The Next Step in Religion: An Essay toward the Coming Renaissance

by Roy Wood Sellars

The Jews of the day cherished the idea that a Messianic kingdom would be established. Jesus shared in this expectation; but it is certain that he thought of it less as a restoration of the Jewish state to power than a change in the position of the mass of the people. In other words, he infused the belief with a finer ethical meaning more in accordance with his concept of God and his sense of what was really valuable and important. There is no means of knowing his entire attitude toward this popular belief in a supernatural kingdom to be established by God upon earth, but he undoubtedly retained its main outlines. He was a child of his age although a notably sincere and high-minded one.

About 28 A. D. John appeared and preached in the wilderness. Jesus went to hear him because of the natural interest he aroused. It is quite probable that he was baptized by John. We do not know whether he associated himself with John or not. At any rate John's message crystallized his own ideas and he felt called upon to continue his mission. He did not proclaim himself as the Messiah but simply preached that the kingdom of God was at hand and that men were to prepare for it. This preparation was of an ethical sort and largely ascetic in character.

Palestine was in a ferment at this time and his appearance and preaching aroused great interest. Like all prophets he was called upon to heal the sick and, accepting the customary views of sickness, he proceeded to exorcise the evil spirits which possessed those who were brought to him. I do not see how he could have escaped this task. What part accident played in giving him confidence cannot be known, but it was probably large. There is no reason to doubt that there is a ground of fact for these stories of healing, although they have been grossly exaggerated by later tradition when he was viewed as divine. We must always remember how late and biased our sources are.

As time went on, he gained more confidence in himself. Since he was human, he could not help being moved by the confidence of the people. He felt that reforms should be made; everywhere was poverty and sickness and unhappiness. Could the thought help coming to him that perhaps he was the one to inaugurate the kingdom? The idea kept coming back, forced upon him by his own reflection and by the questions and assumptions of his disciples. It may be that he never made up his mind but was forced by the course of events to go to Jerusalem where his career ended all too soon. Mankind will never know the details of his inner life; his doubts, hopes, decisions, indecisions are hidden from us in an obscurity that will never be completely lifted.

His preaching became more revolutionary. More and more he set himself in opposition to the mechanical observance of the law and the fanatical worship of forms and days. The opposition of the conservative members of priesthood increased in bitterness. Soon it was war to the knife between this new prophet, with his disregard for the law, and its chosen representatives. Thus Jesus had drifted into a position which he had probably not anticipated when he set out on his ministry. But this is always the way. Mohammed began as a reformer, and the antagonism of the keepers of Caaba led to his aggressive campaign; Luther and Huss and Wycliffe changed their attitude and their ideas at various moments in their career. No man's life is the working out of a fixed and ready-made plan. At any rate, he determined to go to Jerusalem—in all likelihood, as Pfleiderer suggests, in order to win a victory over the hierarchy and to realize the prophetic ideal in the center of the religious life of the Jewish nation. The people received him enthusiastically but his opponents were too strong and clever for him. He feared only secret assassination while they induced the Roman power to intervene.

The story draws to a close. In the garden of Gethsemane Jesus felt the possibility of a tragic end to his hopes of an early coming of the Kingdom. The real situation shines clear through all the legend which a later age has woven around it. When he saw himself surrounded by a multitude of armed men, he knew that resistance was vain. He was delivered into the hands of his enemies. Through all the humiliation and pain of those days, he seems to have hoped that his God would rescue him. It was only on the cross that he finally gave up hope. The heavens were dumb as they always have been and always will be.

The body of Jesus was probably thrown into the common pit reserved for malefactors, as Abbé Loisy suggests, while the story of the burial by Joseph of Arimathea grew up to save him from the terrible dishonor of such a last resting-place. The rest of the traditional narrative is unquestionably mythical. Paul speaks of him as buried and evidently thinks of the risen Jesus as an incorruptible or spiritual man. Paul did not believe in a bodily resurrection. The visions which led to a belief in the resurrection of Jesus were ecstatic in character. We must remember that the ancients were far less critical than we are in regard to dreams and illusions and did not consider a return to life in some shadowy form as very unusual. I have not the slightest difficulty in my own mind in accounting for the belief in the resurrection of Jesus in an entirely natural way. Once this belief arose and became important as a part of a new religion, the rise of legendary details was simply inevitable.

The position I have taken is relatively conservative. Many scholars have even become skeptical whether such a person as Jesus ever lived. We cannot be certain but it seems more plausible to give a relative credence to the older strands of tradition in the New Testament. That such an ethical reformer lived who believed in the coming of the Messianic kingdom, that he was embroiled with the priestly class and was done to death by them with the aid of the Roman governor who feared a seditious outbreak, that his disciples after his death came to believe in his resurrection and his coming Messiahship upon earth, all this appears to me more than probable. Human life is a fertile field for tragedy. The more we rid the narratives of their fairy-story accompaniments and see Jesus, not as a god who foreknows his human life and plays it out gravely as an actor who knows his role, but as a human being hurried to issues he had not at first dreamed of, the more his career becomes comprehensible. Its pathos is increased by this truer perspective, while the moral grandeur of his life gains by the human atmosphere which descends upon it. He lived his life sincerely as other men have done and did not dream of the use history would make of his name.