Review by Charles W Sensel Reprinted by Permission
Seeing Through the Eyes of Jesus: His Revolutionary View of Reality and His Transcendent Significance for Faith by John F Baggett (Author) Grand Rapids: William B Eerdmans Publishers (October 16, 2008) Paperback: 409 pages ISBN-10: 080286340X
Once in a great while a superb book comes along that truly makes a difference. Seeing Through the Eyes of Jesus: His Revolutionary View of Reality and His Transcendent Significance for Faith is such a volume. It is a highly readable and down to earth study of the historical Jesus and of New Testament Christology. Many types of educated readers will find it enjoyable, informative and challenging. It is particularly well suited for pastors and for college and seminary students. I recommend it without reservation as a text in courses where there are students who have difficulty with the place of critical scholarship in Biblical studies.
This is not just another book about the historical Jesus. It weaves together exegetical, historical, anthropological, psychological, theological and spiritual thinking into a colorful and useful fabric. It offers a framework for transcending and moving beyond a number of contemporary polarizing discussions on a wide range of important Biblical and theological topics. In doing so, it paves the way for a more respectful scholastic dialogue and a more productive interchange among diverse communities of faith. Among the book’s significant contributions are the following:
(1) It reframes the quest for the historical Jesus by shifting the focus away from the notion of biography and the currently popular question of which particular template, such as teacher, philosopher, spiritual healer, and apocalyptic preacher, might be the correct one. Instead Baggett proposes that we seek to understand Jesus as a self-in-relationship. He asserts that the Jesus of history can be known to us if we cease looking at him as an historical object and examine instead Jesus’ relationships with God and neighbor as indicated by the earliest traditions upon which the Evangelists depended.
(2) It suggests a fresh resolution to the ongoing debate about the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. Rather than framing the question as one of Messianic consciousness, or of the symbolic differences in the sources between expressions of the faith of Jesus and the New Testament community’s articulation of the faith in Jesus, Baggett invites us to see instead the congruent transcendent reality to which both sets of language are pointing.
(3) It seeks to articulate a relevant Christology for the 21st century that affirms both the full humanity and the full divinity of Jesus in our time. He expresses concern that many churches today appear to present Jesus more as a half man and half god than the Christ who is both fully human and fully divine, while those outside the church dismiss altogether the divinity of Jesus as absurd. He asserts that historical Jesus studies, when approached correctly, can make a powerful contribution to our contemporary understanding of the full humanity of Jesus. And he maintains that a contextual understanding of the New Testament metaphors which point to the divinity of Jesus can assist in understanding what is existentially and spiritually at stake when we are confronted by the New Testament witness to Jesus’ transcendent significance.
(4) It challenges the popular notion that scholarly and devotional approaches to Scriptures are mutually exclusive. While acknowledging that each type must have integrity within its own domain, Baggett believes that scholarly study and faith-based study have much to contribute to each other. Scholarly study is at its best when it clarifies the language of a text and the context in which it arose, and these contributions are of great benefit to those who devotionally seek to understand the meaning of that text and open themselves in faith to it. But scholarly study also can benefit from faith based interpretation, for a hermeneutics that is unable to grasp and appreciate spiritual meaning will always miss the intended message of the text.
(5) It suggests an alternative to modernist absolutism and post-modern relativism. If by relativism one means that anyone’s truth is as good as another’s, Baggett calls that an illusion, as demonstrated by harmful psychiatric delusions. If by absolutism one means that a human being can have access to absolute knowledge of reality, whether through reason or revelation, then not only is that an illusion, it is hubris. The New Testament understanding trumps both modernism and post-modernism, according to the author, not as a return to a first century worldview, but as a testimony to the nature of revelation as address rather than information. There is a truth of faith that is of ultimate importance, but it can only be known through faith and faithfulness, and cannot be imposed imperially on another. The truth of faith is not, however, the only kind of truth, although there is a faith component in the establishment of all agreed upon knowledge. In a luminously written Addendum on method, Baggett articulates an understanding of truth that is multi-dimensional, a distinction of great importance for the understanding of Biblical texts which are often misunderstood by both believers and skeptics because they tend to look through the one dimensional lenses of literalism and modern historicism.
(6) It lays the groundwork for a fresh interfaith dialogue in a chapter titled “The Revealing Word.” Through the framework of the prologue to the Gospel of John and other New Testament passages, Baggett affirms both the universality and the particularity of the Christ Word. He suggests that one can stand firmly in the unique revelation of God in Jesus Christ and discern with appreciation and respect the Christ Word in the religions of the world, and among the non-religious as well. In a time when Christian exclusivism is often manifested as bigotry, and universalism frequently represents an uncritical inclusivism, this chapter offers hope for an increasingly diverse society.
(7) It turns on its head the modern secular belief, articulated by Freud and many others, that religious faith is an illusion. Baggett asserts that the life of unfaith is the one that is lived in illusion. Reality includes both world and spirit. It includes both the way life is and the Spirit that posits it. When we deny spiritual reality we are not living in reality. He is not suggesting we return to the worldview of the first century. Rather, we should open ourselves to the Word in Jesus Christ that transforms our way of seeing so that we can live in all of reality, as God intends our lives to be lived.
The book is divided into two parts. The first part is focused on the historical Jesus. Each chapter title begins with “Jesus and” underscoring the importance of Jesus’ relationships to historical understanding. Those relationships include, Abba, the desert prophets, the disabled, the destitute, the despised, the devout, the despots, and the disciples. Part two is devoted to the Christ of faith and looks at clusters of metaphors that point to the transcendent significance of Jesus. The chapters are as follows: The Revolutionary Hero, The Revealing Word, The Redeeming Sacrifice, The Reconciling Savior, The Reigning Lord and The Resurrected Life. The final chapter, titled “Jesus, Reality and the Life of Faith,” pulls together into a coherent theme the many threads of the book. Each of the book’s chapters contains fresh textual insights and illuminating contextual information drawn from cultural anthropology.
As rich as the chapters are, the reader should not skip the footnotes. Whether one reads them along with the text, or comes back to them in a second perusal, they are worth the effort. In many ways, my favorite part of the book is the Addendum. It is perhaps the clearest statement of historical, critical, existential and theological Biblical methodology that I have seen. It should be must reading in every introductory Bible course at the college level and above.
While a reader might nitpick on this point or that, Seeing Through the Eyes of Jesus is a brilliantly conceived and executed work. There is no better book available to date to help us see and embrace reality as persons of faith. I am recommending it to everyone I know.
Charles W. Sensel
International Bonhoeffer Society (English-language section) and retired United Methodist Pastor
