Jesus, Disciple of the Kingdom. Osvaldo D. Vena
target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_d77e6e68-aaa2-5d4d-8b11-95f54d78837b">2. Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship.
3. Schweizer, Lordship and Discipleship.
4. See Gill, Life on the Road. See also Neville, Prophecy and Passion. It was partly through Gill’s work that I came to both Christian activism and the study of Mark (for more on the First World radical discipleship movement see Myers, Who Will Roll Away the Stone). “Between the seminary, sanctuary and streets” is the tag line we used to describe the “social location” of a U.S. experiment in alternative theological education for activists we founded in 2001, called the Word and World People’s School (see www .wordandworld.org).
Preface
Jesus was not a celebrity, but his contemporaries, and those who came after them, made him into one. His town’s people were the first to capitalize on the notoriety of the prophet from Galilee. His disciples and followers did the same. After the resurrection, the early Jesus movement needed to counteract Jesus’ negative celebrity status, earned by his execution on a Roman cross, and so believers took to the task of writing apologetic works, including the gospels, pointing at the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances as proof that God had vindicated Jesus’ life and ministry. This, in turn, laid the foundation for what was to come, namely, the elevating of Jesus of Nazareth to the position of Lord of the universe, Christus Victor, Savior of the world, and Eschatological Judge.
For millennia, the official church has expropriated and misinterpreted Jesus’ true vocation and message in order to build itself into an institution that, to this very day, has controlled the way Jesus is understood by the majority of Christians. The church has dictated the content of Christology in order to achieve the church’s broad and long-lasting goals of self-preservation and theological hegemony. Some of the social ramifications of this Christology, just to mention a few, are: the subordination of women and their exclusion from positions of leadership in the church; the glorification of redemptive suffering, which justifies violence perpetrated against women and sexual and racial minorities; the glorification of redemptive violence, which justifies war, colonization, and genocide in the name of a supposedly sacred mission to Christianize the world. The list can continue endlessly, but these are sufficient to prove my point, which is that the content of Christology has lasting ethical implications. Or to put it in other words: Christology and social practice are intricately related.
In this book, I try to take a critical view of the church’s Christology and suggest an alternative way of looking at Jesus from the perspective of a community, Mark’s, which could be considered pre-church and pre-institution, even though the signs of institutionalization are beginning to surface. It is a way to envision and imagine a different kind of church and, therefore, a different kind of Christianity, not unlike the one envisioned by the Gnostics of the second century or the Jewish Christians of the first. It represents a bold deviation from the norm and a desire to make Jesus’ words and ministry consistent with and relevant to the community’s context, both ancient and modern.
I am grateful to all those people—colleagues, church members, friends, and family members—who have been conversation partners through all the years during which this idea was conceived and brought to fruition. They have been instrumental in the idea’s coherence and validity, which the reader will have to evaluate on his or her own terms. I am especially indebted to Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary for granting me a leave of absence to complete this work. I am also grateful to my research assistant, Kerri Allen, and my teaching assistant, Melanie Baffes—both doctoral students at Garrett—for their invaluable work of editing and formatting the final manuscript.
Finally, I offer this book to all those who have felt uncomfortable with the church’s view of Jesus of Nazareth, and I thereby suggest a new way of looking at him—as the disciple par excellence of the kingdom of God, a model for our daily, contemporary journey as God’s people.
Osvaldo D. Vena
March 2013
Abbreviations
BDAG Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature
Bib Biblica
BR Biblical Research
BTB Biblical Theology Bulletin
CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly
HCSB The HarperCollins Study Bible
JSNTSup Journal for the Study of the New Testament: Supplement Series
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
PSB Princeton Seminary Bulletin
RevistB Revista Bíblica
SNTSMS Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series
TDNT Theological Dictionary of the New Testament
Introduction
I begin this work with the assumption that Christologies1 are not given revelations or spontaneous historical manifestations but rather community-constructed models, that is, ways of talking about Jesus that are born out of a community’s theological identity. There are some good reasons that a given community ascribed to Jesus different titles and roles. For example, it is very interesting to note the way Paul talks about Jesus and the way Mark does; or the way the authors of Ephesians and Colossians talk about Christ as compared to the way Paul describes him. Each Christological description is different because the make-up and situations of the communities are different. This cannot be overstated. Christology is always driven and fed by the praxis of the community.2 It is not a given. It has to be constructed. It is never deductive, but inductive. It is never from above, a revelation implanted in people’s minds and heart by God, but always from below, from the human sphere where people struggle to remain faithful to God. Christology then is not an abstract, value-free reflection3 about who Jesus is but a practical response of the faithful done from the perspective of interested discipleship. Here I agree with Terrence W. Tilley, who proposes that Christology “must begin where we are. . . . Christology always arises in disciples’ imagination. We start with Jesus as he is perceived and imagined on this earth. We start telling the story here even if the story we tell begins in heaven.”4 This starting point of Christology is made even more poignant by Jon Sobrino:
[We] will give preference to the praxis of Jesus over his own teaching and over the teaching that the New Testament theologians elaborated concerning his praxis. Thus the New Testament will be viewed primarily as history and only secondarily as doctrine concerning the real nature of that history.5
Starting the Christological task deeply embedded in the praxis of the community is something advanced by Liberation Theology and nicely summarized in Gustavo Gutierrez’s famous dictum concerning the relationship between theology and praxis: “Theology follows,” he says, “it is the second step.”6 I treat Christology as a subset of theology,7 namely, the discourse8 about Jesus as Christ, so the dictum still applies. This “second-step” characteristic of any theology explains very well the process by which the New Testament books were written, as well as any contemporary reflection on these texts. What comes first is an experience with God channeled through and rooted in a historical event, namely, the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. The second step is the discourse we construct, from the practice of discipleship,