| 6. Asceticism and World Reformation | ||||
The words in which Jesus attacks wealth must not be misunderstood as meaning that he made the general demand that every one should give away his property, that he preached the ideal of poverty or demanded asceticism. The conception of an ideal which is to be realized through action is, as we have seen, foreign to Jesus. Not a state to which man can attain through his conduct is considered good, but the deed alone is good or bad. Jesus simply sees how wealth claims its possessor, makes him a slave, and robs him of the freedom to decide for God. His words indeed say plainly that whoever follows Jesus must have the strength and freedom to renounce his possessions. But it is equally plain that he does not mean to say that by voluntary poverty a man wins for himself a special quality in the sight of God; not poverty but surrender is demanded. The conduct of the early Christian community makes this quite clear; for in it poverty was by no means felt as an advantage but as real distress. Of course the wealthy members of the church gave up their property for the common good, but voluntarily as an offering, not in order to gain especial saintliness. Nowhere in early Christian preaching is the ideal of poverty taught; it was only later that such ideas gained influence on Christianity. The early Christians, following Jesus, used the childlike prayer, "Our daily bread give us today." | ||||
Jesus desires no asceticism, he requires only the strength for sacrifice. As little as he repudiates property as such does he reject marriage or demand sexual asceticism. The ideal of virginity indeed entered Christianity early; we find it already in the churches of Paul. But it is entirely foreign to Jesus; he required only purity and the sanctity of marriage. Of course he required renunciation of marriage also as a sacrifice under certain circumstances. (Matt. 19 :12) But there is no word from him which declares the sexual life, the physical as such, to be evil, or which ascribes to the state of virginity an especial sanctity. Here too the conduct of his church is clear proof; many of his disciples, Peter included, were married, and no one thought of demanding renunciation of marriage. | ||||
Moreover fasting as an ascetic exercise was not required by Jesus. He recognized it as an allowable religious practice if it comes from the heart. (Matt. 6 :16-18) But fasting as an act pleasing to God, through which a man attains to an especially holy state, he did not know. He was reproached as a glutton and drinker, in contrast to John the Baptist, who was an ascetic. (Matt. 11 :19) In the church the custom of regular fasts on two week days was soon adopted in imitation of the Jewish custom; but even in the church the custom was not a sign of asceticism, not a means to holiness. | ||||
Jesus, then, in no sense desires asceticism, and this is highly characteristic of his whole attitude and shows how he regards the position of man before God. The demand for asceticism really rests on the assumption that man through his behavior can attain a certain ideal or saintly quality which remains with him as a possession. The emphasis shifts accordingly from the behavior, the action, to that which is achieved thereby. Action loses its absolute character as the moment of decision, when subordinated to the view-point of the end, the ideal. This ideal may be the Greek ideal of the harmonious, independent man, complete in himself like a work of art; then asceticism becomes a technique of spiritual discipline, of character development, somewhat as in the Stoic philosophy. This may be called the asceticism of self-improvement. Or the ideal may be determined by the assumptions of religious dualism, that the material world, the body, the senses, are evil, and that man must raise himself out of this lower nature to the divine nature. Since Deity neither eats nor drinks, neither sleep nor begets, man must as far as possible renounce all these things in order to attain divine holiness. In a heightened emotional. life, in visions and ecstasies, as they are induced or furthered by such abstinence, the ascetic believes he already finds traces of this divine nature in himself. This kind of asceticism may be called the asceticism of sanctification. | ||||
Jesus is far removed from both kinds of asceticism. They have in common the goal of the abundant life for men. But this is not for Jesus the essential meaning of human life; for him its meaning is that man stands under the necessity of decision before God, is confronted by the demand of the will of God, which must be comprehended in each concrete moment and obeyed. Man does not have to achieve for himself particular qualities, either an especial virtue or an especial saintliness; he must simply be obedient, and for that he needs no special qualities. God is not far from him, so that a technique is necessary to approach Him; on the contrary, God speaks to him in every concrete situation, for every concrete situation is a crisis of decision. Man has, so to speak, no time for any preoccupation with asceticism. | ||||
In the concrete situation, that is, in this world, in this nature, man stands before God; there is no need of escaping beyond the present or outside of nature. Nowhere does Jesus say that nature is evil, that therefore one ought not to have this or ought not to do that. The will of the man who is disobedient is evil; it is for him to surrender, not to deny nature. Jesus, as we have already seen, does not have the concept "nature" at all. Since he sees the life of man as determined by God, besides God no other powers exist with which man must deal in order to reach God. Rather, that which we call nature comes into consideration only so far as it characterizes that present condition of men which is determined by the necessity of decision. That is, nature as "objective," which can be observed separately from the action of men, does not come in question, except as it presents the manifold possibilities for human conduct. | ||||
Hence not even God Himself can be considered under the category of nature. And all asceticism of sanctification, which aims to attain for itself the divine nature, must be wholly foreign to Jesus. For him there is no such thing as a divine nature; that is a specifically Greek idea. God is for Jesus the Power who constrains man to decision, who confronts him in the demand for good, who determines his future. God therefore cannot be regarded "objectively" as a nature complete in itself, but only in the actual comprehension of his own existence can man find God. If he does not find Him here, he will not find Him as a "nature." | ||||
The consequences of this idea of God can be carried still further. Here it is important first to recognize that for Jesus the will of God in no sense means the demand for asceticism, that his attitude toward wealth as toward all "natural" gifts is determined by the idea of surrender. Therefore Jesus attitude toward property cannot be explained from social ideals or from any socialistic and proletarian instincts and motives. It is true that the poor and hungry are blessed, because the Kingdom of God will end their need (Luke 6:20, 21), but the Kingdom is no ideal social order. Subversive ideas and revolutionary utterances are lacking in Jesus preaching. There were splendid buildings erected under Herod and his successors in Jerusalem and other Jewish cities palaces, theatres, hippodromes but no mention of them occurs in the gospel record; from the gospels we learn nothing at all about the economic situation in Palestine, except that there were peasants and fishermen, hand workers and merchants, rich and poor and all this only incidentally, mostly from the parables. Then we see clearly that all these things played no role in the thought of Jesus and his community, that they did not look with envious and longing eyes toward worldly splendor. Jesus imagination did not concern itself with pictures of the overthrow of wealth or with hopes of achieving still greater splendors. | ||||
There is only one passage in the gospel record in which a rich man is declared deserving of hell-fire simply because he is rich, and a poor man simply because he is poor is found worthy to be carried by the angels to Abraham s bosom the story of the rich man and Lazarus. (Luke 16:19-26) This is unique, and is probably not a genuine part of the preaching of Jesus. | ||||
Jesus does not ascethically renounce this world and its institutions, nor measure it critically by the standard of a social ideal, neither does he give positive worth to the duties which grow out of life in this world. No program for world-reformation is derived from the will of God. He does not speak of the value of marriage and the family for personality and for society. He speaks indeed of the holiness and indissolubility of marriage for him who has contracted it. (Matt. 5 :31, 32; Luke 16: 18) But he demands also the dissolving of all family relationships and the renouncing of marriage as a sacrifice which may be required as an act of decision (Matt. 8:22, 19:12; Luke 14:26) as he himself sends away his relatives and calls those who do the will of God his brothers and sisters. (Mark 3 :31-35) His attitude is therefore characteristically two-sided and will be misunderstood by any one who has not grasped the idea of decision. Neither marriage nor celibacy is in itself good; either can be demanded of a man. How each individual must decide, he will know, if he seeks not his own interests but the will of God. | ||||
Jesus speaks of property only as he does of wealth, that it becomes a fetter to man; that property can be used otherwise than for one s own enjoyment, that is, for service to the common good, as when it serves as a means of production this idea is completely outside the thought of Jesus, and can well remain so. For every one has to decide for himself whether his own property is of this character; and no economic theory about the productive value of property relieves him from the responsibility of his own decision. | ||||
Of the value of work Jesus does not speak. Here it is again made plain that he is not interested in character building, personality values, and the like. Just as little does Jesus think of the value of work for society and civilization. Just as we cannot deduce that for man as Jesus sees him, before God, work can never be a duty (for this is left to the decision of the individual), so also it is clear that in the view of Jesus there can be no thought of the universal value of work. It is an alternative for which decision may be required, but not a demand valid for all. | ||||
Jesus, unlike the Old Testament prophets, does not speak of the state and civil rights. The polemic of the prophets against worship of false gods in Israel was combined with the struggle against political and social wrongs. Their preaching demanded justice and righteousness for the common people, and their demand was asserted by them as a command of God. The words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount show that Jesus sets the requirement of law and justice over against the command of God. | ||||
Nevertheless there is a fundamental likeness between the prophetic conception of the will of God and that of Jesus. The prophets were combating a type of religion which assumed that men could satisfy the will of God through careful observance of the cult and ceremonial cleanliness, and could in other matters follow their own will. In opposition to such a view and to the levity, cruelty, and social injustice which grew out of it, the prophets proclaimed justice and right as the demand of God. The significance of law and justice to them was that it set bounds to man s self-will and controlled the community life by its requirements. But history showed here as elsewhere that man understands how to bend the law which he should serve to his own service. He understands how to combine obedience to the letter of the law with the attainment of his own desires; he knows how to stand on his own rights precisely in relation to the neighbor to whose service the law should compel him. | ||||
Because he realized this corruption of man, Jesus did not endeavor (as we have already seen) to create a better law, but he showed that the will of God, which can manifest itself in the law, claims man beyond the requirement of the law. This naturally does not mean that Jesus wished to abrogate law for human society, that he as Tolstoi misunderstood him advocated anarchy. It means simply that Jesus saw his task not as the founding of an ideal human society, but as the proclaiming of the will of God. Undoubtedly his expectation of the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God excluded the question of practical regulations for nation and state from the centre of his thought. This explanation however does not suffice, because if Jesus had taken any interest at all in the construction of a social order, his predictions of the Kingdom would have shown traces of this interest, as the Jewish Messianic hope did. A Jewish Messianic psalm, for example, runs thus: | ||||
"He will gather a holy people and rule them in | ||||
He will give justice to the tribes of the nation sanctified | ||||
And He will let injustice endure no more in the midst | ||||
And no one may dwell with them who has dealing with | ||||
And no foreigner or stranger can live with them any | ||||
He will speak justice to nations and tribes in the | ||||
The hope of Jesus never includes these elements, and from this it must be fully understood that his only purpose is to make known the position of man before God. What possibilities of political action may arise for the individual from this position, what in the concrete case his concrete duty is, he must himself decide. Although there is one saying attributed to Jesus which promises the position of authority in the Kingdom to the "twelve" (Matt. 19:28 or Luke 22:29), on the whole even in the early Christian community political desires and fancies have seldom found a place in connection with the hope for the Kingdom of God. | ||||
The will of God is then for Jesus as little a social or political program as it is either an ethical system which proceeds from an ideal of man and humanity or an ethic of value. He knows neither the conception of personality nor that of virtue; the latter word he does not even use, it is found first in Hellenistic Christianity. As he has no doctrine of virtue, so also he has none of duty or of the good. It is sufficient for a man to know that God has placed him under the necessity of decision in every concrete situation in life, in the here and now. And this means that he himself must know what is required of him, and no authority and no theory can take from him this responsibility. | ||||
If a man is really capable of meeting this responsibility, he is like the good tree which bears good fruit; then his "heart" is good; and "the good man brings good out of the good treasure of his heart, and the evil man out of the evil brings evil." (Luke 6 :45 ) Whoever sees a wounded man lying on the road knows without further command that it is right to help him. Whoever encounters the sick and oppressed knows that no Sabbath ordinance can hinder the duty to help. In all good conduct it is revealed whether the man desires to do God s will, that is, whether he wills to be completely obedient, entirely renounce his own claims, surrender his natural will with its demands. This in itself implies the requirement of truth and purity, and the casting aside of all hypocrisy, vanity, greed, and impurity. Such a man needs no particular rules for his conduct toward other men; his conduct is determined by renunciation of his own claim. | ||||
"You know that the princes of the nations | ||||
And do not call anyone father on earth, | ||||