For People with Bishop Rob Wright
For People with Bishop Rob Wright
Jesus of Nazareth with Dr. Obery M. Hendricks, Jr.
What happens when we strip away centuries of religious interpretation and confront the actual teachings of Jesus of Nazareth? This Jesus isn't the gentle, apolitical figure often presented in modern Christianity, but rather "a holistically spiritual freedom fighter" deeply concerned with poverty, exploitation, and injustice.
In this episode, Bishop Wright has a conversation with Dr. Obery M. Hendricks, Jr., research scholar at Columbia University and former professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. Their conversation reminds us that Jesus as a radical social reformer whose message has been systematically diluted. Dr. Hendricks draws on St. Paul's emphasis on individual spiritual experiences to convey his message. "Paul transformed Jesus' concern for collective social, economic and political deliverance into an obsession with personal piety," Hendricks explains, suggesting that many Christians today understand Jesus primarily through St. Paul's interpretation, which fundamentally altered the trajectory of Jesus' radical message. Listen in for the full conversation.
A lifelong social activist, Obery Hendricks is one of the foremost commentators on the intersection of religion and political economy in America. He is the most widely read and perhaps the most influential African American biblical scholar writing today. Cornel West calls him “one of the last few grand prophetic intellectuals.”
A widely sought lecturer and media spokesperson, Dr. Hendricks’ appearances include CNN, MSNBC, CBS, Fox News, Fox Business News, the Discovery Channel, PBS, BBC, NHK Japan Television and the Bloomberg Network. He has provided running event commentary for National Public Radio, MSNBC, and the al-Jazeera and Aspire international television networks.
Learn more about Dr. Obery Hendricks and subscribe to his substack.
What does Jesus say? What is the core of what he's talking about? And if we look at all of his sayings and parables and stuff through, that lens like our understanding of the Lord's prayers is not just something you know for children to say before they go to bed. The Lord's prayer is a radical call to change the world. What should we do? What should we do, lord? How should we use our spiritual strength? That is, I think, what we have to call people to again.
Bishop Wright:Hi everyone. This is Bishop Rob Wright and this is For People. Today we've got a special guest, Obery M Hendricks Jr. Dr Hendricks, welcome. Thank you, brother, good to be with you. Good to be with you.
Bishop Wright:He's a research scholar now at Columbia University in New York City, formerly a professor at Drew University Princeton Theological Seminary. He served as the president of Payne Theological Seminary and he is an ordained elder in the African-American Methodist Episcopal Church. Formerly he was a Wall Street investment executive and he received his PhD from Princeton. He's a spokesperson, has been a spokesperson and featured on C-SPAN, pbs, npr, the Bloomberg Network, on and on and on again, and he currently lives in New York City with his wife, farrah. Dr. Hendricks, I've been a fan of your work, I like the way your mind works and wanted to get you on because, as I pay attention to the world, I hear we're talking a lot about what it means to be Christian, and I've noticed that a lot of these ways that being Christian is being described seem to have less and less to do with Jesus of Nazareth in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and it seems like your work has been preoccupied with talking a little bit about this Jesus. And so let's start there. So who is Jesus of Nazareth to you?
Dr. Obery Hendricks:Well, thank you, brother. Who is Jesus of Nazareth to me? Well, Jesus was, as you know, I grew up in the Black Nationalist Movement and saw a lot of figures of great courage, self-sacrificial freedom fighters, and I view Jesus that way. This was a man who was preoccupied with changing the world around him. With changing the world around him he was concerned about we've talked about, for instance, poor people in poverty. More than anything else In his Lord's Prayer, he's concerned about the terrible debt system that was oppressing the people.
Dr. Obery Hendricks:So, in my mind, Jesus was a social and political radical. Political in the sense that he was concerned about distribution of goods and services. He was a radical, but he was also a spiritual radical as well, you know. Yeah, so the core of the gospel is, I think he speaks, his holistic spirituality love your Lord, God, with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself and where those meet. That's holistic spirituality. So I guess, to summarize, I see him as a holistically spiritual freedom fighter who's moved by his relationship with God to attempt to love his neighbors by changing the world and making it more just and loving for us to live in.
Bishop Wright:You know you used the word radical a couple of times and I think that word needs a little bit of explanation. You know William Barber, Bishop Barber, up in North Carolina, who's been really active in the Poor People's Campaign, talks about radical, I think, in the best way, most concise way, radical meaning going to the root of things, right? So what would you say? Would you affirm that definition or would you add to that?
Dr. Obery Hendricks:I affirm that. You know, going to the root, he, I mean he went to the root of the ethical foundation of the biblical tradition, which many, well few, people seem to do anymore. But he was radical in that sense he was not. He was a love revolutionary. I don't know that I would call him a political revolutionary, but he was more than a reformer. Yeah, he was a radical because he wanted to get to the root of things and get rid of the whole superstructure. So, yeah, he was radical, very radical, and you know, he had to be killed. I mean, radicals have to be silenced, particularly in that kind of imperial situation. So, yeah, that explains so much about him, his radicality.
Bishop Wright:You said something really important.
Bishop Wright:I mean, we know Jesus as a storyteller, a wandering storyteller, an itinerant preacher.
Bishop Wright:You know Jesus as a storyteller, a wandering storyteller, an itinerant preacher, you know wandering healer, all those sorts of things, but he just kept talking and the way that he talked kept giving you know an increasingly expansive notion of God's grace, of God's justice, of God's love and mercy.
Bishop Wright:You know, and so you know what I hear when we talk about this Jesus of Nazareth these days, when you start to sort of talk, the way that you're sort of pointing towards people say, you're making Jesus political Right, and so you know why I wanted to have you on the podcast is to begin to help us think through that, especially in these days when there's so much political division red, blue, Democrat, Republican, you know anti-president, you know pro-president, all those sorts of things. It seems the message is that Christians, that is, followers of Jesus of Nazareth, are supposed to be quietly in support of the status quo, and that seems to be out of step with the Jesus of Nazareth. You know, one of the things I like to say is that Jesus was political, is political, but not a political partisan in the way that we think of political partisanship. What would you say?
Dr. Obery Hendricks:Well, he is political. Well, if politics is about who gets what, if it's about distribution and redistribution, he was patently political because he talked about poverty and poor people more than anything else. Look at the Lord's Prayer. I mean, look at it as concerned there. Distribution of power, redistribution of power, for instance, your kingdom come, your will, be done when Caesar's kingdom and Caesar's will are ruling the day. Release our debts. Translated correctly, it should say release our financial debts. He's concerned about what people are going through every day on the ground. So we're talking about distribution, redistribution. You can't be any more political than that.
Dr. Obery Hendricks:And when you look at Luke 4:18, his important political manifesto, Spirit of the Lord's upon me, because he's anointed me to bring good news to the poor. What's good news to the poor? It's about structural change. I mean, if you're bringing good news to the poor, it means that you want to alleviate the conditions that make poor people period, Not like some kind of prosperity anti-gospel. Like you know, I don't care about changing the pie, just let me get a bigger piece of it. So he's political in that sense. I would say for sure, yeah, yeah.
Bishop Wright:Well, you know, and so that's a really helpful way to think about the Lord's Prayer, because, you know, sometimes we, you know, sort of the problem about handling the problem over time, with handling things wholly like scripture, like the Lord's Prayer, et cetera, is we unwittingly round the edges off to suit the life that we want and we end up reducing Jesus, in this case, to really kind of a Sunday only, or mostly Sunday, spiritual lucky rabbit's foot, rather than saying to be in relationship with this 2,000-year-old Jew who, incidentally, at his inauguration, so to speak, didn't add new words, he just simply breathed new life into Isaiah's words.
Bishop Wright:So he went deeper in his tradition, and so I think that's, that's that's really critical. I know, as someone who preaches all the time, you know the occupational hazard, uh, as, as you know, we talk about, is, uh, you know, you end up preaching only your, your sort of pet gospel project, rather than, rather than continually being knocked off balance by Jesus's stories and Jesus's invitation, et cetera. And so do you have any wisdom about how we can stay, you know, centered on this Jesus, because you know the temptation truly is for us to just reduce him to a milk cow rather than let him be the raging bull that he is.
Dr. Obery Hendricks:Yeah, well, I think that the fourth chapter of Luke in its entirety is really instructional, because, as the chapter begins, the first verse Jesus has been baptized, just baptized, just baptizing, rather than immediately running for bishop or putting himself some kind of a sort of something like that.
Dr. Obery Hendricks:He goes in the desert and he engages real spiritual ministrations and working to empower ourselves spiritually in order to be able to rise up finally, after going through all that, all the self-abnegation and meditation and fasting and all that, and then to be able to stand up and say the Spirit of the Lord is upon me now because I have prepared myself. That's a very important, very important model to be to be followed. So I feel like I lost the thread of your question in there somewhere. But you know, but? But essentially it's.
Dr. Obery Hendricks:I think the key to it all is Jesus. The greatest social commandment is love your neighbor as yourself. And I think that if we look at that in this profound social, economic and political dimensions, in which, if you love your neighbor as yourself, it's not about sentiments, but wanting the same for your neighbors as you want for yourself, all the same goods, the same justice, the same for your neighbors as you want for yourself, right, all the same goods, the same justice, the same freedom. But it also implies struggle, because, since we will struggle for ourselves and our own loved ones to have the best, love your neighbor as yourself is a command to struggle for your neighbor to have the best as well. In other words, jesus is saying we must struggle for the common good. And that, I think, is the baseline standard by which all these other stories and all these other interpretations, it's the lens to which it must be viewed.
Bishop Wright:Yeah, and you know, again, as I just sort of look at your work, and one book in particular, you know that I have used recently I did an address to the House of Bishops talking about Christian nationalism, and you know, your work was really more than helpful in that just sort of sitting down and thinking a lot about that. It was the politics of Jesus, rediscovering the true revolutionary nature of Jesus, jesus's teaching, and how they have been corrupted. That was a big piece of work that I appreciated so much and so. So, yeah, so we could go, we could talk all day, really, about the ways in which we have ducked Jesus's stories.
Bishop Wright:All of us have the intensity of all that and the cost of all that. So, given the world as it is right now, I mean, how do we get back on track? How do we rediscover? You know, this Jesus, this Jesus who is again, you said something that needs to be underscored who is again, you said something that needs to be underscored this Jesus who had a lot to say about the poor, who himself was what we would call materially poor, who lived among poor people and saw abuses. How do we?
Dr. Obery Hendricks:A moratorium on reading the Apostle Paul and read the Gospels.
Bishop Wright:Interesting, say more about that.
Dr. Obery Hendricks:Well, many, you know, many, if not most, christians understand Jesus through Paul, and Paul said well, fundamentally, paul was different than Jesus, right, and Paul never met him in the flesh or anything like that. He was really, really proud of that. You know, jesus talked about the sole sovereignty of God, or what we call the kingdom of God, I mean, which is a radical reordering of the world. Paul doesn't talk about that. I mean, he mentions a kingdom once or twice, but it has radically different meaning. Paul was a mystic who wanted to change people from the inside out, to develop, to experience the same level of God consciousness that he talked about when he said he went to the third heaven. You know, jesus wanted to transform us spiritually as well, but he wanted to change the world. Paul doesn't talk about changing the world at all. Paul was ready for the world to end. So that's why he told people, you know, don't worry about being a slave, because the world's going to end soon. And so if we follow Paul, all we do is accept the status quo and we don't really try to change the world.
Dr. Obery Hendricks:Jesus was about changing the world. He was prophetic. He challenged the powers that be among his own people and the Roman Empire. But Paul gives a whole other perspective. Also, paul's notion of salvation and deliverance is Greco-Roman. Jews talked about deliverance. They were talking about in this world, the paradigm, the fundamental liberating event in the faith during the Exodus. They talk about deliverance and salvation when those folk didn't even believe in an afterlife, right? So Paul is not in touch with any of that. And if you do everything that Paul said, it will change people. It could change small communities, but it doesn't really challenge, well, the principalities and powers of the world. Of course we know Paul didn't write that, but Paul really challenged that because he expected the world to end in any minute.
Bishop Wright:You know you are bringing up a key point. I hope folks are really getting this. I mean and you wrote in your book the Politics of Jesus Paul transformed Jesus's concern for collective social, economic and political deliverance for his entire people into an obsession with personal piety of individual. I mean so well done on that sentence, because I think it captures distills exactly what you're talking about.
Bishop Wright:I was doing some graduate work once and I've always thought a lot about Paul and, like you have said, I've gotten to know a lot about Paul. And, like you have said, you know, I've gotten to know a lot about Jesus through Paul. And so when I took this class from an incredible Paul Apostle, paul scholar, he started off with which Paul are we talking about? Because Paul has a development. There is the Paul who thinks Jesus is coming right back and so he has his concerns. And then there's the Paul who finally realizes Jesus is not coming right back and so he's trying to make the concessions he needs to make. And then you see the big shift to personal piety. And then we wonder that movement, along with Christianity, becoming sort of the spirituality of the empire, that one-two punch. One wonders if that isn't how we got to where we get to, where people get the message that if I'll just be a good little boy or a good little girl and maybe show up on church occasionally, then I'll get to heaven and all shall be well.
Dr. Obery Hendricks:Yeah, yeah, you know, it's so interesting that the terms in the Hebrew Bible and in the Greek New Testament for righteousness understood as personal piety, it really, it really has another dimension. You know, justice, like dikia suna in Greek means justice as well, and also in Hebrew, sotaka. Righteousness can't be about personal piety, because the Hebrew Bible was about the collective. It was never about individuals, right, not even a word in Hebrew for biblical Hebrew, for individuals. So so Paul gets all of that, paul. Paul got all of that that wrong that he changed the whole trajectory of focusing on the collective, on, on, on spirituality of community to this personal, personal piety stuff and also, of course, to this personal piety stuff. And also, of course, you know, we have to acknowledge that scholars have shown, you know, pretty conclusively, as you know, right, paul didn't write all those letters, particularly the ones that really go far afield from Jesus, like the pastoral epistles, you know, 1st, 2nd, timothy and Titus, for instance.
Dr. Obery Hendricks:But also look at Paul in Romans when he talks about going along with the status quo, right, can you imagine Jesus on the cross saying, yeah, well, you know, look at these, the governing authorities, as coming from God. And you know, and all that, no, no. So Paul, in a way Paul has and I don't mean this disrespectfully, but in a way Paul betrayed the radicality of Jesus and the Jesus all movements we know become bureaucratized into institutions. But Paul changed, I mean, he made the Jesus movement really well unrecognizable in the final analysis. Right, you follow everything Paul says and you're not going to change the world like Jesus wanted the world to be changed.
Bishop Wright:Yeah, so you know, sort of the last movement here is because that's really helpful, right? So I think the counsel was to let's take a break reading the epistles, let's get really conversant, spend some time with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. As one person told me, if you really want to read the Bible, read it slow. So you really want to get to know Jesus, read the Gospels slow, think on those things. I think that's one good piece of wise counsel for us. I think it is to let Jesus' radicality, that is going back to the roots of his tradition, really speak to you and, in our circumstances, maybe put down our real penchant for self-piety and personal piety me and Jesus, that type of talk and think about Jesus and the community. I think I heard you say that. So the next movement would be so a lot of times people still get their vision of their character cues about Jesus in the average congregation in church.
Bishop Wright:So what word do you have for those of us who teach and preach and those of us who sit in pews and listen? How can we move back to this Jesus of Nazareth? And I'll just say, not to make the question too long, I'll just say I feel like this is job one right now. You know, Walter Brueggemann had just died. God bless his soul. He talked about the urgent prophetic tasks of the church, and one of them was the reality, get reality in the room. Well, the reality is that people are constructing, even as we speak, a Christianity that has abandoned Jesus of Nazareth, and so this is what's behind my question. So how do we get Jesus back? You know, in the local congregation and in the local consciousness.
Dr. Obery Hendricks:You know in the local congregation and in the local consciousness.
Dr. Obery Hendricks:Yeah, yeah, well, a couple of things. The first I have to give short shrift to because it's sort of a longer explanation, but we have to look at the foundational, the ethical foundation of the faith, and it is I talk about it in my most recent book, Christians Against Christianity. But real briefly, I explain that the ethical foundation is the marriage of the two most often occurring concepts in the Bible, and that is justice, egalitarian justice, and social righteousness. And together I explain that what that means is that the foundation of the faith is social justice. And no and if you read what no, no, no Hebrew scholar has ever contested that when I presented it. And so first, I have to keep in mind that the faith that Jesus inherited and embraced was the foundation of social justice, justice in community, egalitarian justice, love your neighbor as yourself. And, on the other hand, I think we have to get back to basics. Folks need to focus. We have to get back to basics. Folks need to focus that Jesus says the greatest commandments are to love your Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. All this other stuff, man, that's going on has nothing to do with that. All this I mean I'm not against at all the African-American cultural celebrations in religious terms and all that. But, brother, all this these days, all this jumping around man and calling stuff holy dance when you're really just having a bunch of fun, all of that stuff that has really nothing to do with the unction of Jesus Christ to build, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to struggle for a just economic system, a just political system, you know, a just social system. So I guess the way, in a nutshell I'd answer we have to go back to the basics. I think that's so important.
Dr. Obery Hendricks:If you ask most people what is the core of the gospel, they'll tell you all kinds of stuff. Few people will say the social core is love your neighbor as yourself. I guess I'd answer this way we got to learn what we have to learn, what's in the Bible. We have to learn to try to really understand what's there, and not from a theologically interested position, you know, but to really try to step back and read it for us. So Christians are essentially biblically illiterate. I mean, everyone knows a little bit. We don't have a tradition study like the Muslims and the Jews who are very serious. They know what they believe. What do we know? What the preacher tells us? And a lot of these preachers aren't worth their weight. Don't get started, brother. But I think that's it. Go back to basics.
Dr. Obery Hendricks:What does Jesus say? What is the core of what he's talking about? And if we look at all of his sayings and parables and stuff through, that lens different view, like our understanding of the Lord's prayers is not just something you know for children to say before they go to bed, but the Lord's prayer is a radical call to change the world. What should we do? What should we do, lord? How should we use our spiritual strength? Well, ask the Lord to bring his kingdom of justice, you know. Ask, ask the Lord to, uh, uh, to God is to allow us to get rid of the economic exploitation and the hunger and all of that. That is, I think, what we have to, uh, we have to call people to again.
Bishop Wright:You know I'm I'm so grateful you said that, um, because I I think you know one of the great opportunities you know every season, because I think you know one of the great opportunities, you know every season right has limitations and opportunities Every season. If it's true personally, it's certainly true nationally. And what my great hope is is that in this present season, where so many are feeling anxious, even fearful, despondent, et cetera, I'm hoping that you know the hardships of this season really, you know, in in God's wonderful wacky economy, are going to be, is going to be the season that makes the next, the next generation of witnesses, because I think that I think that people are, you know, that's sort of. One of the upsides is that when people sort of realize that there is no real reliance or trustworthiness in man-made systems, ultimately for some people that creates an appetite for more, for more learning, et cetera. And I'm hoping that takes us, you know, back to, as you say, to the basics.
Dr. Obery Hendricks:I'm hoping we don't. We, we don't have a vision. Right wing has a vision 2025. We need to be pushed. Like you're saying, we have a new consciousness. Maybe that'll push us to try to develop a holistic vision of the world we want.
Bishop Wright:So grateful for your life of study, so grateful for your bright mind and willingness to be with us. Dr Hendricks, thank you very much.