Theology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Ford David

Author:Ford, David [Ford, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2013-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

5. The Holy Family: Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. Painting on silk. Japan, 20th century

Second, Pelikan’s brisk run through the centuries is a reminder that strictly speaking there is no ‘gap’: at every point in the past 2,000 years there have been people attempting to interpret and follow Jesus. There have been other times and places before the 20th and 21st centuries when it seemed as if gaps were opening up—between the Jewish and the Gentile Jesus, or the Catholic and Protestant Jesus—and each major cultural or civilizational transposition has raised similar issues: the moves to Celtic countries, to Germanic tribes, to India, to Japan, to China, to South America, to Africa, and so on. Looked at in this perspective, the impact of Western modernity has indeed been immense, but the issues it raises are not all unprecedented. Christianity is seen as a faith which continually reinterprets its founder in new settings and finds in those settings inspiration for new ways of portraying him. So the Shoah and the 20th-century gender revolution have provoked hugely influential ways of interpreting Jesus as Jewish and male, but these portraits are always in dialogue with others produced over the centuries.

Third, the argument for massive discontinuity between the premodern and modern is sounding less persuasive now, at the beginning of the third millennium. Modernity’s ‘superiority complex’—the sense that in the contemporary period humanity has emphatically progressed beyond what has gone before—has been shaken by catastrophic events of the 20th and 21st centuries and by the exposure of the oppressive nature of types of rationality which have confidently (and often arrogantly) dominated large areas of modern life. With this superiority complex less in evidence, there is the possibility of less prejudice against premodern voices and more attentiveness to them. At a common-sense level, the continuities are obvious in much to do with life, death, human desires and behaviour, physicality, and influences of genes, education, family, politics, and other elements of context. Of course, all these are partly ‘social constructions’ but there is in principle no greater difficulty in relating to a 1st-century person than there is in relating to those in different parts of the world or even of one society today.

Finally, we return to the five types first discussed in Chapter 2 and raised again earlier in this chapter. In their focus on Jesus they are basically concerned with how he relates to current worldviews and frameworks of understanding. The chief lesson they teach about the hermeneutical gap is that the difficulty is only partly about the possibility of a 1st-century person being relevant today: clearly Jesus is relevant in many ways to hundreds of millions of people. Rather, the main decision is theological: what role does this person play in relation to a particular worldview and way of life? That will always be the most controversial—and unavoidably theological—question about Jesus.

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