When Jesus Came To Harvard Pa: Making Moral Choices Today - Softcover

Cox, Harvey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 061871054X ISBN 13: 9780618710546

Publisher: Mariner, 2006

Synopsis

In this urgently relevant, wholly enlightening discussion of modern moral decisions, the Harvard theology professor Harvey Cox considers the significance of Jesus and his teachings today. As he did in his undergraduate class Jesus and the Moral Life--a course that grew so popular that the lectures were held in a theater often used for rock concerts--Cox examines contemporary dilemmas in the light of lessons gleaned from the Gospels. Invigorating and incisive, this book encourages an intellectual approach to faith and inspires a clear way of thinking about moral choices for all of us.

About this title

About the Author

HARVEY COX is the author of the groundbreaking The Secular City and many other books, including The Seduction of the Spirit, which was nominated for the National Book Award. A professor of theology at Harvard Divinity School, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

When Jesus Came to Harvard

Making Moral Choices TodayBy Harvey Cox

Mariner Books

Copyright © 2006 Harvey Cox
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780618710546
Chapter 1

He Was Then, We Are Now

Twenty centuries — sixty generations — have passed since
Jesus of Nazareth lived. The people who met or heard him
then numbered only in the hundreds, or a few thousand at
most. The Romans did not consider him significant enough to
record his execution in their annals. He wrote no books. No monuments
were erected in his memory. Yet today countless people believe
that he has an important moral significance, not just for his
time, but for ours as well. Still, they are often perplexed and frustrated
about just what that significance is. Many experts, from TV
evangelists to university researchers, claim in self-assured tones to
speak authoritatively about Jesus. But they have so many different
and conflicting interpretations of him, they cannot all be right.

One way I tried to close the then/now gap was to introduce the
students to a number of recent figures for whom Jesus was the principal
inspiration. We studied Gandhi, who never became a Christian
but tried to base his life on the Sermon on the Mount. We read
about Martin Luther King, who found in Jesus the model for his
own nonviolence and a racially inclusive community. We talked
about Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement,
who tried her best to follow Jesus" pattern of poverty and simplicity.
I told the class about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor
whose determination to follow Jesus in Nazi Germany led him to
join the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and who was hanged by the
Gestapo just hours before the Americans arrived at his concentration
camp in Flossenburg. Many students chose to write their term
papers on one of these twentieth-century disciples of Jesus. In a
world full of celebrity idols with oversize clay feet, they seemed to
be looking for credible moral heroes. Jesus obviously provided a
powerful example of someone who took the side of the dispossessed,
spoke truth to power, and was willing to pay the price of his
convictions.

But there was still something missing. Even the most thoughtful
students had a hard time finding in Jesus" life and teaching much
concrete guidance in making the day-to-day decisions they faced.
One day a candid junior who was active in the local Lutheran
church asked me a simple question: "Why does nearly everyone we
study in this course end up getting crucified, shot, or hanged?" He
was referring to Jesus, Gandhi, King, and Bonhoeffer. But he was
not being flip. He told me he had no ambition to get rich or famous,
and that he was genuinely inspired by Jesus" concern for the outcast
people of his day. But, he said, he did want to find a satisfying job
someday, get married, raise a family, and be a good citizen of his
community and of the world. Naturally, he wanted to do the right
thing. But he did not feel up to confronting the Roman legions.

Sometimes the most devout students told me they prayed to Jesus
for guidance about their choices, and I believe they did. But when
they looked to him as a living example of how to make moral decisions,
they were often puzzled. The Sermon on the Mount seemed
compelling to them, and I am sure many would have at least tried to
"turn the other cheek," and even to love their enemies. But were
they really supposed to take Jesus" admonition literally, sell everything
they had, and give it to the homeless people in Harvard
Square? Did I seriously expect them to "take no thought for the
morrow," as Jesus taught, when I had assigned term papers and
scheduled a final exam? In short, they found Jesus powerfully attractive,
but it was hard to make a moral connection with him.

It was not just the Christians who found Jesus both appealing and
puzzling. The Jewish students who knew their own religion recognized
him as a fellow Jew in the tradition of the prophets, like Isaiah
and Jeremiah. Buddhists immediately saw him as a bodhisattva, one
who chooses to forgo entering nirvana so he can help all sentient
creatures to do so as well. Muslims also considered him one of the
prophets and frequently reminded me that he receives a prominent
role in the Qur"an. They all considered him a virtually incomparable
model of courage and self-sacrifice. But as a guide to thinking
through today"s issues, he seemed somehow unavailable. A middleaged
visiting scholar from India, a Hindu economist who audited
the course, once told me he found Jesus extraordinarily admirable
and could well understand why Gandhi had followed his example.
Like the mahatma, he said, he also had a picture of Jesus on the wall
of his room. But, he added, the life of Jesus had ended at the age of
thirty-three. He had never entered what the Hindus call the "householder"
stage of life, nor the ascetic or "sunyasi" phase, which comes
with advanced years. How could one follow him into one"s fifties
and sixties and beyond? Since I myself was entering that last phase I
knew immediately what he was saying. Still, I saw little point in
telling him that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had
once speculated about the same question and had suggested that if
Jesus had not died so young, he might eventually have outgrown his
youthful exuberance, calmed down, and become a different kind of
person. Who knows? Still, it is hard to imagine Jesus collecting Social
Security or playing shuffleboard in Fort Lauderdale.

During the years I was teaching the course many people hoped
that the widely heralded "Jesus seminar" and the search for the "historical
Jesus" might produce an answer to the mystery of who he
really was. Now, they thought, at last they could know the true Jesus,
shorn of all those confusing myths and legends. But they were
quickly disappointed, the more so since the project appeared at first
to be such a promising one. There are, however, understandable
reasons for both its waxing and its waning. The "Jesus seminar"
began with an intriguing question: What can we say about Jesus if
we restrict ourselves solely to currently accepted methods of historical
research? What profile of him emerges if we scrape away the
many layers of myth that have encrusted his figure over the centuries?
What happens if we treat the New Testament Gospels no dif-
ferently from other contemporary ancient sources, such as the Dead
Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas? What is added when
we turn to the archaeology of ancient Palestine; what can anthropology
teach us about the structure of colonized peasant societies
like the one Jesus lived in? It sounded like an exciting enterprise that
might yield a morally relevant Jesus, at least for those who wanted
to emulate him. For a few years this quest for the historical Jesus
captured much of the class"s, and the public"s, attention.

There is little doubt that the notoriety many weekly newsmagazines
and TV shows lavished on the project helped make it more
widely known. The media had previously suspected that featuring
stories about Jesus was a guaranteed way to win readers and viewers,
and they were right. Even after two thousand years, Jesus of
Nazareth remains an enormously fascinating figure and continues
to be an integral part of the collective human psyche in large parts
of the world. This is true whether or not one is a Christian or even
conventionally religious. Atheists and agnostics have written appreciative
books on Jesus. Nearly everyone believes he ought to have
some moral significance, but much confusion and conflict remains
about just what it should be, and about what "following Jesus" in this
or that situation would actually mean. Much of this disagreement
has arisen from the radically different portraits of him that interpreters
have made over the years: the gentle carpenter, the fiery
prophet, the divine lover, the miraculous healer, and the pale mystic.
In recent years Jesus has even appeared as a rock singer in Jesus
Christ Superstar, a circus clown in Godspell, the husband of Mary
Magdalene in The Da Vinci Code, and a helpless victim beaten to a
bloody pulp in The Passion of the Christ. But many people wondered
still, who was he really? Now, with the scientific historians of the
Jesus seminar eagerly at work, perhaps this question would at last be
answered. No wonder the public was fascinated.

In addition, we live in an era of spins and cover stories, of doctored
accounts and "now it can be told" journalism. People often
discount official versions of anything and suspect they are being deceived
or duped. Consequently, when ordinary people learned, not
from the pulpit but from the local kiosk, that the biblical Gospels
were written many years after the events they describe, that they
were pieced together from earlier sources, and that they were edited
for particular audiences, they wanted to find out "the inside story."
Now the Jesus seminar"s quest for the historical Jesus, which hit its
stride during the early 1990s, was there with the answers. It assured
the public that thanks to carbon dating, computer databases, and a
strictly scientific approach to the question, at last we could know
who the "real Jesus" was. Naturally the public curiosity was kindled.
At a time when historical revisionists were overturning previously
sacred versions of everything from the legends of Jesse James to the
Vietnam War, the public"s fascination with the search for the "Jesus
of history" was understandable. Besides, it sold lots of magazines.
So why did the disappointment set in so quickly?

It soon became obvious that the historians carrying on the quest
were coming to a bewildering set of contradictory conclusions about
who Jesus really was. Some depicted him as a wandering sage, others
as a charismatic preacher, and still others as a religiously inspired
social revolutionary. Their disagreement baffled and annoyed those
who believed the search was a genuinely scientific undertaking, the
religious equivalent of the genome project, and that it would produce
a clear and final answer. But it turned out that the answer to
the question, "Who was this Jesus, really?" was as hard to answer as
it had ever been. Why had such a mountainous scholarly effort produced
such a molehill of results?

This impatient dismissal of the historical Jesus project was not
entirely fair. Despite widespread discrepancies among the researchers,
some things were not contested. All agreed that Jesus really had
existed, and that he was a first-century Palestinian Jew living under
the heel of a Roman occupation that — like many such occupations
before and since — had split its captive people into feuding sects and
warring factions. They also agreed that he was a rabbi who taught
the imminent coming of the kingdom of God, and gained a following
as a teacher and a healer in Galilee, especially among the landless
and destitute, but that he aroused the ire of the nervous ruling
religious circles and the tense Roman authorities. When he and
some of his followers arrived in Jerusalem for the Passover holidays
he caused a stir in the Temple, was arrested, interrogated, and executed
by crucifixion, a form of death by torture reserved by the Romans
for those suspected of subverting their imperial rule. But after
his death, his followers insisted that he had appeared to them alive,
and they continued to spread his message even in the face of harsh
persecution.

Beyond this tiny historical capsule of raw data there is an ocean
of additional material about Jesus that does not pass muster with
scientific historians. Much of it is in the Bible itself. But there are
also teachings and sayings attributed to Jesus and stories about him
in the sources called the apocryphal Gospels that the early Christians
chose not to include in the New Testament. There are also numerous
legends about Jesus — for example, that he journeyed to
India or Tibet or Japan during the "silent years" between his twelfth
birthday and the three years preceding his early death, a period the
Gospels simply skip over. But there is no historical evidence whatever
for any of these intriguing travelogues. The sum of the matter
is that although we do know something about the "historical Jesus,"
meaning the bare facts that can be uncovered by contemporary historical
research, this method does not yield very much, and probably
never will. Even carbon dating and archaeology have their limits.
Still, the search for the historical Jesus had not really failed. It
had done much of what it set out to do. It had simply not lived up to
its inflated advance billings or the exaggerated expectations of its
audience.

This is not, however, the main reason why the celebrated quest
for the historical Jesus frustrated so many people. It was disappointing
not because it produced so little, but because what little it produced
seemed so irrelevant. It not only uncovered Jesus as a historical
figure, it also left him as one. Paradoxically, this subverts what the
same scholars believe was the central message of the historical
Jesus. They all agree that Jesus insisted his hearers respond to the
presence of God in the "here and now." The best that historical
reconstruction can do, however, is to leave Jesus in the "there and
then." He is still the robed, bearded figure of the Sunday school
books and the Jesus movies — romantic, tragic, heroic — but no
closer to us than Socrates or Julius Caesar. He is fascinating but
inaccessible, living in a strange world very different from ours, grappling
with issues unlike those we confront.

Despite the failure of the quest for the historical Jesus to satisfy
the unrealistic expectations it engendered, some people continue
to hope that eventually historical research — one more frayed old
scroll dug out of one more cave — will clarify who Jesus really was.
Others still think that asking, "What would Jesus do in this situation?"
will resolve any dilemma. The problem with the first hope is
that, except for the barest essentials, historians will always disagree
about Jesus, and a whole cave full of scrolls will not tell us for sure
who he "really was." Consequently, when we read their differing accounts
of his life or see a film or TV show about him, we often feel
we are catching a fleeting glimpse of an elusive, distant figure on the
other side of a wide abyss. The problem with simply asking what
Jesus would do is that we grapple with many choices today that
Jesus never had to face, so trying to speculate on what he would do
when faced with a controversial modern dilemma is anyone"s guess.
The students in the course knew this all too well. They recognized
that Jesus never had to endure a series of exhausting job interviews,
cope with an unintended pregnancy, or (as far as we know) weigh
the consequences of breaking up with a girlfriend. Looking ahead
in their own lives, they knew Jesus never had to worry about a
fifteen-year-old son he suspected might be taking drugs, or decide
how to tell his parents about a sweetheart they would surely not approve
of, or agonize over whether to place his failing mother Mary
in a retirement community, or consent to disconnecting his father
Joseph"s life-support system if the cancer had spread to all his organs.
On issues like humanitarian military intervention, reproductive
cloning, or doctor-assisted suicide, students could find no clear
answers in his life and teaching — or else they found a range of con-
flicting ones. Try as they would, they continued to see Jesus on the other
side of a wide chasm. He was still then, and they were
clearly now.

These students were not alone. Similar questions stalk anyone
who lives in a society without a widely accepted moral frame of reference.
Many thoughtful people now insist that we should "put
values back into education." They may be right. But if we do,
whose values shall we teach? Which morality: that of the American
Civil Liberties Union, or that of the Christian Coalition? In a Jewish
Yeshiva, an Evangelical Christian college, or an Islamic Qur"an
school these questions answer themselves. But even then, one has to
ask how students and adults who learn these religion-based codes
will fare in a wider, pluralistic world in which tensions between different
religions and value systems often contribute to the discord.

Students do not live on another planet. As they struggled to converse
about moral decisions, I heard echoes of the same goodwill
and the same confusion one might detect in conversations overheard
in restaurants, at family gatherings, on TV panels, at the pizza
shack, and at the neighborhood bar. All of us, whether adolescents
or adults, are up against the same predicament. We are trying to "do
the right thing" in an age in which the old road maps don"t persuade
everyone, and sometimes don"t even persuade us. But what is the
"right thing," and is Jesus any help in discerning it?

I think the people who believe Jesus has an important moral relevance
for the twenty-first century are right, despite the wide historical
ravine that separates his time from ours. But I also believe we
have tried to discover that relevance mostly in the wrong way. Little
by little I have become convinced that there are two key components
to bridging the chasm between him and us, and that the two
are closely linked.

The first is to remember that even before acquiring the rich array
of titles Christian history has assigned to him — Lord, Master, Savior,
Lamb of God, and many others — Jesus was a rabbi. He taught
and applied Torah, the Jewish law, albeit in an unprecedented historical
situation and with an original twist. He never delivered an
easy answer to a hard question but, in time-honored rabbinical fash-
ion, asked another question or told one of his unforgettable stories.
He would not allow people to escape the responsibility of making
their own decisions. Instead he enlisted them in a way of thinking
that would nurture and extend their moral insight. This is exactly
what the best rabbis have always done, and still do.

The second key to spanning the gap between Jesus and ourselves
is to recognize that while he passed on the moral tradition of his
own people in the light of novel demands, he did so by relying more
on narrative and example than on precept and principle. He realized
that the missing dimension in nearly all moral reflection is
imagination. Of course we need reasoning to lead a moral life, but
we need — even more — the capacity to intuit what is important and
what is not, to envision alternative possibilities, and to see beyond
what sometimes appears to be an impasse. We need to appreciate
not just how other people see things but how they feel about them,
and to do this our most potent resource is still the human imagination,
awakened by compelling narratives.

It is not impossible to bridge the gap between Jesus and ourselves.
The secret lies in recovering the link between the rabbinic storyteller
on the one hand, and our own human imaginations on the
other. Taken together, these two elements can still make him our
contemporary and jog the slumbering moral consciousness of our
times.

Copyright © 2004 by Harvey Cox. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.



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Edition details

• Publisher: Mariner
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 061871054X
• ISBN 13: 9780618710546
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 352