When I was in high school in the early seventies, two long- haired “hippies” in Coos Bay became Christians. Jim had often skipped school and spent the day drinking cherry wine in the Mingus Park. John was still having flashbacks from the acid he had “dropped”. But now they were both Jesus freaks and utterly convinced Jesus was the coolest dude ever. A Jesus movement was sweeping across the country and made it onto the cover of Time magazine. Jesus was set free from the religiosity of a white suburban middle-class tradition. Jesus escaped “cultural captivity”. People, even non-Christians, were taking a fresh look at Jesus. I did too.
And I fell into “like” with Jesus. I don’t say “love” because the word has so many religious or purely sentimental overtones. I liked the stuff he did for the poor. I liked the way he talked to hypocrites and corrupt religious leaders. I liked the way he took back the temple for God and the people. He was radical and challenging. He was (still is) the way God ought to be. Reading the Bible with fresh eyes got me excited about doing the basic stuff of following Jesus: loving the poor, living by faith, expecting miracles.
One could argue that liking Jesus is not a powerful reason for believing in God. After all, one might like Buddha or Mohammed. But my liking was deeper than admiration. When I looked at my deepest longing for what God should actually be like, I found that Jesus was the perfect fit for my heart. I became convinced that every human heart had a God-shaped void that, as Augustine suggests, only Jesus could fill.
I knew God had to perfectly balance holiness with love—balancing them in a way that God’s perfect holiness didn’t make relationship with Him impossible. Jesus did this. The story of Jesus made sense to my heart. When I read Christ’s words, “Whoever has seen me, has seen the Father,” my heart celebrated because everything in me wanted a God as cool as Jesus. The things Jesus did and the things he taught rang true to all my experiences with the world and satisfied the deepest longings of my heart.
But even if we reduce all this to mere personal taste, I would argue that many intellectuals reject Jesus precisely because they find Him distasteful. They may hide their distaste behind pseudo-scientific objections or materialistic skepticism, but they often eventually reveal contempt for Christ. This is certainly revealed in the writings of Nietzsche who declared, “God is dead.” In many cases, their distaste is for a Jesus distorted by religious or cultural traditions rather than for the Jesus of the gospels. Some see him as too weak and simpering; others regard him too arrogant for claiming to be the only way to the Father. I think, however, that an honest reading of the gospels presents a picture of God the way we intuitively know He should be: like Jesus.
