporations, kiss that thrust goodbye. If black folks insist a reinstated draft is a clever way to force more African Americans into harm's way, fugeddaboudit. If neo-conservatives say America's muscle is at risk and shoot down Senate initiatives to declare wars or never fight them, there's no chance for change.


We have to have faith that cooperation — as in "love thy neighbor" — is the moral high ground and will work. And we have to live by that faith even when it seems like the height of folly.

Note that compassion as Jesus taught it is also fellow-feeling for our "enemies," whom Jesus instructs us to "love." If we were indeed more compassionate in this way, perhaps we'd not find it so hard to pass laws forbidding the torture and abuse of prisoners we're holding offshore, detainees not now covered by the Geneva Convention.

Still, those of our leaders who refuse to zero out the torture option do have a case. If we don't subject the "enemy" to mental and physical abuse, we might be missing an opportunity to squeeze out much needed intelligence information. Wouldn't that be, in fact, the height of foolishness?

That's where faith really comes into play. The template of truth which Albert Nolan lays out for us says that we will paradoxically avoid catastrophe only by eschewing, in the name of total compassion, exactly the "foolish" things our reason tells us must be done.


That, at any rate, is a sketch of how investing our souls in a commitment to compassion, to a righteousness that would please the Jesus of Nolan's book, might begin shifting our future away from a catastrophe of terrorism.

But, clearly, we'd have to follow it up with such a degree of righteousness as to convince even our enemies.

I'm put in mind of the story told in the movie Gandhi. Mohandas K. Gandhi, in his compassion, saw an India poor, starving, and desperate for independence from the British crown ... but powerless to gain it. He realized that, foolish as it might seem, the only way to oust the colonials and gain home rule was to adjure the use of violent force.

Gandhi's movement of non-violence even — after a struggle lasting decades — gained the grudging respect of some of the English overlords. In part, it was because they realized that they were not being demonized, but were being treated honestly and fairly by Indians in the gradually succeeding movement. Finally the time came when the British simply felt moved to hand over their power to the Indians, as if conceding a well-played cricket match.

In a nutshell, the righteousness of Gandhi's cause and methodology was not lost on the so-called enemy. At the end of the day, compassion, faith, and hope proved stronger than complacency, expediency, and the traditional instruments of power.

Could we do that? Could we "fight" terrorism with righteous compassion, faith, and hope, and win? Could we convince our enemies that we indeed love them, and all people, and that we are not the infidel brutes whom they think we are?

Are we "on trial" here? Are we being "put to the test" which Jesus taught us to pray we would never be put to? Is compassion our only ticket away from catastrophe and toward the kingdom of God?

Chapter 19, "Faith in Jesus," Part 2

In Chapter 19, "Faith in Jesus," Part 1 I began my backward exposition of the teachings and personality of the man who was also God, Jesus of Nazareth, as elucidated in Albert Nolan's spiritually challenging book Jesus before Christianity. Herein, more of the same.

That the man named Jesus was divine, I said in that prior post, was a matter of experience, for the first Christians. They experienced Jesus — the man himself; then the crucified, buried, and, they said, risen Jesus — as being a human of bottomless compassion. They became convinced that his compassion was the same as God's own compassion. So they just knew Jesus was divine truth become flesh.

Nolan has this to say about our different-yet-similar experience of Jesus today:

To believe that Jesus is divine is to choose to make him and what he stands for your God ... [and to] accept the God of the Old Testament as one who has now changed and relented of God's former purposes in order to be totally compassionate toward humankind — all humankind. (pp. 166, 167)

The Old Testament God had been intent on judging us for our sins, Nolan points out earlier in his book, but Jesus realized that ...

... God had changed. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was doing something totally new and unprecedented. God [had in Jesus' time] been moved by compassion for the lost sheep of the house of Israel ... [Jesus attempted] to reveal ... the signs of the times, the signs that God has been moved by compassion to a change of mind ... . (p. 96)

The "lost sheep of Israel" are, today, us — all of us. And only divinity can reveal changed divinity to us. That's one way we know Jesus was divine.

For Jesus interpreted the signs of his times — "the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them" (Matthew 11:5; see p. 95) — in a way that most of his contemporaries were originally blind to. When they heard the "good news" which Jesus proclaimed, they were simply convinced, deep down, of what Jesus was telling them: God had changed.

And since Jesus appealed to no outside authority to back up his claim about the change in God's intentions, Jesus himself had to be divine. Only divinity could speak such an earthshaking new truth about divinity.


Knowing Jesus, we can also accept "the one whom Jesus called Abba as our God" (p. 167), Nolan writes, for thus do we know that "this power of goodness, truth, and love ... [which is] stronger than any other power ... wants to serve us." Nolan fleshes this sentiment out:

God does not [any longer] want to be given the highest possible rank and status ... does not want to be feared and obeyed, but wants to be recognized in the sufferings of the poor and the weak ... is not supremely detached, but is irrevocably committed to the liberation of humankind, for God has chosen to be identified with all people in a spirit of solidarity and compassion. (p. 167)

Abba is the intimate, familiar way Jesus addressed his Father in heaven: it means "dad" or "papa" (see p. 97). And he taught others to (gasp!) do the same, when praying to the Lord God of Hosts whose former modes of address always required humans' "fear and trembling."

If God can rightly be so addressed by Jesus' disciples, then we can call Jesus divine: that's a key point. For, Nolan amplifies:

If this is not a true picture of God [i.e., his compassion, his approachability], then Jesus is not divine. [Yet if] this is a true picture of God, then God is more truly human, more thoroughly humane, than any human being. God is ... a Deus humanissimus, a supremely human God.

This Latin term, Deus humanissimus, is one Nolan borrows from theologian Edward Schillebeeckx's 1982 book Jesus: An Experiment in Christology. I mention it partly to show that Nolan's christology — his understanding of Jesus — is based on that of eminent Bible scholars like Schillebeeckx, and also Joachim Jeremias.

I mention it also because, if we assume "truly/supremely human" means "thoroughly humane," Deus humanissimus sums up in one brief phrase Nolan's whole characterization of Jesus and God, viewed together. Jesus, the supremely human human, was in some incomprehensible way exactly the same as God, the (now) thoroughly humane divinity!

So, how do we learn about this "new version" of God? We do so through what we know about Jesus, says Nolan. (Surprise, surprise!) In fact:

This is the meaning of the traditional assertion that Jesus is the Word of God [writes Nolan]. Jesus reveals God to us, God does not reveal Jesus to us. ... [God and Jesus] are [in one way] distinguishable in that Jesus alone is visible to us, Jesus alone is our source of information about divinity, Jesus alone is the Word of God" (pp. 166, 167).


And what does this Word of God say to us? More than anything else, Nolan maintains that Jesus wanted us to use faith and compassion to eradicate oppression in the world. In other words, Jesus' message was at heart one of radical liberation.

"The root cause of oppression," Nolan writes (p. 118), "was humanity's lack of compassion." In Jesus' time, the Jews in Palestine were being oppressed by the Romans. What was worse, various groups and parties among the Jews — the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Zealots, the temple priests, scribes, and elders, etc. — were oppressing the masses: the poor, the afflicted, the marginalized "sinners" of Jesus' day.

That's why Jesus knew a catastrophe was looming for Israel. "If you do not repent, you will all perish," Jesus says at Luke 13:3 and 13:5. Nolan translates it thus (p. 116): "Unless you change you will all be destroyed." Barring a change of heart among Jews — barring a new and all-inclusive compassion, even toward enemies — the Temple would fall. Great numbers of Jews would perish. And there would be no Jewish homeland left.

And that was in fact what happened in 70 A.D., thirty-plus years after Jesus was executed. The Temple did fall. Then the Jews underwent a "merciless massacre" in 135 A.D. (see p. 108) and were expelled from Palestine.

In announcing the "kingdom" of God, "Jesus had not been mistaken," writes Nolan. Instead, Nolan elaborates,

... he had failed, or rather the people had failed him. A unique opportunity had been lost. But it was by no means the end. There would be another chance and still another because the "kingdom" of God will come in the end — God will have the last word. (p. 108)


Christian belief all turns on Jesus' understanding that a looming catastrophe gives us an either-or choice, says Nolan. The times are given their meaning by the coming catastrophe, which in the Greek-derived lingo of Bible scholars is referred to as the eschaton, or ultimate event.

The eschaton calls to us from the future, provided we can read the signs of the times, and calls us to faith and compassion ... or else. If we heed the call, the catastrophe will not happen. Instead, the "kingdom" of God — Nolan puts it in quotes to emphasize that there will not actually be a power-wielding monarch — will come.

Obviously, the "future event of ultimate importance" (p. 92) that qualified Jesus' times is not the same as that which colors our times. In fact, by the time the Gospel writers began doing their work — the earliest Gospel, Mark, is dated around 65-80 A.D. — they knew the escahton that had imbued Jesus' times with such urgency had already struck. By 70 A.D., the Temple was gone.

So the Gospel writers adopted an attitude toward the eschaton which colors Christianity from then on — and which Nolan takes exception to. (And here is one major respect in which Nolan's worldview is quite different from that of many modern Christians; note it well.) The Gospel writers turned the eschaton or ultimate historical event into "a supra-historical event distinguishable from the historical or politcal catastrophe which was [from Jesus' perspective] just about to take place" (p. 108).

That's how the evangelists who wrote the four New Testament Gospels "apocalyptized the message," according to Nolan. They "adapted [it] to other situations or indeed to any and every situation," by using it "in typical apocalyptic fashion, for moralizing purposes and as a threat concerning the individual rather than society ... laying great emphasis on the judgment day and upon the apportioning of reward and punishment" (pp. 108-109).

Nolan says we can "recover what Jesus meant to the people of his own time, before Christianity, only by 'de-apocalyptizing' the gospels" (p. 109). Why? Because Jesus' original message was "not apocalyptic, it was prophetic."


So, in his concluding chapter when he shows what it means to call Jesus divine, Nolan casts the meaning of Jesus' divinity in terms of a de-apocalyptized reading of the Gospels. He says our compassion and faith, "the unleashing of the divine but throughly 'natural' power of truth, goodness, and beauty," are today being elicited by our own eschaton or "impending catastrophe" (p. 171).

Writing originally in 1976, Nolan sees our looming catastrophe in terms of, first and foremost, the then-pending nuclear threat. His rhetoric implies that the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation could be countered, in the final analysis, only by our opting for "compassion for the starving millions, for those who are humiliated and recjected, and for the billions of the future who will suffer because of the way we live today" (p. 170).

Since Nolan wrote Jesus before Christianity, a resolution to the Cold War has allowed the nuclear threat to recede ... without, I would say, at all defusing "the system" which Nolan excoriates (pp. 170-1). If there is "a power that can resist the system and prevent it from destroying us ... [one that is] stronger than the profit motive," it has not yet vanquished the oppression, marginalization, and poverty in the world.

In fact, I would say that we in our times are further from the sort of compassion Nolan extols. We are conspicuously less enthusiastic about initiatives geared to "the total liberation of humankind" (p. 171) than we were in the 1960s and 1970s. Or else, the buzz about Hurricane Katrina's chilling aftermath makes no sense.

Moreover — and I admit I may be saying this out of my own spiritual obtuseness — it is not clear to me what Nolan, if he were writing in 2005, would identify as the eschaton which looms in our future. We fear terrorism, but it's hard to say that a potential reprise of 9/11 is our present eschaton. For exactly how would renewed compassion on our part in the West, along with stronger faith and an end to oppression, dry up the breeding ground for fundamentalism that exists in today's Muslim world?

Today's globe seems just "small" enough that no one can expect to escape the consequences of the dysfunction which oppression and poverty in one part of the world breed and then visit on other parts. Yet it seems not so "small" that repentance of oppression in the countries receiving the terrorist blows can change hearts and minds in lands where terrorism is born.


Thus, there is for us today a flaw in Nolan's presentation. Though he alludes to "the magnitude, complexity and apparent insolubility of our problems today" (p. 170), the erstwhile Cold War situation seems downright puny, simple, and manageable in the light of al-Qaeda, radical Islamism, and 9/11 today. But Nolan's logic boils down to something like:

(1) We face (as of the 1970s) an identifiable catastrophe: nuclear annihilation in a war with a visible enemy, Soviet communism;

(2) Soviet communism is a (false) system for fighting oppression;

(3) So we in the West ought to adopt a true Christian remedy instead: universal compassion.

It's hard to substitute "Islamic terrorism" for "Soviet communism" and draw the same conclusion. For one thing, we can't locate the "enemy" at any one point on the map. For another, we can't say what it would take to convince us the enemy is no more.

To adapt Nolan's logic to today — to imagine that our becoming really, really devoted to a life of Christian loving-kindness and universal compassion would somehow dissolve the terror threat — seemingly requires that we develop, accordingly, yet more faith than we ever needed before!

Hence I need to say right out loud that, although everything Nolan says resonates with me at a deep, inutitive level, when it comes to subjecting it to a "reality check" per my rational faculties, I have to pass. I simply don't understand how we can use Nolan's de-apocalyptized Gospel message to transmute our current looming eschaton into the coming of the kingdom of God.

Chapter 19, "Faith in Jesus," Part 1

Now for the first installment in my backward review of the interlocking points in Albert Nolan's book Jesus before Christianity, starting with Nolan's last chapter, "Faith in Jesus." For an introduction to the book as a whole and a statement of the intent of this blog, see Welcome to the "Jesus before Christianity" Blog.

This, the final chapter, is where Nolan sums up the entire argument of his book, which can be reduced to two facets. One, Jesus was, or so it might be said, a man made of truth: "in him the truth became flesh" (p. 169). That, at bottom, is what it means to call Jesus divine.

Two, the divine truth that became flesh in Jesus ushered in a new kind of faith: faith in the "kingdom of God" (a.k.a. "kingdom of heaven") that will come when all people, all men and women alike, have begun devoting their lives to serving the best interests of everyone else, without exclusion.


The latter is my paraphrase of the meaning Nolan ascribes to words like compassion, solidarity, and love. As we review Nolan's take on the life of Jesus, I'll try to show why it has to be all people in general who are ... well, yes, who are serving all people in general. For now, suffice it to say that in Jesus' eyes, "group solidarities" in which outsiders have lower status than insiders are no good.

Neither is lukewarm faith. Devoting one's life to serving others is a far different thing than adhering in the abstract to some metaphysical principle which says all people are equal.

Thirdly, what needs serving are people's best interests ... not necessarily what they say they want. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" implies this dichotomy between what people ask for and what they need. You would, in your saner moments, want everyone else to help you facilitate your true best interests, right? Not some valueless or even harmful desideratum of the moment.

This aspect of discernment in serving others, I should add, is not one which Nolan belabors in his discussion. It is simply understood that Jesus always acted to further the best interests of all the people whom he dealt with.


The first part of Nolan's chapter 19, "Faith in Jesus," is a brief discussion of how — under what circumstances, that is — we can conclude that the man Jesus who was crucified, died, and buried some 2,000 years ago was divine. We today must do so for a slightly different reason than the original Christians did. Yet the two reasons are really one, as we shall see.

The original Christians, before they had created any sort of institution by which to perpetuate their faith, were a movement, says Nolan, not an organization. The only thing that united them was "the personality of Jesus himself" (p. 164). Having established that, Nolan continues:

The early Christians were those who continued to experience or began to experience, in one way or another, the power of Jesus' presence among them after his death. ... [Some] were convinced that they had seen him alive again ... . Many also experienced the continued leadership and inspiration of Jesus as the inheriting of his Spirit — the Spirit of God. They felt they were possessed by his Spirit and were being led by his Spirit. ... Jesus was experienced as the breakthrough in the history of humanity ... on a par with God. ... What he stood for was exactly the same as what God stood for. No higher estimation was conceivable. (pp. 164-5)

The key word here is experience. The original Christians experienced God in Jesus.

Today, Nolan says, "To believe that Jesus is divine is to choose to make him and what he stands for your God. ... [Jesus] himself did not regard the truth as something we simply 'uphold' and 'maintain,' but as something we choose to live and experience" (pp. 166, 169).

Now, in the modern context, behind the verb experience there is another keyword: choose. We have to make a choice. Where the original Christians felt possessed by a Holy Spirit or impelled by an immediate vision of a risen Jesus, we stand at a distance and need to decide to make Jesus real in our own personal experience.

So, in the end, belief that Jesus is God all depends on what we choose to experience. That's the modern situation. And it depends on what we consequently do experience, a fact which unites us with the original Christians.


The Catholic essayist Fr. Ron Rolheiser has written a column underlining this need for experience of God recently. It appeared in my local Catholic newspaper as "Proof of God is in your experience" and on the author's website as "Proofs for the Existence of God."

Although he doesn't mention it, Rolheiser is clearly inspired to write his article by the current debate over teaching Intelligent Design in schools. Intelligent Design proponents say Darwin was wrong: life in the universe is too wondrously complex — much more so than a pocket watch — to have evolved without a God behind it. So there must be a God.

This in fact is a restatement of a "proof" of God's existence offered centuries ago by Thomas Aquinas and summarized by Rolheiser: "Its [the universe's] design is a billion times more complex ... than is a watch and the fact the universe is running down tells us [it] can't always have been here."

Thus, Aquinas redux. Rolheiser does not comment on whether he buys into this "proof" wholeheartedly. Instead, he quickly brings up a "different argument" for God's existence: the one offered by Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Thomas Anselm. An exercise is contorted logic, this "proof" impresses me as it does Rolheiser: " ... the rest of us ordinary mortals are [as non-philosophers] perhaps missing something of its meaning." Enough said.

What Rolheiser really wants to convey to his readers is a third "proof" of God's existence, namely the one offered by the 20th-century Catholic theologian Karl Rahner. To elucidate it tersely, Rolheiser mentions a list of — again — common human experiences. Most of us have had at least one or two of them:

•Have you ever remained silent, though you wanted to defend yourself, though you were treated unfairly?

•Have you ever forgiven, though you received no reward for it and people took it for granted?

•Have you ever obeyed, not because you had to or else there would be some unpleasantness, but simply because of some mysterious, silent, unfathomable reality inside of yourself?

•Have you ever made a sacrifice, without receiving thanks, without recognition, without even feeling satisfaction inside?

•Have you ever been absolutely lonely and, within that, had to make up your mind to do something purely for the sake of conscience, from a place beyond where you can describe, from a place where you are deeply alone, and where you know you are making a decision for which the responsibility will be yours alone, always and eternally? [This point is omitted in the newspaper version.]

•Have you ever tried to love when no wave of enthusiasm was carrying you along, where you could no longer confuse your own needs with love?

•Have you ever persevered without bitterness in doing your duty when that duty looked like death, felt like it was killing you, looked stupid to those outside, and left you helpless to not envy those who have chosen a path with more pleasure?

•Have you ever been good to someone from whom no echo of gratitude or comprehension came back and where you weren't even rewarded with the feeling that you had been good and unselfish?


Then, having made his list, Rolheiser springs his final, overarching point:

If you've ever had any of these experiences, then you've experienced God and know that there's a deeper ground beneath the one on which you walk.

Notice that these are all deep experiences, not shallow feelings. In many cases, our shallow feelings about such deep experiences are wholly to the contrary. Being treated unfairly, being taken for granted, ignoring one's own pleasures and needs — these kinds of experiences don't, obviously, feel very good. And yet, quite paradoxically, they let us experience God as "a deeper ground beneath the one on which you walk."

Moreover, it would seem that everything on Rolheiser's list qualifies, in Nolan's terms, as instances of making Jesus real in our personal experience. By doing any or all of the things which Rolheiser speaks of as offering us experiential proof of God, we, in Nolan's words, "choose to make [Jesus] and what he stands for [our] God."

In other words, deep personal experiences of God per se and deep personal experiences of Jesus as God are exactly alike.

This kind of deep personal experience, and not any formal or logical proof, is what Rolheiser says can in the final analysis "imprint us with the belief that the universe makes sense, that we have sufficient reason to love and trust, that there's a world beyond this one, and that there's a God."

Accordingly, Nolan and Rolheiser would seem to be singing from the same experiential hymnbook. In describing what makes God real for us — and what Jesus stands for real as well — both writers talk of serving others without expectation of fair recompense. Such a deep devotion to the welfare of others gives us a personal experience of God.

And that is proof enough.

Welcome to the "Jesus before Christianity" Blog

Albert Nolan's book Jesus before Christianity, though its 2001 edition marked its 25th anniversary, still speaks loudly to us in the post-9/11 age. So much has changed since the original 1976 publication of this compelling re-interpretation of the Christian Gospels in the light of what then seemed the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation — as Nolan himself acknowledges in his 2001 introduction. We still await the coming of the "kingdom" Jesus spoke of, just as we did then. But now, it's fair to say, the "impending catastrophe" which is the divine kingdom's possible alternative in the short run (see p. 171) is a different form of explosiveness.

To say that that current potential for destruction equates just to foreign terrorism, or religious fundamentalism abroad, or Islamic enmity toward the West is to ignore that, even here in America, we are at each others' throats. Just listen to any radio talk show on any given day, if you don't believe that we have turned into an in-your-face culture, ready to fight our "enemies" at the drop of a hat.

In his book, Nolan shows that Jesus stood for just one shocking, yet not so surprising, thing: faith in the redemptive and restorative power of human compassion and solidarity.

Here in the blog I'd like to try to unpack that overarching Gospel truth. My motives for doing so are many. Perhaps the most important is that I find I'm of two minds about Nolan's interpretation. I would like to try to resolve that duality.

One part of me resonates deeply with the clarity with which Nolan shows Jesus' divinity to be real ... as long as real divinity is understood to be, first and foremost, the power of truth. Nolan writes:

Those who were convinced by Jesus were convinced by the persuasiveness of the truth itself. Jesus was uniquely in harmony with all that is true and real in life. His spontaneous compassion for people precluded any kind of alienation or artificiality. His spontaneous faith in the power of goodness and truth is indicative of a life without falsehood and illusion. One could say that he was absorbed by the truth, or, better still, that in him the truth became flesh. (pp. 168-9)

On the other hand, there is a second part of me that raises all sorts of objections. What those specific objections are will, I hope, become evident as I proceed to make my posts to this blog. More briefly, I suppose the things I fret about to fall in two broad categories. First, as a practicing Catholic I wonder whether such of Nolan's strategies as skirting the issue of whether Jesus actually underwent a bodily resurrection or actually performed miracles that defy nature's laws doesn't eat away at the foundations of the Christian belief system as I have received it.

Second, I wonder whether I have it in me to honor the truth that, per Nolan, "our search, like his [Jesus'] search, is primarily a search for orthopraxis (true practice) rather than orthodoxy (true doctrine)." Though I am now a Catholic, my family's roots are in Protestantism, in which the practice of Christian "good works" takes a backseat to "faith alone" as the road to salvation. But Nolan leaves no doubt that "faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead" (James 2:17).


But orthopraxis means not putting first in one's life — not just in one's stated belief system, in one's life — anything other than what Jesus stood for. The "something in your life which operates as your source of meaning and strength, something which you regard, at least implicitly, as the supreme power in your life" (p. 165) must not be a false god-with-a-little-g. "If you think of your highest value as a cause, an ideal or an ideology, you will have a god with a small letter," Nolan continues (p. 166). Assuming, that is, that what you put in first place is not what Jesus put in first place.

I'm not entirely sure what false, little-g god I erroneously put in my own personal first place; it's something I hope to discover more about as I blog. For now, the best guess I can make is that my false god is the soliciting and gaining of the approval of others. It's not just the approval of specific people in particular circumstances, though, that I seek. No, I carry around with me, in my head, a sort of all-purpose, disembodied judge whose potential disapproval forestalls me from doing anything as confrontational as, say, Jesus' gleaning grain on the sabbbath or cleansing the Temple courtyard of the traders and money-changers.

One of the passages from Nolan's book which "convicts" me of this notion about myself is where Nolan writes that the Jesus of the Gospels is:

... a man who is independent of others because of a positive insight which has made every possible kind of dependency superfluous. There are no traces of fear in Jesus. He was not afraid of creating a scandal or losing his reputation or even losing his life. ... Jesus did nothing and compromised on nothing for the sake of even a modicum of prestige in the eyes of others. He did not seek anyone's approval, not even the approval of "the greatest man born of woman" [i.e., John the Baptist]. (p. 144)

There's a paradox here. On the one hand, Jesus preached solidarity. On the other, he got downright confrontational with, say, those who extorted money from the poor. The Temple traders and money-changers were, in today's lingo, "gouging" the have-nots. The chief priests and elders in the official hieararchy of the Temple were, in effect, conniving with them ... as later they would connive with the Roman governor, Pilate, to have Jesus executed. Up with that Jesus would not put, so he got in-your-face about it.

And here I am, claiming that today's rampant in-your-faceness is not what Jesus would want.

Is that claim justified by Jesus before Christianity? Or is it something I'm reading into the book, based on my own false, never-get-confrontational god? In this blog I hope to work toward locating some sort of way to answer these and similar riddles.


In so doing, I plan to examine the Nolan book backwards. I'll start with the last, concluding chapter, "Faith in Jesus," and work my way back toward the first, introductory chapter, "A New Perspective." In some cases, I may combine chapters, as with the ones titled "The 'Kingdom' and (something)," where the "something" can be money, or prestige, or power: false gods which are to be replaced by the solidarity Jesus extols.

To me this backwards approach makes sense, because there is really no "mystery" to what Nolan is saying, no "twist" ending to his narrative. What Nolan says at the end is just an elaboration and restatement of what he says at the beginning, as if to say, "QED." But the "proof" he gives, though he builds it logically à la that of a geometric theorem, is ultimately not one that depends on scientific or historical reasoning. It depends on our recognition that what Jesus says about life just rings true, and there's an end to it.

So a reverse exposition of Nolan's points might quite possibly "prove" to be a valuable alternative way to grasp why it is that Jesus' "claim to first-hand experience of the truth was no hollow boast" (p. 169). For ultimately, Nolan says, if we don't believe that Jesus' "authority" and "power" came wholly and purely from who he was, and not from any outside source, then we will never be able "to find our God in Jesus and what he stood for" (p. 167).