March 31, 2017 | PASTOR ZACHARY PUDLO
Current Views on Jesus
Barna Group, a Christian polling firm, conducted a poll of adults in 2015 as to their views on who Jesus was. The results are worth noting. Over half of all adults believed Jesus was God. However, the younger the generation, the more that generation believed Jesus wasn’t God. In fact, the majority of Millennials believes Jesus wasn’t God. That means a majority of the upcoming generation believes Jesus was merely a man, or that he wasn’t even an historical figure at all. In the same poll, 13% of Millennials believed Jesus didn’t even exist and isn’t even an historical figure.
How We Got Here
How did we get to this point in history where countless people are not only denying the deity of Jesus but even his historicity?
No more than two hundred years after the Christian Reformation a Biblical interpretation movement began from within the Christian church. This movement can be described as an attempt to answer one important question: Who was the real Jesus? Biblical scholars began to question whether or not the descriptions of Jesus in the Bible were accurate. For many of them the answer was, “No”. The Bible describes Jesus as the Son of God incarnate…a man who walks on water, heals the sick, brings the dead back to life and even rises from the dead after being crucified and laid in a tomb for three days. Since this is humanly impossible, scholars began a movement in which they tried to “reconstruct the historical Jesus”. This movement which tried to portray Jesus apart from a supernatural worldview. In the mid 1800’s many scholars dubbed any account of miracles or the supernatural taking place as incredulous. In doing so the authority of the Bible took a huge blow.
By the early to mid 1900’s a majority of the Bible was considered myth. Rudolf Bultmann is a pioneer of the movement to classify the Bible as myth.
Can the Christian proclamation today expect men and women to acknowledge the mythical world picture as true? To do so would be both pointless and impossible. It would be pointless because there is nothing specifically Christian about the mythical world picture, which is simply the world picture of a time now past which was not yet formed by scientific thinking. It would be impossible because no one can appropriate a world picture by sheer resolve, since it is already given with one’s historical situation. (New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings, pg. 3)
Bultmann is saying that the Bible was written from a mythical worldview and a majority of the Bible is itself a myth. At one point in his life Bultmann even admitted that it isn’t even a worthwhile endeavor to study the Bible. All we can really know is that Jesus lived and that’s good enough.
The Reconstruction Problem
That is where we still find ourselves today. Many people view Jesus as an historical figure who taught some really good things. Why would a group of people try to reconstruct the historical Jesus? What’s wrong with the Biblical account of Jesus? Well…the Biblical Jesus is offensive. Some of the teachings of Jesus are very offensive to our modern individualistic culture. Don’t gossip, love God more than everything and everyone including your own family, don’t look at someone with lust in your heart. These are just a few of the teachings that are very offensive in our society. So how should we respond to these offensive teachings? We discard them. “They must be part of the mythical worldview.”
What happens when you cut a physical part of a person out of them? You don’t have more of that person, but less of that person. The same is true of cutting out the offensive teachings of Jesus from the Bible. The movement to reconstruct the historical Jesus has not given us a clearer picture of who Jesus was, but it has given us a less clear picture. It has given us less of Jesus. It has, in essence, cut up Jesus and taken out all the inoffensive parts of him. What we have now is not a real Jesus but a caricature of him, an extremely inoffensive one.
However, a reconstructed inoffensive Jesus ISN’T an historically accurate Jesus. The inoffensive Jesus that we have in our society is almost on par with the Care Bears. The Care Bears are fictional bears whose entire purpose was to spread love and kindness for the whole world. They are, quite possibly, the most inoffensive characters in the history of the world. So the question one has to ask is this: Who would kill the Care Bears? No one. No one kills another person for being kind and loving and completely inoffensive. And no one would worship them either. If Jesus was all about love and kindness…if he really was extremely inoffensive, who in the world crucified him? Why would anyone have crucified him for being loving, kind, and inoffensive? Interestingly, it is a consensus even among these reconstructionists that Jesus was crucified.
The point is this: an inoffensive Jesus isn’t an historically accurate Jesus. He had to be offensive to be cut to pieces by a whip and torn apart by the nails piercing his hands and feet. If he wasn’t offensive, he never would have been murdered. N.T. Wright put it this way in his book The Day the Revolution Began. “‘Young Hero Wins Hearts.’ Had there been newspapers in Jerusalem in the year we now call AD 33, this was the headline you would not have seen. When Jesus of Nazareth died the horrible death of crucifixion at the hands of the Roman army, nobody thought him a hero.” In short, Jesus was no hero. He was no political revolutionary trying to win the hearts of the people and a place on the throne. And he was no cute cuddly care bear whose only goal was to spread love and kindness. He had to be offensive. If he wasn’t he never would have been sentenced to death by his own people.
The people that cut up and crucified Jesus 2000 years ago aren’t alone. People still cut Jesus up today by discarding and disregarding his offensive teachings.
The Truth About Cutting Jesus Up
The truth is there are times we are offended by Christ…offended because he reminds us of our failures, offended because he cuts open our hearts and reveals our pride and aversion to the truth. So what options are we left with? 1) Avoid the truth. We can avoid the offensive statements of Jesus. But that will not leave us with the real Jesus. It will leave us with a cut up fragment of the man he really was. Or we can 2) face the harsh reality. One of the characteristics of a Christian is being dedicated to the truth. There is a proverb that says “Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates correction is stupid.” This proverb is saying that it is foolish, even stupid to avoid the truth. And so the only way to uphold intellectual integrity is to face the truth. We are offended by Jesus because he is God, and we have failed him over and over again.
The results are far better when we face the truth. David writes in Psalm 32 that he wasted away when he hid the truth. When he didn’t confess his sins he felt like he was dying a slow painful death. But then he writes this. “Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’ and you forgave the guilt of my sin.” When we face this truth, we will also see another beautiful truth… that Jesus didn’t come to rub our faces in our failures. He didn’t come to demand perfect obedience. He didn’t come to offend us and then leave us with no hope of pleasing God. Instead, his entire purpose was to take the punishment for our failures. He came to please God for us. In every other religion it is up to the individual to make up for their personal failures by offering works of service to God. But in Christianity, we see God become man, endure suffering, cuts, thorns, nails. He is cut to pieces for the world to see his love. He is put to death to take our punishment. There is no truth as beautiful as seeing God die for us. Without facing the truth about our failures we will never see that beautiful truth of Jesus taking cuts and wounds for us.