Foolish Wise Men and Jesus

"Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things." - Rom 1:22-23

This verse keeps coming to mind during my Gospels class as we've been talking about Gospel Criticism. It's amazing to me to keep hearing about all these brilliant men, mostly German professors, guys with Ph.D.s and scholarly acclaim, who are willing to jump through an absurd amount of logical hoops in their desire to find out who Jesus "really was", or what the Gospels "originally said".

On of the things that was so telling to me was learning about Albert Schweitzer's book The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Schweitzer went back and examined all the previous scholarship on the "historical Jesus", the quest to figure out who Jesus of Nazareth really was. Schweitzer came to the conclusion that all the former questers had made the mistake of stripping everything else away and moralizing Jesus. more than that, and most devastatingly, the Jesus that they ended up finding ended up looking a lot like them. As he said, "They looked down the long well of history in their search for Jesus, and when they saw their reflection at the bottom of the well, Jesus looked an awful lot like they did." Of course, Schweitzer then ends up doing basically the same thing in his conclusion, he moralizes Jesus.

Of course, what these liberal scholars do is really no different than what we do all the time. We probably don't do it consciously, but we love to take the bits of Jesus that we like and disregard the bits we don't, and construct a Jesus that looks a lot like we do. It's built into our sinful nature, we "exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man". All of us try and put Jesus in our own little box, the scholars are just a little more honest about the fact that they're doing it.

The amazing thing about the Gospels is that they tell us about the most amazing person ever to walk this Earth in all his fullness. God took on human flesh and walked among us, and we have not just one account of it, but 4. We can't create a Jesus just of our own liking, he's much too awesome and glorious for that. If we're going to know and love the real Jesus, we have to let him make us uncomfortable every now and then. We have to love the Jesus who convicts us as much as the Jesus who agrees with us. Most importantly, we have to know Jesus primarily as the lord and savior who died bloody and bruised on a cross, not as simply a teacher of ethics.