Douglas Groothuis Joins The Worldview Bulletin
Plus: The Oddness of Jesus
We at The Worldview Bulletin are excited to announce that renowned Christian philosopher and apologist Douglas Groothuis has joined our team of regular contributors! Many readers will be familiar with Dr. Groothuis from his numerous books including Christian Apologetics, Philosophy in Seven Sentences, Truth Decay, Fire in the Streets, and The Knowledge of God in the World and in the Word.
He is also the author of dozens of scholarly and popular articles, and has spoken at a wide variety of venues on issues such as theistic arguments, critiques of Christianity, non-Christian spiritualities, comparative religion, C. S. Lewis, Blaise Pascal, philosophy of jazz, and aesthetics.
He has served as a professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary since 1993, but this summer will take up a new position as distinguished university research professor of apologetics and Christian worldview at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
In his first article for the Bulletin, below, Dr. Groothuis discusses the “oddness” of Jesus and how it reminds us that Jesus “will not be domesticated, muted, or tranquilized.”
Christopher Reese
Found and Editor
The Worldview Bulletin
The Oddness of Jesus and Christian Apologetics
Through many years of apologetic endeavor, I have gladly explained and defended Jesus Christ as the only Savior and Lord (John 14:6; Acts 4:12; 1 Timothy 2:5). I have argued against those who would deny his deity through liberal theology[1] or Islamic theology[2] or who would recast him as a pantheistic New Age guru.[3] But there is another facet about Jesus that apologetics should address: his oddness. By oddness I don’t mean the essential gospel message of Jesus and the Bible, which offends our pride (1 Corinthians 1:18-25), but, rather, certain awkward or strange events in Jesus’ life. Since some may be put off by elements of Jesus’ words and character, a sound apologetic should take this into account. Of course, we must not remove the offence of the Cross itself, which is not ultimately an intellectual difficulty, but a moral condition of rebellion against a holy God.
Odd may seem an odd word to describe Jesus. He was not odd as in being mentally deranged or histrionic or exhibitionistic. Nor was his oddness due to any vice or character flaw. No insult hurled at him ever really stuck. To his contemporaries, Jesus was often hard to read—opaque and perplexing, though compelling and absorbing at the same time. In some ways, he remains odd, even to his most devout and learned followers. Jesus will not be domesticated, muted, or tranquilized. Nor was he ever boring, pedestrian, or predictable. He was not just a good bloke who also happened to be God. Consider a few stories.
In John’s account of Jesus, we find that he is often misunderstood by both disciples and opponents—and he seldom corrects the misunderstanding. Jesus astounds everyone by driving the merchants and money changers out of the temple. He says, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!” (Jn 2:16). Jesus’ actions are audacious enough, but he adds oddness to oddness in his response: “The Jews then responded to him, ‘What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.’ They replied, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?’ But the temple he had spoken of was his body” (Jn 2:19-21). He did not bother to explain this meaning, but after “he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken” (Jn 2:22). Jesus knows something that they did not know—over and over in John’s Gospel. Here is another case.
While discoursing on being “the bread of life,” Jesus pivots from eating baked goods to eating meat and drinking blood—his own. Jesus said to them,
“Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever” (Jn 6:53-58).
Jesus speaks of himself as bread, then as meat and blood, and then again as bread. This did not go over very well. “From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him” (Jn 6:66). He did not explain his meaning any further. Mum’s the word. However, Jesus asked the Twelve, “You do not want to leave too, do you?,” and “Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God’” (Jn 6:67-69).
It is not clear how much even Peter understood what Jesus meant, but he trusted him and would not leave him. We are taught that the first law of teaching is to speak in an understandable way, but Jesus often confused or stymied his audience. Yet he continued to teach, never second guessed himself, and he often impressed his hearers with his authority (Mt 7:28-29).
Jesus had an odd way of eliciting truth from some folks. When talking to a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, Jesus bids her to bring back her husband, knowing full well that she is not married, that she is living with a man, and has been married five times before. What is remarkable is not only Jesus’ supernatural knowledge and that he, a Jewish male, is talking to a Samaritan woman, but that his relational quirkiness turns out to be ingenious. She is thus convinced he is a prophet and spreads the word that he is the Messiah such that many believe (Jn 4). Let us reflect on another encounter with another woman.
When Jesus withdrew to Tyre and Sidon, a Canaanite woman (not a Jew) desperately implored him to have mercy on her and to help her daughter who was “demon-possessed and suffering terribly” (Mt 15:22). What Jesus does ill fits the Jesus of popular piety. He says nothing. Then his disciples insensitively ask Jesus to send her away since she is bothering them by her importunacy. Jesus finally speaks, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel” (Mt 15:24). After this, “The woman came and knelt before him. ‘Lord, help me!’ she said. He replied, ‘It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.’ ‘Yes it is, Lord,’ she said. ‘Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.’ Then Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.’ And her daughter was healed at that moment” (Mt 15:25-28).
If anyone other than Jesus acted this way, we would reckon it rude if not cruel. Why did he not heal the poor woman’s poor demonized daughter instantly as he had healed so many others? When Jesus finally speaks, he insults her, calling both her and her daughter “dogs”—a common derogatory word for Gentiles used by Jews. The Gospel account gives no gloss on Jesus’ actions, no exculpatory exegesis. But, again, Jesus knows more than we do. His repartee provokes a savvy response from the woman that plays on the dog metaphor: “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.” At that, Jesus commends her faith and heals her daughter. Jesus’ rather rough treatment was meant to illicit a great and tenacious faith, and it worked. But how odd! There is a wildness to Jesus that Christians can never tame. C. S. Lewis wrote of this in a letter to a former student, which is worth quoting at length. His reading of the Gospels at one stage was “more depressing than yours.”
Everyone told me that there I should find a figure whom I couldn’t help loving. Well, I could. They told me I would find moral perfection—but one sees so very little of Him in ordinary situations that I couldn’t make much of that either. Indeed some of His behaviour seemed to me open to criticism, e.g. accepting an invitation to dine with a Pharisee and then loading him with torrents of abuse. Now the truth is, I think, that the sweetly-attractive-human-Jesus is a product of 19th century scepticism, produced by people who were ceasing to believe in His divinity but wanted to keep as much Christianity as they could. It is not what an unbeliever coming to the records with an open mind will (at first) find there. The first thing you find is that we are simply not invited to speak, to pass any moral judgement on Him, however favourable: it is only too clear He is going to do whatever judging there is: it is we who are being judged, sometimes tenderly, sometimes with stunning severity. . . . The first real work of the Gospels on a fresh reader is, and ought to be, to raise very acutely the question, “Who or What is this?” For there is a good deal in the character which, unless He really is what He says He is, is not lovable or even tolerable. If He is, then of course it is another matter: nor will it then be surprising if much remains puzzling to the end. For if there is anything in Christianity, we are now approaching something which will never be fully comprehensible.[4]
If Jesus “really is what He says He is,” his oddness fits his character. He is no mere man. He knows more. He does more. He thus perplexes and instructs us. No wonder it was said of Jesus, “No one ever spoke the way this man does!” (Jn 7:46).[5]
Notes
[1] I critique the Jesus Seminar’s desupernaturalizing of Jesus in Douglas Groothuis, Jesus in an Age of Controversy (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1996), 17-63.
[2] See Douglas Groothuis, “The Challenge of Islam,” Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity-Academic, 2022).
[3] See Douglas Groothuis, Revealing the New Age Jesus (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990) and Groothuis, Jesus in an Age of Controversy.
[4] To a former pupil, 26 March 1940. Letters of C. S. Lewis: Revised and Enlarged Edition, W. H. Lewis, ed. Revised and enlarged edition edited by Walter Hooper, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, 344-345, emphasis added. Thanks to Lydia McGrew for this reference.
[5] This essay is adapted from Groothuis, Douglas. Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith, 2nd ed. (pp. 501-504). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition, 2022.
— Douglas Groothuis, Ph.D. (University of Oregon) is Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary where he has served since 1993. He is the author of nineteen books, including Unmasking the New Age, Truth Decay, On Jesus, Christian Apologetics, Fire in the Streets, and, most recently, World Religions in Seven Sentences, as well as thirty peer-reviewed papers in journals such as Religious Studies, Academic Questions, Philosophia Christi, and Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society.
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Happy to be aboard! Glory to God.
Fantastic news! Groothuis is a wonderful apologist.