Deepak Chopra and The Third Jesus – Part I

The false dichotomy is either the most common mistake that plagues clear thinking, or Deepak Chopra has written a new book that re-tells a very old story about Jesus.

This blog, though long, is shorter than it needs to be. In view of this lack, I hope it is pregnant with future bleats on the subject of who Jesus is, and why humans (and theologians) feel the need to diminish his significance to a manageable level. It has been said that God is the eternal iconoclast, destroying our images of him because they cannot justifiably represent. Jesus, on the other hand, seems to be the one icon that God does not feel the need to ‘clast’. Faithful images of him abound to such an extent that they seem countless. At least so says John’s gospel, albeit in terms of literary images (21:25). This feature of the character of Jesus and the mystery of his relationship to God is the subject of the next two blog entries. They are conveniently called Part I, and Part II, for your convenience.

In the first part of his book Chopra argues that we must recover Jesus from the perennial and mistaken assumption that he was unique among us earthlings, or worse yet, that he was something more than a mere earthling. Rather, we should understand that Jesus taught his followers how to achieve “God consciousness” which conveniently for Chopra is both the message that the Church needs to recover in order to save Jesus from oblivion, but also one that leaves aside all those contentious issues that make Christian theology distinct from everything else. This argument, by which Chopra proves the resurrection of the dead (idea), assumes that Jesus did not intend to have any of his disciples put their trust in him as the focus of salvation, nor understand his significance in divine terms. Rather, Jesus was only pointing us to God. Thus, Jesus was a God-conscious human (the first?), and nothing more, regardless of how significant his ‘achievement’ of such a state of being was. I guess this makes Jesus the first Jewish Bodhisattva that later became a Christian Buddha. Chopra quotes Jesus’ words in John’s gospel, “I and the Father are one” as a statement of this transcendental consciousness between one born of this world (Jesus) and its maker (not Jesus). I guess he forgot the bit about Jesus sharing in the glory of God before the creation of the world (John 17:5), not to mention John 1:1, “and the word (Logos) was God.” Whoops. 

Despite his massive oversight in the data (did he actually read the gospel of John or just ask some guy on the street what it says?), I am inclined to agree with Chopra that Jesus’ primary mission was to help others gain access to the reality of God, and that his ability to do such a thing (at least from a human perspective, i.e. ours) was precisely a result of his attainment of a perfect communion between himself and God. But this is merely Mere Christianity in flowery, new age language. Chopra unwittingly preaches something more radical to the postmodern mind than the original words of Jesus, (e.g. “love your enemy”): he preaches the orthodoxy of the Church that he condemns for misunderstanding Jesus (a true accusation in many regards, just not this one). Chopra’s theological formula about Jesus is just another way of saying that eternal life (whatever that means) comes through closeness to God, and that the example Jesus gives of acknowledging God’s right to rule the world, and thus doing what God wants, is the way that closeness to God happens.

But this is where my conviviality with Chopra ends and the dish duty begins. I submit that he insists on a false dichotomy between Jesus’ intention to show us God, and the fact that he is precisely in this ability also the way to God for others. This difference is fundamental to the Christian faith whether we like it or not. It divides the various admirers of Jesus, who conform to every kind of religious, economic, or political system, from the follower of Jesus, who, by definition, conform to Jesus. Whether or not there are other ways to God I have no personal knowledge. However, as Lewis warned long ago, we must not settle our thinking on the idea that Jesus was merely our guide. When (also in John’s gospel) he declared that he was the way, and the truth, and the life, and that no one can come to God apart from him, he summarily eliminated that comfortable, politically-correct luxury. More to the point, there is simply no contradiction between the message of Jesus and the medium of Jesus. The fact that people have been trying to separate the two since the day of his resurrection is proof – via negative – that the icons of Jesus as both teacher and Saviour, brother and Lord, rabbi and God, reflect the divine personality. The character of Jesus is a phenomenon that the late Scottish theologian James Stewart aptly labelled,” The coalescence of contrarieties.” I end with his words.

"When I think of Jesus, I think of the mystery of divine personality; the startling coalescence of contrarieties that I see in him. He was the meekest and lowliest of all the sons of men. Yet he spoke of coming on the clouds of heaven with the glory of God. He was so austere that evil spirits and demons cried out in terror at his coming, yet he was so genial and winsome and approachable, that the children loved to play with him and the little ones nestled in his arms. His presence at the innocent gaiety of a village wedding, was like the presence of sunshine. No one was half so kind or compassionate to sinners, yet no one ever spoke such red-hot scorching words about sin.

A bruised reed he would not break. His whole life was love. Yet on one occasion he demanded of the Pharisees, how they were expected to escape the damnation of hell. He was a dreamer of dreams and a seer of visions, yet for sheer stark realism, he has all of us self-styled realists soundly beaten. He was the servant of all, washing the disciples' feet, yet masterfully he strode into the temple, and the hucksters and moneychangers fell over one another to get away in their mad rush from the fire they saw blazing in his eyes. He saved others, yet at the last, he himself did not save. There is nothing in history like the union of contrasts which confronts us in the gospels; the mystery of Jesus is the mystery of divine personality." Amen