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Dialogues@RU is published
annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume 4
Fall 2005
Ethical Christianity: A Reformation of the Protestant Church - Page 2
By Jeffrey C. Moon
The notion of "salvation through a belief in Jesus the Christ" is a Pauline concept, evident in most of his letters; Galatians, Thessalonians, Corinthians, and Romans all refer to Jesus' supposed ability to save sinners from God's wrath. These compositions form the majority of the New Testament , and, moreover, Christian scripture as a whole. Paul's letter to a heavily-persecuted church in ancient Thessalonica says, "God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Thessalonians 5.9). This statement is similar to what Paul wrote to the congregation in Galatia , "We have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ" (Galatians 2.16). Stephen Harris, the author of an undergraduate New Testament textbook and Professor of Religion at the University of California, Davis, suggests that "[t]he letter of Romans is a calmly reasoned presentation of Paul's doctrine on salvation through faith" (Harris 336). "Salvation through Jesus' sacrifice" is the foundation of Paul's Kerygma , which is a doctrine that has strongly affected the Christian church in belief and in practice throughout its history, and still does in present-day church worship (Harris 42). To complicate this further, biblical historians have found that Paul never met Jesus because Paul wrote his letters thirty years after Jesus died. What validity does Paul have in making such claims? Why does Paul give such attention to the significance of Jesus' death and not to his life?
The majority of today's historians of the New Testament era (0-80 CE) believe that the earliest Christian church survived major and devastating persecution from Rome because it was different from other upstart religions of the day (Harris 111). Harris believes the religious conviction would have immediately stopped with the death of its initiator - Jesus - as had other now-dead religions, without Paul the scripture writer.
For Paul, it is not the message of the human Jesus that counts most in God's plan for human redemption but the post-mortem status of Jesus as the Cosmic Christ. While largely ignoring the traditions about Jesus' earthly career (if indeed he was familiar with them), Paul focuses on the supreme importance of Jesus' death, resurrection, and ascension to heaven. (Harris 342)
Through an Old Testament prophecy in Isaiah 53, Paul found a way to explain the death of its creator, so that Christianity's validity to ancient Jews was not jeopardized. Paul reasoned that any true Jew believed and respected the prophecies and events in the Tanakh - or, as Christians call it, Old Testament - as divine in origin and thus incontestable to debate . Therefore, the Pauline doctrine, which, Harris argues, has greatly shaped current Christianity, is very much an extension from a belief in a specific Jewish prophecy. Consequently, Christian theology has been centered on the Isaiah-based prophecy of a peaceful Jewish messiah killed by sinners for sinners.
The early Christian faith, as Paul described it, was a grafted shoot onto a rooted and pre-existing Jewish religion. But that was then, and Christianity today is firmly established: "there are 2 billion Christians in today's world and 14 million Jews" (Russel 44). Christianity is not threatened with extinction from the powerful Roman government the way it was two thousand years ago, which is the time when its scripture was composed (Harris 14). Therefore, the need to preserve Jesus' legacy is not as strong as it once was. As a result, changes and improvements can be made to ancient Christian theology. This is why Ethical Christianity follows the author of the New Testament letter Hebrews, who believes in "looking to Jesus as the pioneer and perfecter of our faith" (12.2) but does not believe in the notion that Jesus' death on the cross has the ultimate significance for Christian belief or theology. Christians may now look from Jesus' death to his life and find the heart of Christianity- the life that stressed ethical action as a path to the Kingdom of God (Borg 230 and Spong 127).
Jesus, the central figure in Christianity, changed much of the Old Testament's laws while "fulfilling," them because the Old Testament applied to a certain people thousands of years before his time (Harris 71). The Old Testament was antiquated in Jesus' time and still is today. For example, the first five books claim to be about five thousand years old. Jesus knew that one's understanding of God grows and develops, so he made the Jewish religion he grew up with evocative for those of his time, which is now about two thousand years ago.