STAGE 2
He is urged not to believe that Jesus is for him by voices in the group who tell him to cease and desist his petition. Tho he believes that Jesus is for him, the hearts of his critics "believe" that Jesus is not for such a multiply-marginated outsider. They urge him to believe the same thing.
STAGE 3
Were he to follow their counsel, he would never be healed, never be on the receiving end of Jesus calling him.
STAGE 5
"Cheer up, he calls for you." Bartimaeus' response to follow the call: "faith." He trusts Jesus in two ways as mentioned above in the prolegomena.
STAGE 6
Now healed, now seeing, he "follows him on the way." Mark's words to us the readers are: Go and do likewise.
No doubt about it, consensus today on the issue that split the Western church in the 16th century is a big deal. But that doesn't yet say that justification itself is a big deal for today's rank and file Roman Catholics--or rank and file Lutherans either. It never gets mentioned in Albert Nolan's book, JESUS BEFORE CHRISTIANITY. Since it's already in its fifth printing, his book must be getting quite a hearing. From other sources I know that Nolan represents a big slice of today's Roman Catholicism, who really couldn't care less about justification itself, let alone any historic agreements on the matter. And some Lutherans aren't far behind. In conferences with Lutheran pastors I'm no longer surprised to see folks yawn--maybe with a twinge of guilt--when justification gets mentioned. And even worse, their jaws are in danger of locking if the term appears in its full 16th century garb: "justification by faith alone."
Lutheran ennui about justification is another topic deserving its own treatment. Here in Nolan's book is documentation from the Roman side. Nolan wants us to see Jesus "before he became an object of Christian faith," that is, Jesus as he really was before church praxis and doctrinal concerns blurred the picture. That Jesus, says Nolan, is silent on the subject of God justifying sinners through faith--or through any other medium. It does not concern him.
So what does Nolan's Jesus Before Christianity look like if justifying sinners is not on his agenda? In this review I propose to a) describe Nolan's portrait of the real Jesus and b) then show why it is inadequate even for the scaled-down job-description that Nolan ascribes to him.
Albert Nolan is an accomplished RC theologian, a knowledgeable New Testament scholar. He offers a number of compelling reconstructions of Jesus in the midst of Judaism in first century Palestine. And every now and then he comes up with assides that also captivate. E.g., Why is hell portrayed as a place "where their worm does not die, neither are the flames quenched?" Simple, when you remember that the Jerusalem garbage dump, Gehenna, the foulest place imaginable, was exactly that: everything tossed into that pit disintegrated, because the composting worms and the smouldering fires never stopped doing their work.
But what amazes me is that Nolan seems not to know what "everybody" in today's NT scholarship knows, that in the last 200 years there have been scores of attempts to get back to Jesus as he was before church politics and theological conflicts confused the original portrait, putting smoke and mirrors before our eyes. The last time I looked it was still consensus among NT scholars that the so-called Leben Jesu movement was a failure. In attempting to find the Jesus of history, as distinguished from the Christ of later theology, what every author produced was a Jesus whose character and theology bore a striking resemblance to that of the author. Instead of actually getting to Jesus, "wie er leibte und lebte" as the German phrase goes) [what he was like in the flesh and how he actually lived], what we got in each new Life of Jesus was a picture of how the author wished Jesus and his theology had been. And of course that picture too can be documented with NT texts aplenty.
Albert Nolan has produced one more Leben Jesu for the bookshelves. He calls it Jesus Before Christianity. Intending no disrespect, I must say that what we really have in his book is Jesus After Nolan's Christianity. And what does Nolan's Jesus look like? Here are some particulars.
But what about John's concerns, sin and repentance and baptism and forgiveness--all of them items on the justification agenda? Jesus offers a second opinion about that, says Nolan. All Jews knew sins as "debts owed to God." Forgiveness in that paradigm was "cancellation and remission of one's debt to God." How did Jesus address the issue? In his friendship with sinners "Jesus overlooked their past, treated them as people no longer, if ever, [emphasis added] indebted to God and therefore no longer deserving of rejection and punishment. They were forgiven." As Nolan reads the classic text in Matthew 9 [forgiveness and healing of the paralytic], "anyone with sufficient faith could forgive sins. By his very presence Jesus liberated sinners." So is forgiveness of sins a big deal or not? Do sinners really need to be justified before God, or was that just John the Baptist's opinion, while Jesus thought and acted differently?
Christians today still say that. What they mean is that Jesus determines for Christians what God is, namely, deus humanissimus (God humanified to the nth degree), as Schillebeeckx puts it. But the substance of their faith and Jesus' own faith is the same. "To believe in Jesus is to believe that goodness can and will triumph over evil." This adds the aspect of hope and expands compassion and faith into the classical Christian triad of "faith, hope, and love," which has its own even more ancient corollary in "truth, goodness, and beauty."
Lou Murphy, a Roman Catholic colleague from Crossings classes and just this spring an Augsburg Confession class [where justification is THE issue], gave me this book with a hand-written note "Nolan reminded me of you." I wonder what Lou saw in the two of us that suggested connection. When I get back to St. Louis I'll have to ask him what he meant. Because of Lou's commendation I read Nolan through twice, taking notes, and it seems simple to me: Either the confessors at Augsburg are right about the "real" Jesus of the N.T. and the real Jesus needed for the life of the world, or Nolan is. But they can't both be.
The confessors at Augsburg criticized the scholastic theology of their day for doing the same thing Nolan does--under-diagnosing the malady of the patient, and therefore proposing a "smaller" Savior than the N.T. proposes in the crucified and risen Jesus. Nolan doesn't see sin as such a big deal. Maybe it never was, he hints with his "if ever." If sinners have no real problem when facing God, then Nolan's Jesus will suffice. But if God's own "law of sin and death" really is a sinner's inescapable nemesis, then Nolan's Jesus just won't do. If justifying sinners into life is indeed the fundamental good news of Jesus, to avert their being justified to death as God "counts trespasses," then Nolan's Jesus is too tame, not radical enough, still a rookie in the bush-leagues.
But I'll venture a step farther. I don't think Nolan's Jesus is even big enough to fulfill the restricted salvation agenda Nolan proposes for him. I'm teaching in Lithuania right now. The older of my students, and the parents of all of them have seen truth and goodness go down the drain, not conquering, but being conquered. And not just once, but three times in just half a decade, the 5-year sequence of 1940-45. In 1940 the Russians annexed the Baltic countries, and anybody who was somebody was either shot on the spot or sent to the Gulag. In 1941, a year later, Hitler came in and Nazi terror with its slave labor and/or death camps, not only for Jews, made short shrift of truth and goodness. Three years later the Russians came back and another 200,000 Lithuanians disappeared. So much for truth and compassion. Christian faith here has to mean something else than the conviction that truth and compassion will eventually triumph. If I read my students right, they believe in God and his Christ alongside their head-knowledge conviction that truth and compassion will always lose. They need a better Jesus than Nolan's. Even though I'm tongue-tied in the Lithuanian language, I pick up signals: Christians here know that they've got one.
Back once more to justification. The larger theological blueprint that Nolan is working from has no space to sketch in sinners' serious trouble with God. They may think that they are in trouble with God. Their institutions, secular and sacred, may brainwash them into such self-perceptions, but God "if ever," is surely not now any nemesis for them. Since that was already true as Jesus appeared on the scene, all that theology of the cross, not just in St. Paul, but equally prominent in St. John and hardly absent in the synoptics, is not present in the real Jesus, Jesus before Christianity. If that is so, isn't Paul's painful conclusion about his Galatian critics also true of Nolan's Jesus? Namely, if what you say is true, then Jesus died in vain.
Now, of course, Nolan would say Jesus did not die in vain. He died in the confidence typologized in Isaiah's suffering servant. There dying for compassion and in faith is already atoning and redemptive. But where the redemptive benefit occurs is ostensibly in the soul of the survivors, not in any change in their de facto relationship with God. Nolan's is a modern (or is it ancient?) mix of theism and atheism. He has no problem believing in the transcendent power of compassion and faith, but he can't believe in a God who holds the human race accountable in any serious way. But then doesn't the courtroom scene with our primal parents in Genesis 3 have to be rewritten? And was the Baptist just plain mistaken in claiming that forgiveness of sins was indeed a big deal? And do the Gospels ever ground a sinner's forgiveness in the mere "presence" of Jesus? Do any of the four evangelists ever depart from what every Jew--Jesus included--knew: "without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins"? Ergo, if you go around telling people they are forgiven, you (or somebody) are going to have to give a life to make it stick.
Harvey Cox has a kudo on the book's cover: "The most accurate and balanced short reconstruction of the life of the historical Jesus." If Harvey's right, we're still in trouble. Or as Paul might put it, (I Cor 15) if that's the real Jesus, "we're still stuck in our sins."