In both “progressive Christian” and non-religious circles, it has become trendy to peddle a more secular-friendly version of Jesus Christ who is closer to a swami or a self-help guru than a divine savior. He becomes whatever the believer wants him to be. His teachings are feel-good mantras that blend into the followers’ current emotional experience and view of the world. This version of Jesus is a guide, a teacher, and a mentor- but he would not hold us to his own New Testament teachings.
In fact, this iteration of Christ is not necessarily God (although some versions of him may be divine in nature). He has no concrete guidelines for us, and he does not preach repentance as a necessity. There is no pressure to fulfill the “Great Commission” and make followers of others. This Jesus respects all belief systems as equally valid- or at least he knows that everyone will get there in the end if we just love them hard enough and don’t share too many uncomfortable opinions. Conveniently, he is nearly in perfect harmony with American popular culture. Followers of this Jesus may find themselves in opposition to historical Christianity more often than they are at odds with Hollywood or their secular counterparts.
Although a self-help Jesus may be easy to keep in our pocket and only take out when desired, the problem is that the Jesus Christ of the New Testament did not leave the “guru” option open for us. As C. S. Lewis so famously stated in his “trilemma”:
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
So, what did Jesus say about himself? It is easy to dismantle “Swami Jesus” by merely reviewing Jesus’ own words about himself, as recorded by his actual followers whose mentor and guide he really was. This is what they tell us:
Did he claim to be God?
Yes, he did.
In John 8:56-58, Jesus responds to the Pharisees’ questioning about who he was by answering, “Before Abraham was born, I am”– a response that asserted his divinity firstly by claiming to have existed before Abraham and secondly by drawing a comparison to Exodus 3:14 in which God told Moses “I AM THAT I AM.” As in other instances (like John 18), the people understood the reference and attempted to stone him for the claim.
Additionally, in Matthew 16:15-17 Jesus questioned his disciples about who he was and rejoiced in Peter’s conclusion:
…“Who do you say I am?”
Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by My Father in heaven.”
Did he preach sin and repentance?
Yes, he did.
Jesus did not ONLY preach kindness or tolerance. He repeatedly taught personal repentance from sin. Some key verses are below:
“From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’” (Matthew 4:17)
“I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” (Luke 5:32)
“The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.” (Matthew 12:41)
‘Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” (Luke 13:3, 5)
Did he warn about Hell?
Yes, he did.
According to Ed Elliott, about 60 of the 1900 verses describing Jesus’ words pertain to Hell. Although Jesus talked much more about life (both temporal and eternal), he had quite a bit to say about physical death and the “second death” of Hell. Just one example is Matthew 25:46:
“And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”
Was he only concerned with unity?
No, he was not.
While Jesus did not teach division or strife as virtues, he also did not seek to avoid them at all costs. While we see churches now that reject many of Jesus’ instructions and simultaneously embrace secular teachings in an effort to be homogeneous with the world, Jesus said in Matthew 34-36, 38-39:
“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn
‘a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—
a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’
…Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.”
Was his teaching about God “exclusionary?”
Yes, it was.
Most famously, Jesus said in John 14:6, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” That does not mean that God could not choose to have mercy on whomever he wanted through Jesus Christ, but it DOES mean that not all belief systems are equally true according to Jesus’ own claims. It means we should point others to Christ and let his mercy fall where it may, but we certainly should not preach a no-repentance, all-ways-lead-to-heaven false gospel and call it Christianity.
Conclusion
It is a pitfall of the modern church that many are so scared to lose potential converts that they reduce the gospel to a self-help manual and erase its entire message. Instead of the “Good News” that we are no longer slaves to sin and death, many are actually teaching a false gospel that there is no accountability, and their leader is “Swami Jesus” the friendly guru. Rather than the freedom they think they are creating, they unkindly keep people deceived and trapped in sin.
These Christians are in great peril themselves, and they are leading many others after them. It would be better that they reject Christ outright than that they lull these “converts” into a false sense of security in which they do not know the real Christ or His true message while believing that they do. I encourage all Christians to be loud and outspoken in our defense of the core doctrines of Christianity (sin, repentance, eternal life through Christ alone) and reject this watered-down, bastardized gospel and false Jesus at every opportunity.
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About the Author
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Jackie Chea is a blogger from San Antonio, Texas who holds a B.A. in Psychology and an M.A. in Community Counseling from the University of Texas at San Antonio. She writes on political and cultural issues from a conservative, religious standpoint. She lives in the Lone Star State with her husband Nick, her 5-year-old son Lincoln, and her rescue dogs. |
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