Quaker Theology #14

We Are the Missing Link -- Page 5

Post-Easter Sayings Concerning the Son of Man

Next we engage with sayings less likely to have been uttered by Jesus, but added by the early Church. Wink organizes these thematically into two groups, those dealing with the ascension of Jesus to heaven and the apocalyptic sayings concerning the Son of Man’s return and final judgment. Here, Wink echoes the general opinion of the Jesus Seminar and much current scholarship, that Jesus was not apocalyptic in outlook. (I do not share that view, but we will return to that matter soon.)

First, the matter of the ascension. Jung suggests that Christianity could not have spread so rapidly unless there had been a collective psychic readiness in the human species. Building on Jung, Wink remythologizes Jesus’ ascension to heaven as an ascension into the archetypal, imaginal realm. As such, the ascension of Jesus is a historical (collective psychic) event, even if not an observable (empirical) one. The rapid spread of the Christian experience and movement across the Greco-Roman world makes the historicity of the event undeniable. The Son of Man archetype becomes a new filter through which followers will experience God. Jesus becomes their experience of God. Following the logic of this Jungian remythologization, Wink suggests that the revelation of Jesus’ ascension may have been primary. Belief in the resurrection may have been only a secondary inference.

Put another way, by entering the collective unconscious, Jesus becomes available to all. Unfortunately, he is also thereby made accessible to re-appropriation by the Domination System. Hence, the full, liberating power of this historic revelation has been recaptured by powers of psychic and political repression, both within the Church and by powers that dominate the Church. But Wink can still affirm, "The Human Being is a visionary reality now, and it will become a world-historic event in the fullness of time, when the mystery of humanity, the anthropic revelation will be fully revealed" (p. 155).

Turning to the apocalyptic, end-time theme in post-Easter sayings, Wink laments that "the human Jesus is swallowed by apocalyptic fantasies" (p. 158). He differentiates apocalyptic eschatology from standard, prophetic eschatology, suggesting that the latter allows for a continuing historical process, while the former collapses time and confronts us with bizarre, dire, dualistic images. Here, however, it seems to me that Wink has failed to consider the implications of his ideas regarding the ascension. With Jesus moving in the archetypal realm, of course the revelations are vivid and frightening at times! To deny this is to fall prey to the same rationalism that Wink rightly identified in the quest for the historical Jesus. The Son of Man cannot be so tame.

Wink admits that, when we consider the nuclear threat in our own lifetime, we realize that dire, apocalyptic warnings of impending doom can be very appropriate. They can awaken us to where we are heading and inspire us to change course. But still he draws back, calling this modern, rational apocalyptic "anti-apocalyptic." He can imagine that perhaps Jesus did himself utter some of the bizarre warnings contained in Mark 13 and its parallels in Matthew and Luke. After all, Jesus could see the collision course between his people and the Roman Empire, and a judgment coming upon the temple and its regime (pp. 162, 166).

But Wink badly misses the mark with one of the best sayings about the Son of Man. Jesus warns his disciples that people will look for the Messiah, believing they have found him here, then there. But the coming of the Son of Man will be like lightning flashing across the sky (Matt. 24:27; Luke 17:24). Wink compares such a prophecy to a "grandiose media event" aimed at making people believe, a "final solution" that "ought not to happen" (p. 172).

But this prophecy works as powerful imagery of the collective unconscious. It is the Son of Man in the heavenly/psychic realm, lighting up across the entire human race. It stands in the strongest possible contrast to finding the Messiah in this person or that. It is apocalyptic at its best: literally an unveiling of the reality Jesus preached in his lifetime. Frankly, I see no reason not to believe that this could have been uttered by Jesus before his death. I’m bewildered that Wink could miss this, given all the pieces he has assembled so well – until the subject of apocalyptic arose.

That being said, many apocalyptic sayings, particularly in Matthew, portray the Son of Man not only as a coming judge, but as torturer and executioner. (No doubt, the gospel-writers sometimes became tangled in their own projections.) Nowhere is this more painful than in Matthew 25, where the Son of Man comes to separate the sheep from the goats. The sheep are those who have visited the Son of Man in the form of the sick, the imprisoned, the hungry (although they did so unconsciously). The goats are those who did not visit (just as unconsciously). They will be sent off to eternal punishment. Wink rightly notes that violent and repressive texts such as these have re-enforced bad religion in Christian history. But clearly, the solution is not to repress such passages, but to raise them to our own consciousness and work with them.

In early Quaker writings, for example, Friends grapple with hair-raising biblical texts, including many from the Book of Revelation. Rather than discount them, early Friends find them fulfilled in their own spiritual experience. Moreover, they put these very texts to nonviolent and socially transforming purposes. I have tried to show this in my three main books on early Friends: Apocalypse of the Word (1986); The Covenant Crucified (1995); and Seekers Found (2000).

Of course, early Friends are a separate historic case. Their spirituality should not be imposed upon Jesus or the writers of the New Testament gospels. But reading early Friends can help us toward similar readings today, or to imagine similar understandings at work in the early Church. Wink complains that Matthew 25 starts out with good ethical teaching, then reverts to mythical thinking and leaves judgment in a far-off future (p. 186). But when we read it and take it to heart, does it not become a present judgment/confrontation, an apocalyptic unveiling of our true condition?

Son of Man in the Gospel of John and in Paul

Wink prefers the approach in John’s gospel (he is pretty cool, isn’t he?). John features no apocalyptic advent of the Human Being. Rather, the Son of Man is a ladder spanning heaven and earth (John 1:50-51). It is a powerful image of the mediating agency Wink suggests in this book. (Given that, I don’t understand why Wink views the angels descending and ascending on the ladder as heavenly beings, rather than human beings. Either interpretation would seem plausible.) John uses both Son of God and Son of Man titles for Jesus, furthering the interplay between heaven and earth. As a result, Jesus is engulfed by the archetypal. He is past, present, and future humanity before God. The believer, Christ, and the Father all interpenetrate in one collective reality (pp. 202-03).

By contrast, Paul’s letters never mention the Son of Man. But Wink finds the same reality witnessed in Paul’s language of a new humanity and a new era beginning in Christ. His message of collective identity in the body of Christ offers a new, liberating social reality. The body as temple of the Holy Spirit is similarly humanizing (pp. 207-10). Wink also reviews contemporary parallel developments in Jewish mysticism and in gnosticism of the same period (Chapters 15 and 16). He finds in these evidence that the early Christian movement was not an isolated phenomenon. There was a shift in the collective unconscious, articulated in different ways by these different movements.

Wink concludes by suggesting that, because Jesus did not identify himself definitively as the Son of Man, we are freed to become, not like Jesus, but more ourselves. There is no universal Son of Man. Rather, the Human Being is always historical, particular, local, articulated in relationship to communities and traditions (pp. 194-95). By speaking open-endedly of the Son of Man, Jesus intended to make it available to all of us. Nevertheless, we appropriate it only as we surrender to it (p. 256), as he did. Jesus reveals two things to us. The Christological revelation is that God became incarnate in the human. The Anthropological revelation is that God calls us to become human as God is Human. Wink can affirm both revelations, but his emphasis is upon the latter. "The gist of this book is, simply, that Jesus as the son of the man is enough" (p. 259).

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