Since I posted yesterday I've raced through the rest of Walter Wink's The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of Man. I won't provide an extensive review but will try to capture the gist in a way that best serves the typical reader of my blog.
Understanding the title is understanding the book. "The Human Being" is Wink's rendition of the biblical phrase "the son of the man" and the book is an exploration of the significance of that phrase for us as pioneered by Jesus.
The phrase, "the son of the man" is indeed an enigmatic expression that biblical scholars have wrestled with for over a century. In the New Testament, it occurs almost exclusively on the lips of Jesus as a way (apparently) of referring to himself. It apparently was not, then, a title that the early Christians used of Jesus, for it appears nowhere in Paul or Acts or even the gospels as a confession of faith.
It does not get Jesus into trouble with his opponents. The general sense of current scholarship is thus that it was not a ready made Jewish category that Jesus or the early Christians appropriated. It does appear as a messianic type title in the Similitudes of Enoch, which Wink dates to the first century AD. He seems to believe that there was a parallel development in the use of the idea by the Similitudes and the later NT at around the same time (Matthew, Jude, Revelation) independently of each other.
Yet Wink does not think that the work of people like Barnabas Lindars to see in the phrase merely a circumlocution for "I" adequate. Nor does he find it as merely "the man" adequate--"Foxes have holes but the man [me] does not have a place to lay his head."
Rather, Wink sees "the man" as Jesus' references to true humanity. Here's where Wink's spirituality comes into view. Jesus, according to Wink, stands in a mystical tradition that first showed up in Ezekiel's use of the "son of man." In Ezekiel 1 God looks like a man. Here begins Wink's myth (a word he means us to take in a positive sense).
God is nothing other than the true Human. The problem for Wink is not that we are not divine. The problem is that we are not truly Human. God did not come down to earth and become incarnated as human. Rather, Jesus shows us how God, that is, the truly Human, can be incarnated in us.
The sayings of Jesus on "the son of the man" are thus sayings about the Human. To be sure, Wink does not believe all the Son of man sayings in the gospels are "true." By that he doesn't mean "not historical," for his paradigm does not connect truth to historicity. Thus there might be true Son of man statements that do not go back to Jesus and, conceivably, there might be untrue Son of man statements that do go back to Jesus.
Perhaps Wink's bottom line about Jesus is best captured in this sentence: "As bearer of the archetype of the Human Being, Jesus activates the numinous power that is capable of healing, transforming, or rebirthing those who surrender themselves to it" (256).
Wink is not an orthodox Christian by any means, but he is clearly a mystic with a strong pluralistic faith. This statement is indicative: "I want to worship the God Jesus worshiped, not worship Jesus as God" (259). When I say he is a pluralist, I mean that he does not in any way see the Christian path as the only path to God. For him, Jesus is the best archetype to express the common goal of multiple religious paths. For him, he cannot imagine God as impersonal. But he does not wish to consider any other religious path inferior to the one that resonates with him.
The book is filled with references to Carl Jung and tapping into the collective unconscious of humanity. He speaks favorably of Ludwig Feuerbach as a man before his time. Feuerback in 1841 famously argued that God was a projection of the best human traits we can imagine. Wink believes he was almost right. For Wink, God is The Human Being, what we all will hopefully become in the reality behind the second coming, the kingdom of God on earth.
But for Wink, God is not merely the sum of human projection. God is something beyond what we can consciously project. God is something our collective human unconscious has imprinted on it from the beginning of the human species. It is something beyond us that we hope to become.
I'll confess that I have great difficulty relating to this book. I appreciate Wink's mystical faith. Perhaps ironically, it reminds me of Barth, although Barth is thoroughly orthodox. But as my friends will know, I have difficulty relating to Barth too. :-)
Showing posts with label Walter Wink. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Walter Wink. Show all posts
Friday, June 27, 2008
Thursday, June 26, 2008
First Encounter with Walter Wink's The Human Being
As June comes to an end, I plow through the second book an independent study is doing with me: Walter Wink's, The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of Man.
Wink teaches at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City. He is a different bird than I am usually around. Even in England I was not around his approach to Christianity. He is cut from a similar cloth to Marcus Borg in some respects, was also a member of the Jesus Seminar, although I take it his conclusions about Jesus are somewhat different from others on the seminar.
I wouldn't recommend his book for an evangelical but I would recommend it for someone thinking of throwing in the faith towel. In fact, I think I would rather someone in that situation read it before they would read Borg, although I'm not very far in yet in my speed read. One thing I want to be clear on, however, is that while neither of these men have a conventional faith, they have a very deep faith. These are two deeply religious men whose head simply isn't where most evangelical heads are. God judges the hearts, not me.
I was going to wait till tomorrow to blog on Wink, but he had some fascinating comments in his first chapter that I wanted to quote this morning. You will all judge them according to your theological/ideological perspective, but I reproduce them here for your reaction.
The "driving force behind this scholarly exertion [the quest for the historical Jesus] was a modern longing to be encountered by the divine... most scholars study the past in order to be change its effect on the present" (italics his, 9).
"No scholar can construct a picture of Jesus beyond the level of spiritual awareness that they have attained. No reconstruction outstrips its reconstructor. We cannot explain truths we have not yet understood" (11).
"The idea of history is our modern myth" (12).
"I privilege Jesus' critique of domination over all other viewpoints because, after a lifetime of study, I have found it to be the most radical and comprehensive framework for understanding what he was about" (14).
"I am concerned not so much with whether Jesus actually said something, but with whether it is true, regardless of who said it. If truth is our goal rather than historicity, then revelation is a far more appropriate category than facticity, for weighing the impact of Jesus" (15).
We "should not assume that something is true because Jesus said it... The church did courageously retain passages that were clearly disconfirmed, such as the second coming, Mark 9:1 par" (15).
"The myth of the human Jesus requires that Jesus must have made mistakes, have had flaws in his personality, sinned, and otherwise exhibited imperfect (that is, human) behavior" (italics his, 15).
But the statements that prompted me to post this morning were these, which I thought give a very interesting definition of objectivity in a postmodern age:
"The presence of a particular critical perspective does not spell the end of objectivity; we are still required to give warrants for our claims. Once one abandons the chimera of disinterestedness, however, objectivity is free to become what it should have been all along: just another name for simple honesty and the willingness, as Schweitzer demonstrated, to be changed by what we discover.
"I listen intently to the Book. But I do not acquiesce in it. I rail at it. I make accusations. I censure it for endorsing patriarchalism, violence, anti-Judaism, homophobia, and slavery. It rails back at me, accusing me of greed, presumption, narcissism, and cowardice. We wrestle. We roll on the ground, neither of us capitulating, until it wounds my thigh with "new-ancient" words. And the Holy Spirit is there the whole time, strengthening us both" (15-16).
Of course the definition of the Holy Spirit in his glossary is not exactly orthodox: "the power of transformation... That impulse of the psyche...
:-)
Wink teaches at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City. He is a different bird than I am usually around. Even in England I was not around his approach to Christianity. He is cut from a similar cloth to Marcus Borg in some respects, was also a member of the Jesus Seminar, although I take it his conclusions about Jesus are somewhat different from others on the seminar.
I wouldn't recommend his book for an evangelical but I would recommend it for someone thinking of throwing in the faith towel. In fact, I think I would rather someone in that situation read it before they would read Borg, although I'm not very far in yet in my speed read. One thing I want to be clear on, however, is that while neither of these men have a conventional faith, they have a very deep faith. These are two deeply religious men whose head simply isn't where most evangelical heads are. God judges the hearts, not me.
I was going to wait till tomorrow to blog on Wink, but he had some fascinating comments in his first chapter that I wanted to quote this morning. You will all judge them according to your theological/ideological perspective, but I reproduce them here for your reaction.
The "driving force behind this scholarly exertion [the quest for the historical Jesus] was a modern longing to be encountered by the divine... most scholars study the past in order to be change its effect on the present" (italics his, 9).
"No scholar can construct a picture of Jesus beyond the level of spiritual awareness that they have attained. No reconstruction outstrips its reconstructor. We cannot explain truths we have not yet understood" (11).
"The idea of history is our modern myth" (12).
"I privilege Jesus' critique of domination over all other viewpoints because, after a lifetime of study, I have found it to be the most radical and comprehensive framework for understanding what he was about" (14).
"I am concerned not so much with whether Jesus actually said something, but with whether it is true, regardless of who said it. If truth is our goal rather than historicity, then revelation is a far more appropriate category than facticity, for weighing the impact of Jesus" (15).
We "should not assume that something is true because Jesus said it... The church did courageously retain passages that were clearly disconfirmed, such as the second coming, Mark 9:1 par" (15).
"The myth of the human Jesus requires that Jesus must have made mistakes, have had flaws in his personality, sinned, and otherwise exhibited imperfect (that is, human) behavior" (italics his, 15).
But the statements that prompted me to post this morning were these, which I thought give a very interesting definition of objectivity in a postmodern age:
"The presence of a particular critical perspective does not spell the end of objectivity; we are still required to give warrants for our claims. Once one abandons the chimera of disinterestedness, however, objectivity is free to become what it should have been all along: just another name for simple honesty and the willingness, as Schweitzer demonstrated, to be changed by what we discover.
"I listen intently to the Book. But I do not acquiesce in it. I rail at it. I make accusations. I censure it for endorsing patriarchalism, violence, anti-Judaism, homophobia, and slavery. It rails back at me, accusing me of greed, presumption, narcissism, and cowardice. We wrestle. We roll on the ground, neither of us capitulating, until it wounds my thigh with "new-ancient" words. And the Holy Spirit is there the whole time, strengthening us both" (15-16).
Of course the definition of the Holy Spirit in his glossary is not exactly orthodox: "the power of transformation... That impulse of the psyche...
:-)
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