In 1973 Larry Norman released The Outlaw, a song summarising fashionable twentieth century portraits of Jesus. These portraits - Outlaw, Poet, Sorcerer, and Politician – are, essentially, four separate stories. Different aspects of Jesus’ character, sayings and actions are selected and presented from four different narrative perspectives. The four portraits or stories have, therefore, significant differences. Norman rejects all four as partial and concludes:
“some say he was the son of god a man above all men
but he came to be a servant and to set us free from sin
and that’s who i believe he was cause that’s who i believe
and i think we should get ready cause it’s time for us to leave.”
The twentieth century has been unlike other historical ages in producing a multiplicity of images and stories of Jesus, images and stories which are often a complete reversal of the orthodoxy endorsed by Norman.
Peggy Rosenthal described this phenomenon well when she wrote the following about the ways in which poets have described Christ over the centuries:
“Reviewing how the figure of Jesus has looked to twenty centuries of poets is like watching the Gospels’ central character change costume and reinterpret his part on the changing stage of successive cultures’ construction of life’s meaning. First we see a glorious Christ the King who is all at once every good figure, from Cultivator to protective Wing to celestial Milk out-pressed from a young bride’s fragrant breasts. Then the fourth-century East produces the mind-bending figure of the Creator tucking himself into his creature’s womb, while the West shows us the Virgilian Shepherd moving through sylvan mazes to recover his lost sheep. The Middle Ages develop the typological figure who redeems every detail of past history, culminating in a Christ as Celestial Center from whom all meaning radiates through an allegorical system of correspondences, over a stage swelled to cosmic size. With the Renaissance and the Reformation, the figure of Jesus comes down to earth, indeed into each human being’s individual core, where meaning is now seen to reside. On the stage of the individual heart, the Baroque drama of anguished love between God and the unworthy human lover is played out. Jesus’ own human feelings take center stage for Romantic poets; without losing his divinity, Jesus becomes a Romantic hero, sadly alienated from society but moved by a sympathetic nature. With modernism, Jesus is no longer God but merely human, a shrunken yellowed body hanging purposelessly on a dim stage, where the light of trust in any transcendent meaning has gone out.
But along with this diminished figure, the twentieth century produces many other figures of Jesus as well, so that the century’s stage shows us simultaneously a variety of different characters, some playing off each other, some acting in worlds of their own – indeed as in a postmodern drama. So we see one Jesus at the very edge of the stage, moved to the margins of his own story, pondered by poets suspicious that he or anything else can be known. Elsewhere Jesus is actually pushed offstage altogether, though his place can be taken by a humanity now itself possessing divine creative potential. Or, absent, Jesus can be searched for, sensed, or in an unexpected spot suddenly seen. In other places, Jesus is not only present but is an imposing archetypal figure: as political symbol of a nation’s sacrificial suffering or of its resurrecting power, he can appear dressed as the divinity of another religion or be made to join the native dance in one spot and to contend against native gods in another …
The drama goes on. Poets, whose vocation it is to give voice to their culture’s deepest perceptions, show no signs of losing interest in the challenge posed by the Gospels’ central figure.”
This explosion of imagery and narrative has resulted from a loosening of Biblical bonds brought about by the quest for the historical Jesus. By questioning whether the Jesus portraits painted by the Church were accurate representations of the historical Jesus, artists and writers were released to re-create Jesus in a thousand different images or stories (often in their own or their cultures’ image). The quests, and the resultant reaction, produced a divide between the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith, opening up the possibility that the Jesus of History could be the reverse of the Christ of Faith. Equally simplistic, came the fundamentalist reaction seen in The Outlaw: “that’s who I believe he was cause that’s who I believe”.
This opposed opinion and the issues emerging from it, form the background against which Wright and Borg write. In this context, they are to be applauded for conducting a debate and producing a book, in a spirit of mutual respect and understanding while still clearly staking out alternative positions. Underpinning their positions are two key areas – sources and story - where decisions are made which significantly alter the Jesus portraits drawn.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Larry Norman - The Outlaw.
No comments:
Post a Comment