"What kind of MAN is this?" a legitimate question?

Recently I've been reading this graduate theology book by some European theologian whose name I can't pronounce. It's a good book. The title of the book is "JESUS: an experiment in Christology". The "JESUS" part of the title is written in massive yellow letters against a black background. It's conspicuous. I feel slightly strange carrying the thing around. When people ask me what I'm reading I feel the need to say it in the tone of a televangelist; facetiously.

I was reading this book at Starbucks the other evening (great corporate whore that I am), and an older gentleman in cowboy regalia sat down at the next table and asked me why I needed such a big book to understand the Bible. He seemed to think the Bible strait forward enough to make any book about it over 150 pages superfluous. I smiled and gave some answer about having a degree in theology and tried to move on. Honest, strait-foward answers are just too involved sometimes. I've been thinking this last week though about what such an answer would actually be, were I motivated enough to actually give one.

I think, at this particular time in my life, I would prepose that such books are important because fixing errors is always a laborious task. If you need clarification on what errors I am speaking of you can read any of my previous blogs and get a few of the many problems I have with faith, life, and everything in between. I could easily list other errors, but perhaps I'm just now realizing that the errors themselves are not what are important. There is an infinite stream of thought stemming from men much smarter than me pointing out problems. Anything I would add would most likely be excessive not to mention unoriginal if I assumed my task in life was simply to point out problems. Still I see that all too many of the errors that we all live in can be traced back to 'false beginnings'. It is easy to see the flaws of a situation and attempt to make superficial changes. These superficialities give a cosmetic sense of improvement, but in reality allow the deeper problems to go unchanged. In short, plastic surgery does not cure cancer. I see so much of our culture trying to smooth out wrinkles, rid themselves of cellulite, and fill out their bathing suits better, but underneath all of this facade of health they are deathly sick.

I feel that so much of what we call Christian or associate with it has been perverted and become cancerous: the way we read the Bible and treat it, the way we use faith as a means of coercion, on and on and on. With all these things I find that in finding such errors, we make cosmetic improvements, but nothing really changes. Faith becomes a veneer of life masking the death that consumes us underneath. The only answer, the only hope, I find is taking the long and arduous task of tracing our steps backwards to see where we went wrong, and in discerning these core failures, finding hope for the future.

This is why 700 page theology books matter. This is why I don't believe we can just read the Bible and arrive at some pristine and sublime faith. Whether one believe the Bible contains errors or not, it is assured that the reader does, and therefore there remains the threat that the faith inspired by the Bible is partially sick, even if this is well masked by a facade of health. When I read philosophy, or reports on social trends, I am continually struck by the massive, systemic evils in our world that Christian faith contributes to rather than opposes. I don't pretend to have answers to these evils, only an adamant demand that any faith worth adhering to be free of complicity to them.

I'm convinced that all ideologies and faith systems rely on mythology to justify themselves. "Being American" is rooted in mythology. We hold up inaccurate caricatures of our founding fathers, and idealized notions of their beliefs and our connection to these same beliefs. We pose that we are in line with their desires. We hold up the documents of American faith, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, assuming that we are directly in line of the intentions of these documents. Yet, historically if we examine the ideas of the founding fathers and the way such ideas were the context for our 'sacred paper', we find that we are currently quite far from anything these historical figures intended. To see this though, requires one to involve oneself in the laborious study of the past, and the difficulty to seeing past the myths to actual reality. Christianity isn't really any different.

On the one hand, I don't truly believe there is any true faith that is free of mythology. Mythology in a sense is the deepest well of meaning for human life. To deny it any place in our lives is to lose part of what it is to be human. The problem is that meaning as such becomes one of the greatest tools for manipulating human behavior. On the one hand there is the misguided belief that it is possible to live free of mythology, as was thought in most modern systems. Ideologies abounded with the idea that it was possible to live "above mere myths", only to find that ideology became mythic. Marx critiqued religion, and his adherents gave in to the same religious fervor they criticized. They also surrounded Marx himself and his sacred papers with the same mythologic flavor they were supposedly freeing themselves from. So we find mythology to be necessary, but all too easily abused.

One of the biggest problems I see with Christian faith is the way we present it in the West. Western Christian culture presents the mythic view of Jesus as the only viable route to meeting him. He becomes quite divorced from the historical context he emerged from, that is unless a particular preacher find such context convenient to that week's sermon. What we are told in the West about Jesus, the Son of God, dying as an atoning sacrifice for our sins, is pure mythology. It is filled with meaning, as well as immense potential for completely missing the intentions of the historical person it centers on (or the original followers). I don't think the myths themselves are erroneous, only that errors have centered themselve in such myths.

Myths, which again, are inseperable to human experience, are always rooted in some historical experience. Typically they are a means of adding potential meaning to memory. Myths are a collective bank of meaning for a community or society. Still they are rooted in historical experience. And though it is ultimately impossible to retrieve the past, it is still possible to come close. The study of history, especially with Christian faith, allows us to come dramatically close to 'what actually happened'. And in doing so we also get the opportunity to contrast the myth and the facts (which are certainly more vague than is often supposed). So, what am I getting at?

Western Christianity, with its staggering number of problems, strongly favors the mythic Jesus to the historical one. The problem, which the bredth of liberal scholars for the past few centuries have been pointing out, is that the Jesus of history appears to be drastically different that the one of Christian myth. In fact, the factual Jesus seems partially opposed to many of the ideas which the movement he spawned came to uphold. "Actual Jesus" had much different concerns than "Interpreted Jesus". Now all the myths that came to surround Jesus I feel quite confident were rooted in the actual person and that person's actual concerns, but in far too many places theses myths were twisted to oppose the actual intent of Jesus of Nazareth. Perhaps, Jesus, the risen Christ, is in many ways calling his followers to doubt the myths for the sake of discerning the meanings the myths originally formed to capture.

The immediate followers of Jesus did not first encounter the glorified Son of God, nor did the follow Jesus in hopes of finding redemption for their guilty consciences. They first encountered a man, a friend, a rabbi, and a prophet. The myths that arrose from this are of infinite importance, but they are a poor place to begin. Churches in the West frequently encourage converts to proclaim Jesus as the Son of God and the Savior from sins, before people can even experience him as a good person or a man of wisdom. And while mythology is how we discern 'what it all means', it is a horrible way to get to know someone. I firmly believe Jesus would have perferred we know him first. Rather, I think the first error of our myth-loving culture has been telling people that saying "Lord, Lord" is enough. We have long been a society that proclaims him fully God and fully man, while in essence proclaiming him as fully God and on a rare occasion partially man. In doing so I believe we have prepetuated a mythology that mostly ends up serving the very systemic evils which the man Jesus set out to oppose.

And I say all of this not to contribute further to the despair I see surrounding us on all sides, but to display clearly the only place where I still find hope. Somewhere between historical facts and mythic interpretations there resides a person whom millions have understood as our only hope. This hope is not rooted in any cosmic mythology, but rather in the character of this man Jesus, and the character he inspired and inspires in those who decide to follow him practically. (Practical = practice = action-based) I find this to essentially be the only place we can begin. To begin elsewhere, to begin with a mythic interpretation, is to simply default to a meaning which others have given us. Rather, it seems to me, the best, perhaps the only good place to start is with a historical person, always partially in the shadow of what others think of him, but still always potentially ready to change the world and everything we've ever thought the world to be . . . . . .