RE: [asa] Harvard study

At 12:36 PM 10/28/2006, Alexanian, Moorad wrote:

See also, ...A Country Ruled by Faith By Garry Wills ~ Moorad

@ See also, The Curious Apologetics Of Garry Wills

"..Wills’s ecclesiology seems to fall somewhere
between populism and pantheism. .."
http://www.sobran.com/wanderer/w2004/w040603.shtml

W P Book Review:

"The Library of ["C" word] holds close to 17,000
books on Jesus, and about the best thing that can
be said about Garry Wills' 'What Jesus Meant' is
that it is probably not the worst. Wills tells us
in his foreword that Jesus is 'a divine mystery
walking among men,' but rather than reveling in
that mystery, he tries to solve it ­ dissolve it,
actually ­ in a strange brew of devotional cant and historical Jesus cliches.

For decades, participants in the quest for the
historical Jesus have been arguing that Jesus was
a radical egalitarian ­ a '60s-style rebel who
left his home and his job to seek, in the company
of a small cadre of equally disreputable
comrades, the kingdom of heaven on earth. This,
too, is the Jesus according to Wills: an 'outcast
among outcasts,' a 'man of the margins' who broke
bread not with the rich and the powerful but with lepers and prostitutes.

What distinguishes 'What Jesus Meant' from books
by the likes of John Dominic Crossan (who has
also fashioned Jesus in the image of Jack
Kerouac) is its insistence that Jesus was allergic to [insert "p" word] .

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says that he has
come 'to preach good news to the poor ... to
proclaim freedom for the prisoners ... to release
the oppressed.' But apparently Jesus does not
always mean what he says. What he means to say,
according to his latest amanuensis, is that he
came 'to instill a religion of the heart, with
only himself as the place where we encounter the
Father.' Jesus came not to establish a church or
to preach a new [insert "p" word] but to bring in
'heaven's reign,' which, according to Wills, is
characterized by love and love alone. 'In the
gospel of Jesus, love is everything,' Wills
writes, adding that this love 'is not a dreamy,
sentimental, gushy thing. It is radical love,
exigent, searing, terrifying.' Yet Wills' Jesus
has no real radicalism in him. His is a purely
interpersonal and domesticated love, divorced
entirely from the exigencies of ["p" word] and economy.

To be fair, it should be noted that Wills (a
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who is Roman
Catholic) allows his Jesus to hold forth on
ecclesiastical [insert "p" word]; to plump for
married clergy and for women priests; and to
denounce the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of
the Catholic Church, its history of bribery and
warfare, and the haughty disdain of its
holier-than-thou hierarchy for ordinary
believers. In early Christianity, there were no
priests, no bishops and certainly no pope, Wills
observes. Benedict XVI, 'like his predecessors,
is returning to the religion Jesus renounced.'

Though Wills allows Jesus to rail against the
papacy's gluttony for power ­ what else can we
expect from the author of 'Papal Sin: Structures
of Deceit?' ­ he stifles his savior entirely when
it comes to the broader arena of [insert "p"
word] and society. Jesus 'had no ["p"
word] program,' Wills insists. He was 'not a
social reformer.' If the question is 'What Would
Jesus Do?' and the context is ["p" word] and
economic life, then the answer is absolutely, positively nothing.

Wills is trying to undercut efforts by the
religious right to cast Jesus as a ["c" "R"
words] In one of the strongest passages in this
surprisingly flaccid book, Wills likens recent
efforts by evangelicals to dress Jesus up 'in
borrowed ["p" word] robes' to the burlesque of
the Roman soldiers who adorned him with a crown
and scepter while mocking him as 'king of the
Jews.' Whereas Jim Wallis (the author of the
influential 'God's ["p" word') and others on the
religious left have criticized evangelicals for
getting Jesus' ["p" word] wrong, Wills insists
that Jesus had no ["p" word] to get, that 'his
reign is not of that order.' Wills wants to see a
great wall constructed between American religion
and American ["p" word], and he is determined to
have Jesus do the heavy lifting.

There are two problems with this approach. First,
as Wills' own 'Under God' demonstrated, U.S.
religion and ["p" word] cannot be separated so
neatly. Except in the mind of Jefferson and his
most fanatical acolytes (Wills included), church
and state have been intimates here from the
moment George Washington put his hand on a Bible
and swore to uphold the Constitution. Efforts to
make religion ["p" word] impotent have always
been futile in this country, as have efforts to
make ["p" word] religiously irrelevant. Second,
it is just not true that the Jesus of the Gospels
has no ["p" word]. As Wills himself argues, Jesus
spoke repeatedly about inequality and injustice.
He 'renounced theocracy.' He was 'opposed to war
and violence.' He was 'a threat to power.'

But how much of a threat can you be if you refuse
to act ­ or even to speak ­ for or against the
powers of this world? (What would have become of
the abolitionist or civil rights movements if
every ounce of the prophets had been emptied out
of Jesus?) Since the late, great 'faith-based'
["e" word] of 2004, in which 'values ["v" word]'
reportedly secured a born-again ["P" word]
re-election, ["D" word] have been wringing their
hands over what to do next. Should they get
religion, translate their policies into the
rhetoric of revelation and inform American ["v"
word] that they have values and even faith, too?
Or should they stick to the party line of rights
and reasons and continue to insist that religion
and ["p" word] have always been and must forever remain separate?

'What Jesus Meant' is an ill-conceived brief for
the latter view. As such, it tells us far more
about Wills than about Jesus, more about Wills'
devotion to our third president than about his
faith in the second part of the Trinity. Rather
than putting his hand in the hand of the man from
Galilee, Wills puts his hand in the hand of the
man from Monticello. In the process, he misleads
the ["D" word] and misreads the
Gospels. http://www.powells.com/biblio/18-0670034967-0

Stephen Prothero teaches in the Department of
Religion at Boston University and is the author
of 'American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a
National Icon.'" Reviewed by Stephen Prothero, WP
Book World (Copyright 2006 W P Book World Service/W P Writers Group)

~ Janice

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Received on Sat Oct 28 18:05:41 2006