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by Ched Myers

It is both curious and revealing that academic studies of Mark so rarely focus on the theme of discipleship.1 Curious, because discipleship is so unarguably the central theme of the Gospel of Mark, regardless of reading strategy or exegetical method. Revealing, because it shows how wide the gulf between the seminaries, the sanctuaries and the streets has become in North America.

Osvaldo Vena’s study is an exception to this lamentable rule. As a child of liberation theology, he is suspicious of presumptions of scholarly insularity or “objective” aloofness. Nor does he accept the balkanization of critical analysis, genuine faith and social commitment. Vena understands that the ideology of discipleship narrated in the Markan text cannot ultimately be untangled from questions about contemporary Christian practice. The “endless discussion” among First World academics about “the true identity of the historical Jesus,” he rightly complains, serves mostly to “contribute to a generalized confusion about who Jesus really was” while distracting us from engaging “how we are to live as disciples in our historical context.”

Meanwhile, in our North American Protestant churches, the prevailing expressions of faith—evangelical decisionism, mainline denominationalism and fundamentalist dogmatism—are each deeply problematic in a society that is mired in dysfunctional politics, delusion economics and a distractive culture. Faith as discipleship remains the “road rarely taken” here at the heart of empire. We have yet truly to reckon with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous warning, delivered under the shadow of fascism, that “cheap grace is grace without discipleship.”2

More than a half century ago the great Swiss New Testament scholar Eduard Schweizer reiterated Bonhoeffer’s dictum by asserting that from the perspective of Mark’s gospel, “discipleship is the only form in which faith in Jesus can exist.”3 This theological challenge was subsequently advanced by Schweizer’s Australian student Athol Gill, whose teaching of Mark as a manifesto of radical discipleship helped animate renewal movements “between the seminary, sanctuary and streets” in the 1970s and 80s across the English-speaking world.4 Vena, it seems to me, stands squarely in the anti-triumphalist theological tradition of Bonhoeffer, Schweizer, and Gill when he argues that Mark is “more about discipleship, that is, suffering discipleship, than it is about Christology, that is, exalted Christology; it is more about who is a true disciple than it is about who is the real Messiah.”

Mark is, according to the argument of this book, “a creative and innovative Christologist” who contributed “two crucial concepts that have shaped Christian theology and praxis for the last 2,000 years: the idea of discipleship, which refers to the relationship between the believers and Jesus, and the Son of Man metaphor, which talks about the relationship between Jesus and the community of believers.” Vena illuminates both concepts, and connects them by exploring how the Son of Man rubric in Mark can (and should) be understood “through the hermeneutical key of discipleship.” Jesus’ call to the Way of the cross—which Vena recognizes stands at the literary and ideological center of Mark—recontextualizes Daniel’s apocalyptic vision of nonviolent resistance. The communal suffering of the faithful will be vindicated by divine justice, and is thus revealed as redemptive.

Vena’s project is not promoting a “low Christology,” as some defenders of ecclesial orthodoxy will inevitably charge. Rather he seeks to re-ground christological discourse (in which, he affirms, every believing community must engage) in the “prototype” of Jesus’ own discipleship. In this he stays true to the Latin American commitment to the primacy of praxis. This focus also challenges the longstanding docetic tendency in North Atlantic Christology to be preoccupied with ontological debates. This volume also includes a creative attempt to appreciate the longer ending of Mark, using it as an example of how Christological imagination changes under shifting historical pressures. Whether or not Vena’s model will succeed in “bridging the gap” between Christus Victor and traditional “Suffering Servant” atonement Christologies remains to be seen. But this book will surely help seminary and sanctuary return to the roots of the gospel tradition by re-centering the call to discipleship—Jesus’ and ours.

Mark wrote to help imperial subjects (in the first century and today) learn the hard truth about our world and our selves. This story of Jesus does not pretend to represent the Word of God dispassionately or impartially; it was written by, about, and for those engaged in God’s work of justice, compassion, and liberation in the world. To the otherworldly religious, Mark’s Jesus offers no “signs from heaven” (Mark 8:11–12). To scholars who refuse to commit themselves concerning the life and death issues of the day, Jesus declines engagement (11:30–33). But to those willing to risk the wrath of empire, Jesus offers the Way of discipleship (8:34ff.)—which Way he not only proclaims, but embodies, thus empowering us to follow. This is the old story, Vena argues, and its time has come again.

References

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship. New York: Macmillan, 1966.

Gill, Athol. Life on the Road. Dandenong, Australia: UNOH Publishing, 2009.

Myers, Ched. Who Will Roll Away the Stone: Discipleship Queries for First World Christians. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1994.

Neville, David, ed. Prophecy and Passion: Essays in Honour of Athol Gill. Adelaide: Australian Theological Forum, 2002.

Schweizer, Eduard. Lordship and Discipleship. Studies in Biblical Theology 28. London: SCM, 1960.

Segovia, Fernando, ed. Discipleship in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985.

1. Though see Segovia, Discipleship in the New Testament.

2. Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship.

3. Schweizer, Lordship and Discipleship.

4. See Gill, Life on the Road. See also Neville, Prophecy and Passion. It was partly through Gill’s work that I came to both Christian activism and the study of Mark (for more on the First World radical discipleship movement see Myers, Who Will Roll Away the Stone). “Between the seminary, sanctuary and streets” is the tag line we used to describe the “social location” of a U.S. experiment in alternative theological education for activists we founded in 2001, called the Word and World People’s School (see www .wordandworld.org).