Dale Allison’s Historical Jesus as a Foundation for Gospel-Lite (Part 21)
From the perspective of Dale Allison, author of The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (2009), it is clear that traditional Christian belief that Jesus was (and is) the divine Son incarnate cannot be built on the foundations of what we can know with any confidence about the historical Jesus. According to Allison, the little we can know, however, is not insignificant in its ramifications. He does not hesitate to base his own personal faith-testimony at the end of his book largely on the results of his own sincere quest for the truth about the real Jesus of Nazareth:
Although a king, God is even more a father, and a father in that he is profoundly kind and merciful. This is in fact the heart and soul of Jesus’ theology. …
Jesus’ assertion of God’s goodness is not, to say the least, transparently obvious. This is partly why many Christians would say that their faith in God is just that, faith. …
His fundamental intuition is that the creator must be the redeemer, that the divine Father is good enough to ensure that those who weep now will someday laugh. The world cannot be a fait accompli; it must instead be an impermanent stage on the way to some time and place in which God will be all in all. Jesus is relentlessly optimistic about “eternal life” because he is relentlessly optimistic about his God, who “is not God of the dead, but of the living” (Mk 12:27).
We might do well, I suggest, to follow his lead. For although eschatology is not the solution to the problem of evil, without eschatology there can be no solution. If what we see on this earth is all that we can ever see, if there is no further repairing of wrongs beyond what we have already witnessed, then divine love and justice do not really account for much.
That is not, for me, a theological cliché but a philosophical necessity. If the sufferings of the present time are never eclipsed, if there is nothing beyond the tragedy and monotony of death, then I for one do not believe that Jesus’ God exists. …
Jesus’ eschatological hope and his humanitarianism cannot be sundered because they were both products of his infatuation with divine love. God’s loving devotion to the world requires that it not suffer disrepair for ever, and God’s love shed abroad in human hearts, a love that fosters self- transcendence, cannot wait for heaven to come to earth: it must, before the end, feed the hungry and clothe the naked. …
By announcing not only tribulation present and coming, but also salvation present and coming and then by living into both, Jesus commends himself to us. (pp. 106, 108-109, 111, 113, 119)
In other words, despite the fact that, according to Allison, Jesus was technically a false-prophet (because he predicted an imminent end of the world and final coming of the Kingdom that did not in fact occur), Allison still believes that the core of what Jesus taught — the loving and providential Fatherhood of God, and the final triumph of his Kingdom over all evil — remains vitally important to the human spirit. Jesus taught these truths clearly, and lived in the light of them faithfully.
There are profound similarities here between Allison’s approach and that of Adolph von Harnack in his classic What is Christianity? (1901). Like Harnack, Allison believes he has sought and found the central core or essence of Christianity in what we can know with confidence about Jesus from historical research. And who would want to dispute that what he has found does indeed lie near the heart of things? If we can live out in hope what Allison recommends, with the help of God’s grace as sincere followers of Jesus, we are surely “not far from the Kingdom” (Mk 12:34).
But “not far” is still not enough.
The true historical Jesus did more than just “commend himself to us” by his teaching and example. The “Good News” that inspired the sending of evangelists and missionaries to every corner of the globe, that inspired the foundation of countless hospitals, orphanages, schools, and hostels for the homeless and the hungry wherever they went, that provided the intellectual foundation for human rights and put warfare within just limits, that built the great cathedrals and inspired the greatest outpouring of painting, music, sculpture and literature the world has ever seen — that Gospel message was not only that Jesus set a good example for us of faith in the loving Fatherhood of God, and love of neighbour, and gave us hope for some kind of everlasting life. Rather, the Gospel message is also that God loved the world so much he came among us as one of us (Jn 1:14), sharing our lot in the person of his Son, and died for us and rose again to give us the assurance of the forgiveness of our sins, and the sure hope of a final resurrection in the fullness of our humanity, body and soul. And all this includes the gospel hope that if we believe in all that he did for us, and surrender our hearts to his love for us by the Holy Spirit he pours out upon us, we cannot help but love him back, and all humanity whom he loves so much. The dawning in this world of the Kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed comes through human hearts that are being sanctified in just this way: by Christ through the Spirit.
Thus the heart of the Gospel message is not just that Jesus set a good example for us, and taught us about the Father’s providential love (true indeed as far as it goes), but also the good news of the Incarnation and the Cross: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…. ‘Love one another, even as I have loved you’…. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the expiation of our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (Jn 3:16, 13:34; I Jn 4:10-11). Allison’s personal faith testimony, sincere and poignant as it is, is just not Gospel-enough. It still falls well short of the heart of the message of the New Testament. Like all forms of Liberal Protestantism, it has the power to impress, inspire respect, and attract us to the good, but no real power to rescue humankind from the guilt and power of sin. As such, it is yet another example of what C.S. Lewis called “Christianity-and water,” a watered down version of the Christian faith with some power to help, but no real power to save.
Unfortunately, it is also an exercise of “blind faith.” After all, what reason do we have to believe that Jesus was right about God and about his purposes for human life? According to Allison, Jesus was a false prophet who erroneously believed that the end of the world would come soon, perhaps within a single generation [a claim we shall examine in our next web series]: does this inspire confidence in Christ’s other pronouncements about God and his plan for human life? Down through history, Christians have pointed primarily to the wonder of Easter as the ultimate ground of our confidence in Jesus Christ, and our hope for God’s final triumph over evil (I Cor 15:1-28). But Allison’s book is one of the few that one can find about the quest for the historical Jesus that contains no in-depth discussion of the Resurrection as the central claim of the whole gospel story. Whether or not Allison finds the case for the glorious bodily resurrection of Jesus convincing is nowhere indicated in this book (e.g., some response to N.T. Wright’s massive scholarly exploration and defence of that case, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 2003, would hardly have gone amiss here). This is an astounding omission, given that much of lasting significance in what Jesus said and did surely depends upon that Easter-event (I Cor 15:14). [NB: in the follow-up to this web series, we will look at the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus in-depth and detail].
Sadly, by omitting discussion of Easter altogether in a book that is supposed to summarize the results of a lifetime of historical Jesus research, Allison actually undermined his own personal faith testimony at the end of it. After all, if Jesus is not risen, if his life of witness to the Fatherhood of God, love of neighbour, and eschatological hope for humanity merely ended in bloody crucifixion and death, what reason would we have to believe him? We would have every reason not to believe Him. Following Jesus without Easter would be little more than blind faith and wishful thinking — which is precisely the kind of faith that the apostles assured us that we do not need to have (Acts 1:3, 2:23-36; I Cor 15: 1-11; Jn 20:30-31). Allison imports the Resurrection only into the very last line of his book: “For the resurrection does not balance crucifixion and the grave. It defeats them.” But this is either just brave sentiment wrapped in “resurrection” as a metaphor, or it is the central, glorious fact of the Gospel. If the latter, then that surely needed some explanation and defence in a book like this. In any case, it is not hard to see which option leads to a stronger, more courageous, more joyful faith in God in the end.
Finally, Allison’s personal testimony of faith, based on the limited historical picture of Jesus that he gives to us, does not pass the test of internal consistency. If the real Jesus, the one who really lived and taught and died, is just the residue of the gospel portrait of our Lord that Allison and so many of his academic colleagues claim, then the logical conclusion is not that God must be the loving, providential Father that Jesus said he is, but that God must be grossly incompetent. His effort at trying to reveal himself and his purposes for human life through Jesus of Nazareth obviously has been an abject failure, since almost everyone who has explicitly followed him for over 20 centuries has misunderstood the real truth and significance of Jesus. I have nightmares of the removal of the statues and icons of the saints and the Fathers from every sanctuary in Christendom, and the replacement of them by portraits of Adolph Von Harnack, Albert Schweitzer, Johannes Weiss, E.P. Sanders — and Dale Allison — the ones who after all these centuries finally (finally!) understood what the real Jesus was all about ! I say this not to try to slay Dr. Allison with sarcasm, but to illustrate the problem of theological coherence by showing the inevitable reductio ad absurdum here. Allison writes:
So here the outcome of our quest is negative. Among its lessons is our inability to know much that Christians have always wanted to know. (p. 103)
I am afraid that the outcome is far more negative than that. For if Allison’s very limited portrait of Jesus is accurate, it manifests God’s gross inability to reveal the truth about himself, and about human life, in any way that has even a remote chance of being widely understood, widely preached, and widely believed. The truth about Jesus is something that can only (and just barely!) be salvaged by a handful of contemporary historians, clearing away 20 centuries of the Christian misperception and dogmatic fog obscuring the “real” Jesus from view. Too bad God did not foresee any of that 2,000 years ago! And too bad that he seems to be able to do so little, even now, to secure a scholarly consensus on the truth about Jesus from the ups and downs of academic trends. In the end, therefore, we are left not only with a lightweight Jesus, but with a feckless, lightweight God as well. Such is the inevitable result of even the most sincere and sophisticated attempts to cling to a Liberal Protestant residue of historic Christianity: Gospel-lite.
God-bless Dr. Allison for his sincere efforts to seek the truth about Jesus, rooted in historical research. But we can and must do better. Step One is what I have tried to do in this web series: that is, to clear away the debris of the “hermeneutic of suspicion” that has crippled historical Jesus research for many generations. Step Two begins in our next web series on this subject: “Jesus and His Story”
Robert Stackpole, STD
© The Mere Christian Fellowship, 2018
