Resurrection trumps Religion
By: Tony Golsby-Smith
Tags: Christianity, Religion

Hebrews confronts one of the pressing problems of the emerging church in the first century — ie the ‘Judaising’ of Christianity. We will explore this more fully later but the question that this raises is ‘How is revelant to us in the 21st century?

How is the struggle with religion a modern and defining characteristic of Christianity? Is the gospel a form of religion or is it fundamentally not a religion and in fact is at odds with religion? Indeed is religion hostile to the gospel and suffocating?

Bonhoeffer’s problem:

Religion suffocates Revelation

One modern thinker who has helped confront these questions is Bonhoeffer. We will therefore take a little excursion into Bonhoeffer’s inquiries with a view to proving the point that far from being irrelevant, Hebrews confronts problems that are relevant today, and relevant to non-Jews as well as Jews. We can even say, more broadly, that Hebrews was unsuccessful: it failed to stop the Judaising of Christianity so what the writer feared has happened. Thus we are facing a version of Christianity that is distorted into a religion and so the argument of Hebrews — a plea to purify the gospel and be true to its core — is still relevant today. It is an unfinished argument.

Bonhoeffer’s dilemma illustrates how a 20th century theologian grappled intensely with the issue of a public Christianity and articulated it in language that is stark and illuminating — language that many of us can identify with. We should pay attention to Bonhoeffer because as we all know this was not a theoretical debate for him, but one that cost him his life. (I will be drawing on a brilliant conference speech on Bonhoeffer by the eminent philosopher Paul Ricouer and he emphasizes this point).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Tegel prison

Bonhoeffer saw ‘religion’ not as a thing, institution, or social category that defines a justifiable arena of human activities, but rather as a ‘psychology’ as a way of thinking, being and doing about life. Increasingly he saw it as a smokescreen that obscured our knowledge of God and distorted the picture of what God was doing. He struggled to imagine what he began to call a ‘religionless’ Christianity and what it would look like. Importantly he saw ‘religion’ as almost a contrast with being ‘fully human’. He saw that the cloak religion boxes Christianity into a small subset of human activity and therefore limits God’s interests -and indeed God’s claims — on all of life. He would, I think, have been happy with Edwin Judge’s avoidance of the term ‘Christian’ to describe himself. Perhaps most tellingly, he saw religion as diverting attention from not only being fully human, but from being fully Christ-like. This is because he identified Jesus as the archetypal human being, the template for humanity not the starter of a specialist clique whose interests were ‘technical’ religious.

Bonhoeffer’s definition of Religion

He defined ‘religion’ or the religion mindset, as composed of two ingredients

1) ‘Metaphysics’:

By this he meant something like ‘supernatural’. Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy but he did not mean that. The key worldview of the religious psychology is to split reality into two parts — an upper and lower part. The lower part is the world of physicality and the upper part is the world of meaning and spirituality. God gets assigned to the upper part and thus we live in a world where a second layer of reality is added to perceived reality. So God inhabits an outer ring that is optional to belief and at the margins.

a. So clearly in Bonhoeffer’s terms, God must own the material world and it must be central to his interests, not peripheral. Hence a doctrine of creation, must be at the core of discarding religion in favour of a religionless Christianity. The vision of creation must be expansive in scope and push every horizon.

b. Secondly in Bonhoeffer’s terms, we must ‘discover’ God — his patterns, imprints, character revealed — and recognize him in all aspects of this expansive creation. We must recognize his handiwork in it all.

c. Thirdly — and most pointedly — we must recognize the Logos in all of this creation. The Greek idea of Logos — as governing principle behind all creation — suits these purposes as we shall see in Hebrews. Ie the Greek idea of Logos introduced a very rich and flexible picture of creation as animated by meaning which on its own was then disembodied by Plato. But once united to the creation doctrines of Jewish thought, it unlocked a rich picture of creation as logos — which in turn opens the door to Christ as Logos.

d. Thus, as we discover God in any aspect of creation — we are discovering the Logos or Christ.

e. This is supported by the dominant argumentative role that creation plays in Hebrews but also throughout the OT in Psalms, Isaiah and Job to name a few.

2) Interiority

The second ingredient of religious mindset is the ‘interiority’ instinct. This means that, having banished God from the world of activities and matter, he is allowed to return to a private devotional space that is unthreatened by the public world, and makes no claims on the public world.

3) To this we need to add a third —

Morality as audit.

Today we are seeing an increasing claim by the religious mindset on the public space. But they are largely doing this without dismantling the metaphysics mindset. So a kind of ‘sacred’ censorship gets applied to the public space. Ie we take the profane v sacred and apply it to the public space. This is disastrous and inadequate as it ironically appears to be bold but ends being conservative. It forces religion on the public space but fails to recognise the stunning hand of God in the public space.

a. To really integrate we need to first reform the metaphysics mindset — the supernatural view of religion — and replace it with a radical creationism. Thus I see God in all things and this is revelation not just proposition.

b. Then we take a religionless view of God into the public space. We present ourselves as fully human not Christian.

This religious mindset condemns faith to the edges of life. This is what Bonhoeffer identified in the redemptive focus of much of Christianity. The tight links between sin, problems, healing and salvation — all directed at the individual soul — created a dynamic interlocking logic that turns Christianity into a specialist interest that occurs at the edges of life. It fails to answer or address big life questions around meaning, longevity, durability, joy, vocation, innovation, intimacy, physicality, social cohesion, smart thinking, human centred design, organisations, family cohesion, business and enterprise, inquiry and learning to name a few.

Schizophrenia of Sunday to Monday

In making what looks like a radical case for religionless Christianity we must remember that Edwin has told us that this was how the Roman audience interpreted what they heard of early Christianity. They did not hear it as religious nor did they call it a religion but rather a philosophy or even a political movement.

The World of First Century Jews

Having painted a picture of the modern challenges we face with religion — or even ‘Judaised Christianity’ — we can turn back to the first century Jews. As I do, don’t forget Bonhoeffer — I will be arguing that the writer to the Hebrews was also in search of a religionless Christianity.

My goal in now exploring the world of the Jewish audience and their problems is to walk a mile in their shoes. We must be prepared to empathise with them so that we can feel their pain and look at the world through their eyes. We know when we are beginning to empathise because we stop judging and start to feel, ‘Yes at first glance that looked stupid, but I can really feel myself doing the same thing now’.

Firstly understand that Judaism was not a homogenous social unit. They formed into five segments and only one remained in its first century form.

1) Pharisees who were the letter of the law guys. They emphasized the law above all else and it was they who created the para- biblical rules, commentaries and books that have ended up defining Judaism since the first century

2) The Sadducees who were tied to the temple and its rites. They were mortal intellectual enemies of the Pharisees and you can easily see this as Paul played them off against each other. Obviously they collapsed with the destruction of the temple.

3) The Zealots who were in favour of political rebellion against Rome.

4) The Essenes who were monastics who withdrew from life and whose writings we found in the Dead Sea Scrolls

5) The Baptisers who stressed personal repentance and were led at first by John the Baptist.

The early church thought of themselves as Jewish Baptisers

Our first paradigm shift is to recognize that the early Christians did not call themselves Christians — we probably know this but don’t recognize its significance. We assume they mentally identified themselves as the ‘early church’ — ie a non-Jewish, breakaway movement without a name yet. But in fact, it looks much more likely that they thought of themselves as a continuation of Jewishness not a complete break from it. This is the only way to explain their behavior and makes much more sense of a close reading of the Acts which we will get to in a moment.

But it also begins to make much more sense of Hebrews — as the letter that signals the rift where this new movement broke off from Judaism and finally realized it could never be integrated.

The Temple as the defining symbol of Judaism & religion

The defining symbol of this Jewish identity was the temple. It was not mere architecture but the hub of meaning in Jewish religion. This makes Jesus’ prophecy in Mark 13 epic and disrupting . In response to his disciples’ admiration of the temple buildings — wholly understandable given their scale and grandeur — he told them it would all be destroyed and dismantled. It is impossible for us to conceive how jolting this must have been. It is not like saying to an Australian, “The Opera House will be destroyed”, it meant that their whole social identity and hopes would be obliterated. This would demand a complete rethink of their identity.

“As he was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look Teacher what massive stones! What magnificent buildings!” Mark 13

Now we know for sure that Hebrews was written before the destruction of the temple, but it too seems to predict or imply the destruction. But it does more than imply the destruction. It prepares them for its destruction by envisioning a far broader ‘social project’ and destiny that God had in mind — this being the New Jerusalem. He declares at the end of the book that they are coming to a new community defined magnificently by Christ and prefigured by the saints of old — and in this way he seems to me to be laying out the groundwork for what emerged as the totally distinctive movement called ‘Christianity’ and the church.

The Acts of the Apostles illuminates the Jewish struggle

Let us turn now to the Acts as the only extended social history of the early church — or I would prefer say as the evolution of the church and its tensions to be born. We will look at it, literarily — as a drama or a novel capturing a very human journey of discovery as they stumbled towards their destiny — the social destiny that was always coded into the resurrection and the gifts of the Spirit but that they took a long time to recognize.

Traditionally I have looked at this book as a pretty mundane narrative because I could only see it as organized around the theme of ‘organic expansion of the gospel’ which turned it into a geography lesson. There were sermons punctuated throughout but I found these largely indistinguishable and pretty Jewish. And it seemed to peter away at the end, with no dramatic climax.

Now I want to offer a new reading that layers a much more intense drama across the narrative — essentially the long struggle for the baby of the gospel to escape from its domineering parent of Judaism. This domineering parent is represented by the city of Jerusalem in the book and we can now reinterpret the geographical expansion as a series of ever widening circles which are stretching the cords tying the gospel back to Jerusalem — not just in mileage but in thinking. However the struggle is costly and messy and in the end, costs Paul, the principal protagonist of the book dearly. In fact we can trace a secondary narrative throughout the book of the character and the journey of Paul. Luke does not idealise Paul or sugar coat his journey, but emerges for me as an extraordinary biographer, who trusts the tale and lets the events tell the story in all their unresolved and tortured detail. We end up with a very human picture of Paul that challenges the oft cited criticism that “Christianity” was an invention of the intellectual genius of Paul not Jesus. Far from that, Acts suggests that Paul reached the end of his talents and his abilities in the struggle to get free from Jerusalem, and the quest was picked up and accelerated by others, most notably Apollos.

The Dramatic plot structure of Acts

So in this structure of struggle here are the big sections of Acts.

1) The first section covers chapters one to nine: it finishes with Paul’s conversion but we should couple Paul’s conversion with the martyrdom of Stephen and his epic sermon to the Sanhedrin. His sermon reaches a climax with the great rhetorical question from Isaiah; “Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool; where kind of house will you build me?” says the Lord. This question throws down the gauntlet to the old Judaism, and challenges the temple as the centre of their faith. It suggests that God’s work lies way beyond the temple and its customs, in the entire earth and all of the works of men’s hands.

2) The next section is the Peter section between 10 and 11 and Paul’s early missionary journeys . Both of them describe movements into Gentile territory that is criticized by the Jewish Christians, and then discussed and arbitrated on by the council of elders in Jerusalem. Clearly Jerusalem is working as some kind of headquarters for the early believers and they are the ones who demand answers and set policy. The Council in chapter 15 is a major section that Luke gives a lot of attention to. James’ endorsement of the Gentiles is fair but hardly a ringing endorsement; we can identify the traces of conservatism in his judgment, and we can feel the tension in the room and Jerusalem as he gives his verdict. He does not say “Let the Gentiles believe independently, and follow Christ only with no regard to Mosaic Law”. He puts four stipulations on them, both moral and ceremonial. But his reasoning is strange to us: he says that they must abide by these four laws because “Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues every Sabbath”. He is justifying the ruling by Moses and the widespread influence of Jewish customs, synagogues and Sabbath keeping. His reasoning does not emanate from the dying and rising of Jesus.

3) Then we have the long section of Paul’s further missionary journeys

4) Then Acts finishes with the longest section of all — beginning at Chapter 20 we see Paul’s emotional journey back to Jerusalem. We can read between the lines and recognize this is a deep thing for him. It is not a mere tactical return, and it is not like a missionary returning for R and R. This is an affair of the heart; his heart remains in Jerusalem and he wants to give them every chance to come with him to the full journey in Christ. We know that he is filled with foreboding and does not really expect to succeed and in fact this journey back is marked by poignant scenes of farewell and indeed by criticism or disagreement from other Christians who clearly do not think it is a good thing to go back to Jerusalem. Paul expects conflict there.

When he arrives back we see an violent mix of two ingredients: on the one hand, Paul’s strange attempt to compromise with Judaism, and on the other the fearsome extremism of the unbelieving Jews — whom we can only describe as ungovernable, fundamentalist jihadists. All of my sympathies lie with the poor Roman governor trying to make sense of it all and calm everyone down!

But the thing to note is that Paul’s presence caused uproar within days of his arrival — but the continued presence of James and the elders and the believing Jews had NOT caused any such uproar. In fact, they were living somewhat peaceably and they implored Paul to continue to keep the peace — by demonstrating that ‘you yourself are living in obedience to the law’. SO we can only assume that they were participating in Jewish customs, the temple traditions and keeping Moses law while also defining themselves as believers in Christ.

I would posit therefore that they thought of themselves, and defined themselves, and presented themselves as the Jewish Baptiser group, not a breakaway movement.

A new voice emerges from a new city

While this was going on a new voice emerges in Acts — Apollos. Luke gives us a detailed and careful portrait of him and his abilities, that we should read carefully.

Importantly he is from the city of Alexandria, and we need to explain what that means in the ancient world. Clearly he was a product of that city and it remarkable culture. In this city Greek thought and Jewish thought collided and intertwined — it was a productive conversation. This could happen because both movements were in a sense free of their old origins and its limiting hold — they met on neutral territory and in a new context where the old guards had no power.

Philo, Alexandria and the Greek ‘Logos’

In that city, the dominant force among the Jews was the brilliant and influential Jewish philosopher, Philo. Philo is famous for taking the Greek concept of Logos and integrating it into Jewish thought. He found the Logos a powerful and appealing idea, and mined it for its wisdom. It gave him a metaphor or a heuristic to explore God more fully and position God more broadly throughout creation. He could argue that God was not just a Jewish construct, revealed only to Moses but rather that God’s presence permeated all of creation, and all of thought.

He saw the Logos as the great bridge between God and Man — and indeed as the high priest. He identified the logos as the Melchizedek who integrated the mystery of God with the life of humanity on the planet.

Cleary we can see the huge influence of Philo on both John’s gospel and Hebrews. Both writers use the Logos concept heavily, but don’t subordinate their thinking to Philo’s Platonic worldviews. Rather they extend Philo — they agree with him that Logos is a useful way to think about God, and that it broadens the revelation from Jewish only customs to all of creation; that further it aligns nicely with a lot of Jewish scriptures about the revelation of God and indeed it feeds our reflections on the mysterious nature of God. They seem to nod in agreement towards some involvement of the Holy Spirit in the notion of Logos forming in Greek minds. Remember that Logos and Greek Philosophy had no idols and no pagan ceremonies built into them. So Philo was not studying ancient Greek religions (they did exist of course and the Greeks were idol worshippers but it was a marginalized movement in many ways and does not permeate the great Greek philosophers). So the interaction was between Jewish religion and Greek thought/philosophy NOT the Jewish religion and Greek religion. This was what proved fertile.

How John and Apollos extended Logos into Christ

But if Apollos and John had stayed with Philo they would have left Logos as a big Idea. Philo had no revelation of Christ (he preceded Christ by one generation) and so for him there was no incarnation. At best Philo was preparing Jewish thinkers by stretching their minds and their apprehensions — good soil into which the seed of Christ could fall.

So this remarkable man was positioned providentially — by skill, training and context and relationships — to move the gospel further away from the tug of Jerusalem indeed from religion itself, and out into the wide world of the earth and indeed the cosmos. He was in fact better positioned than Paul to do that, since I argue that Paul’s Jewish heritage got him in the end. In a way he was always an emotional prisoner to Jerusalem which was both a strength and a weakness.

The ‘Sins’ of Hebrews: ‘Judaising’ the gospel

Lets finish by looking at the book of Hebrews to identify from that book the problems that Apollos thought the believing Jews faced. What error were they committing, how was their thinking wrong, what dangers were they facing, what was their pastoral position?

You will know that Hebrews contains some dire warnings — and indeed it contains probably the most difficult and scary passage in the NT. Now these dire warnings are regularly used in the service of warnings today and generally in a moral way. We read them or they are preached as if we are facing moral bankruptcy.

Lets look at some of them.

(Chapter 2:1–3) How shall we escape of we neglect such a great salvation?

The sin in view is some kind of ‘neglect’ and the consequences seem pretty dire — as the word ‘escape’ suggests. If you “neglect” this salvation — what does that mean? The mind runs wildly here — try marrying that one to the Anglican confession that precedes every Sunday service! Would ‘neglect’ include not reading my Bible, not witnessing when I have the chance, sexual thoughts, moral shortcomings — even a hardening heart or a wandering mind?? And ‘how shall we escape’ suggests that something judgmental is imminent and we will have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide if we neglect it. You can see how fearful this verse sounds to the sensitive mind.

“See to it that none of you has a sinful unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God” (Chapt 3;12) & “Today if hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion”.

These all into similar territory, but it raised for me the even worse spectre that lack of faith will be my downfall. Since I am natural sceptic this is not very encouraging.

“Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest so that no one will fall by following their example of disobedience.” (Chapt 4:13)

This raises the spectre of disobedience and falling away.

These all climax in the scariest of all Hebrews 6:3ff.

“It is impossible for those who were once enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God, and the powers of the coming age, if they shall fall away, to renew them again to repentance because they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.”

This is the scariest of all because at face value it seems to be saying that if we become apostate, we can never get back to faith again.

If you put all of these together, it makes Hebrews a threatening book, full of warnings and building a picture of a precarious kind of faith with an ominous God demanding that we keep up the standards — or else.

But let us now put these verses right back in the first century context that we have been painting.

1) The early believers were not a distinctive movement in their minds but rather an extension of the Jewish faith.

2) As such there was not a clean break socially, or in terms of social identity

3) Thus there was a critical tug of war between the old — represented by Jerusalem — and the new — represented by Rome or even Alexandria

4) As we shall see later, the new view — of the new city as it were — will extend the kingdom beyond ritual and religion in to all of creation. Thus we can see that the ‘Gentiles’ and accepting the Gentiles is code for a cosmic, non-ethnic defined view of the kingdom and interests of God.

5) The Jewish movement that was tugging the gospel back to the old core (Moses stood for this) was anchored in early believers not the unbelieving Pharisees.

6) This rump of the believers, was their emotional, heartfelt identity defining core and they were fully participating in Jewish customs, laws of Moses and temple rituals.

7) Given this, there was clearly an imminent danger that the new faith would get sucked back into its Jewish origins, get compromised and domesticated, lose its edge and become a ‘religion’.

8) The very heart of this debate was the scope and dominion of Jesus vis a vis the traditions and the law, the prophets and scriptures and indeed Moses.

In the light of this critically important situation we can see that Apollos was a strategic thinker who could identify that the entire faith was at a cross roads. It could get sucked back and lose its voice, or it could break free and fly unhindered towards its Jesus defined destiny. He was thus not confronting in Hebrews a mere pastoral issue, but a truly strategic issue of the future of Christianity. And this future was to be fought over the social shape it would take. So this was not a theoretical or doctrinal contest, it was a social contest. The Jerusalem movement was not fighting for a deliberate watering down of the Jesus message — I am not arguing that they were deliberately unbelievers. They were arguing for a social compromise, or compliance. They wanted Jewish behaviours to continue in terms of compliance with the religious rituals and the national identity. They wanted the temple worship and vows to continue — they were saying, rather like the church did centuries later in Germany, “Don’t worry about your private beliefs, but keep the social fabric preserved! Don’t rock the boat in terms of political, or social, or religious behaviours.” They were simply not taking Jesus seriously enough in Apollos’ mind.

He saw through all that. He recognized that the movement that God had begun in Jesus was revolutionary and cosmic in scope; it could not be contained in the old social wineskins of Judaism/religion. It must take an entirely new shape — that would allow the mesmerizing core to shine and radiate without any clouds or mists to dim it. It must be taken to its natural conclusions.

Thus the ‘sin’ that he was confronting, was the fearful prospect that we neglect this dramatic intervening voice of God, and that we underestimate Jesus and domesticate him, wrap him up inside the Jersualem customs and make him safe. The ‘sin’ was that we don’t rock the boat, we keep him not too threatening, rather than ask, “What has God done here, and how does that working challenge and redefine everything we know including our religion?” we ask instead, “How do we integrate God and religion, how do we demonstrate that we can have our cake and eat it too, how can we make Jesus fit into Jerusalem and Moses?”

It is the ‘sin’ of low vision, too little wonder and amazement, underestimating the ‘still small voice’ that crept into Bethlehem and into the human history in tiny vulnerable form and not realizing that, despite the lack of thunder and lightning, it was indeed God who was visiting us and speaking to us. How shall we escape if we neglect such a voice?

That was the day they killed the Son of God

On a squat hill-top by Jerusalem.

Zion was bare, her children from their maze

Sucked by the dream of curiosity

Clean through the gates. The very halt and blind

Had somehow got themselves up to the hill.

After the ceremonial preparation,

The scourging, nailing, nailing against the wood,

Erection of the main-trees with their burden,

While from the hill rose an orchestral wailing,

They were there at last, high up in the soft spring day.

We watched the writhings, heard the moanings, saw

The three heads turning on their separate axles

Like broken wheels left spinning. Round his head

Was loosely bound a crown of plaited thorn

That hurt at random, stinging temple and brow

As the pain swung into its envious circle.

In front the wreath was gathered in a knot

That as he gazed looked like the last stump left

Of a death-wounded deer’s great antlers. Some

Who came to stare grew silent as they looked,

Indignant or sorry. But the hardened old

And the hard-hearted young, although at odds

From the first morning, cursed him with one curse,

Having prayed for a Rabbi or an armed Messiah

And found the Son of God. What use to them

Was a God or a Son of God? Of what avail

For purposes such as theirs? Beside the cross-foot,

Alone, four women stood and did not move

All day. The sun revolved, the shadows wheeled,

The evening fell. His head lay on his breast,

But in his breast they watched his heart move on

By itself alone, accomplishing its journey.

Their taunts grew louder, sharpened by the knowledge

That he was walking in the park of death,

Far from their rage. Yet all grew stale at last,

Spite, curiosity, envy, hate itself.

They waited only for death and death was slow

And came so quietly they scarce could mark it.

They were angry then with death and death’s deceit.

I was a stranger, could not read these people

Or this outlandish deity. Did a God

Indeed in dying cross my life that day

By chance, he on his road and I on mine?

Edwin Muir