Transcript
Yesterday's discussion led us up to the phrase, in the name of Jesus, which was the, I suggested, the simplest statement of the answer we have to give to the question, what is your authority? And that sounds a very simple statement, but of course it raises an immense number of questions, and one has to start now to examine what is implied by that answer. I started simply from what seems to me to be the clear answer of
scripture, the question when this question is raised, and I emphasise the point that by answering the question in that way, one is proposing a decision of faith. If one subsumes the authority of Jesus under some other authority, in other words, if one offers some other reasons why the name of Jesus should be accepted, as for example, that he offers us salvation, or that he offers us the prospect of world peace, or that he fulfils the religious
aspirations of mankind, or what have you, then you are in fact offering another ultimate commitment to which Jesus is auxiliary. If you answer the question in the name of Jesus, you are proposing an ultimate commitment, an ultimate authority, which you are identifying with the name of a man who lived at a certain place at a certain time, and of whom we have the records in a small group of ancient manuscripts dating from the second century, shall
we say, and that therefore raises very large questions. However, I repeat, simply summarising what I said yesterday, that unquestionably this is the position of the New Testament. When Paul begins his letters, you remember that he always begins by identifying himself simply as apostle of Jesus Christ. He has no other credentials except these. He is apostle of Jesus Christ, one sent by Jesus Christ. At that point, in Truman's famous phrase, the buck stops, there is no validation
beyond that. And again, one is brought to the question, then who is Jesus? Who is Jesus? What, who is this name which one is proposing as the ultimate source of authority? I have frequently had the experience, maybe perhaps others of you have too, similar experiences. I in a small, in an Indian village, there are even today thousands of Indian villages where the name of Jesus means as much and as little as the name Smith, Jones or
Robinson. In other words, it means nothing at all. And you start talking about Jesus, and if the people are sufficiently interested to want to ask questions, they will eventually get around to saying, but who is this man that you're talking about? And then you are faced with the great basic fundamental question in theology. How do you answer that question? I have heard village evangelists answering that question in a great variety of different ways. We are, of
course, talking the Tamil language, and there are any number of, a score of different ways in which you could answer that question. One of the simplest things is to say, to call him Jesus Swami, Lord Jesus, Swami meaning Lord. Jesus is the Lord. But then what does that word Swami mean to a Tamil hearer? According to Hindu mythology, there are 330 million gods. And if there is now another one, this is not an earth shaking event.
Okay, we can go back and get on cooking the lunch. Or if you begin as I have heard evangelists do, I have often heard Indian evangelists attract a crowd by telling a good story, which people gather around to listen. And then when he's got to the end of his story, the evangelist takes a big breath and he says, 2,000 years ago, in a country called Palestine, 5,000 miles from here, there was a man called Jesus.
And by the time he's finished that sentence, the crowd has begun to move away. Because according to the Hindu understanding of reality, the concrete events of history cannot have ultimate significance. History is a, it is the realm of Maya, the realm of illusion. It is the realm of unreality. And nothing could be more unreal and irrelevant than the story of a man who lived 2,000 years ago, 7,000 miles away. Or I have heard people using
the Hindu concept of avatar. You may know the Sanskrit word avatar, which is usually translated in English as incarnation. And according to one strand of Hindu theology, the Vaishnava system, God, Vishnu, when righteousness is declining and unrighteousness is raising its head, Vishnu becomes incarnate in order to reestablish Dharma, the law of righteousness. And there are many incarnations. And many Hindus would be very happy to number Jesus among the incarnations. And to speak of Jesus as avatar
is a very easy way of introducing Jesus to a Hindu mind. But then, of course, there are other avatars. There are many avatars. In fact, I remember that when Neville Chamberlain returned with his famous piece of paper from his interview with Hitler at Godesburg or wherever it was, with his piece of paper which said, peace in our time, you remember, the Hindu newspaper in Madras hailed him as an avatar. So one does not say very much
by saying that Jesus is an avatar. Or one can take a very interesting Tamil word which is used for the supreme God, the word Kadavul, which is a combination of two basic Tamil roots, the first Kada, meaning to transcend, and the second Ul, which means to be, transcendent being, Kadavul. That sounds a very good word to use. But then, if you use that word, your hearers will then begin to ask, in that case, who is the
person to whom Jesus seems to have prayed? And we are back again at the question, who is Jesus? The point, of course, is not only relevant to an Indian village. Every single one of us inhabits a thought world which is already furnished with concepts into which we place new experiences, new names, new facts, and we only grasp any new fact by putting it into some place in the structure of our minds as it is already formed.
To use familiar language, each of us has a myth through which we interpret the world. It is very easy to look at the Western mythological structure within which one interprets Jesus. If you are looking at Time magazine and want to know if there is anything about Jesus in it, you know immediately that you will look to the end of the book after theatre and athletics and you will find religion. One of the subordinate parts, this is
where Jesus belongs in the mythology of our Western world. He belongs in this category called religion, which is an optional voluntary sector of life parallel to athletes, sport, ballet, music and so forth, but rating a bit below all of that lot. Jesus has a place in our structure. We do not expect to find him on the first page where we deal with power politics and the state of the economy. None of us is conscious of his
own myth because the myth is like my spectacles. I do not look at my spectacles. I use my spectacles to see and if I take my spectacles off, I don't see clearly. I don't look at my spectacles. I am not conscious of my spectacles. You are, of course. You are not realizing it, but I am not conscious of my own myth. It is just how things are. This is what things are and I try to fit
Jesus into the world as I know it. I have no other way of grasping a fact except by placing it within the structure of things as I see it now, within my own myth. Now, of course, myths are not permanent. There can be a change of myth and that is a very traumatic experience. To anticipate what we are going to have to say, of course, the problem that we have here is that if Jesus is indeed
Lord, then there is no place already provided for him in any of our myths, either our Western myth or our Indian Villagers myth. In the end of the day, he is going to require us to replace the myth and that is never a rational process. I don't know whether any of you are sufficiently interested in scientific matters to have read the book of Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which has become rather a popular book
in recent years. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn examines the processes by which what he calls major paradigm shifts have taken place in the history of science. For example, the shift from Newtonian physics to the physics of Einstein and he shows how there is no logical process at all by which one can move from one to the other. Each system is totally logically consistent within itself and there are no logical steps by which you
can argue from Newtonian physics to Einsteinian physics. It is what he calls a paradigm shift and it is a process which happens by a kind of conversion. When Einstein's special theory of relativity was first published, it was vehemently rejected by the when these two myths are competing with each other and normally the older myth will be preserved by the older people for whom a paradigm shift is more difficult and it will be the younger ones who
will make the shift but eventually the new one replaces the old and people simply see things in a different way. From the new position you can look back at the old, you can understand Newtonian physics from the point of view of Einstein but you cannot understand Einsteinian physics from the point of view of Newton. There is no line that leads. Now there is something analogous to that which is involved when you are making the confession Jesus
is Lord. In the presence of a people who are already as we all do understanding their world through a certain paradigm, through a certain model, through a certain myth if you like and in the end of the day they will inevitably begin, they must begin, they can only begin by fitting Jesus into some place in that myth as it already is and of course they remain there permanently but there can take place what we call a
paradigm shift which in religious language we call conversion by which the whole world begins to take a different shape in which Jesus occupies the absolutely decisive center in relation to which everything else has to be understood. So if you look at the experience of the early church how did they begin to understand who Jesus is? You remember the famous conversation between Jesus and the disciples at Caesarea Philippi as it is reported in Mark 8, Matthew 16.
Who do men say that I am? And they answer one of the prophets. There is a place for Jesus already within the system. Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Micah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Elijah, one of the prophets just as Time magazine has a place for Jesus along with Buddha and Muhammad and Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and the various other people who naturally fall into the religious page of Time magazine and then of course the question comes who do you say that
I am? And then there is this decisive shift when Peter says you are the Christ, the anointed King. There be many prophets, there can be only one Christ, there can be only one King, anointed King. But of course the problem does not end there because King, Messiah in the mouth of Peter means the one who will rule the world. And Jesus therefore immediately begins to talk about his cross. This Messiah will be one who does not
rule the world by force but who reigns from a cross, from a gallows, from a criminal's execution. And this of course Peter cannot accept and vehemently rejects it. There you have the beginning of the problem of answering the question who is Jesus for the Jew. As Paul says for the Jew a scandal, a stumbling block. The one who claims to be the Messiah and is in fact the executed and excommunicated and accursed criminal on the cross.
And to the Greeks, how do you begin to explain who Jesus is? As the gospel began to attract Greek converts, the inevitable question had to be asked, who is Jesus? How do you fit Jesus into the Greek world? Very similar to the Hindu world of today with its many lords and many gods. In that world, it would be very easy simply to call Jesus Lord in the same sense that it is easy to call Jesus Swami
in an Indian village. There are many Swamis, there are many lords. But for the Greek mind, to say Jesus is God would have been absolute nonsense because the word God means the timeless, passionless, changeless, perfect being which cannot be involved in the changing, corruptible, suffering world of the creation and of man. For the Greek mind, there is an absolute dichotomy between God who is above all change, all suffering, all passion, all impurity and the created world
which is the field of change, of becoming, of decaying, of pain. Man is a to this world of change and yet through his reason, having a link with the world of changeless perfection, through the logos, through the imminent reason within the whole creation. And the natural way to place Jesus in this model was to see him as a being intermediate between God and man, having some of the, having the quality of human nature, of the created,
changing, suffering world, but having also in an exceptional degree a participation in the logos, a sort of intermediate being. And this of course is the way that Jesus is regarded by millions of people in India. It's very, very common in a coffee shop in an Indian village to see on the wall a portrait with three figures on it. On one side Buddha under his peepal tree, on this side Jesus on his cross and in the middle
Gandhi. Jesus, Gandhi, Buddha, three Mahatmas, three supreme representatives of the God-like man, the man in whom the logos, the inherent presence of God is exceptionally clear. And that was obviously a strong temptation for the early that Jesus could have been fitted into this kind of pagan structure of thought. And as you know, there were tremendous battles fought, supremely the battle between Arius and Athanasius, in which this was rejected and out of which there came eventually
the great formulations of Nicaea and the formulation of the person of Christ and of the being of God in terms of a triune model, father, son, spirit, one God. The old classical understanding of God and man and creation, had been shattered and in its place there was developed this new picture of reality, this new myth, if you like, this new model by which reality as a whole was to be understood. And very, very briefly, let me
suggest that this is in effect what happened. The classical world was governed by two great dichotomies, two axiomatic dichotomies. In the first place, the world of science was governed by the dichotomy of what was called the sensible and the intelligible. The intelligible world, the world of pure reason, the world of pure being, which is intelligible by man through his own inherent rationality, through his participation in the logos, and the sensible world, the world of things, the
world which is known to us by sight and sound and touch, about which there cannot be in that sense knowledge, there can only be opinion, because man's senses, his sight, his hearing, his touch, cannot in themselves give access to the ultimate changeless reality of God himself. So you have a dichotomy between the world of pure being, the world of changeless perfection of God, and this sensible world, this world which can be touched and handled and listened
and heard and tasted and so forth. And on the other hand, history was governed by the dichotomy of virtue and fortune. Human history is a struggle between virtue and fortune. Virtue is that which each human being brings to the who bring a supreme gift of virtue to the struggle. And on the other hand, fortune, fate, the ineluctable power of fate, which finally will overwhelm even the greatest of heroes. So you have these two dichotomies, the world
of science governed by the dichotomy of the sensible and the intelligible, the world of history governed by the dichotomy of virtue and fortune. And what the struggles of the first four centuries achieved, what was expressed in the formulations of Nicaea and Chalcedon was the destruction of these dichotomies. So that what had appeared to be axioms, unquestionable axioms, just like our normal acceptance of a distinction between material and spiritual, for example, which is a very similar dichotomy,
were done away. And in their place, there is this model, this Trinitarian model. I will try to develop this in a moment, but just accept it, a picture, a model, father, son, spirit, substance, order, energy, being, order, becoming. These are not three things, but one. The world of the intelligible and the world of the sensible are not two things, but one. The world of fake fortune and the world of virtue are not two, but one. In
Jesus, these dichotomies are overcome. Michael Polanyi, in his great philosophy of knowledge, personal knowledge, says, and I think he proves the point, that in fact, even a physics textbook ought to be written with the words, I believe, at the beginning, that even the most purely objective of the scientists is ultimately a personal commitment of the writer. And the Christian is explicit about that. All statements which claim truth about the world of things external to the speaker,
I mean all statements which claim to be about the external world. I don't mean purely tautological statements like two plus two equals four, which don't have an immediate reference to anything outside of the speaker. All statements which claim to make a statement about the objective world are statements of faith. That is as true of the statements of physics or of biology or of history as of the statements of Christian faith. To put it in another way,
knowledge in any sphere does not arise from a process analogous to photography whereby simply by exposing a plate, there is an image projected onto the plate from the object outside. Knowledge does not arise passively. All knowledge, all human knowing is an activity which is therefore a commitment. There is no knowing which is not a commitment, which is not the result of a passion to know. It is sustained by a passion and therefore by a commitment, even
if it is only the very preliminary commitment that I will look in this direction and not in that direction. That is true of science. It is true in the field of religion. And the Christian is explicit about this. I believe this is a personal commitment. It is in Kierkegaard's phrase, it is the willingness to swim over 60,000 fathoms of water. It is Pascal's famous wager, Pascal's insistence that faith is a wager, that it is the
commitment of one's life. I believe. I believe that Jesus is Lord. That's the other half of the sentence. Now that belief refers to the whole of reality. It doesn't say that Jesus is my Lord. That is, so to say, a secondary derivative. It says that Jesus is Lord and the word Lord of course comes from the word used by first century Jews for Yahweh, for the one revealed to Moses, to Israel, the one supremely revealed in
Jesus Christ. It is a claim therefore that by following the clue which is given in this affirmation, Jesus is Lord, one will be led to a true understanding of all that is and a right practical relationship with all that is. To say Jesus is Lord means that one is making an affirmation which covers the whole of reality, that to follow this clue will give us both the true understanding of all that is and the true practical
relationship, the true program of action in relation to all that is. Just like the claim of the scientist, it is a claim which concerns not just my private life, it concerns the whole public life of mankind. It's not that I am offering you this which is my personal solution to my personal problems, not the particular form of tranquilizer that I have found works well. It's analogous to the claim of the scientist which is also a faith
commitment and which is a claim that by following this clue one will understand reality as it is and therefore one will have the true practical relationship to reality as it is. I think it's impossible to overemphasize the point that from the very beginning Christianity has understood itself in this sense as a movement launched into the public life of mankind. You know that the Roman Empire recognized two types of religious activity, the cultus privatus, the private cult
and the cultus publicus, the public cult. The cultus publicus, the public worship centered in the worship of the empire was that which committed everybody, that which provided the center for the whole corporate life of mankind. The cultus privatus, the private cult, was something which was open to each individual to follow according to his tastes and as you know in the first century world into which the gospel was launched there were multitudes of these private religious societies,
the so-called mystery religions, many of them with their origins in the east, offering all kinds of programs of knowledge and discipline and mystical experience and training in prayer and so forth, which were believed to open the way for eternal salvation. And the Roman Empire didn't interfere with these at all, they were perfectly free to operate, they were voluntary societies to which one could attach himself and go through the disciplines necessary. They were entirely free and
the Roman Empire did not interrupt at all. But this, to challenge the cultus publicus, was to run right into the full power of imperial role. Now it would have been perfectly possible for the Christian church to identify themselves as the cultus privatus. There was a great number of Greek words used to describe these religious societies dedicated to personal salvation. But as far as I know, certainly nowhere in the New Testament and I believe nowhere in the
early history, the literature of the first three or four centuries, nowhere, I believe there is one case that I'm not very clear about, but for practical purposes you can say that nowhere in the Christian literature of the first four centuries is the church ever described by one of the words used for these private religious societies. The word, the only word by which the church defined itself was the word ecclesiast. Now as you know, those of you
who are much better scholars than I am, know that this is the word used to describe the public assembly of the citizens to which every citizen of a Greek city was called. If you have traveled in Turkey and Greece, you will know that every Greek city contained a great theater big enough to hold all the citizens. And to that theater, all the citizens were called by the town clerk to settle the public issues of the city.
And that assembly was called the ecclesia. And this is the word that the church used to describe itself, but it calls itself the ecclesia teiu, the assembly which is called not by the town clerk but by God. It is the assembly called by God. It is the assembly of God. In other words, it is the assembly to which all mankind is summoned. It is true of course that that word is also one of the two words
used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament to describe the congregation of Israel. Two Greek words are used, the word synagoge and the word ecclesia. And in the New Testament, there is only one place where the Christian church is described as the synagoge, that is in James, the epistle of James. And I guess that the reason why this word was not used was because it was already appropriated by Jewish communities. But the early church used
the other word that the Septuagint uses to translate the congregation of Israel, the word ecclesia. And it seems to me very significant that that is the one word used. The church never used any of those words that describe a private voluntary religious society for the pursuit of personal salvation, cultus privatus. From the very beginning, it understood itself as the cultus publicus and therefore it was inevitable that it eventually had to challenge the public worship of the
empire and there had to be a fight to the death between the two. This means that the confession, I believe that Jesus is Lord, is taken with absolute seriousness to mean what it says, that Jesus is Lord. Jesus is the emperor, the emperor of emperors, is the one who alone has the right to summon all men to that assembly in which the issues of man's public life are dealt with and settled. And therefore it follows that
this affirmation has to be carried into the whole public life of the world and has to be tested against every form of human knowledge, of culture, of science, of political organization. So that in St Paul's words, his mission is to bring every thought into captivity to Christ. And the Christian mission is simply the active outworking of this affirmation. I believe that Jesus is Lord. It is the acting out of that verbal statement. It's very much more,
in other words, than an offer of personal salvation to those who are interested to take it up. It's not another cultus privatus. It's the announcement of the reign of God in Jesus. A reign, a rule, which embraces all peoples, all things, visible and invisible. I remember a very interesting moment in my own career as a young missionary in the same city of Kanchipuram. I used to attend every Wednesday evening a meeting at the Ramakrishna mutt, the
Ramakrishna monastery, where we had discussions on religious issues with devout and learned Hindus. And one of those who participated was a representative of what is called the Visishtadvaita philosophy, the theistic philosophy of Ramanuja. I don't know whether any of you here students of Hinduism? Ramanuja was a great, one of the greatest philosophers of Indian history, living in the 11th century, who rejected the extreme monism of the dominant Shankara school of philosophy and developed a philosophy which
made room for the personal worship of a personal god. A philosophy which, so to speak, defended the ordinary popular religion of worship of a personal god. And the theology of Ramanuja is probably the nearest approach to Christian theology that one could find anywhere outside of the Bible. It is so close that, in fact, many of the Christian heresies are reproduced within the history of the Visishtadvaita. The whole theology of grace, the whole problem of grace and
works, of justification by grace and by faith and so forth, it all reappears in Hindu terms in the theology of Ramanuja. Spell that name, sir. Ramanuja, R-A-M-A-N-U-J-A, Ramanuja. There's a fine book by an American scholar, John Carman, on the theology of Ramanuja, which has recently been published. It's a very worthwhile study. 11th century. There's a famous book by Rudolf Otto called India's Religion of Grace. And many theologians have said
that, in effect, this is practically evangelical Christianity with a different set of names. In Kramer's book, Christian Message in a Non-Christian World, he disposes of Ramanuja in about half a page and says that although it looks very much like Christianity, in fact, it is totally different because one is theocentric and the other is anthropocentric. Well, when I read that, I thought that's a bit too quick and I notched Kramer down a few marks in my
mind. But it happened that a few days later at the weekly meeting in the Mutt, I was having a long discussion with the learned exponent of this particular view in that group. And he said to me, will you tell me what you mean by salvation? So I said, will you give me 10 minutes? He said yes. So I tried in 10 minutes to tell him what I meant by salvation with the emphasis on sin and forgiveness.
And when I'd finished, he said, that's very interesting because that is exactly what I would have said. And so I said to him, if that is so, can you tell me what is the basis for your assurance that God does forgive your sins? And as quick as a flash, he replied, if he wouldn't, I would go to a God who would. If he wouldn't, I would go to a God who would. That little remark opened a
window in my mind and made me see that Kramer was right. The whole language was the same. He was prepared to accept the whole of an evangelical statement of forgiveness, grace, sin, salvation, and so forth. But the center was myself and my need of salvation. And God is, so to say, auxiliary. The primary thing is I need to be saved. And God is there to provide the salvation. And if he wouldn't, I would go to a
God who would. Now, a Christian could not have said that word. No Christian brought up on the Bible could have you. It couldn't have come out of his mouth. Because brought up on the Bible, a Christian's mind is dominated by this sense of the sovereignty, the majesty, the fullness of God. And I found that very illuminating. Never, never after that when I was preaching to Hindus did I begin by talking about the need of salvation. I
never did it again. And I think it's extremely important to insist on this point, that Christianity could have offered itself in the first century world as one of the ways of salvation. And it would have then aligned itself with these cultus privatus, the private cults. And it would have not had any trouble with the Roman Empire. It would not have been persecuted. But from the very beginning, it identified itself as something quite different, the ecclesia teiu,
the assembly of God. God, the one God who has the right to call all his children to the assembly, where the public business of the world is to be settled. And although we could use exactly the same language, and you could almost say that the theology of Ramanujja is an evangelical theology of grace with a different set of words, and yet the center is absolutely different. So that the Christian missionary is one who is translating into
action, into the commitment of his whole life, this very simple statement, I believe that Jesus is Lord. And that announcement has to be made in relation to the total reality of the secular world, its politics, its science, its philosophy, as well as its personal life, its domestic life, and so forth. And it is to be made out of the heart of a global Christian society. That is why I say that when I stand up in the
pulpit now and preach, I try to remember these other Christian brethren in other parts of the world and try to see that what I speak in that pulpit would be accepted by them as the gospel, and not just as my cultural version of my particular kind of religiosity. An announcement which is made out of the heart of the whole global Christian family into the whole secular life of mankind. Well now, as I say, if that is
so, then the next question is, who is Jesus? And that takes us into the whole business of Trinitarian theology and so forth, which we come on to. But I think, myself, one has to start with this question about the authority of the faith. Okay.