This comes from Yale Divinity School’s Miroslav Volf writing in Christian Century who points out that both the religious right and left abandon the gospel in advocacy of their politics. The irony is that if either of these groups embraced the life described in the gospels, Jesus would exceed the left’s demand for social justice and the right’s demands for ‘right’ living.
Evangelicals who belong to the religious right insist that Jesus is their Lord and Savior, yet many of them hardly ever talk about Jesus, at least not in public. They talk about politics—how to get their people elected to local, state and federal governments so as to advance their religious, moral and political causes. They pour their energy into political battles and have none left for Jesus. If you were to point this out to them, they’d vehemently disagree, telling you that they wage political wars for Jesus and in his name. But Jesus is no longer at the center of their attention. The struggle for power has taken his place. They are political warriors in religious garb, not followers of Jesus. It took a religious outsider to name what was going on among the seemingly most devout. There are many ways of leaving Jesus behind. Take the famous Left Behind series. Jesus is all over these books. But what kind of Jesus? As I was flipping through the pages of the series, I felt I was more in the world of Terminator movies than in the world of the Gospels or even the world of the book of Revelation. Violent struggle dominates the imagination of the writers, struggle carried out with the most deadly weapons of the flesh. Jesus—the Jesus who came to redeem the world by the power of his self-giving love and demanded that his would-be followers walk in his footsteps—is nowhere to be seen. Overcoming the assaults of the godless enemy by the power of sacrificial witness to the point of shedding one’s own blood! Martyrs of the ancient book of Revelation have morphed into Left Behind’s ruthless warriors. And where is Jesus in all this? He is there, but not as the Jesus who loves enemies and justifies the ungodly. That Jesus has been discarded for the Rider on the White Horse. Never mind that the whole New Testament is united in this crucial point: to follow Christ means to love enemies, not to eliminate them. I am not sure which is worse, trading Jesus for political warring or transmuting him into the image of our own violent selves. In a sense, both amount to leaving Jesus behind. Think of the irony. The religious right is abandoning Jesus! The charge that the religious left has abandoned Jesus for its pet political causes has been the religious right’s standard line of attack against its enemies for quite some time. That charge isn’t unjustified, of course. There is a consistent pattern in the ways many theological liberals have thought about Jesus: Out with the Jesus of the Gospels and in with the historically reconstructed Jesus—which is to say, out with the Jesus who is a stranger to us and can challenge our prejudices and in with a Jesus who is cast in our own image and fits with what is politically expedient. It does not seem to help to point this danger out, as many have done. You like what you like, and if you are at liberty to construe Jesus—which is what much of the reconstruction of the “historical” Jesus amounts to—you’ll construe him to your liking.
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