You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Book 12 - Ch. 4 (1 of 1) - God on Our Side & at Our Service
I don't believe any of this. You certainly don't know who Jesus is.
The pilgrims saw themselves as the ancient Israelites and America as their promised land. And maybe that was the case. Most of the natives were killed by diseases brought by Europeans. They were brutal stone age people who tortured, raped, murdered each other and engaged in cannibalism against each other. The tribes had medicine men who took drugs to come into contact with demons who pretended to be other spirits. So it shouldn't be a shock that the tribes were hostile to the white man.
"Jesus was a marginal Jew". According to what? Jesus was God himself. His virgin birth was prophesied by Isaiah. Jesus could perform miracles. He healed people. Gave sight to blind. Rose the dead back to life. There are hundreds of prophecies that cover Jesus birth, death, resurrection, and return as a king who rules forever. Jesus was critical of the pharisees who didn't love God or people or justice. There was nobody more zealous than Jesus.
On the bright side, you might be the only one who is reading this:). If it upsets you, don't feel a need to continue reading; though, I am grateful for your willingness to engage it. You are right; we disagree on a fundamental level. Before considering that fact, I do think your frustration with the term marginal is based on a misunderstanding of how it is being used. While you still might disagree with the point, it is not meant to be an insult suggesting that Jesus was average or worse. Rather, it's an observation about where Jesus resided in his society. He was not found at the center, but on the margins with those who are left out. He associated freely with tax collectors, zealots, Samaritans, and prostitutes, and suggested his ongoing presence would be on the margins, in the hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, prisoners, and strangers. He ended up on a cross. Invoking the term marginal for Jesus implies that those who wish to follow him must grapple with the fact he showed compassion and love to those who were left out (by the political and religious establishments) and perhaps identify who those people are in our own time. He doesn't validate the "righteous us" belief, and in fact, his life suggests the "righteous us" belief leads people to become judges & crucifiers. He points to extending kindness, love, and understanding of those viewed as others (them) as the path to human well-being and literally stands in community with those people on the margins.
Second, I am troubled by your generalizations in relation to Native Americans. Native Americans were human beings, they struggled with ego as do all human beings. I am uninterested in a debate about who was better, Native Americans or Settlers. Though, I certainly don't believe Native Americans were any worse than Europeans. I think there is a danger in negative narratives in relation to Native Americans being invoked to validate our beliefs in a righteous us narrative. Might a desire to demonize Native Americans with simplistic assessments be a rationalization to justify a long history of actions that clearly violated the golden rule, just as people used a belief that Jesus was bad to validate their violence toward him?
Finally, we definitely don't read the Bible the same way. There was a time that I would have invoked biblical prophesies as proof of certain beliefs about Jesus, reasoning, it would be mathematically impossible for a person to just happen to fulfill so many prophesies. However, an alternate possibility is that the Gospel writers had access to and were familiar with the scriptural tradition, and connected Jesus to various prophecies to help communicate his importance to their audience.
Again, acknowledging that my primary interest is not in theology, I also think we differ in that I operate with a lower Christology than you. In simple terms a low Christology begins with Jesus' humanity while high christologies start with Jesus' divinity. Put another way, for those who are interested in the question of theology, low christology looks to Jesus' life and teachings (death on a cross, love your enemies, beatitudes, radical parables, humility, associating with the other, etc.) to re-think who God is/what our highest values are, while those with a high christology look at Jesus through the lens of their understanding of god. My concern is that higher christologies tend to look at Jesus through divine ideals that are much more in line with empire understandings of god/Zeus/Apollo (power, domination, control, judgment, etc.), and miss out on how radical Jesus' message. I believe even the beginning of his teaching indicate that a significant portion of Jesus' attention was placed on responding to the ordinary suffering of people (the oppressed, slaves, blind, poor, etc.) rather than creating a complex dogma about god, demons, prophecy, etc. (though I understand you may disagree with me on that).