Dismal Proceedings and Dismal Results

One of the most depressing aspects of trying to engage in criticism of Christian theology is having to address actual contentions of Christians who are trying to explain the Jesus of the Gospels.  The Jesus of Christianity is another matter, of course—the Jesus of the rest of the New Testament, the Jesus of Christian tradition and of the practice of claiming that among dozens of faith traditions yours has the “simple truth”—this Jesus can be explained.  The Jesus of Christianity can be explained because the denominations have decided who and what Jesus is, and invariably they find their variant Savior in the Gospels.

But the Jesus of the actual Gospels cannot be so easily explained—a difficulty that exists, of course, only if one thinks he needs explaining.  And the very business of “explaining” is problematic in itself.  Explaining invariably involves drawing out an image of the entity in question from agreed-upon pre-existing notions.  “This” is explained in terms of “that.”  Unfortunately, our thought processes then consign that which is “explained” to the periphery of more mundane understandings—the more-or-less known exists at the edges of what is known.  The rub is in whether we can hold to a notion of God (or Jesus) as more-or-less known.  In the Age of Discovery the edges of the map could be left blank, or be thought perhaps the abode of monsters.  The theologians’ tendency to form a picture of Jesus from a store of received theology and then to explain him as he exists in the Gospels results usually in a “Jesus” who is a monster.

Such it is often in theologians’ attempts to explain our current topic: The Lord’s Prayer.  Jesus, in the Prayer, throws us up against a duty to grasp for a different world than that which we prefer to imagine.  In the Prayer we are deprived of that very “knowledge” base—our experience-worlds, individual and communal—from which we might try to launch a voyage of “explanation.”  Accordingly, it is from concept-denying apprehensions of an estimable “Other”—God above all names and all nouns—that we must try to grasp anew the mundane reality of our existence, a reality that in our more self-assured moments we claim we would discard in a moment to be closer to God.  Instead, of course, we attempt typically to try to explain God and the things of God, with predictably dismal results.

In my next post I will present an example of such dismal proceedings.