What Is Going On? The Relation between Christ and Culture Now – Mark Rich

So I’ve made clear many of my thoughts on Reza Aslan’s book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. My primary reason for reviewing that book – as it is for all my ministry – is that, to me, Jesus matters deeply and greatly. He is the good person for whom I would actually dare to die (Rom. 5:7). But this is more than the fact that I’m a Jesus freak; it’s also that I quite literally believe that his gospel is the salvation of the whole world.

This brings me then to what I really want to talk about, and Aslan’s book is just the springboard for this topic. What does Jesus mean in the US of A  now? In the world now? What is going on in the culture such that Aslan’s mediocre book evokes such a positive reaction?

As I mentioned before, the answer must be in part that while Jesus’ fame is great, the knowledge of him is small. Therefore, anyone with even a modicum of expertise about him can easily look impressive. But there is more.

Jesus has always occupied a unique niche in American culture, and it is always just that – a niche. He is nearly everyone’s spiritual buddy, the spirit avatar of God. (I’m using the word ‘avatar’ in the current virtual sense.) Remember that song “Jesus Is Just Alright”?[1] That song expresses perfectly the American approach to Jesus – he is cool, one of us, alright! “Jesus is my friend…”

As for Christian Americans, we feel like we’ve swallowed him, sandals and all. That may explain why we’re so tribal around communion. If we were actually to share him amongst ourselves, we’d have to be a lot less tribal. And then who would we be? Yikes!

Muslims get to claim him as one of their own, a pre-Mohammad Muslim. Naturally, Jews are not so eager to lay claim to Jesus, especially given the long history of Gentile Christians being decidedly un-Christlike toward them. (However, there is an increasing number of New Testament scholars who are Jewish.)

For white Americans generally, though, being buddies with Jesus means that they can have a claim to whatever spiritual goods they desire (a vague claim to spiritual identity, a hope of some kind of afterlife) without having to really follow through with some major socially-awkward discipleship. One quick example: my brother-in-law, a Presbyterian pastor, once did a funeral for an unchurched neighbor. After the funeral, one of the family members told him “We don’t really go to church, but we always marry and bury Presbyterian.” I believe my brother-in-law was supposed to feel honored.

Such people, who are many, likely take the words of 2 Thessalonians 1:7-8 literally: “…when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus” – except that “obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus” has been replaced with “believe in our buddy Jesus.” Jesus is the one who will sort out the goodies from the baddies at some undetermined future point, sending the good ones to the good place and the bad ones to the bad place. However, Jesus’ lordship and our obedience to him NOW is exactly what is unwanted in America, and even among Christians. His service and obedience to us is exactly what we want from him.

This is so much the case that the new movie Son of God shows Jesus as a cool (and yummy-looking!) California surfer dude – and what could be more surfer-dudish than walking on water! Some hyper-masculine white mega-church pastors have now re-imagined Jesus as a buff, warlike young white man who is going to return to Earth as God’s jihadi, ready to wreak vengeance on the atheists, liberals, gays, and gay-lovers.

This is to say that the American use of Jesus is thoroughly pagan. We confect the Jesus we want rather than obey the Jesus who is the Lord. Rather than re-make ourselves into his image, we re-make him into our fantasies.

It is directly into this sweet spot of American Jesus-narcissism that Aslan’s book is aimed, and it hits. Aslan promises to deliver a Jesus past all the Christian hype (which is not necessarily a bad thing), but then gives us a Jesus who shares our deep American addiction to violence. The myth of redemptive violence – a myth apparent even in parts of the New Testament itself, as in the 2 Thessalonians passage above – has become pretty much non-negotiable for American culture. It’s just the way things are – or so goes the myth. And so Jesus must be made to conform to the myth, which Aslan obligingly does. Jesus’ nonviolent teaching and example must be a lie, according to the myth of redemptive violence, and so Aslan obligingly sweeps it away without really closely arguing the matter, without really helping Americans think their way through to truth.

The deep problem with mythic, culturally-embedded and encoded violence is that it robs people of a future.[2] It literally and figuratively tells people that the only future is either death, which is not a future, or slavery, which is a living death. The US has been doing this systematically, though mostly unconsciously, for my whole life, and I was born in 1956. And the US has been the major world leader for all that time. For most of that time it was a Cold War (along with several hot proxy wars), and now it’s a Hot Earth. The Cold War was mostly fantasy in American culture, but the Hot Earth is way real across the whole planet and it will get us for sure if we don’t change some big things fast.

We in the US and around the world need to know that the future is life, which is an actual real future. And that is why Jesus of Nazareth deeply matters. In his nonviolent teachings and his resurrection beyond the power of death, he is giving us a future that is life, worth hoping for, worth loving, worth sacrificing for.