When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today
- Book Review,
by Harvey Cox
From Publishers Weekly
Ever since his groundbreaking study of religion and society (The Secular City) more than 40 years ago, Cox has devoted his work to a fascinating array of topics: Pentecostalism, interreligious dialogue, liberation theology and Eastern religions. Now, after more than 20 years of teaching a course on Jesus and the moral life to Harvard undergraduates, he shares his experience. He admits honestly that he initially failed to see the value of such a course in a pluralistic religious university setting. Once he began to teach it, however, students filled the lecture hall, and small discussion groups crackled with open and hard-hitting questions about the relationship of Jesus and morality. With sparkling prose, Cox organizes the book around the New Testament stories told by and about Jesus to demonstrate the ways that each can be used to inform moral choices. For example, one of his students made the connection between the Lukan stories about Mary's choice to give birth to Jesus and the ethical decisions that Harvard female undergraduates confronted in advertisements that offered them cash for their fertile eggs. Above all, Jesus emerges as an elusive figure whose actions and words are, according to Cox, harder than ever to pin down. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Cox (The Secular City, Fire from Heaven) links a rabbi’s 2,000-year-old teachings to today’s vast ethical issues to illuminate how we can apply Jesus’s philosophy to our own times. In Cox’s eyes, for example, the Prodigal Son becomes a rebellious dropout. If this situation doesn’t exactly ring true in your view, you may still find inspiration in this provocative, wise, and often humorous book, no matter your religious bent. As one critic points out, When Jesus Came to Harvard does not provide guidance on making moral choices, nor does it take readers step-by-step through Harvard students’ dilemmas. Instead, Cox considers different interpretations of the Bible and cautions against various fundamentalist movements. When in doubt, he writes, just ask yourself, "What would Jesus have done?" Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Noting an alarming surge in insider trading and questionable ethics on the part of American doctors, lawyers, and politicians, and wondering whether the college was responsible in any way for producing amoral leaders, the Harvard faculty asked theologian Cox to create an undergraduate course on morality. Cox knew he couldn't, given the secular and religiously diverse college arena, teach a course based on the current catchphrase "What would Jesus do?" So he did the next best thing. He modeled the course and, ultimately, this significant book about it, on two key points he felt would bridge the two-millennium gap between what Jesus did and the moral choices people face today. First and foremost, Jesus taught in the rabbinical fashion of answering a question with a question, urging inquisitors to think through their dilemmas on their own. The second leaf Cox took from Jesus' book was teaching by means of narrative and example rather than precept and principle. The class had a 15-year run and boasted SRO crowds of students thirsting for a moral tool belt with which to address issues ranging from the use and misuse of power to negative campaign strategies. Like the course, Cox's book doesn't offer answers so much as pose questions that inspire the moral decision-making process. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
Over the fifteen years that Harvey Cox taught his Harvard undergraduate class Jesus and the Moral Life, the course grew so popular that the lectures had to be taught in a theater usually reserved for rock concerts. The overwhelming response was a clear signal of the hunger for guidance in today's confusing world, where moral guidelines seem to shift daily. How can we ask today "What Would Jesus Do?," when Jesus never had to cope with an unintended pregnancy, or confront a teenage daughter about her drug use, or decide whether to put an ailing parent in a retirement home? In his new book, Cox brings the moral wisdom of Rabbi Jesus into the twenty-first century by way of the questions, arguments, responses, and doubts of centuries of rabbinic and Christian theological exploration, as well as the voices of the thousands of Harvard students who attended his course over the years. Cox shows how we can extrapolate from Jesus' parables and bridge the gap between the ancient and modern worlds. As an example, he recalls his experience while locked in a southern jail during the civil rights movement, when the song "We Shall Overcome" rang from nearby cells. The message he takes is from the story of the Resurrection: transcendent hope rising from the depths of injustice. When Jesus Came to Harvard is not another look at the "historical Jesus," but it considers Jesus' contemporary significance by concentrating on the stories he told and those told about him. For youth and adults, Christian and non-Christian, When Jesus Came to Harvard is urgently relevant.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1He Was Then, We Are NowTwenty centuries — sixty generations — have passed sinceJesus of Nazareth lived. The people who met or heard himthen numbered only in the hundreds, or a few thousand atmost. The Romans did not consider him significant enough torecord his execution in their annals. He wrote no books. No monumentswere erected in his memory. Yet today countless people believethat he has an important moral significance, not just for histime, but for ours as well. Still, they are often perplexed and frustratedabout just what that significance is. Many experts, from TVevangelists to university researchers, claim in self-assured tones tospeak authoritatively about Jesus. But they have so many differentand conflicting interpretations of him, they cannot all be right.One way I tried to close the then/now gap was to introduce thestudents to a number of recent figures for whom Jesus was the principalinspiration. We studied Gandhi, who never became a Christianbut tried to base his life on the Sermon on the Mount. We readabout Martin Luther King, who found in Jesus the model for hisown nonviolence and a racially inclusive community. We talkedabout Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement,who tried her best to follow Jesus" pattern of poverty and simplicity.I told the class about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastorwhose determination to follow Jesus in Nazi Germany led him tojoin the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and who was hanged by theGestapo just hours before the Americans arrived at his concentrationcamp in Flossenburg. Many students chose to write their termpapers on one of these twentieth-century disciples of Jesus. In aworld full of celebrity idols with oversize clay feet, they seemed tobe looking for credible moral heroes. Jesus obviously provided apowerful example of someone who took the side of the dispossessed,spoke truth to power, and was willing to pay the price of hisconvictions.But there was still something missing. Even the most thoughtfulstudents had a hard time finding in Jesus" life and teaching muchconcrete guidance in making the day-to-day decisions they faced.One day a candid junior who was active in the local Lutheranchurch asked me a simple question: "Why does nearly everyone westudy in this course end up getting crucified, shot, or hanged?" Hewas referring to Jesus, Gandhi, King, and Bonhoeffer. But he wasnot being flip. He told me he had no ambition to get rich or famous,and that he was genuinely inspired by Jesus" concern for the outcastpeople of his day. But, he said, he did want to find a satisfying jobsomeday, get married, raise a family, and be a good citizen of hiscommunity and of the world. Naturally, he wanted to do the rightthing. But he did not feel up to confronting the Roman legions.Sometimes the most devout students told me they prayed to Jesusfor guidance about their choices, and I believe they did. But whenthey looked to him as a living example of how to make moral decisions,they were often puzzled. The Sermon on the Mount seemedcompelling to them, and I am sure many would have at least tried to"turn the other cheek," and even to love their enemies. But werethey really supposed to take Jesus" admonition literally, sell everythingthey had, and give it to the homeless people in HarvardSquare? Did I seriously expect them to "take no thought for themorrow," as Jesus taught, when I had assigned term papers andscheduled a final exam? In short, they found Jesus powerfully attractive,but it was hard to make a moral connection with him.It was not just the Christians who found Jesus both appealing andpuzzling. The Jewish students who knew their own religion recognizedhim as a fellow Jew in the tradition of the prophets, like Isaiahand Jeremiah. Buddhists immediately saw him as a bodhisattva, onewho chooses to forgo entering nirvana so he can help all sentientcreatures to do so as well. Muslims also considered him one of theprophets and frequently reminded me that he receives a prominentrole in the Qur"an. They all considered him a virtually incomparablemodel of courage and self-sacrifice. But as a guide to thinkingthrough today"s issues, he seemed somehow unavailable. A middleagedvisiting scholar from India, a Hindu economist who auditedthe course, once told me he found Jesus extraordinarily admirableand could well understand why Gandhi had followed his example.Like the mahatma, he said, he also had a picture of Jesus on the wallof his room. But, he added, the life of Jesus had ended at the age ofthirty-three. He had never entered what the Hindus call the "householder"stage of life, nor the ascetic or "sunyasi" phase, which comeswith advanced years. How could one follow him into one"s fiftiesand sixties and beyond? Since I myself was entering that last phase Iknew immediately what he was saying. Still, I saw little point intelling him that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche hadonce speculated about the same question and had suggested that ifJesus had not died so young, he might eventually have outgrown hisyouthful exuberance, calmed down, and become a different kind ofperson. Who knows? Still, it is hard to imagine Jesus collecting SocialSecurity or playing shuffleboard in Fort Lauderdale.During the years I was teaching the course many people hopedthat the widely heralded "Jesus seminar" and the search for the "historicalJesus" might produce an answer to the mystery of who hereally was. Now, they thought, at last they could know the true Jesus,shorn of all those confusing myths and legends. But they werequickly disappointed, the more so since the project appeared at firstto be such a promising one. There are, however, understandablereasons for both its waxing and its waning. The "Jesus seminar"began with an intriguing question: What can we say about Jesus ifwe restrict ourselves solely to currently accepted methods of historicalresearch? What profile of him emerges if we scrape away themany layers of myth that have encrusted his figure over the centuries?What happens if we treat the New Testament Gospels no dif-ferently from other contemporary ancient sources, such as the DeadSea Scrolls and the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas? What is added whenwe turn to the archaeology of ancient Palestine; what can anthropologyteach us about the structure of colonized peasant societieslike the one Jesus lived in? It sounded like an exciting enterprise thatmight yield a morally relevant Jesus, at least for those who wantedto emulate him. For a few years this quest for the historical Jesuscaptured much of the class"s, and the public"s, attention.There is little doubt that the notoriety many weekly newsmagazinesand TV shows lavished on the project helped make it morewidely known. The media had previously suspected that featuringstories about Jesus was a guaranteed way to win readers and viewers,and they were right. Even after two thousand years, Jesus ofNazareth remains an enormously fascinating figure and continuesto be an integral part of the collective human psyche in large partsof the world. This is true whether or not one is a Christian or evenconventionally religious. Atheists and agnostics have written appreciativebooks on Jesus. Nearly everyone believes he ought to havesome moral significance, but much confusion and conflict remainsabout just what it should be, and about what "following Jesus" in thisor that situation would actually mean. Much of this disagreementhas arisen from the radically different portraits of him that interpretershave made over the years: the gentle carpenter, the fieryprophet, the divine lover, the miraculous healer, and the pale mystic.In recent years Jesus has even appeared as a rock singer in JesusChrist Superstar, a circus clown in Godspell, the husband of MaryMagdalene in The Da Vinci Code, and a helpless victim beaten to abloody pulp in The Passion of the Christ. But many people wonderedstill, who was he really? Now, with the scientific historians of theJesus seminar eagerly at work, perhaps this question would at last beanswered. No wonder the public was fascinated.In addition, we live in an era of spins and cover stories, of doctoredaccounts and "now it can be told" journalism. People oftendiscount official versions of anything and suspect they are being deceivedor duped. Consequently, when ordinary people learned, notfrom the pulpit but from the local kiosk, that the biblical Gospelswere written many years after the events they describe, that theywere pieced together from earlier sources, and that they were editedfor particular audiences, they wanted to find out "the inside story."Now the Jesus seminar"s quest for the historical Jesus, which hit itsstride during the early 1990s, was there with the answers. It assuredthe public that thanks to carbon dating, computer databases, and astrictly scientific approach to the question, at last we could knowwho the "real Jesus" was. Naturally the public curiosity was kindled.At a time when historical revisionists were overturning previouslysacred versions of everything from the legends of Jesse James to theVietnam War, the public"s fascination with the search for the "Jesusof history" was understandable. Besides, it sold lots of magazines.So why did the disappointment set in so quickly?It soon became obvious that the historians carrying on the questwere coming to a bewildering set of contradictory conclusions aboutwho Jesus really was. Some depicted him as a wandering sage, othersas a charismatic preacher, and still others as a religiously inspiredsocial revolutionary. Their disagreement baffled and annoyed thosewho believed the search was a genuinely scientific undertaking, thereligious equivalent of the genome project, and that it would producea clear and final answer. But it turned out that the answer tothe question, "Who was this Jesus, really?" was as hard to answer asit had ever been. Why had such a mountainous scholarly effort producedsuch a molehill of results?This impatient dismissal of the historical Jesus project was notentirely fair. Despite widespread discrepancies among the researchers,some things were not contested. All agreed that Jesus really hadexisted, and that he was a first-century Palestinian Jew living underthe heel of a Roman occupation that — like many such occupationsbefore and since — had split its captive people into feuding sects andwarring factions. They also agreed that he was a rabbi who taughtthe imminent coming of the kingdom of God, and gained a followingas a teacher and a healer in Galilee, especially among the landlessand destitute, but that he aroused the ire of the nervous rulingreligious circles and the tense Roman authorities. When he andsome of his followers arrived in Jerusalem for the Passover holidayshe caused a stir in the Temple, was arrested, interrogated, and executedby crucifixion, a form of death by torture reserved by the Romansfor those suspected of subverting their imperial rule. But afterhis death, his followers insisted that he had appeared to them alive,and they continued to spread his message even in the face of harshpersecution.Beyond this tiny historical capsule of raw data there is an oceanof additional material about Jesus that does not pass muster withscientific historians. Much of it is in the Bible itself. But there arealso teachings and sayings attributed to Jesus and stories about himin the sources called the apocryphal Gospels that the early Christianschose not to include in the New Testament. There are also numerouslegends about Jesus — for example, that he journeyed toIndia or Tibet or Japan during the "silent years" between his twelfthbirthday and the three years preceding his early death, a period theGospels simply skip over. But there is no historical evidence whateverfor any of these intriguing travelogues. The sum of the matteris that although we do know something about the "historical Jesus,"meaning the bare facts that can be uncovered by contemporary historicalresearch, this method does not yield very much, and probablynever will. Even carbon dating and archaeology have their limits.Still, the search for the historical Jesus had not really failed. Ithad done much of what it set out to do. It had simply not lived up toits inflated advance billings or the exaggerated expectations of itsaudience.This is not, however, the main reason why the celebrated questfor the historical Jesus frustrated so many people. It was disappointingnot because it produced so little, but because what little it producedseemed so irrelevant. It not only uncovered Jesus as a historicalfigure, it also left him as one. Paradoxically, this subverts what thesame scholars believe was the central message of the historicalJesus. They all agree that Jesus insisted his hearers respond to thepresence of God in the "here and now." The best that historicalreconstruction can do, however, is to leave Jesus in the "there andthen." He is still the robed, bearded figure of the Sunday schoolbooks and the Jesus movies — romantic, tragic, heroic — but nocloser to us than Socrates or Julius Caesar. He is fascinating but inaccessible, living in a strange world very different from ours, grapplingwith issues unlike those we confront.Despite the failure of the quest for the historical Jesus to satisfythe unrealistic expectations it engendered, some people continueto hope that eventually historical research — one more frayed oldscroll dug out of one more cave — will clarify who Jesus really was.Others still think that asking, "What would Jesus do in this situation?"will resolve any dilemma. The problem with the first hope isthat, except for the barest essentials, historians will always disagreeabout Jesus, and a whole cave full of scrolls will not tell us for surewho he "really was." Consequently, when we read their differing accountsof his life or see a film or TV show about him, we often feelwe are catching a fleeting glimpse of an elusive, distant figure on theother side of a wide abyss. The problem with simply asking whatJesus would do is that we grapple with many choices today thatJesus never had to face, so trying to speculate on what he would dowhen faced with a controversial modern dilemma is anyone"s guess.The students in the course knew this all too well. They recognizedthat Jesus never had to endure a series of exhausting job interviews,cope with an unintended pregnancy, or (as far as we know) weighthe consequences of breaking up with a girlfriend. Looking aheadin their own lives, they knew Jesus never had to worry about afifteen-year-old son he suspected might be taking drugs, or decidehow to tell his parents about a sweetheart they would surely not approveof, or agonize over whether to place his failing mother Maryin a retirement community, or consent to disconnecting his fatherJoseph"s life-support system if the cancer had spread to all his organs.On issues like humanitarian military intervention, reproductivecloning, or doctor-assisted suicide, students could find no clearanswers in his life and teaching — or else they found a range of con-flicting ones. Try as they would, they continued to see Jesus on the other side of a wide chasm. He was still then, and they wereclearly now.These students were not alone. Similar questions stalk anyonewho lives in a society without a widely accepted moral frame of reference.Many thoughtful people now insist that we should "putvalues back into education." They may be right. But if we do,whose values shall we teach? Which morality: that of the AmericanCivil Liberties Union, or that of the Christian Coalition? In a JewishYeshiva, an Evangelical Christian college, or an Islamic Qur"anschool these questions answer themselves. But even then, one has toask how students and adults who learn these religion-based codeswill fare in a wider, pluralistic world in which tensions between differentreligions and value systems often contribute to the discord.Students do not live on another planet. As they struggled to converseabout moral decisions, I heard echoes of the same goodwilland the same confusion one might detect in conversations overheardin restaurants, at family gatherings, on TV panels, at the pizzashack, and at the neighborhood bar. All of us, whether adolescentsor adults, are up against the same predicament. We are trying to "dothe right thing" in an age in which the old road maps don"t persuadeeveryone, and sometimes don"t even persuade us. But what is the"right thing," and is Jesus any help in discerning it?I think the people who believe Jesus has an important moral relevancefor the twenty-first century are right, despite the wide historicalravine that separates his time from ours. But I also believe wehave tried to discover that relevance mostly in the wrong way. Littleby little I have become convinced that there are two key componentsto bridging the chasm between him and us, and that the twoare closely linked.The first is to remember that even before acquiring the rich arrayof titles Christian history has assigned to him — Lord, Master, Savior,Lamb of God, and many others — Jesus was a rabbi. He taughtand applied Torah, the Jewish law, albeit in an unprecedented historicalsituation and with an original twist. He never delivered aneasy answer to a hard question but, in time-honored rabbinical fash-ion, asked another question or told one of his unforgettable stories.He would not allow people to escape the responsibility of makingtheir own decisions. Instead he enlisted them in a way of thinkingthat would nurture and extend their moral insight. This is exactlywhat the best rabbis have always done, and still do.The second key to spanning the gap between Jesus and ourselvesis to recognize that while he passed on the moral tradition of hisown people in the light of novel demands, he did so by relying moreon narrative and example than on precept and principle. He realizedthat the missing dimension in nearly all moral reflection isimagination. Of course we need reasoning to lead a moral life, butwe need — even more — the capacity to intuit what is important andwhat is not, to envision alternative possibilities, and to see beyondwhat sometimes appears to be an impasse. We need to appreciatenot just how other people see things but how they feel about them,and to do this our most potent resource is still the human imagination,awakened by compelling narratives.It is not impossible to bridge the gap between Jesus and ourselves.The secret lies in recovering the link between the rabbinic storytelleron the one hand, and our own human imaginations on theother. Taken together, these two elements can still make him ourcontemporary and jog the slumbering moral consciousness of ourtimes.Copyright © 2004 by Harvey Cox. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
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