Dear Christian,
I cannot help but notice that many modern Christians (and perhaps many Christians of the past) have developed a certain way of interpreting Jesus for what appears to be the express purpose of softening his teachings. I am not referring to so called progressive Christians, who tend to ignore certain aspect of Jesus’ teaching under the guise that we live in the 21st century and thus know better. The type of reinterpretation of Jesus I am thinking of often comes from conservatives and so-called traditionalists.
I have in mind two particular methods of interpreting Jesus that are, at bottom, faulty. The first way you can interpret Jesus is to suppose that he is some kind of guru, more akin to the Buddha than to Abraham. In Eastern religions, there is a practice of reciting parables, which in Zen Buddhism are called koans. These koans often contain no direct moral teaching. Rather, they typically revolve around an unsolvable or nonsensical story, which is supposed to beckon the student to a higher plane of consciousness, typically a plane that exists above moral standards. Here is one of the more famous koans I came across in my research.
Once the monks of the Western and Eastern Halls were arguing about a cat. Nansen, holding up the cat, said, “You monks! If you can say a word of Zen, I will spare the cat. Otherwise I will kill it.” No one could answer, so Nansen cut the cat in two. That evening, when Joshu returned, Nansen told him of the incident. Joshu thereupon took off his sandal, put it on his head, and walked off. Nansen said, “If you had been there, the cat would have been saved!” (Source: https://www.rzc.org/news/nansen-kills-the-cat/)
Koans like this one have no readily obvious moral application. In what world must one save cats by walking out of conversations with a sandal on one’s head? The Zen master is still a cat murderer at the end of the day, presumably because one is allowed moral leeway when ascending the path of Zen.
I sometimes get the feeling that people treat the words of Jesus like they were koans, as though Jesus was some kind of Zen master. When the woman is caught in adultery and Jesus says, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” the people dispersed, and the woman was rescued. But chances are you personally know some Christians who act as though they could have just placed their sandals upon their heads and started throwing. “Ah, yes, Jesus, I see the lesson you are teaching us. We are all miserable sinners, no less than this woman,” they say as they bludgeon her to death.
I think we make a grave mistake when we start looking for religious truths from Jesus’ parables at the expense of any moral lessons. When Jesus says, for example, “Whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment,” (Matthew 5:22) many Christians are tempted to explain this commandment away. After all, didn’t Jesus elsewhere tell us to hate our father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters? (Luke 14:26) Many Christians, obsessed with harmonizing the Gospels, will put these two verses together not as a moral admonition but as a spiritual riddle. It’s as though Jesus is really challenging us to hate our brothers without being angry at them. We have all met – or at least, I know I have met – Christians who are constantly angry, but who, when you call them out for their anger, will admonish you that they have “righteous anger.” It is, of course, merely a coincidence that they are always righteously angry precisely in those moments when the average person is only sinfully angry.
The nice thing about Zen Master Jesus is that he never gives us a moral commandment. Every time he appears to condemn some sin, we can simply reinterpret his words into a spiritual exercise. When he says he who lusts in his heart has committed adultery, he isn’t condemning lust. He is really just challenging our cultural assumptions around human sexuality. When he says it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, he isn’t condemning greed. Zen Master Jesus is inviting us to contemplate how we will have to leave our money behind when we die, but for the time being we can hoard wealth with impunity. At no point does Zen Master Jesus challenge us to be better. We are allowed to be just as bad as always, but enlightened.
On this subject of greed, it must be said that there are heaps and heaps of Christians nowadays who will cling to wealth, but every time you call them out with the words of Jesus, reminding them of stories such as that of Lazarus and the rich man, these Christians will quickly become Zen Buddhists in a heartbeat. They will claim that all the wealth they are hoarding is not, in fact, theirs. They are merely “stewards” of God’s money. And if it is God’s will that they spend this money on themselves and not give money to the poor – well, Christians can hardly be blamed for following God’s will now, can they?
This language of stewardship is all over the Gospels, but it is abused and degraded constantly by Christians in order to justify profligate lifestyles. Preachers with private jets, ministries taking from the poor rather than giving to them, self-help gurus who believe in self-help because they do not believe in helping other people – all resort to twisting the words of Jesus like a rag until all the moral content has been squeezed out and only a blank canvass remains, onto which we can paint all our earthy desires. And so it happens that we justify greed and lust, and envy, and hatred, and all the various sins Jesus warned us against, because we convince ourselves that Jesus wasn’t really warning against them so much as he was trying to teach us a more holy way to commit them.
There is another way of interpreting Jesus I want to talk about – a method of interpretation with equally disastrous consequences. We might interpret Jesus as a sort of Odysseus. He knows what to say to manipulate other people to do his will, but his words are not really meant to convey any deeper truth other than to manipulate the situation to his advantage. In the story of the Odyssey, Odysseus fools the cyclopes Polyphemus by telling Polyphemus that his name is “Nobody.” When Odysseus and his men sharpen a log and jam it into the eye of the cyclopes, Polyphemus screams out in pain that he has been attacked by “Nobody.” Upon hearing this, everyone thinks Polyphemus has gone mad screaming in pain because nobody jabbed his eye out. Thus, Odysseus, by his words and cunning, has manipulated events to his plan.
Odysseus is not really lying so much as cleaver. In a certain sense, his words can be called “true” in that they “hit their mark.” Odysseus’ words, once spoken, did not return to him barren, which is one of the characteristic signs of truth. In fact, it is this type of truth that is spoken of in the book of Isaiah: “So shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it.” (Is 55:11) Whereas the classical definition of truth is that one’s words correspond to reality, this type of truth is a truth of efficacy, not correspondence.
In the Greek tradition, there is a word for people who believe the purpose of words is to be efficacious at accomplishing some task, regardless of whether these words actually correspond to reality. They are called sophists. There is a way to interpret Jesus as the “Word of God” sent to save souls, but this word only needs to be truthful in the sense that he is accomplishing his mission, not because his words always correspond to reality. For three years of his public ministry, Jesus runs circles around the scribes, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees, poking holes in their arguments and contradicting them at every term. We can imagine the headline, “Jesus OWNS the Pharisees with FACTS and LOGIC!” This is Sophist Jesus.
On a side note, there was an ancient religious cult, or rather group of cults, that believed that Jesus never preached his actual teachings to the people. They maintained Jesus’ actual teachings were kept secret. Today we refer to these cults as Gnostic. They believed that Jesus’ public words were merely rhetoric to attract the real truth-seekers, but the knowledge, “gnosis,” that Jesus possessed was secret, not even written in the Gospels. One had to become initiated into the fold to know the true teaching. However, I am not here concerned with Gnosticism, with its doctrines and secret knowledge. I am interested in Sophist Jesus, whose words are empty but don’t even have a secret knowledge behind them.
Like Zen Jesus, Sophist Jesus doesn’t challenge you to be a better person. He offers a comfortable belief system which allows you to believe in Jesus without believing in anything he actually taught. Any time we run into a moral teaching we disagree with, we can reinterpret the teaching as mere rhetoric. When Jesus says, for example, that “whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery,” this can be passed off as a rhetorical point Jesus was making to counteract the legalism of the Pharisees. The Pharisees, after all, acted on the presumption all a man needed to do was hand his wife a bill of divorce and poof, the marriage was dissolved. What Jesus was telling them was that their piece of paper did nothing to change the nature of marriage. The invocation of God’s original plan for marriage, or his moral admonition equating divorce to adultery, need not be understood as Jesus’ actual teaching. They are merely rhetorical devices to destroy pharisaic legalism. In this way, the door is left open for us to accept Jesus’ response to the Pharisees while still believing in the morality of divorce. Thank you, Sophist Jesus.
Or take another sin, which Christians nowadays are ever more fond of committing, namely, the love of earthly power. Time and again, we see Jesus in the Bible admonishing his followers against the dangers of earthly power, and he leads by example. Jesus denied earthly authority when Satan offered it to him in the desert. He said to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s. When Pontius Pilate asked Jesus if he was a king, Jesus answered squarely, “My kingdom is not of this world.” And when Jesus was instructing his disciples in ministry, he flatly told them not to follow the model of earthly power: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave.” (Matt 20:25-27)
If you are a Christian desirous of wielding earthly authority over others, one of your best tools for ignoring Jesus’ teaching on this point is to interpret Jesus like a Sophist. If Jesus rejects Satan’s invitation to rule over the world, just claim he was actually rejecting Satan’s rhetoric about earthly power, not the earthly power itself. When he told the people to render to Caesar the things that are Caesar and to God the things that are God’s, just claim he was actually using rhetoric to avoid the trap the scribes and Pharisees had laid for him to have him arrested. When he told Pilate his kingdom was not of this world, you can claim he was using rhetoric to show he was not a threat to Pilate’s earthly power so that the innocence of his sacrifice would be clear. Every time Jesus denies earthly power, you can reinterpreted his words as mere rhetoric. In this way, you can claim authority in the name of Christ that Christ himself rejected.
I do not believe people realize how just how commonly Sophist Jesus is preached among today’s Christians, especially when Christians aspire to power. Of course, one can find other sins to justify. If you believe that Jesus’ only mission was to die for our sins, then his earthly ministry becomes, as it were, merely a means to an end. He had to oppose the earthly powers of the time so that those earthly powers would put him to death, and insofar as his earthly ministry accomplished that goal, then a Christian is able to call Jesus’ words “truth” all the while ignoring them. They are truth in the same way that Odysseus’s words are truth.
Well, dear Christian, those are the two interpretations of Jesus that I feel we must reject. I don’t suppose I have a very good argument for rejecting them. I am just as prone as you are to embracing a little Zen or sophistry from time to time. There are things Jesus did and said that I am really not all that fond of. It would be nice to interpret those things away and continue living my life none-the-more bothered with moral qualms. In fact, sometimes I do. (Don’t take my life as an example of a Christian one.) But it seems to me that it is better to wrestle with the moral teachings of Jesus than to explain them away as mere riddles or mere rhetoric. When Jesus teaches that he will separate the sheep from the goats in Matthew 25, he is clear that he separates them based on their adherence to his moral standards, not on their religious beliefs. Truth be told, commandments are easier to give up than doctrines, and it is much easier to believe that Jesus was a sophist than to follow his rules.
Morality is not an easy thing. Any fool can believe in any religion, recite any creed, or profess any faith; but not any old fool can live a moral life. When we start interpreting away moral teachings as mere religious teachings, we do morality a great disservice. Personally, I am not convinced that modern Christians are up to the task of actually wrestling with moral questions. I see too much Zen and sophistry. I will give just one example.
I was watching a certain Catholic YouTuber the other day (I shall not provide the name) performing the old “holier than the Pope” routine. Pope Leo recently said something to the effect that a true pro-life position is also anti-death-penalty. This particular YouTuber literally thought that Leo’s anti-death-penalty position was anti-Catholic. Why? Because at some point in the Middle Ages, some pope made some kind of doctrinal statement that the Catholic Church supports the death penalty, and the theory that runs in these Catholic YouTube circles is that these pro-death-penalty statements are infallible. Thus, to question the pro-death-penalty position is to oppose the infallible teaching of the “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.”
But what is really going on when a Catholic supports the death penalty out of a blind obedience to a supposed doctrinal purity? Well, to begin with, it gives them the sense of superiority over the head of their own Church. But even more than this, it allows them to turn off their moral thinking (“Is it right for the state to kill people convicted of certain crimes?”) and replace it with doctrinal thinking (“What must I believe to be Catholic?”). Moral reasoning gives way to spiritualism, and as the Zen master would kill a cat to teach Zen, a good Catholic will execute a man to teach Catholicism. But what is even more, one begins to turn off one’s moral reasoning not only toward the pope, but inevitably toward Jesus himself. It was, in fact, the law of God, as given by God himself in the book of Deuteronomy, that dictated that an adulterous woman should be stoned to death. Yet, Jesus set himself in opposition to those who tried to enforce this law.
It brings no comfort to me that certain modern Catholics would refuse to ever side with Jesus on this point. Their doctrinal purity must explain away Jesus’ actions as anything other than a moral example. “He was confounding the crowd!” “He was showing mercy that was not owed!” “He was forgiving sins because God is forgiveness!” “He was deliberately withholding his right to judge!” “He was trying to make the Jews think about their own sins!” “He was calling out the Jews’ hypocrisy for not also bringing forward the man!” Anything - any explanation for Jesus’ actions will do (and I have heard all these explanations), but one thing you must never do, if these Catholic commentators are to be believed, is think that Jesus wants you and me and earthy authorities to give up our right to stone women. That is a bridge too far. That is a hill some traditionalists are willing to die on.
I use this example not so much to call attention to the death penalty per se. (My own position, for the record, is that the death penalty is legitimate in theory but immoral in practice. From the fact that some crimes are worthy of death, it does not follow that we are worthy executioners.) Rather, I use this as a case study to illustrate how easy it is to completely ignore any moral thrust of Jesus’ words and actions. Christians are nearly always in danger of moral relapse under the justification of reading Jesus as a Zen master or sophist. It was Martin Luther who said we could sin boldly so long as we believed even more boldly in the saving power of Jesus. This is sophistic nonsense. It has always been nonsense. This is how we empty Christianity of its moral content.