Jesus made some wild, outlandish, hard-to-believe claims about himself. Whether or not you believe him, you can at least admit (assuming, of course, the Gospel accounts are accurate enough) that Jesus' claims about himself were things we typically hear only from egomaniacs, delusional people off their meds, or presidential candidates.
But how he went about making his case was also off the wall, too. He set himself up to be easily proven wrong. Don't we usually try to avoid that?
He didn't try to win his argument - and there were arguments (chapters 6 and 10 of John, for example) - by means of raising his voice, by dominating the conversation with extra rhetoric, by ad hominem attacks, or by posting myopic memes. In fact, he didn't even keep engaged in the argument until he had "won." He didn't expect to be believed just because he said something, even though of all people, he uniquely has that right. He didn't get mad at people just because they disagreed with him.
What he did do was say, in effect, "Don't believe what I'm saying just because I'm saying it. Watch me. Just do that - watch me. See how I live. See the things that I do and how I do them. Believe me if you see my actions making my argument for me."
Jesus made himself falsifiable. That doesn't mean he was false. Rather, it means that if he was false, it would have been easy to show. This is a term used in scientific research - scientific claims are supposed to be falsifiable, meaning that another scientist is given the means by which to validate or invalidate the claims. If a scientific claim is not falsifiable, it is automatically suspect in the eyes of the scientific community.
In essence, Jesus set himself up. He made wild claims and then put the entire weight of his claims on the end of the tree branch of his works, and dared people to cut off the branch.
And because Jesus made such outlandish claims, he had to do some outlandish acts to match them. It would not have been adequate to back up a claim of being God's only Son by giving a sandwich to a homeless person. Or by being a better debater. No, it had to be big stuff ... which means they would be even easier to falsify if they weren't genuine.
Seems to me real faith makes this occur automatically, naturally. Spelling correction: manfest needs to be spelled manifest.
ReplyDeleteIdeally, yes. However, there is still instruction in the NT, for example, precisely because the discipleship process is incomplete. For example, "Love one another." Real faith should, in theory, make this instruction unnecessary, and yet it is an oft-repeated instruction.
ReplyDeleteWe fight the gravity of self-centeredness.
Thanks for the catch on the typo.