The Questioning Christian

Tag: Summary of the Law

  • Eight reasons for a rationalist to follow Jesus

    In a long discussion thread on TitusOneNine, a commenter, the Rev. Kevin Maney, asked me (cordially): Why would you want to follow a dead guy?   Here’s an edited version of my response.

    I try to “follow Jesus” for two main reasons: 

    1. Jesus stressed the Summary of the Law: I’m persuaded that the Summary of the Law, which Jesus emphasized, touches on something fundamental in the fabric of the universe, at the heart of the processes by which the creation continues. Specifically, we seem to do our best in life — both individually and as a species, both in passing on our genes to future generations and in serving as God’s created co-creators:

    • when we put God first — more concretely, when we face the facts of the reality that he wrought, and when we rejoice in, or at least acknowledge, the goodness of that reality; and
    • when we seek the best for others as for ourselves.

    2. Jesus was faithful, even unto death, to what he believed to be his duty. For whatever reason(s) — growing up in the military, my own military service, whatever — that kind of faithfulness is a huge hot button for me. 

    These are the two main reasons why in an earlier posting I called Jesus a heroic prophet, someone eminently worthy of admiration and emulation.  Off the top of my head, I can think of several other qualities about him to admire and emulate:

    3. Jesus was personally kind. I’m going to assume readers can “take judicial notice” of this without my having to cite chapter and verse.

    4. He was willing to admit that he didn’t know everything, viz., the day or the hour when the Son of Man would come in the clouds with great power and glory [Mk 13.31-32].

    5. He believed in facing facts. When the imprisoned John the Baptist sent emissaries to ask Jesus, are you the one who is to come?, Jesus responded, look around you, and draw your own conclusions: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” [Matt 11.5]. When predicting the return of the Son of Man [Mk 13], he urged his listeners, pay attention to what you see happening around you!

    6. He was willing to change his mind, to be persuaded by other points of view, viz., that of the Syrophoenician woman whose daughter was cured even though she was not an Israelite [Mk 7.24-30].

    7. He was willing to “tell it like it is,” another matter for judicial notice.

    8. He was personally courageous, physically confronting the moneychangers in the temple, and seemingly not being rattled by the crowds that wanted to kill him.

    On reflection, it probably would be fair to characterize what I do as seeking, not to follow Jesus as Jesus, but to conduct my life in accordance with the principles and values that he emphasized and exemplified. 

    Phrasing it another way, I put Jesus in roughly the same hero category as the late Dr. Michael DeBakey, who died a few days ago — except that:

    • Jesus’ impact on the world has so far been several orders of magnitude greater than that of Dr. DeBakey;
    • so far, none of Dr. DeBakey’s later followers have taken it upon themselves to persecute and even kill those who disagreed with them.

    Granted, arguably this view of Jesus is scarcely any different than wanting to “be like Mike” [Michael Jordan]. But I don’t see a problem with that.

    Related posts:

  • Jesus’ mission was a bust – at least if that mission was what the church has long claimed

    Over at TitusOneNine, commenter Jody+ asked me “what [my] understanding of soteriology is if it doesn’t include Jesus’ victory through the Cross and resurrection.  And Tory asked whether I believed that Jesus’ mission was a failure, “since Romans continued to run roughshod over Israel and other occupied peoples?  What kind of salvation did Jesus accomplish, if at all, for it certainly was not geo-political?”

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    If Jesus thought of his mission as that of liberating Israel from worldly oppression and ushering in God’s reign:  then yes, that mission was an utter, abject, desperate, and miserable failure. To refuse to face that fact is to live in a fantasy world.

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    If Jesus thought of his mission as that of winning victory over sin and death, and bringing eternal life to all who believed in him:  we have just about as much reliable evidence that he succeeded, even partially, as we do that the Heaven’s Gates suicides succeeded in joining the hidden spaceship that they believed was coming for them. 

    Intellectual honesty requires us to admit that while we can hope, we simply don’t know, what happens after we die.  To claim otherwise is, again, to live in a fantasy world.

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    What we can say with some confidence is that what Jesus characterized as the way to eternal life — the Summary of the Law — seems to touch on something fundamental in the fabric of the universe:

    • The evidence for the existence of a Creator is pretty compelling, certainly more so than the evidence against;

    • History suggests that, in the words of Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner, we seem to be “created co-creators,” participating unwittingly in a titanic process that has been gradually, and often painfully, creating order out of the chaos of the Big Bang;

    • On balance, over the long term, those who seem to contribute the most to this process of creation — and who seem most likely to survive, reproduce, and pass their genes and memes on, not just to their children but to their grandchildren — are those who face the facts of the reality wrought by the Creator, including the fact of our human fallibility.  Who don’t insist that the world must be a certain way merely because they imagine it to be so.  Who seek the best for others as they do for themselves.  In short, who seek (whether they know it or not) to follow the Summary of the Law.

    For all we know, when we die, the Creator will simply discard us his tools, the way we would throw away a worn-out drill bit. But it’s not totally implausible to conjecture that it won’t happen that way.  It’s not irrational to hope, and trust, that we’ll get to share, somehow, in the end result of whatever unimaginably-wonderful project the Creator has been up to.

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    Returning again to whether Jesus’ mission was a failure:  If Jesus thought of his mission as being to inspire all people to organize their lives around the Summary of the Law, he didn’t completely succeed on his own.  But the church he catalyzed hasn’t done an altogether terrible job of continuing the mission.

    If we would stop insisting that everyone believe traditionalist soteriology, christology, and theology, and return to simply preaching the Summary of the Law, we likely would have much more success in reaching nonbelievers and doubters with Jesus’ message.