Rendering Unto Caesar

Since 1976, when Jimmy Carter’s Evangelical faith became a campaign issue, candidates’ religious orientations have factored in political debate. When George W. Bush cited Jesus Christ as his favorite political philosopher during the campaign of 2000, his statement represented a crescendo of devout rhetoric, but by no means an aberration. The relationship between Jesus and politics will no doubt be taken up again in 2008, and Democratic politicians have been advertising faith-based credentials that they once kept lit under a bushel — if they had been ignited at all. In this environment, it is helpful to have the careful, close reading offered by Tod Lindberg, not a theologian but a Hoover Institution research fellow, in “The Political Teachings of Jesus” (Harper Collins, 272 pages, $25.95).Mercifully, Mr. Lindberg avoids equating Jesus with progressive or conservative policies, recognizing the anachronism involved in such claims. Yet he does identify Jesus not as a progressive, but as the progressive : the force in Western politics who made progress possible by asserting the full equality of men and women. The closest and most effective of Mr. Lindberg’s readings involves the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. Through the careful, literal attention Mr. Lindberg pays to the text, he is able clearly to identify two related principles that are often missing from popular conversation and even scholarly discussion of the Gospels’ political perspective.The first of these insights is that the Sermon on the Mount, beginning with the Beatitudes, is built around a strict injunction to righteousness. In speaking of the persecution his disciples should expect, Jesus does not endorse that outcome, but he does accommodate it. To be persecuted should be accepted as a badge of honor, he teaches, if it comes for righteousness’s sake. The second of Lindberg’s central observations is that the way in which Jesus commends the Law of Moses, the Torah, involves a key qualification. In Matthew, Jesus says the Law will not pass until all is accomplished (Matthew 5:18), and although that has been taken to suggest that the Law is fixed in its content, Jesus truly believed in a prophetic fulfillment that would bring all the peoples of the world to recognize the God of Israel. That fulfillment necessitated a radical transformation of the Law in Jesus’s mind as in the minds of Prophets before him, so as to enable people unrelated by genealogy or custom to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to inherit all the promises of the covenant with the patriarchs.Both principles — the pre-eminent importance of righteousness and the transcendence of Law — are inherent in Jesus’s overall religious vision of the significance of human life, and correspond evocatively to current concerns for justice, especially those concerning economic repression and racism. But a basic correction needs to be introduced into Mr. Lindberg’s careful reading. Although he works closely with the texts involved, he lacks proper attention to context. He acknowledges that Jesus’s approach is not political at base, and yet he lists “equality” among Jesus’s concerns, as though Jesus lived in 18th-century Europe, rather than first-century Palestine. Though political in consequence, the basis of Jesus’s position was not an Enlightenment concern with the nature of political authority, but the promise of Israel’s prophets that a super-political, divine justice would “roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24).The tendency to short-circuit the cultural development between Jesus’s time and later periods also appears in Mr. Lindberg’s repeated treatment of the text of Matthew’s Gospel as a direct statement of Jesus’s political position, rather than one mediated by the community of Matthew 50 years after Jesus’s death. The unfortunate result is that the disagreements between Matthew’s community and its surrounding Jewish community are flattened into a superficial reading of Jesus’s teaching. At one point, Mr. Lindberg finds himself saying, on the basis of Matthew 5:43, that the Hebrew Scriptures explicitly instructed people to hate their enemies. Of course, that is not the case, as has been explicitly recognized by scholars for more than half a century, especially as a result of the detailed contributions of Krister Stendahl.Although this deficiency in attending to context mars the book, it also signals an underlying problem in the wider contemporary debate concerning the relationship between politics and religion. If even careful, close readers are going to take their terms of reference from the broad-spectrum handbooks that Mr. Lindberg cites — Vine’s “Complete Expository Dictionary,” based upon a work published in 1939, and the more recent but still recycled “Backgrounds of Early Christianity published by Eerdmans” — without reference to specific scholarship, we are surely in trouble. Whether you see Jesus’s political influence as positive or negative, a flat reading of the Gospels will take you as far from a historically accurate assessment of Christianity as the assumption of a flat earth would take you from drawing an accurate map of the earth. In the world we live in, the religious maps we use are every bit as important as our geographical ones.Mr Chilton’s book “Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography” is available from Doubleday.

Rendering Unto Caesar

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