The Case for the Real Jesus

by Lee Strobel

  Now the motivational speaker and life coach has created her own belief system, patching together bits and pieces from Christianity, Buddhism, paganism, metaphysics, and a lot from the Tao-te Ching, which teaches that everything is made of energy. “I take what resonates with me from each religion,” she said. Her criterion for picking and choosing elements is based on “what works.”

  Moral codes? “Just religion’s excuse to judge other people.” Ethical behavior? “I don’t believe in right or wrong. It just is. If it feels like something that I should do, then I’ll do it.” The afterlife? “There isn’t some man in the sky waiting to send you to hell every time you do something wrong. And there is no Santa Claus sitting, waiting to reward you for doing good things, either.”

  Tolerance is an overriding virtue. “I believe everybody’s belief system is right for them,” she said. “Mine is right for me, yours is right for you, my mom’s is right for her, and so on. I don’t believe in judging each other the way that I see happening in Christianity and other religions.” Rather than trying to convert anyone to her beliefs, she helps others find their own personal god or goddess.3

  For Ed and Joanne, years of Catholic education only made them more neurotic rather than teaching them how to cope. So like Wendi, they’ve cobbled together their own religion. They decided to keep Jesus, because he’s “big on love,” and then they mixed in elements from popular Zen and New Age authors. The concept of hell was quickly jettisoned. “That’s just something they say to scare you,” according to Ed. Said a Washington Post article on their self-fashioned spirituality:

  Now they commune with a new God, a gentle twin of the one they grew up with. He is wise but soft-spoken, cheers them up when they’re sad, laughs at their quirks. He is, most essentially, validating, like the greatest of friends. And best of all, he had been there all along. “We discovered the God within,” said Joanne. “That’s why we need God. Because we are God.

  God gives me the ability to create my own godliness.”4

  For many seekers, the quest for spiritual answers doesn’t take them down the path toward a high-tech suburban megachurch or the liturgy of a mainline denomination. They’re not interested in what a black-robed clergyman tells them they should believe—after all, why should his opinions trump anyone else’s?

  “People have shifted religious authority away from creeds, traditions, and churches and assumed it themselves,” said James R. Edwards of Whitworth College. “People are less inclined today to defer to established religious authorities, and more inclined to express their own religious preferences.”5

  Increasingly, people seeking religious input draw more from the Internet than from church history, more from their own intuition than formal study. They stress sincerity over doctrinal specifics. They feel untethered to their religious upbringing and are more than willing to interpret Jesus in a fresh light for a new generation. According to a 2005 survey by CBS, 38 percent of Americans say the search for spirituality—no matter where that takes them—is more important than sticking to the traditions of their church.6

  “This tendency to mix elements of different traditions into new hybrid forms will continue in the new millennium, as seekers separated from their religious heritage search out new expressions of faith,” Richard Cimino and Don Lattin wrote in their examination of American spirituality called Shopping for Faith. “Brand name religion is on the wane. The wide range of spiritual texts and self-help books comprise an endless menu of spiritual teachings that can be selected and combined to suit individual needs.”7

  DO-IT-YOURSELF SPIRITUALITY

  When you wed the American independent streak with a postmodern skepticism toward institutions, you set the stage for what theologians call “syncretism,” which is the blending of elements from various faiths into a new form of spirituality. Like grazing at the buffet table at a sumptuous banquet, syncretists adopt doctrines that seem appropriate to them and leave behind others that they regard as offensive or outdated. Orthodoxy becomes “flexidoxy.”

  The CBS survey disclosed that 36 percent of Americans combine the teachings of more than one religion into their own faith.8 Thus, Los Angeles Lakers basketball coach Phil Jackson calls himself “a Zen Christian,” while a well-known actress once identified herself as a Christian who is “into goddess worship.” One Presbyterian minister described how he was taken aback when a woman introduced herself to him by saying, “I’m a Presbyterian Buddhist.”9

  “It’s an eclectic approach,” said Lynn Garrett, who tracks religious trends in the book industry. “People borrow ideas from different traditions, then add them to whatever religion they’re used to. But they don’t want anything to do with organized religion.”10

  Indeed, the attitude of many Americans is that they like Jesus but not the church, which they see as exclusivistic, condemning, intolerant, and intent on strapping people into a straitjacket of rigid dogma. But the Jesus they like may look very different from the historical Jesus. If the traditional church imagines Jesus as a finely painted portrait, then syncretists often render him as abstract art—many times to the point where he’s unrecognizable from the Jesus of ancient creeds.

  For syncretists, that’s okay. Many of them find their Jesus more satisfying than the judgmental Jesus they learned about in Sunday school. Besides, they assert, who’s to say which Jesus is more “real” than the other? If history is all based on someone’s interpretation, then nobody can be certain who Jesus was and what he taught anyway. In this age when “you have your truth and I have mine,” the important issue becomes what “works” for each individual life.

  “What seems to have happened is that the concept of a personal God or of a historical Jesus has been replaced by an idea of God or of Jesus,” said Edwards. “And like any idea—that of freedom of speech, for example—ideas of God and Jesus can be interpreted differently.”11

  When looking through the kaleidoscope of syncretism, the image of Jesus is broken up into all sorts of new and exciting colors and shapes. Freed from belief in an absolute truth, syncretists graft elements of Native American religion, Eastern philosophies, Jewish mysticism, or pre-Christian paganism onto his identity. What emerges is a Jesus customized for their worldview—a designer Jesus.

  Thomas Jefferson is a good example. A skeptic toward the supernatural, he used a razor blade to excise references in the Gospels about Jesus’ miracles, deity, and resurrection, leaving behind only his moral teachings. This radically altered view of Jesus matched Jefferson’s philosophy perfectly. “I’m a sect myself,” he said—a church of one.

  Today, Oprah Winfrey is the queen of syncretism. She grew up in Faith United Mississippi Baptist Church, where she garnered the nickname “Miss Jesus,” and attended Chicago’s progressive Trinity United Church of Christ for a while as an adult. But she has embraced and endorsed so many religious trends through the years that one journalist said, “It’s almost impossible to answer this simple question: What does Oprah believe?”12 Marcia Nelson, who wrote a book on Winfrey’s spirituality, observed, “The gospel according to Oprah doesn’t appear to require some kind of doctrinal commitment.”13

  Said journalist David Ian Miller:

  America has a long history of do-it-yourself spirituality going back at least as far as Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists. And that desire to “roll your own religion” shows no sign of fading away. A September 2005 Newsweek poll found eight in ten Americans do not believe any one faith is the sole path to salvation. So it’s no surprise that some are weaving together strands from a variety of faiths to create their own personal religions.14

  All of this sounds appealing to many people. What could be wrong with Wendi’s nonjudgmental approach and her willingness to grant everyone the freedom to personally fashion a faith to fit themselves? Why shouldn’t Ed and Joanne be able to accept the love of Jesus while overlooking his teachings about hell? Why can’t people follow what’s in their heart without condemning others who believe differe
ntly? Certainly that would seem to be helpful in calming tensions between world religions.

  In the end, isn’t a person’s sincerity more important than whether he or she adheres to every clause in a denominational statement of faith? As Winfrey asked, “Does God care about your heart or whether you called his Son Jesus?”15

  My wife and I were chatting about these sorts of issues in my office one Saturday afternoon. The particularly apt title of a book, crowded among many others on my shelves, caught her eye: True for You, but Not for Me.

  She pulled it out and perused it. “Maybe you ought to talk to the person who wrote this,” she suggested as she closed the book and handed it to me.

  I was familiar with the author, Paul Copan, chair of philosophy and ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Now that Leslie had mentioned him, I recalled that he’s among the leading experts in this area. “That’s a good idea,” I said—and within days I had made arrangements to fly to Florida and meet with him in his offices in West Palm Beach.

  INTERVIEW #5: PAUL COPAN, PH.D.

  Tall and slender, his light brown hair neatly parted on the side, Paul Copan looks considerably younger than his forty-four years. A father of five, with a low-key and self-effacing manner, Copan is engaging, easy-going, and erudite in conversation. He’s equally at home speaking with college students or interacting with the intellectual elite in philosophy of religion, having edited books with contributions by conservative scholars Craig Evans, Ben Witherington III, and Alister McGrath; liberals John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and Roy Hoover; Jewish intellectuals Jacob Neusner and Herb Basser; and skeptic Gerd Lüdemann.

  After graduating cum laude with a master’s degree in philosophy of religion from Trinity International University (thesis topic: “The Impossibility of an Infinite Temporal Regress of Events”), Copan earned his doctorate in philosophy from Marquette University. He has taught at Trinity and Bethel seminaries, worked alongside well-known Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias, and is a member of half a dozen professional philosophy societies. He has authored scores of articles and reviews for philosophical journals and lectured at a number of notable institutions, including Harvard, Boston College, State University of New York, and Moscow State University.

  Copan has written and edited nearly a dozen books. True for You, but Not for Me isn’t the only one relevant to the topic I wanted to discuss with him. He has also authored That’s Just Your Interpretation, How Do You Know You’re Not Wrong? and Loving Wisdom: Christian Philosophy of Religion. He coedited The Rationality of Theism, Who Was Jesus? A Jewish-Christian Discussion, Jesus’ Resurrection: Fact or Figment, Philosophy: Christian Approaches in the New Millennium, and Science: Christian Approaches in the New Millennium.

  Though his five children consume much of his free time, Copan also has been involved with an all-volunteer organization that raises funds for micro-enterprise development loans in such countries as Nigeria, Peru, India, Mexico, Thailand, and Haiti.

  We sat down at a round wooden table in the corner of his office, flanked by floor-to-ceiling shelves teeming with books. Random traffic noises from a downtown street, including the occasional moan of a delivery truck, leaked into the room. I started with a broad question to lay the foundation for our discussion. As I did so, I thought of Pontius Pilate’s question two millennia ago: “What is truth?”16

  IT’S ALL RELATIVE

  “We’re living in a postmodern era in which concepts like ‘truth’ and ‘morality’ are more elastic than in the past,” I said to Copan. “How do you define postmodernism?”

  Immediately, I noticed something about Copan: he’s an intense listener. He concentrates with laser-beam focus on whatever topic is being raised. After mulling over my question for a few moments, he offered a brief historical perspective on the issue.

  “First, it’s helpful to know what modernism involves,” Copan said. “Modernism can be traced back to René Descartes, the seventeenth-century French philosopher who is famous for his pursuit of certainty. Even though he was a committed Roman Catholic, he displaced God as the starting point for knowledge, replacing him with the individual knower who can find certainty on his own.

  “Descartes said that one thing he couldn’t doubt was that he was thinking, so his starting point for knowledge became, ‘I think, therefore, I am.’ There was a sense in which you had to have a hundred-percent certainty or you can’t know something,” Copan continued. “Later, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel offered huge explanatory systems that attempted to put everything into neat packages.

  “So postmodernism is a reaction to Descartes’s quest for certainty and to the creation of systems like rationalism, romanticism, Marxism, Nazism, or scientism. These systems tend to oppress people who disagree with those in power—the Jews under Nazism and the capitalists under Marxism, for example. French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard said that, simplifying to the extreme, postmodernism is suspicion toward a metanarrative, which is a ‘world story’ that’s taken to be true for all people in all cultures and which ends up oppressing people.”

  I was thinking through the implications as he was talking. “The idea, then, is that certainty leads to oppression?” I asked.

  “When people are so certain that they’ve got the truth and believe their system explains everything, then people who disagree with them are on the outside. They end up in Auschwitz or the Soviet gulags,” he said. “So instead of metanarratives, postmodernism emphasizes mininarratives. In other words, each person has his or her own viewpoint or story.”

  “And each viewpoint is as valid as any other,” I said, more of an observation than a question.

  “That’s the postmodern view, yes. Each person has his own narrative, and who’s to say anyone is wrong? Postmodernism celebrates diversity. Postmoderns approach certainty and objectivity by pointing out that we’re finite and limited. We’re limited by our cultural and family background, our place in history, and our personal biases. We’re not totally objective or neutral. There’s a suspicion toward sweeping truth claims, which are seen as power-grabbing: whoever is in charge can say ‘this is true’ and then back it up by oppressing those who disagree.”

  “And suspicion of truth contributes to relativism,” I commented.

  “Right. To the relativist, no fact is true in all times and all places. Objective relativism says that the beliefs of a person are ‘true’ for him but not necessarily for anyone else. No truth is objectively true or false. This means that one person’s ‘truth,’ which really amounts to his opinion, can directly conflict with another person’s ‘truth’ and still be valid.

  “Religious relativism says one religion can be true for one person or culture but not for another. No religion provides a metanarrative or ‘big picture’ for everyone. No religion is universally or exclusively true. You can have your kind of Jesus and I can have mine; it doesn’t matter if our views contradict each other. Moral relativism says there’s no universal right and wrong. Moral values are true—or ‘genuine’—for some but not for others. Since there are different expressions of morality in the world, there’s no reason to think that one viewpoint is any more true than any other.”

  I searched my mind for an example. “So adultery can be okay for some people but not for others?” I asked.

  “In the view of the moral relativist, yes,” he replied. “Something is wrong only if you feel it’s wrong. Now, relativists may not approve of adultery and may even have strong reservations about it. But they’ll say, ‘Who am I to say someone else is wrong?’

  “Then there’s historical relativism, which says we can’t know for sure what happened in the past, so we’re merely left with differing opinions or interpretations of these events. As the saying goes, ‘You’ve got your truth, I’ve got mine.’”

  Even his cursory survey of relativism was enough to surface a host of obvious problems. “What are the greatest shortcomings of relativism?” I asked.

  “Relativism falls apart logically when you e
xamine it. As a worldview, it simply doesn’t work,” he said.

  I was looking for specifics. “Tell me why,” I said.

  “For instance, the relativist believes that relativism is true not just for him but for every person. He believes that relativism applies to the nonrelativist (‘true for you’), not just to himself (‘true for me’). The relativist finds himself in a bind if we ask him, ‘Is relativism absolutely true for everyone?’ If he says yes, then he contradicts himself by holding to an absolute relativism, which would be an oxymoron. To be consistent, the relativist must say, ‘Nothing is objectively true, including my own relativistic position, so you’re free to accept my view or reject it.’

  “There’s no reason to take seriously the claim that every belief is as good as every other belief, since this belief itself would be no better than any other. If we do take it seriously, it becomes self-refuting, because it claims to be the one belief everyone should hold to. The claims of the relativist are like saying, ‘I can’t speak a word of English,’ or, ‘All generalizations are false.’ His statements are self-contradictory. They self-destruct under examination.”

  Even so, I knew that there must be reasons why postmodernism has taken root. “Are there aspects of postmodernism that make sense to you?” I asked.

  “Despite some of its own incoherencies, yes, there are some lessons we can learn from it,” he said. “For example, we do have our limitations, biases, and perspectives. We should admit that. Also, the culturally or politically powerful—even the religious—many times do try to spin the truth to suit their own agenda. And metanarratives often do alienate and marginalize outsiders—although I should note that Christianity teaches the intrinsic value of every individual, including the disfranchised. Finally, the quest for absolute certainty in every area of life is impossible—but I have to add that it’s also unnecessary.”

  “What do you mean by that last statement?”