Throughout his book, Simply Jesus, Wright insists that the significance of Jesus is that God is now in charge.  Politics is about “who is in charge.”  If politics is about power, authority, governance, legitimacy and sovereignty it is clear that Jesus was political.

Wright insists that “the question of Jesus—who he really was, what he really did, what it means, and why it matters—remains hugely important in every area, not only in personal life, but also in political life, not only in “religion” or “spirituality,” but also in such spheres of human endeavor as worldview, culture, justice, beauty, ecology, friendship, scholarship, and sex.” –pp. 5-6.

Jesus arrived at a point in time when the people were expecting a political change. –p. 41.

• “A political movement…that said that it was time for God alone to be king.”
• Jesus spoke and acted as if he had everything to do “with Israel’s aspirations, the ancient promises of God, [and] the hope of the world at large.” –pp. 83-84.
• His opposition’s charge was “decidedly political as well as…religious. –p. 103.

Jesus acted as if he was in charge:

• He “behaved as if he had the right, and even the duty, to take over, to sort things out, to make his country and perhaps even the wider world a different place.”
• “He behaved suspiciously like someone trying to start a political party or a revolutionary movement. He called together a tight and symbolically charged group of associates (in his world, the number twelve meant only one thing: the new Israel, the new people of God).”
• “And it wasn’t very long before his closest followers told him that they thought he really was in charge, or ought to be. He was the king they’d all been waiting for.” –p. 11.
• Talking about someone new being in charge was dangerous talk in Jesus’ day, and its dangerous talk still. Someone behaving as if they possess some kind of authority is an obvious threat to established rulers and other power brokers.

Questions:

• Does humanity evolve morally?
• Has Christianity improved the human condition?
• Is it possibly to be moral without being religious?
• If there is no God, is anything immoral?

“It is often assumed, albeit obliquely, that the human spirit has progressed in such a way that what is culturally older is of less value.  It is true that this brassy evolutionary argument is not received with the same unqualified confidence that it was in the nineteenth century, but it has not died. 

“Then, the argument owed much of its life to the academy, to Darwin and the philosophers who followed him, and to the biblical scholars who echoed their line of thought; today, it is our modern world, the capitalism and technology of which force the mind into the future and for which the world obsolete has a funereal feel about it, that fuels the search for intellectual innovation and spreads a dread of the past as if it were a plague.”

“This is our secular “salvation history,” erected quite deliberately as an alternative to the biblical model by the children of the Enlightenment, which promises a this-worldly deliverance.”

“It posits salvation in abundance.  Its “Word” is secular reason, and its eschatology, its hope, is that as the human spirit progresses, it will emerge from the darkness of its own misdeeds and perhaps even triumph over the misfortunes that life turns up with such disconcerting regularity.”

“The chief appeal of this ambiguous hope seems to lie in the fact that there is no alternative.  Only individuals with an unusually flinty inner makeup can live without hope of any kind, so it is perhaps not surprising that many should settle for what hope they can find, even so paltry a hope as that manufactured from a questionable assumption about progress.”

Excerpt from David F. Wells.  No Place for Truth, Or Whatever happened to Evangelical Theology?  Grand Rapids MI.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993, pp. 260-261.

• Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (New York: George Braziller, 1959
• Thomas Steven Molnar, Utopia: The Perennial Heresy (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1967).
• Stephen Neill, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861-1961 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964).

It is not good character that we value as much as good feelings.

Evangelicals have always insisted that Christ is a person who can and should be known personally; he is not simply an item on a creed to which assent should be given.  But from this point they have drawn conclusions that become increasingly injurious.  They have proceeded to seek assurance of faith not in terms of the objective truthfulness of the biblical teaching but in terms of the efficacy of its subjective experience. 

Testimonies have become indispensable items in the evangelistic fare.  Testifying to having experienced Christ personally is peculiarly seductive in the modern context, because it opens up to view an inner experience that responds to the hunger of the “other-directed” individual but often sacrifices its objective truth value in doing so. 

The question it poses to the outsider is not whether Christ is objectively real but simply whether the experience is appealing, whether it seems to have worked, whether having it will bring one inside the group and give one connections to others.

In any genuine knowledge of God there is an experience of his grace and power, informed by the written Scriptures, mediated by the Holy Spirit, and based upon the work of Christ on the Cross. 

What is not so clear from the New Testament is that this experience should itself become the source of knowledge of God or that it should be used to commend that knowledge to others.  To be sure, there was plenty of witnessing that went on in the early Church, but it is anything but clear that this should be understood as the use of personal autobiography to persuade others that they should commit themselves to Christ.  

New Testament witness was witness to the objective truth of Christian faith, truth that had been experienced; our witness today is witness to our own faith, and in affirming its validity we may become less interested it is truthfulness that in the fact that it seems to work. 

This adaptation has enabled evangelicalism to orient itself to our consumer culture and the habits of mind that go with it.

The older ideas that happiness is properly a by-product of moral behavior rather than the object of pursuit itself and that the self is found only when it is lost are no longer much in favor. The connections between morality and happiness have become quite tenuous, it would seem, because personality is generally assumed to have little to do with human nature.

Excerpt from David F. Wells.  No Place for Truth, Or Whatever happened to Evangelical Theology?  Grand Rapids MI.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993, pp. 171-173.

“Above all: give up power over others, because power, if it is to be effective, ultimately requires the threat of violence, and violence is incompatible with the total acceptance and love of all other human beings that is at the sacred heart of Jesus’ teaching. That’s why, in his final apolitical act, Jesus never defended his innocence at trial, never resisted his crucifixion, and even turned to those nailing his hands to the wood on the cross and forgave them, and loved them.”

But what if a power exists that is more persuasive than violence?  Could any politician handle it?  No.  But what would happen if Jesus became King?  What would it look like to be a part of his kingdom?

Sullivan asks, “What is politics if not a dangerous temptation toward controlling others rather than reforming oneself?” 

WordIQ.com provides these definitions:

• Power is the ability to impose one’s will on another. It implies a capacity for force, i.e. violence, as well as coercion and influence.
• Authority is the right to enforce laws, to exact obedience, to command, to determine, or to judge.
• A government is the body that has the authority to make and enforce rules or laws.
• Legitimacy is an attribute of government gained through the acquisition and application of power in accordance with recognized or accepted standards or principles.
• Sovereignty is the ability of a government to exert control over its territory free from outside influence.

If Jesus could lead with a compelling love and his gospel could change a rebellious heart to one of compassion for others . . . how is Jesus not a politician?

And Jesus did claim to have all power and authority.

The Perfect Storm (as in the movie) provides Wright with the images to paint the picture of a 1^st century spiritual and political storm with Jerusalem as the geographical focal point; a collision of forces involving Rome, Judaism and Jesus.  There was no human concern left untouched by Jesus.  What Jesus said and did mattered then and matters now.  He has something to say about “worldview, culture, justice, beauty, ecology, friendship, scholarship, and sex.”[i]

It is not easy, today, to view Jesus as a threat to Rome.  Didn’t he say, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s” (Mark 12:17)?  But Wright insists that if we consider Jesus from the 1^st century Jewish point of view Jesus certainly was a threat to both Rome and Israel.

“Our culture has become used to thinking of Jesus as a “religious” figure rather than a “political” one. But it wasn’t like that for Jesus and others of his time.”

Jesus was political.

“He behaved suspiciously like someone trying to start a political party or a revolutionary movement. He called together a tight and symbolically charged group of associates (in his world, the number twelve meant only one thing: the new Israel, the new people of God).” p. 11.

But it’s not simply “people taking the “skeptical” position vote Democrat and a lot of people taking the “trusting” position vote Republican” (pp. 14-15).

Jesus threatened the Caesar’s “senior priestly roles.”   “If you’d asked anybody in the Roman Empire, from Germany to Egypt, from Spain to Syria, who the “son of god” might be, the obvious answer, the politically correct answer, would have been “Octavian” (p. 29).  Not Jesus.

“At exactly the time when Jesus was growing up, there was a movement—call it a political movement, a religious movement, or (as Josephus calls it) a “philosophy”—that said that it was time for God alone to be king” (p. 41).

• The people were expecting a political and religious revolution.
• The descriptive terminology used of Jesus first belonged to Caesar and the Temple.
• What Jesus did could only be interpreted as him acting as if he would replace Rome and the Temple.

Top Ten Signs You’re a Fundamentalist Christian

10 – You vigorously deny the existence of thousands of gods claimed by other religions, but feel outraged when someone denies the existence of yours.
 
9 – You feel insulted and “dehumanized” when scientists say that people evolved from other life forms, but you have no problem with the Biblical claim that we were created from dirt.
 
8 - You laugh at polytheists, but you have no problem believing in a Triune God.
 
7 – Your face turns purple when you hear of the “atrocities” attributed to Allah, but you don’t even flinch when hearing about how God/Jehovah slaughtered all the babies of Egypt in “Exodus” and ordered the elimination of entire ethnic groups in “Joshua” including women, children, and trees!
 
6 – You laugh at Hindu beliefs that deify humans, and Greek claims about gods sleeping with women, but you have no problem believing that the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary, who then gave birth to a man-god who got killed, came back to life and then ascended into the sky.
 
5 – You are willing to spend your life looking for little loopholes in the scientifically established age of Earth (few billion years), but you find nothing wrong with believing dates recorded by Bronze Age tribesmen sitting in their tents and guessing that Earth is a few generations old.
 
4 – You believe that the entire population of this planet with the exception of those who share your beliefs — though excluding those in all rival sects – will spend Eternity in an infinite Hell of Suffering.  And yet consider your religion the most “tolerant” and “loving.”
3 – While modern science, history, geology, biology, and physics have failed to convince you otherwise, some idiot rolling around on the floor speaking in “tongues” may be all the evidence you need to “prove” Christianity.
 
2 – You define 0.01% as a “high success rate” when it comes to answered prayers.  You consider that to be evidence that prayer works.  And you think that the remaining 99.99% FAILURE was simply the will of God.
 
1 – You actually know a lot less than many atheists and agnostics do about the Bible, Christianity, and church history – but still call yourself a Christian.

I’m not sure who first compiled the list.  It might have been evil bible.com.  I like Rick Beckman’s  commentary.

“To preach the Bible as “the handbook for life,” or as the answer to every question, rather than as the revelation of Christ, is to turn the Bible into an entirely different book. This is how the Pharisees approached Scripture, however, as we can see clearly from the questions they asked Jesus, all of them amounting to something akin to Trivial Pursuits: “What happens if a person divorces and remarries?” “Why do your disciples pick grain on the Sabbath?” “Who sinned–this man or his parents–that he was born blind?” For the Pharisees, the Scriptures were a source of trivia for life’s dilemmas. To be sure, Scripture provides God-centered and divinely-revealed wisdom for life, but if this were its primary objective, Christianity would be a religion of self-improvement by following examples and exhortations, not a religion of the Cross. This is Paul’s point with the Corinthians, whose obsession with wisdom and miracles had obscured the true wisdom and the greatest miracle of all. And what is that? Paul replies, “He has been made for us our righteousness, holiness and redemption” (1 Cor 1:28-31).” –Michael Horton

There are close parallels in Christian Smith’s The Bible made Impossible and Horton’s short article in Modern Reformation What Are We Looking for in the Bible? (May/June 1996).[i]  The redemptive-historical (Horton)  is offered as an alternative to the holy handbook way of reading (preaching) . 

Horton lists these Six Reasons Why We Fail To Hear Christ In Preaching:

1. Biographical Preaching– In the illustrative approach, we end up preaching Abraham, Moses, David, Peter, Paul and Mary, but not Christ!
2. Psychologizing– Often in this approach, hearers are directed to the inner life of biblical characters in order to discover their own inner life: “Do I have this kind of faith? Am I willing to do what so-and-so did?”
3. Spiritualizing–The woman reaching out to touch Jesus’ garment simply becomes an allegory for our receiving Christ and the wedding feast at Cana becomes an invitation to Jesus today.
4. Moralizing–Moralistic preaching is legalistic; it issues imperatives without the divine indicative; it makes of the gospel a moral law.  …in an effort to be relevant and practical, the text [is] forced to say something other than what it really [says].
5. Typologizing– it fails to allow the text to speak for itself, to point to Christ in its own way. Christ is already present there in the text, whether Old or New Testament, and we do not have to tack him on somehow to the story.
6. Doctrinal Preaching– the preached Word is not merely a word about God or Christ, but is itself the Word of God!

Questions:

• Does your bible reading bring you to faith in Jesus or faith in church doctrine?
• Do you find in the bible support for your traditions or do you find Jesus?
• Do you hear the same Jesus preached on Sunday morning as you read in the bible on Monday evening?

Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible. Brazos Press. Kindle Edition (2011-08-01).

I learned three things.  An unwrapped frog looks exactly like the pictures we looked at, less the labels.  Therefore, for me, the exercise seemed a waste of time and a frog’s life.  And, something I knew intuitively: I’d never get it put back together.  Even if someone could have I sensed that it would never jump again.

But, what about the bible?  We are helped with tons of tradition (the dissecting textbook) that will tell us before we open the bible what we will find and what we ought to think about what we find.  Not much mystery left.  If we honor our traditions we will find the bible saying all the right things.  Then we can rearrange our bible according to its parts, which makes labeling both convenient and a wonderful time saver.

And, the same problem: a dissected bible is as hard to reassemble as a dead frog, and it’s just as dead.   

Perhaps some see more beauty in a dismembered frog spread out on a sanitary operating table than out in the wild.

When Jesus became God he ceased to be human.  The Messiah promised to the Jewish nation in the Old Testament became the God which was required by the Greeks and then the Romans. 

In reality, by 325 CE, the original Christian movement, the Jewish Christians who had regarded Jesus as a fully human prophet, had faded from the scene. Many of the Pauline Christians, who had evolved into proto-orthodox Christians, had accepted that Jesus was both God and human. Another large faction of Pauline Christians maintained that Jesus was fully human. The two sides were almost evenly matched. But Constantine threw his considerable political power on the side of Jesus being both God and man. The delegates agreed with him, and the rest is history.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God….

Christian Smith considers the doctrine of the Trinity, which explicitly names Jesus as divine, to be an orthodox teaching.  The original writers of the New Testament did not work out every implication of the gospel.  They left much for later church leaders to formulate.  The Trinity is not taught in the Scriptures but is to be thought of as consistent with Scripture.  As the flower is the fully developed form of the seed, but the same plant, the Trinity is the flower of the NT idea of Jesus as the seed.

When Jesus became God he ceased to be human.  Much of American Evangelicalism insists that the various titles attributed to Jesus, ultimately, refer to his divinity. A bit of proof-texting with Romans 1:4 provides a tidy platform for our version of Jesus, the gospel and American Christianity.  Anyone who returns to life after being dead for three days surely must be God and absolutely is worthy of our worship. 

And we are mystified that the rest of the world is not interested.  They already have plenty of gods and they don’t need another one, or they want to be god or they want to be nothing or they want to have everything.  All different ways, perhaps, of saying that what we really want is to be fully human.

As a believer in the divinity of Jesus I have always found Luke 24:13ff (the road to Emmaus) unsatisfying.  Two disciples (and I assume them to have been intelligent, sincere and committed) were not impressed with the stories of Jesus’ resurrection.  They were not looking for God, they already had one, and he was YHWH.  They were hoping for a Messiah, and the events of the last few days had been devastating.  The resurrection of Jesus was not even interesting to them.

Christ is not Jesus’ middle name and it does not mean “God.”  Christ corresponds to the Hebrew word Messiah.

Questions:

• God will save us from death but who will give us life?
• Is your Jesus more human or divine?
• Do you worship Jesus or follow his example?
• Did Jesus introduce a new ethic or a new agenda?

The book by Chuck Colson, Doing the Right Thing, insists that ethics are objective and universal; not relative; not based on transcendent truths “dependent on the situation and the people involved” (p. 11). 

Ethical morality is absolute and universal.

Is there at least a little wiggle room?

As to the theory, I think that those of us who accept the idea distinguish between the idea itself and what those ethics are.  That is, there is no universal list of laws available – beyond perhaps the 10 commandments.   And there is no one standard guiding how natural law ethics speak to every culture (situation and people involved).

• Were there violations of natural law ethics that God did not consider to be sinful under the Old Covenant?
• Were there parts of the Law of Moses that violated natural law ethics?

Is Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount a higher standard of morality than was required of those living under the Old Covenant or the rest of the world before the New, or the non-Christian world after?  If it is, what does that say about the theory of natural law ethics?  It seems to me that it would violate its universality.

Is the human heart a part of the evolutionary process of creation?

Were the Jews of Jesus’ day morally superior that the first generations?  If it (either evolution, natural law or the Law of Moses) was working, why was a New Covenant necessary?

William J. Webb’s Redemptive Movement Hermeneutic seems to contradict the natural law ethic principle advocated by Chuck Colson.  In some way it is required of us to see the human heart evolving from one generation to the next  if we understand the progress of scripture as a “less-than-ultimate ethic” or in a partially realized expression of love, which is sometimes evident within in the biblical text” “towards something better.”

Does the universality of natural law ethics include time?

What is the gospel?

• A superior ethical standard?
• How to succeed at life?
• A survival guide till we get to heaven?
• Christ crucified?

• William J. Webb and Darrell L. Bock, Slaves, Women & Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis (May 30, 2001).
• Charles W. Colson, Doing the Right Thing, A Six Part Exploration of Ethics, hosted by Charles W. Colson, Brit Hume and Dr. Robert George
• Baker, Robert C., General Editor, Natural Law: A Lutheran Reappraisal.