The Jesus I Never Knew

Philip Yancey

ISBN: 0-310-38570-9

Read: 18 January - 1 March 1998

Reviewed: 24 March 1998

This was the last in the set of books recommended to me by Randy Wallace some time ago. It was also studied about a year ago in the Homeroom 539 Sunday School class. I'm improving; I'm only a year or two behind the curve on these readings.

This is not your standard Catholic mystic devotional on some aspect of The Christ; this is a hard look at what Jesus was really like as a person here on earth from what we can tell from the Bible. Yancey is careful to stay close to the Bible. This will be a requirement for many readers to take him seriously and perhaps for himself as well. He makes the claim that "the spiritual life obeys laws as verifiable as those of the physical world." (He also goes after our "success addicted society" to which I had to marginally note: "without which this book would not have been possible.") He is careful and musters as much integrity as he can to look beyond the traditions, the pre-suppositions, the centuries of distortion, assumption, comfort, and familiar feelings that we Protestants have about God and His Son. This all just further confirms my belief that our institutions, even the less conservative church that I attend, are the modern Pharisees, protectors of the faith of the status quo and defenders against any really human and unpredictable Jesus who might cause us to change anything about the way we think or compel us to do something we might not want to do.

The organization is three sections: Who He Was, Why He Came, and What He Left Behind. In the first, we explore our presuppositions. Then we try to take a cosmic view. God, who had the choice of any time and any place, picked the Jews under Roman occupation as the place to be a person Himself. Apparently, there was a doctrine in the first few centuries that Jesus had been a hunchback. As blasphemous as this seems today against our notion of God as being perfect, it does match with certain other scripture, some that may (or may not) metaphorically liken Jesus and his claims to great pain and sorrow.

In the second section his ministry is discussed. One myth exploded, for example, is that the law is irrelevant to us now, a dispensational view. While this is true because of grace, it does not mean that the standards are lower. Just take the beatitudes seriously for example. Jesus' standards of perfection are the highest in the universe, perfection itself, not just some rules to follow during the day with some slack for relaxation after hours. Anger equals murder, for example.

A good answer to the question "why doesn't God just fix everything" is proposed. While Jesus did perform miracles in situations where he was placed to help, he didn't fix every wrong in the world. His works are snapshots of the kingdom where things will be perfect, but we are not now in it. God's intersection with here is a place where he fixes things in His physical domain, but does not yet claim the creation fully back from corruption. At no point does a miracle force belief. After all, that would leave no room for faith in the precious environment of free will.

Faith as insurance is clarified too. "Insurance does not prevent accidents, but rather gives a secure base from which to face their consequences." Indeed, this also clarifies insurance itself for me. Upside Down Kingdom is echoed somewhat in the fresh (rather than staid) interpretation of the preaching. It was revolutionary, inverted, "lucky are the unlucky." The only reason this doesn't seem radical today is because we've been indoctrinated with the stories, in our "church life" which is far removed from the realities of the streets of today, or the streets of Palestine under Roman domination....

And then, Jesus is resurrected, and the standard proofs are given: bunches of unexpecting people saw it and it all had to be explained to them. None of these guys were capable of or thinking even vaguely of a conspiracy such as what is claimed by opponents of the resurrection, much less of pulling one off. And then, after explaining his new life to everyone he comes across, Jesus ascends into heaven and is gone, except in Spirit. And that is a different discussion. For a person who resisted the temptation to make a difference, he made a remarkable difference. And here we are today trying to make sense of and live in Christ-like ways yet.

The juxtaposition of the grown up view of Christianity, as seen by other religions and from within, is educating. As a Jewish political Messiah, for example, the Jews see Jesus as a great failure, who was then killed. Of course, we Protestants explain all this away, "it was a different kind of kingdom," we say, echoing Jesus' own words, perhaps on this subject. But real-world problems demand real-world approaches. Trying to integrate our flannel-board shepherd Jesus and our other-world church existence into the reality of the rest of our lives, something that my parents did and taught me to do by refined compartmentalization, doesn't cut it when we start to run out of gas in one world or the other and need to make up the slack, or to have the two worlds count within each other. It is an ongoing struggle for me, one that Yancey shares in part. I find a nav-aid of faith in his quote of Walter Wink, "If Jesus had never lived, we would not have been able to invent him." Perhaps this is not true of figures in the other 'not so true' religions.

Yancey is an excellent writer, and is as honest as he can be. I perfectly share his discouragement with the "silence of God," the God who seems to sit on his hands while anything and everything 'goes wrong' in the world. I am also struck by the similarity to my own observations of his claim that "[God has] nearly inexhaustible patience with individuals but no patience at all with institutions and injustice." If I can fully internalize (and verify) this truth, it could have cosmic implications.

Viann had this book in connection with the Sunday School study last year but hadn't cracked it much. She was upset that I was going to borrow it and read it first, so now it will go back to her stack.

Postscript: 2007 June 30

I have made no progress internalizing the truth of God’s impatience with institutions. I don’t even pretend to grasp it now.

One thing that has stopped me cold in religious debate is touched on here. The last time I had a religious debate on rational grounds the opponent said that he did not believe in a benevolent and omnipotent God. By observation of the wrong in the world we conclude that God is either benevolent but impotent or omnipotent but malevolent, or at least indifferent. I thought about answering this with the standard “explain it away” arguments of religion. “How do you know what ‘good’ is? Maybe God has good (‘good’) reasons for not using his omnipotence.” These retorts are unsatisfying and diversionary. They usually lead to some claim about “free will” which has questionable bearing on the issue. The question is still open. As long as it is, I’ve lost the debate. Presumably God can handle it, if he wants to.