A Sectarian Manifesto

Week of Monday, May 27, 2002

Is North American evangelicalism sick? New Testament scholar Robert Gundry thinks so, and in his most recent book, Jesus the Word According to John the Sectarian,¹ Gundry offers some stern advice and strong medicine to rehabilitate the patient. The deterioration he laments is most severe among those whom he calls “the elites,” that is, “the well-educated, the cultured, the economically and socially upscale” (xiv), as opposed to our fundamentalist forebears at the turn of the century who were marginalized from and perhaps by mainstream culture (although it might be argued that fundamentalists marginalized themselves).² The antidote that we need, says Gundry, is a strong dose of the Gospel of John, which as he understands it has a strongly sectarian character to it.

When you read the Gospels carefully (or any part of the Bible, for that matter), you realize that they were written by different people who lived in different circumstances and who wrote to different audiences with different purposes in mind. Simply put, each Gospel has its unique purpose, perspective and message. Likewise, our own circumstances vary widely according to time, place, and culture. Although in one sense we should read the entire Bible as applying equally to all of us all the time, in fact, certain parts of the Bible might bear special weight and importance to us given our unique circumstances. Gundry thinks that the sectarian character of John has a timely message for today's evangelical elites of North America.

When you read the Gospel of John, says Gundry, what you discover is a very sectarian message about Jesus the Word. Vast stretches of John, in fact, are Jesus's own words about Himself. Think of that red letter Bible of years gone by, where the words of Jesus were printed in red, as if to mark their special import. One scholar estimates that as much as seventy-five percent of John 1–20 are the sayings, dialogues and monologues of Jesus. At the feeding of the 5,000, for example, John adds a long discourse by Jesus on the bread of life (6:26–66) that is not in the other three Gospels. Or at the Last Supper, John adds four full chapters of discourse by Jesus (chapters 13–16). Jesus is speaking long and often in John, and it is almost always about Himself. What is he saying? He is not merely an orator, speaker, or peasant preacher. No, he not only speaks the Word(s) of God; He is Himself the Word of God. In postmodern terms, Jesus's message about Himself is an unapologetic, full scale, metanarrative. He makes absolute, unconditional and uncompromising claims upon those who hear Him, both then and now.

Why does Gundry construe John's Jesus as a sectarian message? What does he mean? Jesus's words about Himself are simple and clear; they are also extraordinary. In John's Gospel, those who believe “get it” and understand the message, while unbelievers do not. John creates a sharp divide between those in the light and those in the dark, believers and unbelievers, children of the Father and children of Satan. “John,” writes Gundry, “is using the antilanguage characteristic of sectarians. They define themselves over against the world, unbelievers, the nonelect. They form themselves into an antisociety that uses an antilanguage” (56). In other words, John, and John's Jesus, is a separatist, a sort of proto-fundamentalist who because of His message necessarily lives at the margins of culture and society. In John, for example, the “world” is almost always used in a negative sense (cf. 1:10, 29), Jesus never eats with “sinners” as He does in the three synoptics, He reveals Himself to his (sectarian) followers but not to the world (14:22), and—how can it be?!—He even says that He prays for His followers but He does not pray for the world (17:6, 9). This sectarian anti-worldliness points His followers and hearers to some sort of otherworldliness: “The one who loves his life will lose it, while the one who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (12:25). Thus, the Jesus of John, says Gundry, “is unalterably counter cultural and sectarian” (p. 63).

Evangelical elites in North America, on the other hand, have become worldly. We have done the opposite of what John describes. We have cuddled up to the world, accommodated ourselves to it, embraced it, soft pedaled the hard sayings of John, and smoothed over its sharp edges. Whereas John the sectarian shouted the Word without apology, we whisper it ever so politely from the centers of society (74).

Gundry argues that this evangelical erosion has taken place in both key theological tenets, but also in our lifestyles. We de-emphasize or avoid altogether John's doctrine of eternal punishment and divine judgment, we allow social and political engagement to usurp evangelism, while our interest in being seeker-sensitive is really a dumbing down of the Gospel message into a psychological massage (78). In our lifestyles he points not to former fundamentalist taboos like drinking and dancing, but to larger issues like “materialism, pleasure-seeking, indiscriminate enjoyment of salacious and violent entertainment, immodesty of dress, voyeurism (cf. internet pornography), sexual laxity, and divorce” (77–78). We have moved from “vibrant sectarianism to torpid institutionalism” (91).³

In Gundry's mind, what we need is a return to John's sectarian emphasis on separation from the world (cf. 1 John 2:15–17). This return to a sort of fundamentalism, he argues (93–94)

would be culturally engaged with the world enough to be critical rather than so culturally secluded as to be mute, morally separate from the world but not spatially cloistered from it, and unashamedly expressive of historic Christian essentials but not quarrelsome over nonessentials. Such a renewed fundamentalism would take direction not only from fundamentalism at the very start of the twentieth century but also, and more importantly, from the paleo-fundamentalism of John the sectarian, whose Christology of the Word has Jesus come into the world (there is the engagement with it), sanctify Himself (there is the separation from it), and exegete God (there is the message to it).

One might quibble whether Gundry has read the Gospel of John and evangelical elites just right. Many others have voiced similar concerns (cf. Hunter). Further, the quotation above is as specific and concrete as he gets in his descriptions of what a renewed fundamentalism would look like today. This is a shame because he does a fine job at describing a perennial problem that has vexed believers from the earliest days of the church: how does one love and embrace the world like God does (John 3:16) without becoming a worldly person (1 John 2:15–17)? The fundamentalist alternative of sectarian separatism risks isolation and irrelevance, whereas the effort of engagement always risks accommodation and conformity and an irrelevance of its own sort. For those who have not done so, the best starting point on these issues is still H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture (1951).