Brian McLaren emphasizes knowing and following Jesus as a prophet:
Many Christians have tried to understand Jesus primarily through his spiritual descendants by asking, “What did Paul say about Jesus? What did Augustine say about Jesus? What did John Calvin or John Wesley say about Jesus?” If we only try to understand Jesus through what people said after his lifetime, we will miss how much more we could understand about Jesus by seeing him in the context of those who came before him—in the story of his ancestors and his spiritual lineage. Jesus waits to be rediscovered in the context of his history and story. Growing up as a Jew, Jesus enters the ancestral lineage of the patriarchs and matriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel. But Jesus also enters through a spiritual lineage of prophets and prophetesses beginning with Moses, the first biblical prophet….
He begins his public ministry with a prophetic proclamation [see Luke 4:14–30]. He acts like a prophet by doing all kinds of bizarre public demonstrations. Like the prophets, Jesus offers warnings and promises, blessings and woes. He also loves to quote prophets, especially Isaiah and Hosea….
Unfortunately, this rich prophetic understanding of Jesus became minimized in the Christian tradition. Instead, we talked almost exclusively about Jesus as the Son of God, … the savior from original sin, and the sacrificial lamb. We minimized his work and life as a prophet. We are free to understand Jesus as more than a prophet, but we should never understand him as less. His prophetic tradition should form the core and the baseline of our understanding of Jesus.
If we take Jesus seriously as a prophet, we take his incarnation seriously, because Jesus comes into a particular historical situation. As part of a society, he had to grapple with politics and economics. The crucifixion makes sense because prophets’ lives don’t usually end well. Very few have a comfortable retirement. His prophetic identity also requires us to take the story of the resurrection seriously as a prophetic demonstration and affirmation that the work of the prophet must continue even after he is executed and buried.
If we let Jesus as prophet be eclipsed by other understandings, Jesus is reduced, and so are we. Jesus wants his followers to become like him…. He says, “My movement is a prophetic movement. If you join my movement, you’re in that line of work, including its hazards.”
If we take Jesus seriously as prophet, it will help us in our multi-faith conversations because other religions take the role of prophet seriously. Muslims love and revere Jesus as a prophet. When we think about the white patriarchy and white supremacy that are so deeply embedded in many forms of Christianity, we realize that the revolutionary contributions of Black, eco, feminist, womanist, and liberation theologies take Jesus’ life and work as a prophet more seriously. When we can reclaim the understanding of Jesus as prophet and let that revolutionize us, we can rediscover prophets in today’s world.
Jesus the Prophet
In a homily Father Richard describes the tension between priestly and prophetic tasks—both necessary for healthy religion:
There are two great strains of spiritual teachers in Judaism, and I think, if the truth is told, in all religions. There’s the priestly strain that holds the system together by repeating the tradition. The one we’re less familiar with is the prophetic strain, because that one hasn’t been quite as accepted. Prophets are critical of the very system that the priests maintain.
If we have both, we have a certain kind of wholeness or integrity. If we just have priests, we keep repeating the party line and everything is about loyalty, conformity, and following the rules—and that looks like religion. But if we have the priest and the prophet, we have a system constantly refining itself and correcting itself from within. Those two strains very seldom come together. We see it in Moses, who both gathers Israel, and yet is the most critical of his own people. We see it again in Jesus, who loves his people and his Jewish religion, but is lethally critical of hypocrisy and illusion and deceit (see Matthew 23; Luke 11:37–12:3).
Choctaw elder and Episcopal bishop Steven Charleston considers how Jesus invited others to share in his prophetic vision:
Jesus … saw a vision that became an invitation for people to claim a new identity, to enter into a new sense of community.… Jesus offered the promise of justice, healing, and redemption.… Jesus became the prophetic teacher of a spiritual renewal for the poor and the oppressed…. Jesus was more than just the recipient of a vision or the messenger of a vision. What sets Jesus apart is that he brought the elements of his vision quest together in a way that no one else had ever done….
“This is my body,” he told them. “This is my blood.” For him, the culmination of his vision was not just the messiahship of believing in him as a prophet. Through the Eucharist, Jesus was not just offering people a chance to see his vision, but to become a part of it by becoming a part of him. [1]
Richard honors the role of prophets in religious systems:
The only way evil can succeed is to disguise itself as good. And one of the best disguises for evil is religion. Someone can be racist, be against the poor, hate immigrants, and be totally concerned about making money and being a materialist but still go to church each Sunday and be “justified” in the eyes of religion.
Those are the things that prophets point out, so prophets aren’t nearly as popular as priests. Priests keep repeating the party line, but prophets do both: they put together the best of the conservative with the best of the liberal, to use contemporary language. They honor the tradition, and they also say what’s phony about the tradition. That’s what fully spiritually mature people can do.
Addiction as Idolatry
The Things We Worship Instead of God
by Mark Longhurst
We are all addicted to something.
Some of us struggle, or know people who struggle, with devastating addictions to drugs, alcohol, sex, or gambling. But even for those of us untouched by substance abuse, addiction reaches much deeper. It hides in our habits of thought and behavior, in our compulsions to control, perform, or prove ourselves.
Psychologist and spiritual writer Gerald May defined addiction as “a state of compulsion, obsession, or preoccupation that enslaves a person’s will and desire.” That line gets to the heart of it. Addiction is not only about substances; it’s about the ways we become attached to whatever promises relief, affirmation, or control.
For about half of my life, I’ve been addicted to caffeine. It’s one of the socially accepted addictions—alongside sugar, chocolate, and nicotine. I started drinking thick, black German coffee at fourteen, eager to prove my maturity. I was suffering from undiagnosed depression and discovered that caffeine gave me the energy I couldn’t summon on my own. So I drank six or seven cups a day. I would walk into the Black Forest (where my boarding school was located) with a thermos, find a quiet place to sit, pull out my self-serious existentialist novel, and finish the whole thing. My brain needed—and still needs, if I’m honest—that jolt to keep going.
But it’s not just me. We are all addicted in some way. Our desires and wills are compulsive, obsessed, and preoccupied—attached to habits of behavior and thought that enslave us. Some of us are addicted to caffeine or chocolate, some to hidden fantasies, email, our phones, or television. Most of us are addicted to ways of thinking: being right, being in control, being successful, being loved, being needed, even helping others.
And our addictions don’t stop at the individual level. We can see how the United States is addicted to white supremacy and fights fiercely to reject and attack the inherent diversity that defines us. We can see how the United States is addicted to fossil fuels, which connects to our addiction to war and the increasingly desperate craving to remain a global empire.
From a spiritual perspective, addiction is idolatry: worshiping something other than God. When we attach ultimate desire to anything finite, whether a person, a substance, a nation, or an ideology, we place our trust in what cannot sustain us. As the apostle Paul writes in Romans 1, we turn away from God when we “worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator.”
Paul’s insight echoes the first commandment given through Moses: “You shall have no other gods before me.” Yet even as Moses descended from the mountain, the Israelites had enlisted Aaron to craft a golden calf. That story in Exodus is timeless. Golden calves are a symbol of the human tendency to orient our trust toward what we can see—something shiny, attainable, or seemingly secure. When we direct our longing toward what is not Infinite Love, we treat something other than God as god. Addiction, then, is misplaced worship.
That’s why the third of the Twelve Steps reads: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.” AA founder Bill Wilson understood that sobriety requires a spiritual change of course in one’s will and desire. And that is true not only for alcoholics; it is true for everyone.
Paul had a word for our universal addictive tendencies: sin.
I know that word makes many people uneasy, and often for good reason. For folks hurt by religion, we can easily use different words. I live only a stone’s throw from the church where Jonathan Edwards preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” This category of sin has often been wielded as a weapon of fear. But understood rightly, sin is simply the truth of our condition: our woundedness, our misaligned desires, our addictions. Naming sin is not self-hatred or a way of avoiding our inherent divine image within; it’s just truth-telling—and as Jesus said, “the truth shall set you free.”
In Romans 7, Paul captures our inner struggle: I do what I do not want to do; I intend to do the right thing, but my intentions fall flat. I grabbed the bottle after five years of sobriety. I lashed out at someone I love. I meant to seek the other’s good, but couldn’t control my reaction. There is something in each of us that fails to live up to our own standards and is misaligned with Love.
Romans 7 builds on the argument Paul makes earlier: all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. It’s a brilliant rhetorical reversal. In Romans 1, Paul seems to play into stereotypes about Gentiles as immoral outsiders and he lists their supposed vices in a kind of moral crescendo. It’s an over-the-top list: Gentiles are guilty of envy, murder, deceit, craftiness, malice, covetousness, gossip, slandering, God-hatred, insolence, haughtiness, boasting, inventing evil, rebelling against parents, heartlessness, ruthlessness. On and on. But then, in chapter 2, he turns the tables: “You have no excuse when you judge others, for in passing judgment you condemn yourself.”
You Gentiles who think you’re upright. You Jewish believers confident in divine favor. You modern Christians convinced God is on your nation’s side. You conservatives so certain that others are damned, and you liberals so certain that others are ignorant—all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. As Jesus reminds us in Matthew’s Gospel, we first must remove the plank from our own eyes.
Transformation begins only when we face the truth of our situation. The first of the Twelve Steps says: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” We resist this kind of conversion at every turn. Paul himself needed a blinding encounter with Christ before he could release his violent certainty. Most of us need a crisis—a death, a diagnosis, a collapse, a reckoning—to wake us to the truth of life’s unmanageability. We just won’t let go, it seems, unless something forces us to.
Prayer, then, becomes a recovery practice: a way of detaching from our attachments. Detachment doesn’t mean aloofness or indifference. It means learning to witness our obsessions and slowly reorder our desires toward God.
Contemplative prayer is a daily humiliation for the aggrandized ego. When we sit in silence, even for two minutes, the first thing we notice is that we are not silent. Our minds teem with opinions and judgments: I need to do that thing later. What does that person think of me? That other person is really annoying me. I look pretty good today. Do I look pretty good today? Anything to avoid resting in the grace-filled enoughness of God’s love.
In prayer we throw our addicted selves onto the mercy of God. We confess our powerlessness and acknowledge that our lives have become unmanageable. As the ancient Christians prayed: Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
As a college student, I often participated in events on campus called Open Forums. They were question-and-answer sessions held in a dorm or fraternity house, where I fielded questions about faith and philosophy. Sometimes they were organized as more formal debates between me and an atheist or skeptic. Early on, I viewed myself as a defender of the faith, a next-generation apologist following in the steps of Lewis and Schaeffer.By my senior year, however, I had grown disillusioned with the Open Forums for two reasons. First, I never saw anyone argued into the kingdom of God. Of course, some people had very legitimate intellectual struggles with belief and the claims of Christianity—I had been one of them. While apologetics could lower barriers to faith, I learned that it’s only a genuine attraction to Jesus himself that lures a person in. Second, it occurred to me that my righteous attempts to defend Christ were more often a self-righteous attempt to defend myself. I came to this second realization through reading the novel Silence by Shusaku Endo. The story follows two Portuguese priests who secretly enter Japan in the seventeenth century to search for their lost mentor. Japanese Christians were severely persecuted at the time, and many were martyred. The novel explores the journey of the two young priests who were proud defenders of the faith but became broken men tempted to publicly deny Jesus. It is a beautiful and haunting novel that explores facets of faith never addressed or even acknowledged in many Christian communities today.More than anything, Endo helped me realize that Jesus is not relying upon my defense. His vindication was accomplished when the Father raised him from the dead, and it will be evident to all on a day still to come. Until then, our Lord is quite familiar with being mocked and scorned. Isaiah prophesied that he would be despised and disrespected, and the most enduring image of our faith, the cross, is a symbol of shame and rejection. Jesus was very willing to accept both, but I am not. Through Endo’s novel, I came to recognize that my spirited defense of Jesus through rhetoric and argument was, in fact, an attempt to defend my own honor and reputation on a campus where the Christian faith was largely dismissed and disrespected. There is a place for Christians to speak intelligently about their beliefs, and it is appropriate to answer critics of faith in an often hostile public square, but these efforts should never be divorced from a large dose of self-reflection. As our culture becomes increasingly post-Christian, and we seek to defend our faith, we ought to ask ourselves this essential question—Are we really seeking to defend Jesus’ honor or just our own?