Jesus in the Victorian Novel

Reimagining Christ

Jessica Ann Hughes

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350278172
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Religious Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book tells the story of how nineteenth-century writers turned to the realist novel in order to reimagine Jesus during a century where traditional religious faith appeared increasingly untenable. Re-workings of the canonical Gospels and other projects to demythologize the story of Jesus are frequently treated as projects aiming to secularize and even discredit traditional Christian faith. The novels of Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Mary Augusta Ward, however, demonstrate that the work of bringing the Christian tradition of prophet, priest, and king into conversation with a rapidly changing world can at times be a form of authentic faith-even a faith that remains rooted in the Bible and historic Christianity, while simultaneously creating a space that allows traditional understandings of Jesus' identity to evolve.

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The Narrative Consequences of Theology

The eighteenth century’s evangelical revival underscored Great Britain’s self-understanding as not only largely Christian but as specifically Protestant. In such a context, one might expect Jesus to occupy a position of cultural centrality, and yet nineteenth-century poetry, popular piety, and biblical criticism bring Jesus—and an inherited lack of clarity about his identity—into far greater focus. So, how did it come about that figure of Jesus came to be relatively neglected in the eighteenth century, leaving the gap the nineteenth century rushed to fill? And, why in the world would writers think that the novel offered a way to resurrect Jesus from the fog of familiarity that rendered his character both ubiquitous and a complete mystery? To answer these questions, one must first understand how the widespread theology of substitutionary atonement preached by eighteenth-century evangelicals encoded a particular narrative structure that re-centered the narrative of faith on the believer rather than Jesus. At the same time, one must also understand how the relational procedures of the novel offered a means by which readers might “relate” to Jesus.

The Backstory: Conversion Narratives and the Novel

To say that narratives contain theology is obvious. Both in terms of content and in the ideologies that shape narrative structure, stories communicate ideas about God and the world, in other words, theology. But Christian theology, and in particular Protestant theology, is at its very foundation narrative in its form. While it is easy to lose sight of this reality when staring at shelf-after-shelf of multivolume systematic theologies, all these systematizations are, at their core, systematic explications of the biblical narrative. But theology is not essentially narrative because it examines a story any more than literary criticism is narrative because it engages stories. Theology’s narrative power lies in the way that theology shapes the retelling of the Bible and the telling of the life of the believer in preaching and practice.

Beginning with Peter’s sermon at Pentecost, Christian preaching frequently articulates a two-fold narrative. One is the narrative of God’s actions (especially as manifest through Jesus). The other is the narrative of those listening, the narrative of believers and potential believers as their lives intersect—and potentially become a part of—this divine drama. Both these narratives are always present in the communication of Christian doctrine across traditions and denominations, and these narratives serve as the basis for Christian theology across traditions and denominations. But whether the divine or human narrative is emphasized changes with time and place, culture, circumstance, and the central theologies preferred by a particular body of Christians. Moreover both narratives exist in a constant hermeneutic circle with theology, where the text or the experience of reading communities or individuals gives rise to interpretation, even as previous interpretations (also called theology) always shape a reading of the text or of the community’s or individual’s experience. These formative interpretations frequently force particular structures, assumptions, focal points, characterizations, and themes to become dominant within the believer’s or community’s worldview, such that other concerns become virtually invisible. One fraught theology that encoded a particularly powerful narrative form in the eighteenth century is the idea of the atonement: the idea that God and the world are somehow reconciled through Jesus’s death on the cross.

For the first thousand years of Christian history, the majority of Western theologians frequently understood the atonement achieved through Jesus’s death and resurrection in terms of either a divine ransom or a heroic champion.¹ The ransom theory of the atonement maintained that Satan enslaved humanity along with the whole earth through Adam and Eve’s fall in the Garden of Eden. In order to buy humanity back, God paid a ransom to Satan through Jesus, whom Satan was then free to kill. In doing so, God essentially tricked Satan because Jesus, being himself God the Son, could not be held by death (which Satan somehow did not know). After Satan’s defeat, there remains the project of restoring order amid the chaos Satan left behind. In this version of the atonement, God is the classic literary trickster who uses his wily cunning to defeat the villain.

In the heroic, or Christus Victor, model, the earth becomes occupied by the forces of evil at the fall. Jesus battles with Satan through his life, passion, and death, finally defeating Satan through his resurrection. Because Jesus is “fully human,” he is the single-combat champion for humanity and thus, in defeating Satan, he frees humanity from Satan’s occupying forces. While this model casts Jesus as the triumphant military victor at the Resurrection, his victory is followed by a long period of ridding the earth of Satan’s remaining strongholds. Both the ransom theory of the atonement and Christus Victor frequently appear side-by-side in the writings of the early church and through the middle ages, and the two are not in fact exclusive. Both traditions involve a period of ridding the world of evil after Jesus’s victory, and both offer similar characterizations of God (and of God through Jesus). In both, God is presented in traditional heroic terms: like Odysseus or Jacob, God is a trickster; like Achilles, Romulus, or David, Jesus’s victory is victory for all.

By the late seventeenth century a different model of the atonement became influential in Protestant theology in England. English Puritans, like many other Protestants of the time, had developed a Calvinistically inflected way of understanding the atonement known as penal substitution. While substitutionary atonement generally is not unique to Protestantism (in fact it was influentially theorized Anselm in the eleventh century), the nuances of penal substitution were central to Protestantism’s self-definition against Catholicism, particularly in Britain where Protestantism became central in constructions of national identity.² Penal substitution depicts humanity as alienated from God because all creation was marred through the fall. To reconcile God and the world, God in Jesus takes the place intended for sinners, thereby paying for humanity’s crimes against divine holiness with his own death. In his construction of penal substitution, Calvin allegorizes the ritualistic understanding of the Israel’s priesthood and aligns it with juridical language, equating not only sacrifice and debt-repayment but also roles of priest with mediator or advocate. Thus, “because Christ now bears the office of priest” he “not only that by the eternal law of reconciliation . . . may render the Father favourable and propitious to us, but also admit us into this most honourable alliance.”³

In penal substitution, then, humanity’s debt is not owed to Satan but to God. As such, God becomes the narrative all-in-all. God is both the offended party and the means by which restitution is made. Consequently, all the narrative drama—the struggle between good and evil, between the hero and villain—is collapsed into God’s own being. God is offended, but God wants to redeem his people; God satisfies his own wrath with the bloody execution of God the Son, and God chooses whom he will save. In this tradition God’s emotional life appears deeply contradictory and even potentially illogical. If God is the one who is offended, why does he need blood to satisfy his own wrath? Can’t he just let it go? If God is so loving, why does he only choose to save some people? Particularly within the Calvinistic version common among Puritans, the individual human’s only role in the story is to search for signs of divine election for salvation. As such, the individual has little actual agency in the divine drama.

Because substitutionary atonement locates the core problem driving narrative and the dramatic tension within God, traditions like Puritanism and later evangelicalism minimize the narrative of cosmic battle between good and evil. The battle instead is between God’s love and God’s justice. Accordingly, Jesus’s victory is a foregone conclusion scripted by God and contained within an unchanging (albeit emotionally complicated) God. Such divine sovereignty produces two connected narrative consequences. First, any element of Jesus as an active hero striving against cosmic evil or oppression is erased from Jesus’s narrative action. While Jesus may oppose the injustice that humans wreak on each other, he is not personally engaged in the conflict. Rather, his role on earth is to be a perfect human and satisfy God the Father’s wrath, all of which he will always, certainly do. The second consequence is that God’s character becomes impossible to narrate. Because he is unchanging, it is heretical to say that God changes from wanting justice to preferring mercy through the events of the cross. Because he is all-knowing, God cannot wrestle with contradictory emotions and then, after long and hard thought, develop the solution of the cross. And because he is outside of time, God cannot respond to human action in a way that produces narrative tension within his own being. While it may look to humans like God suddenly responded to their prayers or sins or righteous actions, from the perspective of the timeless and unchanging God, he has always and will always be aware of human action and be responding to it out of his justice and mercy. Thus, in this theological tradition, the divine narrative becomes a bit like watching a mediocre, well-known, and highly predictable dramatic movie with badly acted, flat characters from the past. Not only is the ending obvious, the journey to that conclusion is utterly free of dramatic tension and human emotion. The story does not even offer the action-packed close calls, near misses, real temptations, and questionable heroic actions that make watching other well-known films fun.

While the Calvinist, Puritan, and later evangelical tradition of the atonement precludes the possibility of Jesus as an epic hero, this tradition does maintain the epic sense of a closed past. From the earliest days of the Reformation, Protestants made clear that Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross exists in an absolute past because of theological polemics regarding the manner in which Jesus might be present in the Eucharist. Whereas Catholics argued that the Eucharist draws believers into the eternally present, ongoing sacrifice of Jesus, many Protestant traditions insisted his death was not an ongoing act taking place during the mass or communion. Even though the Eucharistic theology of both Luther and Calvin allows for Jesus to be “present” in communion, neither casts his presence in terms of present, narrative action: Jesus’s death is a finished act in history.

This insistence on a closed, finished past also has important narrative consequences. In such Protestant theologies, Jesus is no longer passively suffering on the cross. In his present state, Jesus is the triumphant, risen Son of God, ascended into heaven and seated at the right hand of the Father. Because believers understand Jesus to be exalted in heaven—and watching each person from on high—he is at present distant from the believer. In Protestant eucharistic theology, Jesus’s life story and his suffering become “an absolute distanced image, beyond the sphere of possible contact with the developing, incomplete and therefore re-thinking and re-evaluating present.”⁴ Particularly for Puritans and evangelicals, Jesus is able to break through to the sphere of developing present, but not in the eucharistic enactment of his sacrificial death. Instead, Jesus can break into the present via the subjective experience of the believer. As such, the realm of dramatic action is no longer the historical narrative of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection but the story of the believer as he or she comes to understand and respond to the Jesus narrative.

One place we see the narrative implications of substitutionary atonement inscribed is in eighteenth-century hymns. During the evangelical revival, hymnody emphasizes the triumphant and ascended Jesus, whose past work provides the context for the individual believer’s experience. The Methodist hymnody of the era, which became popular throughout English-speaking Protestant congregations, borrows heavily from the church and the stage, alluding to the emotional and sexual intensity of the pleading lover, as Misty Anderson argues.⁵ The dramatic scope of these hymns frequently includes a meditation on the crucifixion and passion, drawing on the Moravian tradition of contemplating the suffering body of Jesus. And yet, such hymnody always presents Jesus’s suffering as taking place in a narrative and temporal past, even if not explicitly a historical or historicized past. Tense is a small grammatical detail but, by consistently presenting Jesus’s bloody and broken body in the past or past perfect tense, such hymns reinforce the past and completed nature of Jesus’s narrative of suffering. Jesus is not currently bloody and broken. Rather, in the words of “Amazing Love,” Jesus “left his Father’s throne,” “Emptied himself of all but love, And bled for Adam’s helpless race.” Though his suffering was great, it is over. In the words of Charles Wesley’s enduring Easter hymn, “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” “Love’s redeeming work is done.” Jesus has “fought the fight” and “the battle won.” The finished nature of Jesus’s suffering is reinforced in hymns like Wesley’s “Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending,” “Soldiers of Christ Arise!” and “Love Divine,” all of which position Jesus currently in heaven. His heavenly position is reinforced in such hymns by his ability to rule this life, either in the heart of the believer or over the earth as the eschatological king. As one would expect, in these hymns Jesus’s triumphant descent is expressed in either the present, future, or imperative tenses, reinforcing the conviction that his current state is that of the triumphant, ascended God-Man in heaven.

Within Methodist hymnody, the narrative significance of Jesus’s past suffering and current glory lies in the salvation and sanctification of the believer. Wesley’s celebratory “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing” captures this narrative force particularly well. Depicting Jesus as the “gracious master and . . . God” who has redeemed humanity and conquered death through his atoning work on the cross, the hymn details the speaker’s s...