Quick Hitter: The Jesus Movement



To me, the most inspiring and exciting Christian leader in the United States is the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Bishop Michael Curry.  His handling of the brouhaha over the Anglican primates meeting strikes me as not only politically masterful but also spiritually uplifting--standing firm on a set of core values, but also refusing to be provoked into recrimination and tit-for-tat.  And while it is difficult to tell exactly what the outcome will be with regard to the broader Anglican world, or even what is actually going on at some of these meetings, it seems to this outsider that the "joyous resistance in place" strategy is paying dividends.

In the interview above, Curry talks about the idea of the "Jesus Movement" as a core concept in his approach.  I've heard him mention this before, and he fleshes the idea out a bit in this interview.  Bishop Curry points out that the earliest followers of Jesus were people who were impacted and transformed by the person of Jesus and His teaching and His life.  They saw who He was and what He stood for and decided to follow that way.  The notion, then, is to try to get back to that experience of being a follower of Jesus, someone who is caught up in the inspiration of His life and wants to carry that forward.

This strikes me as enormously helpful, and a better and simpler way of saying much of what I was trying to get at with the idea of the encounter with Jesus.  Seen through this lens, all of what we think of as "Christianity"--the New Testament, the doctrines of the Church, the Ecumenical Councils, etc.--are a collection of reflections on the experience of being part of the Jesus Movement.  Christianity is a product of this Jesus Movement and not its source.  An authentic product and an important product, even a necessary product, but still a product.  The core irreducible experience is encountering this person of Jesus (in a variety of ways--in the pages of Scripture, in the teaching of the church, in others, in an ineffable highly personal experience, etc.) and then having that encounter be a springboard to living in a different way.  Everything else that is associated with Christianity is, one way or another, there to support that core.  

It also seems to me that this is a powerful evangelical tool.  Maybe you are not sure about how to reconcile story X in the Bible with what you learned in science class, or you have serious doubts about doctrine Y that Christianity has traditionally advocated for.  That's OK; let's start with this person of Jesus and the things He said and the life He modeled for people to live.  Is that attractive to you?  Do you want to try to live this way He is setting out?  Then come on over and be part of the Jesus Movement.  Don't ignore or suppress your other questions and concerns.  Live with them, but focus on living a life that models (in no doubt a limited and at times failed way) that of Jesus.  If you are open in principle to what the other members of this Jesus Movement have said throughout the ages, maybe over time you will come to understand their perspective and what they are trying to say.  Or perhaps not, but in any event you will be surrounded by people trying to live out the life Jesus models for us (in the same limited and flawed way) who can help you on that journey.  That's a reason to come to church, to be with fellow travelers on the road.

Said another way, rather than "fronting" the doctrines of Christianity as the entry point for people to come into the faith, the Jesus Movement suggests we should front the person of Jesus and the life He is trying to get people to live.  That's not easy, because it makes concrete demands on us to, you know, live the way Jesus wants us to live, and that way is not easy.  But, I suspect it is a much more attractive and resonant message than the complex doctrinal edifice of Christianity.  Our "best foot," so to speak, is the person and life of Jesus.  Why not put that forward?  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Another Theology of the Body, Part VI--A Theological Exploration of the Clitoris

I was introduced to The Body's Grace by Frank from Letters to the Catholic Right in this post , where he quotes Williams saying: It puts the question which is also raised for some kinds of moralist by the existence of the clitoris in women; something whose function is joy. If the creator were quite so instrumentalist in ‘his’ attitude to sexuality, these hints of prodigality and redundancy in the way the whole thing works might cause us to worry about whether he was, after all, in full rational control of it. But if God made us for joy…? I want to talk about the first part of that quote here, regarding the clitoris.  I am not aware of any theology that has been done on the clitoris, but there should be.  As Williams alludes to, the existence and nature of the clitoris is a theological "problem," especially if you want to hold on to traditional Christian sexual morality.  It is especially problematic if you want to hold that sexuality needs to be understood through the
Read more

On a Pelagian Politics, and Why It Would Be Good

I have two very hot takes.  The first is that Joe Biden is the best United States President in my lifetime, and probably the best since Franklin Roosevelt, and his many critics on both the right and the left are wrong.  The second is that the Irish monk Pelagius and his (mostly Celtic) disciples were basically right, and more specifically Pelagius's great opponent Augustine (and by extension the rest of the Western Church ever since) was wrong.  But the hottest take, the Hegelian synthesis of this Hotness, is that these two takes are ultimately the same take.  I believe that Biden is a great President because I am a Pelagian with a Pelagian world view, whereas American politics is fundamentally Calvinist, which is just Augustinianism taken to its logical conclusion. Let me try to justify this ball of hot takes. 1. Most of what we know of Pelagius comes from his opponents, especially Augustine and Jerome, who attempted (more or less successfully) to have him cast out of the church a
Read more

Jesus Doesn't Care if You Masturbate, and Other Provocations

Image
1.  A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon this post on the Patheos Catholic channel .  In it, a young woman named Marina S. Olsen began what she promised is a series of posts discussing sexual sins, and she begins with masturbation.  To call the post alarmist would not do it justice--even in the heyday of the drug scares in the 80s, an anti-drug ad that adopted this tone would be seen as over-the-top.   But something struck me in reading her post--Ms. Olsen believes, with an apparently unshakable conviction, that what the Catholic Church has to say about masturbation is true.  Actually, that's not quite right--she takes as a given  that what the Church says about masturbation is true.  It is noticeable that at no point does she try to do the Dr. Greg trick, which is to justify her opposition to masturbation on the basis of ostensibly neutral or scientific grounds .  No, her thesis is that people despair about masturbation because masturbation is going to result in those folks
Read more