Dismissing Jesus

How We Evade the Way of the Cross

Jones

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621896692
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What is the way of the cross? Why does it create resistance? How do we answer objections to it? The revival of interest in Christ's kingdom and radical discipleship has produced a wave of discussions, but sometimes those discussions are scattered. This book aims to pull together in one place the core claims of the way of the cross. It aims to examine the deeply cherished assumptions that hinder us from hearing Jesus's call.When we do that, we'll see that the gospel of Christ is not primarily about getting into heaven or about living a comfortable, individually pious, middle-class life. It is about being free from the ancient, pervasive, and delightful oppression of Mammon in order to create a very different community, the church, an alternative city-kingdom here and now on earth by means of living and celebrating the way of the cross--the reign of joyful weakness, renunciation, self-denial, sharing, foolishness, community, and love overcoming evil.

Part One

What Is the Way of the Cross?

1

Overview of the Way of the Cross

I am spiritually blind. Conservative Christian and blind. I am one of the many who followed the broad path and said to Jesus “I will follow you” but did “not sit down first and count the cost” (Luke 14:28). I have taught and pastored and misled many sincere Christians—congregants, students, my family—for decades, preaching cheap grace and missing the weightier matters of the law. “Whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:33). “Whoever does not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:27).

I am the rich young ruler Jesus addressed. I have a car, several computers, lawn sprinklers, a tiled shower, a full pantry, air conditioning, a nice outdoor deck, plenty of books, and I’ve spent years sincerely trying to figure out theological questions—“Good teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” (Luke 18:18). Bonhoeffer commented on the rich young ruler’s strategy: “Keep on posing questions, and you will escape the necessity of obedience.”1

Why read on, then? Why read a book by the spiritually blind? Maybe, because I am not alone. I suspect you, like me, are a rich young ruler. Most of us in the West are. It’s our most common shape. At least, Jesus “looking at him, loved him” (Mark 10:21). Maybe there’s hope for us.

So, I am blind but arguing with myself, with us. I write to persuade myself out of blindness, with a plea to the Spirit. I long for a second chance, now later in life. Maybe the Spirit can get through to me. Of course, most of us rich, young rulers don’t consider ourselves wealthy or blind. It’s always the people above us, the blatantly greedy and cruel, whom Jesus had in mind, not us innocuous and insipid followers. And it’s always secularists or people in other Christian traditions who are blind. Never us.

But when Scripture addresses God’s people, it portrays spiritual blindness as rather normal. It’s regular, common, cutting across Old and New Testaments. Moses promised the Israelites “I know after my death you will become utterly corrupt, and turn aside from the way which I have commanded you” (Deut 31:29). A psalmist lamented “They do not know. . . . They walk about in darkness” (Ps 82:5). Isaiah declared, “who is blind but my servant?” (Isa 42:19) and “His watchmen are blind, they are all ignorant; they are all dumb dogs” (Isa 56:10). Jesus was frustrated by both opponents and followers: “blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind leads the blind, both will fall into a ditch” (Matt 15:14). And even just a few short years after the crucifixion, resurrection, and Pentecost, Christ told his own people, “I will vomit you out of My mouth. Because you . . . do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked” (Rev 3:16,17). Blindness everywhere. God’s people have a high probability of blindness.

How would you know if you were spiritually blind? It’s not obvious. Imagine, for a moment, that you are actually among the majority of us who are spiritually blind. You walk about in darkness, but you think you see clearly. Imagine you’re one of the nice, well-meaning churchgoers, who has nice Christian ideas in your head. Imagine you were one of the people Isaiah spoke to, the ones who sacrificed diligently and properly (Isa 1:11), you appeared before the Lord regularly (Isa 1:12), attended worship meetings and festivals (Isa 1:13), you offered many prayers (Isa 1:15), and you might even have been one of the few who were disciplined enough to fast regularly (Isa 58:3). That’s exactly the sort of person who was and is most likely to be blind. We are those who so often totally miss what God has called his people to do. Can we imagine being so sincere and well-meaning and diligent and yet hear God say to us “When you spread out your hands, I will hide My eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not hear” (Isa 1:15)? “I have had enough” (Isa 1:11). Rather, we tend to assume mere middle-class niceness and decency protects us from blindness. But it’s that decency that makes us the most likely to be blind.

So how could we know if we’re spiritually blind? The Old Testament prophets thought they could get through to us with pointed denunciations. Some of us respond to denunciations by looking more and more inward. We hope that greater introspection will lead to truth. But that, too, is often a path of blindness. Most truth is not that mysterious and subjective. Just as Moses said, “for this commandment which I command you today is not too mysterious for you, nor is it far off” (Deut 30:11). And it’s not as complicated as struggling to get a small gnat from a drink and accidentally swallowing a beast (Matt 23:24). In the end, Christ’s message is pretty straightforward and obvious. You don’t need five hundred years to figure it out. “Whoever does not bear his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” It’s not hard to see. In fact, spiritual blindness assumes that truth is easy to see and obey. It’s so easy we have to manufacture obstacles in order to “miss it.” We don’t want to see it. I don’t want to see it.

That’s what I want to argue about in this book. Here’s a short version of my thesis: The dominant form of Christian living is one designed to shield us from Jesus’s explicit priorities. How is it that the vast majority of Christians set aside Jesus’s obvious and revolutionary call so easily? How do we make disobedience and blindness so normal and acceptable?

Here’s a longer version of the same thesis: Certain deeply and widely cherished assumptions about Christ, society, and our selves block us from seeing Jesus’s call, and we must escape these blinders before we can walk Jesus’s path again. When we do that, we’ll see that the gospel of Christ is not primarily about getting into heaven or about living a comfortable, individually-pious middle-class life. It is about being free from the ancient, pervasive, and delightful oppression of Mammon in order to create a very different community, the church, an alternative city-kingdom here and now on earth by means of living and celebrating the way of the cross—the reign of joyful weakness, renunciation, self-denial, sharing, foolishness, community, and love-overcoming-evil.

We simply do not want the way of the cross to be what life is all about. It would mean that what most often passes for Christianity is largely a lie, a deception designed to keep us from the way Jesus. But how could a majority get it wrong? That seems so unlikely. I’ll come back to that.

This book is divided into three parts. The first and main part aims to get clear about the way of the cross itself. We have to understand the way of the cross before we can evade it. The second part focuses on several key, contemporary reasons why we can’t see the way of the cross, and it tries to undermine each. The third part offers a brief, constructive vision about what a healthy local and international church would look like if it took up the cross of Christ. It’s a new world with ancient roots. The final chapter describes the sort of ancient spirituality required for the kingdom work to proceed.

I somehow stumbled into talk of the way of the cross late in life, decades after doing the typical evangelical thing, and I’m still not there. I certainly wasn’t looking for it, and it’s certainly not some unique angle I made up. It has always been a stream within the Christian church, and it’s a tradition that beautifully cuts across all denominations and traditions. Within each prominent Christian tradition, you can find longtime defenders of the way of the cross. They’re usually pushed off to the side, often ignored, often suppressed, while the major institutions and teachers continue fussing and fighting about the broad and easy way. The way of the cross is sometimes described as “radical” but it’s just normal Jesus. The “radical” label frees us from taking it seriously. The way of the cross stands out clearly in the early church. But we also see it through the early Middle Ages in various expressions of monasticism. Later we see it in the Waldensians, St. Francis, Wycliffe and the Lollards, Hussites, Vincent de Paul, Thomas a Kempis, and many more. In modern times, we find expressions of the way of the cross in Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Eberhard Arnold, Nikolai Berdyaev, Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day, Howard Thurman, Andre Trocme, Jacques Ellul (both from my own Reformed tradition), Clarence Jordan, and, of course, the Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the author of the most important theology book of the last two or three hundred years—The Cost of Discipleship (1937). That’s the book that many of us have long had on our shelves but never got around to reading. It is not a perfect book, but it is profoundly simple, exasperating, timeless, and revolutionary. It aims, after all, to be just a simple restatement of Jesus’s most basic teaching—the way of the cross.

Bonhoeffer recognized the long tradition of the way of the cross. He offered this famous insight about the rise of monasticism as a protest movement, once the “broad way” had settled into the church after Constantine.

Here on the outer fringe of the church was a place where the older vision was kept alive. Here men still remembered that grace costs, that grace means following Christ. Here they left all they had for Christ’s sake, and endeavored daily to practice.2

Bonhoeffer added that the false turn came when the church represented monasticism “as an individual achievement which the mass of the laity could not be expected to emulate.”

By thus limiting the application of the commandments of Jesus to a restricted group of specialists, the Church evolved the fatal conception of the double standard—a maximum and a minimum standard of Christian obedience. . . . [T]he fatal error of monasticism lay not so much in its rigorism (though even here there was a good deal of misunderstanding . . . ) as in the extent to which it departed from genuine Christianity by setting up itself as the individual achievement of a select few, and so claiming a special merit of its own.3

The way of the cross turned into something marginal, something radical, and so Jesus’s basic, normal way was sidelined throughout most of the church. Jesus’s way diverged from the “normal” Christian way. Jesus’s path somehow became freakish. The Sermon on the Mount was tamed and declawed.

And, strangely, none of these results should be surprising. Jesus predicted this marginalizing of himself within the church. After all, he gave all those famous warnings about the “narrow way.” What other words have been so ignored and explained away? Sure, some Christian traditions, way-of-the-cross traditions understood these passages, at least in part. But most of our traditions have to twist and turn to get away from that pointed warning in order to make the faith fit with Western notions of bigness and success. Wall Street can’t do anything in a narrow way.

What could be more st...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface on Persuasion
• Part One: What Is the Way of the Cross?
• Part Two: Special Blinders to the Way of the Cross
• Part Three: Constructing the Way of the Cross
• Appendix A: A Short Retelling of Romans
• Appendix B: The Way of the Cross and the Reformed Tradition
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography