Against The Grain

... the interpretation of world and history is a fundamental process without which human beings cannot grasp reality at all. There can be no perception of reality without an interpretive model. More than that: when people open their mouths and do not just put out animalistic sounds such as groaning and growling but use concepts, they are already interpreting their reality. Every language presumes an overarching interpretation of the world and is itself such an interpretation.

Those who assign interpretation to the realm of the arbitrary call into question every field of scholarship, including the natural sciences. Still more, they question the value of every human discourse, because whenever we speak and construct sentences we are interpreting the reality that surrounds us. The same is true of Jesus of Nazareth, and of him above all. He is unthinkable without Israel, the people of God, in whose tradition he lived, and he can therefore be adequately understood only in faith and out of the believing memory of the people of God. An understanding of Jesus demands the foundation that is Israel, that is the church. If we do not hold to the church’s interpretive tradition and seek its genuine realm of experience again and again, then sooner or later the image of Jesus will disintegrate before us. Interpretation of him will become a matter of taste or at least be determined by the momentary horizon of the interpreter. We see this clearly in the many images of Jesus produced in the last several decades, each according to a shifting fashion. They show very little of the Jesus of the gospels but a great deal of the spirit of those who produce them.

So we see Jesus as an opium for the soul and as a political revolutionary. Here he is as the archetype of the unconscious, there a pop star. He appears as the first feminist and as the faithful advocate of bourgeois morality. Jesus is used by those who want to see nothing change in the church, and he is used as a weapon against the church. He is instrumentalized over and over again to confirm people’s own desires and dreams. At present he must above all stand for the legitimation of universal tolerance, which is no longer interested in truth and therefore threatens to slide off into arbitrariness.

Gerhard Lohfink , Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was