Get Me To The Greeks
Photo by Francisco Ghisletti on Unsplash
The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life…Matthew 20:28
One of the subjects I studied at school was called RE – Religious Education. Back in those days, this meant exploring Christianity, and our curriculum was largely based on the gospel accounts. Our teacher, John Fenning, was an ordained Anglican deacon with a Friar Tuck figure and a Charlie Chaplin moustache who was deeply committed to a process called demythologising. Often associated with German existentialist theologian Rudolph Bultmann, demythologising was a big hit in the seminaries of the 1950s and 1960s, and therefore in the classrooms of the 1970s. The approach is fairly straightforward: miracles and all supernatural activity are unacceptable to the modern scientific mind because they are by definition impossible. So anything in the gospels that seems supernatural is not original to the event, i.e. it didn’t happen. It was added later by credulous believers. Take it all out, and you get back to ‘the historical Jesus.’ The idea was that modern people would find it easier to accept the important message of Jesus if it was not weighed down with all that first-century magical thinking.
We were encouraged to extract the supernatural from every gospel story we encountered. My two favourites were Jesus walking on the water and feeding the five thousand. In the first, there were stepping stones just below the surface of the lake, at the shallow end of course, but the disciples couldn’t see them because of the angle at which the moonlight reflected on the water. This also explains how Peter missed them. In the feeding miracle, all those people had brought their sandwiches with them but were keeping them hidden because they didn’t want to have to share. When a young boy selflessly offered his lunch to Jesus, they were cut to the quick and immediately organised a Woodstock-style share-in, producing so much previously hidden food that everyone ate plenty and there were basketfuls left over. The real miracle was that the little boy’s gesture broke open the selfishness of the community and they all learned the joy of giving.
I remember these two examples for their comedy value: they are so contrived, they end up seeming even less likely than the miracles they are supposed to replace. There is also a serious point here, though. The agenda behind all of this – the big issue that seemed to dominate 20th-century theology – was the question of whether Jesus, in any supernatural sense, could be God at all. How could a penniless peasant turned itinerant rabbi possibly be, or even claim to be, God? Vexing as these disputes were, it wasn’t the questions themselves that were most problematic – it was the response they produced in those who wanted to retain a divine Jesus. Some felt so threatened by these arguments that they were drawn to mount a stirring defence of Christ’s divinity, sometimes so overstating the case as to lose sight of the human figure altogether. When I later attended an Evangelical Bible college, this was very much the order of the day – our primary task was to search out, highlight and defend the divinity of Christ. We insisted that Jesus’ priority all along was to prove his divine status. We would scan the gospels, rejoicing over every proof of the ‘Godness’ of Jesus. The miracles, the wisdom, the foreknowledge – all were there to reveal to us his divine identity. This need to vindicate Jesus as God so coloured my approach to the issue that, for years, I simply didn’t see what the New Testament was about.
