Does the church act triumphalistically, or treat its people arrogantly? Is it an agent for the suppression of human needs and aspirations? Does it foster intolerance and small-mindedness? Does the church proclaim a gospel of success and offer Jesus as a better business partner? Does it encourage an ethos of prosperity
to the neglect of the earth’s good, or an individualistic spirituality to the neglect of the world’s needy? Are its leaders corrupt and coercive? Such distortions of Christianity can find no harsher critic, no more radical rejecter, than the Jesus found only in the pages of the New Testament, the Jesus who was himself emptied out for others and called his followers to do the same. The Jesus to whom Saint Francis of Assisi appealed in his call for a poor and giving rather than a powerful and grasping church was not the Historical Jesus but the Jesus of the Gospels. One must only wonder why this Jesus is not also the “real Jesus” for those who declare a desire for religious truth, and theological integrity,
and honest history.
~Luke Timothy Johnson
