A Serious Way of Wondering: The Ethics of Jesus Imagined

Reynolds Price is not best known for his writing on religion, but most people familiar with his fiction will recognize the importance of Christianity within it – an importance that looms just as large as it does in O’Connor, McCullers, or Faulkner. This very short volume is just one more that Price has dedicated to a several-decades-long quest to understanding what he believes to be the historical Jesus, and his continuing legacy in the tradition to which Jesus gave his name.

Price tetchily but accurately points out that today it seems like everyone (at least most Christians) fervently know what Christ would have done in any number of ethical dilemmas which we were not recounted in the Gospels. As he repeatedly reminds the reader show more here, he finds himself stuck between the rank theological illiteracy of the “What Would Jesus Do?” tribe (replete with their conspicuous, ubiquitous bracelets, almost always worn by people much too young to even understand how serious these questions are) and, on the other hand, the archliteracy of the Jesus Seminar, with whom Price has major methodological quibbles. Price’s lack of presumption is appreciated. As a Christian, though an admittedly unorthodox one, he begins here: that Jesus Christ really lived, and really rose from the dead. According to some scholars, because of this he has already gone too far. But we must all begin with axiomatic assumptions and if that’s where a self-professed Christian wants to begin, I wouldn’t necessarily begrudge the point.

Unfortunately, what follows is the worst of milquetoast ethics from the dregs of bland, uninspiring, twentieth-century Christianity: Jesus never would have condemned homosexuality and the essence of Christianity is “God loved us; we must love one another.” I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with either one of these assertions – except for the fact that Price happens to be a homosexual himself, and his own celerity to exonerate himself in the eyes of his Jesus smacks of the same Christian presumption which I mentioned above.

Price doesn’t contend to be a religious scholar or have any formal training in anything he’s talking about here. To his credit, quite the opposite is true. He’s just a passionate Christian trying to make sense out of his world. And who can hold this against him? If I’m going to subscribe to theological, it can’t be as toothless and lovey-dovey as this. You end up getting a Heaven that resembles something like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” where everyone has a golden ticket. Universal grace and forgiveness rest at the heart of the most attractive kinds of Christianity. Yet just as central to the religion is a body of proscribed behaviors transgressions against which we must be punished for. Where does the stress fall? Now this is a question that can be taken up in one of hundreds of different denominations and, ultimately, only in the human heart.

Price’s attempt to provide answers will satisfy some readers (most likely those who identify as liberal Christians), but it was less appealing to me – an open-minded atheist with a longstanding interest in Christian history, ethics, and Christology. show less