Taking Jesus Seriously #4

02/18/10


Can Christianity make exclusive claims—e.g. Jesus is the only way to salvation—without being necessarily violent?


How can you be passionate and committed about Christian belief and not cause offense in a pluralist world?

How can you respect other traditions and not water down your own?

Has Christianity lost its voice?



Thinking they’re better than others seems to be a default setting for just about any human group. Many nations think they’re the best on earth. Every season sports team and supporters think this will be the season when they win the series.

In religion and philosophy better-than-others thinking gets translated as metaphysics, i.e. claims about the ultimate order of reality. It gets to be my-metaphysics-is-better-than-yours. Philosophies and religions set out to be winners in the game of truth.

It seems to be impossible to get away from the game of truth. If you say there is no truth, then you’re claiming that to be truth. But does it have to be violent?

Christian metaphysics became highly legalized in content. It wasn’t just a matter of: this is the name by which we should know God and we all have a spark of God inside us. It was: We all have a big problem because God does not like sin. God has given us a solution, but then if you don’t accept the solution you’re in really deep trouble. You’re going to hell, a place God keeps going for all eternity.

This explains the urgency behind the approach of many evangelicals. They really want to save you from something terrible. On the other hand because there is so much violence in the message it comes across as itself violent.

But what if the legal definition is the problem? What if making Jesus’ death a legal transaction between humans and God is the mistake? The Christian tradition that framed it this way was in fact keeping a lid on the human revolution brought by Jesus. It was saying: “Jesus is not asking us to change our violent way of being human because God is in fact intensely violent. The death of Jesus is not about human victim-making, but a victim demanded by God!”

All the same, the fact that the tradition put the problem in the area of victims was basically correct. It had a sense this was the issue, and now this has come to full light. So Christianity’s claim to truth becomes as follows: Jesus challenged and changed the core mechanism by which we work, from violence toward the other to forgiveness. Only the biblical religions take the side of the victim, and only in Christianity does God become the victim in order to make the victim live through love. So the divine becomes the weakest human, in order to change the violence of the human from inside.

This means that Christians in making claims about truth are setting themselves against all exclusion and violence. Damnation is simply what we do to ourselves in and through history once we refuse the challenge of love. On the other hand, to accept this challenge is to pour forgiveness and love into whatever human system you find yourself in. We all know the temptations of adding violence to a system. But in Christ we know the joy and peace of for-giving (forth giving) into that system.

And who could not be passionate about that, the birth of love in the world?