Tag: Jesus

The book of Revelation and peace, part I: The peace of the Lamb [Peace and the Bible #18]

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Ted Grimsrud—March 28, 2024

The book of Revelation has a pretty bad reputation among many people—not least because it is easily interpreted as portraying quite a bloodthirsty God. And many Christians have affirmed that interpretation. I first decided to study Revelation after hearing a teacher argue against pacifism by claiming that Revelation teaches that divinely initiated violence is part of Revelation’s End-Times scenario. This teacher coupled Revelation’s violence with the violence of the Old Testament stories such as Joshua to argue that sometimes God does want war.

I knew in my heart (though not yet my mind) that the Bible should not be read in such a pro-violence way. So, I decided to look closely at Revelation for myself. I discovered that indeed Revelation may be read in a very pro-peace way. My recent book, To Follow the Lamb: A Peaceable Reading of the Book of Revelation (Cascade Books, 2022), articulates my latest understandings about Revelation’s peace message. In this post and one to follow I will share some of the key ideas in that peaceable reading.

The key step for me was my starting point in reading Revelation. I took very seriously the opening words of the book, “the revelation of Jesus Christ” and read the book expecting it to complement the story of Jesus in the gospels. I was open to be proven wrong about Revelation’s Jesus-linked orientation, but I first wanted to see if indeed Revelation did further Jesus’s own message. That is, I read Revelation asking, “What (if anything) does Revelation teach us about peace?” rather than “What does Revelation teach us about the future?” or “What does Revelation teach us about a violent, pro-war God?” Along with the opening words that refer to Jesus, I also quickly recognized that the key image (in a book full of images, symbols, and metaphors) in the entire book was the image of the Lamb. Clearly, this Lamb image was meant to evoke Jesus and, as I came to recognize, to keep the various visions and imagery anchored in Jesus’s message.

I will develop two aspects of the Lamb image in what follows. In this post I will discuss “the peace of the Lamb.” With the Lamb’s peaceable orientation in mind, I will then turn to “the war of the Lamb” in the next post and show that Revelation’s “war” is actually a struggle for peace on earth that uses thoroughly peaceable methods.

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The death of Jesus and the weakness of God [Peace and the Bible #14]

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Ted Grimsrud—March 15, 2024

Christianity has focused a great deal of its theology on the death of Jesus and its purported cosmic significance. This emphasis has not had an altogether positive result. To mention just one of the problematic outcomes, viewing Jesus’s death as the necessary sacrifice that somehow enables God to offer salvation to sinful human beings has placed an act of terrible violence at the heart of Christian faith—thereby greatly weakening the peaceable impact of Jesus’s life and teaching. When some sort of punitive “justice” that needs to be “satisfied” by Jesus’s violent death is seen to be part of the essence of God’s character, it greatly increases the likelihood that Christians will also see themselves and their institutions as agents of such “justice”—that is, as agents of divinely approved violence. The long legacy in the “Christian” West of the state as the wielder of such violence in warfare and in criminal justice bears witness to the dark legacy of theological interpretations of Jesus’s death.

I suspect that part of the appeal for seeing Jesus’s death as salvific for Christian theology has been a large emotional investment in the notion of God being victorious and in control. If Jesus is God Incarnate and the Savior, how can it make sense that he would die such an ignominious death? How can it make sense that God would face such a defeat? How can it be that God’s control could be breached by such a horrendous and blasphemous act as executing the Christ? One way to understand traditional Christian atonement theology that makes Jesus’s death into such an efficacious act is to recognize it as a way to turn defeat into victory, to turn weakness into overwhelming power. But what if such a move actually has led to many problematic consequences—turning a peaceable story on its head and making it into a story that has underwritten a great deal of violence? And what if such a move actually misconstrues the story of Jesus’s death itself—and in doing so misses the main points of that story that would indeed have major peacemaking consequences? Perhaps it is no surprise that the truly peaceable and transformative message we find in Jesus’s life and teaching has been so seldom evident in the long history of Christianity these past 2,000 years.

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What did Jesus mean by the “Kingdom of God”? [Peace and the Bible #13]

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Ted Grimsrud—February 5, 2024

I believe that one important indicator that Jesus had a “political” agenda (as I have discussed in my previous two blog posts, “Peaceable politics and the story of Jesus” and “Did Jesus have a political philosophy?”) is simply his prominent use of the term “kingdom of God” (or its equivalent in Matthew’s gospel, “kingdom of heaven”). This seems actually to be a complicated metaphor—it’s not obvious exactly what Jesus meant. But that “kingdom” has political connotations cannot be questioned. As a simple definition of “kingdom,” we may say it is a stable community of people that is led by a queen- or king-like ruler. In whatever sense Jesus had in mind of “community” and “ruler,” he did have in mind some sort of political entity.

I have long been ambivalent about our using the “kingdom of God” metaphor today. It seems hopelessly archaic, not to mention patriarchal. It breathes of a world of domination and hierarchies. Yet, Jesus—as I understand him—opposes patriarchy, domination and hierarchies. Is there a better way to understand his metaphor, then? I think so, though I am still not fully comfortable making the term a regular part of the faith language. But rather than simply dismissing the metaphor, I think we would be well served to try to figure out what Jesus himself meant by it. What was he trying to convey? May we affirm his intent even if we seek to find more contemporary language to articulate it? To work at answering these questions, let’s look at the biblical history of the notion of the “kingdom of God.”

The failed territorial kingdom of the Old Testament

The initial picture of the kingdom of God in the Old Testament is of Abraham’s descendants, a community of freed slaves who God led out of Egypt. After the exodus from slavery, God provides the people with a set of laws (Torah) that calls for a social order that in many ways would be an alternative type of politics in contrast to the domination-style politics of the Egyptian empire. The liberation was led by Moses, whose role was to be a kind of extemporaneous prophet, not a permanent king-like leader and not a military leader sitting atop a permanent war-making machine. God is presented as the true king of the people; that is what makes the community an expression of the “kingdom of God.”

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Peaceable politics and the story of Jesus (Peace and the Bible #11)

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Ted Grimsrud—December 18, 2023

In my blog series on “Peace and the Bible,” I am showing just how political the concerns of the Bible are. Most people I know find it easier to see that in the Old Testament than the New. In the second half the series, I will argue that the New Testament presents a kind of political philosophy. This philosophy has at its core a commitment to pacifism, a commitment based on the centrality of Jesus Christ to the Big Story the Bible tells. Christians have tended to miss the social implications of the New Testament part of the story because of assumptions about both politics and Jesus.

Politics have been seen as directly tied to running governments and the necessary use of violence. Jesus indeed did not talk about running governments or using violence. However, if we define politics more broadly as the way human beings order their lives together in social groups, perhaps Jesus and the rest of the New Testament were engaging in political behavior. Once we think of politics in this wider sense, we will be more open to recognizing that Jesus indeed was interested in politics—and, actually, very little else. When Jesus spoke of the “Kingdom of God,” perhaps what he had in mind was not some other-worldly existence but a reimagining of politics in this life—in line with the political dynamics in his Bible (what we call the Old Testament). The notion that Jesus spoke only of the personal sphere actually has little support in the texts.

If Jesus did indeed care about politics, then that Christians understand him to be the model human being and the definitive revelation of God would seem to require them to take seriously Jesus’s political witness. If we do take the story of Jesus seriously as an account of a peaceable way of ordering our social lives, our other question will be how relevant that account should be for our present-day political convictions and practices.

Who was Jesus?

At the very beginning of the story of Jesus in Luke’s gospel—the song of Mary in 1:46-55 upon her learning of the child she will bear—we learn that this child will address social reality. He will challenge the power elite of his world and lift up those at the bottom of the social ladder. This child, we are told, will bring succor to those who desire the “consolation of Israel.” Those who seek freedom from the cultural domination of one great empire after another that had been imposed upon Jesus’s people for six centuries will find comfort. From the beginning, the story presents this child in social and political terms.

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The pattern of Jesus (Revelation, chapters 1–5)

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Ted Grimsrud—August 8, 2023

[This is the second of a series of four posts on the book Revelation. The first is “Reading Revelation with an Anabaptist Sensibility.” The third is “Healing amidst the chaos (Revelation, chapters 6–16).]

If we take up the book of Revelation expecting it to present a case for the truthfulness of the peaceable way of Jesus, we will find plenty of evidence to confirm that expectation. The first five chapters introduce us to Jesus and his presence among Christian congregations of the late first century. These chapters make it clear that Jesus’s way stands in opposition to the domination system of the Roman Empire of the time—and all empires since.

The pattern of Jesus (1:1-6)

The first six verses of the book set the stage for what the book as a whole will be about. This is the “revelation of Jesus Christ.” That is, this is the Jesus of the gospels. We may accurately say this revelation comes from Jesus. More so, though, I think the meaning is that this book is about Jesus. And about interpreting life in light of Jesus. Once we look for it, we will see throughout the book allusions to the way of Jesus—or, as I want to say, “the pattern of Jesus.”

The word translated “revelation” is apocalypsis, may also be translated “apocalypse.” I think that latter translation may be misleading for us, though. It often has the connotation of future oriented, catastrophe oriented, kind of magical. Revelation is all too often seen as a different kind of writing than the rest of the Bible (“apocalyptic” literature). We should note that the word is not used again in Revelation. The book does not seem to want to make a point of being different. I think the best meaning is that this is a book of insight about Jesus and applying his message to life. This book is about our world, both the 1st century and the 21st century.

The statement, the “time is near” is not about predicting the future but rather urgency about the importance of the message of the book. To say “near” is a rhetorical flourish that has to do with the importance of choosing between Jesus and the Empire as the bases for one’s approach to life. We see an increased sense of urgency as we move through the three sets of plagues that come later in the book—going from 1/4 destruction to 1/3 to full, not to signify chronology but to say with increased intensity that this stuff really matters.

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Is Christianity the only way to God? [Questioning faith #23]

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Ted Grimsrud—May 11, 2023

A number of years ago, my wife Kathleen and I visited a Sunday School class in a large Mennonite congregation. The speaker was a member of the congregation who had just returned from a year in the Far East, and he was reporting on the experience. He talked about how he found the religious beliefs and practices that he had seen so interesting. He then told how he tried to encourage his new friends to be the best Buddhists (or it could have been Hindus) they could be.

I learned later that this comment caused a bit of a furor. People who believed that faith in Jesus as Savior is the only way to find salvation were distressed. The speaker’s embrace of religious pluralism, his implied belief that any number of religions can lead a person to God, raised concerns.

Religious pluralism as a fact of life

This issue of Christian faith in relation to other religions grows ever more challenging for Christians in our globalized world. Here in the United States, we can no longer avoid asking about different religions. Many of us travel around the world, doing business with people from many cultures and religious traditions, and, if nothing else, rub shoulders in grocery stores, ethnic restaurants, and even in our own neighborhoods with other-than-Christian religious folks.

I taught for many years at a tiny Christian college in small, fairly remote town in Virginia’s Shenandoah valley. I had students who were Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and Buddhist. Our favorite places to eat in town have included restaurants operated by recent immigrants from Nepal, Vietnam, China, Indonesia, Germany, Thailand, India, El Salvador, Mexico, and Ethiopia. A few years ago, I heard that our local public high school had students from sixty-four different countries who spoke forty-four different languages—and represented many different faiths. Religious pluralism has become part of our everyday life, like it or not.

So, what do we think of the various religions of the world? How do we relate our own Christian faith to Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and so on? How does our understanding of the religions fit with our broader theological convictions?

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Did Jesus (and the early Christians) actually expect him to return soon? [Questioning faith #13]

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Ted Grimsrud—December 23, 2022

Many New Testament scholars and others influenced by them assert that Jesus (and, following him, other New Testament writers such as Paul and the writer of Revelation) believed that he would return within a relatively short time after his death. This return would be tied with an end to history and the inauguration of a new heaven and new earth.

The people who advocate this view go on to point out that Jesus (and the others) were obviously wrong. Christianity thus quickly evolved to be a more conservative, more doctrine-oriented—and less radical-ethics-oriented—religion. Christians linked themselves with political structures (e.g., the Roman Empire) that would allow them to sustain their structures so long as Christians would contribute to the wellbeing of the political status quo. Over time, various small renewal movements would arise that would hearken back to the radical message of Jesus (and, in some interpretations, of Paul and Revelation). These movements could be dismissed because they were basing their visions on a message from Jesus that was meant for the short time between his life and his return. That message was not meant for the long haul of coming generations who were tasked with sustaining the faith over a much, much longer period of time than Jesus had anticipated. This work of sustaining the faith, thus, in the real world, required accommodation to the political systems of the world.

But is this true?

I have the impression that many of the people who accept the idea that Jesus (and the others) expected a soon end of history have not scrutinized the evidence very carefully. The first thing that I note is how ambiguous and peripheral most of the references are that seem to voice such an expression. We don’t have a clear, straightforward statement that Jesus will return soon. We do have various statements that seem to allude to something major happening in the near future without explaining what that would be and what would be the consequences. And there are more vague statements of hope about God’s victory to come. How should these be understood?

It could be that they are indeed predicting a soon end to human history and the inauguration of a new age of pure salvation. But such a predication does not have support in the overall message of Jesus and the rest of the New Testament that emphasizes the call to faithful living in a broken world. A key value in the New Testament is perseverance, the sense that followers of Jesus have a long haul ahead of them that will require strength, a commitment to resist the ways of the world, and an acceptance of the likelihood of suffering for the sake of their faith.

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Is Jesus God? [Questioning faith #9]

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Ted Grimsrud—December 8, 2022

Many years ago, I had a friend who was probably the most principled person I have ever known. As a young college professor, he was denied tenure in large part because he sided with a student in a dispute with one of the school’s high administrators. My friend and his family then moved to a new town on the other side of the country.

A few years later, he was offered a teaching job at another college. However, he didn’t take the job because he could not sign the school’s doctrinal statement. The school dean argued with my friend—“Nobody takes this statement seriously. Just sign it; we don’t care if you agree with it or not.” What was the issue? The divinity of Jesus Christ. The doctrinal statement said something to the effect that “we believe Jesus Christ is God Incarnate.”

Now, my friend was hardly a liberal. He was kind of a biblical literalist, and he didn’t think the Bible itself taught that Jesus is God. He didn’t give much weight to the later creeds and confessions that make that affirmation. At that point in my life, I hadn’t really questioned the standard “orthodox” view, but my friend’s costly commitment to his belief system impressed me. So, I started thinking about this question, “is Jesus God?” I still haven’t figured it all out, though.

What’s the question?

One of the difficulties I have is that I can’t quite figure out what the statement “Jesus is God” actually means. It seems a bit like saying that in the 4th quarter of a close basketball game, Steph Curry is a cold-blooded killer. You have a sense of what the statement means, but it’s a metaphor. A person playing basketball is not in any literal sense a killer. But Curry can be like a cold-blooded killer when he ignores the pressure and makes a crucial shot that leads to his opponent’s defeat.

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In what sense is Jesus our “savior”? [Questioning faith #3]

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Ted Grimsrud—November 7, 2022

Quite a few Christians, it seems, assume that there is a clear demarcation between those who are Christians and those who are not. They might differ on how they describe the line of demarcation, but for many it has to do with whether a person trusts in Jesus as one’s savior or not. That is certainly what I was taught when I started going to church. I don’t find that a helpful notion anymore.

What I was taught about salvation

It took a while after my age 17 conversion for me to figure out what I was actually being taught about Jesus as savior. As I look back now all these years later, I find it remarkable that something that was such a pillar of faith would be so little explained. But this is how I would now reconstruct my first church’s understanding of Jesus as savior.

The key first step would be to assert that human beings are inherently sinful—each one of us. We are born that way. And because we are sinful, we exist in alienation from God. Ultimately, if something does not happen, we will be condemned to spend eternity in hell. So, making “something happen” is extremely important. We can be assured that God wants this “something” to happen, that God has provided a way for this alienation to be overcome.

This way (and it is the only way) is for us to accept Jesus as our personal savior, to recognize that we are sinful and deserve condemnation, and to recognize that Jesus’s death on our behalf has made is possible for us to find reconciliation with our holy God and thus to escape our certain condemnation. What is rarely explained, though, is how this works. How does Jesus’s death make our salvation possible?

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The war of the lamb: A response to Jason Porterfield’s Fight Like Jesus

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Ted Grimsrud—June 14, 2022

Jesus has gotten sidelined in many ways, which is one of the main reasons why the record of Christianity is so poor when it comes to witnessing to the world in a healing manner. One kind of sidelining goes back to the several centuries after Jesus when church doctrine evolved to exclude the life and teaching of Jesus from core creeds and confessions, moving from Jesus’s miraculous birth to his death and resurrection with scarcely a glance at what Jesus said and did. Another kind of sidelining has been what we could call the sentimentalizing and devotionalizing of the events of Jesus’s life in a way that minimize their social and political elements.

Jason Porterfield’s new book, Fight Like Jesus: How Jesus Waged Peace throughout Holy Week (Herald Press, 2022) initially may give the impression of fitting in this second category as a devotional treatment of the last week of Jesus’s life. Happily, though, Fight Like Jesus ends up being a challenging account of ways that the events of Jesus’s final days actually have powerful socially transformative significance. As such, its relevance extends much further than simply a spiritually uplifting set of meditations that would mainly be of interest just during the Easter season. Indeed, this book would be a valuable resource for any Christians seeking to understand better the practical relevance of Jesus’s life and teaching for all peacemaking work the year around.

Giving a close reading to the stories from Jesus’s final week, Porterfield shows how those several days serve as a kind of microcosm that help us better understand Jesus’s overall peacemaking agenda. The book is both practical and theologically perceptive. The Jesus that is presented here was creative, courageous, confrontive, and constructive in his response to the deadly resistance he faced due to his activist peaceable ministry.

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