So, this morning I got an email from Frank Viola’s publicist asking if I’d be willing to promote a document that he had co-written with Len Sweet. The document,  A Magna Carta for Restoring the Supremacy of Jesus Christ (a.k.a. A Jesus Manifesto for the 21st Century Church) can be found at http://ajesusmanifesto.wordpress.com.

The document, being called “A Jesus Manifesto” is mostly good stuff. To be honest, when I first got the email, I was miffed. I mean, I’ve promoted Frank’s stuff here and have had digital correspondence with him here and there. I know he knows about the Jesus Manifesto. And, I think it wasn’t the most collegial thing for him and Len to use a phrase that has been a key component to this webzine’s identity for a few years.

So, while my sense of pride and justice is sore, I’ve decided the most helpful thing I could do is to let it go and, instead, honestly engage their Jesus Manifesto and encourage people to take it seriously as an exhortation to follow in the Way of Jesus.

One of the first things that jumps out while reading their Manifesto is how tenaciously Christ-centered it is:

What is Christianity? It is Christ. Nothing more. Nothing less. Christianity is not an ideology. Christianity is not a philosophy. Christianity is the “good news” that Beauty, Truth and Goodness are found in a person.

While many Christians would agree with this sentiment, Viola and Sweet believe that a Christ-centered faith is increasingly replaced with language of “justice” and “the Kingdom of God” and “values” and “leadership principles.”

While there is certainly a valid critique here, I’m a bit uncomfortable with pitting Jesus against “the Kingdom of God” but what they are trying to get at is the way in which we can often divorce the person of Jesus Christ from his message. In other words, we cannot just put his teachings into practice without also embracing Christ as our center. If we embrace a Kingdom without its King, then what have we got?

They challenge us to move away from language of imitation…for example:

Our life is Christ. In him do we live, breathe, and have our being. “What would Jesus do?” is not Christianity. Christianity asks: “What is Christ doing through me … through us? And how is Jesus doing it?”

Amen. I agree.  However, as I continued to read their manifesto, something began to gnaw at me. In trying to correct a growing over-emphasis on Jesus-as-exemplar, I wonder if they don’t go too far.

For example, at one point they suggest that Jesus “was not a social activist nor a moral philosopher.” Really? Of course he was. Certainly he isn’t JUST a social activist or moral philosopher. Throughout, there is just enough over-statement to rob this manifesto of its power. It is possible, I think, to over-emphasize a high-Christology to the point of robbing us of the earthy implications of the Kingdom of God.

The authors write: “When Jesus becomes an abstraction, faith loses its reproductive power.” I couldn’t agree more. But by refusing to ground Christ sufficiently in the social, political, and economic realities of his earthly ministry, I suggest they are abstracting Jesus.

I agree that we mustn’t give into the temptation to downgrade Jesus into a prophet who shows us the Kingdom way of living. I am not interested in a Jesus who simply shows me how to be a radical.  But neither am I merely interested in an object of worship.  In this document, the authors are trying to strike the right balance here, but I feel they miss some of the radical implications of the Incarnation.

One of those implications is the way in which Christ is present in the poor. I am a firm believer in Jon Sobrino’s challenge that there is “no salvation outside the poor.” If the world knows who Christ is through the witness of the Church, than the Church knows who Christ is through the witness of the Poor.

This critique aside, I am glad they’ve shared this manifesto. It is a word of exhortation sorely needed in a world where Christians so easily detaches from the radical truth that we are the embodiment of the Risen Christ:

If Jesus could rise from the dead, we can at least rise from our bed, get off our couches and pews, and respond to the Lord’s resurrection life within us, joining Jesus in what he’s up to in the world. We call on others to join us—not in removing ourselves from planet Earth, but to plant our feet more firmly on the Earth while our spirits soar in the heavens of God’s pleasure and purpose. We are not of this world, but we live in this world for the Lord’s rights and interests. We, collectively, as the ekklesia of God, are Christ in and to this world.