The Christ Ideal · 8 of 9

The Denunciations

A great many people have been troubled by the denunciations of Jesus. That he should call certain people blind guides, hypocrites, offsprings of vipers, has been a difficult fact to reconcile with his doctrine of love, his sweet and noble life.

Context

The Denunciations chapter is reading Matthew 23, where Jesus calls scribes and Pharisees blind guides, hypocrites, brood of vipers. This is the historical anti-Judaism flashpoint in the gospel. Read carefully: Dresser is not addressing the Christian-Jewish-relations question that two World Wars and the Shoah will eventually force theologians to confront. He is writing in 1901 American Protestantism where the rhetoric of Pharisee-as-stand-in-for-formalist-religion was unexamined. He is not actively antisemitic, but he uses the Pharisees as an undifferentiated foil, the way most Christian writers of his era did. The honest reading: the durable kernel of Jesus's prophetic critique survives, but the period framing of the Pharisees as proto-hypocrites flattens a complex Second Temple reform movement.Matthew 23 historical-context; period 1901 Protestant unexamined Pharisee-as-foil rhetoric; modern Jewish-Christian dialogue corrective (E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism).

Some have tried to meet the difficulty by denying that he said these things. Others have declared that, if he said them, he was so far imperfect. At any rate, these sayings are in flat contradiction to some of the accepted criteria of present-day thought.

Let us consider these sayings in the light of Jesus’s method, as a teacher. As we have repeatedly noted, Jesus always spoke with perfect confidence. There is no doubt, no hesitancy, no speculative spirit apparent in any of his sayings. He foretells his own life with the same confidence which he puts into the enunciation of a universal law. His is ever the word of the seer, never the hypothesis of the experimenter. He is nothing if not honest.

Jesus also sees through the schemes and questionings of every critic or enemy. He reads the thoughts of the scribes, Pharisees, aud Sadducees, even before they are uttered in secret. He estimates each critic at his real worth.

What else could he do, then, but go straight to the point, frankly exposing the hypocrisy and scheming of his critics, he who believed that every idle word shall be accounted for in the day of judgment? If he had concealed his real thought behind clever flattery, he would have been no better than his alleged modern followers in the aristocratic church. Since they were really blind guides, he could not consistently call them by any other name. Probably he did them more good than by any other statement he could have made. For he spoke with that authority which was not to be gainsaid.

Consider what an upheaval would follow if hypocrisy were now exposed with the same honesty. Ministers and newspaper editors all over the land who must withhold anything that may lose them their wealthy patronage would at last speak out in all sincerity. Healers, doctors, quack mediums, and thousands of charlatans would have to confess that they do not know half what their clients believe them to know. Polite society would be revolutionised, and many occupations would be gone for ever.

Everyone believes in honesty—theoretically. Everyone knows from personal experience that the true friend is the one who, upon occasion, goes straight to the point, as Jesus did. We all prefer praise; but we all know that blame is safer, if only it come alternately with encouragement.

To be sure, Jesus said, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” But when you really know, what can you honestly do but express your true thought, your righteous judgment?

It is charity to give people the benefit of the doubt. There are,however, many people who really know, who are gifted with a measure of that same insight which characterised the thought of Jesus, and made his statements uncompromising and straightforward.

If Jesus were here to-day, would he not expose hypocrisy as unsparingly as he did eighteen centuries ago? And who would be his followers? They would be the honest men, the truth-tellers, those who, without regard to money or social standing, pursue truth and virtue.

To condemn Jesus on account of the denunciations is like charging him with egotism because he said, “I am the way and the truth and the life.” We ought rather to estimate any particular saying in the light of his spirit as a whole, his career as the Christ, not in isolation from its true context.

In this connection, let us also remember to judge rightly Jesus’s saying that he came not to bring peace but a sword. Some have taken this literally, hence the acceptance of a theory which we shall consider in the next chapter.

His entire ministry, despite the denunciations, shows that Jesus was, above all, the messenger of peace. Peace may be said to be his watchword—the sweet companion of his love.

The symbolical reference to the sword unquestionably relates to the leavening process, the conflict which Jesus foresaw as the result of his coming.

Insight

The symbolical reference to the sword unquestionably relates to the leavening process, the conflict which Jesus foresaw as the result of his coming. The hard saying is Matthew 10:34 (I came not to send peace but a sword) and Dresser is reading it as descriptive prophecy rather than prescriptive command. Jesus is foretelling that his message will cause division within households and communities, not endorsing the use of violence. This was the reading the early Church Fathers held; it was also Tolstoy's reading in The Kingdom of God Within You. The verse has historically been weaponized to justify everything from family-sundering revival theology to Crusader rhetoric, and Dresser's gentle insistence on the symbolic-prophetic reading is the responsible exegetical position.Matthew 10:34; patristic readings of the sword-saying; Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Within You (1894); reception-history of misuse.

Everyone who has tried even in a slight way to realise the Christ ideal, knows that to stand for peace and love, for freedom and equality, means that one shall encounter opposition, misinterpretation, abuse and persecution.

No sooner had the dove of peace descended than the temptation of Jesus began. Very early in his ministry certain men became his enemies and began to plot against him.

Over against the passages which seem to imply the sanction of physical violence and spiteful condemnation, we must place the passage in which he forgives even those who crucified him, and also the highly important declaration that be came not to destroy but to fulfil.

No saying of Jesus is more distinct than this, that he came to construct, to add to and complete.

There is surely no sanction for “Christian warfare” in Jesus’s teaching. Nor is one justified in resorting to the methods employed by many of Jesus’s would-be followers to make converts to Christianity.

Insight

There is surely no sanction for Christian warfare in Jesus's teaching. Dresser is making the move that has been the perennial test-case for Christian ethics. The Crusades, the wars of religion, the conquest theology of European colonial expansion all claimed gospel sanction, and Dresser is following the long minority tradition (the early pre-Constantinian Church, the medieval peace traditions of the Franciscans and Cathars, the Anabaptist and Quaker pacifist witness, Tolstoy in his time) in saying that claim is exegetically and pastorally false. The position has consequences: it means Christian history contains an enormous amount of Christianity that was not Christian. Dresser does not fully name the consequence; the consequence is real.Pre-Constantinian Christian pacifism (Tertullian, Origen); Anabaptist and Quaker peace witness; Tolstoy; pastoral consequence flag.

Let us remember that it was the life that Jesus led which had so powerful an effect upon humanity. Therefore, if we would follow him, let us first live as be lived. Let us first win the confidence of those whom we would help. Then if we can add anything to their lives it will carry the invincible conviction of love, consecration and sympathy.

The vast hordes of human beings who are still outside the pale of Christianity are really sons of God. Let us treat them as such. Their religion, if unlike ours, is still an aspiration after God. It is not wholly false; it is like the inadequate statement, “Two and one are four.”

If you aspire to be a foreign missionary, go and live among your brothers of another colour, not as a superior being, but as a co-worker. Study their life. Study their religion. Then if you see how to add the one unit, so that two and two are four, add it gently. Do not destroy; fulfil. Call no man heathen. Call no son of God a lost soul. Speak only of the hell of action and reaction. Speak only of the heaven of the omnipresent Spirit.

Thus shall your Christianity pass from the old to the new. Thus shall your method pass from negative to positive. And when you have thus learned not to destroy but to fulfil, when you have begun to live the Christ life, you will be able to look beneath the letter of Jesus’s denunciations and supposed warlike statements to the spirit of constructive, fulfilling peace which consistently inspired every word he uttered.