The Academy and the Eclipsed Christ – Mark Rich

You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life. (John 5:39-40)

For many years now I have noticed a disturbing trend in many different areas of the church. I know the trend is not new; in fact, it already manifests in the latter parts of the New Testament. But this trend surely manifests aplenty nowadays. Let’s call it The Eclipsed Christ.

Christ and Christian Ethics

Today I will focus only on one book, The Moral Vision of the New Testament by Richard Hays. Hays is a prominent scholar at Duke University, his prominence attested by the top-drawer endorsements of his book. The thrust of his book is twofold: to present and summarize the moral teachings of most of the New Testament, and to use those teachings to illuminate five contemporary issues – violence in defense of justice, divorce and remarriage, homosexuality, anti-Judaism and ethnic conflict, and abortion.

Hays’ treatments of these five issues are consistently judicious, thoughtful, and faithful. All Christians would profit from his discussions of these five, even if they wouldn’t always agree with his conclusions. They would especially profit from the faithful ways he generally employs scripture.[1]

There are nonetheless some instructive curiosities about Hays’ book. First, at least two and perhaps three of his five chosen moral topics – divorce and remarriage, homosexuality, and abortion – are minor issues in the New Testament (as he himself recognizes). Abortion doesn’t even figure directly at all. That says something very important about the modern church, one which Hays forcefully notes in discussing violence:

One reason that the world finds the New Testament message of peacemaking and love of enemies incredible is that the church is so massively faithless. On the question of violence, the church is deeply compromised and committed to nationalism, violence, and idolatry. (By comparison, our problems with sexual sin are trivial.) p. 343

I wholly agree. We as the church have both explicitly and tacitly decided that we should mostly ignore the more substantive and trenchant moral teachings of the gospel and should focus instead on all things sex. Is not this obsession on sex clearly pagan? Is this obsession fitting for the gospel of Jesus Christ, the celibate savior? But why then does Hays pay so much attention to them? Doesn’t he partially give in to this faithlessness by so prominently highlighting sexual issues and almost completely ignoring the central thrust of Jesus’ proclamation?

Hays is certainly right in paying full attention to violence and ethnic conflict; both are major components of Jesus’ ethics. But why is his attention to sharing possessions so little and so late in the book, taking up no more than five pages of the conclusion? It seems to come in there as an afterthought, even while he claims it is highly important. He passes off as a trifle André Trocmé’s argument (seconded by John Howard Yoder) of Jesus’ jubilee proclamation at the very beginning of his ministry. The sad truth is that such passing off is entièrement comme il faut within the guild of professional Christian ethicists. Despite that late effort in the book, however, I was still surprised and dismayed that Hays almost entirely ignores the whole nexus of issues of social class, debt, release, slavery, money, etc. – again, with the exception of those same five short pages. Surely the moral vision of the New Testament cannot be well understood and discussed without extensive work on these matters.

Worse, Hays quickly sandbags his arguments about the importance of the voluminous New Testament literature on possessions. He observes “we cannot derive simple or univocal rules for economic practice from the New Testament.” Uh, riiight… since when did we expect simplicity or univocality from anywhere in the Bible, unless we are flatfooted literalists? And is that how we use the New Testament, for simple univocal rules? Hays knows that’s not at all true. But then why does he bring that up now as a major difficulty in accessing the New Testament’s teachings on possessions?

I shall hazard a guess here as to this enormous blind spot in an otherwise excellent major work in Christian ethics. The problem is much bigger than Hays. It is a problem even bigger than the church, for it is shared by the whole culture, although massively abetted by the church. It is this: we still don’t think of Jesus of Nazareth as a politician – AT ALL – even though all the titles assigned to him in the New Testament are political ones. The principle subject matter of politics is property, money, wealth, taxes, social class, etc. That is fundamentally what politics is: determining who gets what, how much, and where it comes from. Jesus does exactly that and he does so right from his first public words – see Mt 3:15, Mk 1:14f, and Luke 4. Furthermore, the gospels and Paul go to no small pains to ensure that their readers/hearers know that their economic teachings come from Jesus himself. However, we simply don’t want Jesus to speak to us on these matters, but rather on spiritualized matters alone, apart from the real substance of life.

To make matters worse, in the United States our current Dark Age has decided that the fundamental public question of who gets what, how much, and where it comes from has now been privatized. It is out of bounds politically, socially, and culturally. That is how far our public discourse has been debilitated, even infantilized. In its place we substitute sexual or cultural matters that don’t really belong in the public sphere. As Christopher Lasch observed in 1996,[2] the revolt of the elites and the betrayal of democracy is mostly complete.

In this way the most radical and important politician of the last 2,000 years, Jesus of Nazareth, is instead mistaken for nothing more than a religious leader. How utterly humiliating! And of course, the church is in the forefront of promulgating that mistake, but it does so not on its own behalf, but on behalf of a wildly narcissistic and materialistic culture and society.

But now back to Hays. He doesn’t just sideline Jesus, he substitutes something else for him – the good old New Testament. Here are a couple passages where he does this quite openly and, it seems, quite unconsciously. John Howard Yoder made following Jesus the whole thrust of his classic The Politics of Jesus. Here’s the remarkable thing: Hays puts Yoder’s words in quotation marks – and then immediately reinterprets Yoder to say not what Yoder says, but what Hays wants him to say (which I underline below):

The confession that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” means that “…the business of ethical thinking has been taken away from the speculation of independent minds each meditating on the meaning of things and has been pegged to a particular set of answers given in a particular time and place…. [The] will of God is affirmatively, concretely knowable in the person and ministry of Jesus.” Thus, Yoder fundamentally appeals to the New Testament as the source of a definitive paradigm for ethics. (p. 249)

Do you see the switch? Hays goes immediately and unconsciously from Jesus to New Testament. Here it is again on the very next page:

When … we see reality in the terms taught by Jesus’ example, our entire frame of reference is transformed. We learn that the apparent efficacy of violence is illusory, that “suffering and not brute power determines the meaning of history.” Because the world is to be ruled by “the lamb that was slain,” Jesus becomes “the standard by which Christians must learn how they are to look at the moving of history.” Thus, Yoder acknowledges, his ethic of nonviolence makes sense only within the confessional framework of Christian faith, only within the christologically determined symbolic universe of the New Testament texts.

Hays starts out by accurately characterizing Yoder’s thought, and then Hays again switches seamlessly from Jesus to New Testament, making the latter the framework of Christian faith, rather than Christ himself. There is evidently no room in Hays’ systematic thought for Jesus, so he unconsciously transforms Yoder’s Jesus-based argument into the familiar framework of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. And so Jesus is eclipsed once again, this time by a highly-skilled and –esteemed Christian scholar.

I pick on Hays this much not because he’s a bad scholar – he’s certainly not – but rather because he’s so entirely typical of his field. The field of Christian ethics has become more focused on being intellectually defensible (in contemporary terms) through exegeting texts rather than through teaching others to follow Christ. One of the effects of this academic correctness is that this major scholar goofs up the central radical thrust of Jesus and his movement – although he does manage a quick addendum so as not to miss it entirely.

Tomorrow I will look at some of the ways we currently and commonly eclipse Christ within the church itself.

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[1] Although I must demur in passing, he still buys the very old canard that Rom. 13:1-7 requires Christians to obey the state. Everyone needs to read Mark Nanos’ book The Mystery of Romans. He quite effectively lays that old dead mule to rest.

[2] The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.