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Q & A
Q&A: Was Jesus’ divinity only an 'add-on'? Mary Jacobs, Apr 7, 2009
Robin Meyers
Editor's note: For an alternate viewpoint, see this Q&A with Dr. Larry Hurtado.
“Who do you say I am?” When Jesus posed that question, he sparked a debate that still rages. Did Jesus say he was divine? Or was belief in his divinity a later development?
In his book, Saving Jesus from the Church (HarperOne, February 2009), Robin R. Meyers argues that Christians should shift their focus from worshipping Christ as Savior and instead “start following Jesus.” A United Church of Christ, Dr. Meyers is pastor at Mayflower Congregational Church in Oklahoma City, Okla., and a philosophy professor at Oklahoma City University. He spoke recently with staff writer Mary Jacobs.
What led you to write a book about Jesus? I’m a member of the Jesus Seminar, and realized that with all this fascinating research done on the historical Jesus, people in the pews never get it. Pastors go to seminary, and about 60-70 percent end up believing things that they never share with their congregations because they are afraid they’ll lose members. So there’s a disconnect between what seminary grads believe and what they preach. This book is an attempt to help bridge the divide between the scholarship and the rest of us.
What we all have in common is Jesus. He’s the most misunderstood person in human history, but he’s also the most compelling, because here we are still talking about him. Most of the books have either been written out of uncritical adoration or out of a desire to destroy what is remarkable and messianic about him. I want to be in-between those two.
Your book asserts: “Christianity’s obsessions with personal salvation must be abandoned.” Aren’t you throwing the baby out with the bathwater? This depends on your definition of salvation. Most Christians understand salvation to be a change in destination after death. There’s a contract made by believing certain things that will pay off in post-mortem rewards: You will go to heaven and not to hell. It’s enough of a departure from what the original communities of Jesus-followers believed that we need to re-imagine what salvation might have meant first. In the first century, salvation meant we were primarily saved from ourselves, from our ignorance, our lack of compassion and empathy for other people, and our failure to form meaningful and loving communities. In the Sermon on the Mount, there is not a single thing about what to believe; it’s only about what to do. By the time Constantine makes Christianity the official religion by the fourth century, the Nicene Creed does not have a single thing in it about what to do; it’s only about what to believe. Something has gone quite wrong if we have departed that fundamentally from what it means to become a disciple.
When I think of salvation, I think of the Salvation Army commercial where different people riff on the lyrics of “Amazing Grace”: “I once was . . . a crack addict . . . a drug addict . . . an alcoholic . . . a meth freak . . . a wretch,” and then say they’ve been restored. That’s been a powerful testimony throughout history. I’d probably appreciate that approach to salvation, but I don’t think the original teachings of Jesus had anything to do with a different afterlife. I’m interested in the religion of Jesus, not the religion about Jesus. Using the historical Jesus research, we can see by rational scholarship that a Galilean sage was turned into a supernatural savior over time. I’m not going to convert hardcore orthodox Christians who believe that creeds and doctrines define the essence of the message. But I think there are a lot of people out there—including my good Methodist friends and colleagues—who are being asked to believe things they know are not true to get rewards they doubt are even available. They want their head and heart to be equal partners.
I’ve been an ordained minister for 30 years and I have been preaching Jesus as the Messiah, but not metaphysically, for all that time. And I have developed a vital, growing congregation with an amazing reputation. Yet most of the people in my church don’t believe in the Virgin Birth, the suspension of natural law in the miracles stories in the Bible, the blood atonement as it developed by the Middle Ages. They don’t believe in a bodily Resurrection and they are not waiting for the Second Coming. And yet we have not gone out of business.
You write that, “In the beginning, the call of God was not propositional, it was experiential.” What would an experiential church look like? Well, it would look like Mayflower Church: We feed 600 homeless a month, we have a medical clinic in Nicaragua, we repair the homes of elderly. It would be a church that sought to model the love and compassion of Jesus of Nazareth. This is primarily a way of being in the world, not a set of creeds and doctrines demanding total agreement. I don’t mean creeds are unimportant; they mark our evolution in understanding. But that evolution goes on. We don’t want to freeze ourselves at one moment in time and say, “That’s the way God has to be worshipped.”
Jesus recruited ordinary men to involve themselves in healing, to preach and teach radical new ways of relating to one another. It was an ethic, not a belief system. There’s nothing propositional, and yet Christianity is almost predominantly propositional.
If you don’t have some sort of creed, how do you have boundaries? Do you let just anybody in your church? We let everybody in, but we say, “We’re going to try to understand God primarily through lens of Jesus.” They’re welcome to bring their Buddhist or Zoroastrian affiliation, but in this church we are looking through the lens of the Bible for what we can learn about God. I believe in God and so do most of the people here. But I’m not interested in conformity except when it comes to love and compassion. The truest statements in the Bible are about love: “If you say you love God and hate your neighbor, you are a liar.” We are primarily a community of love, service and compassion. These things represent the core of the message of Jesus. I could be wrong and we could all be going to hell. But I’m sleeping well at night because I look at what my church means in the world and the people that we’ve helped.
You cite “an inverse relationship between church attendance and negative social statistics like teen pregnancy, divorce, physical and sexual abuse and chemical dependency,” and then add, “Where there is denial there is dysfunction . . . ” Are you equating church attendance with denial? The areas of the country where more people go to church, where there is more conservative, evangelical Christianity, also have worse social statistics: divorce, substance abuse, teen pregnancy. Red states have worse social statistics than blue states.
Having grown up in that part of the world, my theory is that there is an unreality about religion that translates into an unreality about life: a fairytale view of marriage, life, life after death. There is an arrested development in the way we think about life, about God as a source of a personal help, a rich uncle or financial advisor who is going to take care of us. There is a kind of simplistic approach to religion that equates into a simplistic approach to life, and often that doesn’t equip people to deal with life as it really is.
And often religion is used to cover secret lives that are not so religious, and church attendance may be motivated in part by guilt. My experience with fundamentalist Christians is that not only do they not have a better record for staying in marriage or staying out of jail, but that they are doing it at a higher rate than the secular humanists they are often criticizing.
Robin Meyers
Your book asserts: “Christianity’s obsessions with personal salvation must be abandoned.” Aren’t you throwing the baby out with the bathwater? 
