Jesus As a Gifted Teacher of Ethics

Many people believe that Jesus was an teacher ahead of his time but nothing more. His emphasis on a person’s intention, a core concept in our modern criminal justice system, demonstrates his forward thinking. They therefore acknowledge Jesus as innovative and gifted and are prone to focus on his advocacy of love as the alternative to retributive (payback) justice.

Those who admire Jesus for his nobility tend to wonder why everyone in the world can’t simply get along, without the pride, arrogance, and greed that seems to motivate many heads of state. If everyone followed Jesus’ teachings, they believe, there would be enduring peace. But, in the end, in their view Jesus, regardless of his genius, was still a man and nothing more.

Some nineteenth-century Protestant theologians saw in Jesus a spark of the divine, by which they seem to have meant that, more than most if not all others, he approximated the ideal man. But they refused to regard him as qualitatively different from the rest of us and saw nothing truly supernatural about Jesus. The traditional Christian claim that Jesus was God was, in their view, part of the mythology that developed around him, as the early Christians departed from conventional Judaism to establish a new religion centered on his ethics and our inner sense of the divine. What they most stumbled over was the claim at the heart of Christianity, that Jesus was God incarnate (in the flesh).

From this, they reached three further conclusions. First, Jesus could not have been birthed by a woman without human impregnation, so the notion of a virgin birth was actually untenable. Second, also untenable were all the miracles that writers of the New Testament report: restoring sight to the blind, healing the lame, multiplying food to feed multitudes, turning water into wine, bringing back to life a person who had died. None of this could truly have happened. Third, there is no way, from a modern point of view, to accept the claim that after Jesus was crucified, God caused the physical resurrection of Jesus. Among the difficulties of this perspective is the phrase, “from a modern point of view,” so it is worth knowing what it implies.

Some, in the tradition of skeptical Scottish philosopher David Hume, insist that because miracles in the New Testament usually happened only a few times, and a long time ago at that, there is no compelling reason to believe they ever happened. Along with Hume and his fellow so-called British empiricists, they take contemporary experience to be the criterion of truth. That few if any credible people today report having experienced or witnessed a miracle, however, is no proof they never happen or that Jesus never performed them. If there is a God and Jesus was God in the flesh, why not?

Another questionable line of reasoning is that, since science has shown miracles to be impossible and that everything that happens has a physical cause, claims of the miraculous are superstitions and unscientific. There is much to question here.

First, to suggest science has shown miracles to be impossible is to confuse a scientific with a philosophic question. Science deals with the natural, not the supernatural, and nothing in science can be taken to rule out the existence of the supernatural. It is also to accept that absence of evidence, in this case for the supernatural, amounts to evidence of its non-existence.

Second, a related point is the leap of faith required to assume, beyond doubt, that everything has a physical cause, which is to accept a fundamental assertion without sufficient evidence to support it. It would be far better to keep an open mind on the issue. Those who argue that everything has a physical cause tend to accept explanatory reductions as eliminative reductions. Because specific thoughts and emotions may all turn out to correspond to the firing of specific neurons in the brain is not the same as insisting that these thoughts and emotions are nothing but the firing of these neurons. Are love and loyalty only the byproducts of neurons firing? How about any sense you might have or right and wrong? And if so, where did this sense come from? How did it come to be built into the brain?