Liberating the Gospel: Translating the message of Jesus in a Globalised World (sample)

Liberating the Gospel

Liberating the Gospel Translating the Message of Jesus Christ in a Globalised World

David Smith

First published in 2016 by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd 1 Spencer Court 140–142 Wandsworth High Street London SW18 4JJ Š David Smith 2016 The right of David Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN 978-0-232-53233-3 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Designed and typeset by Kerrypress, St Albans AL3 8JL Printed and bound by Scandbook AB

For Joyce who continually encouraged me to ‘keep on writing’

We are groping after something new and revolutionary without being able to understand it or utter it yet. That is our own fault. During these years the Church has fought for self-preservation as though it were an end in itself, and has thereby lost its chance to speak a word of reconciliation to mankind and the world at large ‌ We are not yet out of the melting pot, and every attempt to hasten matters will only delay the Church’s conversion and purgation. It is not for us to prophesy the day, but the day will come when men will be called again to utter the word of God with such power as will change the world. It will be a new language, which will horrify men, and yet overwhelm them by its power. It will be the language of a new righteousness and truth, a language which proclaims the peace of God with men and the advent of his kingdom.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, written from his prison cell in 1944 shortly before his execution by the Nazis Letters and Papers from Prison (London: Collins/Fontana, 1959), p. 160

Contents

Foreword xi Introduction 1

1. What’s the Problem?

5

Danger Ahead!

Bridging the Gap

6 11

2. The Galilean Jesus

15

The Gospel in Context Jesus and Galilee Listening to Jesus The Finger of God Jesus and the City Leaving Galilee

3. Paul and his Gospel in Context Paul in the Flow of Biblical History At the New Frontiers Windows on Emerging Churches Turning from Idols Politics, Power and the Gospel Message and Mission

21 26 34 40 43 50

55 58 62 65 73 80 95

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4. John of Patmos: Imagining Another World He Who Has An Ear The Door Standing Open in Heaven The Two Scrolls Babylon and New Jerusalem Hearing Revelation Today

5. Liberating the Gospel Twenty-first-century Questions Globalisation and its Discontents Not by Bread Alone A Post-Christendom Agenda The Shape of the Emerging Paradigm Liberating the Gospel Signs of Hope

107 110 116 125 131 142

149 152 156 166 175 178 180 188

Notes 195 Bibliography 239 Index 253

Foreword

by Richard Bauckham

David Smith has placed at the outset to his excellent book a quotation from Dietrich Bonhoeffer that is quite stunning in its vision of the future of the church and the Gospel. It speaks perhaps even more powerfully today than it did to those who first read it after Bonhoeffer’s death. Confident that ‘the day will come when men will be called again to utter the word of God with such power as will change the world’, Bonhoeffer disclaimed ability to prophesy when that day would come. But he knew that it could only follow ‘the Church’s conversion and purgation.’ He meant, I guess, that the church must itself be converted to the message of the Gospel entrusted to it. That is, of course, something that happens again and again, here and there, in differing ways and contexts.

The ‘something new and revolutionary’ toward which Bonhoeffer felt he was ‘groping … without being able to understand it or utter it yet’, was never likely to happen all at once. But amidst the decline of Christendom in the West and the vitality of the churches of the global South, the Spirit is blowing. David Smith is one of those who are currently seeking to discern the way along which Bonhoeffer pointed.

David takes up N. T. Wright’s advice that we should read the New Testament ‘with first-century eyes and

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with twenty-first century questions’. So he engages in what he calls ‘deep listening’ to the message of Jesus and the New Testament writers. This means attending to the context in which and to which they spoke. Their Gospel was not disconnected from the political, economic, social and cultural dynamics of their world. It spoke into those dynamics, often quite precisely and pointedly.

David therefore draws fruitfully on major recent work in New Testament studies with the aim of showing both that the first-century context of the Gospel was considerably different from ours, but also that there are real analogies that can help us re-contextualize the Gospel today. In order to hear the text with ‘twenty-first century questions’ it is certainly not enough, as some Christians seem to think, merely to live in the twentyfirst century. We can live in the twenty-first century but see it with nineteenth- or twentieth-century eyes. So we need the kind of critical studies of the contemporary world on which David draws in the latter part of his book. One merit of the book is its basis in a wide range of scholarship in a variety of disciplines, such as biblical studies, missiology, the social sciences and cultural criticism.

Only by deep listening and contemporary contextualization can we ‘liberate’ the Gospel from the western cultural fetters with which it has often been constrained in the modern period. One aspect of such liberation that emerges throughout David’s book is the discovery that the message of Jesus and the New Testament writers is so much ‘bigger’ than we thought.

Its reach is cosmic and its power is world-transforming.

It is easily the equal of the ideology of economic globalization that now dominates our world, though the manner in which it works to transform is quite different from that of today’s global forces.

Foreword by Richard Bauckham xiii

As I write this, on 1 December 2015, it is all too clear that our world stands on the brink of more than one sort of catastrophe. International talks about climate change have just opened in Paris. Many thousands of migrants continue to make the dangerous journey to European countries that cannot reach agreement on how to respond. Tomorrow the House of Commons in Westminster will debate whether to bomb the headquarters of so-called Islamic State in Syria. All of these crises are interconnected. All of them are aspects of the economic globalization of which David Smith in this book has given a penetrating Christian critique.

Mostly they were unforeseen or ignored by the political leaders of the world until they forced themselves on their attention. In all of them Christians, inspired by the vision of the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed, are active on behalf of that kingdom, in campaigning and in practical service. David’s book could not be more relevant.

Richard Bauckham December 2015

Introduction

More than a decade ago when introducing my book Mission After Christendom I wrote that the experience of teaching in the tropical rainforests of Nigeria had made me realise how deeply my own faith had been conditioned

by Western culture and ‘how little I really understood the strange world of the Bible’. The quest for such understanding has continued during the intervening years and it received a significant boost when I was fortunate enough to discover the work of the Catholic biblical scholar, Sean Freyne. He had devoted his life to the study of the Galilee of Jesus and his books have shed important light on the geographical, social and political context of the ministry described in the gospels. My indebtedness to Freyne’s careful scholarship, especially his discussion of the manner in which the imperial power of Rome, including its policy of urbanisation, impinged upon the life of Jesus, creating a situation of severe social disturbance and economic hardship for the peasant population to whom his ministry was directed, will be evident in Chapter 2 of this book.

My growing awareness of the long shadow which the Roman Empire cast over first-century Galilee and Judea, and a deepening understanding of many (over)familiar texts which resulted from this, led to further questions regarding the crucial importance of a knowledge of this context for the understanding of the rest of the New

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Testament. Indeed, since Paul took the message of the crucified Messiah far beyond Palestine, making Roman cities throughout the eastern Mediterranean central in his missionary strategy, and since he expressed a deep desire to reach into the very heart of the imperial power in Rome itself, the relationship between the gospel he preached and that which Rome propagated throughout the vast region it controlled now seemed to be essential for the interpretation of Paul’s letters, and indeed, of the entire literature which makes up the New Testament.

The transforming power of this knowledge on my own reading of this literature will be evident in Chapters 3 and 4.

Having discovered a new set of lenses with which to read the Bible, the problem that then moved centre stage concerned how to relate and apply the fresh insights concerning Jesus and the gospel to the globalised world of the twenty-first century. My earlier book had focused on the demise of Christendom; now, with that entire social and religious structure in ruins, it was no longer a matter of asking what might come next, but facing up to the actual reality of the world around us today, shaped by the empire of capitalism and the ideology of consumerism. The vacuum left by the collapse of institutional Christianity in Europe, and just as importantly by the fading of the dreams of the Enlightenment, has been filled by the rise of an economistic culture in which human desire has been released from moral and ethical restraints, unleashing upon the world a vision of human existence which is essentially nihilistic. Suddenly it becomes clear that the world emerging before our eyes today is not entirely different from that of Jesus, Paul and John of Patmos, so that, as at the beginning, we discover that authentic witness to Christ as the Saviour of the world results in a

Introduction 3

clash of gospels as the message of the crucified Messiah ceases to be innocuous religious jargon, and becomes again a scandal, subversive of the reigning values of our culture and potentially destructive of the idols of our times.

I have attempted to relate the ‘deep listening’ to the Bible in the opening four chapters of this book to the challenges posed by the contemporary world in Chapter 5. The conclusions in this final section are inevitably tentative, but I trust they offer a signpost pointing toward the future for world Christianity, and giving hopeful indications concerning the shape of the stillemerging paradigm of Christian identity and mission in the decades ahead. My own study and reflection has led me to the belief that the analogies and parallels between the context of the New Testament and that which Christians everywhere face in the globalised world of today provide grounds to hope that we may stand on the brink of a completely new era in history. There is at least the possibility that the gospel of Jesus Christ can be articulated with fresh power and relevance, renewing and uniting the community of faith itself and providing credibility for its witness to the promise that the faith of Christ can bring about ‘the healing of the nations’.

I have to thank the many people who have encouraged me during a time of personal loss and difficulty to persevere with this project and bring it to a conclusion.

Among folk too numerous to mention, my colleagues Derek and Audrey Newton read part of the manuscript and offered insightful feedback, as did my dear friend Wes White. Tony Sargent has often enquired of progress and been unfailingly supportive. I am especially grateful to Elizabeth Swain, Maggie Hobbs, and Jennifer Perry for reading the drafts of two of my chapters in their apologetics discussion group, and for allowing me the

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privilege of hearing their valuable feedback. My sons Philip and Andrew have given me wonderful support during some very dark days, and I am grateful for Andy’s critical sociological insights on the final chapter. I am humbled by Richard Bauckham’s generous foreword, not least because his own contribution to biblical studies has so greatly enriched us all, as frequent citations in the following pages will reveal. To David Moloney and his colleagues at Darton, Longman and Todd I am extremely grateful for the efficient, supportive and encouraging way they have dealt with me, and I am delighted to be publishing this book with them. Finally, to Joyce, my dearest friend and most honest critic, with whom I have known the joy of shared life and ministry for almost fifty years, I owe an incalculable debt of gratitude. Even when very weak in the final days of her life here, she kept urging me to ‘keep on writing’. This was not an easy instruction to follow when she was taken from us, but I thank God for the grace that enabled me to complete a project which, like so much else, would have been impossible apart from a life shared with Joyce.

August 2015

1 What’s the Problem?

For too long we have read scripture with nineteenth-century eyes and sixteenth-century questions. It’s time to get back to reading with first-century eyes and twenty-first-century questions.

Tom Wright1

The title of the book you hold in your hands is provocative and clearly requires some explanation and justification. Within Christian circles – and especially among evangelicals – it is taken for granted that the word ‘gospel’ refers to a message which is by definition liberating. In addition, it is often simply assumed that there is a correspondence between the way in which this term is understood today and the meaning it had in the first century. Thus, despite the fact that between us and Jesus there are two thousand years of history and a whole series of cultural transitions and repeated translations, the belief persists that the gospel as articulated by believers in the twenty-first century correlates very nearly to the message and mission of Jesus and the apostles. I wish to challenge this assumption and to propose that the gospel needs to be heard afresh within its original

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historical and cultural context and that this process of what I wish to call ‘deep listening’ is the indispensable precondition for the release of its liberating power in the very different situation of our globalised world in the twenty-first century.

Some readers will be shocked by the suggestion that their received ways of understanding and sharing the gospel might rest on largely unexamined assumptions which require challenging. Can we even contemplate the possibility that the modern version of the gospel and the manner in which it is generally preached and shared in the evangelistic work of contemporary Christians might be something other than a faithful expression of the message of Jesus and his earliest followers? What if our understanding and presentation of this faith owes at least as much to the hidden cultural and social forces which shape the modern world as it does to the firstcentury preaching of Christ? In that case our conception of the gospel could turn out to be not such an ‘old, old story’ after all, but a rather recent version which Jesus and Paul might have difficulty recognising. Clearly, there is a need at the commencement of this book to offer some explanation for the claim that the modern telling of the core Christian message requires serious critical examination in the light of the original message and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.

Danger Ahead!

For readers who are immediately placed on the defensive by the comments made above, I suggest that even a superficial reading of the New Testament suggests that a reluctance to be self-critical with regard to the religious traditions we have inherited is actually very odd. The Jesus we meet in the Gospels is for ever warning of the possibility, one might perhaps say the probability,

What’s the Problem? 7

that his radical message of the coming of the kingdom of God will be compromised, its demands softened in a process of accommodation to the spirit of the world, until it becomes a form of words without the power to bring about change. When that happens, Jesus says, the resultant religion becomes good for nothing ‘except to be thrown out and trampled by men’ (Matt. 5:13).

Warnings like these are not issued to the enemies of Christ, to those who dismissed him and his teaching, but to the disciples who loved him, hung upon his every word, and experienced the blessings of his love and grace. That being so, it is sobering to reflect on the possibility that Jesus’ words may suggest that the deepest cause of secularisation in the modern world lies not with what is done or said by unbelievers, but with the failure of those who profess to follow Christ to fulfil their calling to act as salt and light in the world. The compromising or abandoning of this vocation, reflected by a flight from the public world to the interior realm of the individual soul, strips the gospel of its power, turning it into a formal, dead or dying religion which is easily disregarded, then abandoned, and finally is ‘trampled underfoot’.

We might conclude then that the massive recession from Christianity in Europe during the twentieth century and its growing cultural marginalisation in North America, so often blamed on the spread of secular ideas, has far more to do with a long process of internal corruption within the churches, accompanied by a retreat from concern for the earth and the world so clearly spelt out by Jesus. This process results in the erosion of spiritual vitality and moral courage and what remains is good-for-nothing religion, devoid of ‘saltiness’ and irrelevant to the deepest of human concerns. Dare modern Christians, especially evangelicals who profess

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to honour Jesus and the scriptures, claim that they are immune from the possibility of degeneration and decay against which Jesus warns his closest disciples?

The words of Jesus are paralleled throughout the New Testament writings by similar expressions of concern that the powerful, transformative message of the gospel was placed in peril by forms of accommodation to the spirit of the world. Indeed, one might almost read this entire literature as the expression of an immense apostolic struggle to defend the radical demands of the gospel against multiple forms of compromise and syncretism.2 Paul agonises over the vulnerability of his converts in letters suffused with deep pastoral concern, and he warns them that the message of the cross of Jesus can be ‘emptied of its power’ by a process of reinterpretation designed to make it fit smoothly with ‘words of human wisdom’ (1 Cor. 1:17). The cross has long been the most familiar symbol of Christianity and has formed the central theme of preaching and evangelism, so it is sobering to discover Paul indicating that even this symbol can be perverted and used to represent ideas and beliefs which are the antithesis of the liberating gospel.

In the last century, the Jewish theologian, Ignaz Maybaum, who lost his mother and two sisters in the Holocaust, asked where Jews might have encountered Christians during Hitler’s Reich. His reply was that they very seldom did so because German Christians had emptied the cross of its scandalous meaning, presenting the crucified Jesus as ‘a glorified tragic hero’, so obscuring the fact ‘that he was a persecuted Jew hanging on a Roman gallows’. The cross was thus transformed into a symbol of power and glory which concealed the truth.

The Cross did not prevent the greatest carnage of history from happening; what happened, happened

What’s the Problem? 9

while the Cross was the sign of respectability, while the Star of David was the sign of the outcast; the Cross was the smug symbol of a religion lived in Concordat with Hitler.3 These sobering words illustrate the abiding relevance of Paul’s warning with regard to the possibility of the subversion of the meaning of the death of Jesus and they highlight the imperative need to reflect on the possibility that our presentation of the gospel in the globalised world of the twenty-first century involves unrecognised forms of compromise which are misrepresenting Jesus Christ and turning his message into a religious ideology devoid of prophetic and transformative power.

To the warnings of Jesus and Paul we might add the searching language of the neglected letter of James. This document might be described as an extended prophetic denunciation of religion without ‘saltiness’, as the famous repudiation of faith without works makes clear.

Such ‘faith’ is described as both useless and demonic and James regards it as the symptom of a fatal accommodation to the pagan values of the powerful, dominant culture.

The dazzling attractions of money, power and honour had evidently begun to seduce believers to such a degree that they foolishly ignored the express warnings of Jesus in their attempt to worship both God and Mammon (Jas. 4:13, 5:1–3). In some of the most disturbing and directly challenging texts in the New Testament, James warns professing Christians that their lust for the accumulation of wealth, accompanied by an economics which justified hoarding money and paying starvation wages to workers, would testify against them on the Day of Judgement (Jas. 5:3–6). For James this powerless, ideological religion was a parody of the gospel and represented a betrayal of Jesus Christ. Can rich and privileged Christians in the

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age of globalisation really read such statements without critical self-examination? Must we not be afraid that, in a world in which the power of Mammon has become all-pervasive and increasingly enters into every nook and cranny of our lives, we also might fall under the searching judgement of James’ prophetic teaching?

Finally, consider the alarming depiction of a representative selection of primitive Christian groups in the last book in the Bible. The letters which John of Patmos addresses to seven churches in Asia Minor on behalf of the risen Christ depict a movement in danger of complete apostasy. Most of the groups addressed in Revelation seem to have moved so far down the road of compromise and assimilation to the spirit of the Roman Empire that they are face to face with extinction. As Richard Bauckham points out, the false teachers active in these congregations ‘made it possible for Christians to be successful in pagan society’ and in Laodicea the ‘idolizing of material prosperity characteristic of Rome’ had become a feature of an entire church.4 What is striking about this particular group is its terrible collective delusion; the congregation’s estimation of its condition was the exact reverse of that of Jesus, whose searching eyes penetrated beyond the surface appearance of wealth and success to expose the reality of a state described as ‘wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked’ (Rev. 3:14–18).

The metaphor of salt devoid of the power to preserve or savour used by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount is here complemented by another which likens ideological Christianity to tepid, lukewarm water, ‘neither cold nor hot’. But the outcome of this lifeless, conformist religion is the same; in the one case its destiny is to be ‘trampled underfoot’ by people who perceive its hypocrisy and emptiness, and in the other (even more seriously) it is spat out of the mouth of Christ himself as a distorted

What’s the Problem? 11

misrepresentation of the gospel he embodied and declared.

All of these texts (and they represent a far larger number of similar statements) indicate that within a matter of decades from the death and resurrection of Jesus his revolutionary message had become entangled with ideas and practices that threatened to rob it of its liberating power. The appeals of Paul, James and John of Patmos are for the liberation of the gospel. The texts cited above demand a process of deep listening to the voice of Jesus, accompanied by a penitent spirit at the realisation of the full extent of the churches’ compromises, and a renewed willingness to walk in the way of Jesus Christ whatever this may cost. Why should twenty-first-century Christians in a world in the grip of multiple forms of idolatry be offended or alarmed at the thought that they must return to first principles, listen with a new spirit of attentiveness to the words of Jesus, and be willing to open their hearts, minds and wills to the summons to ‘follow the Lamb’?

Bridging the Gap The statement of Tom Wright cited at the top of this chapter suggests that the liberation of the gospel demands a two-stage process in which we listen to the message of Jesus within the context of the first-century world in which he lived and died, before then facing the challenges posed by our own situation in the globalised world of today. Wright’s mention of the sixteenth century clearly suggests the possibility that modern Christians may be so deeply attached to one or another of the traditions which emerged at the time of the Protestant Reformation (or indeed, to movements which came into being at other times, including Evangelicalism, denominationalism, Liberalism or Pentecostalism, for

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example), that they fail to recognise either the emerging challenges to faith and obedience in the contemporary world, or the inadequacy of the received traditions to address them. This is in no way to deny the courage and faithfulness of earlier Christian leaders who insisted on a return to scripture, nor does it ignore the abiding importance of the traditions they established. However, a crucial aspect of the Protestant Reformation was its insistence on the supreme authority of the Bible and its demand that the interpretation of scripture and the reform of the church were continuing obligations. We are not faithful either to the gospel, nor to the tradition of the Reformation, if we refuse to recognise the shifting frontiers of the Christian mission in our present century and the necessity of striving to translate the message of Jesus afresh in order that its liberating power may be unleashed at precisely those places where the struggle between faith and unbelief is at its sharpest. In fact, as Darrell Guder has observed, reform alone is simply not enough: The emphasis upon reform can, in fact, ignore the central missiological vocation of the church, or narrow our focus to questions of our shape and organization, that is, issues of ‘form’ …

[T]he church’s crisis is one of fundamental vocation, of calling to God’s mission, of being, doing, and saying witness in faithfulness to Jesus Christ, the Lord. Our missional challenge is a crisis of faith and spirit, and it will only be met through conversion, the continuing conversion of the church.5 The urgent and challenging questions which the contemporary world presents to faith will be our concern in the final chapter of this book. However, our primary

What’s the Problem? 13

task is to attempt to listen afresh to the message of the gospel within the context(s) of the ancient world in the first century and to that end the following three chapters are devoted to an attempt to understand Jesus, Paul and the early Christian movement within that setting. As we undertake this investigation, using the insights of scholars from various disciplines, including historians of the ancient world, specialists in the Galilee of Jesus, and of the world of Paul and his communities of faith in the urban world of the Roman Empire, we may expect two things to become clear. First, we shall discover the distance between our globalised world in the twenty-first century and the social and cultural setting in which the Christian faith came to birth. It is imperative that this difference is understood and respected if we are to avoid modernising Jesus and making him fit into the moulds which we have constructed on the basis of needs and desires belonging to us as contemporary people. Jesus has been portrayed in many guises in modern times, from the innocuous story-teller of pale complexion beloved of Victorian Christianity, or a Che Guevara revolutionary figure who seeks the overthrow of capitalism, to the strangely disembodied Christ whose actual fleshand-blood life is ignored by so much contemporary evangelism and spirituality. What all of these modern images (and a host of others) share in common is a disregard of the historical evidence provided by the firstcentury writers and witnesses as these are recorded for us in the New Testament.

In the second place, however, we will find striking analogies and parallels between then and now, so that despite the gap of time and culture between the ancient world and the modern one, it is possible to construct a bridge between these realms by means of which the life of Jesus and his words can speak into the situation today.

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Indeed, when the hard work involved in these tasks is properly done, we shall find that the original message of the gospel will begin to resonate with extraordinary power in our world, coming alive in startling ways as the words of Jesus and the writing of the apostles burst free of the modernist cultural assumptions imposed upon them. This serves to underline what is meant by the stated aim of this book, to liberate the gospel, allowing it to be heard afresh in a manner which might demonstrate not only its challenge to a church which has lived for too long in a comfortable alliance with modernist culture and Western civilisation, but also to display its transformative power in a world on the brink of catastrophe.

At the conclusion of his brilliant study of the history of the twentieth century, Eric Hobsbawm wrote that we live in a world ‘captured, uprooted and transformed by the titanic economic and techno-scientific process of the development of capitalism’. It is clear, he suggested, that this process cannot continue ad infinitum; the future cannot be simply an extension of the past because the forces ‘generated by the techno-scientific economy are now great enough to destroy the environment, that is to say, the material foundations of life’. Our world, Hobsbawm concluded, ‘risks both explosion and implosion. It must change’.6 If the gospel of Christ is to be the agent of that sorely needed change, it must be liberated in order to appear once more as genuinely good news to contemporary people.