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Jesus and the Fundamentalism of His Day

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By William Loader

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Copyright © 2000 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8028-4796-X

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Introduction

It caught me by surprise-but there they were: gum trees on the shores of Capernaum! Disembarking from the ferry I could reach out, pluck a eucalyptus leaf, and suddenly smell that "at home" feeling as I rubbed it in my hands. A little bit of Australia in Jesus' hometown. But then it might seem equally strange that in the land of the eucalyptus we find the story of the carpenter of Galilee and the signs of the movement his life created. It is already fantastic that his first-century movement is alive and well in the twenty-first century. The tradition of Jesus has transplanted itself in ever new generations and has taken up roots in strange soil.

Walking down the road from the jetty I am reminded that there is much more to it. There at the end of the road are remnants of a synagogue erected a few centuries after Jesus. Underneath are signs of an earlier building constructed from local stone. It was here that Jesus proclaimed the gospel. It was possibly here or in a similar meeting place in his hometown Nazareth that he heard the great stories of the Old Testament. This place is full of history. It is full of culture, especially Jewish culture. Even two thousand years later you can feel something of what Jesus must have felt as he looked out at those same hills and over that same lake. Some things have not changed. Silt andthe occasional earthquake have changed the shoreline. Neighboring Bethsaida to the east is no longer on the shore. The Jordan has been building its alluvial plain; but, even so the fish are still there along with the fishing industry.

Change and Continuity

Change and continuity. Change of time and change of place. Change of culture. Across time and space Christians acclaim continuity and all that Jesus stood for. Jesus is alive even as the twentieth century merges into a new millennium. The exiles of Israel asked, "How can we worship God in a strange land?" We might ask: How can we discern and do God's will in a place and time so distant from the age when Jesus walked these streets? How much of the ancient tradition preserved in Scripture is still just as relevant for today and how much belongs to the language and customs of yesteryear?

This book is about how we read the Bible, how we handle the religious tradition we have inherited, and how we sort out what matters most from what matters little or not at all. It has been common for people who argue for sensitivity to such distinctions to point to Paul's instruction to the Corinthians that women should worship with their hair covered. Few within the church insist on such practices today, although the issue has reentered Australia in a new form. Many women in our Islamic communities apply strict rules about covering to everyday life. Within the churches we have learned to treat such demands lightly and to respect them as observances belonging to a particular cultural experience rather than as universal rules.

The film Chariots of Fire was a splendid illustration of devout sabbath observance applied to Sunday. Yet within a few decades strict Sunday observance has been modified to the point that we find religious institutions-the same ones that once sanctioned great strictness about sport on Sundays-blessing, and sometimes running, Sunday leisure programs. Some will see this as a sign of depravity. If people think about it at all-and few do-they do not see this as a depravity, but as a result of reassessing our attitudes towards Scripture and tradition. Divorce is a more serious case in point. A good many Christians and Christian churches see it as frequently presenting the most creative and caring option for all concerned. Again, they would not see this as a sign of lax morality; rather the issue has become one of what is most practical and compassionate.

How Much Change?

Just how far should such changes go? Are we in danger of throwing away what Scripture stands for? Does its authority no longer stand? How can you say you acknowledge the Bible's authority and in the next step sanction divorce? These are legitimate questions, and they are based on fears that must be taken seriously. When Paul warned Roman Christians not to be conformed to the world, he was making it clear that the world, the predominant culture of any age, exerts enormous pressure to make everyone conform. Just look how fashions govern the lives of so many. A Christianity that conforms itself to the going fashions is likely to disappear into the sand. It will lose its distinctiveness and end up becoming the religious justification for the dominant culture. In its history it has been hard for Christianity, especially in the West, not to succumb to this temptation. When it does so, it runs the risk of disappearing as cultural values change.

The issue of what abides and what can be left aside as belonging to past culture and custom lies behind many of the disputes that face the churches today. It has comes to the fore in discussions about women in the church and in ministry, and in the churches' grappling with sexuality and homosexuality in particular. It is also there at a deeper level in ways people think about God, about Jesus, and about the church. How can we hang on to what is vital and let go what is not vital? And how can we tell the difference?

Jesus and Change

This book is about the way Jesus dealt with such issues and the way those who told his story reflected on it. It is written in the hope that understanding what went on then will shed light on ways of handling the issues today. People too often assume that to interpret and reinterpret Scripture in the light of changed realities or changed perceptions of reality is a modern phenomenon. It is not. It was a central issue in Jesus' disputes with his contemporaries and continued to be central in the church of New Testament times. Those who opposed such an approach to Scripture and insisted on keeping to the letter of its demands were to be found mostly not on the side of Jesus but among his opponents. This was, indeed, one of the major reasons why many opposed him and later opposed people like Paul from within Christianity. Thus passions aroused in our day were also aroused on the streets of first-century Capernaum and in those early Christian communities that first heard the gospels. The emergence of Christianity within Judaism had a lot to do with the way people treated the Scriptures. The very existence of Christianity depended in part on a particular solution to these problems.

The people who followed Jesus were real people. They were committed, devout, and energetic in their proclamation of the story of Jesus. But they soon scattered far and wide outside of Galilee. As soon as they did, the issue arose: Was their Jewishness an essential part of their being Christians or did it need to be jettisoned? Few chose either of these extremes. Most grappled with compromise solutions. The passion of the conflicts that arose was because they did not see this as a matter of holding or discarding Jewish customs; they saw it as observing or discarding commands of Scripture. When Paul championed the view that Gentiles need not be circumcised he laid himself open to the charge that he was rejecting the explicit command of Scripture; and in fact the accusers were correct. Fortunately there were others who supported Paul's stance in this, but even among them there were fierce disputes. Some felt that Paul had gone far too far in saying Christians are no longer under the Law. After the clash between Peter and Paul in Antioch over observing biblical laws concerning food, most sided with Peter. These were struggles going on within Christianity.

About the Bible

It is little surprise that two millennia later we find similar passions aroused when people differ on how to treat the Bible. It was not that Paul or Peter or James or the strict fundamentalist Jewish Christians who allowed no compromise had a low view of Scripture. They all hailed its authority and saw at as holy. They even argued on the basis of its authority when supporting the various stands they adopted. But their approaches varied.

The more extreme group argued that every statement was inspired, every command infallible. It was a very logical and consistent stance. The Bible is the Word of God and that is that; no changes! It would have been hard to answer. These people would see Jesus as the climax of God's action in the world, but not as one who rendered actions and instructions of the past obsolete or inapplicable. God has acted consistently throughout. Those who claimed otherwise laid themselves open to the charge that they were watering down the commands of Scripture and that they were being inconsistent-and declaring God to be inconsistent. Waiving the clear demand that non-Jews be circumcised was especially suspect. How could you answer the accusation that this was a very crude case of cheap marketing by dropping standards?

Nonetheless most of the early Christian movement espoused this more lenient approach and rejected the suggestion that it was a cheap ploy. They were forced to develop a different way of interpreting Scripture. They rejected the view that all Scripture commands are equal because they are all God's commands. In various ways they argued that some commandments were less important than others and that some could even be discarded. The more they made Jesus the center of their thinking about God, the easier it became to claim that his coming had necessitated a change. Still, there were others who rejected this. They saw nothing in Jesus that required any such changes.

We are fortunate to possess a number of Paul's original letters, which reflect these conflicts. Most of them stem from the time when Christianity was only about two decades old. They are worth reading for their own sake, and they reveal the depth of the conflict at that early stage. Some of this is still evident in the account of early Christianity written about thirty years later in the Acts of the Apostles.

The Gospels

In this book I shall be looking particularly at the gospels. They are the primary sources about Jesus and so help us understand the conflicts he faced. They also indicate how four different writers understood the issues in their own time. This has the advantage of enabling us to set these pictures of Jesus side by side. There is not one single approach to the use of Scripture in the New Testament, and there is not one single way of understanding how Jesus approached the matter and, by implication, how we should do so. There are at least four. By looking at these different approaches in some detail we shall be able also to compare and contrast them. In the process it is my hope that we may come to a better understanding of what the issues are in interpreting Scripture today. There are four different approaches, but also some significant common elements.

Another advantage of approaching the issue this way is that, hopefully, we will avoid the generalizations that often dog discussion of the role of Scripture, frequently with dogmatic claim and counterclaim, and too often (on both sides) without adequately listening to what the biblical writings themselves say. Instead, I am inviting the reader right into the text. Let us hear what each gospel writing is saying. Let us try to get in touch with what the issues were then.

Of the four gospels, Mark is commonly believed to be the earliest, written around the year 70. Matthew and Luke wrote about fifteen years later. They revised and expanded Mark. They also appear to have used another written source that has not survived, standardly identified by the letter Q. John's gospel stands on its own and has been produced independently of the others, although the author may have known them at a distance. In 1947 a further gospel came to light, the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings of Jesus. In its final form it comes from the second century but appears to be based on a much earlier collection.

Each of these gospels deals in its own way with the issue of continuity and change. This probably reflects to a large degree what was going on in the communities in which their authors wrote. Each contains sayings and anecdotes about Jesus that are much older than the gospels themselves. Many of these earlier traditions also reflect the struggles in the early church communities over the way to treat the Bible. A good many of them give us insight into the approach of Jesus on the matter. It was, after all, a major source of controversy in his ministry. When the churches find themselves in passionate controversy about how to interpret the Bible they are in good company. It went on in the apostolic age. It was a major issue in the ministry of Jesus.

Fundamentalism?

The title of this book uses the word "Fundamentalism." Strictly speaking, the term arose in relation to a twentieth-century phenomenon. But, as is the case with words, the term is now used much more widely. It is one of the flags people wave in the debate over Scripture-for some, a term of abuse, for others, a key tenet of faith. I am using it in the popular sense to refer to an approach to interpreting Scripture that accepts it without question as absolute authority, leaving no room for taking into account changed circumstances or possible error. Such an approach is often characterized by a concentration on the letter of Scripture as law and as binding for all time, and stands in contrast to another approach that interprets the authority of Scripture for what it enshrines and the attitudes it purveys.

Both approaches may apply the term "Word of God" to the Bible, but in the former case the meaning is closer to "the words of God." It is often linked to speculation about how the limited nature of the writers as human beings had been overridden to prevent error and ensure absolute authority. Both approaches may speak of inspiration, but, again, in the former case the inspiration often tends towards being a theory about how human words or statements could be deemed divine and inerrant. No doubt Jesus and Paul considered that God's word was to be heard in the Scriptures and that they were the products of God's Spirit in the lives of people, but the authority is located at a deeper level. It is not seen as overriding natural human limitations, whether in relation to factual inaccuracies or in relation to reflecting the limited knowledge and perspectives of one particular cultural or religious background.

Dangers

There are two notes of caution. First, it is a common mistake to assume that fundamentalism is a monolithic system of thought. Many people are fundamentalist in their attitude towards Scripture because that is part of the culture in which they have grown up. They are not ideologically fundamentalist and move easily from an uncritical appreciation of Scripture to a more discerning approach. Often, their approach to the Bible is just an element of their spirituality, which may be very open, flexible, and compassionate. To cast labels on people who happen to have grown up in such an environment is to my mind both inappropriate and frequently destructive.

Others, however, who deliberately espouse what I have described as a fundamentalist approach to Scripture frequently use the term of themselves and it is an appropriate description for the attitude they espouse. Even then I would want to caution that it is easy to slip from discussing fundamentalism as an approach, one of my concerns in this book, to discussing people as fundamentalists. People are always more than whatever "-ist" title you apply to them or they apply to themselves! This is equally true of those who might describe themselves as hard-line fundamentalists. People are people and people matter most, not ideologies.

The second caution looks in the other direction. Some assume all too readily that to espouse anything other than a fundamentalist stance towards the Bible means to devalue it. I am reminded that as a parent it is quite liberating to know that you are loved and respected even with your faults. Having a high regard for Scripture, including seeing it as the authority for faith and practice, does not demand that we deny the humanity of its writers. In fact, many have come to a deeper appreciation of Scripture when they have realized that it is precisely in these writings, which arose from real-life situations written by real-life human beings who are as human as we are, that we can find deep spiritual nourishment. Facing up to the realities of what these writings are in their context need not diminish respect for them. It becomes a matter of sorting out the wood from the trees, of finding and, for the Christian believer, of committing oneself to the God whose ways one finds enshrined in these documents of faith and experience. It is much more than following commands and always has been, but that was as hard for the contemporaries of Paul and Jesus to understand as it is for people today.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Jesus and the Fundamentalism of His Day by William Loader Copyright © 2000 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company . Excerpted by permission.
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