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The Bible and the Smell Test

WHAT YOU BELIEVE matters. That is, beliefs have consequences.

Our culture is rife with examples. A young man believes all non-Muslims are the enemy of God and that God will reward all martyrs, and so we read of another suicide bomber. A Christian minister believes that the Koran is the work of Satan, so he publicly burns a copy, instantly insulting the faith of over a billion people. And we shake our heads at how people can be so deceived. What we believe matters.

Research shows that those who believe in a wrathful God are more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety disorders than those who believe in a loving, merciful God.¹ Our beliefs really do have consequences, for they structure how we live.

I tend to be a pretty logical person. I like debates, reasoned arguments, and rigorous thinking. But after many years of searching and studying the ways of God, theology, and the Bible, I’ve concluded the following:

Bad theology begets ugly Christianity.

Good theology begets beautiful Christianity.

I call it the smell test. It’s an aesthetic argument. Like me, you’ve probably pulled that half-gallon of milk out of the back of the refrigerator, seen that the “best by” date is long past, and cautiously waved the open bottle under your nose. The result is either, “Smells fine to me!” or a sour stench strong enough to strip the bark off a tree.

That may seem an odd way to measure a faith system. We are used to matters being true or false, right or wrong, not beautiful or ugly, sweet or sour. Most prefer a more forensic approach: she who has the most logical doctrine wins. But, as we will see in the pages to come, many religious systems that are perfectly logical are nevertheless downright ugly. They’re bad for the world and bad for people. In other words, you can devise a system of doctrine that makes perfect sense within its own little self-inscribed world, but when you take it out into the broader marketplace of ideas, it spoils, like dropping a teaspoon of vinegar into a gallon of milk.

Jesus himself taught us to use a “smell test” in the Sermon on the Mount:

           Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits.²

According to the Gospel of John, at the end of his ministry, Jesus told his followers to love one another, and that “by this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”³ Even Jesus declared that we can tell something about people’s faith by looking at how they live their lives, so we’re in good company.

The beauty of art is famously subjective. One person walks through a museum of modern art and sees masterpiece after masterpiece, while another sees blobs and squiggles. Music is the same: to one, the latest pop song is a tour de force; to another, it’s an assault on the eardrums. Nevertheless, I am proposing that we judge theology similarly. Jesus instructs us to do this. As you read this book—or any book dealing with God, Jesus, spirituality, or faith—stop every once in a while and take a whiff. Does it emit a sour stench? Or is it developing in a way that you find palatable, even wonderful? That’s what Jesus is telling us to ask.

What I’m saying is that deciding what we believe is less like doing math or chemistry and more like making music or painting a portrait or composing a beautiful photograph.⁴ And just like good art, mastering one’s subject matter is important—i.e., one needs to proceed from the truth—but how we shade and color that truth makes all the difference. And if it’s not beautiful or it smells bad, then we haven’t got it right.

I’m also saying that the outcome of someone’s belief is a fair criterion by which to judge the belief. Paul famously wrote, “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”⁵ How often do we measure Christian ideas and beliefs by these criteria? Paul is saying that you can tell something about people’s faith by how they behave in the world. To paraphrase: assholes have bad theology. Or, related to the point above, it doesn’t matter how logically airtight some doctrinal system is if it results in an army of jerks.

This is a controversial point, to be sure, because you could then say that a church’s financial or sexual scandal can be attributed to its doctrine. Yes, that’s basically what I’m saying—at least that theology plays a role when things go bad in religion.

The early church members were not known as hateful and judging. Just the contrary. They got in trouble for being too loving, for calling one another “brother and sister” and greeting one another with a “holy kiss.” As a result, some Roman government officials thought they were a sex cult.

The modern church, on the other hand, is considered hateful, judging, condemning, and obsessed with sex. Is this imprecision merely the result of persecution, the result of outsiders misperceiving a church that in reality is all about love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? No, I’m afraid not. Many of us Christians have these negative impressions from within the church, because some of the loudest voices in modern Christianity have some of the worst doctrine (meanwhile, thousands of small communities of beautiful faith toil in relative obscurity).

I’m saying that the church that looks beautiful in the world has better doctrine than the church that is known for its ugly hate-mongering. And I’m saying that what someone thinks about the crucifixion of Jesus very much abides by this rule.

A lot of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the regnant interpretation of Jesus’ death as primarily the propitiation of a wrathful God. For one thing, we don’t experience God as uber-wrathful toward us. For another, it simply doesn’t make sense that God would game the whole system so that he has to kill his own son just to vitiate this wrath.

It just doesn’t smell right.

How an explanation of the crucifixion “smells” isn’t our only criterion. We also need to measure our beliefs by other teachings we learn from scripture and from the great teachers throughout history. Jesus testified to a loving God, and we’re going to search for that love in each of the explanations of the crucifixion that we encounter. We’ll do that by asking a set of questions about each model:

       •  What does the model say about God?

       •  What does it say about Jesus?

       •  What does the model say about the relationship between God and Jesus?

       •  How does it make sense of violence?

       •  What does it mean for us spiritually?

       •  Where’s the love?

Hopefully that rubric will help us sort through the many options that confront us.

What About the Bible?

As we look for a better way forward, for a new (or old) explanation of what really happened on the cross, we will of course have to deal with the Bible’s voices on the subject. I say “voices” because the Bible is not exactly unanimous on Jesus’ death—its causes or its consequences. The Bible is composed of 66 books, and many of those were edited several times before settling into their current form. With that many hands involved in its composition, it’s no surprise that the Bible is rarely univocal on a subject. The variety found between the Bible’s covers both keeps a lot of scholars employed and accounts for the myriad denominations we’ve got in the world today. It gives us plenty to talk about, even argue about.

The upside is that we can mine the Bible’s depths for amazing insights into the nature of God and humanity and the relationship between us. The downside is that sometimes people can find anything they want in the Bible and even in the meaning of Jesus’ death. Here’s a case in point:

I teach a class at a local state university called “Introduction to the New Testament.” The first half of the semester is taken up with the historical, religious, and literary context of first-century Palestine and the Gospels, and the second half of the semester is concerned with Acts, the letters of Paul, and the balance of the New Testament writings. Just before the midterm, having looked at all four Gospels, we spend one class session considering the “quest for the historical Jesus”—who was Jesus, really, and how much can we confidently say about him? So I’m always looking for examples of how the Bible and Jesus are used as if they’re floating signifiers. Recently, two examples fell right into my lap.

The first was a 60 Minutes interview with a right-wing TV personality. He’d just written a book about the death of Jesus, and he was doing the talk-show circuit, selling his book. He professed to 60 Minutes that he’d written a book free of any religion or doctrine—“It’s a history book,” he claimed. Then he got to the crux of his argument, the thesis, he said, of his book: Jesus was killed by the Jewish and Roman authorities because he interrupted the flow of taxes from the “folks” to the elites. Jesus was a small-government revolutionary, shown most clearly when he stormed the Temple and overthrew the table of the money changers and those selling animals for sacrifice.

As I was sitting in the living room, watching this interview, my spouse, Courtney, started chuckling. “What?” I asked. “Well, I was just reading about that same episode.” Courtney was sitting across the room, studying for her yoga teacher certification. She proceeded to read to me from one of her assigned books, World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony, in which the author claims that Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple was “an act of animal liberation” and that “it was for this flagrantly revolutionary act that Jesus had to be crucified by the herding culture’s power elite.”⁶

So, we’ve got two authors, both saying that Jesus’ actions in the Temple got him killed. One claims it’s because Jesus was a small government, anti-tax protestor. The other says it’s because Jesus was an anti-herding animal liberationist.

I showed the 60 Minutes interview to the class, and I read them the relevant paragraphs from World Peace Diet. We all had a laugh. Then I read them the passage about the cleansing of the Temple from the Gospel of Matthew. It’s two verses long:

           Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, “It is written,

‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of robbers.” ⁷

Nothing about taxes, and nothing about a vegan diet.

There’s an old saw that you hear a lot these days. If you read a newspaper report about the deleterious effects of coffee on your health, wait a week, because there’s sure to be a study next week that touts coffee’s wonderful benefits. The Bible has a similar role in our society. One person reads it and finds God’s love; another sees God’s wrath. One finds justification for gay marriage; another reads condemnations of all homosexuality. And on and on it goes.

This is very much the case for Jesus’ death. As we’ll see below, many diverse interpretations of the significance of that event have been proposed over the centuries, each with biblical backing. The Bible is rife with language about both God’s love and God’s wrath. The Bible talks of sacrifice, for example, and of the penalties for sin. Proponents of one version will tell you that their position has more Bible verses in their favor, while another camp will tell you that they have better verses. Quantity versus quality. And on and on it goes.

The authors of the New Testament say many things on the topic of Jesus’ death. They are not of one voice on the matter; they are polyphonic. Thus, we will have to weigh the biblical evidence, but we’ll also have to run it through the gauntlet of our reason. Our conclusions, too, will have to pass the smell test.

I once got mentioned in a sermon by Jerry Falwell. It was only a couple of weeks before he died, and he was preaching a sermon condemning me and my friends and what was called the “emergent church movement.” He was deeply offended, it seems, by something I wrote about in a blog post about postmodern philosophy and the Bible. Here’s what I wrote:

           I am quite convinced that the Bible is a subversive text, that it constantly undermines our assumptions, transgresses our boundaries, and subverts our comforts. This may sound like academic mumbo-jumbo, but I really mean it. I think the Bible is a f***ing scary book (pardon my French, but that’s the only way I know how to convey how strongly I feel about this). And I think that deconstruction is the only hermeneutical avenue that comes close to expressing the transgressive nature of our sacred text.⁸

In his sermon, Falwell read the sentence with the F-bomb, then addressed me: “Really, Tony; don’t you think it’s rather pitiful that your vocabulary is so limited that this is how you speak about the Word of God you are supposed to proclaim to your fellow ‘Christ-followers’?”⁹

Jerry Falwell’s distaste for vulgarity notwithstanding, I do find the Bible to be subversive and, quite honestly, a little frightening. That’s because it’s so unpredictable—the Bible has shown the capacity to be open to myriad interpretations, both beautiful and terrifying. And the stakes are high in these interpretations, since the four Gospels constitute our sole record of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. That is why I think it’s crucial we keep in mind that the Bible is the second most important revelation of God to humanity. The most important revelation of God is Jesus himself. The Bible is, among other things, our best record of who Jesus was and what he did. But Jesus comes to us in other ways as well. Jesus has been explicated and interpreted by church councils, theologians and popes, and countless everyday Christians. Jesus himself promised that his presence would continue with us through the advent of the Holy Spirit, who came to Jesus’ followers immediately after this promise. Therefore, we can reliably count on our own experiences of Jesus to complement what we find in the Bible.

For a Christian, the Bible is primarily a record of (1) the experiences of the people of God who prepared the way for Jesus; (2) the testimony of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus; and (3) the early church’s interpretation of what Jesus was all about. The Bible is other things as well: a history of Israel’s experiences with God, a catalog of the rules that bound a people to that God, various genres of ancient literature (histories, prophecies, poems, and apocalypses), and the early history of an upstart religion under the dominance of the Roman empire. The Bible is lots of things, and it is a great treasury on which we can draw in this investigation. But it’s also contentious.

Conservatives tend to valorize the Bible to the point that it lords over everything. Liberals, put off by the Bible’s seemingly primitive taboos and violence, too often minimize the Bible’s role to the point of unusefulness. They’ve both got a point. The Bible does have authority, both because it’s the sole primary source we’ve got when investigating Jesus’ death and because the church has uniformly allowed the Bible to set the terms for the conversation about salvation. But the Bible also comes from a context—from a time and social location that is very distant from our own. In fact, it can be argued that the original context of the Bible’s writing is virtually inaccessible to us. We know a lot less than we’d like about first-century Palestine—most of the history of that era comes from the capital of the empire, Rome.

Further, the books of the New Testament record the first wrestling with the meaning of Jesus’ life and death. Each of the four Gospels was written to a different audience, with a slightly different purpose, and as such they hold different details: each, for example, has Jesus uttering different words from the cross. The Bible is neither a textbook nor a newspaper. Its purpose is not to present an objective account of a noteworthy event. Instead it is the record of a community of people trying to come to grips with the meaning of their leader’s death.

As we journey into the meaning of Jesus’ death ourselves, it will be supremely important that we bear this in mind. On the one hand, we should take a fresh look at the Bible and listen anew to what it has to say. On the other hand, a lot of smart and faithful people have looked at these same texts and proffered opinions about what they mean, so we should listen to them as well. Honestly, the most faithful thing we can do is wrestle with the Bible in the same spirit that the first Christians wrestled with their own thoughts and feelings about Jesus’ death.

Our Working Assumptions

So we’ve got some working assumptions to begin this book. One is that theology can be “beautiful.” Two, the life that results from doctrinal convictions is a fair way to determine how beautiful that doctrine is. Three, the Bible is of prime importance to this discussion, but it’s got to be understood for what it is: the record of a group of people in search of answers about their Messiah’s death and resurrection.

I write this by way of introduction. This is not a conclusive book on the crucifixion, meant to solve the riddle of Jesus’ death for all time. In fact, I think that theologians who attempt to do that are fooling themselves and probably their readers. Theology is, by its very nature, an ongoing conversation across the ages. Some issues come up because culture brings them up, and we deal with them. Gay marriage is a current topic in this vein, just as indulgences were for Martin Luther in the sixteenth century and Neoplatonic Gnosticism was for Augustine in the fifth. Other issues have vexed the church since its inception, including the Trinity, the return of Christ, and, yes, the crucifixion.

As we’ll discover, the way that Christians have understood the crucifixion has changed through the years. In fact, it has changed dramatically. That tells us two things. First, it reminds us that the event is more fundamental than our explanations of it. The cross compels us, moves us, and works on us before we can even put words to it. Second, this diversity of explanations also provides us some freedom. Yes, the history of these changes is both compelling and telling, giving us an insight into our forbears’ understanding. But it also reminds us that we’re allowed to change our minds on this issue. The very evolution of this doctrine testifies to the fact that there is no unanimous understanding of why Jesus died. But there are answers. Therefore, it is supremely faithful to ask questions like Why did Jesus die? and Did God kill Jesus? But we can’t stop with the questions. We’ve got to press on toward faithful answers, because that’s what the Christian journey is all about.