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By Bob Cornwall 

Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? The New Testament Evidence.  By James D. G. Dunn.  Louisville: WJK Press, 2010. 

If popular hymnody was to be the guide to answering the question posed in the title of this book by British New Testament scholar James Dunn, the answer would appear to be yes.  The assumptions that underlie the doctrine of the Trinity would also lead us toward a similar answer.  After all, according to the creeds Jesus is divine, and if Jesus is divine then shouldn’t we worship him?   Complicating this conversation is the assumption that the Christian faith is monotheistic, and if Judaism offers guidance as to what that involves, then doesn’t worship of Jesus distract us from the worship of God – whom many Christians name Father?   The question that Dunn seeks to answer in this relatively brief book concerns the New Testament evidence.  If one attends to this evidence, what are we to conclude? 

Dunn notes that this discussion not only has implications for Christians, but it also has implications for interfaith dialogue, especially with Jews and Muslims who have a much more straightforward monotheism.  To regard Jesus as divine, as worthy of worship as God, seems to them an obvious rejection of the oneness of God, more a form of polytheism than a form of monotheism (p. 1).

The doctrine of the Trinity, which is the traditional answer to this dilemma is not only baffling to our monotheist friends, but it is a bit baffling to many Christians as well.  Words like essence, substance, and even person make little sense outside their Greek philosophical foundations.  Whatever theological answers have emerged over time, as Christians have wrestled with and reflected upon the biblical witness, a satisfactory answer to the question of whether worship should be given to Jesus requires us to attend to the New Testament evidence. 

Our ability to offer an answer to the question of whether the first Christians worshiped Jesus requires us to first define what worship is.  A basic definition assumes that reverence or praise is being given to a god or God.   Even here, however, there are complications because the word worship is often used in ways that diverge from that basic definition.  In England judges, for instance, are referred to as “Your Worship.”  Surely judges aren’t gods.  And the Book of Common Prayer uses the word worship in the context of the marriage ceremony in reference to the relationship of the husband to wife.  Being that he is a biblical scholar Dunn takes the reader on a tour through the words used for worship in the New Testament, including proskynein and its relatives.  Used to refer to deference to higher authority, submission, and worship – it is used in relationship to beings other than God.  Although used in relationship to Jesus, the number of cases are few, and the clearest use comes in Revelation.  There are a number of other terms that can mean to give praise, to worship, that have references both to God or to Jesus, but none of these usages are conclusive. 

Dunn concludes that while there are intriguing pieces of evidence of usage that suggest worship of Jesus, these usages are limited.  When used these words most often show wonderment at the “realization that God had raised Jesus from the dead, and in some of the worship offered to the Lamb in the visions of the seer of Revelation” (p. 27).  There is no evidence at all of cultic/liturgical worship of Jesus, and the most commonly used words for praise and thanksgiving are never applied to Jesus.  Instead, thanks is given to God for what Jesus has done.

If there is little language usage that suggests direct worship of Jesus, the accounts of religious practice of the early Christians are not suggestive of direct worship either.  As for prayer, it is almost always directed toward God, and of course, Jesus himself is depicted as praying to God.  The early Christians invoked Jesus’ name and prayed in his name, though sitting at the right hand of the Father he could be appealed to, but does this connote worship?  Dunn isn’t convinced.  As for hymns, many of the New Testament hymns focus on Christ, but they’re not directed to Christ.  Instead, they give praise to God for Christ.  Clearly Jesus is central to the early church’s self-understanding – the church is described as the body of Christ, for instance, but does that connote direct worship?  As for sacrifice, Jesus is the one who offers sacrifice and is the sacrifice, but the sacrifices are offered to God, not to him.  The conclusion?  Jesus was central to early Christian worship, was the reason why prayers were offered to God with confidence, and was the subject of Christian hymns.  They invoked his name and appealed to him for help in times of crisis.    He was the context for worship and its means, but worship was accomplished through him, but wasn’t normally directed to him.

Dunn’s conclusion after reviewing the relevant evidence is that the question posed in the book’s title is far too narrow and thus misleading.  The better question concerns whether Christian worship was and is possible without Christ.  Therefore, we need to pursue a somewhat different question: “was earliest Christian worship so closely bound up with Jesus that inevitably he participated in the receipt of worship just as he participated in the offering of the worship?  Was earliest Christian worship in part directed to him as well as made possible and enabled by him?” (p. 58).  If we are to move toward this broader question of whether Jesus is included in the worship of God, then we must also move toward wrestling with questions about the nature of monotheism and Jewish understandings of heavenly mediators and divine agents.  When we move toward this question many new possibilities open up.  The Old Testament, for instance, doesn’t offer as strict a monotheism as modern Judaism and Islam claim for themselves, and there are references, for instance, to angels who reveal God’s presence as examples of divine immanence.  Dunn notes that ancient Jewish theologians affirmed a double aspect of God, one that is both transcendent and invisible and one that is immanent, reaching out to humanity and the created order in a variety of ways.  There is, Dunn believes the possibility of a binatarian understanding of God’s existence even prior to the emergence of Christianity, one that would prove beneficial to the early Christian theologians – references, for instance to the Wisdom of God and the Logos of God.  Thus, while there was no thought of any being other than God being worshiped, Second Testament Judaism offered a context or atmosphere in which “the question of Jesus being worshiped could arise, and arise as a natural corollary to the status attributed to him, it had provided no precedent to which the first Christians could appeal” (p. 90).     

In a lengthy fourth chapter entitled “The Lord Jesus Christ,” Dunn wrestles with the question of Jesus’ own understanding of monotheism, which he answers in the affirmative, but with the caveat that Jesus had a sense of intimacy with God that, in Dunn’s words, “the disciples could only begin to experience as they stood with him and came to God as Father in dependence on him, as though youngsters who found it possible to stand before their father only when accompanied by their older brother” (p. 101).  From there he moves to the confession of “Jesus as Lord,” setting the confession in the context of Jewish understandings of God and the important Pauline texts.  He then moves to the use of Word (logos), Wisdom (sophia), and Spirit (pneuma), seeking to understand how these terms came to be used in expressing a developing Christology. 

 In this fourth chapter Dunn takes up what he admits is the most difficult issue in the conversation – the occasional use of the word god/God in reference to Jesus.  If this word is used in relation to Jesus, and yet we are to keep from moving in a polytheistic direction with Jesus being a second God, how should these references be interpreted?  In answer to this question, reflecting on texts in the Johnannine corpus and elsewhere, he concludes that “Jesus was God, in that he made God known, in that God made himself known in and through him, in that he was God’s effective outreach to his creation and to his people.  But he was not God in himself” (p. 135). 

So should Jesus be worshiped?  Dunn concludes, after a lengthy conversation with such contemporary figures as Larry Hurtado, Richard Baukham, and James McGrath, that we must start from the premise of monotheism, and that if Jesus is worshiped, it is in the sense that God is worshiped in and through him, but Jesus is not worshiped directly in distinction from God.  That is, we must beware of practicing what Dunn calls “Jesus-olatry.”  Like idolatry, in which the idol absorbs the worship due God, in “Jesus-olatry,” Jesus becomes a substitute for God, and therefore absorbs the worship due God alone.  Thus, it would be better to see Jesus as an icon, a window through which the divine can be seen and experienced.  The problem with worship directed at Jesus is that worship ends there and doesn’t move onto God.  Therefore, as Christians, worship is directed not at Jesus, but we are called to worship God in and through Jesus.  If we stick with the original question posed by the title, then the answer is no – the early Christians didn’t worship Jesus.  However, if we broaden the question and ask whether Christian worship of God is defined by Jesus, then the answer is yes.  Christianity, Dunn concludes, remains monotheistic, but its worship is enabled by Jesus and God is revealed in and through Jesus. 

James Dunn has provided the church with an important resource that will help it come to grips with the place of Jesus in worship.  It also helps us better develop a Christology that reflects the biblical witness.  Dunn’s monotheism is Trinitarian in nature, but it seeks to keep things in proper alignment.  This is not a lengthy book, but it is demanding reading – not in the sense that it is dense prose, but because it demands much of us who are Christians to examine our understandings of God and the way in which we approach God in worship.  Thus, this is a must read book for anyone wanting to understand the place of Jesus in theology and worship.

To read more of Bob Cornwall’s articles visit Ponderings on a Faith Journey

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By Bob Cornwall  

Julian of Norwich: A Contemplative Biography by Amy Frykholm.  Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2010. 

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were marked by political, cultural, religious, and social turmoil.  The crusades continued in one form or another, with Spain being the center of the battle between Christian and Muslim forces.  The Byzantine Empire was crumbling and the plague took a heavy toll on Europe.  This was the era of the Avignon Papacy and the Great Schism, when politics played a central role in the life of the Western Church.  This was also the era of the proto-reformers, John Wyclif and Jan Hus, who challenged the ecclesiastical foundations of the Church and set the stage for Luther and his contemporaries in the sixteenth century. 

It was into this world, one in which superstition and fear made themselves felt, where dissent was viewed with suspicion, and the voice of an educated woman was rarely welcomed, that Julian of Norwich appeared on the scene.  Although there were few places where a woman, especially an inquisitive one, could safely explore intellectual and spiritual ideas, the convent and the anchorage provided that kind of safe space.  Julian of Norwich has become a well-known figure in the modern age among those who desire to engage the mystical side of the Christian faith.  Although not as well known as Catherine of Sienna or Teresa of Avila, Julian was one of the earliest female spiritual and theological writers in England. 

According to Amy Frykholm, a journalist and member of the staff of the Christian Century, Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love was the first book composed in English by a woman in an era when books written in English were still uncommon.  It may help to realize that this was the era of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  Indeed, according to Frykholm this book, also known as the Showings, “remains one of the greatest theological works in the English language” (p. ix). 

Despite the importance of Julian’s book, we know little about her, including her true name, which could possibly be taken from the church where she served as an anchorite – St. Julian’s in Norwich.  Although her life largely remains a mystery, Frykholm has done an excellent job of teasing out information from Julian’s writings and from what we know about the historical context to offer us a rather compelling picture of Julian’s life.  In part because Julian was a contemplative herself, Frykholm has chosen to write a contemplative biography. 

What we do know about Julian is that she was born around 1342 in Norwich, which was then the second largest city in Britain.  Second only to London, Norwich was a major commercial and industrial region, known for its wool trade.  In the fourteenth century, Norwich suffered a devastating blow from the plague losing nearly half its population.  It is possible that Julian had been married, but there is no record of this event.  Then in 1373, at the age of thirty, she began to receive visions, which she discerned were coming to her from God.  Concerned about the nature of these visions Julian sought guidance from an Augustinian friar who lived in a monastery nearby.  This friar served as a spiritual guide and teacher, introducing her to the great theological writings of the church, including the works of Augustine and the Scriptures themselves.  After a time she began, under the guidance of this teacher, to write down her visions.  Because it was dangerous for a woman to be known as a mystic and write, outside the confines of ecclesiastically recognized entities, her spiritual director suggested that she become an anchorite. 

Sometime around the age of fifty, Julian attached herself to the church of St. Julian in Norwich.  Although we do not have direct information about the nature of her installation, we do know how such events transpired, and so Frykholm imaginatively describes what likely occurred in Julian’s case.  There she lived until her death around 1416, spending her life in prayer and writing down her visions.  An anchorage was a solitary cell, in which a devout person would spend their lives essentially cut off from the outside world.  As Frykholm tells it, the typical anchorage was a single room, with possibly three windows, one of which would have opened up to the church, so that the anchorite could hear the mass.  A second window would have opened to the quarters of the servant who cared for the needs of the anchorite, and the third window opened onto a porch, where the anchorite received visitors, including those seeking her spiritual guidance.  A box would be placed on the porch, where members of the community might leave alms for Julian’s support.  In exchange for her prayers, members of the community also provided Julian’s food.  She would have been assigned a servant, who lived in quarters attached to the anchorage, and who tended to her physical needs.  It appears that Julian was able to leave the anchorage to attend services, but beyond that, her world was contained behind walls and dark curtains until the day of her death, after which her book of visions began to gain a readership. 

One of the reasons why Julian may have become so popular in the modern age is that her vision of God is one of love and grace.  The Jesus who appeared to her spoke in gentle tones and rarely if ever was the focus of the visions on topics such as hell, purgatory, or sin, which stood at the forefront of much of the religious teaching of the era.  Frykholm writes of the theology that emerges from her visions: 

She herself had received no visions of hell or of purgatory. “God is all love,” she offered.  “He is all mercy and all grace. There is no wrath in God.”  She often felt that she was speaking to the black curtain alone and that her words floated no farther than an inch from her mouth.  They wanted her to tell them that she had seen this or that loved one saved from the jaws of hell by the flight of angels or that Mary had come to her and personally whispered the name of the one who would be saved.  Julian did not see these kinds of visions, and she could only tell them honestly that she saw no wrath in God.  She felt their disappointment, but she hoped that something of God’s love might echo for them, long into the future (pp. 97-98). 

There was a significant dissonance between her visions and the belief systems of her contemporaries, which led some to fear that her visions would prove disruptive to a church that not only taught a theology of fear but also used it to keep control of the people.  Reflecting on the concerns of a critic, the fear was that opening oneself to love might lead a person into the arms of the heretics (p. 111). 

Whether one has read the works of Julian of Norwich, Frykholm provides an enjoyable and readable look at a significant figure in the life of the church.  Since Julian left few traces of her own life, except her writings, Frykholm must fill in the gaps with accounts of life in the era in which Julian made her presence known.  One can read this as an introduction to Julian’s life, and to the spiritual life of the Middle Ages.  In either case, the book is a worthy gift to the modern Christian pursuing the contemplative life, or the person seeking to understand the mystical tradition that has been passed down from one generation to the next. 

Read more of Pastor Bob Cornwall’s articles at:  http://pastorbobcornwall.blogspot.com/

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By Bob Cornwall 

It is rather difficult to believe the inanity of the “conversation” going around about Islam right now.  It is fueled by a number of currents, some political, some cultural, and some religious.   You have this huge disconnect about the President’s faith — he’s a CHRISTIAN folks, not a Muslim.  It is fueled in part by at best misinformed people like Franklin Graham who go on CNN and say that Obama was born a Muslim because his father was a Muslim, and then when asked whether Obama is a Christian, gives this tepid answer — when he knows the truth.  Then you have the hullabaloo surrounding the Cordoba House (now Parc51) Islamic Center (today I got an email from a woman declaring that she had been told that Osama Bin Laden is funding it).  You have Newt Gingrich comparing Islam to the Nazi’s.

Right now, we’re in the midst of this “debate” where facts no longer seem to matter.  And so, I think Stephen Prothero, Professor of Religion at Boston University, is exactly correct when he responded to a question from CNN’s John King as to whether the current conversation about Islam is helpful.  Prothero, who has a new book out (which I’ve not yet read) entitled God is not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World — and Why Their Differences Matter, responded by saying that it’s not helpful because the conversation about Islam is taking place at a “below kindergarten level.”  

One of the reasons why the debate is so skewed is that Americans suffer from an intense form of religious illiteracy, and that is dangerous.  As Prothero demonstrates in his earlier book  Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know and Doesn’t, is that most Americans don’t even know the tenets of their own faith.  And if we’re going to put an end to the misinformation, it’s going to take those of us who are Christians to step up and say no to it. 

I think that Prothero’s presentation on CNN is something that needs to be heard.  It’s straightforward, pulls no punches, and gets to the bottom of the issue.  So, take a look:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMSxJ8v5GSo

To read more articles by Bob Cornwall visit his blog site at:  http://pastorbobcornwall.blogspot.com/

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By Bob Cornwall  

Book Review of Hannah’s Child:  A Theologian’s Memoir,  Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2010. 

In 2001, just one day before the events of 9-11 transpired, Time Magazine announced its selection of Stanley Hauerwas as America’s most important theologian.  Although there may be dissent as to whether Hauerwas deserves the honor, the fact that a general news magazine would deem the Duke Divinity School theologian and ethicist worthy of the honor suggests that he has impacted America’s religious and public life.  But, who is Stanley Hauerwas? What has he done and said and written that has attracted the attention not just of the religious press but the secular press as well? 

Memoirs offer persons of note the opportunity to define themselves, to lay out their own sense of who they are and how they became the person the public thinks they know.  The author of this memoir seems to find it difficult to recognize himself in many of these portrayals, for in the very first sentence of the book he writes: “I did not intend to be ‘Stanley Hauerwas’” (p. ix).  In making this statement he notes that there is a person out there who goes by this name, a person who is “allegedly famous,” but the question remains, who is Stanley Hauerwas?  In this book, Hauerwas, the son of a West Texas bricklayer, tells how his parents married late and thus had a child late in life. The title of the book comes from the fact that his mother borrowed the prayer of Hannah, the mother of Samuel, and prayed that if she were blessed with a child, then she would dedicate this child to God’s ministry.  It is the burden of this prayer that served as the guiding principle of his life, for not only did his mother pray this prayer, but she also shared this news with her son.  The memoir is essentially Hauerwas’ reflection on how he moved from being Hannah’s child, the one dedicated to God’s service before his birth, to the person he is today, a person who with great difficulty and struggle, came to understand himself to be a Christian, so that his life is now “unintelligible if the God we Christians worship does not exist” (p. x). 

As a reviewer, I came to this book having read here and there in Hauerwas’ writings. I know him more by reputation than by any close reading of his works.  I have read the critiques of his work and know a number of his students, people who have been influenced not only by his writings but by his teaching and by their interactions with him. From these “encounters” with Hauerwas, all from a distance, I knew he had a reputation for being profane and for being a pacifist.  I knew he embraced the call to community but found him – through my “at a distance” reading – to be too quick to abandon the public square.  Not all of my preconceptions have been proven wrong, but I have come to have a greater appreciation for the man behind the headlines. 

The story begins in Pleasant Grove, Texas, outside Dallas.  As noted earlier, his father was a bricklayer, and his father and grandfather had been bricklayers. Early on in his life, Hauerwas took up his father’s trade, and probably would have been a brick layer himself, had his mother not dedicated him to God’s service.  The calling came through his mother, but from his father he learned how to work hard. He also learned the words he would become famous for uttering in polite society.  As for the prayer and the dedication of his life, Hauerwas wished that his mother had refrained from sharing the news, but he also believes that it was this prayer that made him the person he is today. Had he not known of this calling, which he confesses may have limited his autonomy, but ultimately, that may not have been a bad thing. 

Autonomy, given my energy, probably would have meant going into business and making money. There is nothing wrong with making money, but it was just not in my family’s habits to know how to do that. All we knew how to do was work, and we usually liked the work we did. As it turns out, I certainly like the work Mother’s prayer gave me (p. 4).

Before this calling could be fulfilled, Hauerwas would have to be saved.  Although baptized at Pleasant Mound Methodist Church, being saved was a long process, one that didn’t truly take until he became a theologian. Carrying the burden of service to God, he knew he had to go to college, something no one in his family had ever done. Encouraged by his teachers and by his ministers, he became an avid reader, so that even before he went to college he was reading history and philosophy. This need to study for ministry took him to Southwestern College, a place at which he discovered he didn’t really fit in. He was of working class stock and yet he has spent his life in academia. It was at Southwestern that he met the first of his mentors, a professor who would guide his studies and helped him navigate both life and faith.  It was there that he discovered a love of philosophy, which would undergird his work as a theologian and ethicist.  Despite the direction that his life was taking, he still wasn’t sure that he was a Christian. But during this time he discovered that “to be a Christian meant that you could never protect yourself from the truth” (p. 11). This discovery, combined with his working class Texas background helped contribute to another aspect of Hauerwas’s reputation – his straightforwardness and desire to get to the heart of the matter.  It was a quality that would get him into trouble on many occasions during his academic career. 

One of the traits that he mentions throughout the book is a lack of self awareness, or perhaps better, a lack of knowledge of the rules of etiquette, a trait that has led to misunderstandings.  It was also a trait that seems to have led to a disastrous marriage to a woman he met in college.  He seemed to fall into the marriage, quite unaware of what it involved, or Anne’s mental stability.  The story of his relationship with his late wife, forms a significant part of the book, for he was by his own report left to do much of the child rearing and family duties. There was a fear of her hurting herself, and even him, whom she blamed for all her problems.  The marriage lasted nearly a quarter century before she left, driven along by her own mental illness. Later he would meet a woman, one who would become his wife and his intellectual partner.  There is a sense of healing that emerges out of this later story, even as he grieves what had come before.  All of this helps humanize the well-known theologian. While there is this lack of social self awareness and the problems that developed as a result of his first marriage, we also see the devotion that he has to his son Adam, with whom he spent significant time, as he was functioning essentially as a single parent. Beyond this, we discover the importance of friendships to his life. Especially during the years at Notre Dame and Duke, more and more people came into his life – colleagues, students, church members.  In the epilogue, he notes that his ability to write the book is a “testimony to friends,” for he confesses that without these friendships he would never have survived. 

If friendships and family form a significant part of the story, so too does his developing theology and his commitment to the church as community. Going to Yale, he discovered Karl Barth whose discomfort with natural theology helped form Hauerwas’s commitment to a revelational theology, one that is Christocentric and rooted in community.  Although Hauerwas is Methodist his understandings of church, society, and theology have been formed in conversation with Lutherans at Augustana College and Catholics at Notre Dame.  He was influenced by James McClendon and John Howard Yoder, one a Baptist and the other a Mennonite. Yoder would become his colleague at Notre Dame.  He seems to have thrived at Notre Dame, becoming more catholic in his perspectives. Later, as things began to change in his department at Notre Dame, he moved to Duke Divinity School, which put him back into the Methodist orbit.  Although this was a good fit in many ways, bringing him into contact with new conversation partners, he did have troubles with his dean. One of the partnerships that proved fruitful was with William Willimon. What is interesting is that despite the fact that Hauerwas has a distinctively negative view of church growth perspectives – so much so that he eventually left the UMC church he had long been a member of after it turned in that direction and became an Episcopalian — he makes no mention of Willimon’s increasingly vocal emphasis on numbers and growth since becoming a Methodist bishop. 

What is clear about Hauerwas’ perspective is that he believes strongly that what one believes influences what one does.  He believes strongly that God works through the church to bring transformation in the world – not by the church taking public political stands, but by living out the gospel.  He’s all for interfaith dialogue and cooperation, but he urges Christians to own their own faith.  He doesn’t put a lot of trust in public institutions, and while recognizing the frailty of the church, it is in the church that God is present.  Ultimately, he believes that God is a necessary word, but “learning how to say ‘God is hard but good work.” 

It is good work because the training necessary to say “God” forces us to be honest with ourselves about the way things. Are. Our lives are but a flicker. We are creatures destined to die. We fear ourselves and one another, sensing that we are more than willing to sacrifice the lives of others to sustain the fantasy that we will not have to die (p. 236).

What is important to understand about Hauerwas and his theology is that he is not easy to categorize.  He speaks of himself as a conservative, and yet he is in many ways quite radical.  He isn’t an evangelical, nor is he a classic liberal. He is influenced deeply by Barth, and yet isn’t a Barthian.  His is a theology that is deeply philosophical, with Aristotle and Wittgenstein both being important influences on his thought.  All of this may go a long way to explaining why he is so often misunderstood. 

Whether one is a fan of Hauerwas or not, whether one agrees with his theology or not, this book is worth reading closely.  It is honest and straightforward. In other words, it names names! It’s challenging in its content and yet graceful in its prose (and no there’s no profanity in the book).  You will discover a man who is deeply flawed and yet committed to the God revealed in Jesus Christ.  I’ve not jumped into the Hauerwas camp, but I do understand where he is coming from. I also appreciate the story of his faith journey, for it is a reminder that for many of us, salvation comes not in a moment in time, but often as we’re living in the midst of the community.  Take and read, you will be enlightened, challenged, and maybe even blessed.

To read more articles by Bob Cornwall visit his blog site at:  http://pastorbobcornwall.blogspot.com/