[Jesus said,] “You know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:4-6)
Let me share an ongoing struggle with you.
About a year ago, I decided I needed a fresh look at the gospels. Among the motivators were two beliefs that could be at odds: first, that the Bible deserves to be taken seriously (whatever that means); second, that I cannot imagine God excluding any human soul because it did not subscribe to specific beliefs. That, to me, makes God smaller—and I distrust anything that makes God smaller.
I started with Matthew and loved it. I felt liberated by the overwhelming emphasis on inner transformation and outer practice as part of the reign of God—elements that, I think rightly, Marcus Borg cites as the core of the gospel in The Heart of Christianity. This gospel calls us to embrace the less fortunate, to be generous to all, to heal, to distrust wealth, all from the wellspring of a heart transformed by the Spirit. Wonderful.
Then I came to the gospel of John.
Suddenly it is not so much about the practice of Christianity as the person of Jesus. Belief in Jesus as Messiah is the path to God. In fact, verses like the one above—including “those who do not believe are condemned already” (3:18)—indicate that this belief is the only path to God. If true as written, that would pretty much take down my belief in an all-inclusive God.
So what gives? Is it that simple: we take it literally and assume that the Buddhists are going to hell? On the other extreme, do we simply ignore it because we don’t like it?
Those answers, I believe, are simplistic. Now look at the next (perhaps more thoughtful) level of response: Do we explain this message as a product of the times in which John was written? Or the understanding of that writer in that culture, time, and place? Or the fact that the whole gospel was written more than a half century after Christ, so who knows what he really said?
These seem more reasonable to me, and if I were a Bible scholar, perhaps I could adopt one of them with confidence. But without the scholarship to back them up, even these approaches seem too dismissive, too unwilling to stare into the text and then, like Jacob with the angel, wrestle it until it blesses us.
What’s the answer? I do have a couple of thoughts: it intrigues me, for instance, that Jesus calls himself the way—so the way is a person, not a belief system. But honestly, I don’t know. Maybe wrestling with texts, regardless of one’s academic background, is the only way to give proper respect to all the factors: the text, the context in which it was written, and where we live now. Maybe that’s the best way to get at the truth behind each passage. Maybe.
What do you think?
3 comments:
I have very similar feelings about Matthew vs. John.
I'm all for looking at the context, the culture, the history that intervened between Jesus' life and the writings about that life, and the language of the times. But then my education and a significant part of what I laughingly call my "career" was in cultural anthropology. I can't help but look at things that way.
And then John has all that stuff about "the Jews", "the Jews". As a Jew, I find that unpleasant.
And yet my Christian conversion experience was triggered by the John 14 sentences you cite, so loved by fundamentalist displayers of John 3:16 banners at sporting events, about Jesus being the way. So I find that short passage very meaningful.
But I didn't, and don't, experience it in exclusive terms. One problem with the sentence as it appears in our Bibles is that, in English, you have to choose either the definite article or the indefinite. You can't just say, as one can in Chinese, "I am Way."
"I am a Way" is too pluralistically wimpy and potentially polytheistic for ardent translators. "I am the Way" is the only viable choice. But the definite article carries with it the notion of exclusivity. I suggest shedding that linguistic determinism.
What I'm left with is a unitary Way. It's created and re-created by the walking of it in a certain way, or manner -- the way of love. It's exclusive in the sense of requiring that actions are based on love. But it's non-exclusive in the sense that there can be many on-ramps.
Thus, I like your perception that The Way is a person, not a belief system. (Belief systems are like "merging lanes ahead" signs on the on-ramps, to carry that metaphor to barbarous lengths.) Jesus shows us the Way by embodying it, by being a pioneer. Perhaps, as we believe, the pre-eminent Wayshower. But not necessarily the only Wayshower.
It's time we take the Creeds as non-inerrantly as most of us Episcopalians take the Biblical texts, as much as that might bother our priest. For me, the religion of Jesus trumps the religion about Jesus. A healthy concentration on Jesus the Jew would bring some of the more abstract flights of Christian theological fancy down to earth.
If one believes that the Bible is the divinely inspired, inerrant word of God, then whether or not the book of John was written 50 years after Jesus' death & resurrection makes no difference, does it? What Jesus said is correctly recorded for us because it is supremely important.
You are absolutely right, Anonymous: if one subscribes to inerrancy, it doesn't much matter--or it certainly matters less. Years of wrestling with this issue, however, have led me to drop my belief in inerrancy (though I still buy divine inspiration). As far as I can see, the scriptures just hold too many cross-currents and insights at odds with one another--let alone outright contradictions--to allow distillation into a single unified narrative, as inerrancy would require. I think it is in the meeting of those cross-currents, not in their rational resolution, that we get closer to the mystery at the heart of God.
That's probably pretty opaque, so if you want me to clarify, by all means let me know.
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