November 14: Medieval Christian views / psychological impact

David Vishanoff

Tuesday, July 21st, 2015

Assignment

Read Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries, chapters 8, 10, and 11.

• Ch. 8 – Christ Crucified: Christians have made Jesus’ death, represented by the cross, a symbol of power, a model of meekness, an expression of God’s love, and a satisfaction of God’s justice.
  • What other kinds of significance have you heard Christians attribute to the cross?
  • What kind of psychological function or effect (good or bad) do you think these understandings of Jesus’ death might have for those who hold them?
• Ch. 10 – The Bridegroom of Soul: Mystics regarded Jesus as a lover with whom the soul longs to unite.
  • Is this view of Jesus still around today in our culture?
  • What kind of psychological function or effect might this view of Jesus have?
• Ch. 11 – The Divine and Human Model: Jesus as a model of poverty and suffering to be strictly imitated.
  • Does this seem like a psychologically useful image of Jesus, or a detrimental one?
• Finally, which of these images seems most plausible to  you? Are they all equally reasonable for those who have held them, given their backgrounds and contexts? Or are some of them historically or morally problematic?

Think about the psychological impact you want your gospel to have on your audience. What kind of personal transformation would you like to see in your readers? What psychological function would you like your Jesus to play for them? Do you want your readers to see Jesus as a lover, a model to imitate, a mirror in which to examine herself, an affirmation of his own struggles, or … what?

Then write an introductory essay for your gospel, or expand the one you already have. Make sure you have set forth the context and audience for which you are writing, and the symbolic function you want Jesus to have. Then add an explanation of the psychological impact you want your gospel to have on your audience.

As time allows, continue working on your research, adding explanations in comments and introductions, and fleshing out your gospel narrative, thinking especially of how you can increase its psychological impact on your readers.

Notes from class

Today we considered a whole series of interpretations of Jesus, asking whether they are still around today in some form, and what psychological impact they might have on people:

• The cross:
  • A charm to ward off evil: common in the middle ages; still present in movies but seldom admitted to today.
  • A symbol of military power and conflict (e.g. the crusades, antisemitism): more common in the middle ages.
  • A symbol of God’s victory over sin and death: common in the Eastern churches; heard in some American churches; used as a confidence booster; used as grave markers to express hope of life beyond death.
  • A reminder of God’s love: this is how many people, historically and today, view the crosses they wear or that they see in churches; its impact might be personal affirmation and motivation to love others sacrificially.
  • A reminder of the gravity of one’s sin: for many people crosses and crucifixes induce feelings of guilt.
  • A solution to the paradox of God’s justice and mercy: This view was advocated by Anselm, and remains very common among Western Christians; it serves to resolve a theological paradox, and helps avoid images of God as purely vengeful or as a pushover (as in “moralistic therapeutic deism”).
  • A metaphor for reconciliation to God: some modern evangelistic tracts represent the cross as a bridge over a gulf separating God from humans.
  • A symbol of meaning and hope in suffering: it gives some Christians a way to deal with suffering, seeing it as meaningful and part of redemption.
• The bridegroom of the soul:
  • An analogy for marriage: Paul made this analogy, which is used at weddings today, but is not mentioned by Pelikan.
  • The object of mystical desire: medieval mystics claimed experiences of union or (sometimes rather erotic) love relationships with God; this is not visible to us today, and has long been considered theologically problematic by non-mystics.
  • An intimate personal friend: today mysticism has been replaced in American Christianity by the idea of an intimate personal relationship with God, sometimes expressed in love songs; establishing this kind of personal connection with God could be comforting, but to us and Pelikan it seems sentimental and even bizarre.
• A model of suffering and poverty:
  • A model to imitate literally: this was exemplified by St Francis, but today is not widely admired, being limited to a few who go “off the grid” or who adopt radically poor lifestyles as missionaries in poor neighborhoods and countries; we take the cynical attitude that this is often just romanticized poverty for self-aggrandizement; this seems to devalue the body, or make it secondary to more spiritual goals.
  • Cultural critique: more popular in recent years has been the idea that Jesus models cultural critique, and his followers should likewise resist consumer culture even if they don’t adopt radical poverty; some of us feel this too just results in creating a hip new culture that people can feel good about joining.

I was struck today by how malleable but inescapable symbols are: Jesus is constantly being reinterpreted, and even a simple symbol like the cross can be given dramatically different meanings by different groups, yet for the individual within those groups the meanings ascribed to the symbol are then inescapable: they are constructed, but then they take on an independent reality, so that we find it hard to not see those meanings once we have been taught them.