Please send your letters to: Sofia Editor: Dinah Livingstone, 10 St Martin’s Close, London NW1 0HR editor@sofn.org.uk
Jesus as Teacher
Thank you for this edition of Sofia (144 June 2022), which I am reading with pleasure. While I hesitate to challenge anything I read in this magazine, I cannot accept Stephen Mitchell’s dismissive remark about the teaching of Jesus. The four Gospels describe Jesus as Teacher over 40 times, more than any other title. Certainly, the Evangelists thought that Jesus the Teacher was a most important aspect of his ministry. Alongside the Gospels, the other writings in the New Testament contain examples of his teaching, and we could put them all together and have a body of ethical teaching as relevant today and comparable with any modern moral system.
But there is more to it than that. It isn’t the content of the teaching but its relationship to other religious, political, and ideological systems which is vitally important. In my early ministry as an industrial chaplain, I recall a conversation with a leading communist in South Wales—an intelligent and serious person—who argued that the communist requirement for the moral behaviour of its followers was every bit as good as that of Christianity. But in communism, moral behaviour is seen as the servant of the system. Jesus teaches that it is the other way around.
This applies to any religious system and is, in fact, the root of Jesus’s challenge to the Judaism of his time: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”
David
The Venerable David S Lee
Llanishen, Cardiff
Many thanks for the latest edition of Sofia, as usual full of interesting things. On my first glance through, one thing that caught my eye was the interesting letter from Stephen Mitchell. But I was somewhat puzzled and surprised by his concluding thought that he didn’t think the future of the church “lies in resurrecting teachings of a 2000-year-old man” (Jesus).
Over recent months, I have been troubled by the controversies over slavery and anti-Semitism that have been raging. In particular, I struggle to understand, let alone explain to others, how these became the hallmarks of a Christian society and civilisation promoted by the church, or more specifically, its clerical hierarchy.
Then along comes Lucy Worsley with her superb and chilling TV documentary on the horror of the witch-hunts. Her research focused on the case of Agnes Sampson, the first of many thousands of women to be burnt at the stake in Scotland—not to mention Europe—for being a witch.
How did we, the church, get here? Ironically, all three of these issues—anti-Semitism, enslavement, misogyny—are specifically condemned in one of the earliest credal statements of the church, Galatians 3:28. If nothing else, all this represents a radical misrepresentation in church Christianity of the teachings of the 2000-year-old man that challenges us to look again at what he really said.
From all this, I would conclude that if there is to be any future for Christianity, or the planet, it will be in the rediscovery of just how radically challenging the ethics and teachings of that 2000-year-old man really are.
Dominic Kirkham
Manchester
