The many faces of Jesus
One of my class staples is an exercise that I call “the Jesus Game.”
The premise is a simple one. I show the students a variety of images: European, African, Middle Eastern and Asian faces of Jesus, as well as depictions of Jesus with HIV/AIDS, Jesus holding a gun, and so on. I ask the students to tell me which one most closely resembles the Jesus that lives in their head, which ones seem historically accurate, and which ones they find disturbing, intriguing or questionable. This exercise often leads to interesting conversations about the power of images in shaping our religious imagination, and about the contextual nature of theology. It also opens up reflections on who Jesus Christ is for different people — the “many faces of Jesus” across the centuries and around the globe.
What can we know about the man from Nazareth?
What has the church historically confessed about him?
Who is he to modern Christians, who live in a radically different world than his?
As the church shifts from being a Western institution to a significant presence in the Global South, what new faces of Jesus are emerging?
How do we discern which faces of Jesus are worthy of worship and emulation?
What face of Jesus do we as Christians present to the world?
Jesus himself invited this kind of theological reflection when he asked his disciples: “Who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:27-29, Matthew 16:15, Luke 9:18-20). “You are the Messiah,” the disciples answered, although a fuller understanding of that had to wait for the cross and the resurrection. As the Jesus movement morphed into the Christian church, its answer to this question became its foundational confession: “Jesus is Lord.” With this confession the church said, from early on, that Jesus is more than a prophet, teacher or moral example. Instead, we confess that he is the one in whom we encounter God, the one to whom our lives belong. In 2025, it will be 1,700 years since the Christian church gathered at the Council of Nicea and declared that Jesus is more than a special emissary from God, that he is indeed one with God. The debates that preceded and followed this important moment in the life of the church sometimes appear overly complex, perhaps obscure, even speculative. But they were driven by serious theological and existential concerns: how do we simultaneously confess, with him, that God is one, and confess, about him, that he is one with God, and what difference does it make in our salvation? The church pondered these questions while traversing cultural complexities, figuring out how to express faith in Jesus Christ in ways that made sense to people in their cultural, linguistic, and economic realities. For this reason, the answer to the question, “Who do you say that I am?” has always been marked by diversity, by the many faces of Jesus.
What can we know about the man from Nazareth?
This is not to say that any face of Jesus is acceptable: already in the formation of the Scriptural canon, choices were made about which faces of Jesus were more acceptable than others. Yet the canon also reflects diversity, as evidenced by the different faces of Jesus presented in the Gospels: Mark’s Surprising Messiah, Matthew’s New Moses, Luke’s Friend of All, John’s Incarnate Logos. As the church took root in the Roman Empire, it blended images from both its Jewish roots and its Hellenic environment, depicting Jesus as the Divine Wisdom of God, Victorious Warrior, Divine Teacher, Cosmic Reason, or Ruler of the Universe. In the centuries to follow, theologians would offer distinct yet overlapping perspectives on the implications of Jesus for our lives: he showed us the love of God in his life, he died for our sins on the cross, he slayed the powers of death and darkness through his resurrection, and he calls us to a life of personal and social morality, in “imitation of Christ.”
Who do you say that I am?
The modern world brought new challenges to the church’s confession of Jesus Christ. The Protestant Reformation remained rooted in the classical confession of the divinity of Jesus, but it also brought a stronger focus on Jesus’ humanity. The European Enlightenment downplayed claims to the divinity of Jesus, instead depicting him as a great moral teacher or focusing on reconstructing the historical Jesus. But by the end of the 19th century, it was clear that the faces of Jesus emerging from this first quest for the historical Jesus largely reflected bourgeois European assumptions, and that the moral teachings offered by these faces of Jesus coincided comfortably with dominant cultural norms.
The answer to the question, “Who do you say that I am?” has always been marked by diversity, by the many faces of Jesus.
World War I became a turning point in Western culture and in the church’s conversation about who Jesus is. The young Swiss theologian Karl Barth lamented the fact that his teachers offered no prophetic voice
against the war: he blamed this on the post-Enlightenment “face of Jesus” as a European gentleman who blended into the dominant culture, supported its social structures, and provided no moral perspective that would challenge the status quo. In response, he called the church back to its confession of the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Only a few years later, this emphasis would shape the resistance of the Confessing Church to Nazi distortions of the gospel. One such distortion was the effort to seek an Aryan Christ, denying the Jewishness of Jesus. The German theologian Paul Tillich rejected this as a demonic effort to rid Christianity of the prophetic spirit it inherits from Judaism.
Despite the theological objections raised by some Christians, the painful reality is that most of the church went along with Nazism. Here it is important to remember that Jesus did not only ask his disciples, “who do you say that I am?” but also “who do the people say that I am?” In part the answer to this latter question depends on our behavior: faith is not just a matter of confessing beliefs about Jesus, but of following Jesus, of living in a way that shows his face to the world. When we condone atrocities in the name of Jesus, the face we show is one of demonic distortion, a sinful abuse of Christ’s name, as the Jewish-born Catholic martyr, Edith Stein (Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), noted in her 1933 letter to Pope Pius XI, begging him to resist Nazi overtures. We have to face the ugly truth that, throughout the centuries, Jews were persecuted and killed in the name of Jesus. We have to face the fact that, when the Nazis rose to power, they rode a wave of centuries of Christian antisemitism. No perspective on who Jesus is can ignore the tragedy of our own sinful distortions of Jesus – not only antisemitic distortions, but also the distortions that would condone colonialism, slavery, and other forms of oppression. No confession of the Lordship of Christ can occur without confession of sin.
…faith is not just a matter of confessing beliefs about Jesus, but of following Jesus, of living in a way that shows his face to the world.
Two post-Holocaust emphases on the conversation around Jesus signal a response to this theological crisis and open further conversation on the public nature of our confession of Jesus Christ.
- A renewed examination of antisemitism in Christian theology. Increasingly, Christian scholars do not see Judaism as the negative backdrop to who Jesus was, but rather as the key to understanding him. This perspective has shaped the “third quest” for the historical Jesus, in which the Jewish face of Jesus emerges anew.
- A stronger emphasis not only on what we believe about Jesus but on how we believe in Jesus — or, as theologians like to say, an emphasis on orthopraxis (right living) and not only orthodoxy (right teaching). In the aftermath of the war, German theologians like Jürgen Moltmann developed a political theology based on the prophetic denunciation of injustice. The global birth of various forms of liberation theology followed. Latin American liberation theologians like Jon Sobrino have argued that no view of Jesus is entirely neutral in a world where structural injustices exist, and that the poor and the oppressed bring us face to face with the crucified person. Likewise, the father of North American Black Theology, James Cone, suggests in The Cross and the Lynching Tree that those who were lynched in American history bring us face to face with the cross of Jesus Christ. Cone built his work upon the Black Church’s experience of a Jesus who stands opposite the distorted Jesus of White supremacy. Such a rejection of distorted oppressor faces of Jesus is the essence of all liberation theologies, including those from the Americas, the Minjung theology of Korea, Dalit theology from India, and anti-apartheid theology in South Africa. A perspective on Jesus as one who is heartbroken about history’s victims, and who calls his disciples to active participation in the building of his Kingdom in this world, drives these theologies.
Voices from the margins
Throughout the centuries, although much of the Christian conversation was dominated by men, women have had their say too. In the Middle Ages, Julian of Norwich spoke of Jesus as our Mother who feeds us from his body, echoing an old Christian tradition of depicting Jesus as the Mother Pelican who picks her own flesh to feed her chicks. Countless women over the centuries have seen Jesus as their friend, the One who stands with them as they struggle to survive, perhaps even flourish. But it is also undeniable that the maleness of the historical Jesus has often been distorted into justification of male domination in Christ’s church. In particular, the maleness of Jesus has sometimes been used to argue for the maleness of God. This does not stand the test of orthodoxy, since the traits of Jesus’ humanity cannot simply be transferred to his divinity, and since the church, despite largely using male metaphors for God, has never taught that God is male. It also fails the test of orthopraxis, because associating maleness with God, especially in combination with historical associations of women with sin through the figure of Eve, sets up a religious imagination in which the full humanity of women is denied. A related distortion centered on the maleness of Jesus can be found in Roman Catholic teachings on the priesthood, which rest in part on the idea that only men can resemble Christ and thereby preside over the sacraments. This argument rests more on Aristotelian concepts than on serious examination of Scripture, and it denies the vocation of women.
These distortions have led some women to see the male face of Jesus as in itself the problem, leading them to give up on Jesus and seek alternative spiritual paths. Others have sought better interpretations of the maleness of Jesus: for instance, Rosemary Radford Ruether, a founding mother of feminist theology, points to ways in which Jesus’s life and teachings signal that he emptied himself of patriarchal power. Alternatively, the Roman Catholic feminist theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson seeks to associate Jesus with Sophia, the female symbol of Divine Wisdom (with which he is indeed associated in Scripture). The perspectives of women from marginalized communities and across the world add deeper dimensions to the conversation. For instance, womanist theologian Delores Williams, cautions against the glorification of the suffering of Jesus in light of African American women’s experiences, while Jacquelyn Grant, also a womanist theologian, contrasts “Black women’s Jesus” with “White women’s Christ.” Korean feminist Chung Hyun Kyung notes various faces of Jesus among Asian women, including the ways in which Jesus is experienced as a saving presence in the daily lives of poor women.
The perspectives of women from marginalized communities and across the world add deeper dimensions to the conversation.
Similarly, Latin American feminists like María Pilar Aquino see in Jesus the face of God who affirms human life and flourishing. And when Mercy Amba Oduyoye and the other members of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians tell us that they see Jesus as the one who supports women in their struggle to survive, they not only claim Jesus for themselves, but also claim that their experiences become part of the many faces of Jesus in the life of the church.
It is clear that, over the past century, the church’s response to Jesus’ question, “who do you say that I am?” has become increasingly diverse and more attuned to the moral demands tied up with our confession of Jesus as our Lord. This diversity of responses, the “many faces of Jesus,” can be expected to grow exponentially. The church is increasingly a global phenomenon: by 2010, only 25% of the world’s Christians lived in Europe, compared to 66% in 1910, and today the majority of the world’s Christians live in the Global South. This demographic shift invites new faces of Jesus to enter the Christian conversation. Who is Jesus to villagers in Ghana, city dwellers in Hong Kong, suburbanites outside São Paulo? What kind of experiences and cultural environments will shape the church’s answer to Jesus’ question in the years to come? When African theologians like John Mbiti speak of Jesus as Elder Brother, Ancestor or Chief, they are incorporating elements from African cultures in their theological reflections on what kind of presence Jesus is in their lives, similar to what early Christians did when they blended Jewish and Hellenic elements in finding language to confess their faith in Jesus. In Asia, Christians are a religious minority, much like the early Christians were, which means they must find ways to stay true to Jesus Christ amidst other truth claims. In short, the “new” faces of Jesus are coming from similar situations as those faced by the early church as it struggled to answer the question, “Who do you say that I am?”
What others see of Jesus depends on what we show them.
As the church continues to ponder who we say Jesus is, it needs to remember the other question Jesus asked: “Who do the people say that I am?” What others see of Jesus depends on what we show them. What kind of face of Jesus are we showing those who are not Christian? Is it the face of intolerance, White supremacy, genocide? Such a distortion is the worst form of idolatry that a Christian can engage in. As we anticipate the church’s future, we need to hold tight to both right teaching about Jesus and right living in imitation of him. We confess that Jesus is Lord of our lives, that in him we see the face of God and we know God cares infinitely about this world. We also confess with our actions, showing the world the face of Jesus. This calls us to responsibility, to constant self-examination, discerning which faces are distortions unworthy of worship or emulation, as we simultaneously seek to express the glorious diversity of the many faces of Jesus.
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