When I say politics is contentious, I mostly mean how faith has become, for many Christians, reduced to politics. Among progressives, faith is equated with social justice activism. Among conservatives, faith is equated with Christian nationalism and nostalgia for a lost Christendom. Both groups increasingly define their faith as the winning of elections. So when you read the subtitle of Dusenbury's book -- "A Political Life of Jesus" -- you might expect it to go in one of those two directions. But the reason I was interested in reading the book is because it doesn't. In these polarized times, I Judge No One comes as a surprise.
In surveying the history of how Jesus' kingdom proclamation has been received by philosophers, Dusenbury sets out two main camps. On the one hand were thinkers who took Jesus' Kingdom of Heaven to be "a cipher of the theocratic political order [Jesus] hoped to impose on the 'land of Israel'. The logic of coercion belongs to Jesus' kingdom of heaven, and vice versa. What Jesus brought was... a 'political faith'." Today, the political visions of both progressive and conservative Christians assume this view. Christianity is inherently a "political faith," demanding that Christians establish a political order which, by definition, will involve the use of coercive power to make that order a reality.
The alternative view of Jesus, which Dusenbury describes using the work of Immanuel Kant, is that Jesus doesn't seek to establish a political order but instead preaches "a kingdom of of virtue." Dusenbury goes on to describe Kant's view of this:
Kant writes that Jesus 'brought about' through his life and death 'an incalculably great moral good in the world, through a revolution in the human race'. At the heart of that revolution is the idea of what Kant calls 'a kingdom of virtue'. And what is a kingdom of virtue? It is one which has 'freedom from coercion in its very concept'. It is a 'kingdom' which must be freely chosen.
Dusenbury's book defends, through a close reading of the gospels, this second view, that Jesus preached a kingdom of virtue that was rooted in freedom rather than the use of coercive power to achieve political goals. As Dusenbury sets out his thesis statements for the book's argument:
...I will try to show
(i) that the modern theory of a political Christ is utterly incongruent with the dramatic structure of our earliest texts on the life of Jesus; and
(ii) that something like Kant's theory of an ethical Jesus, whatever its limitations, is far more philosophically interesting.
Dusenbury ends his first chapter by quoting Nietzsche, who described Jesus as a "strange figure." Politically speaking, Jesus was a very strange figure. No one in the gospels could figure out the nature of Jesus's political project. Politically speaking, what was Jesus up to? Think about Pilate's puzzlement. What did Jesus want? Pilate couldn't figure it out.
The Romans, the Zealots, the Jewish political leaders, Jesus confused them all. I'd suggest that Jesus continues to confuse us. Neither progressives or the conservative Christians quite understand the political strangeness of Jesus. And Dusenbury's book is helpful in showing us why.
