miroslav on "jesus-left behind"

miroslav has a column coming out in his christian century slot called 'faith matters' and it is so dead right, so prickly, and so needed that i wanted to post it here. this is not the *final* version so check cc for that, but this is close and anyway you'll get the point. literally.

"A few months ago a friend told me of a conversation he’d had with an atheist in Colorado Springs. If you think that Colorado Springs, the Mecca of American evangelical Christianity, is the last place an atheist would feel at home, you are not much off the target. But there he was living, right in the middle of what from his perspective must have felt like a lion’s den. My friend had met him and started talking to him about Jesus. The man was interested. Even those who feel like a piece of meat before hungry lions when standing before Christians nonetheless are often attracted to Jesus. After they had studied the gospels for a few weeks, the atheist’s fascination with Jesus grew, but he was puzzled about his spiritual guide. “What kind of Christian are you?” he inquired of my friend. “If you really want to slap a label on me, it should probably read ‘Evangelical.” “You can’t be an evangelical,” responded his interlocutor. “You are talking about Jesus!”

The story had a force of revelation for me. Evangelicals who belong to the religious right insist that Jesus is their Lord and savior, but nowadays they hardly ever talk about Jesus, at least not in public. They talk about politics—how to get the right people elected to local, state, and federal governments so as to advance their religious, moral, and political causes. They pour all their energy into political battles, and have nothing left for Jesus. If you were to point this out to any representative of religious right, they’d tell you that they wage political wars for Jesus and in his name. But Jesus is no longer at the center of their attention; struggle for power has taken his place. They are political warriors in religious garb, not followers of Jesus. It took a religious outsider to name what was going on among the seemingly most devout.

There are many ways of leaving Jesus behind. Take the famous Left Behind series. Jesus is all over these books. But what kind of Jesus? As I was flipping through their pages, I felt that I was more in the world of Terminator movies than in the world of the Gospels or even the world of the book of Revelation. Violent struggle dominates the imagination of the writers, struggle carried out with most deadly weapons of the flesh. Where is the Jesus who came to redeem the world by the power of his self-giving love and who demanded of his would be followers to take up their cross and walk in his footsteps? In these books, he is nowhere to be seen. Overcoming the assaults of the godless enemy by the power of sacrificial witness to the point of shedding of one’s own blood!? Nothing of the kind. Martyrs of the ancient book of Revelation have morphed into Left Behind’s rootless warriors. And where is Jesus in all this? He is there, but the one who loves enemies and justifies the ungodly has been discarded for the Rider on the White Horse. Never mind that the whole New Testament is united in this crucial point: to follow Christ means to love enemies, not to eliminate them.

I am not sure which is worse, trading Jesus for political warring or transmuting him into the image of our own violent selves. In a sense, though, both amount to the same. Either way, Jesus is left behind.

Think of the irony involved. The religious right is abandoning Jesus! The charge that the religious left has abandoned Jesus for their pet political causes has been the religious right’s standard line of attack against their enemies on the left. That charge isn’t unjustified, of course. You need not belong to the religious right to notice a consistent pattern in the ways theological liberals have thought about Jesus: Out with the Jesus of the Gospels and in with the “historically reconstructed” Jesus—which is to say, out with the Jesus who is a “stranger” to us and can challenge contemporary prejudices and in with Jesus who is cast into our own image and fits with what is politically expedient. It does not seem to help to point this danged? to theological liberals, as many have done. You like what you like, and if you have the liberty of construing Jesus—which is what much of the reconstruction of the “historical” Jesus amounts to—you’ll construe him to your liking.

Then there is a simple disregard of Jesus on the part of the religious left. I’ve sat through many a sermon which was all about this or that cause that demands our energies and about this or that social or psychic technique that will solve the problem. It is not that I disliked the causes on the whole, but I kept wondering, Where is Jesus in all this? At best I could hear distant echoes of the “spirit” of Jesus translated into a modern idiom. Social causes demanded respect, not the concrete person Jesus.

Complaints that religious left has abandoned Jesus are not new. Now religious right has fashioned itself in the inverted image of the religious left. energized as it is by a set of political causes crafted in opposition to religious left, it has abandoned Jesus.
If this is even roughly right, writing on the wall is spelling the doom of the religious right. Just think of this: the political power of the religious right is parasitic on its religious power, and its religious power is the direct result of the erstwhile centrality of Jesus in the life of its communities. Discard Jesus and you’ve not only foolishly replaced the one true God with the idols of your own making; you’ve also cut the branch on which you sit as a political actor. The challenge for political right is to show that Jesus matters to it more than politics. Then, and only then, will it be a true leaven in the world of politics."

Comments

[Becca]

wellsaid ... well written ... well deserved. As an evangelical I believed for years that we sat in the wings and never got involved in politics, culture, etc. We were majorally outclassed by the liberlas in this realm ... so we got into the fray ... wholeheartedly and lost our center (our Lord) (our Way). But the pendulum is swinging back and evangelicals are asking the questions again "where is the real Kingdom of God? ... and why are we not living more like Jesus?" This was clearly the call of the recent Hope & A Future Conference in Pittsburgh last weekend where 3500 evangelical & catholic Episcopalians/Anglicans met together in a hopeful and unified celebration of Christ, Scripture & Outreach.