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.