Jesus as a Metaphorical Theologian (Kenneth Bailey)

I recently finished listening to Kenneth Bailey’s lecture series Jesus Interprets His Own Cross. In the opening lecture he makes some great comments about Jesus as a metaphorical theologian. Here is a transcription of some of his remarks. (I’m looking forward to his new book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels.)

Now to understand Jesus as someone who is explaining his own cross, quite naturally we have to ask about Jesus as a theologian. The phrase itself may be new to you. Perhaps you have really never thought of Jesus as a theologian. You see, quite often what happens, almost unconsciously in our minds, is when we say “theologian” we think of Paul … Luke? Sure. John? No doubt? Peter? Why not? … we think of them as theologians and when we look at the person of our Lord what sort of comes on to the screen of our memory is “Aha! This is the Son of God. This is perfect man and perfect God. This is the one who dies for our sins and rises again victorious over sin and death, and he is the perfect example of love.” In short, we admire everything about him except his brains. Perhaps it really doesn’t occur to us that he has any. “Brains? Well… yes… he was a smart enough man but the things he had to say, well, we sort of learned those back in Sunday School. And they’re nice stories and, well, they’re kind of stories that kind of give us guidance as to how to live the Christian life, you know, the story of the Good Samaritan… how we’re supposed to help other people even though they’re not part of our community … yes... the stories of Jesus do have what we call ethics. They do have instructions as to how we should live. They are interesting stories. They’re fine to get us started in the Sunday School.” But they are also profound insights into the secrets of the Kingdom of God and often they are profound insights into the nature of the person of our Lord himself.

When we think of Jesus as a theologian, we have to consider metaphorical theology. In our Western tradition, generally we have done our theology out of a structure of philosophy. In the early centuries of the Christian Church, the dominant philosophy, that is the structure of the way people did their thinking, was Platonism, following the ideas of the great philosopher of Greece, Plato. In the middle ages, they did their theology and their philosophy in Aristotelian terms. During the Reformation it was Scholasticism. After the Reformation comes the age of Rationalism; comes then the Hegelianism of the nineteenth century; the existentialism of the early twentieth century; now people are talking about process philosophy, and thereby process theology, and thereby exegesis, interpretation of the Bible in the light of this philosophy. This is fine. If there are brilliant men and women who can structure Christian thinking in the sort of the wave lengths of the philosophical mood of the day, that’s fine. May God’s spirit bless them. They render all of us a great service. But there is another way of doing theology.

It has been my privilege to spend my life ever since I was four and half years old in the Middle East, and in the Middle East serious thinkers do their thinking in pictures; in concrete images. They don’t do it structured around a philosophical mood, but they do it in terms of those pictures. I’m sure you’ve all heard of the great English writer George Orwell who produced Animal Farm and 1984. In one of his essays about the nature of language, he takes a couple of verses from Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament and then he translates them into philosophical, conceptual, theological language, of the kind that we use in our Western tradition. Listen carefully to the two of these and try and hear and feel and perceive the different ways by which the biblical author and then George Orwell, in his translation, are trying to communicate with you. First of all, Ecclesiastes:

“I returned and saw under the sun
that the race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong,
neither yet bread to the wise,
nor yet riches to men of understanding,
nor yet favor to men of skill,
but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

Alright. Now here is George Orwell’s translation:

“Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity. But that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”

Now the contrasts are so sharp it’s, you know, it’s almost funny. Here is the biblical author speaking with these rich colorful pictures. Then we have taken these as abstract ideas and put them into this almost mumbo-jumbo language of philosophy and of theology and … alright … it says a part of it, but it doesn’t say all of it. Why? Because someone who talks in pictures … we’re going to call them metaphors or parables, and we’re going to put together the simile, the metaphor, the proverb, the parable, and the dramatic action. Because all five of them are of a class. They are a class in which the author is making his point by reference to something concrete.

Now mind you the author is not giving you an idea and then explaining that idea with an illustration. No. No. The author is giving you the meaning with the metaphor. The two are wedded together. The cross is not just an example of how God loves, and so thereby we could say “Well, yes, this is a biblically approved illustration but, Ah!, for the Greeks we could talk about Thermopolis, and for the Americans we can talk about George Washington crossing the Delaware; here is a great historical act in which a great figure is willing to suffer in order to save his people, and so thereby the theology is an idea. This idea then has certain illustrations.” No. No.

In biblical theology the meaning and the way by which that meaning is expressed in the biblical metaphor or the dramatic action are a single unit. You can not separate them out and say “Here’s the idea and then here’s the illustration of it, and we could find other illustrations that might be just as good.” Part of why that’s true is that the center of Jesus as a metaphorical theologian is his own person. And we will find that his own person occurs in some of these great teachings. We are not comparing Jesus to a Hans Christian Anderson; somebody who can express wonderful ideas through pictures and through stories, and so thereby we can take the parables of Jesus and the stories of Hans Christian Anderson and maybe we could find similar themes and say that they are in some sense equal. No. Because the person of Hans Christian Anderson is not at the heart of the ideas he’s trying to get across as he tells his stories. But the person of Jesus is at the heart of what he is proclaiming; the heart of the Kingdom which he comes to inaugurate; the entering of God into history through his life and his cross and his death and his resurrection. Thereby, when we look at Jesus as a metaphorical theologian, we’re dealing with great theology. We’re dealing with theology at its most weighty levels. Not at simply stories for children in the Sunday School.

Comments

[robert austell]

Michael,

This is a really helpful article... especially seeing the comparison of Eccl. and Orwell. I'm neck deep in writing about music and worship and some of the implications of post-modernism on it... and this is so helpful in showing the turn we are making away from the rationalism of the Enlightenment.

One of your RSS readers,

Robert

[Brad Cooper]

Hey Michael,

Thanks for the article. Very important stuff. And thanks for introducing us to Kenneth Bailey. I went to his website and checked out his bio. What an interesting guy! Makes me want to hear more of what he has to say.

Peace.

[Michael W. Kruse]

I agree, Robert. Bailey has been writing about this perspective on Jesus for more than thrity years. His insights into the Eastern mind and how our Western thinking has distorted our understanding of the faith are profound.

Brad, he is a fascinating person with a rich life. He has had more impact on my theology then probably any other one person I can think of, though, some I'm sure would say he has not had enough impact on me. :) Anyway, I expect there were will be much more about Bailey at this blog in 2008.