The Sins of Scripture (22 page)

The Apostles’ Creed clearly deflected the guilt that had accrued to the Romans for the death of Jesus by suggesting that it was only “under,” and not at the hands of, Pontius Pilate that Jesus had been crucified and had died.

The framers of this creed opted for the phrase “on the third day,” which indicates that another early dispute on the timing of the resurrection had been resolved. The earlier tradition, found in Mark, suggested that resurrection occurred “after” three days (8:31, 9:31, 10:34). Echoes of this earlier tradition are also found in Matthew’s gospel, suggesting that this was the original understanding of that gospel writer (12:40, 27:63), before the pressure of making the dawn after the third day coincide with the first day of the week forced an accommodation into the timeline of the narratives. The assumption made in the Apostles’ Creed was that three days was a literal measure of time and not the liturgical interpretive symbol that it surely seems to have been when the stories of the resurrection were first told. The affirmation that Jesus ascended into heaven derives from Acts 1:1–11 and clearly reflects a three-tiered universe. Yet the ascension as an event separate from the resurrection did not come into the Christian consciousness until the ninth or tenth decade. None of these concepts dates back to apostolic days; all were developed long after the apostles had departed this world.

Despite its name, the Apostles’ Creed appears to have first circulated locally in the late second and third centuries as a kind of baptismal formula. In all probability it began with a variety of forms from church to church until by the end of the third century the rough edges had been smoothed over, its various emphases had been brought into harmony and it had achieved more or less its final form. The fact that neither its actual point of origin nor its author had ever been identified led to the convenient conclusion that it dated from the witness of the original twelve. With its general acceptance by common usage, it represented an enormous step away from the three-word creed that was the original summation of the church’s faith and into the formulation of theological complexity, complete with doctrine, dogmas and the power to force conformity on the Christian community.

When a literal link back to the apostles became impossible to defend, the line of defense was that the Apostles’ Creed was simply the working out “under the power of the Holy Spirit” of the original intention in the tradition that dates all the way back to the disciples of Jesus. Then it was said without embarrassment that the creed was exactly what the earliest Christians “had meant” when they called Jesus
maschiach—
Messiah, Christ and Lord. However, it is clear that the explanation of who Jesus was and is had become much more complex and to accommodate that complexity, the three-word original creed of the church had now expanded to a creed of ninety-three words. It would not end there.

The elusive unity that people hoped would develop around this creed also did not happen. Even with the creed expanded to its new length, the wiggle room was not removed. Many people said this creed, but they understood what it was saying and what they meant by it quite differently. No matter how hard they tried, they could not close out this perennial debate. They could not establish a consensus and they could not agree on the meaning of that faith which had been once “delivered to the saints.” It did not occur to these people that the task they were trying to accomplish was not a human possibility, that the mystery of God, including the God they believed they had met in Jesus, could not be reduced to human words and human concepts or captured inside human creeds. Nor did they understand that the tighter and more specific their words became, the less they would achieve the task of unifying the church. All creeds have ever done is to define those who are outside, who are not true believers; and thus their primary achievement has been to set up an eternal conflict between the “ins” and the “outs,” a conflict that has repeatedly degenerated into the darkest sort of Christian behavior, including imperialism, torture, persecution, death and war.

When Constantine won the battle at Milvian Bridge in 312 CE, he moved quickly to proclaim the Edict of Milan in 313 CE, which made the Christian religion, for the first time in its brief life, a legal religion within the Roman Empire. That edict changed the nature of Christianity dramatically and for all time. Christianity was no longer a persecuted sect. The same civil and political authorities that once had tried to stamp this movement out now relinquished their hostility and began to move first toward reconciliation and second toward submission. More important than that, the empire began to co-opt this religious tradition in the service of its own agenda, to unite the empire under a common religion and then to claim the power to put the empire’s stamp of approval on particular ecclesiastical patterns. The Council at Nicaea was called by the emperor Constantine in the year 325 CE for the purpose of clarifying, presumably for all time, what the exact faith of the church was. The intention of the men who gathered for that council was to be able to state exactly what one must believe to be a Christian. The journey from three words to ninety-three words was about to be expanded mightily in that elusive quest for unity inside a clearly defined truth.

Can you imagine the task of forging an external Christian creed being the goal of a political convention? Conventions are places where deals are made, compromises are offered and secret backroom negotiations occur. How was “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” going to fare in this setting?

The real issue at the council that Constantine convened revolved around that perennial concern about the nature of the Christ figure. It was fought between the followers of Arius, who asserted that Jesus was “of like substance with the Father,” and those who were followers of Athanasius, who asserted that Jesus was “of the same identical substance of the Father.” Both camps were miles away from the Jesus of history. In the gospel of John (95–100 CE) Jesus had been identified with the eternal “logos” or “word” of God present in creation. The deification of Jesus that had been developing as the years went by was about to take an enormous leap forward. The Athanasians, who were the ultimate winners at this council, wanted to make sure that the divine nature of their Jesus was no longer subject to debate, that all the wiggle room had been removed from the Apostles’ Creed.

When the smoke of battle cleared, the Christian church had a new creed that now contained two hundred and six words. From three to ninety-three to two hundred and six words represented a rather stunning chart of creedal growth and the expansion was related mostly to the task of erecting layers of defense around Jesus’ divinity. He was declared to be “begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made; who for us men [and women] and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary and [only then] was made man.” This creed was intended to close every loophole, to describe in a straightforward way the exact nature of the faith once delivered and to end the debate about the person of Jesus for all time. Anyone who did not subscribe to this creedal statement was separated from the church. As noted earlier, creeds never unite; they always divide. Creeds are boundary-makers.

As was inevitable, the Nicene Creed also failed in its unifying task. Wiggle room was not removed. The debate raged anew. A century or so later, another creed was adopted, called the Athanasian Creed after the winner at Nicaea, Athanasius. Unbelievably long and convoluted, it never became part of Christian liturgy. However, even with its six hundred and thirty-seven words, the debate was still not over. Finally the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE sought to bring this debate to a conclusion, recognizing strangely enough that the task of clarifying what the church intended to teach about the nature of Christ could not be stated positively. Chalcedon succeeded only in saying what Jesus was
not
.

Anxious because God could not be reduced to a human formula, the leaders of the church contented themselves with the task of enforcing the faith they could not define. If one disagreed with these ever-more-differing explanations, one was simply evil. The problem was not in the words; it was in the hardened hearts of the heretics whose obstinacy and sinfulness prevented them from believing. The stage was thus set not for unity but for a purge. Whenever deviant beliefs were discovered, they had to be rooted out and those who espoused them killed in the service of conformity to the catholic faith. So Christianity turned demonic. Infidels like the Jews were constantly persecuted and Muslims as well as Jews were killed in the Crusades. Heretics were burned at the stake. Religious wars were waged to defeat anyone who did not worship properly. Efforts to force people to conform were accomplished by way of torture first and if that failed by execution.

The human need for certainty confronted the majesty and wonder of God and when it could not force the divine mystery into human concepts, expressed itself in violence and persecution. That was when Christians appealed to the authority of scripture and particularly to the text in Jude, seeking justification for their evil. Such an appeal, however, never works. There is no such thing as a set of propositions that constitute “the faith…delivered to the saints.” That is nothing but idolatry. Why are uncertainty and humility before the Ultimate Mystery vices rather than virtues? Or is it the very nature of religion to demand conformity and when it is not received to turn violent and destructive? If that is so, should we not be done with it? Dietrich Bonhoeffer once proposed that we develop a “religionless Christianity.” Perhaps the time has come to do just that!

If Christianity could separate itself from Judaism at the end of the first century in order to become the religion of the emerging empire, is it possible that Christianity in our generation might separate itself from religion in order to enter into a universal human consciousness? I think that is exactly the challenge of our time in history: a religionless Christianity must be born; a humanistic Christianity must come into being. That is the vision of a reformation that I see beginning to dawn. I will return to this idea in the closing section, and ultimately in a subsequent book.

I
f a particular religious system possesses the truth—something “once delivered,” in an unchangeable form, to its founders, as the epistle of Jude seems to claim—then it quickly follows that this system clearly has a monopoly on salvation or on the pathway to the holy. So it should not be surprising to see that claim registered vigorously and most often offensively. If salvation is found only in our faith tradition, then those who are outside our system are lost, benighted or invincibly ignorant. If they are lost, any conversion tactic or missionary strategy is appropriate, for it is our duty and our burden “under God” to reach out to save them whether they want to be saved or not. If they are benighted, we can relate to them and their religious understandings as pitiable, uninformed and primitive without ever bothering to understand the role those religious values play in their corporate life. Finally, if they are invincibly ignorant, then any tactic that might be used to open them to truth can be justified. That makes cruelty, torture and warfare in the pursuit of the purity of religion quite legitimate. This kind of religious imperialism requires that its adherents be convinced that they, and they alone, possess absolute truth. The ever-present effect of this religious mentality is to diminish both the practices and the being of anyone who might stand outside the system for which these claims are being made. That diminishment in turn makes the outsiders fit objects for both conversion and missionary activity. All this flows from the claim that the ultimate truth of God has been or can be captured by any religious system.

Most of the missionary hymns of the Christian church were written in the service of these definitions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The nineteenth century, which church historian Kenneth Scott Latourette has described as the greatest period of Christian expansion,
³
just happens also to have been the greatest century of colonial conquest as well. That is not coincidental. However, the leaders of the Christian church never seemed to link the two in their minds or in their rhetoric. Perhaps they never heard the lament of native people that when the missionaries came, the missionaries had the Bible and the native people had the land. After the arrival of the missionaries, they and their descendants had the land and the native people had the Bible.

Missionaries in the nineteenth century were highly romantic figures who sacrificed the comforts of their advanced civilizations and sometimes even the well-being of their own children to answer the call of God to rescue the lost of the world from the fires of hell reserved for the unbelievers. Let it be said that some of these people were truly dedicated and brought many gifts of great value to areas of the world where standards of living were very low; nonetheless, the missionary effort itself was baseborn, deeply compromised, and quite imperialistic.

The old missionary hymns make that abundantly clear. Reginald Heber’s hymn “From Greenland’s icy mountains” winds up its last stanza with the assertion, “They call us to deliver their land from error’s chain.” Earlier this hymn had asked, “Can we whose souls are lighted with wisdom from on high, can we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?”
⁴
Some of the images employed in these missionary hymns are quite military. I think of the hymn that proclaims, “Fling out the banner,…” as if an army were on the march, and concludes with words that make that concept absolutely clear: “We conquer only in that sign.”
⁵
Still other hymns of that day refer to those “who yet have never heard the truth that comes from Jesus, the glory of his word.” Among the people described in that hymn are those who inhabit the great forests of Africa where, the hymn suggests, “apes swing to and fro.”
⁶

As always, these offending attitudes were related to the words of scripture. The favorite text used by the missionaries in general and imperialistic Christians in particular was a verse in John’s gospel in which Jesus is quoted as having said, “No one comes to the Father, but by me” (14:6). That became the basis for the ultimate assertion that Christians alone control the doorway into God. If you do not come to God through Christ, you cannot get there. It was a powerful claim wrapped inside a text that has been the source of enormous pain to many people. It is still quoted in Christian circles to justify religious bigotry and even religious persecution. It is a text, therefore, that demands inclusion in this series on the “sins of scripture.”

“No one comes to the Father, but by me” is also a text that invariably comes up when I am lecturing on the vision of an interfaith future. It seems to be a hurdle that people must get over to break the spell of their romantic imperialism. So the question becomes: Does this text actually support this claim? The answer to that question is simple. It does so only if one is profoundly ignorant of the New Testament scholarship of the last two hundred years, only if one literalizes the Bible and finally only if one knows nothing about the Fourth Gospel in which alone this text occurs. I begin this analysis by putting these Johannine words under a microscope.

“No one comes to the Father, but by me” is only the last half of this Johannine verse. The first half constitutes the sixth in a list of sayings that the author of this book attributes to Jesus. All of them include the words “I am.” This text reads in full, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father, but by me.” These “I am” sayings are all familiar: “I am the bread of life” (6:35), “I am the light of the world” (8:12), “I am the door of the sheep” (10:7), “I am the Good Shepherd” (10:11), “I am the Resurrection and the Life” (11:25), “I am the way, the truth and the life” (14:6) and “I am the vine, ye are the branches” (15:5). Several of these are repeated more than once. The words “I am” are used in other sayings attributed to Jesus by this gospel writer: one thinks immediately of such Johannine verses as “Before Abraham was, I am” (8:58) and “When you see the Son of Man lifted up, then you shall know I am” (8:28, my translation). The RSV translators, failing to understand this last saying, have added the words “that” and “he” to the text. They thus make it read, “Then you shall know
that
I am
he,
” but there is no “that” or “he” in the original Greek. John has a purpose in the use of this “I am” symbol that these translators simply have not grasped.

Of course, Jesus never literally said any of these things. For someone to wander around the Jewish state in the first century, announcing himself to be the bread of life, the resurrection or the light of the world would have brought out people in white coats with butterfly nets to take him away. None of the earlier gospel writers give us any indication that any of them had ever heard it suggested before that Jesus taught this way. The “I am” sayings are clearly the contribution to the tradition of the Fourth Gospel. What then do they mean? Why did John add these sayings to the ongoing Christian tradition? The answer is found in the period of history in which the Fourth Gospel was written.

Allow me to go back and repeat the major events in the turbulent 70s that afflicted the Jews. In 70 CE the city of Jerusalem fell to the Roman army in the climactic battle of the Galilean War, which had begun in 66 CE. The nation of Judah after that battle disappeared from the maps of human history. The Jewish capital of Jerusalem was reduced to rubble. The temple and the priesthood were no more. I referenced this bit of history earlier in my effort to describe how the figure of Judas arose. Now I need to carry it further to clarify why the separation of the Christians from the Jews was so bitter.

The disciples of Jesus were destined not to separate from the synagogue’s worshiping community before about 88 CE. Until that moment, they continued to think of themselves as Jews who found in Jesus a new way to approach the God of Israel. They were aware that throughout the empire, gentiles were coming into the Jesus movement, but these gentiles had agreed to be respectful of Jewish traditions even if they did not adopt them (see Acts 15).

The compelling task of the first Jewish disciples of Jesus was to relate the story of Jesus to the traditions of their Jewish faith. That is why the gospels are filled with references to Jesus as the fulfillment of the prophets. That is why Moses stories are retold about Jesus. For example, the story of a wicked king who sought to destroy the promised deliverer by killing Jewish boy babies was told about both Moses and Jesus (compare Exod. 1:22 with Matt. 2:16–18), and there are obvious parallels between Moses’ Red Sea experience and Jesus’ baptism and between Moses wandering for forty years in the wilderness and Jesus wandering for forty days in the wilderness. That same attempt to connect Jesus to the traditions of the Jewish faith explains why Elijah stories were wrapped around Jesus. For example, both Jesus and Elijah ascended into heaven (compare 2 Kings 2:1–12 with Acts 1:1–11), and both poured spirit out on their disciples.

As the orthodox party after the defeat of the Jewish nation grew more and more fundamentalist, however, their ability to tolerate these revisionist Jews who kept reinterpreting the Jewish scriptures lessened. The very existence of these “revisionists” seemed to proclaim that the Torah was not perfect, that something more had to be added. Thus these Jesus people appeared to relativize the orthodox claims about the completeness of the Torah, which meant they tampered with the ultimate source of the security of the orthodox Jews. The tensions grew more and more strained until finally the rupture occurred and the followers of Jesus were excommunicated from the synagogue by the orthodox Jews. The hostility that flowed between the two groups was fierce and bitter. “You are no longer part of the faith of your mothers and fathers,” the orthodox party would shout. “You no longer can claim Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph as your fathers in faith. You are no longer part of the traditions of Moses and the Torah.”

The excommunicated revisionists fought back with counterclaims. Playing on the Torah’s opening chapter, John wrote, “In the beginning was [not just God, as the Torah claims, but] the Word” (1:1). What we have met in Jesus, the revisionists said, is that Word enfleshed. They used the Greek word
Logos
to communicate Jesus’ relationship with God. Jesus was identified with the Word of God that came forth in the dawn of creation and thus he was more deeply related to the Jewish God than either Abraham or Moses. In other words, the revisionists were claiming to be more orthodox than the orthodox! They possessed in Jesus the earliest revelation of God in creation. To make this identity even more specific and concrete, the Christians began to say that the God who revealed the divine name as “I am who I am” to Moses at the burning bush (see Exod. 3:14) was the same God they had met in Jesus of Nazareth.

So the battle raged on, as all battles do when religious feelings are at stake. The gospel of John was the product of these excommunicated revisionists. That is why references appear in this gospel to the followers of Jesus being put out of the synagogue (see 9:22 and 12:42). That is why this gospel reinterprets the opening chapter of the Torah (compare John 1 with Gen. 1). That is also why this gospel, over and over again, claims the divine name “I am” for Jesus of Nazareth. The Christians (formerly the revisionist Jews) were saying, “We have met the holy God who was once revealed to Moses and who has now been revealed anew, and perhaps more fully, in Jesus. We are not separated from the God of our fathers and mothers as the orthodox party was asserting. Jesus is the very way through which we walk into the same divine mystery that our ancestors in faith also knew. We know of no other way that we can come to the God of our fathers and mothers except through this Jesus.” That was a testimony to their experience. It was not a prescription claiming that they possessed the only doorway into the only God. It is amazing to me that this attempt on the part of the early disciples of Jesus to validate their experience journeying through Jesus into the mystery of the God they had known in Israel would someday be used to judge all other religious traditions as unworthy, wrong or even evil. Yet that is the path this text has followed as Christianity moved from minority status into majority power.

There is a difference between my experience of God and who God is. There is a difference between affirming that I walk into the mystery of God through the doorway called Jesus and that in my experience this is the only doorway that works in my journey, and asserting that there is no doorway through which anyone can walk except mine. Imagine the idolatry present in the suggestion that God must be bound by my knowledge and my experience! Yet that claim has been made and is still being made by imperialistic Christians today. The text written by persecuted minority members of the early Christian community to justify their claim to be part of the larger people of God becomes a text that is interpreted in such a way as to become a claim that issues in religious imperialism. Is it not interesting how little attention is paid to another text that proclaims an open and inclusive faith? It is found in the words attributed to Peter in Acts 10:34ff.: “Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”
⁷

We live in a religiously pluralistic world, but there is only one God. This God is not a Christian, nor is this God an adherent of
any
religious system. All religious systems are human creations by which people in different times and different places seek to journey into that which is ultimately holy and wholly other. Until that simple lesson is heard, human beings will continue to destroy each other in the name of the “one true God.”