Reading Blog: Untamed by Alan and Deb Hirsch, Chapter 1
Alan Hirsch has made a name for himself in recent years as a missiologist who has drawn attention to the neglect of mission to the West. His books, The Shaping of Things To Come (co-written with Micheel Frost) and The Forgotten Ways take up these subjects, along with his other missional initiatives such as the Forge Missional Training Network and Shapevine (started along with Lance Ford). For Untamed, Alan c0-writes with his wife Deb, an experienced and articulate minister in her own right.
Section 1: Untamed God
Chapter 1: Jeebus Made Me Do It
Homer Simpson is the template for this chapter. Trying to escape a debt to PBS, Homer gets shipped to the South Pacific by Reverend Lovejoy as a Missionary where he promptly destroys the pristine native civilization by preaching “Jeebus” and building a Casino-themed religion that introduces gambling and alcohol to the natives. For the Hirsch’s, this is a snapshot of what happens when we don’t really know God; we create toxic religious enterprises and institutions.
As has been pointed out abundantly by a growing collection of popular Christian authors in the last two decades – from Dallas Willard to Dan Kimball to Dave Kinnamon and Gabe Lyons – Christians often don’t look much like Jesus at all. Reflecting this, Bill Maher has said, “I don’t know anyone less Jesus-like than most Christians.”
It’s critical to reclaim the centrality of Jesus as the defining image of God. We know God by knowing Jesus Christ, or as former Anglican archbishop Michael Ramsey has said, “God is Christlike.” The Hirsch’s believe that this re-centering of Christ, not just as the savior of humanity, but also as the model of discipleship leads us to take Jesus seriously as a template for life. This incarnational view of God breaks us out of the tendency to “know” God primarily through the abstract concepts of his transcendent “otherness.”
However, this need to see God through Christ can include the tendency to create Christ in our own image. Quoting Voltaire’s famous saying – that God created us in his image and we returned the favor – the Hirsch’s explore the phenomenon of enculturated versions of Christ. Europeans create a light-skinned, light-haired version, Africans create a dark-skinned version, etc. While it’s necessary to recognize Christ ability to identify with every culture, this tendency can quickly becomes idolatrous. There’s an interesting example of this in Untamed, taken from an infamous sermon preached by Seattle pastor Mark Driscoll:
He [Driscoll] has become somewhat infamous for his portrayal of Jesus as some sort of ultimate fighter. But in attempting to “butch up” Jesus and make him appeal to “real men,” has Driscoll come close to creating Jesus in his own image? Consider this from one of his sermons:
“Latte-sipping Cabriolet drivers do not represent biblical masculinity, because real men—like Jesus, Paul, and John the Baptist—are dudes: heterosexual, win-a-fight, punch-you-in-the-nose dudes. In other words, because Jesus is not a limp-wristed, dress-wearing hippie, the men created in his image are not sissifed church boys; they are aggressive, assertive, and nonverbal.”
Now we don’t believe Mark’s original intention was bad. What he was trying to do is rescue Jesus from the overly feminized ways in which Jesus has been portrayed. We would agree and also want to rescue the image of Jesus from this [...] But the problem with Driscoll’s ultimate-fighting Jesus is that Jesus has been freed from one distortion only to be captured by another.
The Hirsch’s are very concerned with how an overly personalized and distorted image of Christ leads to toxic religious abuses. Instead, “Jesus must be freed in order to relate to all people; if he isn’t freed, the incarnation fails to make sense [...] That’s the whole point of the incarnation: he became a human in order to fully identify with each and every one of us.”
The authors go on to ask why is it that Christ’s holiness tended to attract the marginalized sinners of his day, but the “holiness” of Modern Christians tends to repel them? The Hirsch’s answer is that Jesus’ holiness wasn’t about conformity to the rules of personal morality, but rather individual and corporate conformity to God as revealed in Christ. The distinction they make here is the classic Evangelical distinction between religion and “relationship.” The authors affirm that Christ taught a reconciled relationship with God that leads to a genuine desire to please Him out of love.
However, that “conformity” to God usually sets us prophetically at odds with the surrounding culture (secular and religious). This is where the Hirsch’s view of God becomes “untamed” in the “gutsy” and “intoxicating” Jesus of the Gospels. There is a radical freedom expressed by God and his people to stand for what is truly righteous, unfettered by the rules of society.
Some Questions for Reflection:
- Aside from Mark Driscoll’s “Ultimate Fighter” Jesus, What are some of the other caricatures of Jesus you recognize in Christianity that are inconsistent with the biblical picture of him?
- What about Jesus do you identify with most? Does Christ seem attractive to you?
- What do you think of the distinction the Hirsch’s make between moralistic religious conformity to the rules of society and relational conformity to the will of God? How can we reliably know the difference?
I think the way that we counter making Jesus into our image is gaining more and more understanding of Jesus rooted in his 1st century Jewishness. A good book that I read last year on this was Race: A Theological Account by J. Cameron Carter. http://www.amazon.com/Race-Theological-J-Kameron-Carter/dp/0195152794
He actually details the history of modern Western society’s creation of Jesus as a universal white man and how that contributed theologically to racism. Very profound.