This Friday’s preview of Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence recalls my surprise upon hearing a quote from CS Lewis and popularized by Josh McDowell about how Jesus couldn’t be a great moral teacher.
When I first encountered this idea at 15, I found it completely bewildering. But I embraced it anyway. And it took years for me to figure why it was wrong — and what had been right about Jesus the Teacher.
JESUS THE TEACHER
From Freeing Jesus, pp. 56-60.
c. Diana Butler Bass, 2021
In 1975, during my sophomore year in high school, I had an argument with a friend. He was a conservative evangelical, and he found my mainline Methodist theological education wanting.
“Who is Jesus?” he asked me.
“Well,” I replied, “Jesus was a great teacher. He taught the Golden Rule. You know.”
The next day, my friend brought me a book, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, by Josh McDowell. First published in 1972, it was a work of popular apologetics, intended to make the case to an increasingly skeptical world that Jesus was God. Christianity Today would eventually place it at number 13 on its list of “most influential” Christian books of the twentieth century.
“Read this,” he instructed. He pointed to a section with a long quote from C. S. Lewis, an author I had not heard of until then:
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.
Why was it so wrong, I wondered, to think of Jesus as a “great moral teacher”? The Golden Rule, the commands about love, the parables, the New Testament itself? So much teaching, so many challenging ideas. I did not understand.
I had, of course, stumbled into an argument that I did not know existed. Although I had an inkling of some sort of rift in Protestant Christianity, I was unaware that “Jesus as teacher” triggered strong theological reactions, one of the ideas that had for nearly a century driven a wedge between conservative and liberal Protestants.
My Methodist upbringing emphasized Jesus as the model teacher—and this was intellectually and morally important. Jesus as teacher did not stop us from singing hymns about his being born in a manger or celebrating the Resurrection on Easter. It did not seem to contradict other things the church taught about Jesus or recited in creeds. Rather, the teacher Jesus somehow existed alongside the Son of God Jesus without much of a second thought. To diminish “teacher” in favor of, say, “Lord,” made little sense to me.
But my friend was mad — mad — that I thought of Jesus as teacher. He wanted to correct my bad theology, make sure I knew the right doctrine about Jesus. Jesus was Lord, and that was it. “Teacher” was weak, incomplete, and dangerous. He pressed on me Lewis’s logic of Lord, liar, or “lunatic” (Lewis’s word — not mine). Those were the choices. Moral teacher was not on the list. Jesus as teacher was what liberals thought, what heretics believed. He continued, “You don’t want to be one of those, do you?”
When you are fifteen and someone you desperately want to impress asks such a question, there is only one way to answer. No, I did not want to be a liberal or a heretic. I wanted to be part of his group, to go to his church, where another boy I had a crush on went, to sit in the circle and hold hands while singing, “They will know we are Christians by our love.” It must be bad, I thought, to be Christian and a liberal or a heretic. This C. S. Lewis fellow thought it was bad, as Josh McDowell so logically explained. If I had three choices — Lord, liar, or lunatic — and Jesus the great moral teacher has been crossed off, it was not hard to choose. I said goodbye to the Jesus I had known. Holding hands with the cute boy in Bible study beckoned.
Although I had grown from child to teenager with Jesus the teacher, I had limited notions of what a teacher was. As far as I knew, a teacher was a rule keeper, a tool giver, and a content provider, maybe a sort of third parent or good storyteller. Perhaps my friend was right. Jesus was much more than a teacher, and it diminished him to call him such.
As I made my way through high school, college, seminary, and graduate school and finally into classrooms where I stood in front of the students, I learned that teachers were much more than my teen-aged ideas. The best ones taught from the heart by raising questions and presenting material in surprising ways. Great teachers opened their homes and tables and modeled a generosity of knowledge and spirit that transformed the lives of their students.
Indeed, the best teachers I have ever known — as well as the teacher I aspired to be —nurtured a way of being in the world, a way that treasured questions and logic, research and study, critical thinking, and a love of words. I heard it said of one such master teacher, a professor whose dinners with students were legendary, at his memorial service: “He gave us instructions and he set us free.”
That is what it means to teach: to instruct and liberate.
It is hard to imagine a better way to think of Jesus — the Teacher.
Some reflection prompts: Did you experience any significant spiritual turning points when you were around 15? How did you think about Jesus as a teenager? Were you influenced by that Lewis-McDowell quote, too? What difference might it make to you to understand Jesus’s power as a teacher?
Over the next several weeks, I’ll share Friday sneak peeks of my forthcoming book here at The Cottage. Of course, there will continue to be the regular essays on faith and what’s going on in the world and in the news more generally (usually on Monday or Tuesday). But I’m pleased to invite you into an early look at Freeing Jesus — a book I hope will inspire new questions about what it might mean to follow Jesus in these fraught days.
INSPIRATION
Jesus was a sage, a teacher of wisdom. Regularly addressed as “teacher” during his lifetime by followers, opponents, and interested inquirers alike, he has been hailed by subsequent generations of Christians as more than a teacher, as indeed he was. Nevertheless, he was not less than a teacher.
— Marcus Borg
You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am.
— John 13:13
Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher.
— Japanese Proverb
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
— Nelson Mandela
I remember
the first day,
how I looked down,
hoping you wouldn't see
me,
and when I glanced up,
I saw your smile
shining like a soft light
from deep inside you.
“I'm listening,” you encourage us.
“Come on!
Join our conversation,
let us hear your neon certainties,
thorny doubts, tangled angers,”
but for weeks I hid inside.
I read and reread your notes
praising
my writing,
and you whispered,
“We need you
and your stories
and questions
that like a fresh path
will take us to new vistas.”
Slowly, your faith grew
into my courage
and for you—
instead of handing you
a note or apple or flowers—
I raised my hand.
— Pat Mora, from “Ode to Teachers”
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For podcast, media, review, and interview inquires and availability regarding the book launch, please email Dan Rovzar at HarperCollins publicity: Dan.Rovzar@harpercollins.com.
When I was 14, Walt Wangerin came to my church. He became my Sunday school teacher before he became our assistant pastor. Walt taught me to think, not be afraid to ask God questions. He introduced me to great Christian writers and thinkers. I had been a pretty legalistic Missouri Synod Lutheran up to that point. Jesus was real to me and I loved Him deeply. But...I definitely lived by rules, right and wrong. Walt challenged me to think about why I believed what I believed. I will forever be grateful to him for that among so many other things.
As several have already said above, it seems way counterintuitive to oppose “teacher” and “Lord:” the explicit point of Lewis’s saying is that he is not “just” a teacher. But others above have also gone along with this needless juxtaposition and prefer him to be teacher, but not Lord.