Red Letter Christianity?

When I first encountered Shane Claiborne and Tony Campolo’s book Red Letter Christianity, I seized it in the hope that it might answer my questions.  Over the previous few years, I had been finding it impossible to reconcile being a Christian (i.e. someone who believes Jesus is our saviour) with focusing on the ‘red letters’ (i.e. what the Bible records of the teachings of Jesus himself, which are printed in red letters in some editions of the Bible).

Campolo and Claiborne had adopted the term ‘Red Letter Christianity’ to describe those who take the teachings of Jesus seriously and try to live up to them (for example, in loving their enemies, freeing the oppressed, sharing all their possessions, etc).  They explained that they had done this because the term ‘Evangelical Christian’ had come, particularly in America, to imply Far Right, pro-gun-ownership, anti-environment, etc, none of which they were.

To me, ‘evangelical’ had the much simpler meaning of ‘someone who believes the Gospel is good news,’ and I had convinced myself that there was no good news.  After trying to read Jesus’s teachings afresh, unhindered by the church’s traditional message of love and grace, I had concluded that Jesus’s real message was probably something like this:

‘I am going to separate out the righteous from the wicked, take the good to Heaven and send the wicked to Hell.  You are all evil, because no-one is good except God, so you are all going to Hell.  You will not be saved by faith in me, but judged on your deeds, and, as you are evil, you can’t do anything that isn’t evil.  You must hate being alive, hate your parents for causing you to be born, and love only your enemies, because they wish to harm you, which is what you should wish for if you hate yourselves.  I hate even my closest friend and regard him as the devil incarnate, so how much more do you think I hate the rest of you?’

Of course, Campolo and Claiborne don’t believe that Jesus is like this.  They believe that we should be gracious, generous people because Jesus has saved us, not that we have to try to be good in order to earn salvation, and certainly not that we are all condemned.  They can point to words of Jesus to back this up – but I can equally point to words of Jesus to back up my view of him as a hate-preacher.

The truth is that they don’t really see the ‘red letters’ of the Bible as more important than all the rest of it.  More important than rules in Leviticus, maybe, but not more important than the gospels’ description of Jesus healing and feeding people, being filled with compassion for the crowds, crying when his friend died.  Not more important than the gospels’ accounts of his death and resurrection, and not more important than what the rest of the New Testament says about our being reconciled to God because of what Jesus has done for us.

If I assume Jesus’s words are more important than his actions, then his words make apparently kindly actions seem sinister.  Here is someone who gave food to the hungry, but said, ‘Woe to you who are well fed, for you will go hungry’; who restored dead people alive to their families, but commanded his followers to hate their families and their own lives; who healed the sick, but told his followers to chop bits off themselves. 

If, however, I assume that his actions gave a good indication of the kind of person he was, then I am bound to conclude, either that the version of his words that we have isn’t completely accurate, or that he didn’t mean literally everything he said.

Sometimes, we assume that when Jesus said we must become like little children, it is easy to assume he meant we must take his words literally.  Young children sometimes take figures of speech literally because they don’t have enough experience to know that when the teacher says, ‘Your mum will be late coming to pick you up, because she’s a bit tied up at the moment,’ Mum hasn’t literally been kidnapped and bound.  But Jesus talked in metaphors, and was frustrated when his disciples insisted on taking them literally. 

Similarly, children may follow only the letter of instructions, and not always because they are looking for loopholes.  Sometimes they genuinely don’t understand that when Mum says, ‘Don’t go out of the front gate,’ she means, ‘Stay in the garden, because you could get hurt if you wander into the road,’ rather than, ‘If you want to go out, you can squeeze through the hedge.’  But Jesus frequently reminded people that obeying God meant not simply keeping a set of rules (e.g. don’t murder, don’t commit adultery), but repenting of vindictive or adulterous ways of thinking and feeling.

And, of course, this is what radical, committed Christians like Claiborne and Campolo are all about.  For example, to them, being ‘pro-life’ doesn’t simply mean being against capital punishment and abortion, but positively valuing people’s lives, which implies, for example, providing good healthcare, adopting children whose families aren’t able to care for them, protecting the environment, working to overcome poverty, and far more.  However, they don’t ask, ‘Why would we be pro-life at all, when Jesus tells us to hate even our own lives?’, because, even if they aim to live as if Jesus meant what he said, they know he didn’t mean it that way.

So I respect what they actually do, and I would recommend reading their book.  But I think they’re fooling themselves if they claim to believe that what Jesus taught in words, rather than by actions, was the most important part of the Bible.  After all, if instructions on how to live were the most important thing Jesus could give us, he would have written the Bible himself.