It’s hard to avoid the figure of Jesus in the Western world. Jesus is both pivotal and controversial. Philosopher Carl Jaspers names him as one of four major paradigmatic figures in human history - along with Socrates, who taught us to think; Confucius, who taught us the good moral order that binds a nation; and Buddha, who taught the spiritual reality behind the illusions of stability. Jesus taught the universal love that should extend beyond the borders of our limited affiliations
Felix Adler, who founded Ethical Culture, came of age in the 19th century, when Higher Criticism was emerging in Europe. In a lecture delivered December 31, 1876, in New York, and included in his book, “Creed and Deed,“ he addressed the topic of “The Founder of Christianity.” Adler was aware of the scholarship now impinging on the Gospel story. Renan, for example, had written his “Life of Jesus” in 1863, David Friedrich Strauss his presentation of Jesus in 1836, and Reimarus, in many ways the father of Enlightenment criticism in New Testament studies, had been published posthumously, in the previous century.
Adler echoes that scholarship in saying: “The New Testament presents but scant material for the biography of Jesus, and the authenticity, even of the little that remains to us, has been rendered extremely uncertain by the labors of modern critics.” Yet he concluded that there was enough to go on. He said: “A few leading narratives, however, are doubtless trustworthy, and these will suffice for our purpose.”
On that remainder of trustworthy witness, Adler commented: “There is a rare and gracious quality in the personality of Jesus as described in the Gospels, which has exercised its charm upon the most heterogeneous nations and periods of history wide apart in the order of time and of culture.” He placed Jesus squarely within the Hebrew prophetic tradition, and found compelling not so much the originality claimed for his teaching but his acting on the principle of Righteousness, especially in going to the poorer of society, and in “rousing against the offender the better nature in himself.” “It was,” Adler asserted, “the humanity, not the dogma of Jesus, by which Christianity triumphed.”
In sum, Adler found in Jesus a winsome Exemplar of moral action.
Other Ethical Culture scholars have continued this fascination with the Jesus of history. In his book of 1916, “The Religion of Experience,” Horace Bridges, who for more than 30 years was later the Leader of the Chicago Ethical Society, gave a chapter to “The Re-Discovery of Jesus Christ.” Once again, the Ethical scholar addresses the critical studies of his day in approaching the Gospels, drawing on studies by Arnold, Seeley, Schmidt, and Schmiedel, plus the work of critics that dismiss the historical Jesus as mythological. Bridges doesn’t buy that theory, contending that the chief reason for believing in the historicity of Jesus lies in the conflict of the picture of him reconstructed by criticism as a human being with virtually no supernatural attributes and the picture afterwards fabricated of him and framed in the creeds as a transcendental being with scarcely any vestige of humanity left about him.
Bridges then runs through the Gospels pointing out their special interests and gives special attention to the Parables of Jesus. He develops facets of the message of Jesus, such as “the inner secret of the democratic faith of Jesus… is his recognition of the hidden fineness even of vile persons.” Once they, like the Prodigal, “come to themselves.” For Bridges, the conclusions established by modern study argue for a Jesus who saw no difference between himself and other humans, who was a free-thinker, appealing to independent moral judgement, who was no miracle-monger, who disbelieved in special providences, and who believed not in man’s depravity but his greatness.
But Bridges did not believe in an imitation of Jesus, did not advocate looking to Jesus, but rather a looking with him to the sources of moral insight and to the challenge that awaits us all in a world not consistent with the righteous laws that are the structural principles of our nature. In sum, Bridges concludes: “The true resurrection of Jesus consists in the appropriation of his long-forgotten spirit and principles.” Bridges uses “resurrection’ in this special sense, which he applies also to the resurrection of Socrates and the rising again from the dead of the spirit of Aristotle. But he does join Adler in finding a positive inspiration in the figure of Jesus, newly recovered from the overlay of ecclesiastical dogma.
Another Ethical Culture scholar who dealt extensively with the story of Jesus was David Muzzey. In “Ethics As A Religion” (1951), Muzzey has a chapter on “Ethical Religion and Christianity.” Like his Ethical colleagues and in keeping with the growing scholarship of the Quest of Jesus, Muzzey contended that the “Christ of the church” had been substituted for the “Jesus of the Gospels,” with the elaboration of creeds and ceremonies that Jesus would have found alien to his spirit and with an eventual unholy alliance with the political state. Muzzey regrets that Jesus was elevated to the position of an oriental monarch to be bowed down to. And, he declares, “ethical religion is free of all this theological sophistry.” And he appealed for a new religion of humanity that would fulfill the dreams of Jesus and prophets like him in every age.
Through this presentation by Muzzey one reads between the lines his deep admiration for Jesus. This admiration received articulate expression in an earlier book by Muzzey, entitled “Spiritual Heroes - A Study of Some of the World’s Prophets.” This dates back to 1902, but was republished for another generation in 1959 by arrangement with Muzzey, so that we may assume his continuing imprimatur on his thought of over 50 years earlier.
Muzzey is aware that to treat Jesus under the category of “hero” will offend the orthodox believer, but he does this, he says, in the spirit of the historian. He traces the early history of Jesus and finds in the documents “substantial accuracy” in delineating his teaching. He saw Jesus taking on the role of Messiah or Deliverer for his people, but losing their allegiance when his deliverance focused not on military opposition to the imperial power but on inner moral reform. Jesus’ early popularity and his attacks on a religion of outward observances also ranged the religious authorities against him, and they eventually took the opportunity of his protest in Jerusalem to encompass his death. If the church that distorted his image and his message has hidden him from us, we must nevertheless “strive to know this wonderful man of Nazareth,” and not “lose sight of his marvelous life in Galilee two thousand years ago, and his lasting service to the human race.”
The several final pages of Muzzey’s exposition represent a paean of praise for Jesus as the “absolute type of the religious man,” as one who consistently went to the spiritual core of every human problem, to “the heart motive behind the act,” past the ceremonial, past political compromise, speaking with “final simplicity and power the word that is nearest to every humblest mortal heart, the one word love.” That Jesus obviously touched Muzzey’s life is clear in his concluding remarks that “when one touches on the highest and holiest that history has to show, there is a quickening of the pulse and bating of the breath. I confess that without the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth, religion, the supreme treasure of humanity, were to me a sealed book.”
In many secular humanist circles, the above encomiums to Jesus, though shorn of ecclesiastical dogma, would be questioned. Skeptics would argue that if one takes the words of Jesus seriously, about hell-fire, for example, they do not argue for an exemplary moral model. Muzzey would answer that we need to understand Jesus within the concepts of his time, many of which he borrowed and used but transformed. While his contemporaries saw a great divide between the justified and the damned, Jesus took up their picture only to stand it on its head, and, in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, to declare that the final denouement would be filled with surprises: justification would depend not on correctness of theological doctrine or religious observance but on one’s humanity to one’s fellow-humans. Veritably a humanist manifesto!
History is semper reformans. The picture of the past changes as we view it with new perspectives. So with our understanding of Jesus. It is the argument of this article that there is in Ethical Culture history a reservoir of positive comment on Jesus of Nazareth, which is critical and rational, but warmly appreciative. We are urged still, in the words of Muzzey: “Seek not his doctrine in the pomp of ecclesiasticism, or the ponderous volumes of theologians, or the manifold creeds of Christendom; but read the Gospels.”
John Hoad, Ph.D.
Posted by John Hoad on January 10, 2003