The Philosopher and the Gospels

Jesus Through the Lens of Philosophy

Derek Wilson

• Publisher: Lion Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780745958552
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

The teachings of Jesus Christ, as presented in the Bible, are familiar to millions, but do we really understand them? Keith Ward argues that, by scrutinising the Gospels through the lens of contemporary philosophy, we can discover a profound teaching that is not always apparent in traditional church teaching. Ward's analysis of what Jesus really said uncovers four central themes: - that the Gospel is for everyone (but not necessarily everyone will be saved); - that the Second Coming will lead to a future in the spiritual realm, not a physical world; - that Jesus presents a moral ideal for life rather than a literal set of rules; - that God is expressed initially through the incarnation of Jesus, but ultimately through the whole of creation.

Part 1

Approaching the Gospels

What can a philosopher say about the Gospels?

I began this book by wanting to look at the Gospels as a philosopher, and see what emerged. In particular, I looked at the “Sermon on the Mount” (Matthew 5–7) and at the parables in the first three (Synoptic) Gospels, because they claimed to give the teachings of Jesus. Accordingly, I did not look at the miracles, the healing ministry, or the passion of Jesus, even though these are major themes in the Gospels. I wanted to concentrate on how the Gospel writers had presented the teachings of Jesus.

When I did this, three themes leaped from the pages of the Synoptic Gospels. It seemed to me that Jesus’ teaching was, above all, that God was a God of limitless and self-giving love. There are some passages in Jesus’ parables that seem to stress God’s terrible judgment and God’s exclusion of sinners from salvation. Clearly, this is a problem. Being a philosopher, I set out to explore the idea of a God of unconditional love and its implications, and to see if there was a way of interpreting the parables of judgment and exclusion that was consistent with such an idea. My first theme was in place, that the Christian gospel is one of universal salvation. Some theologians call this conditional universalism, because it says that everyone can be saved, but does not logically entail that everyone will be saved.

Then there are some parables that speak of the “end of the age”, of the judgment of God on the nations, and some that speak of the choosing of an “elect” people. These, too, seem very problematic, on two main counts. First, they seem to suggest that God only really loves a few people of faith, and leaves the rest to a terrible fate. Second, the world did not end within the first generation of believers, as a number of verses apparently say it should have done. The main problem here is one of interpretation. What do terms like the “Son of man” or his coming on “clouds of glory with angels” really mean? Can they be taken literally, or do they have a symbolic meaning, referring to real events, but not in a literal way? Here again a philosopher may have something to say, both about the nature of metaphorical or symbolic speech in general, and about how we can use language as a very inadequate vehicle to speak of the relation between an eternal and infinite God and a temporal and finite creation. This led me to the idea that Jesus was speaking of profound truths, but they are spiritual truths about the world to come, not literal truths about this physical world. And that seemed to me to make a great deal of sense of some of the most difficult parts of the New Testament. I have called this a spiritual eschatology, because it teaches that there is a future in which evil will be eliminated and Christ will rule (that is “eschatology”, the doctrine of the “last things” or the ultimate destiny of the whole creation). But it is not a future in this physical world. Rather, it is a future in the world to come, the “new creation” that is promised in the New Testament.

Finally, many parables seem to be about life in the kingdom of God. In modern moral philosophy, there is a great interest in what is called “virtue ethics”. Attention is not concentrated on moral rules or on ways of obtaining the greatest happiness of the greatest number (often called deontology and consequentialism, respectively). The focus is on what sort of person one should be, on the virtues or excellences of character that go to form a good person. Looking at many of the parables in this light, a good account can be given of them by seeing them as portraying the sort of virtues that we would have if we saw Jesus as our moral ideal, and if we sought to let the Spirit of God form in us the virtues that were fully actual in Jesus.

True religion is, a philosopher may say (at least this one would), a matter of practice. It is a discipline of the soul by which liberation is sought from egoism, pride, and hatred, and union is sought with the beauty and perfection of God. So Christian morality will be closely bound up with a spiritual discipline of the soul, and with belief in a God who, Christians believe, can bring the soul by the power of the Spirit to share in the life of Christ. Philosophers might call this a participative virtue ethics, because it sees the excellences of mind and character at which humans should aim as responses to, and participation in, the nature of God as revealed in Jesus.

When these three themes emerged, I decided to develop them by putting down in italics my own versions of the “Sermon on the Mount” and virtually all the recorded parables of Jesus. Then I wrote a sort of personal commentary on them, so that readers can see how my three main themes grew as I read the recorded teachings of Jesus. When I say “my own versions”, what I mean is that they are not translations. They are expressions of what they meant to me as I read them. I have tried not actually to falsify them, and hope that they are plausible readings. But I know that the parables will mean different things to different people, and I am not claiming that these are the “correct” or “real” meanings of the parables. I think that my three main themes are reasonable readings of the Gospel material, but they do not wholly depend upon the small summaries of the parables that I give in the italicized passages. Let those summaries just be reminders of the parables and indicators of one personal response to them.

These three themes spring from a reading of the “Sermon on the Mount” and the parables in the Synoptic Gospels. The fourth Gospel is significantly different, containing no parables and only one (double) mention of the kingdom of God (John 3:3, 5). We need to account for this difference, and New Testament scholars have done that. What a philosopher can do is to ask if a general philosophical worldview can be found in John’s Gospel, and if so, what it is. That is precisely what, as my fourth theme, I try to do.

I conclude that the Gospel of John, and to some extent the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, suggests a total theistic worldview that is only implicit in the Synoptic Gospels. John’s doctrine of the mutual indwelling of Jesus and “God the Father”, together with the teaching of the unity of believers “in Christ” (especially in the parable of the vine in John 15), naturally led to what was later unfolded in patristic theology as the union of the human and divine natures in Christ. But, in a way that would surprise some Christians, I will argue that it even more naturally lends support to the formulation of an idealist metaphysics, a unitive idealism. Idealism is a philosophical system which postulates that mind, or at least something mind-like, is the ultimate reality of which the whole material universe is an expression or appearance. That, of course, for Christians, is God. Idealism is unitive if it claims that the universe, which may be estranged or alienated from its underlying source of being, has the ultimate goal of being united to Absolute Mind.

In its Christian form, it asserts that the being of the eternal God is temporally expressed in creation and redemption – and here John’s image of the “Word” becoming flesh is paradigmatic. God then brings the whole temporal creation to participate in the divine being as its completion and consummation – and that, I suggest, is the implication of the teachings that Jesus is the saviour of the world (John 1:29), and that the redeemed are “in” Christ, who is “in” the Father. John’s Gospel can be read as suggesting that there is in the teaching of Jesus just such an idealist metaphysic, though Jesus himself expressed it in the symbolic forms of Jewish imagery that are found in the Synoptic Gospels.

If the Gospel of John is an authentic unfolding of themes implicit in the Synoptic Gospels, then it becomes plausible to hold that Jesus might have somehow envisaged the goal of a union of humanity with the divine, which was foreshadowed and actualized in his own person. It then becomes much more plausible to believe that Jesus was aware of his unique identity with God, and this will influence any assessment of what his teaching was. It becomes more probable, other things being equal, that Jesus himself taught that God’s love is universal; that he used language about the “end of the age” in a symbolic, not literal, way; that he taught a spiritual way of overcoming egoism and participating in the life of God through the indwelling of the Spirit; and that he taught that the fulfilment of such participation, however exactly it may come about, is the final goal of human life.

Some would say, however, that all we can know is that these teachings existed in early Christian traditions which arose from reflection on Jesus’ life and death. In that case, we must, if we are Christian disciples, at least say that such traditions do not fundamentally mistake the implications of Jesus’ own teaching, and that we do not worship a Jesus who never existed, or who would have denied these traditions. Allowing that possibility, I will nevertheless sometimes refer to these traditions as “Jesus’ teachings”, meaning that they are teachings I think Jesus is likely to have given, or that were implicit in and consonant with what he did teach.

There are, of course, other interpretations of Jesus’ teaching than this. But I suspect that it is a lack of philosophical reflection on biblical language and belief that has sometimes led to some over-literal and spiritually superficial interpretations that seem to be widespread today. It is also true that historical Jesus research has usually been more interested in relating Jesus to his first-century Jewish environment than to the impact of his life and teaching on subsequent believers. The philosopher may be guided by an interest in the moral and metaphysical beliefs which seem to be implied by the recorded Gospel teachings. Sometimes those implications have taken centuries to be made explicit – for instance, the realization that slavery and sexual inequality are incompatible with the Gospel teaching took almost 2,000 years to become widespread!

The philosopher deals in questions of meaning and interpretation, in different possible ways of reading the Gospel texts, perhaps for different purposes. The Gospels are, after all, not just historical memoirs. They are written for a purpose – to proclaim Jesus as the messiah (in the Synoptic Gospels) or as the “saviour of the world” (in John’s Gospel). They are written to sustain and develop the faith of communities of disciples of Jesus, who already believed that, as Paul put it, “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4).

Christian churches today still hold that basic belief, and they take the Gospels as canonical texts which are to be used for sustaining and developing faith in a very different world from that of Jesus’ time. The philosophical theologian is interested in how the texts can be read to do that job. The interest is mainly about how the records of Jesus’ teachings can be used in developing a living Christian faith today.

There must of course be some connection between what Jesus actually said and a specific modern interpretation of ancient texts. Throughout the ages, different interpretations of his recorded teachings, often arising within different church traditions, may be seen as sometimes more and sometimes less natural and plausible developments of his teachings. Contemporary Christian views arise out of centuries of worship of the risen Christ, of thinking over what such worship implies about Jesus’ unique status as an object of worship, and of general ideas about God, human destiny, and the nature of revelation, that have been partly developed in response to advances in human knowledge, and that have been formed, often after protracted arguments, in specific historical traditions of worship.

It could be that Jesus shows the nature of God and God’s purpose, without consciously moving beyond the perspective of a first-century Palestinian Jew who was concerned to obey God’s will and proclaim God’s coming kingdom to his fellow Jews. As the church grew in the Gentile world, it developed more universal ideas of the kingdom and interpreted memories of the life of Jesus in the light of the resurrection appearances to the disciples. That process of development has continued for 2,000 years through many different cultures and philosophies. Our reading of the texts today will probably differ from that of the original writers.

The philosopher will be interested in the question of how the original teachings, in the light of all the scholarly disputes about what those may have been, can be seen as containing basic themes and latent possibilities of development that will make it reasonable to see Jesus as the source and inspiration of a specific interpretation of modern Christian teachings, as well as the proper object of Christian worship.

I have found Jesus’ recorded teachings to be philosophically profound, far more than good stories with a nice moral attached or clear instructions that need little thought to understand and put into practice. Such profundity, in my view, suggests a source, not in groups of argumentative disciples, but in a spiritual teacher of unique knowledge and insight. What has impressed me more and more as I have read the Gospels is the transcendent mystery of Christ and the ever-elusive yet always illuminating character of his teaching. This book tries to convey that – but I have no hope of putting as simply as he did thoughts that are as profound as his.

Can we know what Jesus taught?

I am very conscious of the fact that I am not a New Testament scholar, and I depend almost entirely on the historical, linguistic, and cultural researches of those who are. I am writing as a philosopher who uses such research as a resource, but whose primary focus is the text as it stands in the New Testament. I think that no serious student of the Bible can afford to neglect the work of the best biblical scholars. But contemporary scholarship leads to vastly different portraits of Jesus, with no obvious way of arbitrating between them. Sometimes decisions between conflicting scholarly interpretations have to be made, and I have tried to note where I have made them and why. On the whole, I am not claiming that I know Jesus thought this way. My claim is that we can, as disciples of Jesus, read the recorded responses to Jesus that we find in the Gospels in this way. The implication is that this is an intelligible development from Jesus’ teaching, even if it is not an exact reproduction of it.

First I need to address some general questions about how the recorded teachings of Jesus relate to what the historical Jesus might have taught, and how they may have been influenced by factors arising in the life of the early churches. This is not first-order historical Jesus research on my part, but a philosophical reflection on the principles and presuppositions underlying such research. This will give a basis upon which my philosophical and theological interpretation of the Gospels may proceed.

All biblical scholars are well aware that pure historical research can give no certainty about what Jesus taught. Our pictures of Jesus are at least in part reflections of our own ideals of what a great spiritual teacher should be (or maybe, in some cases, reflections of a belief that religion is an illusion and there is no God). Some views, however, are generally thought to be more plausible than others. In assessing historical documents of this sort, three main sets of considerations are relevant. First there is the question of general worldview. If you believe there is no God, or that Jesus was a mistaken prophet of the end of the world, you will seek an interpretation for which Jesus was at best, as Geza Vermes holds, a Galilean holy man or Hasid – not a scholar, but a rural miracle-worker and exorcist who met a tragic and untimely end. If, on the other hand, you believe that there is a God and that God created the cosmos for the sake of good, you may be more disposed to see Jesus as (at least) a prophet inspired by God, who may indeed have appeared after his death to his disciples. Assessments of the wisdom and worth of Jesus’ recorded teachings will be affected by such background worldviews.

Second, there is the question of whether you accept, on grounds of faith, the authority of some church tradition or not. If you do, you may well think that the recorded teachings of Jesus are authentic, at least in general. You will think that the church has been right in believing, for instance, that Jesus is the human image and act of God. If so, Jesus’ own beliefs may have been culturally restricted (for example, he would not have known about the size or age of the cosmos), but he did have unique knowledge of the nature and reality of God, and of the right way to relate to God. His recorded teachings may have been developed in slightly different ways by the Gospel editors, but they have not been completely changed either by the early church or by Paul, as Vermes and Crossan seem to suggest. They will be consistent with his being the saviour who is presently experienced in the community of your church.

If you are a convinced atheist, you will be disposed to think that Jesus and the traditions arising from him were pretty basically mistaken in some fundamental matters. Or if you belong to a more liberal church tradition, you may think that the recorded teachings are sayings arising within the early churches to meet their own specific spiritual needs, and that it does not matter so much whether they go back to a historical Jesus. Different churches take differing views on these matters. My point is merely that it would be reasonable to let your commitment to a particular church tradition influence your evaluation of the historical evidence. In short, it is a matter of faith that the Christ of faith is, or is an authentic development of, the Jesus of history. Such faith is not blind. It is a reasonable reading of a historical figure that cannot be objectively and conclusively verified, but that is strongly implied by present commitment to a tradition that claims to be derived from him. For present-day disciples of Jesus, he is the matrix or reliable foundation of a developing and diverse set of traditions which claim to disclose the divine nature and purpose. If you belong to or sympathize with one of these traditions, it will be reasonable for your historical judgments to be influenced (but, of course, neither overruled nor completely determined) by that fact.

Third, there is the question of assigning Jesus a plausible place in the history and culture of Galilee in the times of Pontius Pilate. Knowledge of the Aramaic language, the imagery of Apocalyptic, and messianic claimants before the Jewish War will give Jesus a historical context that will help in interpreting what his recorded teachings may have meant. Views on these matters will be important in deciding, for instance, whether Jesus could have claimed to be the messiah, whether he could have used “Son of man” as a title (Vermes claims that it was not possible to do so), and what he meant by the kingdom of God.

One method used by some New Testament scholars to establish which of Jesus’ reported teachings are likely to be genuine is the criterion of dissimilarity. Professor Crossan writes that “a rigorous negativity must be invoked to separate what Jesus said or did from what the tradition records”.¹ If any reported sayings of Jesus can be found in contemporaneous Jewish records, or if they express known general attitudes of the primitive church, they must be rejected. This means that the only authentic sayings of Jesus will be those that differ from the views of his Jewish contemporaries and from those of the early churc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• From the author of
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Approaching the Gospels
• 2 Universal Salvation: The True Gospel
• 3 The Cosmic Christ
• 4 The Ethics of Personal Fulfilment
• 5 Theosis: The Union of Human and Divine
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography