Adapted from a reflection paper for my Nietzsche and Secularization class. Good stuff in that class.
No one wants to talk about Jesus!
This includes, to differing extents: Nietzsche, Taylor, my Christian friends, my Buddhist friends, my atheist friends, my favorite Christian rock band growing up, and... me. It’s always about God. Or maybe about “Jesus as Teacher.” Jesus as God is either awkwardly ignored (the theological elephant in the room) or outwardly dismissed.
But the central tenant of Christianity is that God became a human being, which is insane, and that this human being lived in time, under the constraints of time, was documented by historical sources (including secular sources such as Josephus, the non-Christian, Jewish historian of the time), died and was documented as such, and then, with grand mythological flare, came alive again and somehow because of this, humans are capable of being freed from being purely human and can be remade as something greater than human. WTF?!? What kind of an odd compilation of mythology, history, and enchantment is that? But it’s what every Christian church service rests on, what every Christian theology has to bend around, and what every Christian life acknowledges. So why does everyone – me included – want to keep the story to just God? Why, even amongst Christians, is it never about Jesus? Is it because it’s such an inherently awkward story, particularly for the 21st century? (“Yeah, so, like, this Jewish guy was God and he came back to life! Like, sweet, right?”). Instead, we talk about God, and when we talk about Jesus, he is stripped of his status as a God-man (if not in theology, than in casual discussion) and turned into a cross between Gandhi and Kant – wandering around Galilee spreading peace and wisdom.
But as awkward a concept as God becoming man, dying, and coming back to life is, it’s absolutely essential to Christianity. The loss of the divinity of Christ is absolutely the central turning point towards secularization.
Once Jesus loses his divinity, two things happen. First, Christianity becomes a moral system based around following a moral teacher. Moral systems are wonderful, but the loss of enchantment, grace, and the supernatural means that it is only one step more to eliminating God altogether (Charles Taylor is big on this - the loss of enchantment, post-Medieval life, is the beginning of the loss of all religion). Once religion is simply moral rules, then why have a God at all? Why can’t we be moral people, living a flourishing life, without God? If Jesus is a teacher, and not a supernatural savior, then the focus is on rationality, on human ability to “follow rules,” and on human capability to achieve perfection apart from any outside help. All of these things are completely possible without a God-man.
The second thing that happens is that the moral rules that Jesus himself gave become irrelevant and impossible. How are the commands of Jesus to “give all you have to the poor and follow me,” his promises that his followers would have “no place to lay their heads,” that the poor are “blessed,” sustainable with the kind of Deism that reduces God's plan for humans to having them “ realize the order in their lives which he had planned for their happiness and well being”? (Some more Charles Taylor). When Jefferson removed the divinity of Jesus from him, what he did was make Jesus absurd (how could he make such radical and impossible demands on people?) and irrelevant (since his actual demands are so high, it is impossible that we follow them in reality, so we can admire Jesus from a distance while being entirely off the hook for any real life-change). Jesus’ actual teachings are so insane if taken literally that it seems that the only way to deal with him is to place him in a specific historical context, “mummify” him as a “good teacher” (even while we do not take his commandments literally) and proceed to live a life that “flourishes”.
If Christianity is just deism and religious humanism, then its lifestyle demands are too radical. But if Jesus was divine, then his commands aren’t just “do this” into a void of human inability, but empowered by him. If Christianity is actually supernatural, then maybe we can become beings that are capable of immense sacrifice, immense love, and immense freedom. Without supernatural help, however, Jesus was a naive 1st century radical who failed to comprehend humanity. Charles Taylor talks a lot about “transcending flourishing": Living a life that's more than just "the good life." This sort of life is impossible without a reality of Jesus as divine.
