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.