by
Michael Johnston
A Mystical Pagan Hermeneutic
Introduction
This essay theologically analyzes a text from the "New Church's Teaching Series," Michael Johnston's Engaging the Word.(1) Its subject matter is hermeneutics, the science of interpreting Scripture.
The "Church's Teaching Series" has been one of the primary ways in which the Episcopal Church educated its members in the fundamentals of the Christian faith. It has been in existence for over fifty years, and the Church has officially approved past editions. Johnston's text does not belong to the old series, but to the "New Church's Teaching Series." Although its title incorporates the old title, it has not received official sanction. In Johnston's words,
This new series differs from the previous two in significant ways: it has no official status, claims no special authority, speaks in a personal voice, and comes not out of committees but from scholars and pastors meeting and talking informally together.(2)
I intend to show that this text, produced by "scholars and pastors meeting and talking informally together," promotes a form of mystical paganism masquerading as an enlightened version of Christian truth. Among other things, I shall contrast this pagan hermeneutic with aspects of an orthodox understanding of Scripture, that of Athanasius and the Creed.
The term "mystical," as in Johnston's mystical paganism, requires some clarification. The Christian religion contains mysteries, the doctrine of the Trinity, for example, or the two natures yet one person of Jesus Christ. Even more, not just doctrine, but God himself is a mystery, and knowing God in his transcendent holy nature has always entailed a sense of the mystical. Therefore, as this essay unfolds, I shall show how a Christian mystical sense of God differs from Johnston's mystical paganism. As discussed elsewhere, Johnston's mystical paganism is another example of a perspective widely held throughout the church in the West.
From the beginning of the church's life, heretics used Scripture to subvert the faith. The early church countered this threat in a number of ways, but its main bulwark was the regula, the body of creed like statements and public confessions that provided the key to an orthodox reading of the Scripture. These rules of faith were eventually formulated into the Creeds, such as the Nicene or the Apostles' Creed. These Creeds did not give detailed interpretations of Scripture, but they set the pattern, the structure, the over arching framework by which Scripture must be interpreted. As Francis Young puts it:
Neither the Rule of Faith nor the creed was in fact a summary of the whole biblical narrative, as demonstrated earlier in The Art of Performance. They provided, rather, the proper reading of the beginning and the ending, the focus of the plot and the relations of the principal characters, so enabling the "middle" to be heard in bits as meaningful. They provided the "closure" which contemporary theory prefers to leave open. They articulated the essential hermeneutical key without which texts and community would disintegrate in incoherence.(3)
For the purposes of this essay, I will focus on the Nicene Creed. It has been accepted by the Church universal, East and West, and rehearsed each Sunday throughout Christendom. It lays the groundwork for understanding two principle doctrines: the one God as Trinity, and Jesus Christ as fully God and fully man. Further, it starts with creation, associated with God the Father, focuses on the Incarnation, associated with God the Son, and ends with the "life of the world to come," associated with God the Holy Spirit. This triune pattern, with incarnation at the center, formed the pattern for interpreting Scripture for the early church.
Since the Creeds proclaimed that God is one, the early church read Scripture as a narrative unity, as the revelation of one God. Scripture is not, as the gnostics sought to show, the revelation of several gods. This narrative unity begins with creation in Genesis, continues with sin and a resultant fall and corruption, followed by law and prophets, centers in the incarnation of God the Son or Word, followed by the Epistles and ending with the book of Revelation which speaks of the life of the world to come. Jesus Christ is the narrative center of Scripture since he is the definitive revelation of God, "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God."
As a result, three principles emerged for interpreting Scripture: 1. The Creed as guiding principle. 2. The unity of Scripture. 3. The centrality of Jesus Christ for biblical interpretation.
In investigating Johnston's hermeneutic, I shall show that he has no concept of God as triune, nor of incarnation, nor of the Creed as a guiding principle, nor of the unity of Scripture, nor of Jesus Christ as its center. As a result, he does not interpret Scripture in a creedal, orthodox, trinitarian, and incarnational fashion. Rather, he operates with a view of God that is totally alien to Christian faith. His "God" is a pagan deity who transcends yet includes a pantheon of mediating images and mythic impressions.
Johnston's Perspective
Johnston's theological perspective can be envisioned as an equilateral triangle. At its apex is an Ineffable God of multiple images. The two base angles can be labeled experience and community. This triangle image depicts Johnston's belief that the ineffable God is revealed in experience and community as they mutually condition one another. In the center of the triangle is the word "stories," referring to Johnston's conviction that stories mediate God, experience, and community in mutual and dynamic interactions.
As I shall show, Johnston believes that "God" is ultimately indescribable, and therefore, to account for the ineffable and sublime nature of this god, one must include the full range of images taken from the whole of experience. These images then form and are formed by the community. For lack of a better name, I shall call Johnston's deity the "multiple god," or the "ineffable god."
In regard to experience, Johnston understands the world as process. As this process unfolds, the community makes sense of itself, its experience, and the multiple god by means of stories. These stories are repeated, and as they are repeated, they are modified in light of new experiences, new manifestations of the multiple god, and new understandings of the community. This interactive process continues throughout history -- life ever changing, the community ever transformed, the multiple god ever re imaged, the stories ever evolving. As this happens, the four aspects of the diagram the ineffable god, experience, community, and story mutually create, modify, and form each other. Here are two quotations:
The founding myths shift as the lives of the people shift. In fact, the experiences that a community goes through shape its people's stories, just as the stories they hear and pass on shape them. Or, to phrase it another way, the sacred community assembles its texts as much as the sacred texts assemble the community. This is by no means mere expediency, however, because the community of faith is always in dialogue with its sacred story, and experience is one party to the conversation.
I prefer to think that God's variety, ambiguity, nuance, and contradiction come honestly from people's authentic experience of God in concrete and diverse situations. In this incarnational stance the divine and the human are both involved in the ongoing work of creation, so God makes us up as we go along as much as we make up God.(4)
In the first quotation, the "founding myths" are interactively related to the community so that stories and community mutually create each other. As a result, the "sacred community assembles its texts as much as the sacred texts assemble the community." In the second quotation, Johnston's "God" (the "multiple god") reveals itself in "concrete and diverse situations," namely, in diverse experiences. But, since the "divine and the human are both involved in the ongoing work of creation," it turns out that "God makes us up as we go along as much as we make up God." In other words, the community and the multiple god mutually create each other as they interact in experience.
This perspective is pagan, since its primary source for the images and stories of God is general experience rather than the incarnation of Jesus Christ at the center of Scripture. Further, as I shall show, it is mystical since it claims that God is ineffable, and therefore, must contain all images, even ones that are contrary to each other. These diverse and contrary images are harmonized into a sublime One, since "God" is ultimately beyond all finite knowing. In many ways, this mystical pagan vision is similar to that held by the Presiding Bishop.
This picture contrasts with orthodoxy in two fundamental ways. First, orthodoxy holds that God is not generally revealed in all of experience, but personally and decisively in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is not everything, but a specific person who said and did specific concrete things. As a result, not all images reveal God, rather, God's image is Jesus Christ. Second, although one can know God concretely in Jesus Christ, this explicit objective knowledge of God also reveals God as mystery. For example, the resurrection, the appearance of Christ in glory, revealed that God is beyond comprehension, but only because the disciples could touch and see the risen Jesus. In other words, the incomprehensible reality of resurrection depended upon the disciples seeing, touching, and hearing the risen Lord. Without that sensible knowledge, given to their senses and apprehended by their minds, there was no awareness of God's incomprehensibility. In Johnston, however, the knowledge of God given to finite knowing, seeing, touching, hearing, is left behind in order to arrive at a mystical and ineffable One beyond all finite knowing. In other words, Johnston's mysticism is not incarnational. This will become more apparent as we proceed.
Multiple "God," Community, Story
Johnston's first task is to redefine the biblical revelation according to his mystical pagan vision. He starts this process in chapter one, entitled "Telling the Story."
When Johnston reads Scripture, he notices that the biblical people experienced the world, themselves, life, and the divine, and that they expressed their experiences in stories. These stories take a religious form, that of myth. A myth is a story that forms communal and personal identity, gives meaning to the world, and relates the community to the heavenly realm. One feature of myths, and this includes biblical stories, is that the details, the facts, or the particulars of the myth, are not the real story. Rather, the details or "facts" of the myth function to disclose the deeper truth that the myth illumines. For this reason, Johnston understands Scripture, as well as doctrine and the Creeds, as expressions of deep "truths" which lie beyond or behind the text. This is the mystical move which leaves behind the objective text of Scripture in order to contemplative the mystical One.
Since Johnston understands Scripture as a compendium of mythic stories, he does not conceive of it as the Word of God speaking directly to us. Of course, he uses the term, "Word"; the title of his book is Engaging the Word. But the term "Word" does not mean God speaking, but mythic stories told by communities to make sense of their experience. Of course, it may well be possible to experience God speaking, but as I shall show, this is peripheral to Johnston's perspective. This will have far reaching implications.
As a result, Johnston begins by making two implicit claims in regard to Scripture. First, Scripture is primarily an assortment of stories told by ancient communities to define themselves and make sense of their experience. Secondly, the meaning of these texts is not directly given in their verbal content, but lies behind the text, beneath the surface. Here are a few typical quotations:
Believing communities are fundamentally communities assembled around sacred texts. The word "assembled" connotes more, however, than a simple gathering to hear the tales told, for these are the stories that tell us who we are. They give us our identity. We find in them the myths and deep mysteries that constitute the truest rendering of where we have come from, how we ought to be, and where we are going.
The bible is authoritative because our experience tells us that its stories best explain who we are as a believing people and provides a record of our timeless relationship to God.
These stories have a hold on me because they are my stories, just as they are your stories, and they are the stories of the family and the community to which we belong. They make sense out of our lives, our relationships, our world, and our God.
But whatever you bring to the Bible or require of it, the Bible always invites you to read below its surface as well, because the mystery of God is not found simply on the page, or within the text, but behind it.
The Exodus was both a single historical event and a larger historical movement. As event, it was an action of God in history recorded first in Exodus 3 14 and then recapitulated in the songs of Moses and Miriam in chapter 15. This single action was, of course, the delivery of the Hebrew people from their bondage in Egypt. It was their founding experience, and the memory of that experience has served throughout the centuries to define Jewish identity.
Again and again I hear and tell these same stories, captured by them, held hostage to them, as thought I were hearing for the first time: "On the first day of the week, while it was still dark, came Mary Magdalene early to the tomb" (John 20:1). Just the sound of those words never fails to strike deep chords within me.(5)
Notice that Johnston refers to the biblical stories as "deep mysteries," pointers to our "timeless relationship to God." This is because God is beyond words, so that the "the Bible always invites you to read below its surface as well, because the mystery of God is not found simply on the page, or within the text, but behind it." In this view, the biblical words are like a mask which must be stripped off to reveal the indescribable One beyond all language. For this reason, one does not so much as hear, reflect upon, and obey the biblical words. Rather, one resonates to their deep mysteries so that "just the sound of those words never fails to strike deep chords within me."
As an example of Johnston's perspective in action, let us consider his analysis of Joshua 24. Here is his description of this biblical passage:
Joshua begins the ceremony by reciting the events of Israel's salvation history starting with the era before Abraham, when "your ancestors Terah and his sons, Abraham and Nabor lived beyond the Euphrates and served other gods" (Joshua 24:2). He recounts the journey of Abraham and his family from Ur of the Chaldeans, around the arc of the Fertile Crescent, and down into Egypt. He summarizes the Exodus in roughly three verses, skips quickly through the wilderness sojourn, brings his hearers across the Jordan river at Jericho, ...
The Hebrews of Shechem are incorporated into the ancient story; the ancient story, told again, assembles a new community. The Mosaic covenant is not so much being remembered as the Exodus story is being re membered. Retelling the story to new hearers is always meant to do precisely that.(6)
Let me ask the reader to read Joshua 24. Notice certain features of this biblical text. First, the people "presented themselves before God." That is, God was objectively present in a particular time and place. Secondly, Joshua begins by stating, v. 2, "This is the word of the Lord the God of Israel." He then continues speaking in the first person singular, with the "I" of the narrative being God himself. As described by Johnston, however, the narrator is Joshua, not God. From there, it is a logical step to say that the "ancient story" "assembles a new community," rather than God assembling the community. Of course, Johnston mentions that the narrative depicted "God's mighty acts," but his real emphasis is the story depicting the community's experience, rather than God acting or speaking as portrayed in Joshua 24.
It is difficult to understand, however, how Joshua could be addressing the assembly in human words, yet be speaking with the divine "I," as God himself speaking. This theological problem, how the divine Word could be human words, was the theological problem of the incarnation. By incarnation, God the Word became the words and deeds of the Jesus. This mystery led to the doctrine of the two fold nature of Jesus Christ as formulated in the Creed of Chalcedon. But it is not a problem for Johnston. He shows no understanding of incarnation, that God could actually take form in specific words and deeds. As a result, he ignores the fact that the text claims God as the one who addresses the community. Instead, he interprets the text to say that Joshua is recounting an experience that began with the Exodus.
One logical corollary to this is that Johnston does not believe that Scripture is the Word of God:
Likewise, we need to remember that the Bible does not announce itself as the Word of God; that is our attribution. So our sacred texts are not the final word on God's preferred behavior for us. In fact, our behavior, like our faith, draws from a Person, not a Book, however sacred that Book has come to be.(7)
The Christian faith, of course, is derived from a Person. But this person revealed himself in his words and deeds. His words and deeds were not a window through which one looked to mystically glimpse the Ineffable One beyond his words and deeds. No, the person of Christ is given in his words and deeds as recorded in the Bible. Johnston, however, falsely sets the Bible against the Person of Christ. Further, he seems unaware of the fact that the Bible repeatedly announces itself as the Word of God, with Joshua 24:2 being one of many instances.
Johnston's view also differs from that of the Creed. The Creed's primary emphasis is God's acts, his saving words and deeds. There are three great acts presented in the Creed, each in a different paragraph creation, the person and work of Christ, the work of the Spirit culminating in the life of the world to come. These three acts give the unity of Scripture, beginning with creation in Genesis, centered in Jesus Christ as God incarnate, and ending with the book of Revelation which heralds the final day. From the perspective of the Creed, the primary content of Scripture would be God acting and speaking. Therefore, Scripture is called the "Word of God." There are human words and deeds in Scripture, but these are integrally related to the divine Word and Deed.
Not only does Johnston fail to see that Joshua 24 is God assembling and speaking to the people, he fails to relate Joshua 24 to the whole of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation with its center in Jesus Christ. This is because he isn't thinking in trinitarian, incarnational terms.
Athanasius, by contrast, does think in trinitarian and incarnational terms. He conceives of God as one in three. Within God, God the Word or Son forever comes forth from the Father like rays from the sun, or like water forever springing up from a fountain. This Word is God's Word, his Act, his Wisdom, his active presence. As a result, when God says or does something, it is always the Word or Son of God that is spoken or done. Therefore, when God appears to Abraham in his tent, when he liberates the people from Egypt, when he addresses the people in Joshua 24, all of these concrete manifestations of God speaking and acting are God the Son or Word.
As a consequence, Athanasius believed that God the Word or Son was revealed in the Old Testament, although the full revelation of God the Son occurred in Jesus Christ. Therefore, the Old Testament manifestations of God speaking and acting are Jesus Christ, albeit in a hidden form. As a result, Athanasius was able to make sense of the New Testament statement that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the law and prophets, for both the law given to Moses and the words of the prophets were manifestations of the one Word of God Jesus Christ. In Athanasius' words,
If Divine adoration was neither due to Him [Jesus Christ], nor paid Him, until after His death, how is it that Abraham worshipped Him in His tent (Gen. xviii)Moses in the bush (Ex. iii), and Daniel saw thousands upon thousands of angels ministering unto Him?(8)
Further, when Athanasius analyzes a scriptural text, he places it in a narrative context, beginning with creation in Genesis, centering in Jesus Christ, ending with the final eschatological age. This can be seen throughout his writings, but is especially apparent in his two treatises Against the Heathen and On the Incarnation. In these texts he starts with Genesis, discusses fall, goes forward to Jesus Christ who reverses the fall, and ends with the blessings of heaven. When analyzing a text, he understands it in that context.
None of this is possible for Johnston. Trinity and incarnation contribute nothing to his understanding of Scripture. He does not read Scripture as a unity, nor does he relate particular passages to Jesus Christ, nor to the whole of Scripture. As a result, and this will become quite clear, he interprets each text as a unit, a discrete text unrelated to other texts. These diverse unrelated texts produce a pantheon of images, all valid, all necessary, all unrelated to the whole of Scripture, with the result that "God" becomes a collection of multiple images united in an ineffable one which includes them all.
This is not to say that Johnston does not, from time to time, make use of traditional phrasing. For example, in one of the above quotations he noted that the Exodus "was an action of God in history recorded first in Exodus 3 14 and then recapitulated in the songs of Moses and Miriam in chapter 15." But this passing statement is placed in a context, in a section entitled "The Exodus Story," in a chapter entitled "Telling the Story." The point of the section is that the Hebrews formulated their experience of the Exodus in a story, and it is the story, not God's Word or Act, that Johnston places at the center of his analysis.
Johnston's pagan presuppositions that God does not speak his Word, that Trinity and incarnation aren't relevant, that general experience is revelatory are not, however, presented as pagan. They are simply presented without trinitarian and incarnational considerations. Whether or not he knows he is pagan, whether or not he can critique his own thought in terms of orthodox theology, is not apparent from his text. He simply appeals to the reader's rather obvious experience that life is experience and that persons formulate that experience in stories. That is all he needs and all he presents.
Passing On the Story
Once Johnston has marginalized the concept of God's Act or Word, and claimed that Scripture is a collection of community stories, his next step is to show how stories are reformulated and passed on in communities. This is the theme of his second chapter, "Passing on the Story." As an example, he uses the gospel of John.
As Johnston tells it, the community that wrote John's gospel reformulated its sacred stories (the Old Testament) in light of its experience of Jesus Christ. The result was the gospel of John. This gospel made sense of Christ by reassembling Old Testament texts for a new story. As this happened, community, story, and experience interactively shaped each other. Similarly, communities today can reshape their inherited stories (Scripture), in light of new experiences, just as the community of John reshaped their story of the Old Testament.
In fact, the experiences that a community goes through shape its people's stories, just as the stories they hear and pass on shape them. Or, to phrase it another way, the sacred community assembles its texts as much as the sacred texts assemble the community. This is by no means mere expediency, however, because the community of faith is always in dialogue with its sacred story, and experience is one part to the conversation.
We are always transforming the text so that the text will transform us. When that kind of transformation occurs, reflectively and prayerfully, it is not a tampering with the text but the movement of the Holy Spirit... The sacred story has always invited an interpretive conversation between itself and the people it shapes, so that a new story can reassemble a new community for a richer life in God.(9)
From this point of view, Scripture is not so much content as method. It shows how ancient peoples, the community of John for example, reassembled their Scripture (the Old Testament) in light of their new experience (Christ), and therefore, how we can reassemble our story (Old and New Testament) in light of our new experiences so that a "new story can reassemble a new community for a richer life in God."
If, however, the gospel of John is our warrant for creating a new story, this implies that contemporary experience is to Scripture as the apostolic experience of Christ was to the Old Testament. The apostles experienced a new revelation in Jesus Christ which superseded the Old Testament revelation. When Johnston asserts that "the sacred community assembles its texts as much as the sacred texts assemble the community," he is implicitly claiming that contemporary experience supersedes the biblical encounter with the incarnate Word since the community today can reassemble the apostolic witness to Christ (Scripture), just as the apostolic witness reassembled the Old Testament revelation.
The Creed, however, presents Jesus Christ as "eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made ... incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary(10) and became man, and was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate ..." God the Son became incarnate in one place and one place only in a specific human being, the one "incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary," the one who "suffered under Pontius Pilate." The Creed does not say that God the Son became incarnate in ongoing experience.
Further, when the Creed says that the Son is "eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God," it means that the Son is the definitive revelation of God. The Creed presents no other major definitive revelation of God except the Son by incarnation, and the Son will not be revealed in any qualitatively new way until Christ "will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead." That is, there is no contemporary experience of God that supersedes incarnation until the return of Christ.
The Creed also speaks of the Spirit and the church, but both depend upon the Incarnation. The Spirit does not introduce a qualitatively new revelation. The Spirit comes from the Father and the Son. In other words, the Spirit shapes the church according to the work of the Son in redeeming the Father's originally good creation now corrupted by sin.
I know of no major classical theologian who would claim that contemporary experience supersedes or is even equal to incarnation. Athanasius, for example, thought that one could know God as orderly and powerful in creation, but this knowledge of God did not reveal God as a personal savior. That only happened in Jesus Christ. Similarly, Hooker felt that experience could never reveal the supernatural saving truth found in Jesus Christ; only Scripture did that. He would be appalled to think that someone would actually dare to place experience above or even equal to Scripture.
Implicitly, covertly, Johnston has introduced a pagan deity. Paganism begins with the assumption that the divine is revealed in the multiplicity of images found in general experience. That is Johnston's position.
Johnston's Hermeneutic
Once Johnston has redefined Scripture as the stories of an ancient people, and shown how these stories are continually reassembled according to fresh experiences, he is now ready to introduce his method for interpreting Scripture.
Johnston's hermeneutic occurs in three steps. First, one begins with the literal sense, strict attention to the words of a text, their syntax and their meaning. This is invaluable and affirmed by the hermeneutical tradition.
Secondly, and this is the heart of the matter, the student of Scripture goes behind the text to the history of the text and the history behind the text. By the former Johnston means how the text arose, the history of its conversion from event or speech to oral tradition to written text. The history behind the text is found by reconstructing the social, economic, religious, and social conditions of the person and communities that wrote the text.
Finally, once one understands the text in its original historical and social context, one then arrives at the prophetic or spiritual meaning. This is what the text says today, or how it illumines the "action of God" in our lives.
We may first note that this three step hermeneutic isolates a given text by removing it from its place in the biblical narrative. One simply reads the text, goes to the community behind it, and then discerns the meaning. This allows each individual text, in and of itself, to become a discrete revelation of God, without showing its unity and relation to Scripture as a whole. Further, the text itself no longer becomes a revelation of God speaking, but a revelation of the community behind the text. In this way God, as the primary actor in the biblical drama, is simply eliminated. This justifies Johnston's belief that contemporary communities can be sources of revelation, equal to if not superseding Scripture.
Imagine for the moment that Scripture is like a play in which God is the principle character. Over the course of the play the word and deeds of God give unity to the play, and by interaction with others, establishes God and the other characters as credible. What remains after the words and deeds of God are removed from the play? The play decomposes into a series of vignettes without any overall unity in which the various characters appear as partially developed persons. The real meaning of Scripture is utterly lost. The vignettes become independent units, each a window into the ineffable. In short, the pagan form, reality as the revelation of a multiplicity of gods emerges.
The Hermeneutic in Action
In his next chapter, "Breaking Open the Word," Johnston applies his hermeneutic to two biblical texts. I will consider his first example, his interpretation of Mark 5:1-20, the story of the Gadarene demoniac.
On the basis of scholarly reconstruction, Johnston claims that the community that wrote Mark's gospel was a Gentile Christian community struggling to maintain its radical values in a Roman/Greek cultural milieu. In contrast to the hierarchical and exclusive social life of the Romans, the Marcan community practiced a radically egalitarian and inclusive ethic.
In regard to Mark 5:1-20, Johnston reaches this conclusion on the basis of a number of clues. For example, he notes that the demons name themselves "legion," a Roman military term denoting a band of soldiers. Casting out the "legion" would then symbolize the eradication of the oppressive social and economic structure maintained by Roman military power. From there, Johnson views the exorcism of the Gadarene demoniac as the proclamation of a social program. In other words, the text has a hidden meaning, a social program found by reconstructing the social world behind Mark's gospel and seeing the text in that context:
Mark's gospel is rather like a richly nuanced cryptogram, encoding in its story world the details of Mark's social world. And Mark's Jesus, in turn, wipes the Palestinian landscape clean of its dominant politics and its prevailing piety in order to establish an alternate social reality what he will call, as the gospel moves forward from these stories, the "kingdom of God."
Building the kingdom of God involves "wiping the landscape clean" of economic exploitation and class oppression, political domination and colonial occupation.(11)
From there, it is but a short step to the spiritual or prophetic meaning of the text, the call to social justice:
Where is the demoniac of economic exploitation in the neighborhoods or our urban poor? Where do we collude with the demons of oppression in our political process? Where is the shackling of the mind in our schools and of the spirit in our churches? And where are our "swineherds" who anxiously oppose the unmasking of the powers of darkness? Mark's gospel draws sharp attention to our dependence on, indeed, our addiction to, habits of economic entitlement and personal power. These are our stalwart twentieth century Western demons, but we dare not name the truth of them for fear of wreaking havoc on all hat is comfortably familiar in our social world. (12)
This is called "breaking open the Word," an apt metaphor because one cracks open the text like breaking open a nut. One then discards the shell but eats the meat within.
Several comments are in order. First, Johnston's second hermeneutical step, the passage to the community behind the text through the use of scholarly reconstruction, erases the possibility that Mark 5:1-20 might be telling us something of the supernatural power of God. Johnston is not alone in this. The general aim of modern scholarly analysis of biblical texts is not to affirm God's act, but to reconstruct social worlds behind the text. Once that world is reconstructed, the interpretation of the text becomes a social political program since this is all that is left.
Mark 5:1-20 cannot be reduced to a social program. The passage may well have social implications, but first and foremost it describes God acting and speaking in the words and deeds of Jesus to save, help, and deliver a possessed person. Athanasius knew this; so did the church fathers. They believed God could act, and they read Scripture as a whole. Since they read the whole of Scripture, they knew God's work in Christ could not be reduced to the status of a social program similar to that of the Old Testament. Something new happened in Jesus Christ, something that went beyond the Exodus, the entrance into the Canaan, and the formation of a new social, economic, and religious order. Let us attend to what they have to say about the Gadarene demoniac:
It was for the greater good of attesting God's power and eliciting faith that the swine were slain by the agency of demons. (Jerome, Chrysostom) The glory of humanity made in the image of God had freely fallen to the depths under the power of unclean spirits. (Prudentius) These fallen spiritual creatures were first to recognize the Son as holy, sovereign, God. (Athanasius, Peter Chrysologus, Prudentius) It is one who is truly man and truly God that the demons instantly recognize with dread. (Gregory Nazianzen) Even if a whole army of demons takes up residence in a single body, the redeemer can transform human misery into soundness. (Lactantius, Ephrem the Syrian) Limited powers are temporarily permitted to the demonic to test faith. (Tertullian) The church continues to petition God to deliver the faithful from demonic powers. (Apostolic Constitutions, Ephrem the Syrian) The demonic powers are not originally and directly willed by God but are only permitted by God under the conditions of sin, and as a consequence of taking freedom seriously, they play a role in drawing forth the greater good. They are already being bound up by the anointed one. (John of Damascus) The faithful today attest the same cleansing grace. (Gregory the Great)(13)
What is the immediate, overwhelming, interpretation of Mark 5:1-20 given by the church fathers? Is it not that God acted in the words of Jesus to liberate a possessed man from the power of the demons? That interpretation of the text is as obvious as the text itself. There is no cryptogram here. It is a witness to the act of a sovereign God. Further, the fathers claimed that God the redeemer continued to do the same in their day as well. Gregory the Great (540 604), for example, reflected on the passage by saying that a "legion of demons has been, as I believe, cast out of me."(14) It is well known that the early church exorcised its catechumens for months prior to their baptism. It was believed that this power to heal led to a qualitatively new form of life superior to any other.
Similarly, Athanasius frequently claimed that God the Son sets human beings free from the power of the devils as well as creating love of God, purity of heart, and joy in believing. He believed in the utterly obvious meaning of Mark 5:1-20 because he saw that Christ in his day did exactly what Mark 5:1-20 claimed that Jesus did then.
For it is plain that if Christ be dead, he could not be expelling demons and spoiling idols; for a dead man the spirits would not have obeyed. But if they be manifestly expelled by the naming of his name, it must be evident that he is not dead; especially as spirits, seeing even what is unseen by men, could tell if Christ were dead and refuse him no obedience at all. But as it is, what irreligious men believe not, the spirits see that he is God and hence they fly and fall at his feet, saying just what they uttered when he was in the body: "We know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God," and "Ah, what have we to do with thee, thou Son of God. I pray thee, torment me not." (15)
Or how, if he [Jesus Christ] is no longer active (for this is proper to one dead), does he stay from their activity those who are active and alive, so that the adulterer no longer commits adultery, and the murderer murders no more, nor is the inflicter of wrong any longer grasping, and the profane is henceforth religious. Or how, if he be not risen but is dead, does he drive away, and pursue, and cast down those false gods said by the unbelievers to be alive, and the demons they worship? For where Christ is named, and his faith, there all idolatry is deposed and all imposture of evil spirits is exposed, and any spirit is unable to endure even the name, nay, even on barely hearing it, flies and disappears. But this work is not that of one dead, but of one that lives especially of God.(16)
Furthermore, the patristic interpreters of Mark 5:1-20 placed this text in a wider biblical and theological context. They did not go behind the text to a reconstructed "Marcan community," but read it in the context of the entire biblical witness. The statements that the "glory of humanity made in the image of God has fallen to the depths," or that "limited powers are temporarily permitted to the demonic," or that "the demonic powers are not originally and directly willed by God but only permitted by God under the conditions of sin," or "these fallen spiritual creatures," are all statements indicating an awareness that God created the world good, that there was a fall, and that the Redeemer reversed the conditions of the fall. The sweep of biblical history, from Genesis to Revelation, lies behind these statements and gives them their true narrative and theological context.
Thus, if the church fathers are right, the meaning of Mark 5:1-20 is that Jesus cast out demons, and further, they can be cast out in his name today. That, above all, must be professed with all possible force. This is not surprising. Jesus Christ is Lord. He does these sorts of things, as much now as then. Unfortunately, it is a miserable fact that virtually the whole of contemporary exegesis of Scripture ignores what God has done in the past, does now, and will always do. But any biblical scholar, academic, or Christian who takes Mark 5:1-20 seriously as God's act, and shares the insight of the church fathers, needs to seriously consider that this passage, in conjunction with many others in the New Testament, tell us that God has given to the church the authority to set people free in the name of Jesus.(17) That is the immediate, obvious interpretation of this biblical text.
I will omit Johnston's next section, on ethics, as I am addressing it in another essay on Hooker and Timothy Sedgwick. As the reader may well imagine, however, Johnston does not believe that God speaks his Word of ethical command. Therefore, he does not believe that God tells us how to live ethically. Rather than a code of ethics, Scripture presumably reveals a set of ethical abstractions such as love, equality, mutuality, justice, inclusiveness, faithfulness, and so forth. If, however, God does not speak concretely, if he does not give specific ethical injunctions, why would he command specific abstractions? In the end, these abstractions will have little ethical substance. Their empty forms will be filled by an amalgam of impulses, feelings and social trends taken from experience.
Johnston's "God"
Once Johnston has eliminated the concept of God's act, placed experience ahead of Scripture, defined biblical interpretation in terms of community story, and turned ethics into a progressive realization of abstract norms, he is ready to discuss the nature of God as found in Scripture. That chapter is entitled "Who is the God of the Bible?"
The Christian response to that question is that the God of the Bible is the Father of Jesus Christ. That is the most important affirmation in the whole of Scripture. Without that, there is nothing. But Johnston doesn't make that claim. He is wondering about the God of the Old Testament, and he doesn't really connect that God to Jesus Christ.
To begin with, Johnston notices that the Old Testament is filled with multiple images of God. There is a reason for this. Israel, like her pagan neighbors, found a wide variety of images in creation. Among these images, only certain ones were applied to God. But unlike her neighbors, these images were welded together in a narrative stream of God's acts which placed them in a new interpretative context. It was this specific narrative stream of God's acts that distinguished the Hebrew God from the pagan deities.(18)
Johnston, however, reverses the process. He picks texts out of the biblical stream, isolates their images, and proclaims that these multiple images reveal "God." In this way the narrative meaning centering in Jesus Christ is lost. "God" then becomes a mystic one beyond all images, yet including and harmonizing all of them. Since the source of these images was originally creation, they reproduce the pagan form.
Further, since Scripture is really the product of communities telling "their" stories, and since the divine is given in the stories, it follows logically that "God ... makes us up as we go along as much as we make up God."(19) Athanasius, of course, would consider this blasphemy. Here is Johnston:
There is no single metaphor, nor complex of metaphors, that serves fully to define the ineffable character of God. No single revelation can exhaust all that is to be revealed. In fact, the more adept you become at the kind of critical Bible reading I have tried to suggest in these pages, the more you begin to see that the God of the biblical tradition is not a single reality at all, but a multiplicity of realities, a diversity, more a plurality than a unity and often uncomfortably so.
I prefer to think that God's variety, ambiguity, nuance, and contradiction come honestly from people's authentic experience of God in concrete and diverse situations. In this incarnational stance the divine and the human are both involved in the ongoing work of creation, so God makes us up as we go along as much as we make up God.
God may be a single, comprehensive reality in heaven, but the God we find in most of the biblical texts who actually seems to have some "shadow" sides as well is busy and restless, an innovative Creator who is working some very strange sides of the streets of the world.(20)
Johnston calls his stance "incarnational." By this he does not mean the Incarnation of the Word in Jesus Christ. Rather, everything is "incarnational," meaning that creation's diverse images all contribute to the sense of the ineffable god. Implicit, though not stated, is the idea that those who hold to Jesus Christ as the definitive image of God have a limited and restricted view of incarnation. Similarly, when he gets to Jesus and the incarnation, he will expand the valid images for Christ so as to include present experience and avoid what he calls a "boxed in Jesus."
In the third quotation, Johnston denies that the biblical God is a "single, comprehensive reality" outside of heaven, and implies that he may not be so in heaven either. In other words, he denies the Christian tradition that God is One. The oneness of God was the traditional defense against paganism. To say that God was three did not mean that God was three distinct Gods. God was one in essence ("substance"), three in persons, with each person sharing in the one divine essence. Johnston ignores all this. He wants a god who is an ineffable one internally, but externally manifested in a variety of images, metaphors, stories, and myths.
Further, since these multiple images are taken from creation, they must include images of evil. Pagan religions were well aware that the powers of nature both bless and curse. The sun brings light and life, but also drought and death. Rain produces crops, but also flooding and destruction. The pagan gods were both good and evil. By contrast, however, Scripture does not locate evil in God. Consistent with his pagan approach, however, Johnston wants to include the full range of images, the light and the "shadow" in God. Therefore he claims that God has his "shadow sides" (note the plural) as well.(21)
As an example of these ideas in action, we may consider Johnston's treatment of Isaiah 6:1-4 and Hosea 11:1-4. In Isaiah 6, God is utterly transcendent, "awesome, numinous, and presidential, who occupies a reality vastly different from our own." Hosea's God, however, is close at hand, one who "takes your infant hands in his and steadies your halting first steps, raises you up when you fall, and cuddles you cheek to cheek." From this, Johnston concludes that each of these conceptions is a "very different deity"(22) from the other. That is, they are two different gods.
They may be different gods, but Johnston "does not think for a moment that these two images are contradictory; in fact, one complements the other."(23) This is logical. These two images may contradict verbally, but each points to the "ineffable," the transcendent divine one beyond verbal contradiction. Yet each image is required since all images are required, and therefore, they complement each other.
The passages, however, do not refer to two "very different" deities. They refer to one deity, the Father of Jesus Christ. In both passages God speaks, and that spoken Word is Jesus Christ. In Isaiah, God addresses the prophet with the words, "Whom shall I send?" In Hosea, speaking in the first person, God describes his calling Israel out of Egypt. Above all, Jesus was the one sent by God, and the New Testament understands his life, death, and resurrection as a new Exodus from the Egypt of sin. He is the one fulfillment of all the prophetic words. As Hebrews 1:1 puts it, "God, who gave to our forefathers many different glimpses of the truth in the words of the prophets, has now, at the end of the present age, given us the truth in his Son." Since Johnston does not read Scripture with Christ at the center, he concludes that Isaiah and Hosea refer to two "very different" deities.
Johnston ends his chapter on the God of the Bible with a passage that rather neatly sums up his pagan vision:
In the end, Isaiah probably got it right: Yahweh is other! other! other! Which is just another way of make the point of this chapter: God has a rich and diverse interiority that no single reading can exhaust. But I think it is also a joy and comfort really Good News that the God of the Bible has some scandalous dimensions as well. Alongside wisdom and justice and love and compassion and peace, we discover ambiguity, contradiction, and incongruity as well as some rather bad behavior. We know these things to be true about ourselves, but we did not know them about God. Once having made that discovery, however, we are set free to read the stories of our own lives without having to omit specific verses that look as if they should not belong in our personal texts. It turns out what we may be more in the image of our Creator than we had ever thought.(24)
Here we have a slight change. In previous passages Johnston had located the sense of complexity in the "variety, ambiguity, nuance, and contradiction come honestly from people's authentic experience of God in concrete and diverse situations." In other words, the "divine" multiplicity lay outside God. Here, however, he moves the complexity into God, with the single term "God" referring to an abstract catchall that contains the full panoply of diverse and scarcely related images. This divine One is wholly "other! other! other!", meaning that it transcends yet requires each and every metaphor. Since creation's images contradict each other, some good and some evil, this "other! other! other!" will manifest itself in contrary qualities existing side by side. Love exists right along with some "rather bad behavior," which makes for "ambiguity, contradiction, and incongruity." We knew this about ourselves, now we know it about God.
This is a mystical pagan vision, a sense of ultimate mystery coupled with a pantheon of divine images including the personification of human virtues and vices. This is the logical conclusion of a hermeneutic in which "God makes us up as we go along as much as we make up God."
Finally, we may note that this "Good News" sets us free to "read the stories of our own lives without having to omit specific verses that look as if they should not belong in our personal texts." When decoded, this means we are free to be as much of a scoundrel as God is.
Johnston's Jesus
Once Johnston has eliminated God's act, turned Scripture into a series of community stories, subordinated Scripture to experience, ignored God's ethical command, and defined "God" through a pantheon of images united in a mystical one, he is ready to introduce the subject of Jesus Christ. This occurs in his chapter, "Who is the Jesus of the Bible?"
Johnston is quite consistent. First, he does not connect Jesus Christ to the whole of Scripture so that Jesus Christ is the central revelation of the God of the Bible. Further, he does not think there is one Jesus Christ in Scripture, the one "incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary" and "crucified for us under Pontius Pilate." Rather, just as the God of the Bible was multiple, so is Jesus. Each biblical Jesus was the product of an original Jesus history, transformed and augmented by different communities on the basis of different experiences. Finally, just as the biblical people created four gospel versions of Jesus, communities today can create their own version of Jesus on the basis of their own unique experience.
Johnston's begins by reading the gospels as a three layered composite. First, there is the Jesus of history. This is what you would get if you followed Jesus around with a video camera. But the early church didn't have video cameras. They had stories about Jesus that circulated orally. This original layer of oral stories is called the "Jesus of history." As these stories were circulated they were embellished and transformed, with material added or subtracted according to the varied circumstances and interests of different communities. This is the second layer. Finally, various communities reflected theologically on the stories. They added their theological reflections to the stories. This produced the third layer. The latter two layers are called the "Christ of faith." This process of transformation took place in different communities, each arriving at different stories of Jesus. Finally, various communities wrote down some of the transformed stories. Four accounts were later preserved as authoritative, the four different gospel accounts of Jesus.
The Jesus of history belongs to the first layer, the Christ of faith belongs to the second and third. This is not to say that the first is the only authentic layer while the other two are somehow invalid. Quite the contrary. Just as we discovered with the God of the Hebrew Bible, redaction of the Jesus material functioned to assist revelation. In short, the gospels are not journalistic recitations of the life of Jesus; he left behind followers who were thinkers, not merely scribes, and who believed the Christ of faith was still with them in the Holy Spirit, teaching and leading them into new truths.(25)
This process can be illustrated by applying it to Mark 5:1-20, the story of the Gadarene demoniac. Originally, there may not have been any miracle at all. A strange and unkempt man may have recognized something startling about Jesus, and in his excitement, frightened some pigs and they ran into a lake. As the story circulated, however, it became exaggerated. The man was described as possessed. He was fierce, he broke his chains. These details entered the story at level two. Even more, as the early Christian community felt the holy in this story of Jesus, they came to sense he was the Son of God. Therefore, the story picked up that title, placing it in the lips of the possessed man through whom the demons recognized Jesus. The title, "Son of God," thus belongs to level three, the level of theological reflection.
Crucial to this analysis is that God did not act to deliver the possessed man, just as he did not calm the storm, feed the five thousand, and raise Jesus from the dead. Or, if Jesus really did deliver the man, it was the effect of his compelling personality rather than God's act. In other words, phrases about Jesus referring to God's divine acts, or Jesus sharing in God's divinity as God's Son, belong to the second and third layers. They are the "Christ of faith," creations of the early church. This is a logical conclusion to a hermeneutic that has eliminated God's act.
Let us suppose for a moment that Jesus, more or less, did as Scripture claims. Let us also assume, like Gregory the Great from whom a "legion of demons has been, as I believe, cast out of me," that demons are cast out today in the name of Jesus. Let us assume further that we were in the crowd that saw Jesus cast the legion of demons out of the man. What would we then think? We could maintain skepticism by believing that Jesus' miracles were occasional freaks of nature, or the result of his impressive personality, or we could believe that Jesus was possessed by the supernatural power of the devil, or else believe that he did the works of God. Those who witnessed Jesus' mighty acts and wrote the gospels knew where they stood, as did the fathers, as do those whom Jesus has liberated today. For them, he did the works of God. That conclusion would have been obvious and immediate. The claim that he was the Son of God would have been rooted in the reality that Jesus did what only God could do.
Whether the demons actually called Jesus "Son of the Most High God" is beyond my verification. It is known that evil spirits sometimes confess Christ at the moment of defeat.(26) In that case, the demons' confession could have belonged to level one. What is important, however, is that Jesus acted to save, then and now. What must be denied is that the title was simply a mystical impression an experience of holy being in the man Jesus (Macquarrie), the Infinite in the finite (Tillich), Jesus' potent God consciousness (Schleiermacher), rather than a title for a man who did what only God can do.
Even if the original stories were partially transformed as a result of subsequent reflection, I would affirm that this reflection, the "Christ of faith," was rooted in the reality of Christ as the second person of the Trinity incarnate as the Son of Man.
If this be true, if the "Christ of faith" is integrally related to the "Jesus of history," then there is no artificial division between the two. Rather, there was a Jesus who lived and a God who acted, and the God who acted did so in the words and deeds of the Jesus who lived. From their view, the gospels proclaim the man Jesus and the divine presence inextricably bound together. This eventually found its authoritative statement at Chalcedon, the doctrine that Jesus Christ was one person of two natures, human and divine.
By contrast, "Christ of faith" scholarship has little or nothing to say about Jesus being God, except to report the history of the concept in early Christian writings. Instead of the divine and human natures in the person of Jesus Christ, such scholarship presents the non-divine Jesus of history and an interpretation of the early church called the Christ of faith. These two human elements are then merged into four separate stories called gospels, devoid of God's saving acts.
Athanasius, however, saw the matter in an utterly different light. In his view, it would be madness to view the deity of Christ as a theological add on to a human Jesus who did nothing divine. Over and over again in his battle with Arius he insisted that Jesus was God because he did what only God could do. Further, he had to do what only God could do or he could not save. Only God could reverse the sin, corruption, and death, that afflicts the world. Only God could raise Lazarus from the dead. Jesus did this, and therefore, he was God.
This is not to say that Athanasius didn't engage in theological reflection. He did, and some of his reflections took him beyond the language of Scripture. For example, he affirmed the homoousia, a term not found in Scripture. But his reflections did not allow him to create attributes which did not have their foundation in Scripture. In fact, his Against Arius is an intensive analysis of Scripture as the one Word of God, Jesus Christ. Here are two typical quotations out of many. In the first, Athanasius counters the assertion that Jesus was a phantom and not a man. In the second, he counters those who would claim Jesus was not God, that the divine attributes did not have their origin in reality:
And thus when there was need to restore to health Peter's wife's mother who was sick of a fever, our Lord's hand touched her, but His Godhead cured her (S. Matt. viii. 14). It was not the spittle and the clay, but Christ's Almighty Power that gave sight to the man that had been born blind from his birth (S. John ix. 11). The voice of man called Lazarus out of the grave, but it was the Word of God which raised him from the dead (S John xi. 43). And our Lord, by acting in this manner, gave evidence of His manhood, and prevented any suspicion if His being only an apparition or phantom.(27)
For his charging evil spirits, and their being driven forth, this deed is not of man, but of God. Or who that saw him healing the diseases to which the human race is subject, can still think him man and not God. For he cleansed lepers, made lame men to walk, opened the hearing of deaf men, made blind men to see again, and in a word drove away from men all diseases and infirmities: from which acts it was possible even for the most ordinary observer to see his Godhead.(28)
Once Johnston has separated the life of Jesus into four gospel portraits, and once each gospel has been separated into layers, he then compares the first layer of each against the first layer of the other three. Essentially, he comes up with nothing. There is nothing there because a primary actor in the story, God acting, has been eliminated, allowing the residue to fall into a heap of sand. This heap can be variously interpreted, and from my reading, contemporary scholarship appears to drift from one hypothesis to another. Johnston describes the state of current scholarship with these words:
Depending on what you read, the Jesus of current scholarship is an eschatological prophet, an itinerant Cynic sage, a social revolutionary, a teacher of unconventional wisdom, a founder of a religious movement, or a shaman that is, a mystical holy man.(29)
What do we have here? We have six versions of how Jesus could have been a human being. Not one of them makes the claim that Jesus was fully human, yet fully divine, and that a primary significance of the human nature was that it revealed God's mighty acts.
What however, is the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith? Or, why is it that the gospel narratives differ on certain features of Jesus' life such things as the day of the crucifixion, the order of the temptations, the wording of the Beatitudes, or even the voice in which Jesus speaks? The church fathers, Origin for one, were aware of these differences. This matter can be addressed from the point of view of the Creed.
According to the Creed, each person of the Trinity is directly associated with a specific divine act. The Father is associated with creation, the Son with incarnation, the Spirit with the "one, holy, and apostolic church" and "life of the world to come." Although a specific person of the Trinity is at the fore of any act of God, the other two persons are also present and active as well. As a result, the whole Trinity is involved in every divine act. For example, God the Son is the one who became incarnate. Nevertheless the Son was sent by the Father and "incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary." Therefore, both Father and Spirit were involved in the Incarnation.
Consequently, the Spirit was involved in the witness to the Incarnation, that is, in the work of gospel formation. Johnston is right to say that Jesus "left behind followers who were thinkers, not merely scribes," and that the Spirit led these followers. The apostles reflected theologically on Christ, and their reflections are woven into the original gospel stories.
He is amiss, however, to claim that the Spirit can guide the community into "new truths." If the community can create "new truths" on the basis of new experience, this implies that the Son (the Truth) comes from the Father (general experience) and the Spirit (community). This is not the creedal faith. For the Creed, the Son does not come from the Father and the Spirit. The Spirit comes from the Father and the Son, which means that the Spirit in forming the gospels truthfully witnessed to the Incarnation as the redemption of the Father's original good creation now corrupted by sin and death. Therefore, while the Spirit and the Christian community played a part in preserving the witness to Jesus Christ, the Spirit's work was not one of invention, but of faithful reflection and exposition of God's saving acts in Jesus Christ. The Spirit did not create "new truths" as Johnston claims, but more fully revealed the truth of Christ.
If the Spirit was faithful to the truth of the Incarnation, and if the apostles were led by the Spirit, then the apostolic witness to Christ developed and strengthened the revelation in Christ without exceeding its limits. That is the creedal statement that the Church is "apostolic." Being apostolic does not mean having the authority to assemble a new Jesus under the impact of a spirit. Rather, it means that the biblical apostolic witness is reliable and that the church must be faithful to it. This has been the claim of the church from the beginning.(30)
This is a faith statement, affirmed by those who hold the theology of the Creeds. It cannot be proved nor disproved. If someone wants to claim that the Spirit created a "Christ of faith," and that this "Christ of faith" was composed out of "new truths," it is hard to see how their claim can be falsified since we have virtually no other source for the person of Jesus except the biblical records themselves.
Finally, when Johnston reads the four gospel accounts, he reads each against the other. This maximizes the differences between them and leads to four different versions of Jesus. Johnston knows this isn't the tradition: "By and large, Christian tradition has not encouraged horizontal reading, comparing one gospel account to another. Instead, the faithful have been taught, if they have been taught at all, to read vertically and look for agreement and unity. The result gives us a boxed in Jesus."(31)
There may be four different gospels of Jesus Christ in Scripture, but the church has always known there was only one Jesus. He was not four persons, nor does Jesus take on new forms today in light of new experiences. Nor does the fact that there are some variations in the gospels imply that Jesus was multiple rather than one. There are scholars today who take account of the different gospel witnesses, yet recognize that Jesus was one, with the result that there is a single substantial person revealed in all four gospels. There are even those who understand that Christ did miracles, and that he acted as God. N.T. Wright's "Jesus and the Victory of God" is a good example.
Why does Johnston impugn the tradition with the term "boxed in Jesus?" He wants to get out of the box. He wants to create new versions of Jesus on the basis of new experience. But that is the one thing the Spirit will not do. Only when Christ comes again will there be a qualitatively new revelation, and even then, it will not deny but complete and fulfill the revelation already given in Jesus Christ.
In the end, where does Johnston leave us in regard to Jesus? He leaves us with the Jesus of "experience and promise." That is all that matters the Jesus we experience today, the one assembled "out of the lives and hopes of believing communities and faithful individuals." This has nothing to do with the apostolic faith.
Thus, we are left at the end of this chapter with the question I posed at the beginning still unanswered: "Who is the Jesus portrayed in the Bible?" But perhaps that is not the most urgent question; it is really only another way to ask, "Who do people say that I am?" That question seems peripheral, especially if we focus only on the literal and historical Jesus. But when we attend to the prophetic Jesus as well, what is primary and crucial is not the Jesus of record but the Jesus of experience and promise. He is ultimately assembled out of the lives and hopes of believing communities and faithful individuals. Who do you say that he is?(32)
This claim, the claim that the Spirit can redefine the truth is nothing new. One of its first proponents was the heretic Montanus, followed by the spiritual Franciscans, the radical Anti-Baptists, the enthusiasts of Hooker's time, and those today who feel they can rewrite Scripture as they please. As Hooker states:
When they of the family of love have it once in their heads that Christ does not signify any one person but a quality whereof many are partakers; that to be raised is nothing else but to be regenerated or endowed with the said quality; and that when separation of them which have it from them which have it not is here made, this is judgment; how plainly do they imagine that the Scripture everywhere speaketh in the favour of that sect.(33)
Johnston does not believe that Christ was "one person," but "many," created by those who have the "said quality," that is, the "Jesus of experience and promise," by virtue of the fact that resurrection means that they are "regenerated or endowed with the said quality; ..." And this text, "Engaging the Word," is an attempt to show that "Scripture everywhere speaketh in the favour of that sect."
What will happen if Johnston's hermeneutic is adopted by the Church? First and foremost, the Father of Jesus Christ will be replaced by a pagan deity wearing the mask of Christian truth. As a result, the living God of the Bible, the one who acts to save, as much now as always, will be replaced by a pantheon of programs, fads, insights, and revelations, all more or less contemporary, all more or less brilliant, all more or less relevant, and all, inevitably, surely, and without delay, leaving us bereft of the One whose "power within us is able to do infinitely more than we ever dare to ask or imagine." In short, the loss of the gospel and the ruin of the Church.
Endnotes
1. Michael Johnston, Engaging the Word. The New Church's Teaching Series, Volume 3. Cambridge: Cowley Publications, 1998. All quotations of Johnston are from this text.
2. Johnston, pp. ix-x.
3. Frances M. Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 21.
4. Johnston, pp. 25, 97.
5. Johnston, pp. 12, 12-13, 23, 4, 19, 23.
6. Johnston, pp. 20, 22.
7. Johnston, pp. 94-95.
8. Athanasius, Against Arius. I, 38.
9. Johnston, pp. 25, 37.
10. In regards to the phrase "from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became man," the 1979 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer inserts a word not found in the original Creed. That word is "power." It reads "by the power of the Holy Spirit" rather than "from the Holy Spirit." This weakens the original conception. Men and women in the Old Testament did things by the power of the Holy Spirit, but the Creed is saying something much stronger the divine Son became "incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary." This was a unique event without Old Testament parallels.
11. Johnston, pp. 60 61, 61.
12. Johnston, p. 62.
13. Oden, Thomas C. and Hall, Christopher A., eds. Ancient Christian Commentary On Scripture, New Testament II: Mark." Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998, pp. 66 67. This text is one of a series on the patristic interpretation of Scripture. The series is in process, and it is invaluable.
14. Oden and Hall, p. 71.
15. Athanasius. On the Incarnation of the Word. The Library of Christian Classics, Volume III: Christology of the Later Fathers. Hardy, Edward Rochie, and Richardson, Cyril C., eds. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954, p. 86.
16. Athanasius. On the Incarnation of the Word, pp. 84-85.
17. While I cannot go into detail here, I have been involved in a ministry of deliverance for more than thirty years, and have seen first hand the astonishing things that happen in the name of Jesus Christ. Over and over again I have known people to be delivered in ways that absolutely amaze me, as much now as when I first began so many years ago.
18. A good analysis of how this happened can be found in Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973
It wasn't the fact that Yahweh revealed himself in history that made him unique. Pagan deities could act in history. Rather, Yahweh revealed himself in a specific history, with a specific people. This is what distinguished Yahweh from other gods. Ultimately, God is unique because he has revealed himself in a specific person, Jesus Christ, and not just persons in general.
19. Johnston, p. 97.
20. Johnston, pp, 99-100, 97, 97.
21. The term "shadow" is taken from the analytical psychology of Carl Jung. For Jung, wholeness occurs when good and evil, light and dark, female and male, spirit and matter, unite to form the "coincidence of opposites," the divine one behind all finite phenomena.
22. Johnston, p. 99.
23. Johnston, p. 99.
24. Johnston, pp. 114-15.
25. Johnston, pp. 119-20.
26. It is rarely recognized that one of the decisive turning points in the development of Karl Barth's theology was his encounter with the Blumhardts. The Blumhardts, father and son, carried out a ministry of healing and exorcism, and Barth visited them quite early in his ministry. There he saw God act miraculously. This experience, together with WWI and what he called the "Strange New World of the Bible," led him to see that Scripture was concerned with God's deeds, and not simply the history of religious experience.
It was only after his reading of Anselm in the late 1920s, however, that Barth was able to formulate in trinitarian and christological terms the meaning of God's act or Word. This analysis forms the prolegomena of his Church Dogmatics. But he did not forget the Blumhardts, nor did he forget that a decisive moment in their ministry occurred when a demon was cast out of a young women. As it left, it uttered "Jesus is Victor." Among other places, Barth speaks of the Blumhardts in a section of the Church Dogmatics entitled "Jesus is Victor."
That Jesus conquers was not stated nor known, and certainly not "settled" in this way among the contemporaries of Blumhardt, whether extra or intra muros ecclesiae, whether in the world of Goethe or Hegel, whether in official circles, pietistic groups or theology, whether by the Rationalists, Supranaturalists and Pietists of the 18th century or the Romantics, Speculatives, Biblicists or theologians of the Awakening of the 19th century. To be sure, many important things were then seen and said concerning Jesus the God man of the early dogma, Jesus the supreme vehicle of eternal reason, Jesus the friend of humanity and Teacher of ethics, Jesus the Saviour of souls, Jesus the centre of Christian piety, and, after the fabulous discovery of D. F. Strauss, Jesus the mystical personage. If we turn to any secular or Christian book of the period, and among the Christian books it makes little difference whether it is a work of scholarship or edification, the two words said about Jesus in this declaration, namely, that He "is Victor," could be put on the outer margin of any of them, but they could not have the decisive and comprehensive significance, the emphasis, which they have for Blumhardt. ... The only question which is finally relevant in relation to the incident is the spiritual one whether or not we will hear this saying. (Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV, Part Three, first half, Edinburgh: T&T; Clark, 1961, p. 171.)
27. Athanasius, Against Arius, III, 32.
28. Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, p. 72.
29. Johnston, p. 127.
30. Let me suggest chapter 1, pp. 1ff., of J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, Third Edition. New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1972. Also, T. E. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, Edinburgh: T&T; Clark, 1988, pp. 285f.
31. Johnston, p. 178.
32. Johnston, p. 141.
33. Hooker, Lawes, Preface, III, 9.
The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D.
May, 2002.
