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Preface

T here is no easy peace. The earth’s exploding population renders more difficult each day a peaceful solution to the problems of hunger, national security, and social justice. Simultaneously, the threat of nuclear destruction continues to hover over the future of humanity.

Meanwhile, the gap widens between the mentality of our contemporaries, shaped by a technological civilization whereby we control nature, and traditional religion, conceived during a rural epoch when human beings bowed under the weight of nature. Though technology threatens human existence more than it ever did in times past, Christian thought – frightened by the responsibilities it should assume – refuses to see in the gospel anything but a message of individual salvation. It might even be said that today’s Christianity finds suspect any actions performed for the physical salvation of the human race. It spurns any practical efforts of authentic Christian obedience as presumptuous and pharisaical – and that in an age much in need of them. Such a reversal of the teachings of Jesus Christ must be rectified, lest the church disqualify itself as an instrument capable of pointing the way for a humanity bordering on collective suicide.

I am neither a professor of history nor of theology, and the following little more than scratches the surface of areas normally reserved for specialists. Let me say, however, that having flirted with the theologies and philosophies of despair, I have now rejected their poison. Existential thought may sate one with its lucid analyses, which define the problems, but it fails to offer a courageous obedience capable of resolving them. Such an approach is nothing but a subtle excuse to evade one’s responsibilities in the world and is thus characteristic of a period of moral and religious decadence. In fact, the tendency of Christians to intellectualize ethical issues is in direct proportion to the extent that they have become a part of the power establishment.

All of us, Christian and non-Christian alike, are responsible for the hunger, injustice, egoism, exploitation, and wars that devastate our time. Christians bear special responsibility: knowing that God can change both people and their situations, the disciple of Jesus can help bring into being God’s future for humanity.

Christians profess that at a given place and time, God intervened in history, rendering all subsequent happenings on this planet as of divine importance. Because of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we know that every birth, every life, and every death matters to God.

If each person has thus been invested with such value, how great is the worth of the sum of human history! Whether one believes he is the Son of God or not, Jesus is the central event of history, because de facto his coming changed humankind. We must therefore understand who this Jesus was in order to fully grasp the value of humanity and of our task toward it.

Recent works have reopened the debate about who Jesus was.¹ Everyone agrees that when the authors of the New Testament attempted to present Jesus to the people of their generation, they made use of certain beliefs then current in the Mediterranean basin. Obviously, Jesus and his disciples spoke the language of their contemporaries. This should not alarm us. We need not, for example, dispute the value of what people of the first century said about the universe simply because our knowledge of the universe has since expanded. Behind the vocabulary of Jesus’ day, we can still discover the enduring Christ.

The gospel merits being read not only with faith, but with intelligence. This does not mean we have to give way to the demythologizing zeal of some interpreters, whose efforts to weed out the gospel have only transformed it into a desert.

If the New Testament has to be demythologized at all, it should be done with the assistance of the Old Testament, not our modern myths.² The more one adheres to the strict monotheism of the God of Israel, the more visible the thought of Jesus Christ becomes. The God of Jesus Christ is the God of Israel. The Christian faith dissolves into pure mythology as soon as it no longer leans upon Judaism. True, the authors of the New Testament borrowed from sources other than the Old Testament in order to explain Jesus to their Jewish and Greek contemporaries. But let us not forget that their main frame of reference was always the Old Testament.

Conversely, the Old Testament stands in need of the New. Jesus lifts the crushing fact of the original Fall and broadens the dogma of a narrowly elected people. He humanizes the ritual laws of Moses. He accomplishes what the prophets of old could only announce. Thus one loses nothing by Christianizing Judaism, because Jesus Christ has already done so.

The Jesus of history actually transcends both the Old and the New Testament. He is the point of encounter between two theological edifices, the Jewish and the Christian. He has fulfilled the first and engendered the second. He alone explains that which came before and that which came after him. One does not put a lamp under a bowl, but uses it to lighten the darkness. The light dawns when we let Jesus himself interpret Judaism and Christianity for us.

Jesus’ life and teaching are a bridge connecting two historical epochs – a bridge defined by the parables and aphorisms which he spoke. We should try to grasp their deeper meaning. Their depth is more striking than any rigorously consistent doctrine, for they spring from the presence in Jesus of the living God, who reveals himself as the loving Father of all people. God’s presence manifests itself; it does not prove itself.

I have thus limited my ambitions to the modest goal of interrogating Jesus Christ by Jesus Christ. What have I discovered? In short, the portrait of a vigorous revolutionary capable of saving the world without using violence.

Although I have examined secondary literature, I wish to underline again my limited exegetical and historical competence. My many other activities have simply prohibited me from doing much scholarly work.³ The theses concerning the proclamation of a biblical Jubilee by Jesus are my own. If their somewhat unusual character can stimulate the curiosity of the specialists and provoke further inquiry into the social ethics and nonviolence of Jesus, I will have attained my goal.

André Trocmé