The final chapter of Jesus Before Christianity is so wonderful
that I would love to quote the entire chapter! After concentrating on
looking at Jesus' humanity in all of the preceding chapters (1-18),
Albert Nolan focuses his final chapter on Jesus' divinity and the
implications of His being God.
There are two primary implications to Jesus being God that the author proposes:
1) We must allow Him to define what God is like (i.e., the way Jesus lived shows us exactly what God is like).
2) Acknowledgement that Jesus is God and Truth means to live like He
lived, understanding the world and times that we live in just as He
understood the world and times that He lived in.
Speaking of the early church's response to Jesus after his life and death and resurrection, Nolan says, "The movement was pluriform,
indeed amorphous and haphazard. Its only unity or point of cohesion was
the personality of Jesus himself...Everyone felt that despite his death
Jesus was still leading, guiding and inspiring them...Jesus remained
present and active through the presence and activity of his Spirit...Jesus was everything...Their admiration and veneration for him knew no bounds. He
was in every way the ultimate, the only criterion of good and evil and
of truth and falsehood, the only hope for the future, the only power
which could transform the world...Jesus was experienced as the breakthrough in the history of humanity. He transcended everything that had ever been said and done before. He was in every way the ultimate, the last word. He was on a par with God. His word was God's word. His Spirit was God's Spirit. His feelings were God's feelings...
"To believe in Jesus today is to agree with this assessment of
him...To believe that Jesus is divine is to choose to make him and what
he stands for your God...By
his words and his praxis, Jesus himself changed the content of the word
'God.' If we do not allow him to change our image of God, we will not
be able to say that he is our Lord and our God. To choose him as
our God is to make him the source of our information about divinity and
to refuse to superimpose upon him our own ideas of divinity...Jesus
reveals God to us, God does not reveal Jesus to us...if
we accept Jesus as divine, we must reinterpret the Old Testament from
Jesus' point of view and we must try to understand the God of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob in the way in which Jesus did..."
The author masterfully sums up the implications of Jesus being God: "We have seen what Jesus was like. If we now wish to treat him as our God, we would have to conclude that our
God does not want to be served by us, but wants to serve us; God does
not want to be given the highest possible rank and status in our
society, but wants to take the lowest place and to be without any rank
and status; God does not want to be feared and obeyed, but wants to
be recognized in the sufferings of the poor and the weak; God is not
supremely indifferent and detached, but is irrevocably committed to the
liberation of humankind, for God has chosen to be identified with all
people in a spirit of solidarity and compassion. If this is not a
true picture of God, then Jesus is not divine. If this is a true picture
of God, then God is more truly human, more thoroughly humane, than any
human being...
"Jesus was immeasurably more human than other human beings, and that
is what we value above all other things when we recognize him as divine,
when we acknowledge him as our Lord and our God."
If we accept that Jesus is God then the way He lived His life on earth is how we must live ours: "In
the last analysis faith is not a way of speaking or a way of thinking,
it is a way of living and can only be adequately articulated in a living
praxis...The beginning of faith in Jesus is the attempt to read the
signs of our times as Jesus read the signs of his times...we can begin
to analyze our times in the same spirit as he analyzed his times. We
would have to begin, as Jesus did, with compassion - for the starving
millions, for those who are humiliated and rejected, and for the
billions of the future who will suffer because of the way we live
today...
"Searching for the signs of the times in the spirit of Jesus, then,
will mean recognizing all the forces that are working against humanity
as the forces of evil...We shall have to try to understand the
structures of evil in the world as it is today. How much have we been
basing ourselves upon the worldly values of money, possessions,
prestige, status, privilege, power and upon the group solidarities of
family, race, class, party, religion and nationalism? To make these our
supreme values is to have nothing in common with Jesus."
Nolan concludes his book with one final challenge: "There is an
incentive that can mobilize the world, enable the 'haves' to lower their
standard of living and make us only too willing to redistribute the
world's wealth and its population. It is the same drive and incentive that motivated Jesus: compassion and faith...With
this kind of approach to the problems of our time one will surely come
to recognize the impending catastrophe as a unique opportunity for the
coming of the 'kingdom.'...God is speaking to us in a new way today. Jesus can help us to understand the voice of Truth..."