Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God

Christian Century, Jan 2, 2002 by Marcus Borg

Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God. By Jack Miles. Knopf, 352 pp., $26.00.

I ADMIRE MUCH about Jack Miles's new book, a sequel to his 1995 God: A Biography, which not only became a New York Times best seller but also won a Pulitzer Prize. Miles's exposition is often brilliant and insightful. His writing is elegant and disciplined, and his argument is fresh and provocative. Whether it is also fanciful and problematic, readers will have to decide.

In his first book, Miles provided a literary reading (in contrast to historical and theological readings) of the Hebrew Bible by focusing on God "as the central character in a work of literature." Here he applies his literary approach to the central character of the Christian Bible. As the title suggests, his topic is not Jesus as a figure of history but "Christ" as a literary character who, as "God Incarnate," resolves "a crisis in the life of God." Miles admires the way Christ "makes familiar objects and images strange by combination," an ability that Miles shares. In a remarkable imitatio Christi, he, too, makes the familiar strange.

The crisis in God's life is at least twofold. (Because Miles regularly refers to God as "he," apparently because God is primarily a male character, I will for the sake of this review follow his convention.) On the one hand, God is feeling remorseful and guilty. God knows that he has been vengeful: his punishments have often been wildly disproportionate to the deed. The curse of work and pain and death itself for eating some fruit from a tree? Sending killer snakes among the Israelites during their sojourn in the wilderness because they had complained about bad food? God knows that he has been "a head-basher," and often a promise-breaker, failing to keep his side of the covenant with Israel. How can God atone for this?

Christ resolves this crisis. The death of Christ as God Incarnate is God's sacrifice of himself in atonement for his own sins. This is a stunning inversion of conventional Christian thought: Christ dies not for the sins of the world but for the sins of God. Christ is the repentance of God, indeed the penitence of God, "a remedy for God's own past ruthlessness."

At the same time, God is in a jam, for God knows what will soon happen to the Jewish people: the legions of Rome will destroy Jerusalem and the temple and kill hundreds of thousands of God's chosen people. And God knows that he will do nothing to stop it, indeed that he is powerless to stop it. God is unable to defeat his and Israel's enemies.

Christ's teachings resolve that second crisis. In the teaching that God does not differentiate between the just and unjust, between "friend and foe," and in the command to "Love your enemies," Christ as God Incarnate declares that there are no enemies, and thus exempts himself from the need to rescue Israel from its enemies. This, Miles notes, would be "cleverness on the cheap," except that God as a human being now bears the consequences of his nonviolent stance: "Israel will be slaughtered like sheep, but God has become a lamb."

While Miles's Christ inverts central Christian understandings of the death of Christ, his argument also supports some of the most questionable elements of popular Christianity. His claim that the New Testament reflects "an enormous change in God" supports a widespread but erroneous Christian tendency to see the God of the Hebrew Bible as wrathful and judgmental and the God of the Christian Bible as merciful and loving.

Miles's Christ is quite docetic, to some extent because Miles depends primarily upon the Gospel of John, supplemented by a few passages from the synoptic Gospels (here he departs from the method he used in his book on the Hebrew Bible, which he sought to treat as a whole). Miles's Christ never needs to ask questions. He can read minds. He knows the future. Moreover, he remembers the distant past: as God Incarnate, Christ remembers feeding the Israelites in the wilderness in the time of the exodus, and recalls what he did to the Amalekites in the time of the conquest. Clearly, anybody who remembers what he did a thousand years ago is not a real human being.

Miles's book inadvertently illustrates why we also need a more historical reading of the Bible. The literary or narrative approach to the Bible, which sets aside historical questions, is not only legitimate but important. But if it is not balanced by a historical approach, we risk losing the connection to real history and genuine incarnation. The central argument of this book strikes me as unpersuasive, and its docetism and its treatment of the God of the Hebrew Bible are disturbing. Yet there are brilliant vignettes of insight scattered throughout that can be integrated into a wide variety of theologies.

How does one evaluate a work like this? As Miles himself says, it is neither history nor theology. As a literary creation, it is impressive. But what is it about? Is it simply a demonstration of Miles's cleverness? Or is it making a significant claim about something? Is it, in some important sense, serious?