Knowing Jesus

I was chatting with a friend about someone I knew who was at the extremity of life and described him/her as a person of devout religious faith in one of the more liturgical traditions (for example, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Catholic, Orthodox, etc.). My friend, quickly replied, “Does he know Jesus?” For a moment I was flabbergasted! The suggestion was palpable—how could one of those possibly “know Jesus.” How does one respond to such a question and suggestion?

            Jesus, as every conscious person in these United States knows, is a figure of the ancient past; he lived around two Millenia ago. An obscure (in his day) healer, thaumaturge and religious teacher during his life, he was crucified at the hands of the Romans on a charge of sedition and near the middle of the first century CE he was touted by his followers as being raised from the dead.

            Hence, the question could mean, does my seriously ill friend know Jesus like a figure of human history, or does he know Jesus as a figure in modern culture, for the name of Jesus is touted by innumerable religious groups, by their church steeples on countless corners, in religious commercials on television, in religious publications, in political movements, in marketing, etc.

            But I do not think my friend, who raised the question, was talking about knowing Jesus as a figure of the ancient past or as a cultural icon in the modern world. I was being asked if my seriously ill friend knew Jesus intimately, as we know those dear to us. That is, does he know Jesus spiritually, in his heart by faith? Has he been “born again” through a faith encounter with the living Jesus?

            Physically, human beings have only five faculties of sensation: seeing, smelling, hearing, touching, tasting.¹ These are the only means by which we are able to “know” the world around us. Physical sensations encountered through our senses are transmitted by means of neural activity to the brain where the brain interprets them. For example, we sense a touch, and the brain interprets it as soothing or painful.

Christian folk, however, believe there is also another non-physical way of “knowing.” It is by perceiving “spiritually.” Spiritual perception, they claim, is not dependent on the physical senses but rather on the Spirit of God that communes with the human spirit (Rom 8:14-16; 1 Cor 2:11-14; 6:17) to impart a knowledge of Jesus, the Christ (Phil 3:7-11). It is in this spiritual sense that I was being asked if my seriously ill friend “knew Jesus.”

The difficulty, however, is that human beings don’t have indwelling spirts as a distinct, identifiable aspect of the human anatomy. Human beings can “show spirit,” for example, but the spirit in this case is a motivational attitude that animates an individual, and that attitude would likely be considered an emotional response to some exterior stimulus. “When Paul speaks of the pneuma [spirit] of man, he does not mean some higher principle within him or some special intellectual or spiritual faculty of his, but simply his self…”² Nor do we usually speak in polite society of an exterior spirit acting upon us to produce an emotional response, such as that of “knowing Jesus.”

            As with any stimulus, the brain must process the putative “spirit encounter.” The stimulus in this case would be hearing the “Gospel” in the clamor of the different gospels preached by the likes of a Jim Jones or Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Benny Hinn or Billy Graham, Martin Luther or Norman Vincent Peale, Billy Sunday or Bishop John Shelby Spong, etc. Two texts in the New Testament even disagree over the role of Faith (Paul: Gal 3:6-19) and Works (James 2:18-26) in salvation. In short, there are competitive gospels, and each proclaimer is arrogant enough to think the gospel he preaches is absolute divine Truth to the exclusion of all other truths. Compare Paul’s arrogant statement about those who disagreed with his gospel in Gal 1:6-9. We tend to forget in our arrogance that it is God (if God there be) who will judge the condition of the human soul (if human soul there be) and will thereby “separate the sheep from the goats.”³

            There appears to be no accounting for the unusual things people will take as “gospel truth” when it comes to religion.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Philip G. Zimbardo, et al., Psychology. Core Concepts (Boston, MA: Pearson, 2009), 305.

²Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament (2 vols. in 1; trans. K. Grobel; New York: Scribner’s1951, 1955), 1.206.

³An image used by Matthew’s Jesus in Matt 25:31-46.