God for Now

Theology through Evangelical and Charismatic Experience

Mark Amos

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781725252257
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Does God want to be known? Does experience matter? Does theology matter? This book is for people asking these questions. It treats them seriously and offers a testimony--a way through--from the viewpoint of evangelical and charismatic faith. The answer is yes, yes, and yes, but there are bumps in the road, problems to interrogate, assumptions to question, voices to hear, before the yes is reached.

Part 1

Jesus

Introduction

The Christ who appeals to me aesthetically but also confronts and challenges is the one spoken about in the Bible. Christ is presented at his most vivid and compelling in the gospels. I have known these accounts since childhood and I love the man we read about there. As a young child, I can remember singing:

There is a green hill far away,

Without a city wall

Where our dear Lord was crucified;

Who died to save us all.1

Singing this song is one of my earliest memories. Even then, I was drawn to this faraway hill and the man being crucified there. It seemed full of mystery, and yet it triggered something in my imagination. There was a point of connection. I could see something of Jesus and wanted to know more. I still want to know him more. Even that line “died to save us all” holds so much I want to know more about. He has never ceased to draw me to himself, never ceased to question and move me. It doesn’t take much to turn my thoughts to Jesus. If I read a storybook about him with my children, my emotions get straight there: to Galilee by the sea; to the home of a tax collector; to the temple in Jerusalem. The Jesus I know, even from that strange world of old, speaks life into this world, breaks into the moment.

For a number of years, I lived and worked with teenagers living in economic and social deprivation. The Jesus that I have come to know would have understood those teenagers and they would have been drawn to him. Jesus knew what it was to be cast out into the darkness—to be on the underside of humanity.2 He would have been for them and with them. I have also taught teenagers from economic and social privilege. The Jesus I know would also be for them. He would be their hope and transformation.

In church, I look around and see that Jesus is the object of our worship. When we sing songs that speak of him we are glad. When we gather to eat bread and drink wine, we know him with us. In each of these spaces, Christ has been the center from which everything else makes sense—at least as I have seen it. I seek this same Jesus when reading theology. Studying theology has been a joy and a frustration. It has ignited passion and kept me awake with questions. I couldn’t do without it. As I narrate my experience of God, it is as one who feels things through theological reflection. Reading about Jesus never gets tiring. He keeps me wanting to be Christian and seeing what theologians have said about him helps. In particular, a number of authors on the gospels enable us to recognize him more fully. They pursue Jesus with intent and heart. We now turn to the wisdom of these commentators whilst maintaining a focus on the motivations of faith.

1. Cecil Frances Alexander, 1848. Public Domain.

2. There will be more to say of this later.

1

Christ and Scripture

The Real Jesus?

In many ways, the world of Jesus was not like ours—not completely different, but different enough to feel strange. We should realize that we often cast Jesus in our likeness. We see him as we see ourselves. We want him to be like us. My likeness is white, university educated, English. Jesus was none of the above. To get to him we therefore need to do some work. Context is key. Sometimes doing background work is tough—boring even. However, looking into the historical Jesus is never dull. Understanding his world brings him to life. It makes him more interesting, not less. When we catch Jesus as he was in flesh and blood, we see he is not so much the esoteric holy man speaking and acting on some existential plane. He is much more visceral and salt of the earth than that.

We come to see that he is not always the guy we have made him out to be, in art, song, and culture. When we look closer and are ready to have our assumptions challenged, Jesus comes into view. Jesus was, of course, a middle-Eastern Jew. A carpenter from Galilee, no less. This matters, not so much technically, but in order for us to understand him. And for all this, he is much more interesting, more present, and more relevant to us and our world.

There are many studies on the historical Jesus—some good, some bad. They have a laudable aim: to get back to the real Jesus. Looking at Jesus in his first-century context begins the adjustment of our mindset. It turns our focus on the man himself in his time. Of the various studies, N. T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God has had the greatest impact for me. Wright focuses with great intensity on Jesus’ world, creating a fascinating portrait of the man himself. It feels as though the Jesus he introduces us to might just have been real.

It is worth dipping into some Wright.3 He has an insatiable hope that we can get to Jesus through the Gospels. He trusts that the Gospel writers are doing more than propagating their own agenda. They actually get close to the real Jesus. Take what Wright says about Jesus’ self-awareness and mission. If we want Jesus, we need to know what he thought about himself. To get to this, we need to understand him in relation to first-century people—their dreams, hopes, and fears. Wright observes that many Jews were hoping for a messiah—an anointed one from God who would restore their fortunes. What the messiah would look like varied from group to group. It is in this setting that Jesus figures out his vocation. He knew that a messiah would bring God’s reign of justice, presence, and peace to his people and the whole earth. God’s presence was meant to be in the temple, but the temple seemed empty. No wonder Zechariah was so surprised when an angel turned up there. The temple was meant to be God’s blessing to the earth, but instead was sucking the life out of many through taxation. At the same time, it was excluding others altogether.

Jesus increasingly recognized that God’s presence was not arriving through the temple but through himself. He was acting like the temple. His miracles, teachings, prophetic judgements—these were bringing in God’s presence. That people sought him out just confirms this: lepers; prostitutes; the sick. They saw the love of God in him. They saw in him the God of the covenant, the God who had been victoriously present in the stories of their heritage. In Jesus, they knew they would find welcome, healing, and restoration. Jesus gets what is going on—gets somehow that God is running though his veins and out towards others. To put it in Wright’s terms, Jesus sees that he is acting as the embodiment of the God of Israel.4

Jesus is not a heroic or mythic figure. Neither is he more God than human. He makes sense in this world and from the Scriptures. It makes at least some sense that a first-century Jew might understand his vocation as messianic considering what was taking place around him and through him. It also starts to make sense of early Christian claims about Jesus’ divinity. Jesus acts and speaks in a way that brings the kingdom of God to bear on the world. He acts as Israel’s God has been known to act. We can see why the Gospel writers highlight these aspects of Jesus’ ministry. As they have pieced accounts from various people together, they have been caught by who Jesus was. The Jesus they are narrating is who they believe him to be. They are compelled to talk about him. I am hooked on this Jesus. Why? Not least because he is luminous and real, but also because in him I see a God worthy of worship. I see something that relates not only to then, but to this moment.

So far, so interesting. But Wright is doing more than saying interesting stuff about Jesus. For him, when we read the gospels we are actually getting the first-century Jesus. This is significant because for a while modern scholarship had been brutally critical of the Gospel accounts. Actually, the criticisms haven’t stopped.5 People I speak to outside of Christianity with an awareness of the Gospels are suspicious of their authenticity, thinking they reflect the wishes of the authors rather than the real Jesus. Wright thinks such objections say more about the objectors than the gospels. Suspicion more likely reveals our own prejudices than exposing the truth. Rather than seeing the motives of the authors as sinister, it makes better sense to look at the Jesus they have been captivated by and the account they give of him.

Much as Wright’s portrayal of Jesus is brilliant, I have some concerns. There is a tension. The tension is around approaching the Gospels objectively and being a Christian. I am not objective when it comes to Jesus. My feelings run too deep. I think Wright is trying to be objective when really it is not so important. I agree with him that the actual Jesus living in time and space is reachable. I too trust that the Gospel writers are talking about this Jesus. I agree that it is valuable to use historical tools to understand the context of the Gospels and so Jesus himself. But I also think that because the Gospel writers have faith in Jesus, their accounts display some of their allegiance to him. Their faith matters in relation to their portrayals. This is why I cannot just read the Gospels like history books, or even as biographies. I read them as a Christian. The faith bit—both our own and that of the Gospel writers—matters. When I come to these texts, it is as one who wants to believe in Jesus. My spectacles are rose-tinted. I would not have it any other way.

The Preexistent Jesus

Why does the faith bit matter? Some things to do with Jesus are more difficult to get at without faith. Take a theological concept such as Christ’s preexistence. The Son lives eternally with Father and Spirit, existing before taking human form as Jesus.6 Swallowing a teaching like this is not easy. Because we are really not preexistent, we do not have a requisite framework for understanding preexistence. However good we are at ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Jesus
• Part 2: The Spirit
• Part 3: Knowing God
• Bibliography