Christ Is the Question

Christ Is the Question. By Wayne A. Meeks. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006. x + 166 pp. $12.97 (paper).

This is not a typical treatment of the historical Jesus. Nonetheless, in this book, which originated as lectures at Emory given at the request of Luke Timothy Johnson, Wayne Meeks tackles "this most central of issues for the New Testament Scholar and for the Christian" (p. ix). Those familiar with Meeks's work on the sociological and moral worlds of early Christian communities, especially those urban assemblies connected with Paul, will recognize a similar depth of scholarship and insight. Here, he answers different questions and addresses himself to a broader audience.

In the first chapter, Meeks introduces the theme of Christ as question. Noting that historical scholarship creates as many problems as it solves, he observes that "many Christians I know who have lived long and deeply in the faith also have more questions than answers and, even more surprisingly, believe that questions may be more expressive of their faith and better pointers to the ground of their confidence than 'answers'" (p. 3).

In the first and second chapters, Meeks tells the story of the rise of "scientific history" (p. 14) and its complex relationship with Jesus. Here, he is indebted to his Yale colleague Louis Dupré, especially in Passage to Modernity. Despite the optimism which is still expressed by those who would promote history as the means to a single vision, contradictory images of Jesus proliferate, in some cases because of different critical readings of the Bible. Meeks takes aim at both old and new quests for the historical Jesus, rehearsing the history of the former's demise with Schweitzer and at the same time likening the new quests to the old: "Once again, however, the modernist longing to discover true facts about Jesus, to find the hidden key that will explain him with a stroke, proves irrepressible" (p. 30). Meeks resists the tendency to dismiss the Enlightenment: "I grew up in the fundamentalist, racist, smalltown South, and I rejoice to say that I lived some of that story of liberation" (p. 34), Nevertheless, he sees problems with the "literalism, cognitivism, privatism, and romanticism," which infect religions life in modernity (p. 37).

With regard to literalism he gives a useful summary of the views of his late colleague Hans Frei on the distinction between the meaning of the Bible and its historical reference. For Frei, the confusion of these results in an inability, common to fundamentalists and liberals alike, to take adequate account of one of the chief genres in the Bible, namely realistic, history-like narrative (p. 35). Meeks's main constructive proposal, at the end of the second chapter, owes much to Frei. Like Frei, Meeks moves away from attempts to uncover the Jesus behind the text by using a different conception of personal identity than typical modern ones. Relying on trends in philosophy, social psychology, and literary theory, Meeks advocates a "social, transactional model of the self," according to which identity is a "process, not a substance" (p. 59). This allows him to reconceive inquiry into the historical Jesus as open-ended investigation into a person whose identity consists of the stories that others tell about him in an ongoing process of interpretation and who indeed alters the "master narratives" of his culture in away that "made history" (p. 61).

In the third and fourth chapters, Meeks examines this "Christological process," (p. 75) by which Jesus reshapes the entire biblical narrative. He shows how this is true in the gospel writers and in Paul respectively. Meeks's account of Paul, centered on the logos of the cross in 1 Corinthians, is a masterful, concise treatment of the apostles effort to reread all Scripture in light of the paschal mystery.

In the fifth chapter, Meeks questions the use of the phrase "the Bible clearly teaches," returning to the theme from which the book takes its title. The chapter is beautifully illustrated with an example from his own experience as a student pastor. Here, Meeks returns to Frei, as well as Kathryn Tanner's related account of the plain sense of Scripture. He demonstrates the usefulness of some very difficult writing about biblical interpretation, Meeks advocates the abandonment of the Reformers' doctrine of the claritas scripturae. He suggests that whatever usefulness this may have had as a polemical doctrine is spent and that it would be better to acknowledge that reading the Bible involves a "rigorous discipline that entails, among other things, learning to be comfortable with ambiguity and a willingness to admit that there are things we do not know" (p. 118).

In the sixth chapter, Meeks addresses the question "Is Jesus the last word?" Here, he brings Timothy Radcliffe and the Apostle Paul into the conversation. He manages to develop a model for thinking about the finality of Jesus which eschews imperial ambitions and yet makes substantive claims in the public square. Like much of the book, this concluding chapter defies attempts to pin Meeks down in the simplistic dichotomies that corrupt so much theological and political discourse in the church today. Meeks opts for a path of faithfulness that unsettles all facile answers to the many questions raised by Jesus.