Friday, June 27, 2008

Friday Review: Wink's The Human Being

Since I posted yesterday I've raced through the rest of Walter Wink's The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of Man. I won't provide an extensive review but will try to capture the gist in a way that best serves the typical reader of my blog.

Understanding the title is understanding the book. "The Human Being" is Wink's rendition of the biblical phrase "the son of the man" and the book is an exploration of the significance of that phrase for us as pioneered by Jesus.

The phrase, "the son of the man" is indeed an enigmatic expression that biblical scholars have wrestled with for over a century. In the New Testament, it occurs almost exclusively on the lips of Jesus as a way (apparently) of referring to himself. It apparently was not, then, a title that the early Christians used of Jesus, for it appears nowhere in Paul or Acts or even the gospels as a confession of faith.

It does not get Jesus into trouble with his opponents. The general sense of current scholarship is thus that it was not a ready made Jewish category that Jesus or the early Christians appropriated. It does appear as a messianic type title in the Similitudes of Enoch, which Wink dates to the first century AD. He seems to believe that there was a parallel development in the use of the idea by the Similitudes and the later NT at around the same time (Matthew, Jude, Revelation) independently of each other.

Yet Wink does not think that the work of people like Barnabas Lindars to see in the phrase merely a circumlocution for "I" adequate. Nor does he find it as merely "the man" adequate--"Foxes have holes but the man [me] does not have a place to lay his head."

Rather, Wink sees "the man" as Jesus' references to true humanity. Here's where Wink's spirituality comes into view. Jesus, according to Wink, stands in a mystical tradition that first showed up in Ezekiel's use of the "son of man." In Ezekiel 1 God looks like a man. Here begins Wink's myth (a word he means us to take in a positive sense).

God is nothing other than the true Human. The problem for Wink is not that we are not divine. The problem is that we are not truly Human. God did not come down to earth and become incarnated as human. Rather, Jesus shows us how God, that is, the truly Human, can be incarnated in us.

The sayings of Jesus on "the son of the man" are thus sayings about the Human. To be sure, Wink does not believe all the Son of man sayings in the gospels are "true." By that he doesn't mean "not historical," for his paradigm does not connect truth to historicity. Thus there might be true Son of man statements that do not go back to Jesus and, conceivably, there might be untrue Son of man statements that do go back to Jesus.

Perhaps Wink's bottom line about Jesus is best captured in this sentence: "As bearer of the archetype of the Human Being, Jesus activates the numinous power that is capable of healing, transforming, or rebirthing those who surrender themselves to it" (256).

Wink is not an orthodox Christian by any means, but he is clearly a mystic with a strong pluralistic faith. This statement is indicative: "I want to worship the God Jesus worshiped, not worship Jesus as God" (259). When I say he is a pluralist, I mean that he does not in any way see the Christian path as the only path to God. For him, Jesus is the best archetype to express the common goal of multiple religious paths. For him, he cannot imagine God as impersonal. But he does not wish to consider any other religious path inferior to the one that resonates with him.

The book is filled with references to Carl Jung and tapping into the collective unconscious of humanity. He speaks favorably of Ludwig Feuerbach as a man before his time. Feuerback in 1841 famously argued that God was a projection of the best human traits we can imagine. Wink believes he was almost right. For Wink, God is The Human Being, what we all will hopefully become in the reality behind the second coming, the kingdom of God on earth.

But for Wink, God is not merely the sum of human projection. God is something beyond what we can consciously project. God is something our collective human unconscious has imprinted on it from the beginning of the human species. It is something beyond us that we hope to become.

I'll confess that I have great difficulty relating to this book. I appreciate Wink's mystical faith. Perhaps ironically, it reminds me of Barth, although Barth is thoroughly orthodox. But as my friends will know, I have difficulty relating to Barth too. :-)

3 comments:

Angie Van De Merwe said...

Wink must be a humanist in the best sense, but it also seems that he is committed to a Marxist ideology that I cannot buy. I do not believe that any man in power can "divy up the goods" in a just way. Nor do I think we will ever be able to disolve differences here on earth. The challenge is ethical assessment...and that is not confining Christian tradition to "peace solutions" when others are not willing to "come to the table, give and take, or be accountable to a larger interantional community"...Therefore, I believe that the individual is accountable and responsible for how he handles his own goods, and what his convictions are concerning "justice" and "peace" issues....Empirically Marxist Uptopianism does not work...even though many would like to equate it to "the Kingdom of God"...

Anonymous said...

That sounds like a good read.
I find it interesting that historically a thinker like Feuerbach hasn't gotten much airtime in the classroom or much attention in literature, and yet there is so much of his seminal thought being expressed in culture. Feuerbach was one of the first individuals to point out a potential problem of looking outside human nature to solve problems that are inherently human, with religion being the key issue that separates "man from the brutes." One doesn't need a degree in philosophy or religion to understand the force of that paradox, and I think we are seeing many people head in that direction. "Religion" serves the purpose of recognizing and finding solutions to the problems of human nature. And if it is the case that all human beings live in the same universe--complete with all of its struggles and suffering--then why can't one person's "way" of solving those human problems be just as good as anothers?
There are certainly philosophical problems with this type of functionalist thinking, but is the religiously enlightened individual going to care all that much? Probably not. In the progression of religion can you see the question of Does it work? being more important than Is it true?
So us "religious exclusivists" who are about evangelizing definitely have some thin ice to walk on.

Angie Van De Merwe said...

Isn't understanding human nature also a problem, that is, if you don't take the traditional religious understanding of total depravity or understand depravity in a different way, other than the spiritual/religious...psychology has many ways to discuss human nature...and I find that the nature/nurture debate, not to say the least the new understanding via neuroscience, are also considerations.
Of course, fundamenatlist would want to dismiss the psychological on the basis that it is unreligious and humanist...in fact, some would consider it the "tool of the devil" and against God.