The Homebrewed Christianity Guide to Jesus

Lord, Liar, Lunatic, Or Awesome?

Tripp Fuller

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781451499575
• eBook ISBN: 9781506401256
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Christology is crazy. It's rather absurd to identify a first-century homeless Jew as God revealed, but a bunch of us do anyway. In this book, Tripp Fuller examines the historical Jesus, the development of the doctrine of Christ, the questions that drove christological innovations through church history, contemporary constructive proposals, and the predicament of belief for the church today. Recognizing that the battle over Jesus is no longer a public debate between the skeptic and believer but an internal struggle in the heart of many disciples, he argues that we continue to make christological claims about more than an "event" or simply the "Jesus of history." On the other hand, C. S. Lewis's infamous "liar, lunatic, and Lord" scheme is no longer intellectually tenable. This may be a guide to Jesus, but for Christians, Fuller is guiding us toward a deeper understanding of God. He thinks it's good news—good news about a God who is so invested in the world that God refuses to be God without us.

4

Reading the Gospels Heresy-Free

One of the things about my upbringing I’m most grateful for is the love of Scripture that my parents gave me. I remember thinking I had finally arrived when I was able to read the Bible and pray by myself before bed. I loved it! I read the Bible every night in my bed, so proud of my accomplishment.

Then, during Holy Week when I was in fourth grade, I discovered that my Bible was broken.

I had decided to read all four Gospel accounts of Jesus’ final week. As a dutiful student of the Bible, I remember charting out just what Jesus did, when it happened, and how it went down. But I found a mistake in the Bible my parents had given me. More than one, in fact. The Gospels didn’t all have Jesus dying on the same day! Plus, they contained inconsistencies about what Jesus said from the cross, who was there when he died, who was at the tomb, and even details about the resurrected Christ—in one, he can go through walls; in another, he’s eating fish. You would think a good editor would have noticed these glaring contradictions.

Pause. I need to reread those stories.

When I expressed my dismay to my dad, he assured me that my Bible was not broken and that the Gospels I read are the same four Gospels found in every Bible. He told me that each of the four Gospels had its own unique account of what God did in Jesus. He explained it to me by likening the four Gospels to the four members of our family explaining how amazing our trip to Florida was. We would each mention spring training baseball, good times at Disney World, a nighttime spaceship launch, and some great large-mouth bass fishing. But I would focus on the Vero Beach Dodger games, my brother on the Mets, and my dad on the Orioles and the size of Mark McGwire’s forearms.

All of that is to say, the four of us had experienced the same trip to Florida, but we would each recount the trip differently. I bet when Mom reads this she’ll tell me I’ve collapsed multiple trips to Florida into one, but that’s OK because when the Fuller family went to Florida, we made serious memories. Now imagine that the four of us weren’t actually present for everything that happened on the trip; instead, the stories were passed down orally for more than forty years and we used multiple sources when writing our accounts. Despite the glaring differences, the Fuller family archive includes all four versions—on purpose.

The Tatian Temptation

A number of people wrote down their accounts, and these gospels circulated among the churches. Eventually, the early church leaders debated which ones to include in the New Testament. In that time, there was a theologian named Tatian (c. 120–c. 180 ce) who could not handle the contradictions the testimonies offered. He created the first “harmony gospel,” a single account of the life of Jesus in which there were no contradictions. It’s called the Diatessaron, which is a pretty sweet name and literally means “out of four.” For example, the Gospel of John has Jesus cleansing the temple at the beginning of his ministry and the other three have him doing it at the end, so Tatian’s gospel depicts him doing it twice. This line of thinking eventually got Tatian condemned as a heretic, but he just could not trust the veracity of the gospel unless all the details lined up!

Too many want a childish faith rather than a child-like faith, and they never grow past it.

A lot of us are tempted to want Tatian’s gospel: a nice and tidy account of Jesus that we can read and believe without question. Despite the popularity of the harmony gospel, the church condemned it and instead chose to include the four Gospels we have today. And it turns out that having four Gospels actually serves an important purpose. Since Christians hold that the Word of God is Jesus Christ, not any single text, having these four testimonies to the Christ event keeps us from confusing the text with the person, the story with the experience, and the surface with the content.

The Gospels are a genre of literature. The authors intended to tell the story of Jesus, each in a very particular way. That doesn’t mean they aren’t trustworthy, but they definitely are not “objective history,” a concept unknown in Jesus’ day. Just as there’s a difference in how you read the different sections of a newspaper—an editorial versus front-page news versus the comics—reading a Gospel requires a certain type of reading.

I guess it’s okay to use the term “evangelist” as long as you don’t add “tel-” at the front of it.

The evangelists—a term for the authors of the Gospels—were not telling the story of a dead Jesus, but of the resurrected Christ. The communities that gave birth to these texts believed that God had raised Jesus from the dead. And, even more, the church had an ongoing relationship with the resurrected Christ, and they believed that Christ mediated the community’s relationship to God. Telling the story of this resurrected Christ needed more than a simple biography. A Gospel is a multidimensional telling of the story of Jesus—a Jesus who has come to be known as the Christ.

Everything that happened in his ministry and even on the cross is known and interpreted in the Gospels in light of Jesus’ end—the resurrection—which is also a new beginning. Think of it like a wedding toast given by a groomsman. As the groom’s friend for years, he knows the best and worst parts of the guy, but knowing that the history leads to this celebration, he tells the stories during the toast in a new way—in light of the ending. This retroactive realization that the Spirit of God was always at work in Christ gave the early church a new lens for reading the Hebrew Scriptures and telling the stories of Jesus. Doing this was not a sleight of hand or twisting of the truth, at least from their perspective, because they were bringing God’s self-testimony in Christ to the fore. The cool thing about having four Gospels in the New Testament is that we get to hear four different theological tellings of the Jesus story.

One canon, many voices. One church, many testimonies. This is what faithful freedom looks like!

Where should the story begin? If you asked most people how to start the story of Jesus, it’d be like a Christmas pageant at church: shepherds, angels, and wise men crammed into a stable, bowing before a glowing manger. But here’s the deal: the shepherds and wise men never met, Jesus and John the Baptist aren’t really related, and there was no census that sent every conquered subject of Rome back to their ancestral home for tax purposes. And that verse in Isaiah about the “virgin conceiving” isn’t even about the state of the woman’s hymen. There’s a bit more to it than that, but take a deep breath. The first time I read a distinguished Bible scholar writing about all of this, I took his book and threw it out of my bedroom window. Luckily, I managed to keep reading (a different author’s book) and found out that the birth stories are still pretty sweet. Of course, you may miss just how awesome they are if you’re hung up on the veracity of the Christmas pageant.

Just ruin Christmas, why don’t you? Next you’re gonna tell me there’s a real Santa, and I didn’t have to buy so many presents.

We’re going to start with Mark, the first Gospel written— but you’ll notice there’s no baby in the manger. As we look at each, we will pay attention to how it gives an account of Jesus’ beginning that coheres with the new beginning at the end. Follow that?

Mark

The earliest of the Gospels is Mark, written around 70 ce.¹ Mark is the shortest of all the Gospels and quickly gets to the point. There’s no manger and no donkeys. Mark begins with a reference to the prophet Isaiah’s call, “Prepare for the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”² This verse, which anticipates a new exodus, a return from exile, is what frames the ministry of John the Baptist and his expectation for the coming of another, greater prophet.

In Mark’s version of Jesus’ baptism, it’s only Jesus who experiences the opening of the heavens, the Spirit’s descent, and the voice from heaven. This word from heaven—“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased”³—identifies Jesus as God’s son and echoes the anointing of both a new king and the people of Israel for the work of renewal.⁴ From here, the Spirit drives Jesus out into the desert where he is tempted by Satan; then, after the arrest of John, Jesus begins his ministry. In just fifteen verses, Jesus has already started his ministry, announcing the kingdom of God as the renewal of Israel and calling disciples to join his endeavor.

For Mark, it’s the descent of the Spirit and the anointing by the Father at Jesus’ baptism that sets Jesus apart and launches his messianic mission. This is in contrast to Paul and the other Gospels because here there’s no hint of a miraculous conception (as in Matthew and Luke), no preexistent status of the Christ (as in John), and no revelation of Jesus as God’s son only after the resurrection (as in Paul).⁵ In Mark, the story of Jesus always looks toward the cross, the expected confrontation between God’s kingdom and the world. Jesus’ prophetic intensity is consistently turned toward his disciples, insisting that they walk in the way of the Lord and give God’s kingdom their ultimate allegiance. Jesus’ pastoral concern for discipleship, a call to remain faithful in spite of the tumultuous situation, is primary. And remember, if scholars are correct that Mark was written around 70 ce, that corresponds with the destruction of the temple and the earth-shaking changes that followed, so faithfulness mattered.

This wrecked me in seminary (in a good way). #sufferingservant

Although the first verse of the Gospel reads, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” it’s not until Jesus hangs dead on the cross that a centurion says, “Truly this man was the son of God.”⁶ Mark saw Jesus as the son of God in a functional sense, as the suffering servant-messiah of God’s kingdom. This means that what most Christians think when they hear the phrase “Son of God”—the metaphysical connection between the Father and Son from all eternity—is not what Mark meant. For Mark, Jesus isn’t a deity, come down to rescue humanity. Jesus is a suffering messiah, offering hop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Series Introduction
• The Homebrewed Posse
• Lord, Liar, Lunatic . . . or Just Freaking Awesome
• Jesus’ Jewish Neighborhood
• Abba Says, “Drop the G”
• Reading the Gospels Heresy-Free
• Anselm, Luther, and the Cootie Collector
• Getting High with Jesus
• Turning Jesus Down
• The Skeptic and the Believer
• Acknowledgments
• Notes