With so many words over so long a time, perhaps passersby can still hear tones inaudible to the more passionate participants. Somebody seems to have hoped so, once.
Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
Jesus fascinates. That this is so in a culture where “Jesus” has been used for everything
from selling hats and t-shirts to justifying white supremacy is a miracle of no small proportion. Jesus fascinates because of his on-going influence, because of the good that has also been done in his name despite the harmful and the tacky, and because of the literature in which the story of Jesus is told. Beyond that, the literature on the literature is something of a cottage industry. “The appetite for historical study of the New Testament remains a publishing constant and a popular craze” (Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, May 24, 2010).
Two authors, Gopnik and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, have both penned thoughtful and engaging articles about Jesus and the Jesus literature this summer. The articles appeared not in arcane theological publications, but in journals of culture. Gopnik’s piece, a review of a wide range of material on Jesus and the gospels appeared in The New Yorker. Phillips work, a review of Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief in which the writer also engages in deeper religious analysis, was published in the summer edition of The Threepenny Review (published in Berkeley). I am fascinated by their fascination with Jesus, and engaged by their engaging thoughtfulness. While neither author tips their own religious hand explicitly, the impression given by both is that these are articles written by “outsiders,” passersby if you will.
Gopnik is an able judge of current scholarly literature on the historical Jesus. “The current scholarly tone is… realist but pessimistic,” that is to say, the scholars think there are historical materials in the gospels, but getting to the bottom of them is complex. Gopnik thinks this affects faith, or perhaps argues that it should have an impact on faith. “The intractable complexities of fact produce the inevitable ambiguities of faith.” Among the things that reasonably could be said about Jesus, Gopnik includes the following: He’s verbally spry and even a little bit shifty. He likes defiant, enigmatic paradoxes and pregnant parables that never quite close, perhaps by design…. Jesus’ morality has a brash, sidewise indifference to conventional ideas of goodness. His pet style blends the epigrammatic with the enigmatic…. There is a wild gaiety about Jesus’ moral teachings that still leaps off the page. Gopnik writes about Jesus’ “social radicalism” – the relaxed egalitarianism of the open road and the open table. Yet he also acknowledges another dimension to Jesus. In Mark, Jesus is both a fierce apocalyptic prophet… and a wise philosophical teacher who professes love for his neighbor and supplies advice for living. There is a “twoness” about Jesus, including a twoness between what Gopnik calls “Paul’s divine Christ” and “Jesus the wise rabbi.”
Here Gopnik offers additional reflections of his own, distinguishing between “storytelling truths” and “statement making truths.” The twoness in the Christian story is a part of its dynamism, Gopnik thinks. From the very beginning there is ambiguity and symbolism. The sublime symbolic turn – or the retreat to metaphor… begins with the first words of the faith…. The argument is the reality, and the absence of certainty the certainty. Jesus fascinates Gopnik because he continues to offer the possibility for this kind of deep conversation. Somehow in asking about Jesus, we dig more deeply into life.
Adam Phillips offers more than a book review, as already noted. He characterizes Elaine Pagels’ work as “trying to find, within the multiple faiths called Christianity, a version of Christianity that she can morally afford to believe in.” Like Gopnik, Phillips sees within Christianity a certain multiplicity. Phillips argues that Pagels is trying to find a Christian faith that does not demonize the enemy “even if the enemy is what you still need to call them.” Pagels search for such a Christianity has centered in gaining deeper understanding of and insight into the earlier years of the Christian faith. She has studied the writings of the Gnostics, and Beyond Belief focuses on the non-canonical “Gospel of Thomas.” She offers a sympathetic view of the rise of orthodoxy and canonicity. This act of choice… leads us back to the problem that orthodoxy was invented to solve: how can we tell truth from lies. What is genuine and thus connects us with one another and with reality, and what is shallow, self-serving, or evil? Anyone who has seen foolishness, sentimentality, delusion, and murderous rage disguised as God’s truth knows there is no easy answer to the problem that the ancients called discernment of spirits. Phillips then offers his reflections on this passage from Pagels. For Pagels, it is to our (defining) credit that there is no easy answer to the problem of discernment of spirits, and she suggests that our hardest and best task is to keep the problem alive. Orthodoxy robs us of our doubts, and it is only self-doubt that keeps us from demonizing our enemies. He believes that Pagels finds in The Gospel of Thomas a Jesus “who is on the side of the seekers rather than the finders… who prefers being sympathetic to being right.” Phillips wraps up his reflections on Pagels, Christian faith and Jesus with these words: For Christians like Pagels… Jesus invites us to reinvent Christianity, not establish it. He is the visionary who calls for revision. Like a contemporary pragmatist, he doesn’t want to be followed, he wants to be redescribed…. There are as many Jesuses as there are gospels – as there are Christians. All Pagel’s Christians have in common is a quest in which they must try and find what they are looking for.
Agreeing completely with either Gopnik or Phillips is not the point. I am fascinated by their fascination with Jesus, and fascinated by the Jesus they find fascinating. This Jesus, with his fondness for enigmatic paradoxes and pregnant parables that never quite close, with his invitation to a belief that also includes doubts and questions, casts a certain spell (the root of the word “fascination” is in a Latin word that means casting a spell). I am charmed. Parker Palmer writes, “truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline.” Perhaps at the heart of Christianity is an eternal conversation about the meaning of Jesus conducted with passion and discipline. If so, Gopnik and Phillips sound tones, sometimes inaudible to some who have been engaged in the conversation a long time, that nevertheless need to be heard. Fascinating.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
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Thanks for you comments on the articles by Gopnik and Adam Phillips. I've read neither article, but I was in a study group on Pagels book, Beyond Belief, sponsored by the downtown Episcopalian church here in Austin. I didn't like the book at all! I tend to be suspicious of the suspicious these days. Pagels is furiously grinding an axe, I think, dissatisfied with how the Christian Church has turned out. She seems most distressed with how creeds and confessions are considered more significant than "walking the talk." I came across this sentence today, though, by Jonathan Lear: "One of the twentieth century's most significant contributions to philosophy- manifest in the work of the later Wittgenstein and of Heidegger- is a working through of the idea that there can be no viable distinction between the existence of concepts and the lives we live with them" (_Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life_, p. 8).
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