The Burden of the Gospels

The Burden of the Gospels by Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry reflects on the burden the Gospels place upon an honest reader: not a lack of faith, but a refusal of certainty about one’s own righteousness, God’s purposes, or one’s ability to obey Christ under pressure. He asks whether modern readers would truly have followed Jesus had they encountered Him as an unknown teacher demanding nonresistance, love of enemies, blessing of those who curse, and prayer for those who mistrust. The example of Dirk Willems, who saved the pursuer trying to arrest him and was then captured and burned to death, makes Christ’s command to love enemies painfully concrete. Such questions cannot be safely answered in advance. People remain subject to the next test of faithfulness, and religious confidence can coexist with cruelty, persecution, and gratitude for an enemy’s death. The Gospels therefore impose enduring questions rather than providing grounds for complacent judgment. Berry also considers the difficulties of reading the Gospels. A literal reading, he argues, requires words to make plain sense before interpretation can move to other meanings. Yet literal seriousness exposes contradictions and demands that cannot be easily resolved, such as the command to “hate” father, mother, wife, children, siblings, and one’s own life. Rather than dismissing troubling passages as errors or mere hyperbole, readers may need to bear their failure to understand. The Gospels, like all writing, are incomplete representations of a reality too great to be fully recorded or known. This limitation should produce humility, not systems of religious explanation claiming final knowledge of God. The central issue becomes reality itself. Berry rejects both reductive religion and reductive materialism, since human minds cannot define the full scope of reality. Jesus’s promise of life “more abundantly” cannot mean greater possessions, longevity, or worldly expansion. Material sufficiency is necessary, but life is already abundant as participation in the living world. True abundance means freedom from hatred, violence, indifference, and the rationalizations by which people harm one another. Jesus’s commandment of love is practical: love is a willingness to help and be useful, extending beyond kin, tribe, nation, and friends to strangers and enemies. In the parable of the Samaritan, compassion cannot be divided into material and spiritual acts. Binding wounds and caring for an enemy are both earthly and heavenly because the distinction itself wrongly divides reality. Berry broadens this understanding of love beyond humanity. The Gospels unfold in a world of mountains, waters, fields, animals, plants, sheep, lilies, and birds, all sustained by God’s care. Drawing on Biblical affirmations that all flesh lives by God’s spirit and breath, he sees the Samaritan’s act as recognition of a fellow participant in the life of God. More abundant life is thus responsible membership in a single holy reality, embodied in distinct creatures but not reducible to divisions between spirit and matter, heaven and earth, or human and nonhuman life. This vision bears especially heavily on industrial humanity, which has desecrated soils, forests, streams, air, rain, species, and the climate while sustaining a war economy and fossil-fuel destruction. Humanity has chosen an economics of extinction over abundant life and is deeply complicit in the murder of creation. The Gospel question becomes economic as well as personal: how can people live and work without estrangement from God’s presence in creation? Love offers the necessary principle, but turning it into economic practice demands answers not yet known. Berry ends by urging humility and caution toward those who claim to possess those answers already.

By Wendell Berry · First published 2019 · Genre: Religious Essay, Christian Theology, Biblical Criticism · 4,727 words

First lines

ANYBODY HALF AWAKE these days will be aware that there are many Christians who are exceedingly confident in their understanding of the Gospels, and who are exceedingly self-confident in their understanding of themselves in their faith. They appear to know precisely the purposes of God, and they appear to be perfectly assured that they are now doing, and in every circumstance will continue to do, precisely God's will as it applies specifically to themselves. They are confident, moreover, that God hates people whose faith differs from their own, and they are happy to concur in that hatred.

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Christianity · Gospels · religious essays · theology · faith · ethics · biblical interpretation · spirituality · church criticism · modern culture · community · stewardship

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