Is there a Problem with a DEI Jesus?

When Inclusivist Sociology Meets Kingdom Eschatology!

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

There’s an article by Markus Bockmuehl, now fifteen years old, which I often think about:

Markus Bockmuehl, “The Trouble with the Inclusive Jesus,” HBT 33 (2011): 9-23.

Bockmuehl’s words from 2011 ring true in 2025:

Social “inclusiveness” has in recent decades become a new moral absolute—perhaps the only moral absolute—among opinion makers in Western societies that abandoned absolutes in the middle decades of the 20th century. "Inclusion” is today’s unquestionable orthodoxy in government, in education and in the churches, is political use of “inclusive” or “inclusion” in a social-engineering sense was still unknown to the Oxford English Dictionary’s 1989 edition. By the time of the 1993 supplement, however, its emergence was tellingly traced back to developments in religious terminology of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Bockmuehl points out that Jesus was exclusive of some (e.g., the rich) and inclusive of others (e.g., the poor). In addition, Bockmuehl raises a good point, social inclusiveness is really a modern value, and biblical interpreters are quick to try to make Jesus the all-inclusive hero who championed his message of complete and comprehensive inclusiveness against all forms of exclusivism.  The problem is, as Bockmuehl rightly puts it:

However one parses the exegetical particulars, Jesus of Nazareth is (as Richard Hays puts it), not only the friend of sinners but also the nemesis of the wicked. Another way of putting this is to say that Jesus of Nazareth includes a remarkably wide diversity of the marginalized, yet he also marginalizes an uncomfortably diverse range of the religiously or socioeconomically included. That necessarily complicates any discussion of Jesus’ “universalism” or “inclusiveness”: Jesus, like Paul, appears to envisage the saved as well as the unsaved or the not-yet-saved ... Our problem, then, is that the apparent smoothness and attractiveness of the “inclusive Jesus” hypothesis are acquired at a very high moral price. As we have seen, the structure of the argument typically follows the familiar liberal departicularizing of a Jesus who takes his stance over against the Judaism of his time: Jews were narrow, ethnic, culturally conservative; Jesus by contrast was universal, inclusive, and welcoming without exception. (pp. 14, 17).

Jesus was indeed a friend of “sinners,” he had many women followers, he hung out with tax collectors and prostitutes. He had a concern for the infirm and disabled. However, Jesus appears to have upheld, as far as we know, Jewish ethics concerning wealth, sexuality, and family, albeit in light of his eschatological conception of the kingdom. He believed in a judgment and some would definitely be judged and be excluded from the kingdom of God.

As a result, any “DEI Jesus” flounders on the particular demands that Jesus lays upon people and his belief that one must enter the kingdom even if that means divesting oneself of worldly values.