In today's American Christianity we have a multitude of Jesuses. Jesusii? Multiple versions of Jesus. One is a Socrates-esque itinerant teacher who wandered the Middle East giving good advice, another a feel-good spiritualist prosperity guru (with well-coiffed hair) and most prominently the Right-wing icon illustrated above. These are only a handful of the iterations of Jesus that decorate the American ideological spectrum.
So how do we account for these wildly differing Jesuses? Well, for this issue we refer to the famous French sociologist Émile Durkheim. Now while we're going to agree to disagree with Mr. Durkheim on a variety of his theories there is one in particular which is particularly illuminating for our conversation. You see, one of Dr. D's emphases was in the sociological effects and, ultimately, the origins of religion. In his studies he identified a form of religion which he believed to be the most basic form from which all other religions arise. He monikered this baseline religious practice as "totemism".
Durkheim saw totemism as a form of social religious imaging. Societies corporately created images and idols (in the sense of a religious object with definable visible form) out of their collective social experience. In a manner of speaking they projected the practices and structures of their selves and their community onto the divine. This is summed up in his famous quote "God is society, writ large." He identified humankind's natural tendency for self-worship, hidden behind a collective religious totem.
So what does all of this have to do with our plethora of Jesuses? While we might perhaps disagree with Durkheim about the ultimate origin of religion he is clearly correct in identifying the manner in which we produce particular understandings or images of Jesus. Our abundance of Jesuses are rooted in our tendency to project ourselves onto our gods. Rather then attempt to live the kind of life which God blesses and desires for us we instead try to create the kind of God who will bless the life we are already living. Jesus becomes the things we want instead of what need Him to be. This is how we arrive at Nationalistic American Jesus and Prosperity Gospel Jesus, they tell us the things we want to hear. This is even how the Third Reich's religious minds were able to produce an Anti-Semitic Jesus (a rather impressive feat of historical revisionism.)
So then how are we ever to be certain that the Christ we are worshiping is the true Christ of history? For that purpose we have two clear and interrelated tools at our disposal. The first, and most obvious, are the scriptures themselves. The Gospels as we have them today were chosen for their clarity, unity and accuracy in conveying the person and narrative of Jesus in the most faithful and transparent manner. If our Jesus cannot conform with the witness of Scripture then our Jesus has become skewed. If the principles and teachings exhibited in Jesus's life are absent, contradicted or even less than fully exhibited we are dealing with an idol rather than a Savior.
Our second tool is context. Jesus lived in a particular time and world just as we do. While there are immediate things we can learn from studying Christ in the Gospels (and let's face it that alone would be more than most of us live out) there is a rich sea of detail and clarity that can only be found in thorough investigation of the world in which Jesus lived. The most obvious example (though perhaps not as obvious as I used to imagine) is that of the Good Samaritan. Most people in Christian circles learn soon enough that Samaritans were a rather despised Semitic off-shoot of Judaism and therefore they understand the message of righteousness that confounds traditional expectation. However, when teaching this lesson to a group of youth I was once told that a Samaritan was "someone who went around doing good stuff and helping people". Obviously this sort of destroys the message the parable is intending to teach. So as we study the scriptures we must always firmly root ourselves in what it meant to live in the Roman occupied, 1st century, 2nd temple Judaic Palestinian world in which Jesus lived and walked. Similarly we must walk with our eyes open to our own context. It is only when we can understand both Jesus's world and our own that we can truly begin to see Him moving in our own day and time.
When we can bring these two tools together we can finally begin to make some kind of start at an honest search for the genuine Jesus. When we can learn to doubt the idols of our imagination and the inclinations of our own personalities we can begin to unravel the illusions we've constructed for ourselves and begin to peer through for a true glimpse of the divine.
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