Jesus Christ Superstar. Robert M. Price
here. In other words, they admitted they hadn't really explained anything. What they had done was to eliminate various false ideas about Jesus. The dogmas were really boundary markers beyond which lay mystery, before which one might only bow in humble faith. The result of this double bind was a situation in which one need only have "implicit faith;" i.e., one could not understand what precisely it was that one was required to believe, so all one had to do was to believe that whatever theologians understood these beliefs to mean--must be true. Rather like holding a sealed envelope and saying "Whatever it says in here is true! I know it, even though I have no idea what is written in here!" Incomprehensible creeds do not tell the believer anything in the long run except to tell him that he'd best not question the party line, or there'll be hell to pay. As Pontius Pilate says, "But what is truth? Is truth unchanging law?" Theologian Don Cupitt makes this point well: "From early times there has been a tendency to treat doctrines defined by official gatherings of the hierarchy as something like laws, and deviations from them or failure to uphold them as something like a crime."15 In other words, "thought crime," as George Orwell called it in 1984.
When you are a "law-abiding" believer in this sense, you have "lost something kind of crucial" (as the Jesus of Godspell would say), namely the felt need to search for truth. Somebody has told you that you already have all the truth you could need, and to question that truth is blasphemy. What a result: religion telling you not to bother seeking the truth. Spiritual and intellectual complacency is the result. The soul and the mind become "comfortably numb." And religion starts badmouthing the intellect. Job is blamed for daring to question God. Paul condemns the wisdom of philosophers and intellectuals as the merest foolishness in the eyes of God. No, God prefers the ignorant and has made them his chosen people (1 Corinthians 1:26-29). We are congratulated insofar as we can manage to believe without sufficient evidence (John 20:29). We are told it is a woeful lack of faith to see any plan as unrealistic. We are told to become childlike; otherwise we will be excluded from the kingdom (Matthew 18:3).
And it is such religiously reinforced childishness that made many pious people protest Superstar as blasphemy when it first appeared. Some reproached the libretto for not keeping literally to the words of the gospels, for adding new ones, for sketching in the details of the vague gospel characters. Bob Larson (famous nowadays for his radio talk show, then for his rock record burning rallies) even went so far as to claim that Tim Rice was literally inspired by a demon who dictated the lyrics to him!16 Larson "knew” this because he later had occasion, he reported, to exorcise the same spook from a teenage rock listener, and the demon confessed the whole thing. There you have it, right from the Pale Horse's mouth, I guess.
I suggest that this outrage on the part of the faithful was much the same as the indignation of the little child who wants the bedtime story told in the very same words each and every night. If the parent wants to skip a part for time's sake, or begins to summarize, embroider, paraphrase, the child will sternly bring him or her back to the letter of the text. You see, it is the familiarly formulaic drone of sameness which helps the child go to sleep, and likewise, it is the slavish adherence to biblical literalism that is required for the true believer to keep his intellect snoozing peacefully. Changes, especially like those we see in Jesus Christ Superstar and The Last Temptation of Christ sound like an alarm clock, jolting one suddenly awake from one's "dogmatic slumber" (Kant).
Strange Thing Mystifying
A creed full of affirmations can be put under one's pillow to make one sleep tight. But a creed that is more like a set of questions will keep you awake, prodding and needling you, a constant irritant. And this is what the religious person needs, lest the frostbite of spiritual complacency steal over him. In his book Lost Christianity, Jacob Needleman argues that we must be shoved into a state of disorientation, knocked off balance, before the Spirit can breach our defenses. This explains why Zen masters try to jolt their novices into Satori (enlightenment) by unexpected jokes, slaps, non sequiturs, even blasphemies! There is a spirituality of blasphemy. Accordingly, in Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ Jesus retorts to the High Priest Annas: "Didn't they tell you? I'm Saint Blasphemer!"
Once you think you've got the truth wrapped up in a creed, the danger is smugness, bigotry, the assumption that one need not listen to anyone else's viewpoint. Absolute Truth corrupts absolutely. Just look at the people who are pretty sure they've got it. Gotthold Lessing, one of the great religious Rationalists of the 18th Century, saw this and once wrote, "If God held all truth in his right hand and in his left the everlasting striving after truth, so that I should always and everlastingly be mistaken, and said to me, 'Choose,' with humility I would pick on the left hand and say, 'Father, grant me that. Absolute truth is for thee alone.'"17 When mere human beings think they have the truth all wrapped up, you get religious wars, book burnings, etc.
What does all this philosophizing have to do with the way Jesus Christ Superstar is written? As Paul would say, "Much in every way" (Romans 3:2). Tim Rice has used anachronism and irony to keep us close enough to be involved in the saga of Jesus yet at enough of a distance that we remain haunted with our Twentieth-Century doubts and questions about Jesus. Accordingly, he never brings the saga to a genuine resolution. He leaves the listener suspended between faith and doubt, between heaven and earth, just like Judas, who, again, is our representative, who voices our own sincere confusions, who shares Jesus' plaint: "I look for truth and find that I get damned!" And the medium is the message. Some literary techniques accomplish this, where others would impede it. Rice wants to leave us with a sense of wonder (the crucial ingredient of worship, in my humble opinion).
If Superstar had come to a pious and "safe" conclusion (like, for instance Franco Zefferelli's Jesus of Nazareth TV miniseries did, thanks to Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ who advised Zefferelli not to end with the mysterious empty tomb as he had planned but rather to have a flesh-and-blood risen Christ on hand!), one satisfying to Bob Larson and his affronted brethren, it would have dead-ended in pious, stale certainties, lulling the listener back into a peaceful narcotic dogmatic slumber ("Sleep and I shall soothe you..."). But Superstar aims to disturb, just as Jesus himself did ("He scares me so!"). This is why I think reviewer Henry Hewes, who made several insightful observations at other points, veered off the track at this one. He judges Jesus Christ Superstar to be "the life of Jesus as seen by modern agnostics, who don't seem to want to take a discernible position on the crucial question of Christ's divinity. Such equivocality is undramatic."18
This was in the days before the currency of Reader Response criticism. Since then it has become clear through the writings of Roman Ingarden (The Literary Work of Art), Wolfgang Iser (The Act of Reading; The Implied Reader), Stanley Fish (Is There a Text in This Class?), Umberto Eco (The Open Text), and others that the open-ended, open-textured character of literary texts compels the reader/viewer/hearer to fill in certain "zones of indeterminacy" left open by the author so that the reader becomes an active collaborator in producing the text as the reader experiences it. We could almost go so far as to say that if the text, the drama, were completely univocal, if there were a single intended definitive meaning visible to every reader/viewer, then the literary work would be merely a dead stone. There would be no real role for the reader save for passive reception, and this is not really reception at all. Good luck trying to get the catharsis of pity and terror (as Aristotle said) from a drama that is just dumped in front of you as a fait accompli.
Or think of a detective mystery. The whole point of this genre is to involve the reader as a silent rival of the investigator: the reader eagerly assembles a hypothesis using every fresh piece of evidence tossed him by the author, trying to figure out the ending in advance: "‘whodunit?" If the mystery writer cannot place the reader in this kind of suspense, the story has already crashed before it could take off. So the case of a mystery story well illustrates the crucial importance of indeterminacy precisely in order to make the story dramatic. And this much Hewes would probably not deny. He would rightly point out that any and every detective mystery story resolves itself. Sooner or later we discover the identity of the guilty party; the mystery is solved, and we can breathe freely again.
But the drama of Superstar is not of this kind, and a "dramatic" resolution of its suspense will destroy its (aesthetic or religious) effect. For the mystery of religion, the mystery of the gospel, is not like the mystery of a mystery story. The latter is just a problem, an empty blank that Sherlock Holmes