April 29, 2025 • 40 mins
- Scot McKnight’s The King Jesus Gospel
- James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Get up in it.
(00:01):
This feels official in a way
that I should no longer be a part of this.
I feel like this has now reached a level
of class and distinction that I do not belong in.
Oh, we're using headphones?
I'm sorry.
Is that I actually have to see myself?
I think it was like Mark Twain who said
I wouldn't want to be a member of any club
that would accept me.
That's what I feel.
Do I listen to a podcast that would actually talk to me?
(00:22):
Welcome to TikTok Theology,
a podcast that tackles the major trending topics
on social media that concern the Christian faith.
I'm Meagan.
And I'm Steven.
We know you can't form a theology in three minutes
or less, but those videos can identify current issues.
TikTok will give us the prompt
and then we'll do a deep dive.
Thanks for joining us in this exploration.
(00:45):
Hi friends.
Can you believe already coming to the end of season four?
Right at the end.
Oh, time flies.
When you're having fun.
Yep.
Come on somebody.
Anyways team, today we're gonna be having
a really, really fantastic conversation.
It's not just gonna be me and Steven yapping as usual.
We have a lovely guest that we will get to present
(01:05):
in a second, but today we're gonna be talking
about profiling Jesus.
Now that seems like one of those things
that people are gonna get upset about immediately.
So hold on, don't get upset yet.
Let us explain.
I think that it's a really important conversation,
especially something that we've seen
and had other conversations in the season
about Christianity not being a Westernized religion
(01:26):
and things like that.
And this kind of speaks into the issue
in the wrestling with like a white Jesus
that we have seen presented in a lot of ways.
I remember I think I had like a kid's Bible,
like one of those picture kids' Bibles.
And I think he was white in that picture Bible
that I had as a kid.
It's like light base.
Yeah, like definitely, but definitely not like brown.
(01:49):
So I think there's definitely this like conversation
and issue of like how we represent Jesus.
And that I think it leads to the fact that
we don't really understand all that well who Jesus was.
We understand how he relates to us, you know,
biblically and stuff like that.
But I don't think, I think it's also important
to understand where Jesus comes from
and like what that means for, you know,
(02:11):
how we understand him and how we understand scripture.
And so I think we're gonna get to dig into that today.
Yeah, it's an issue that's in social media,
especially as we were like politicized
and you have like politicized even marketed versions
of Jesus on merch and different things.
And he's got a look and a vibe and he's everyone's Jesus.
(02:32):
Like he's, he's this for me and this for me and this for me.
Like Talladega nights.
Yeah, Talladega.
He's like my six pound eight ounce
or eight pounds, six ounce baby Jesus.
I pray to my Jesus in a tuxedo shirt.
Exactly like Talladega nights.
But yeah, so I mean the issue here is Jesus is historical.
Right.
And as we come from a faith tradition, he's living.
(02:56):
Right.
This, so when we talk about profiling Jesus,
we want to get into who Jesus is.
And that he was a real person.
That he was a real person.
He is a real person.
He's alive now in us.
And I think there's an important point about
how we can contextualize Jesus in a way
that's like helpful and fruitful.
We can know him in our own context,
but then we still have to remember the history
(03:17):
of who Jesus is.
And we have a very, I'm excited about our guests.
And so I'm looking at him right now.
We were like, you know what?
When we go through this,
I think the best person to talk about this
is the tallest theologian we can find.
Yeah. We just looked around and we were like, all right,
who's up there?
(03:38):
Chris.
All right.
Da, da, da, da, da, da, da.
I love that so much.
All right.
Tallest theologian we can find.
I'm sure there's others out there.
I was gonna say, there's definitely more out there
who are gonna beat me.
I mean.
I think I'm gonna get you a shirt for Christmas.
I'll take it.
Tallest theologian we could find.
That's some TikTok theologian merch right there.
There you go.
The tallest theologian we could find.
(03:58):
That would get me around.
Most introductions I have usually lead with,
my word, you're tall.
As if it's something I should be surprised to find out.
Well, really?
What?
I didn't know that when I bought pants last time.
All right.
Well, let me go ahead and tell you about our friend,
Chris Whyte.
Now he is actually our colleague
and he works at LPU,
(04:18):
but he is recently graduated with a PhD
from the University of St. Andrews.
Just came back to the States.
Yeah.
Only been back for a couple months.
Yeah.
Only been back for a couple of months.
And so he's like still working on his American accent
right now.
Are we all, all of us European educated folks in this room?
Actually, all of us are.
I know.
That's why I've been trying to shake
(04:38):
that British accent for years.
Oh, there you go.
That's a lie.
I'm sorry, everyone.
I still get looks when I ask where the nappies are.
And they, you know, just you're in a store
and they look at you like you're a fool.
You're like, right, fine.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
Diapers.
Do you have diapers?
Oh, that's not my fault.
I apologize.
Yeah.
But one thing about Chris that I think is really interesting,
it's not really going to play a lot into what we're talking
about here, but you are a Bonhoeffer scholar.
(05:01):
And that is pretty amazing
because Bonhoeffer is like the dude.
And that's also been a social media conversation recently
with all of that.
Yeah, that recent, there was the family getting angry
at Eric Metaxas for about that book.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he overlaps with this conversation actually
because Bonhoeffer in a lot of ways
has the Talladega nights phenomenon.
Because, you know, it's interesting.
He's all Bonhoeffers to all people.
(05:22):
He is.
It's wild how many people will say, you know,
my Bonhoeffer would have never.
And you're like, oh, that's really interesting.
He was an actual dude though.
He's just Bonhoeffer.
You would think, but I mean, I feel like most areas
of study or interest or fandom, you know,
have a tendency to recast the object of their affection
(05:46):
in a certain image.
Yeah.
You know, and then we're always surprised to find out
when that person is much more human than we want them to be.
This has, I'm not speaking of Jesus, just to be clear.
Before people come with me.
Right, before we get blessed with me.
Before we get smelt in this room.
I do think we just have that tendency to project quite a bit.
So.
For sure.
Absolutely.
Great.
(06:07):
So before we get into that conversation,
I think we should talk about the historicity of Jesus.
So I'm going to throw some facts, some quotes out for us here
to kind of frame our discussion before we get into
how he's construed in culture.
So Jesus is a historical figure.
Now, some people might contest that claim,
but it's not really contested by historians.
(06:27):
And this is what I think is very important for people to see.
For example, if Buddha, if Siddhartha Guadama
was a historical figure, that's contested.
Because the only anything that we have about it,
writing about it, our Buddhist texts.
So there's nothing outside of Buddha's texts
that tell us if the Buddha was an actual historical person.
Whereas Jesus, there are lots of things
(06:48):
outside of Christian texts that affirm Jesus' personhood.
And so really for Christianity,
it's less a question if he was a real person,
because that seems to be historical fact
in the way that anything can be a historical fact.
Obviously we weren't there.
What?
I mean, in any way that can be a historical fact, it is.
So the question is not if he's historical figure,
it is if you believe he is Lord.
(07:10):
And that's the question that determines the Christian.
So some facts here.
One, Jesus was born during the reign of Caesar Augustus.
Augustus reigned from 27 BCE to 14 CE in Judea,
which was occupied by Rome.
Now, BCE and CE, you might see,
people might question what that is.
It essentially aligns up with before Christ and Anodomani.
(07:34):
Not after death, it's actually Anodomani, the day of our Lord.
And the reason why historians and other traditions
will use BCE and CE is because it is a non-religious way
of talking about that determined period of time.
If you think about it,
we would probably feel pretty uncomfortable
if we were like in the day of Muhammad.
Yeah, no, that's fair.
You know what I mean?
And so it's just a way to kind of like just be neutral.
Neutrality is not bad.
Yeah, it's not bad.
(07:55):
If you're in a generally Christian context,
and you're using BC and AD,
like nobody's gonna bat an eye on that.
But if you're like in an academic context, they might.
So that's just the point there.
You're a little tidbit heads up for this one.
Right, for people.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, so Jesus was killed during the reign of Tiberius.
And that was from 14 to 37.
(08:16):
And Pontius Pilate was the governor of the province of Judea.
And there was governors,
they were obviously occupied by Rome in general.
But what Rome would do is they would let all these like
places have their own governments.
And they would just basically,
you'd have to pay allegiance and pay taxes to them.
And they would offer protection or whatever.
And so they had like these dual governments
that they were paying taxes to Israel, but also to Rome.
(08:38):
Herod the Great ruled the Jews from 37 to four CE,
37 BCE to four CE.
And then the Jewish kingdom was split between his sons.
And Herod Antipas ruled Galilee and Pariah
from four CE to 39 CE.
So he was the Herod near and time of Jesus.
Now there's several non-Christian texts
that corroborate Jesus' life and existence.
(08:59):
So one of the most famous is Cornelius Tacitus.
Now he's a Roman historian hired by Rome.
And his job was to basically talk about all of the period
from Caesar Augustus' death to the death of Nero.
And he did that in the Annals.
And then there's the histories.
(09:20):
And that's from Nero's death to the reign of Domitian,
which was 96.
And so he wrote both of these.
And these were authoritative texts for all Roman history.
In the Annals, he actually has a section
where he talks about Jesus.
And he says this,
Christus, the founder of the name,
was put to death by Pontius Pilate,
procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberius.
But the pernicious superstition, repressed for a time,
(09:42):
broke out again, not only through Judea,
where the mischief originated,
but through the city of Rome also.
So this affirms Jesus, Christus, and the founder.
And it affirms that he was put to death by Pontius Pilate,
and that Christianity existed its way.
And it does so in a negative light.
It's actually saying it-
Mischief.
Yeah, mischief is saying it's bad.
Okay.
And so then there was another one,
(10:02):
Pliny the Younger.
He was a Roman governor in Bethany in 112.
And he wrote to Emperor Trajan,
and he was actually seeking advice
of how to treat Christians,
because he kept killing them,
because they wouldn't recant.
And so he was like-
Said, hey guys, not sure what to do about this.
Please comment how to-
So many of them are dying.
He asked the emperor,
he can't get them to curse Christ,
which a genuine Christian cannot be induced to do.
(10:25):
And so this affirms both the existence of Christ
and the Christians that were being martyred.
And then one of the most famous
people talk about is Flavius Josephus.
So he was a Jewish priest, general, and a historian.
And he was hired by Rome to write a Jewish history for them.
And so he wrote the Jewish antiquities in 94 CE.
Here there's a passage about Jesus.
(10:46):
Now, some people are wondering if it was,
there's two versions of it.
An older version has some less Christian sounding language.
And then the other version
has more Christianized sounding language in it.
But even the lesser one affirms Jesus
as a historical figure.
But it says this,
says,
(11:31):
and the tribe of Christians so named from him
are not extinct at this day.
That last bit was the thing that people believe was added.
But before that,
he was already affirmed as a historical figure,
a miracle worker and stuff,
a doer of miracle in the oldest version.
And so right there,
you have what any historian would need
to corroborate the existence of a historical figure,
(11:53):
non-Christian accounts of a Christian figure, boom, dunzo.
That's not the question.
The question is not, does Jesus exist?
If that's, or did Jesus exist
and was Jesus a historical figure,
that is a historical fact as any historical fact
can be secure, you know?
In the same way that Julius Caesar was historical figure.
So now the question is, is Jesus Lord?
(12:15):
And this is basically what makes a Christian.
And we're not gonna get into it
and have like the tons of apologetic arguments.
I think one that's pretty powerful
is somebody were like, well, did they, you know,
remove the body, the disciples, it was a great scheme.
Well, all the disciples died horrific deaths,
except for John, but he was according
to Christian tradition, boiled alive, he just didn't die.
(12:37):
Yeah.
And so he was tortured.
He was tortured, he just didn't die.
And so with that being said, the witness of the disciples
and all the people who were actually martyred and died,
that doesn't make sense logically for all of them
to go through that, never recant Jesus if it was all farce.
Yeah.
So that's kind of like an apologetic
that we would use to kind of show the validity of it.
So first I would say, Chris,
(12:59):
do you have any like insights or thoughts about this?
What do you think about that
before we get into the contextualizations?
I mean, thoughts is broad.
I think what you're highlighting is important
because whenever we have a conversation like this,
you kind of have to put your cards on the table
for why you're having it, right?
(13:21):
Because when we talk about who Jesus was,
there have been scarly moves by atheists to say,
Christ is a myth, didn't exist in history.
And so you're trying to use the historical record
when you make that move to try and find evidence
that supports this idea that you just had this splinter cult
that came up with this idea and came up with this name
(13:44):
and these stories and they corroborated
and were so deluded that they're willing to be martyred.
And so in that sense, when you're coming at that angle,
you have to do a lot of work, right?
And we talk about this, you know, kind of what you were
saying, there's a professor of New Testament at Cambridge
named Simon Gathricle.
And I love this quote.
(14:04):
He says, basically, I'm paraphrasing now,
but he says, you know, basically it doesn't matter.
The question is not whether Jesus lived and then died.
That's pretty settled.
The question is whether he died and then lived.
That's good.
I like that way of framing it just because I think
when we look at the examination of history
as a way to determine whether he lived,
(14:25):
you have to do a lot of work to pretend
that the historical record doesn't corroborate that.
And you have to change your standard
for how we determine if a historical figure lived.
Because we don't raise the same standard
for other historical figures.
So I think it's okay to be honest about that
and say we don't have to so much question,
(14:47):
did he, as much as we can examine what, where, how,
what did this mean?
So it's a different set of questions.
And I think the apologetic is helpful
because it just kind of sets the table
for the conversation we want to have.
It kind of goes, look, are we all there?
Are we on the same page?
You know, if someone says I still don't believe it,
then you have to have a much longer conversation
(15:09):
about historical texts.
But that's not really where we're going.
No, it's not.
So now that we can all kind of establish that,
we, at least the three of us in this room,
most historian friends would agree
without a doubt that Jesus did live.
That is your right, Chris,
not necessarily the conversation that we're having today.
So in the nature of what we're actually trying to ask
(15:32):
and get to the deeper conversation behind this
is how have we characterized Jesus throughout the centuries?
So I love the way you ask that
because how have we characterized Jesus
points to the fact that we have characterized Jesus.
We have done so.
And I think that's important to own.
You said that earlier about, you know,
(15:54):
the image of Jesus in a Sunday school Bible.
A year ago, we were looking for books for our kids
that would have, you know,
would lay out the Easter story and the Nativity story
made us two years ago.
You know, my daughter's four, my son seven,
you know, something accessible for both my daughter
and my son.
And it was wild trying to find a Bible
(16:17):
that didn't have a white Jesus in it.
Like, this is still, this isn't like, this isn't a new thing.
And I always think it's interesting
because I'm not necessarily pointing to the church
when I say this, but there's a sort of,
there's a phenomenon lately
where people get very aggravated
if a mythical figure is misrepresented.
(16:40):
And so famously there was a huge debate
over whether Santa was white.
Oh yeah, I actually did see that.
This was animated.
I mean, now if you're talking about, you know,
Nicholas the saint, right.
Slap a heretic.
You know, that's another fun conversation.
But we can talk about where he lived,
(17:00):
but are we talking about that Santa?
Or are we still talking about the one
who delivers presents because that's imaginary.
And yet it was this heated conversation.
Right, but Christians broadly have a lot,
for most of the last, I don't know, I want to overstate this.
It's pretty common not to think about it.
Just to say, oh, that's great.
(17:22):
That's Jesus.
And it would be an interesting assignment
to have everyone draw what they think Jesus looked like.
Because I have a similar upbringing
and my Jesus looked pretty similar
to like a Southern California surfer,
you know, kind of a Wysand surf coach
who I might run into it, you know, in like Orange County.
He sits barefoot on his surf board on the sand.
He's like, yeah.
(17:42):
So I have a fun little story here
that has to do with this sort of.
This sort of.
So I was a high school art teacher
before I became a professor
while I was working on my PhD and stuff.
And one of my assignments,
I was teaching them how to do portraits
and made them as like, hey, you can,
and they're young, they're like ninth, 10th graders.
And it's like my drawing one class.
And they were like, okay.
(18:03):
So you guys have to get a picture printed out
in black and white, and then you can draw whoever you want.
You know, like it's totally up to you.
I will supply an image if you don't bring one,
but make sure you do.
And so as a punishment, I gave them an image of me,
which is hilarious.
So I had like 20 students.
It's like 40 students and like half of them are drawing me.
(18:24):
Right?
Well, yeah.
For ninth, 10th grade, yeah.
Yeah.
And so it was great.
Now it's their fault.
They could have drawn whoever they wanted to,
but now they're drawing me.
And what was hilarious, we did critiques afterwards,
everyone created me in their own image.
Wow.
They mixed my features with their own features.
(18:44):
That's so funny.
And so there was a version of me that looked like Drake,
because it was drawn by an African-American student.
There was a version of it that looked Mexican,
because it was drawn by a Mexican student.
There was a, I remember there's one,
like this little white boy, he was the little country boy.
And he made me look straight up like,
(19:04):
what's that painting?
The old man and the old woman with the farmer.
American Gothic.
American Gothic.
He made me look just like the dude from American Gothic.
Yeah, with the pitchfork.
And so it was just so funny.
And I told them, I was like, because one of the main keys
of drawing is like, draw what you see and not what you know.
Your mind has already made determinations of things.
The features that you've seen the most are your own.
(19:25):
You've looked in the mirror more than you've seen anybody else.
And so in your family and people that are close to you.
And so whenever you start drawing eyes,
you just reflex and start drawing what you know
and not what you're actually seeing of how this person is.
And so that's a big thing in art is to separate that.
But I think that's what we do with Jesus.
Is we essentially, we don't read what we see,
(19:48):
we read what we know.
We've also sort of been,
we've been trained to a certain imagination.
I mean, this is one of the things,
like J. Cameron Carter talks about this,
that when Emmanuel Kant was outlining,
his theological vision for humanity,
that he described Jesus as the personification
(20:08):
of the good principle, that he's the ideal human.
But at the same time was articulating
that some humans are more ideal than others
and that it happened that Euroanglo humans
were transcending race and all other peoples were trapped
in this excess, this particularity of race
that they were trapped in.
And so there is this philosophical tradition
(20:30):
that not only does plays on how we project,
but also tries to train us that Jesus looks a certain way.
And it's mapped onto this particular anthropological vision
of what it means to be a good human.
And so it's both, right?
So we can do that, but why is it, I was traveling once
and I was visiting a friend in Thailand
and I was speaking with someone who said,
(20:52):
I looked like Jesus.
And I thought about that,
like how far reaching this kind of enterprise is
to depict Jesus as a white man, right?
And so we have to own that
because there is a racialized history to it.
Just even as race becomes articulated as an idea
that was being articulated by broadly Christian,
whether you think they were Christian or not,
that's a whole different debate,
(21:14):
philosophers and theologians who are saying,
you know, if he's ideal, if he's good,
what is ideal and good?
And it's mapped onto this imagination
that to be European, you know,
so there's ways where it's not just that,
it's not just we project,
but we're trained to project in a certain way.
And I think Christians can say a lot
(21:35):
about whether we think it's a good idea
to have someone else tell us
what Jesus should look like.
Now, to be fair, you do look a little bit like the actor
from a Jim Kimbezo.
No, from the Joe's.
No, no idea.
Yes, you do.
I got a little bit of that vibe.
Not even a little bit.
Because he's not like, they did a good job.
I've been told I look like the center forward
(21:58):
for the German national soccer team.
I think that's, I feel like that's too very different.
I feel like Thomas Mueller, that's...
Okay.
You know what I'm talking about?
Yeah, I absolutely know what you're talking about.
Yeah, so I would say I can see that one more
than I'm fairly dramatic.
Perhaps.
But yeah, you know.
Yeah, I mean, Albrecht Doerr's version of Jesus,
you know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
(22:18):
I think if you guys cut your hair the same,
I think you definitely would have a resemblance
here to Thomas Mueller.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, it's funny though, because I was thinking about that.
I was teaching a class on Christology
and I was just, I just looked for images of Jesus.
And one of the first ones that popped up
is the stained glass window in Dordrecht in the Netherlands.
And it's not that Jesus is white, but he's blonde.
(22:39):
Like he's really blonde.
He looks more like Patrick Swayze in Point Break
than he does, you know, like, you know,
like anyone who I would imagine.
The importance fisherman.
Living in Judea under Roman rule, you know,
in the first century.
And it's just interesting that, you know,
and it was posted, oh, this is a beautiful, you know,
nobody, it's interesting how little you hear people say,
(22:59):
huh, he's really blonde.
You know, it's just interesting that we've been formed
in a way to not even kind of recoil and think,
well, that doesn't look right, right?
And I, you know, and I say that because a lot of times
we look at art and representation.
And when people think about different historical figures
or mythical figures or they depict art in a contextual lens,
there is a different response.
And in that same lecture, I showed a painting
(23:21):
by a Chinese artist who depicted Jesus' baptism,
but in a traditional Chinese style.
And the response was much more, well, that looks off.
And so it's, you know, it's interesting, you know,
why is it that Euro Anglo Jesus doesn't cause a reaction
but Chinese Jesus does?
And that speaks to how we've been kind of trained
(23:42):
to have a certain imaginary around what Jesus looks like.
Absolutely.
Well, I didn't even think, I think I thought genuinely
Jesus was white until I went to college.
Not because anybody told me that.
It was just the only way I ever,
he was ever depicted in places that I was.
Right.
Like in pictures or like not cause anyone said to me,
Jesus is a white man,
but because that's the only thing I ever saw
(24:02):
until I took my ancient civilizations class.
And someone was like, hey guys, just remember
that where Israel is and like what that is.
And I was like, oh, or at least especially
in the context that I was in, like told me
in a lot of ways that Jesus was white.
And I just kind of was like, okay.
So for me, I didn't ever think about it as Jesus is white,
(24:23):
but I saw him as a reflection of myself
and which is still a little different.
Like I didn't see him with like your complexion, Megan.
Like I never saw that,
but I did see him as like looking like a half Puerto Rican,
half German, you know what I'm saying?
Like just like literally like myself.
And I think there's that reflex that we have too,
just from this is who you know, this is what you know.
(24:44):
And the training I think is crucial
because that's like when you have other cultures
that this is not what they know
and they still affirm a white Jesus or something like that.
Then you're like, okay, we've gone beyond
just kind of this natural reflex.
Yeah, that's a really good point
because if you think about it, you would expect,
you know, if you went into a, you know, a culture
(25:04):
with no sort of artistic aesthetic formation
on what Jesus would look like,
it wouldn't be surprising for that culture to say
for their imagination of what an ancient person looked like.
You know, and you see this across art,
you see this across literature.
Yeah, totally.
And that's a really great point.
Like projection is perhaps not surprising.
When you talk about your art project,
that's what we would kind of expect with imagination.
(25:25):
It is surprising when, you know, communities and cultures
have been given an imagination that's foreign
and you know, kind of it's imposed in a sense.
Yeah, exactly.
It seems that projection and contextualization
in a lot of ways is human.
Like we just kind of do that because that's what we do.
But I mean, I think the important conversation here
is to ask, and I think Chris, you should speak to this,
(25:46):
is why is it crucial to recognize Jesus as Jewish,
as a man from the Levant area of like the,
for in like ancient Near East?
Like why is that understanding of who Jesus was important
for us as believers and as Christians to, yeah,
we can project and we can contextualize and stuff
(26:07):
in a lot of ways that is the spiritual relational aspect
of loving Jesus.
But why is it important for us to remember
and to integrate who Jesus really was as a person
and where he was from?
Okay, so that's another amazing question.
So we have kind of wholesale inherited, you know,
(26:28):
when I say we, I'm referring to Christians in the West,
Christians in the United States,
sort of the Greco-Roman metaphysical imagination
of what it means to worship Jesus, right?
First 400 years of the church,
most of the arguments were how can one person
be God and human?
And it's these metaphysical debates.
Does he have a human mind or a God mind?
You know, does he have, does he just look human
(26:51):
or is he human?
Like these were the debates.
And within that, it has a tendency to change
what it means to worship Jesus into,
do I have the right metaphysical idea?
And I think the shame of that,
and I think this is why it's important,
is that the incarnation happens in time.
It happens in a moment of in history,
(27:11):
and it's a part of the larger sweep of redemptive history
that runs from creation all the way to the kingdom come.
And in this moment in time,
Jesus is actively speaking into what is happening
and what will happen.
And so if we don't understand what it meant for Jesus
to live when he lived, to, you know,
(27:32):
join the history he joined,
to anticipate the future he is anticipating
and when he joined it,
you know, if we don't do that,
we're essentially, we don't mean to say this.
I don't think anyone means this intentionally,
but we are in our apathy saying that we don't really care
what was important to Jesus.
So we let him know.
Scott McKnight has a book called
(27:53):
the King Jesus Gospel where he really,
his question is really simple.
He's like, you know,
if you ask any Christian what the gospel is,
they'll usually lean on for it's been great,
by grace you've been saved through faith
and not by works so no one can boast.
Amazing, but Jesus never said that.
Right.
It doesn't even say anything close
when he's proclaiming the good news.
So how do we make sense of,
(28:15):
because of course that's the gospel,
but what was the gospel for Jesus, right?
You know, it's the coming of the kingdom.
It's the restoration of Israel.
It's God's compassion for humanity.
These are things that he's saying
that are very meaningful in his time in place.
I think when we take his time and his place,
(28:36):
how he understood himself, you know, as a rabbi,
you know, as someone who lived, you know,
in the line of David,
as someone who was recapitulating history,
as someone who's remembering everything
that Israel has done, you know,
and describing when you mentioned the law and the prophets,
right, you think about the road to Emmaus,
when the two, you know, disciples are confused,
(28:57):
he doesn't go, hey, don't worry,
let me describe what the church is going to be like.
Yeah. Right?
Yeah.
He recounts all of Israel's history
and describes how it all points to himself.
It's so important to Jesus.
And so the question is, is what is important to Jesus?
Important to us.
Because when we ask the question to,
when we're asking the question of lordship,
(29:18):
I think it's easy to forget that these conversations
are part of our worship.
And so do we want to worship Jesus on his terms or ours?
That's great.
So I think that to me is the thing
that we have to be coming with.
So it's not that we're just history buffs
who really want to get it right,
but we want to resist the tendencies to obscure
(29:39):
what was important to Jesus,
to obscure the people who were important to Jesus,
the timing.
We also want to find out why he was communicating,
what he was communicating and what he was intending.
You know, the woman at the well is a great example of this.
If we don't understand Jewish Samaritan intention,
that whole interaction.
Doesn't make sense.
It's just an interesting sort of, wow,
(30:01):
this, you know, Jesus knows a lot about this woman
and tells her, you know,
and it just oversimplifies something
that's much more dramatic.
Anyway, so I could go on for a long time on that.
Awesome, that's powerful.
That's fantastic.
That's powerful.
That'll preach too.
That'll preach.
That will preach, tell you what.
You know what I'm saying?
I also think it's like, to that effect is like,
when if you're removing the fact that like,
the importance of the timing in which Jesus lived,
(30:23):
it almost is like, oh, well, you know,
we could have just dropped Jesus any old place in history,
like, and kind of takes out the intentionality
and like so much of like prophetic fulfillment
of like him being there
and like how that was an intentional decision.
And like that was the perfect spot
in which he was meant to exist in history.
And so to kind of isolate all of that,
I feel like does in a lot of ways diminish the impact
(30:46):
that Jesus had on the space and time that he was in
and then how much it like really would diminish a little bit,
like what was said in scripture
and all the things that pointed to him as a savior
because it would be like, oh, well, then if we theoretically
could have just dropped Jesus any old place
and any old time, then you're not understanding
like the depth of, you know, Jesus's life
(31:07):
and what that means for us
and what that meant for like fulfillment
of the Old Testament.
I just love the idea.
Make important for you what was important for Jesus.
Come on.
And this leads I think to our last question.
We like to end with kind of like a practical application
because we both have this conviction that like
when you do theology that is like,
(31:28):
not doesn't affect the church.
Then it's like, it's like kind of besides the point
and me and you, we've hung out a lot in the
in academic circles and we've probably seen a lot of this.
It's just like, okay, you're just thinking to think
which is cool in its own realm.
But fundamentally we want to help people be drawn deeper
to who Jesus is, to be drawn deeper into their discipleship.
(31:49):
So we always want to end with that kind of
very practical level response.
And that being the case, how do you think these ideas
that we're talking about here can affect the church?
And this could be locally, but also globally.
I have to say this really carefully.
I think most of these conversations are,
they're scalpel conversations, not sledgehammer conversations.
(32:13):
You know, you talk about separating, you know,
bone from marrow, like you really have to be careful.
And to answer, I'm going to kind of work backward
from horror, if that's okay.
Yeah, okay.
You know, during the third Reich,
the Nazis had a de-Judaization Institute,
which was designed to find and strip all elements
(32:37):
of Jewish identity from Christian practice and religion.
Like that was an Institute that was founded
to seriously obscure parts of his history.
And, you know, we hear things like this
or we think about slavers during chattel slavery,
(32:58):
who used Philippians two in the idea
that Jesus took on the form of a slave
as justification for slavery.
And we see these horrors when people weaponize
or obscure or corrupt who Jesus really was
to the various purpose.
(33:19):
We never think we're part of that, right?
We just, we hear these things and we think, you know,
well, you know, sort of pharisthetically,
thank God I'm not like that.
But if we take Jesus seriously,
coming back to how he thinks about things,
you know, he has a tendency to take the standard
back to the very, very, the smallest sparks of evil, right?
(33:44):
You know, you say you don't murder,
but are you angry at your brother?
Do you curse him in your heart, right?
These questions.
And so if we work backwards from that type of war,
I think what matters is where am I overlooking
or obscuring or weaponizing for my purposes,
my, you know, for what's important to me,
(34:05):
who Jesus is that should confront me?
Because if he's Messiah, if he's Lord,
and in Messiah, I mean, we didn't have time for this,
but Jesus' understanding of Messiah as a rabbi
has a whole host of consequences
for anyone who seriously wants to follow him.
Yeah, right.
That if we understand how that term was used
(34:25):
throughout the Old Testament, it changes how we follow, right?
And so that feeling of is it important to Jesus
comes down to where the seeds of a similar impulse, you know,
we all like to say, you know, like I'm not a Nazi,
I wouldn't do that, but are we stripping things
from his self-declared identity,
(34:47):
how he described himself, how he did his ministry
consciously or unconsciously
in ways that has impacts for other people, right?
And so when we come back to the projection thing,
I think it's beautiful that slaves and chains
were able to know that Jesus was acquainted with suffering.
But at the same time, you know,
James Cohn's The Cross and the lynching tree points out
(35:09):
that missing the fact that his crucifixion, you know,
was an execution at the hands of Rome,
causes you to miss that he understood what it was
to be lynched on a tree.
And that miss enabled Christians for hundreds of years
to just accept or sanction slavery.
You know, and so the geopolitical history,
you know, you asked about the region,
(35:30):
the geopolitical history of Jesus's region,
you think about a Syrian conquest
and how it named it, Palestine.
And then, you know, the Romans then named it Judea.
And then the Romans put down the Bar Kokba revolt.
I hope I said that right, but they put down a revolt
and then rename the region, you know,
rename the region Palestine as part of that,
(35:52):
that there's this complex history with names, right?
And so, you know, so if say a Palestinian Christian
remembers the history of the name Palestine and says,
oh, Jesus is from the region I'm from, that's beautiful.
But that can also be weaponized.
We've seen antisemitic sentiment.
And I say this to say,
(36:12):
Jesus's identity, when best,
should bring us into faithfulness to human worship,
an ethic that aligns with his ethic,
which includes compassion for the poor
and the downtrodden and the oppressed.
And, you know, that declares the year of the Lord's favor
and understands how the year of the Lord's favor
affected those who are suffering or in bondage,
those in chains, like these things.
(36:36):
And our apathy to what matters to Jesus
often points back to that same thing.
And so I think when you talk about the practical,
I think it's easy to forget that the name Christian came
about because early Christians were acting so much like Jesus.
They were serving and they were acting
and they were living out his ethic.
They weren't just worshiping him as God,
they were doing Jesus things.
(36:57):
Yeah.
And so where have I allowed myself to ignore, miss,
or project over and pose my own narrative over Jesus' story
in a way that gives me permission to not act like him?
And so I think, yeah, that's,
maybe that's not the same thing as the Nazi effort,
(37:18):
but is it a spark of evil that Jesus asked me to overcome
in worship of him as I allow his self-revelation,
how he revealed himself in time and place to challenge that.
And I probably said something in there
that could offend people.
I just mean it genuinely, like what brings us
into the most faithful discipleship to Jesus
(37:38):
that worships him the most and says again and again,
renew my mind to be like yours.
That's good.
I mean, that's the heart of it.
I have recently just released a book,
The Problem and Problems of Freedom,
but in it I talk about how Jesus,
when he talks about all those jubilee,
I've come to declare the day of the Lord.
Pentecost, I argue, could be seen as a cosmic jubilee.
(37:58):
So what was made for the Jews
to bring justice to the whole world,
the spirit being poured out on all flesh
now becomes that thing that this is the message
that can spread out to the whole world.
What I like about that thought
and the way you just kind of framed it is like,
that's what was important to Jesus.
Jesus claimed that as his own ministry.
And so what the church should do,
(38:19):
we're the ones who are spirit-empowered,
we should go out and proclaim Christ's ministry
for the whole world.
And I think when we do that,
yeah, we're gonna see ourselves being confronted.
We're gonna see our own hearts being confronted.
But fundamentally, we're gonna see powers and principalities
and all sorts of things being confronted
(38:39):
because all things that are not of Christ
are going to be confronted in us
and outside of us and everywhere.
And being open and ready for that,
I think is one, it's a prophetic task,
it's a beautiful task that the church can do.
But also, and I think what you're really hitting
that's crucial is let's actually look at ourselves in this
(39:03):
and see how we've been implicated
by some of the same things
that we might ask somebody else to check on themselves.
We're out of time, but I feel like
I've already had a couple of coffees with you
and we've already talked for like long times,
spilling over and getting late to class
and stuff like that, but, because it's so good.
You're such a thoughtful, well-spoken fellow
(39:24):
and I think your heart for God and God's people
shines through so clearly.
And I think this is such an important thing,
something that can be weaponized.
We should look at it as not the thing that weaponizes that,
but the thing that actually unifies us
as we all be conformed to the image of Christ
and who Christ actually is as we profile him.
(39:45):
Not who we think is, but who he actually is.
That's good.
Thank you Chris for being on today.
We're so thankful for you speaking to us, preaching to us,
preaching to the people.
And friends as always, these episodes are sponsored
by LPU School of Theology and Ministry.
All right, we'll see you next time.
See ya.
Get up in it.
(00:01):
This feels official in a way
that I should no longer be a part of this.
I feel like this has now reached a level
of class and distinction that I do not belong in.
Oh, we're using headphones?
I'm sorry.
Is that I actually have to see myself?
I think it was like Mark Twain who said
I wouldn't want to be a member of any club
that would accept me.
That's what I feel.
Do I listen to a podcast that would actually talk to me?
(00:22):
Welcome to TikTok Theology,
a podcast that tackles the major trending topics
on social media that concern the Christian faith.
I'm Meagan.
And I'm Steven.
We know you can't form a theology in three minutes
or less, but those videos can identify current issues.
TikTok will give us the prompt
and then we'll do a deep dive.
Thanks for joining us in this exploration.
(00:45):
Hi friends.
Can you believe already coming to the end of season four?
Right at the end.
Oh, time flies.
When you're having fun.
Yep.
Come on somebody.
Anyways team, today we're gonna be having
a really, really fantastic conversation.
It's not just gonna be me and Steven yapping as usual.
We have a lovely guest that we will get to present
(01:05):
in a second, but today we're gonna be talking
about profiling Jesus.
Now that seems like one of those things
that people are gonna get upset about immediately.
So hold on, don't get upset yet.
Let us explain.
I think that it's a really important conversation,
especially something that we've seen
and had other conversations in the season
about Christianity not being a Westernized religion
(01:26):
and things like that.
And this kind of speaks into the issue
in the wrestling with like a white Jesus
that we have seen presented in a lot of ways.
I remember I think I had like a kid's Bible,
like one of those picture kids' Bibles.
And I think he was white in that picture Bible
that I had as a kid.
It's like light base.
Yeah, like definitely, but definitely not like brown.
(01:49):
So I think there's definitely this like conversation
and issue of like how we represent Jesus.
And that I think it leads to the fact that
we don't really understand all that well who Jesus was.
We understand how he relates to us, you know,
biblically and stuff like that.
But I don't think, I think it's also important
to understand where Jesus comes from
and like what that means for, you know,
(02:11):
how we understand him and how we understand scripture.
And so I think we're gonna get to dig into that today.
Yeah, it's an issue that's in social media,
especially as we were like politicized
and you have like politicized even marketed versions
of Jesus on merch and different things.
And he's got a look and a vibe and he's everyone's Jesus.
(02:32):
Like he's, he's this for me and this for me and this for me.
Like Talladega nights.
Yeah, Talladega.
He's like my six pound eight ounce
or eight pounds, six ounce baby Jesus.
I pray to my Jesus in a tuxedo shirt.
Exactly like Talladega nights.
But yeah, so I mean the issue here is Jesus is historical.
Right.
And as we come from a faith tradition, he's living.
(02:56):
Right.
This, so when we talk about profiling Jesus,
we want to get into who Jesus is.
And that he was a real person.
That he was a real person.
He is a real person.
He's alive now in us.
And I think there's an important point about
how we can contextualize Jesus in a way
that's like helpful and fruitful.
We can know him in our own context,
but then we still have to remember the history
(03:17):
of who Jesus is.
And we have a very, I'm excited about our guests.
And so I'm looking at him right now.
We were like, you know what?
When we go through this,
I think the best person to talk about this
is the tallest theologian we can find.
Yeah. We just looked around and we were like, all right,
who's up there?
(03:38):
Chris.
All right.
Da, da, da, da, da, da, da.
I love that so much.
All right.
Tallest theologian we can find.
I'm sure there's others out there.
I was gonna say, there's definitely more out there
who are gonna beat me.
I mean.
I think I'm gonna get you a shirt for Christmas.
I'll take it.
Tallest theologian we could find.
That's some TikTok theologian merch right there.
There you go.
The tallest theologian we could find.
(03:58):
That would get me around.
Most introductions I have usually lead with,
my word, you're tall.
As if it's something I should be surprised to find out.
Well, really?
What?
I didn't know that when I bought pants last time.
All right.
Well, let me go ahead and tell you about our friend,
Chris Whyte.
Now he is actually our colleague
and he works at LPU,
(04:18):
but he is recently graduated with a PhD
from the University of St. Andrews.
Just came back to the States.
Yeah.
Only been back for a couple months.
Yeah.
Only been back for a couple of months.
And so he's like still working on his American accent
right now.
Are we all, all of us European educated folks in this room?
Actually, all of us are.
I know.
That's why I've been trying to shake
(04:38):
that British accent for years.
Oh, there you go.
That's a lie.
I'm sorry, everyone.
I still get looks when I ask where the nappies are.
And they, you know, just you're in a store
and they look at you like you're a fool.
You're like, right, fine.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
Diapers.
Do you have diapers?
Oh, that's not my fault.
I apologize.
Yeah.
But one thing about Chris that I think is really interesting,
it's not really going to play a lot into what we're talking
about here, but you are a Bonhoeffer scholar.
(05:01):
And that is pretty amazing
because Bonhoeffer is like the dude.
And that's also been a social media conversation recently
with all of that.
Yeah, that recent, there was the family getting angry
at Eric Metaxas for about that book.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he overlaps with this conversation actually
because Bonhoeffer in a lot of ways
has the Talladega nights phenomenon.
Because, you know, it's interesting.
He's all Bonhoeffers to all people.
(05:22):
He is.
It's wild how many people will say, you know,
my Bonhoeffer would have never.
And you're like, oh, that's really interesting.
He was an actual dude though.
He's just Bonhoeffer.
You would think, but I mean, I feel like most areas
of study or interest or fandom, you know,
have a tendency to recast the object of their affection
(05:46):
in a certain image.
Yeah.
You know, and then we're always surprised to find out
when that person is much more human than we want them to be.
This has, I'm not speaking of Jesus, just to be clear.
Before people come with me.
Right, before we get blessed with me.
Before we get smelt in this room.
I do think we just have that tendency to project quite a bit.
So.
For sure.
Absolutely.
Great.
(06:07):
So before we get into that conversation,
I think we should talk about the historicity of Jesus.
So I'm going to throw some facts, some quotes out for us here
to kind of frame our discussion before we get into
how he's construed in culture.
So Jesus is a historical figure.
Now, some people might contest that claim,
but it's not really contested by historians.
(06:27):
And this is what I think is very important for people to see.
For example, if Buddha, if Siddhartha Guadama
was a historical figure, that's contested.
Because the only anything that we have about it,
writing about it, our Buddhist texts.
So there's nothing outside of Buddha's texts
that tell us if the Buddha was an actual historical person.
Whereas Jesus, there are lots of things
(06:48):
outside of Christian texts that affirm Jesus' personhood.
And so really for Christianity,
it's less a question if he was a real person,
because that seems to be historical fact
in the way that anything can be a historical fact.
Obviously we weren't there.
What?
I mean, in any way that can be a historical fact, it is.
So the question is not if he's historical figure,
it is if you believe he is Lord.
(07:10):
And that's the question that determines the Christian.
So some facts here.
One, Jesus was born during the reign of Caesar Augustus.
Augustus reigned from 27 BCE to 14 CE in Judea,
which was occupied by Rome.
Now, BCE and CE, you might see,
people might question what that is.
It essentially aligns up with before Christ and Anodomani.
(07:34):
Not after death, it's actually Anodomani, the day of our Lord.
And the reason why historians and other traditions
will use BCE and CE is because it is a non-religious way
of talking about that determined period of time.
If you think about it,
we would probably feel pretty uncomfortable
if we were like in the day of Muhammad.
Yeah, no, that's fair.
You know what I mean?
And so it's just a way to kind of like just be neutral.
Neutrality is not bad.
Yeah, it's not bad.
(07:55):
If you're in a generally Christian context,
and you're using BC and AD,
like nobody's gonna bat an eye on that.
But if you're like in an academic context, they might.
So that's just the point there.
You're a little tidbit heads up for this one.
Right, for people.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, so Jesus was killed during the reign of Tiberius.
And that was from 14 to 37.
(08:16):
And Pontius Pilate was the governor of the province of Judea.
And there was governors,
they were obviously occupied by Rome in general.
But what Rome would do is they would let all these like
places have their own governments.
And they would just basically,
you'd have to pay allegiance and pay taxes to them.
And they would offer protection or whatever.
And so they had like these dual governments
that they were paying taxes to Israel, but also to Rome.
(08:38):
Herod the Great ruled the Jews from 37 to four CE,
37 BCE to four CE.
And then the Jewish kingdom was split between his sons.
And Herod Antipas ruled Galilee and Pariah
from four CE to 39 CE.
So he was the Herod near and time of Jesus.
Now there's several non-Christian texts
that corroborate Jesus' life and existence.
(08:59):
So one of the most famous is Cornelius Tacitus.
Now he's a Roman historian hired by Rome.
And his job was to basically talk about all of the period
from Caesar Augustus' death to the death of Nero.
And he did that in the Annals.
And then there's the histories.
(09:20):
And that's from Nero's death to the reign of Domitian,
which was 96.
And so he wrote both of these.
And these were authoritative texts for all Roman history.
In the Annals, he actually has a section
where he talks about Jesus.
And he says this,
Christus, the founder of the name,
was put to death by Pontius Pilate,
procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberius.
But the pernicious superstition, repressed for a time,
(09:42):
broke out again, not only through Judea,
where the mischief originated,
but through the city of Rome also.
So this affirms Jesus, Christus, and the founder.
And it affirms that he was put to death by Pontius Pilate,
and that Christianity existed its way.
And it does so in a negative light.
It's actually saying it-
Mischief.
Yeah, mischief is saying it's bad.
Okay.
And so then there was another one,
(10:02):
Pliny the Younger.
He was a Roman governor in Bethany in 112.
And he wrote to Emperor Trajan,
and he was actually seeking advice
of how to treat Christians,
because he kept killing them,
because they wouldn't recant.
And so he was like-
Said, hey guys, not sure what to do about this.
Please comment how to-
So many of them are dying.
He asked the emperor,
he can't get them to curse Christ,
which a genuine Christian cannot be induced to do.
(10:25):
And so this affirms both the existence of Christ
and the Christians that were being martyred.
And then one of the most famous
people talk about is Flavius Josephus.
So he was a Jewish priest, general, and a historian.
And he was hired by Rome to write a Jewish history for them.
And so he wrote the Jewish antiquities in 94 CE.
Here there's a passage about Jesus.
(10:46):
Now, some people are wondering if it was,
there's two versions of it.
An older version has some less Christian sounding language.
And then the other version
has more Christianized sounding language in it.
But even the lesser one affirms Jesus
as a historical figure.
But it says this,
says,
(11:31):
and the tribe of Christians so named from him
are not extinct at this day.
That last bit was the thing that people believe was added.
But before that,
he was already affirmed as a historical figure,
a miracle worker and stuff,
a doer of miracle in the oldest version.
And so right there,
you have what any historian would need
to corroborate the existence of a historical figure,
(11:53):
non-Christian accounts of a Christian figure, boom, dunzo.
That's not the question.
The question is not, does Jesus exist?
If that's, or did Jesus exist
and was Jesus a historical figure,
that is a historical fact as any historical fact
can be secure, you know?
In the same way that Julius Caesar was historical figure.
So now the question is, is Jesus Lord?
(12:15):
And this is basically what makes a Christian.
And we're not gonna get into it
and have like the tons of apologetic arguments.
I think one that's pretty powerful
is somebody were like, well, did they, you know,
remove the body, the disciples, it was a great scheme.
Well, all the disciples died horrific deaths,
except for John, but he was according
to Christian tradition, boiled alive, he just didn't die.
(12:37):
Yeah.
And so he was tortured.
He was tortured, he just didn't die.
And so with that being said, the witness of the disciples
and all the people who were actually martyred and died,
that doesn't make sense logically for all of them
to go through that, never recant Jesus if it was all farce.
Yeah.
So that's kind of like an apologetic
that we would use to kind of show the validity of it.
So first I would say, Chris,
(12:59):
do you have any like insights or thoughts about this?
What do you think about that
before we get into the contextualizations?
I mean, thoughts is broad.
I think what you're highlighting is important
because whenever we have a conversation like this,
you kind of have to put your cards on the table
for why you're having it, right?
(13:21):
Because when we talk about who Jesus was,
there have been scarly moves by atheists to say,
Christ is a myth, didn't exist in history.
And so you're trying to use the historical record
when you make that move to try and find evidence
that supports this idea that you just had this splinter cult
that came up with this idea and came up with this name
(13:44):
and these stories and they corroborated
and were so deluded that they're willing to be martyred.
And so in that sense, when you're coming at that angle,
you have to do a lot of work, right?
And we talk about this, you know, kind of what you were
saying, there's a professor of New Testament at Cambridge
named Simon Gathricle.
And I love this quote.
(14:04):
He says, basically, I'm paraphrasing now,
but he says, you know, basically it doesn't matter.
The question is not whether Jesus lived and then died.
That's pretty settled.
The question is whether he died and then lived.
That's good.
I like that way of framing it just because I think
when we look at the examination of history
as a way to determine whether he lived,
(14:25):
you have to do a lot of work to pretend
that the historical record doesn't corroborate that.
And you have to change your standard
for how we determine if a historical figure lived.
Because we don't raise the same standard
for other historical figures.
So I think it's okay to be honest about that
and say we don't have to so much question,
(14:47):
did he, as much as we can examine what, where, how,
what did this mean?
So it's a different set of questions.
And I think the apologetic is helpful
because it just kind of sets the table
for the conversation we want to have.
It kind of goes, look, are we all there?
Are we on the same page?
You know, if someone says I still don't believe it,
then you have to have a much longer conversation
(15:09):
about historical texts.
But that's not really where we're going.
No, it's not.
So now that we can all kind of establish that,
we, at least the three of us in this room,
most historian friends would agree
without a doubt that Jesus did live.
That is your right, Chris,
not necessarily the conversation that we're having today.
So in the nature of what we're actually trying to ask
(15:32):
and get to the deeper conversation behind this
is how have we characterized Jesus throughout the centuries?
So I love the way you ask that
because how have we characterized Jesus
points to the fact that we have characterized Jesus.
We have done so.
And I think that's important to own.
You said that earlier about, you know,
(15:54):
the image of Jesus in a Sunday school Bible.
A year ago, we were looking for books for our kids
that would have, you know,
would lay out the Easter story and the Nativity story
made us two years ago.
You know, my daughter's four, my son seven,
you know, something accessible for both my daughter
and my son.
And it was wild trying to find a Bible
(16:17):
that didn't have a white Jesus in it.
Like, this is still, this isn't like, this isn't a new thing.
And I always think it's interesting
because I'm not necessarily pointing to the church
when I say this, but there's a sort of,
there's a phenomenon lately
where people get very aggravated
if a mythical figure is misrepresented.
(16:40):
And so famously there was a huge debate
over whether Santa was white.
Oh yeah, I actually did see that.
This was animated.
I mean, now if you're talking about, you know,
Nicholas the saint, right.
Slap a heretic.
You know, that's another fun conversation.
But we can talk about where he lived,
(17:00):
but are we talking about that Santa?
Or are we still talking about the one
who delivers presents because that's imaginary.
And yet it was this heated conversation.
Right, but Christians broadly have a lot,
for most of the last, I don't know, I want to overstate this.
It's pretty common not to think about it.
Just to say, oh, that's great.
(17:22):
That's Jesus.
And it would be an interesting assignment
to have everyone draw what they think Jesus looked like.
Because I have a similar upbringing
and my Jesus looked pretty similar
to like a Southern California surfer,
you know, kind of a Wysand surf coach
who I might run into it, you know, in like Orange County.
He sits barefoot on his surf board on the sand.
He's like, yeah.
(17:42):
So I have a fun little story here
that has to do with this sort of.
This sort of.
So I was a high school art teacher
before I became a professor
while I was working on my PhD and stuff.
And one of my assignments,
I was teaching them how to do portraits
and made them as like, hey, you can,
and they're young, they're like ninth, 10th graders.
And it's like my drawing one class.
And they were like, okay.
(18:03):
So you guys have to get a picture printed out
in black and white, and then you can draw whoever you want.
You know, like it's totally up to you.
I will supply an image if you don't bring one,
but make sure you do.
And so as a punishment, I gave them an image of me,
which is hilarious.
So I had like 20 students.
It's like 40 students and like half of them are drawing me.
(18:24):
Right?
Well, yeah.
For ninth, 10th grade, yeah.
Yeah.
And so it was great.
Now it's their fault.
They could have drawn whoever they wanted to,
but now they're drawing me.
And what was hilarious, we did critiques afterwards,
everyone created me in their own image.
Wow.
They mixed my features with their own features.
(18:44):
That's so funny.
And so there was a version of me that looked like Drake,
because it was drawn by an African-American student.
There was a version of it that looked Mexican,
because it was drawn by a Mexican student.
There was a, I remember there's one,
like this little white boy, he was the little country boy.
And he made me look straight up like,
(19:04):
what's that painting?
The old man and the old woman with the farmer.
American Gothic.
American Gothic.
He made me look just like the dude from American Gothic.
Yeah, with the pitchfork.
And so it was just so funny.
And I told them, I was like, because one of the main keys
of drawing is like, draw what you see and not what you know.
Your mind has already made determinations of things.
The features that you've seen the most are your own.
(19:25):
You've looked in the mirror more than you've seen anybody else.
And so in your family and people that are close to you.
And so whenever you start drawing eyes,
you just reflex and start drawing what you know
and not what you're actually seeing of how this person is.
And so that's a big thing in art is to separate that.
But I think that's what we do with Jesus.
Is we essentially, we don't read what we see,
(19:48):
we read what we know.
We've also sort of been,
we've been trained to a certain imagination.
I mean, this is one of the things,
like J. Cameron Carter talks about this,
that when Emmanuel Kant was outlining,
his theological vision for humanity,
that he described Jesus as the personification
(20:08):
of the good principle, that he's the ideal human.
But at the same time was articulating
that some humans are more ideal than others
and that it happened that Euroanglo humans
were transcending race and all other peoples were trapped
in this excess, this particularity of race
that they were trapped in.
And so there is this philosophical tradition
(20:30):
that not only does plays on how we project,
but also tries to train us that Jesus looks a certain way.
And it's mapped onto this particular anthropological vision
of what it means to be a good human.
And so it's both, right?
So we can do that, but why is it, I was traveling once
and I was visiting a friend in Thailand
and I was speaking with someone who said,
(20:52):
I looked like Jesus.
And I thought about that,
like how far reaching this kind of enterprise is
to depict Jesus as a white man, right?
And so we have to own that
because there is a racialized history to it.
Just even as race becomes articulated as an idea
that was being articulated by broadly Christian,
whether you think they were Christian or not,
that's a whole different debate,
(21:14):
philosophers and theologians who are saying,
you know, if he's ideal, if he's good,
what is ideal and good?
And it's mapped onto this imagination
that to be European, you know,
so there's ways where it's not just that,
it's not just we project,
but we're trained to project in a certain way.
And I think Christians can say a lot
(21:35):
about whether we think it's a good idea
to have someone else tell us
what Jesus should look like.
Now, to be fair, you do look a little bit like the actor
from a Jim Kimbezo.
No, from the Joe's.
No, no idea.
Yes, you do.
I got a little bit of that vibe.
Not even a little bit.
Because he's not like, they did a good job.
I've been told I look like the center forward
(21:58):
for the German national soccer team.
I think that's, I feel like that's too very different.
I feel like Thomas Mueller, that's...
Okay.
You know what I'm talking about?
Yeah, I absolutely know what you're talking about.
Yeah, so I would say I can see that one more
than I'm fairly dramatic.
Perhaps.
But yeah, you know.
Yeah, I mean, Albrecht Doerr's version of Jesus,
you know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
(22:18):
I think if you guys cut your hair the same,
I think you definitely would have a resemblance
here to Thomas Mueller.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, it's funny though, because I was thinking about that.
I was teaching a class on Christology
and I was just, I just looked for images of Jesus.
And one of the first ones that popped up
is the stained glass window in Dordrecht in the Netherlands.
And it's not that Jesus is white, but he's blonde.
(22:39):
Like he's really blonde.
He looks more like Patrick Swayze in Point Break
than he does, you know, like, you know,
like anyone who I would imagine.
The importance fisherman.
Living in Judea under Roman rule, you know,
in the first century.
And it's just interesting that, you know,
and it was posted, oh, this is a beautiful, you know,
nobody, it's interesting how little you hear people say,
(22:59):
huh, he's really blonde.
You know, it's just interesting that we've been formed
in a way to not even kind of recoil and think,
well, that doesn't look right, right?
And I, you know, and I say that because a lot of times
we look at art and representation.
And when people think about different historical figures
or mythical figures or they depict art in a contextual lens,
there is a different response.
And in that same lecture, I showed a painting
(23:21):
by a Chinese artist who depicted Jesus' baptism,
but in a traditional Chinese style.
And the response was much more, well, that looks off.
And so it's, you know, it's interesting, you know,
why is it that Euro Anglo Jesus doesn't cause a reaction
but Chinese Jesus does?
And that speaks to how we've been kind of trained
(23:42):
to have a certain imaginary around what Jesus looks like.
Absolutely.
Well, I didn't even think, I think I thought genuinely
Jesus was white until I went to college.
Not because anybody told me that.
It was just the only way I ever,
he was ever depicted in places that I was.
Right.
Like in pictures or like not cause anyone said to me,
Jesus is a white man,
but because that's the only thing I ever saw
(24:02):
until I took my ancient civilizations class.
And someone was like, hey guys, just remember
that where Israel is and like what that is.
And I was like, oh, or at least especially
in the context that I was in, like told me
in a lot of ways that Jesus was white.
And I just kind of was like, okay.
So for me, I didn't ever think about it as Jesus is white,
(24:23):
but I saw him as a reflection of myself
and which is still a little different.
Like I didn't see him with like your complexion, Megan.
Like I never saw that,
but I did see him as like looking like a half Puerto Rican,
half German, you know what I'm saying?
Like just like literally like myself.
And I think there's that reflex that we have too,
just from this is who you know, this is what you know.
(24:44):
And the training I think is crucial
because that's like when you have other cultures
that this is not what they know
and they still affirm a white Jesus or something like that.
Then you're like, okay, we've gone beyond
just kind of this natural reflex.
Yeah, that's a really good point
because if you think about it, you would expect,
you know, if you went into a, you know, a culture
(25:04):
with no sort of artistic aesthetic formation
on what Jesus would look like,
it wouldn't be surprising for that culture to say
for their imagination of what an ancient person looked like.
You know, and you see this across art,
you see this across literature.
Yeah, totally.
And that's a really great point.
Like projection is perhaps not surprising.
When you talk about your art project,
that's what we would kind of expect with imagination.
(25:25):
It is surprising when, you know, communities and cultures
have been given an imagination that's foreign
and you know, kind of it's imposed in a sense.
Yeah, exactly.
It seems that projection and contextualization
in a lot of ways is human.
Like we just kind of do that because that's what we do.
But I mean, I think the important conversation here
is to ask, and I think Chris, you should speak to this,
(25:46):
is why is it crucial to recognize Jesus as Jewish,
as a man from the Levant area of like the,
for in like ancient Near East?
Like why is that understanding of who Jesus was important
for us as believers and as Christians to, yeah,
we can project and we can contextualize and stuff
(26:07):
in a lot of ways that is the spiritual relational aspect
of loving Jesus.
But why is it important for us to remember
and to integrate who Jesus really was as a person
and where he was from?
Okay, so that's another amazing question.
So we have kind of wholesale inherited, you know,
(26:28):
when I say we, I'm referring to Christians in the West,
Christians in the United States,
sort of the Greco-Roman metaphysical imagination
of what it means to worship Jesus, right?
First 400 years of the church,
most of the arguments were how can one person
be God and human?
And it's these metaphysical debates.
Does he have a human mind or a God mind?
You know, does he have, does he just look human
(26:51):
or is he human?
Like these were the debates.
And within that, it has a tendency to change
what it means to worship Jesus into,
do I have the right metaphysical idea?
And I think the shame of that,
and I think this is why it's important,
is that the incarnation happens in time.
It happens in a moment of in history,
(27:11):
and it's a part of the larger sweep of redemptive history
that runs from creation all the way to the kingdom come.
And in this moment in time,
Jesus is actively speaking into what is happening
and what will happen.
And so if we don't understand what it meant for Jesus
to live when he lived, to, you know,
(27:32):
join the history he joined,
to anticipate the future he is anticipating
and when he joined it,
you know, if we don't do that,
we're essentially, we don't mean to say this.
I don't think anyone means this intentionally,
but we are in our apathy saying that we don't really care
what was important to Jesus.
So we let him know.
Scott McKnight has a book called
(27:53):
the King Jesus Gospel where he really,
his question is really simple.
He's like, you know,
if you ask any Christian what the gospel is,
they'll usually lean on for it's been great,
by grace you've been saved through faith
and not by works so no one can boast.
Amazing, but Jesus never said that.
Right.
It doesn't even say anything close
when he's proclaiming the good news.
So how do we make sense of,
(28:15):
because of course that's the gospel,
but what was the gospel for Jesus, right?
You know, it's the coming of the kingdom.
It's the restoration of Israel.
It's God's compassion for humanity.
These are things that he's saying
that are very meaningful in his time in place.
I think when we take his time and his place,
(28:36):
how he understood himself, you know, as a rabbi,
you know, as someone who lived, you know,
in the line of David,
as someone who was recapitulating history,
as someone who's remembering everything
that Israel has done, you know,
and describing when you mentioned the law and the prophets,
right, you think about the road to Emmaus,
when the two, you know, disciples are confused,
(28:57):
he doesn't go, hey, don't worry,
let me describe what the church is going to be like.
Yeah. Right?
Yeah.
He recounts all of Israel's history
and describes how it all points to himself.
It's so important to Jesus.
And so the question is, is what is important to Jesus?
Important to us.
Because when we ask the question to,
when we're asking the question of lordship,
(29:18):
I think it's easy to forget that these conversations
are part of our worship.
And so do we want to worship Jesus on his terms or ours?
That's great.
So I think that to me is the thing
that we have to be coming with.
So it's not that we're just history buffs
who really want to get it right,
but we want to resist the tendencies to obscure
(29:39):
what was important to Jesus,
to obscure the people who were important to Jesus,
the timing.
We also want to find out why he was communicating,
what he was communicating and what he was intending.
You know, the woman at the well is a great example of this.
If we don't understand Jewish Samaritan intention,
that whole interaction.
Doesn't make sense.
It's just an interesting sort of, wow,
(30:01):
this, you know, Jesus knows a lot about this woman
and tells her, you know,
and it just oversimplifies something
that's much more dramatic.
Anyway, so I could go on for a long time on that.
Awesome, that's powerful.
That's fantastic.
That's powerful.
That'll preach too.
That'll preach.
That will preach, tell you what.
You know what I'm saying?
I also think it's like, to that effect is like,
when if you're removing the fact that like,
the importance of the timing in which Jesus lived,
(30:23):
it almost is like, oh, well, you know,
we could have just dropped Jesus any old place in history,
like, and kind of takes out the intentionality
and like so much of like prophetic fulfillment
of like him being there
and like how that was an intentional decision.
And like that was the perfect spot
in which he was meant to exist in history.
And so to kind of isolate all of that,
I feel like does in a lot of ways diminish the impact
(30:46):
that Jesus had on the space and time that he was in
and then how much it like really would diminish a little bit,
like what was said in scripture
and all the things that pointed to him as a savior
because it would be like, oh, well, then if we theoretically
could have just dropped Jesus any old place
and any old time, then you're not understanding
like the depth of, you know, Jesus's life
(31:07):
and what that means for us
and what that meant for like fulfillment
of the Old Testament.
I just love the idea.
Make important for you what was important for Jesus.
Come on.
And this leads I think to our last question.
We like to end with kind of like a practical application
because we both have this conviction that like
when you do theology that is like,
(31:28):
not doesn't affect the church.
Then it's like, it's like kind of besides the point
and me and you, we've hung out a lot in the
in academic circles and we've probably seen a lot of this.
It's just like, okay, you're just thinking to think
which is cool in its own realm.
But fundamentally we want to help people be drawn deeper
to who Jesus is, to be drawn deeper into their discipleship.
(31:49):
So we always want to end with that kind of
very practical level response.
And that being the case, how do you think these ideas
that we're talking about here can affect the church?
And this could be locally, but also globally.
I have to say this really carefully.
I think most of these conversations are,
they're scalpel conversations, not sledgehammer conversations.
(32:13):
You know, you talk about separating, you know,
bone from marrow, like you really have to be careful.
And to answer, I'm going to kind of work backward
from horror, if that's okay.
Yeah, okay.
You know, during the third Reich,
the Nazis had a de-Judaization Institute,
which was designed to find and strip all elements
(32:37):
of Jewish identity from Christian practice and religion.
Like that was an Institute that was founded
to seriously obscure parts of his history.
And, you know, we hear things like this
or we think about slavers during chattel slavery,
(32:58):
who used Philippians two in the idea
that Jesus took on the form of a slave
as justification for slavery.
And we see these horrors when people weaponize
or obscure or corrupt who Jesus really was
to the various purpose.
(33:19):
We never think we're part of that, right?
We just, we hear these things and we think, you know,
well, you know, sort of pharisthetically,
thank God I'm not like that.
But if we take Jesus seriously,
coming back to how he thinks about things,
you know, he has a tendency to take the standard
back to the very, very, the smallest sparks of evil, right?
(33:44):
You know, you say you don't murder,
but are you angry at your brother?
Do you curse him in your heart, right?
These questions.
And so if we work backwards from that type of war,
I think what matters is where am I overlooking
or obscuring or weaponizing for my purposes,
my, you know, for what's important to me,
(34:05):
who Jesus is that should confront me?
Because if he's Messiah, if he's Lord,
and in Messiah, I mean, we didn't have time for this,
but Jesus' understanding of Messiah as a rabbi
has a whole host of consequences
for anyone who seriously wants to follow him.
Yeah, right.
That if we understand how that term was used
(34:25):
throughout the Old Testament, it changes how we follow, right?
And so that feeling of is it important to Jesus
comes down to where the seeds of a similar impulse, you know,
we all like to say, you know, like I'm not a Nazi,
I wouldn't do that, but are we stripping things
from his self-declared identity,
(34:47):
how he described himself, how he did his ministry
consciously or unconsciously
in ways that has impacts for other people, right?
And so when we come back to the projection thing,
I think it's beautiful that slaves and chains
were able to know that Jesus was acquainted with suffering.
But at the same time, you know,
James Cohn's The Cross and the lynching tree points out
(35:09):
that missing the fact that his crucifixion, you know,
was an execution at the hands of Rome,
causes you to miss that he understood what it was
to be lynched on a tree.
And that miss enabled Christians for hundreds of years
to just accept or sanction slavery.
You know, and so the geopolitical history,
you know, you asked about the region,
(35:30):
the geopolitical history of Jesus's region,
you think about a Syrian conquest
and how it named it, Palestine.
And then, you know, the Romans then named it Judea.
And then the Romans put down the Bar Kokba revolt.
I hope I said that right, but they put down a revolt
and then rename the region, you know,
rename the region Palestine as part of that,
(35:52):
that there's this complex history with names, right?
And so, you know, so if say a Palestinian Christian
remembers the history of the name Palestine and says,
oh, Jesus is from the region I'm from, that's beautiful.
But that can also be weaponized.
We've seen antisemitic sentiment.
And I say this to say,
(36:12):
Jesus's identity, when best,
should bring us into faithfulness to human worship,
an ethic that aligns with his ethic,
which includes compassion for the poor
and the downtrodden and the oppressed.
And, you know, that declares the year of the Lord's favor
and understands how the year of the Lord's favor
affected those who are suffering or in bondage,
those in chains, like these things.
(36:36):
And our apathy to what matters to Jesus
often points back to that same thing.
And so I think when you talk about the practical,
I think it's easy to forget that the name Christian came
about because early Christians were acting so much like Jesus.
They were serving and they were acting
and they were living out his ethic.
They weren't just worshiping him as God,
they were doing Jesus things.
(36:57):
Yeah.
And so where have I allowed myself to ignore, miss,
or project over and pose my own narrative over Jesus' story
in a way that gives me permission to not act like him?
And so I think, yeah, that's,
maybe that's not the same thing as the Nazi effort,
(37:18):
but is it a spark of evil that Jesus asked me to overcome
in worship of him as I allow his self-revelation,
how he revealed himself in time and place to challenge that.
And I probably said something in there
that could offend people.
I just mean it genuinely, like what brings us
into the most faithful discipleship to Jesus
(37:38):
that worships him the most and says again and again,
renew my mind to be like yours.
That's good.
I mean, that's the heart of it.
I have recently just released a book,
The Problem and Problems of Freedom,
but in it I talk about how Jesus,
when he talks about all those jubilee,
I've come to declare the day of the Lord.
Pentecost, I argue, could be seen as a cosmic jubilee.
(37:58):
So what was made for the Jews
to bring justice to the whole world,
the spirit being poured out on all flesh
now becomes that thing that this is the message
that can spread out to the whole world.
What I like about that thought
and the way you just kind of framed it is like,
that's what was important to Jesus.
Jesus claimed that as his own ministry.
And so what the church should do,
(38:19):
we're the ones who are spirit-empowered,
we should go out and proclaim Christ's ministry
for the whole world.
And I think when we do that,
yeah, we're gonna see ourselves being confronted.
We're gonna see our own hearts being confronted.
But fundamentally, we're gonna see powers and principalities
and all sorts of things being confronted
(38:39):
because all things that are not of Christ
are going to be confronted in us
and outside of us and everywhere.
And being open and ready for that,
I think is one, it's a prophetic task,
it's a beautiful task that the church can do.
But also, and I think what you're really hitting
that's crucial is let's actually look at ourselves in this
(39:03):
and see how we've been implicated
by some of the same things
that we might ask somebody else to check on themselves.
We're out of time, but I feel like
I've already had a couple of coffees with you
and we've already talked for like long times,
spilling over and getting late to class
and stuff like that, but, because it's so good.
You're such a thoughtful, well-spoken fellow
(39:24):
and I think your heart for God and God's people
shines through so clearly.
And I think this is such an important thing,
something that can be weaponized.
We should look at it as not the thing that weaponizes that,
but the thing that actually unifies us
as we all be conformed to the image of Christ
and who Christ actually is as we profile him.
(39:45):
Not who we think is, but who he actually is.
That's good.
Thank you Chris for being on today.
We're so thankful for you speaking to us, preaching to us,
preaching to the people.
And friends as always, these episodes are sponsored
by LPU School of Theology and Ministry.
All right, we'll see you next time.
See ya.
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Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.