Jesus, the path to right living?

“‘Who said any­thing about being a Chris­t­ian? I’m not a Chris­t­ian’.
The idea Struck Mack as odd and unex­pected and he couldn’t keep him­self from grin­ning. ‘No, I sup­pose you aren’t’.

They arrived at the door of the work­shop. Again Jesus stopped. ‘Those who love me come from every sys­tem that exists. They were Bud­dhists or Mor­mons, Bap­tists or Mus­lims, Democ­rats, Repub­li­cans and many who don’t vote or are not part of any Sun­day morn­ing or reli­gious insti­tu­tions. I have fol­low­ers who were mur­der­ers and many who were self-righteous. Some are bankers and book­ies, Amer­i­cans and Iraqis, Jews and Pales­tini­ans. I have no desire to make them Chris­t­ian, but I do want to join them in their trans­for­ma­tion into sons and daugh­ters of my Papa, into my broth­ers and sis­ters, into my beloved.’”¹

In the above quote from The Shack (notice the shift from ‘were’ to ‘are’) I see more than few con­cerns, mostly expres­sions of post­mod­ernism that have made their way into the text.  It’s not a new claim of the emer­gent church, nor is it an absurd claim to say that those who ‘love Jesus’ come from every ‘sys­tem that exists’. Obvi­ously! How­ever, what needs to be said is that the Bud­dhist, Mor­mon and mur­derer, in turn­ing to Christ, fol­low­ing Christ (after all, that is what Chris­t­ian means), had to leave behind Bud­dhism, Mor­monism and mur­der (2 Corinthi­ans 5:17). If we under­stand that to call one­self a Chris­t­ian is to say, ‘I’m a fol­lower of Christ’ then I find the claim, ‘I have no desire to make them Chris­t­ian’ to be entirely unscrip­tural and inco­her­ent. We could rephrase the above sen­tence to say, ‘I have no desire to make them fol­low me, but I do want to join them in their trans­for­ma­tion…’ Now, what exactly does that mean? It’s a view sim­i­lar to that of Spencer Burke, it’s all about jour­ney and mys­tery and less about truth and doctrine:

“Tour guides don’t feel free to devi­ate from the ‘route’ other Chris­tians have set. What’s more, they’re apt to impose that same kind of rigid struc­ture on oth­ers. Becom­ing a trav­eler, how­ever, enables you to be true to your­self … As a trav­eler, I am free to love and be loved. I’m not wor­ried about tak­ing a wrong step or los­ing my posi­tion. I’m just one more per­son on the jour­ney — a beloved child of God.“²

This (emer­gent) view is fur­ther rein­forced by Jonathan Campbell:

“We have come to see that it is all about Jesus and not just a method­ol­ogy. It is not about mis­sion, not about church, but it’s about Jesus and his glory, his life. To know Jesus is not an event, a rit­ual, a creed, or a reli­gion. It is a jour­ney of trust and adven­ture. We don’t believe in any reli­gion anymore–including Christianity–but we do believe in fol­low­ing Jesus. We no longer need reli­gion with its spe­cial build­ings, dog­mas, pro­grams, clergy or any other human inven­tions that dis­place gen­uine spir­i­tu­al­ity. Why do we need a name and address to be a church? We’ve come out of reli­gion and back to God.“³

This view, that the jour­ney is more impor­tant than the des­ti­na­tion, fos­ters, whether it means to or not (espe­cially when com­bined with post­mod­ern pre­sup­po­si­tions) the idea or view that Chris­tian­ity might only be one of many paths of jour­ney, even if the best jour­ney, still one of many. Return­ing to The Shack for a minute, Jesus states, “I am the best way any human can relate to Papa or Sarayu. To see me is to see them. The love you sense from me is no dif­fer­ent from how they love you.“⁴ The best, but not the only.

With respect to John 14:16 Bell says, “Jesus at one point claimed to be ‘the way, the truth, and the life.’ Jesus was not mak­ing claims about one reli­gion being bet­ter than all other reli­gions. That com­pletely misses the point, the depth, and the truth. Rather, he was telling those who were fol­low­ing him that his way is the way to the depth of real­ity. This kind of life Jesus was liv­ing, per­fectly and com­pletely in con­nec­tion and coop­er­a­tion with God, is the best pos­si­ble way for a per­son to live. It’s how things are … Per­haps a bet­ter ques­tion than who’s right, is who’s liv­ing rightly?“⁵ In con­sid­er­ing the vir­gin birth (and while affirm­ing his belief in the vir­gin birth) Rob bell, after posit­ing a hypo­thet­i­cal sit­u­a­tion in which we dis­cover Jesus had a bio­log­i­cal father, asks the ques­tion, ‘is the way of Jesus still the best pos­si­ble way to live?‘⁶ This is entirely the wrong ques­tion to ask, by the way, not with­stand­ing the real­ity that if Jesus wasn’t born of a vir­gin, a large por­tion of Scrip­tural wit­ness is out­right wrong.The point of Jesus and Chris­tian­ity was and is not to show us the ‘best pos­si­ble way to live’. McLaren, in rein­forc­ing right liv­ing over the real­i­ties of sin, the cross and redemp­tion, “For me the ‘fun­da­men­tals of the faith’ boil down to those given by Jesus: to love and to love our neigh­bors’”.[7]

Address­ing McLaren above, D.A Car­son has stated, “I think that this is among the shal­low­est and most dis­torted read­ings of Mark 12:28–34 now on offer. Jesus presents these com­mand­ments as the two that are most impor­tant in the law, not as the fun­da­men­tals of the faith. Those who rec­og­nize what Jesus says are ‘not far from the king­dom.’ … To claim that these two laws are ‘the fun­da­men­tals of the faith’ not only mis­con­strues the con­text of the pas­sage where Jesus’ utter­ance is found, it also over­looks the cen­tral themes of the canon­i­cal Gospels and, indeed, the entire New Tes­ta­ment.“⁷

From the think­ing above, and in agree­ment with Bell and McLaren, Pagitt writes, “Jesus made it clear that the after­life isn’t a place. It’s a state of being. It’s the state in which all of God’s hopes for the earth, all of God’s desires for this part­ner­ship with human­ity, come to fruition. The king­dom of God is made real in Jesus, the Mes­siah and Sav­ior. The king­dom isn’t some­where else, wait­ing for us to die before we can be part of it. It is in us, through us, and for us right here, right now.“⁸

The ‘emer­gent Jesus,’ then, is not con­cerned with sin, redemp­tion or the state of his cre­ation so much as he’s con­cerned with right liv­ing. Liv­ing rightly is surely impor­tant (James 1:27)! How­ever, not at the expense of other impor­tant truths and teach­ings. Dan­ger­ous stuff.

Related posts:

1. Did Jesus Exist?
2. Book Review: Liv­ing As A Chris­t­ian by A.W. Tozer
3. Was Jesus who he said he was?
4. “Take me away, Jesus!”