Desperate Houseflies: The Magazine

Feel free to pull out your trusty fly swatter and comment on what is posted here, realizing that this odd collection of writers may prove as difficult to kill as houseflies and are presumably just as pesky. “Desperate Houseflies” is a magazine that intends to publish weekly articles on subjects such as politics, literature, history, sports, photography, religion, and no telling what else. We’ll see what happens.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Was Jesus Smart?

Another interesting section of The Divine Conspiracy reads:

"If you play a game of word association today, in almost any setting, you will collect some familiar names around words such as smart, knowledgeable, intelligent, and so forth. Einstein, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and the obligatory rocket scientists, will stand out. But one person who pretty certainly will not come up in this connection is Jesus.

"Here is a profoundly significant fact: In our culture, among Christians and non-Christians alike, Jesus Christ is automatically disassociated from brilliance or intellectual capacity. Not one in a thousand will spontaneously think of him in conjunction with words such as well-informed, brilliant, or smart.

"Far too often he is regarded as hardly conscious. He is looked on as a mere icon, a wraithlike semblance of a man, fit for the role of sacrificial lamb or alienated social critic, perhaps, but little more.

"A well-known 'scholarly' picture has him wandering the hills of Palestine, deeply confused about who he was and even about crucial points in his basic topic, the kingdom of the heavens. From time to time he perhaps utters disconnected though profound and vaguely radical irrelevancies, now obscurely preserved in our Gospels.

"Would you be able to trust your life to such a person? If this is how he seems to you, are you going to be inclined to become his student? Of course not. We all know that action must be based on knowledge, and we grant the right to lead and teach only to those we believe to know what is real and what is best."

[The author of these paragraphs obviously believes otherwise. What do you think?]

9 Comments:

Blogger juvenal_urbino said...

Christians, in particular, tend to not think of Jesus when asked to name some smart people for the same reason they don't think of God the Father: it's both too obvious, and unfair to everyone else in the category: deities don't count.

Personally, even setting aside the whole divinity/omniscience issue, and thinking of Jesus in purely human terms, I probably still wouldn't use "smart" to describe him. His was a different category of intelligence. I would describe his as more the artistic/prophetic kind of intelligence.

That's not the same thing as "smart," in the same way that "beautiful" is not the same thing as "extremely pretty." A woman or a work of art can be physically beautiful without being at all pretty, and vice versa. They're 2 totally different categories; not greater and lesser degrees of the same thing.

The word we generally use for the artistic/prophetic kind of intelligence Jesus had is "inspired." Not the "inspired" of Christian doctrine, but the "inspired" of van Gogh or Beethoven or Flaubert or, perhaps, Martin Luther King.

10:05 AM  
Blogger Al Sturgeon said...

Excellent point, JU.

I think what resonated with me in the excerpt was the question of who would want to be a student of a teacher you didn't deem the most knowledgeable.

I'm convinced that the overwhelming majority of church-goers aren't interested in learning how to actually live life from Jesus. The "why that is" quest may have been what grabbed me about this particular excerpt.

3:09 PM  
Blogger DeJon Redd said...

The first thing that comes to my mind is the overt anti-intellectual bias that seems to run rampant in a lot of churches I've seen.

On more than one occasion I've heard church members voice concerns about hiring a pulpit minister with an advanced degree in theology.

I believe it all starts with many church folks' perversion of the definition of faith.

I perceive many to hold to an epistemology based solely on tenacity and intuition. They say they're epistemology is deeply rooted in the authority of the Bible. But when one looks just a little deeper than the rhetoric, you find they have little tolerance for textual criticism.

I know more than one God-fearing person that wouldn't hesitate to call me a heretic for taking issue with the idea of an "inerrant" scripture.

There is often little tolerance for the type of faith defined in Webster's (or Hebrews 11.) What some are truly displaying is not faith, but a rigid certainty based on faulty epistemology.

All this to say that in the corner of the traditional protestant tradition in which I was raised, intellectualism has little social value.

"Book learnin'" draws skepticism.

Generally speaking, the best way to gain credibility is to look the part, speak the language and reinforce the stereotypes of the culture.

That's why many the conviction of many mindless church attenders is that "Jesus is a white, middle-class Republican. And if you want to go to Heaven, you have be like him."**

At least that's my take.

**I stole those words from Derek Webb (His latest album is worth a listen.)

3:51 PM  
Blogger Al Sturgeon said...

Good points, DeJon (or Derek!).

Maybe factoring in your argument leaves many churchgoers in the place of the college student who is sure his professor is smart, but all the student is concerned about is getting what he needs to make the grade. Surely not sitting at his feet and drinking in the professor's knowledge & applying it to his life.

(At least that was me in college. But I don't want that to be my relationship to Jesus.)

7:23 AM  
Blogger DeJon Redd said...

I'll buy that analogy... All too often sad, but true.

9:36 AM  
Blogger juvenal_urbino said...

I'm convinced that the overwhelming majority of church-goers aren't interested in learning how to actually live life from Jesus.

I agree, mostly. OTOH, I don't think most churchgoers -- in CsofC, at least -- have ever been exposed to the life of Jesus. They don't hear about it at church, and the way they've been taught to read scripture makes it almost impossible for them to get at it on their own.

If more churchgoers got to know Jesus, more of them might find him the kind of person they'd like to learn from.

I also agree with DeJon's point about anti-intellectualism. It's in CsofC's DNA -- that whole combination of Baconianism and Scottish Moral Sense epistemology that tells them training and careful reading and hard work aren't necessary to understand scripture. That same tradition is at the root of other branches of the Stone-Campbell tradition. The Disciples of Christ have outgrown it and moved on. Some Christian Churches have. Very few CsofC have.

A lot of historians believe that has to do with the historic socio-economic differences in the memberships of the Disciples and the CsofC. I think there's something to that. However, I also think the members of CsofC are just darn comfortable and self-satisfied with not having to think too much about religion.

11:13 AM  
Blogger Beta Bunny said...

"I'm convinced that the overwhelming majority of church-goers aren't interested in learning how to actually live life from Jesus. "

I think this is very true. I haven't seen too many Christians saying that they feel called to sell their goods, give the proceeds to the poor, and take no thought for the morrow.

Most of the modern Christians I know (imo) have a radically different mindset from that of Jesus. And most of the Christian church services I have attended have had far more to do with Paul than with Christ.

1:30 PM  
Blogger Beta Bunny said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

1:30 PM  
Blogger Michael Lasley said...

That's an interesting observation, Mystique. (About Paul vs Jesus in church.) If anyone else is still reading down on this thread, I'd be interested in hearing what they have to say about that.

10:13 AM  

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