{"id":491,"date":"2012-06-15T10:42:23","date_gmt":"2012-06-15T14:42:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=491"},"modified":"2012-06-15T10:42:23","modified_gmt":"2012-06-15T14:42:23","slug":"jesus-no-radical-ii-replies-to-critics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2012\/06\/jesus-no-radical-ii-replies-to-critics.html","title":{"rendered":"Jesus: No Radical II: Replies to Critics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jesus was no \u201cradical.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

To this claim of mine, several thoughtful responses have been in the coming.\u00a0 My friend and writer, the always perceptive Ilana Mercer, lead the charge (you can see some of this exchange here: http:\/\/barelyablog.com\/?p=52564<\/a>). \u00a0Jesus was indeed a \u201cradical,\u201d Mercer asserted.\u00a0 He was also a man of \u201cgenius\u201d and \u201ccourage\u201d whose qualities place Him squarely within an extensive, rich prophetic tradition.\u00a0\u00a0 Most of Ilana\u2019s fans who contributed to this discussion, by and large, shared her judgment.<\/p>\n

Originally, the contention against which I argued is the prevailing consensus among contemporary Biblical scholars that Jesus\u2014the \u201cHistorical\u201d Jesus\u2014<\/em>was a \u201cradical,\u201d \u201crebel,\u201d or \u201crevolutionary.\u201d\u00a0 In the hands of these \u201cpolitical-theologians,\u201d as Burke referred to the radicals and revolutionaries inFrance, these terms are loaded with specific connotations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The vast majority of those who claim to have excavated from the accretions of Christian theological embellishment a Jesus who sought to subvert \u201cthe structures of power\u201d of his society have substituted for the Christ of traditional Christian faith a Jesus made in the image of their own leftist politics.\u00a0 Against this move, I claimed that Jesus was not a radical social egalitarian who never made any claims to divinity.\u00a0 And He did not aspire to usher in a utopian age in which the old system of power and property would be razed.<\/em><\/p>\n

In short, it was always cosmic <\/em>justice\u2014not social <\/em>justice\u2014with which Jesus was first and foremost concerned.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This, in turn, is but another way of saying that unless we read Him in the theological<\/em> terms in which He described Himself, He will forever elude us.<\/p>\n

Some people accused me of constructing a Jesus of my own, a Jesus who I could conscript into the service of \u201cright-wing\u201d or conservative politics.\u00a0 They couldn\u2019t be more mistaken: my whole point is not that Jesus wasn\u2019t a first century political radical; my point is that He wasn\u2019t political <\/em>at all\u2014at least not in our sense of that term.<\/p>\n

It is, of course, correct that the distinction between politics and theology or religion to which we have grown accustomed was nonexistent in Jesus\u2019 culture.\u00a0 Yet this is all the more reason to resist the impulse to anachronistically characterize Him in the political terms that define our world.<\/p>\n

A political radical is the sort of figure for whom conservatives in the tradition of Burke have utter contempt.\u00a0 Inasmuch as he suffers from the character defects of impatience and intemperance, the radical is vicious.\u00a0 <\/em>These vices in turn lead him to advocate tirelessly on behalf of revolutionary change, change that consists, not of reform<\/em>, but of destruction.\u00a0 <\/em>The radical desires nothing less than to \u201cfundamentally transform\u201d the institutional arrangements of his society.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jesus, in stark contrast, looked not to \u201cabolish the [Mosaic] law, but to fulfill it.\u201d\u00a0 Having mastered the language of His Jewish tradition, He sought to draw the attention of both his contemporaries and opponents to the fact that it was pregnant with a plethora of possibilities of which they were forgetful<\/em>.\u00a0 This is particularly illuminating for present purposes: Jesus, unlike the radical, did not disdain the past.\u00a0 Quite the contrary: He constantly drew on His people\u2019s rich and richly diverse history in order to connect their past with their present and their future.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In reality, even the most immoderate of radicals is as incapable of emancipating himself from the cultural traditions in which he has been reared as he is incapable of liberating himself from his first language.\u00a0 But the radical likes to believe otherwise.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Black Nationalist is one telling illustration of this self-delusional conceit.\u00a0 He judges America and the whole Western world to be incorrigibly \u201cracist\u201d to the core, fundamentally beyond the possibility of redemption\u2014as long as the current \u201csystem\u201d stands.\u00a0 The so-called \u201cgender feminist\u201d is another example: the gender feminist thinks that Western civilization is so ridden with \u201cpatriarchy\u201d and \u201csexism\u201d that nothing less than a systemic and systematic dismantling of its institutions is called for if women are ever to gain \u201cequality\u201d with men.<\/p>\n

I could continue ad infinitum adding to this list of examples of radical thought.\u00a0 It would be a superfluous exercise, however, because the radical is a well known character to all of us.<\/p>\n

What should be equally clear, by now, is that, as I said initially, Jesus was no radical.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jesus was no \u201cradical.\u201d\u00a0 To this claim of mine, several thoughtful responses have been in the coming.\u00a0 My friend and writer, the always perceptive Ilana Mercer, lead the charge (you can see some of this exchange here: http:\/\/barelyablog.com\/?p=52564). \u00a0Jesus was indeed a \u201cradical,\u201d Mercer asserted.\u00a0 He was also a man of \u201cgenius\u201d and \u201ccourage\u201d whose…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nJesus: No Radical II: Replies to Critics<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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