Yes, Jesus Had a God Complex

Author: John Stonestreet and Dr. Timothy D. Padgett 

 According to an article by Patrick West in The Spectator, many young people find Jesus annoying. West pointed to a survey of UK teens, ages 14 to 17, entitled “Troubling Jesus.” This joint project of the Scripture Union and the Bible Society sought to understand how non-Christian kids think about Scripture. According to the study’s authors,  

What they shared was sometimes deeply uncomfortable, unsettling interpretations  we may be overly familiar with and offering fresh perspectives on God and Jesus  that can sound almost heretical at first. 

These students had the impressions that the God of the Bible was “really violent and aggressive,” practiced “mansplaining,” and had an “unequal power dynamic.” God the Father came across as a bully. God the Son was “arrogant, powerful, religiously motivated, and male.” The most telling claim was that Jesus had a “God complex.” 

According to West, the reaction is understandable: 

Young people raised in a world without authority figures who command respect, in a society bereft of didacticism, are naturally going to regard the teachings in the Bible as hostile and aggressive. In a world where everyone is reduced to having their “own truth,” many will find the idea of Christianity simply incomprehensible. 

That’s an understatement. The dominance of the “Critical Theory mood” over the U.K. and other western nations, invented and normalized new moral absolutes. A generation fully catechized in these absolutes will judge everything else by them, especially anything that smacks of tradition or what they consider to be the oppressive past.  

But there’s another factor, too. As West went on to say: 

Over the years, the Church of England and nearly all Christian denominations have merely gone with the flow of society and even helped to hasten Christianity’s descent into relativism and ignorance. 

In other words, the experiment to win the lost through strategies of cultural relevance has failed. In fact, it has failed in two ways.  First, too many churches and too many Christians lost their own theology in the process of remaining relevant. Second, we failed to make disciples, which is the primary task our Lord gave to us. 

How fascinating that so many thought Jesus had “a God complex,” that He acted like He was God. They meant it as an insult, but they’re not wrong. Jesus did act like God. He talked as if every person’s eternal destiny depended on Him. He said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” He affirmed the formerly doubting Thomas when he called Jesus “(m)y lord and my God!” Jesus regularly used the phrase “I am” about Himself, and often in unusual ways. Most notably, as reported in John 8, He said, “Before Abraham was, I am.” His opponents immediately took this as blasphemy, in reference to God’s self-disclosure to Moses at the Burning Bush as “I am.” 

Christ identified Himself as the greater fulfillment of Old Testament events. Like Moses, He provided food for the people in the wilderness and brought the Law down from the mountain. Like Elijah and Elisha, He raised a mother’s son from the dead. And He said and did these things as though He had the power and authority Himself. Unlike the older prophets, Jesus didn’t say the classic line, “Thus saith the Lord!” He spoke on his own authority, saying, “Truly, truly, I say to you.” 

After all, Christ wasn’t killed because He was such a nice guy or stood up for the poor. He was killed because the powers that be found Him dangerous. He wasn’t the Messiah they were looking for, so they rejected Him. John the Evangelist quoted Jesus as affirming, “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.” Alluding to Isaiah, the Apostle Peter wrote of its message as, “A stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense.” 

Ironically, even in their ignorance, these UK teens recognized a truth of Scripture that the Church of England has too often downplayed or downright rejected. And better to be offended by Him than to remake Jesus into something He was not. 

As C.S. Lewis famously wrote in Mere Christianity: 

You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.