Hey, this is John Ortberg. I’m so glad you’re here for this one passage to wisdom. We’re looking at a book called screw tape letters. And I wanna talk to you today about Jesus. And can you really know, Jesus, can you have confidence that you are coming to know the person who lived 2000 years ago and that lives still, and this particular letter, which is amazingly prophetic old uncle screw tape writes to his junior nephew, tempter wormwood about how, since the person that wormwood supposed to be tempting has recommitted his life to God for a long time, it will be impossible to remove spirituality from his life. So uncle screw tape says very often, then we must corrupt it. And he notes that a as much darkness as can come out of a life of a tyrant or somebody who’s just thoroughly Deb botched, oftentimes a corrupted spiritual person, a Pharisee, a judgmental person, a spoiled Saint can do even more damage.
So screw tape writes. I think the best point of attack would be the borderline between theology and politics. That’s a very telling line in our day, 80 years later, where people are increasingly increasingly confused about whether their primary sense of identity and devotion is spiritual to God or political to their ideology. Uncle screw tape goes on. Um, several of his new friends are very much alive to the social implications of their religion. That in itself is a good thing, but it can be put to bad use. You’ll find a good many Christian political writers think that Christianity began to go wrong and departing from the doctrine of its founder at a very early stage. Now this idea must be used by us to encourage once again, the conception of a historical Jesus to be found by clearing away later accretions and perversions, and then to be contrasted with the whole Christian tradition.
Now this idea that there is a difference between the Christ of faith that people worship prey to who was resurrected, who is the son of God, that there’s a gap, a difference between him and the Jesus of Nazareth, that human being that was born in Bethlehem and the died on a cross in Jerusalem. This has been around for several centuries and, uh, the, uh, ideas behind it are a real important part of the culture in which we live the doubts that a lot of us face, if you’ve ever read the book, or you remember from 10 or 15 years ago, the book called the DaVinci codes. Very much part of the idea behind that book was that there was, or may well have been a Jesus that was actually alive, but the truth about his life has somehow been covered up. And that centuries later the church in collusion, maybe with the Roman empire developed this myth of resurrection and the divinity of Jesus.
And so if we could just get back to who was that guy that actually lived and what did he teach and what did he say? Then we would be standing on solid historical ground in the 18 hundreds as a consequence of the enlightenment. This, uh, caught a lot of momentum and there were actually literally believe it or not. Hundreds of books called the life of Jesus. Hundreds of versions of these that were written in the 18 hundreds about 1906, a man by the name of Albert Schweitzer. You remember that name, amazing human being brilliant scholar, doctor, world class musician humanitarian wrote a very influential book called the quest for the historical Jesus. And it turns out that, uh, all those different attempts to get behind the new Testament and try to find the real historical truth about the character who lived back then end up leading in very subjective paths.
And very often the Jesus that gets described by those different authors looks an awful lot like those particular authors. And so, uh, that quest is largely understood to have come to an end about the time that Schweitzer wrote his book, cuz it wasn’t leading to anything that historians could agree on as the Jesus that is somehow more historical uncle screw tape goes on in the last generation, we promoted the construction of such a historical Jesus on liberal and humanitarian lines. We are now putting forward a new historical Jesus on Marxian catastrophic and revolutionary lines. The advantages of these constructions, which we intend to change every 30 years or so are manifold. And again, this, these are just remarkably prophetic words, Lewis among other things was a brilliant scholar. And it turns out that after that first quest for the historical Jesus, about 10 years after this book, the screw tape letters was written.
What’s generally understood to be a second quest for the historical. Jesus was begun about 1953. And you might remember there was a, um, ongoing event called the Jesus seminar where some scholars and actually lots of people that were just kind of celebrities, Hollywood figures and so on would convene periodically. And they would vote with marbles of different colors. The extent to which they thought a particular saying or a particular event in the gospel was actually authentic, whether or not Jesus had it. And scholars worked on creating different criteria. For example, the criteria of embarrassment, the more embarrassing this story would’ve been to the early church, the more likely they thought it was authentic is who would make up an embarrassing story. But again, all of this kind of presupposes that, um, there was a historical underneath different than other than the figure of Jesus that we meet in the gospels.
And it would be possible through a variety of historical methods to uncover him kind of like tainting TA taking, uh, the surface paint off of a painting where there’s a, a real painting underneath it. And inevitably it continued just to lead to a very subjective situation where whoever the historical Jesus was turns out to teach what it was that the person who writes about him most wanted him to teach. So that second quest also pretty much ended up in kind of a subjective non-productive Moras, uh, Lewis Wrights here. We intend to change this every 30 years ago, uh, 30 years or so remarkably in the 1980s was begun. What is sometimes called a third quest for the historical Jesus. This one actually has been, I think, somewhat less subjective and more productive. And it has mostly involved taking much more seriously the Jewishness of Jesus, part of what triggered this was people reflecting on the fact that the Holocaust, the genocide of millions of Jewish people took place in Germany, which among other things was the heart of new Testament scholarship for much of the 20th century and scholars asked, how could it be possible that a place that was, uh, so involved in new Testament scholarship was the place that exterminated, um, God’s people, the Jewish race.
And one of the realizations that came out of that was, uh, how for a long time in the church, there has been a tendency to neglect or deny or not focus on the fact that Jesus was Jewish and that his Jewishness and the Jewishness of his early followers and that close relationship between the church and the Jewish people had been badly neglected. And so that’s something that you read about a lot more than you would’ve read about, um, 50 or 80 years ago. Old screw tape goes on the documents that is the new Testament documents, say what they say and cannot be added to each new historical Jesus therefore has got to be got out of them by suppression. At one point, this story, this name must not be accurate and exaggeration at another. And by that sort of guessing, brilliant is the adjective. We teach humans to apply to it on which nobody would risk $10 in ordinary life.
And then one more comment from old uncle screw tape about this. He writes about how, uh, nobody is brought to faith pretty much by reading a biography and we don’t have a full length biography of Jesus at all. The earliest converts were converted by a single historical fact, the resurrection and a single theological doctrine, the redemption operating on a sense of sin they already had and sin not against some new fancy dress law produced as a novelty by a great man, but against the old platitude in this universal moral law, which they had been taught by their nurses and their mothers, Jesus came not to teach some new morality. Interestingly enough, the moral truth that Jesus taught was quite similar. Lewis writes about this on a book called the abolition of man with moral truth that has been taught by all religion and all great tradition.
He came to say that now it’s possible to live. And the reality of the kingdom of God God’s presence and God’s reign and the new Testament documents were written, uh, out of quite careful eyewitness testimony in oral cultures, we understand a lot more about the nature of oral cultures and the oral transmission of history than people did a hundred or 200 years ago. And all of that means that we can be very confident that the Jesus that we meet in the new Testament, gospels is the Jesus who lived in Israel and is the resurrected Christ of faith whom we worship. It is still true that we meet him on the grounds of the crucifixion and the resurrection, and that we can know him and learn from him and follow him and love him in the records that God has provided. And so I wanna invite you to read those books, Matthew and mark, and Luke and John, and ask God to help you meet the Jesus whose life and death and resurrection is found there. And I’ll see you next time.