Pharisees and Sadducees

The word "Pharisee" is rather common in modern speech. It usually means hypocrit, or self-righteous, or the like. We get this characterization from the Gospels, where the Pharisees seem to be the principal opponent of Jesus and his message. Turn to Matthew 23 and you will find all the vitriol that Jesus can muster against them. "You snakes, you brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell?"

No such words for the Sadducees. The one time Jesus seems to interact with them at all, it is merely to respond to a riddle by which they hope to trip him up in his belief in the resurrection of the dead. All in all, they seem very minor characters. The Pharisees are the real bad guys.

And so I see many attacks on conservative Christians as "Pharisees." They maintain traditional beliefs about sexuality, marriage, and abortion. For such views they are branded as self-righteous bigots, the kind that Jesus most fiercely chastised.

Yet in the Bible, those closest to God get the fiercest treatment. The prophets speak judgment against Israel's neighbors, yes, but the harshest critiques are reserved for Israel, and even more so for Judah and Jerusalem. It is important not to get too close to God, for he is "a consuming fire," as the people learned from Mount Sinai. They were so afraid after having heard the words of God, they didn't want to hear any more, and God told Moses they were right to think that way. Those who are closest to God have the greatest responsibility. And so Moses, the man who spoke to God face to face, was kept out of the promised land for the slighest offense (he hit the rock instead of speaking to it).

It is not a coincidence, then, that Jesus ends up alone. The ones who hand him over to be crucified are the ones who are closest to him--that is, the Pharisees. But even his own disciples abandon him--and one of them is a traitor. Although it is the Romans who actually kill him, it is those who should have been with him from beginning to end who receive the condemnation of Scripture. That is because the Scriptures are written for them, both as an offer of reconciliation and as a warning. It is our heart's greatest desire to be close to God; but the closer we are, the more it hurts to have our sins purged from us.

The Romans receive no condemnation whatsoever in the Gospel narratives; there is no need, for they are very far from Jesus. (Pilate reveals just how far with his famous question, "What is truth?" The Pharisees would never have asked such a question.)

The Sadducees, too, are far from Jesus. No, he doesn't call them hypocrites, or blind guides, or whitewashed tombs, or snakes, or brood of vipers. But he says to them, "You know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God." What more is there to say?

Importantly, when Jesus responds this way to the Sadducees, the Pharisees gather together around him. They ask him what is the greatest commandment. And Jesus affirms exactly what they believe: Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself. The Pharisees do know the Scriptures and the power of God. They are not far from the kingdom.

It is their very proximity that earns them the greatest condemnation. "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them." (Mt. 23:13) They are standing at the very gate, but they refuse to go in; worse, they refuse to let others go in.

So naturally this is a very serious warning for traditional Christians, who take righteousness seriously, as the Pharisees did. Those who are closest to God are closest to the fire of condemnation. If we wish to be pure in heart, so that we may see God, we must suffer the most. In some sense the Bible condemns the righteous even more than sinners.

But for those liberal Christians who think they are on the right side because they don't find Jesus condemning their position, I'm afraid they have it all backwards. To them Jesus simply says, "You know neither the Scripture nor the power of God." Of course Jesus is not offended by those who have completely abandoned the traditions of the church. He is only hurt by those close to him. He is hurt the most by his true disciples.

To such as these the kingdom of heaven belongs

"Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs." (Matthew 19:14) Jesus reproaches his disciples for thinking that the kingdom of God is primarily about adults. On the contrary, he insists. "Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 18:3)

Yet Paul's rhetoric is always the other way around. "I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food." (1 Cor. 3:1-2) "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways." (1 Cor. 13:11)

So which is it? I am genuinely puzzled. Jesus also said, "Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 18:4) Are children humble? Are they not mainly concerned with their own needs, desires, and feelings? As a new parent myself, I have many words to describe our beautiful baby boy, but I'm not sure "humble" would be one of them.

Or maybe there is humility in always screaming when one is in need, or even when one feels in need. The psalms are full of complaints which seem to abruptly transition into praise. Those who truly pray to God do not hold back. Even if their cry is entirely irrational, just like the cry of a young child ofen is, the comfort of knowing God hears is what counts.

Is there an ironic sort of maturity in this? The "wise" in Paul's are sometimes those who are wise according to the world, sometimes those who are spiritually wise. In Christ everything gets flipped upside down. "God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong." (1 Cor. 1:27) This resonates much better with the sayings of Jesus.

Sometimes, I have learned, children's cries can only be calmed by subtle reminders of their parents' love. Our baby had quite a lot of difficulty learning to fall asleep alone. It was necessary to let him cry, a lot at first, less and less over time. Not that we were ever absent. We went into his room to gently remind him of our presence. It just wasn't what he wanted. He wanted to be in our arms, and especially to drink his mother's milk.

Maybe prayer is like that. At first we believe we need "milk, not solid food." In time we realize that the whole purpose of life is to gradually mature. Sometimes our prayers are only answered in the most subtle of ways. We cry ourselves to sleep at first, but we soon learn that we are truly not alone.

But it is not spiritual maturity to stop crying. The world is full of sadness, injustice, oppression, horrors of every kind. If we refuse to cry, it is only because our souls have forgotten that we have a Father in heaven. "If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!" (Matthew 7:11)

Once again, the Christian life is a paradox. It means becoming more human by becoming more divine, more mature by becoming more childlike.

Against politics

My blog has taken a turn toward philosophical and religious speculation in the past several months. I have no talked about the election. I have not even discussed political issues. Although I do engage in political discussions on facebook (and no, I don't always find it a complete waste of time) I have very consciously avoided politics on this blog.

I will admit that some of it is fatigue. When we talk about politics, passions can get the better of us. It's not good to think about it all the time, simply because it will suck us dry.

On the other hand, I've never been one to avoid controversial topics out of the desire not to offend. The idea that we should all just "get along" presumes that the way we all live is basically OK and there's nothing wrong. But many political issues are important just because they point out what's wrong with the way we live, and more particularly with the way we treat others who are on the "outside." Sure, maybe we can get along, but what about people who are influenced by our foreign policy and immigration laws? What about the children we abort? What about the unarmed civilians who get shot by police? What about people who lose their livelihood because of government regulation of the economy? I've never been able to ignore these issues of basic justice, nor do I understand how anyone else can.

Indeed, if the increasing polarization of our society bothers me, it's not because I wish we could all agree to get along and empathize with one another. Don't get me wrong, empathy and getting along are great, and if we get better at them, we've certainly accomplished something. But to me the real danger is not just that polarization makes us mean but that it makes us stupid. We become so angry at "the other side" that we justify everything that "our side" does. It makes us incapable of applying principles consistently. The most obvious is when one party criticizes the other party's president for enacting virtually the same foreign policy (secret kill list and all), for encroaching on our civil liberties in many of the same ways, and so on. I could also get more specific on particular issues, but there's no time for that here.

So anger makes us blind, damaging our relationships and distorting our thinking. But where does this anger come from in the first place?

I think it comes from a belief, sometimes conscious and other times subconscious, that the most important thing we do is politics. If we don't elect the right candidate, we will doom our society by leaving it in the hands of evil or incompetence (or both). But if we can just enact the right policies, we can cure society's ills and have justice. It is tempting to think this is the highest of all human endeavors. Every election becomes the most important in our lifetime. The news can find nothing more important than the decisions of government.

I claim this belief is false. We have only to imagine a world in which government is just, and good policies are implemented. What, then? Have we finished all the important work? Is there nothing left but to sit back and relax and enjoy an easy life? Would that not be utterly devoid of meaning? Would it not be...boring?

Christians have long wondered (and debated) what the kingdom of heaven will really be like. Will we just play harps all day and sing praise to God? Will it be one endless party? There are many people who say they would not want immortality, because they would be utterly bored. If the limited visions presented are literally correct, I suppose they are right. We need to refine our imaginations a little bit.

I don't see how the mind can live forever without continually growing and, indeed, working. The end of evil would not mean the eternal victory of laziness. On the contrary. Work is at the heart of who we are, who we are intended to be. The mind is satisfied when it creates and discovers. The reason we are so miserable in this modern age is that we have so many things to distract us that we fail to satisfy our deepest need to discover things eternal and spiritual. We have reduced everything to a problem to be solved, and presumably once that problem is solved we have no purpose left.

This is vanity and a chasing after wind. Impatience makes us miserable. If we want a cure for all this anger and grief caused by politics, the only answer is thinking beyond the next four years, beyond even the next century. I am not drained by politics only because it provokes anger, but also because it disconnects me from the mysterious, the beautiful, and the transcendent. I forget about music and poetry and nature. I forget about those haunting questions about free will and salvation and the nature of mind.

Supposing we managed to enact all the right policies and save society from its ills, what would it then have? Would there be any meaning in such a perfect existence? Does satisfying every physical need of human beings give them what their souls desire?

It is fashionable these days for Christians to critique the older tendency to reject temporal concerns in favor of eternal, spiritual ones. But we have slipped into the opposite tendency. I think we need to rediscover the virtue of relativizing the needs of the present. It is only by rediscovering the eternal significance of our lives that we can address our temporal needs without losing our minds. Life is not one big problem to be solved. It is a gift, one which we can learn to appreciate more and more for all eternity.

So I think I need to detach myself from politics, at least until I am able to come back to it with a right perspective. Engaging in politics should be an act of love on the part of one who has the proper goal in mind. Jesus entered into our world and did not despise the temporal, but he came down from heaven. We ourselves also need to enter into the heavenly realms, so that we can labor on earth with the energy of heaven.

But I have said this the wrong way. It is not so that we can labor on earth that we strive for the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is the goal; all the rest will be added to us because "your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things." Let us strive first for the kingdom.

Origen on the inspiration of Scripture

From On First Principles, Book IV, Chapter I:

"Now if we consider how in a ery few years, although those who professor Christianity are persecuted and some are put to death on account of it while others suffer the loss of their possessions, yet the word has been able, in spite of the fewness of its teachers, to be "preached everywhere in the world" (cf. Mt 24:14) so that the Greeks and barbarians, wise and foolish (cf. Rom 1:14) have adopted the religion of Jesus, we shall not hesitate to say that this achievement is more than human, remembering that Jesus taught with all authority and convincing power that his word should prevail (cf. Mk 13:31).

"Consequenctly we may reasonably regard as oracles those utterances of his such as...." 

Further on:

"Now when we thus briefly demonstrate the divine nature of Jesus and use the words spoken in prophecy about him, we demonstrate at the same time that the writings which prophesy about him are divinely inspired and that the words which announce his sojourning here and his teaching were spoken with all power and authority and that this is the reason why they have prevailed over the elect people taken from among the nations. And we must add that it was after the advent of Jesus that the inspiration of the prophetic words and the spiritual nature of Moses's law came to light."

In other words, the Scriptures themselves do not attest independently of their own inspiration; they are wholly dependent on the coming of Jesus Christ.

Later on in Chapters II - III he explains that the Scriptures must be understood in a spiritual way. Passages have both a "soul" and a "body." The body is the physical, literal, or straightforward meaning, when there is one. But there isn't always a "bodily sense" that is acceptable! Origen gives a list of examples (Chapter III) in which the Bible cannot be taken literally, starting with (interestingly enough) the creation story:

"Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning existed without the sun and moon and stars? ... And when God is said to 'walk in the paradise in the cool of the day' and Adam to hide himself behind a tree, I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual events."

He gives many other examples of things from Scripture which he finds to be unlikely or even "impossible."

To me, the most significant thing about these arguments is that they come from what is perhaps the first systematic theology ever written in the Christian tradition. Far from some modern liberal interpretation of the Bible, this comes from one of the oldest sources we have on Christian doctrine. And while I disagree with Origen about many things, this is one thing on which I agree totally, and I can't express quite enough how thankful I am for it. It makes the Bible readable. Everyone who has read the entirety of Scripture knows that there are passages and even whole themes (such as the divinely ordered destruction of the peoples of Canaan) that present impossible problems for Christians. But if we read every passage in a spiritual way, inspired not just by any thoughts that happen to arise in our heads but rather by the person of Jesus Christ found in the gospels, we rediscover the Bible as a source of power. We find in all of these stories of war and divine wrath a story about our own struggles with sin and evil and longing for redemption.

And what could be more Christian? Christ is the center; the rest must be understood in terms of him.

Breath, spirit, will

My wife pointed out to me the other day something profound. The breath, she said, is essentially the border between the conscious will and the unconscious, automatic processes governing the human body. The heart, for example, beats at whatever rate it's supposed to. The stomach gets to work whether you tell it to or not. On the other hand, most things we control consciously do very little automatically. We choose to walk around; it is extremely rare for someone to start walking in their sleep. As for our mental life, well, it is true that we may have both conscious and subconscious thoughts, but how they interact is a complete mystery to me; in my common sense experience of the world, my thoughts are purely conscious.

But the breath is in between. On the one hand, I don't need to consciously think about breathing. When I sleep, my body automatically breathes. Even when I don't sleep, my lungs will automatically work at the pace they need to when the occasion calls for it. Yet I can choose to override these automatic rhythms. I can hold my breath. I can choose to breathe more slowly, or more quickly if I so desire.

This is especially evident in that most human of all activities: speech. To speak, I must take a breath big enough to finish the phrase I have in mind. This act of will is taken to a higher level in song.

In the Bible, "spirit" means "breath" or "wind." As far as I know, this is true in both Hebrew and Greek, both Old and New Testaments.

The Spirit of God, then, might be seen as the will of God coming to life in the physical world. As God prepares to speak, He takes a breath... and the Word that comes out will not fall to the ground without accomplishing its purpose. God is a good speaker, a well-trained singer.

The traditional Christian Trinity is recited as "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit," but one could make the case that "Father, Spirit, Son" is also an appropriate order. The Son is the Word, and the Word comes from the Father through His Spirit, that is, His Breath. Do we not say that the Son was conceived by the Holy Spirit? And if the Son is God Incarnate, that is, the Will of God made into a body, then is not the Spirit of God, so to speak, the boundary between God and His body? But I am stretching the image rather far; I don't mean to invent new theories, only jot down hypotheses.

For us, I think rediscovering the breath as spirit is important for our lives. When we focus on the breath as the center of our being, we reconnect the spiritual with the physical. We reconnect the human will with the human animal.

Sit and concentrate on your breathing. Sit up straight, fix your posture so that you have plenty of room to take in the air. Breathe slowly, so that you can enjoy it. As you breathe, you will notice that the rest of your body responds. Your heart changes its rhythm in response to the breath. You will feel the blood flow through all parts of your body and be made more aware of them. You will come into contact with your body on a physical level which is not habitual. On the other hand, you will also be more spiritually alert. The breath is an act of the will; it is a striving toward truth, toward beauty, toward the good. As you straighten out your back and breathe deeply, you will be reminded that your body is a sanctuary for the divine, a building that reaches upward.

Florensky on philosophy

"Psychologically, it is natural for people to say that everything is very simple. This is opposite to the sense that begot philosophy--the sense of wonder. To be a philosopher is always to perceive reality as something new, as something that is never boring or stale. The adventure of the spiritual life consists in the fact that everything is renewed, first is one's consciousness and then outside oneself. The one essential thing is to transform all of reality. We must die and forget everything that seemed boring and stale, and when we awaken, all will be renewed for us; it will be beautiful and eternally joyous." -- Pavel Florensky, At the Crossroads of Science and Mysticism

I think this is my new mission statement for life. For context, this is actually part of a critique of modern thought. The quote continues:

"And to some degree this actually happened. The second part of Faust represents spiritual renewal after suffering. Its beginning is depicted in hues reminiscent of the sky, an approximate vision of the primordial creature, in contrast to the task of Renaissance culture--not to wonder at anything." 

 This book is a gem, absolutely necessary for anyone thinking about building a Christian worldview.

Elon the Zebulunite

After him Elon the Zebulunite judged Israel; and he judged Israel ten years. Then Elon the Zebulunite died, and was buried at Aijalon in the land of Zebulun. (Judges 12:11-12)

There are certain passages of scripture, like this one, which stand out for being so...useless. There is no wisdom, no moral teaching, not even a story. Even Ibzan of Bethlehem and Abdon son of Hillel the Pirathonite, who came before and after Elon, had little tales attached to their name (Ibzan had thirty sons and thirty daughters, who all married people from outside the clan; Abdon "had forty sons and thirty grandsons, who rode on seventy donkeys"). Elon judged ten years; that's it.

That's not to say there isn't a lot to be gleaned from a deep analysis of these two verses. A quick Google search yielded an article delving into the historical Israelite practices surrounding transfer of territory. Of course, even that topic is history mainly for history's sake. If Israel is itself sacred, then understanding its history is of religious value. Perhaps that is one of the main draws of this brief passage. We can imagine an historian dutifully recording Elon's brief appointment as judge, for no other reason than to faithfully reproduce the sequences of events that led Israel from the days of Joshua up to the time of the kings.

Still, what about Elon himself? We will never know anything about him other than his name, his title, and the fact that he bore that title for ten years. I often imagine all the saints meeting in the kingdom of heaven. Many of them will meet Elon and ask him what he did during his life on earth. Perhaps he will respond with many stories. Or maybe he will just smile and say, "I judged Israel ten years."

Following the teaching of Jesus, who said such things as "the last will be first and the first will be last," and, "whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave," one might say Elon is the greatest of all the judges. There are no stories glorifying him. It is enough for him to have served the nation of Israel, God's people. In this way, maybe a Christian can glean from this brief mention of Elon a model of heroism, after the manner that Christ taught us. But I suppose that's rather reaching. After all, Elon was judge. He was not slave of all; unlike Christ, he did not refuse to be put in a position of power (cf. John 6:15).

Implicit in my questions about this text is the notion that every text of scripture should be edifying, as in 2 Timothy 3:16, "All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness." One has to really reach in order to apply this principle to all scripture. For the Christian, it's not enough that a passage should faithfully record the history of Israel; some application to our lives, as we strive to become more like Christ, is necessary. And anyway, modern historical criticism casts so much doubt on the history recorded in scripture that taking these passages at their word is a leap of faith.

So what do we do with Elon the Zebulunite? What do we do with any of the judges? Even the great ones like Samson can hardly be considered models. But at least a story like that of Samson may or may not have an allegorical interpretation which is edifying. Elon is simply a footnote.

But there he is, eternally etched into the narrative of scripture, refusing to budge. I am tempted to think one simply has to have a sense of humor when approaching the Bible. It did not come together the way anyone would expect if one were imagining God speaking directly to us. Now that it has enjoyed its 2000 year status as canonical, there's no changing it. We can rest assured Elon the Zebulunite will remain there, challenging us to find a spiritual meaning behind his name and his ten years as judge.

I think there is something edifying about this, after all. We need continual reminders that the universe is the way it is because of events that preceded us, that we cannot change, and that defy any sort of theoretical explanation. We live in God's world, not a world which is "designed" according to human standards. Not everything has an immediately obvious purpose. And yet, if it had not been for all of these apparently meaningless events in the exact sequence they happened, I would not exist.

In other words, as much as I might naturally feel that my life would be totally unaffected if Elon the Zebulunite's name did not appear where it does in scripture, in fact it would change everything. Over two thousand years of history would be altered. If a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane...or however that's supposed to go,,.one can only imagine what it would mean if even a single character, however uninteresting, were removed from the Bible.

The more I read the Bible and reflect, the more I become less concerned with the abstract principles it teaches (though I have not lost sight of them), and the more I am aware of its very presence. Almost the very essence of the Bible's power is that it cannot be changed. Although it may have gone through many revisions to become what it is today, from now on no such revision is even conceivable. (Here I am not talking about translation and interpretation. I am mostly certainly aware that there will always be as many interpretations of scripture as there are human beings on the planet, but I think this can be safely distinguished from the content of the Bible.) That is the kind of presence in our world that can be felt, all the more so when one makes it a habit to read these now unchangeable document.

Paradoxically, this judge without a story has provoked in me more thought than any other, thus becoming the judge I would be least in favor of omitting from any reading of scripture. Of course, I doubt anyone would know who I'm talking about if I casually brought him up in conversation. The presence of scripture can be felt, but its contents remain a secret hidden in plain sight. I suppose that's natural. I don't mean to lament the lack of biblical literacy of our society based on the evidence that no one has ever heard of Elon the Zebulunite. This is simply a meditation, one that cannot possibly resolve all the mysteries surrounding this strange text.

Then again, it would be nice to know that the Christians who, in speaking about scripture practically deify it, actually knew its contents. Maybe then they would speak about it with much less certainty.

Faith and the intellectual life

I think discussions about science and faith are important. I think it's necessary to ask whether the latest scholarship and research contradicts or affirms traditional beliefs. I like to be involved in those debates, because I think sometimes skeptics can be convinced that Christianity is not all baloney and sometimes Christians can be convinced that not every traditional doctrine is Truth with a capital 'T'.

But there's a deeper, more fundamental question that surprisingly few Christian apologists ever bother to answer (and perhaps few Christians ever think to ask themselves). Is Christian faith consistent with a vibrant intellectual life at all?

Perhaps the question seems so blatantly offensive that it doesn't seem worth considering. I can certainly understand why. So many of the greatest minds, not only in science but in all areas of philosophy and the arts, have been faithful believers. Why should we doubt that one can have both sincere devotion to God and at the same time vigorously pursue intellectual questions?

Yet it seems to me there is naturally a great deal of tension between faith and reason for the intellectual. By "intellectual" I mean someone who seeks relentlessly to know what is true, who is indeed so committed to the pursuit of understanding that they will not allow any tradition, force of habit, feeling, prior commitment or anything else to stand in the way of rational inquiry. Thus intellectuals necessarily leave themselves open to changing every opinion, even those they hold most dear.

Christian religion, on the other hand, most certainly demands that we believe something. We are called to believe and warned not to fall away. We are expected to be convinced, and once convinced we are warned never to doubt. Faith is indeed a form of loyalty. It means devotion to a person--Jesus Christ--and to his mission, and to all the other people who have also made themselves loyal.

Can the intellectual truly hold such loyalty? I suppose the same question applies to any sort of loyalty. Can one be a committed member of a political party and be an intellectual? But changing political parties is certainly not unheard of. Perhaps a more dire question would be, can one honestly be loyal to one's country and be an intellectual? Is it not the case the one's country might get in the way of the truth, in which case such loyalty must be abandoned?

Less dire, more personal: can one be an intellectual and faithfully devoted to a family? This question seems to me far less hypothetical than the others. Families fall apart all the time in our day. That seems to be in large part because we are quite committed to discovering ourselves as we go, which means old commitments might sometimes have to give way to new self-discoveries. Some people seem to think it's worth it; others of us aren't so sure.

Maybe one could legitimately ask whether it's right or good to truly be an intellectual. After all, is it not self-defeating? To be committed to the pursuit of truth at the cost of any and all loyalties is itself a kind of loyalty of the most demanding kind. Yet that kind of loyalty is exactly the kind Jesus himself demanded: "Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me." Indeed, Jesus declared that he is the truth.

If we are committed to the truth at the cost of all other loyalties, there is no internal inconsistency, and moreover we are found merely to be doing what Jesus himself demands of us. The only question is, what gives Jesus the right to call himself the truth? Do there truly exist such overwhelmingly compelling arguments in support of such a claim?

Some apologists begin with five (or so) arguments for the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent creator. Others begin with historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Others begin with an appeal to our sense of justice and innate belief in moral objectivity. Still others appeal to the universal human thirst for spiritual meaning.

When we add up such arguments together, do we yet get anywhere close to where we need to be, in order to convince the intellectual that Jesus himself is indeed the truth? Can intellectuals' loyalty to God ever be higher than their devotion to the truth? Must their devotion, if it is sincere, lead to faith? (Such a demand seems to defy common experience.) Or is the ultimate discovery rather that their devotion to the truth is a sort of faith in God, albeit unbeknownst to them?

Peter denies Jesus

The woman said to Peter, "You are not also one of this man's disciples, are you?" He said, "I am not."

He surprised himself with how quickly he answered. Was it fear? Was he lying just to avoid suffering?

When he first heard Jesus talk about his own suffering and death, he took him aside and rebuked him. But he turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."

It had taken a while to get over that. Slowly he had come to understand what Jesus meant. The power of God is not like the power of man. Throughout all the history of Israel, was it not through human weakness that God's power was seen the most? Did not the prophet Isaiah say that the servant of God would be despised and rejected by others, a man of sorrows and acquainted with infirmity?

By the time it came to Peter's last meal with Jesus, he was ready to say, "Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you." If the Lord himself had to suffer, then he would suffer with him. But Jesus answered, "Will you lay down your life for me? Very truly, I tell you, before the cock crows, you will have denied me three times."

Three times. Was that a prediction, or a command? Peter couldn't tell the difference. Everything Jesus said would happen was happening, no matter how bizarre. Why did he now deny his master? Was it in fact out of loyalty to him? Was he trying to fulfill his words? Or were Peter's own words beyond his control? Had destiny caught up with him?

"You are not also one of his disciples, are you?" He denied it and said, "I am not."

An exact repeat of the first instance, only this time he was surrounded, whereas at first it had only been a single woman.

Perhaps he had really meant it this time. Why should he follow the one who had pushed him away? It was Jesus who had told him not to follow him. He had offered to lay down his life for him, and instead he had insisted, "Where I am going, you cannot come." Why did Jesus think that he must suffer alone? He had taught all along that all of his disciples should take up their cross and follow him. It had taken Peter so long to understand that teaching, and just at the moment when he could at least put it into practice, he was met with rejection.

One of the slaves of the high priest, a relative of the man whose ear Peter had cut off, asked, "Did I not see you in the garden with him?" Again Peter denied it, and at that moment the cock crowed.

Well, then, the prophecy is fulfilled, Peter thought. Have I not done my duty? Have I not done God's will? Have I not, indeed, done exactly what my master told me? I have been a faithful disciple by denying my master. I have followed him by falling away. What else would he have me do? Where he is going, I cannot come.

The Lord turned and looked at Peter.

And he went out and wept bitterly.

Anthropocentric religion, part 2

A while back I wrote on this blog against the complaint that Christianity is essentially anthropocentric. Yes, the universe is vast, and humans are very insignificant in relation to the whole sum of existence. That is hardly an argument against a faith which, historically, strongly affirms these claims.

But then again, experience often contradicts this fact and reinforces the idea that Christianity is a religion focused on satisfying some human psychological need. I was reminded of this a week ago during Sunday worship.

Perhaps the vast majority of self-identified evangelical churches would summarize the gospel as follows: we are great sinners, but Jesus is a great Savior, who through his sacrifice on the cross atones for our sins and loves us unconditionally, so that through faith in him we may approach God with confidence and find eternal life.

All the main elements of worship at the church where I worshiped were clearly designed to reinforced this message. From the opening remarks (in which the associate pastor confessed that he, too, is a sinner, awkwardly eliciting faux surprise from the congregation) to the songs (including a rendition of "It Is Well with My Soul" in which the instruments made sure to put a musical climax around the verse, "My sin, O the bliss of this glorious thought... is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more...") to the sermon (an interpretation of Psalm 139 which, though quite sophisticated, nevertheless boiled down to, "God loves you and thinks about you even more than you do"), everything pointed one's thoughts toward our individual need for love and redemption and the good news that God satisfies these needs. (Ironically enough for an evangelical church, it was perhaps the Lord's table which made an exception to this rule, the focus being not merely Christ's atonement on our behalf, but the spiritual life he gives us by feeding us. But I digress.)

The closing hymn was none other than "Just a Closer Walk with Thee," which has the following lyrics:

I am weak, but Thou art strong,
Jesus, keep me from all wrong,
I’ll be satisfied as long
As I walk, let me walk close to Thee.

Just a closer walk with Thee,
Grant it, Jesus, is my plea,
Daily walking close to Thee,
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.

Through this world of toil and snares,
If I falter, Lord, who cares?
Who with me my burden shares?
None but Thee, dear Lord, none but Thee.

When my feeble life is o’er,
Time for me will be no more,
Guide me gently, safely o’er
To Thy kingdom's shore, to Thy shore.

Now, far be it from me to say this song is without merit as a hymn of praise. It is not wrong to celebrate one's personal walk with Jesus Christ. And yet, an outside observer could be forgiven for concluding from these words that Christianity is fundamentally about worshiping an imaginary friend who comforts individuals through hard times and assures them that one day this sad, physical, temporal existence will give way to an eternal, motionless bliss.

To be clear, I don't think the evangelical summary of the gospel is a lie. I merely think it is not a summary of the whole gospel. Where is the cosmic significance of Jesus Christ? Where is the story of God's creation? Where is the hope for the redemption of the universe? These things are also part of the gospel, and they beckon us toward something much larger than the affairs of human beings.

Consider a different hymn, "Of the Father's Love Begotten":

Of the Father’s love begotten,
Ere the worlds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega,
He the source, the ending He,
Of the things that are, that have been,
And that future years shall see,
Evermore and evermore!

At His Word the worlds were framèd;
He commanded; it was done:
Heaven and earth and depths of ocean
In their threefold order one;
All that grows beneath the shining
Of the moon and burning sun,
Evermore and evermore!

He is found in human fashion,
Death and sorrow here to know,
That the race of Adam’s children
Doomed by law to endless woe,
May not henceforth die and perish
In the dreadful gulf below,
Evermore and evermore!

O that birth forever blessèd,
When the virgin, full of grace,
By the Holy Ghost conceiving,
Bore the Saviour of our race;
And the Babe, the world’s Redeemer,
First revealed His sacred face,
evermore and evermore!

O ye heights of heaven adore Him;
Angel hosts, His praises sing;
Powers, dominions, bow before Him,
and extol our God and King!
Let no tongue on earth be silent,
Every voice in concert sing,
Evermore and evermore!

This is He Whom seers in old time
Chanted of with one accord;
Whom the voices of the prophets
Promised in their faithful word;
Now He shines, the long expected,
Let creation praise its Lord,
Evermore and evermore!

Righteous Judge of souls departed,
Righteous King of them that live,
On the Father’s throne exalted
None in might with Thee may strive;
Who at last in vengeance coming
Sinners from Thy face shalt drive,
Evermore and evermore!

Thee let old men, Thee let young men,
Thee let boys in chorus sing;
Matrons, virgins, little maidens,
With glad voices answering:
Let their guileless songs re-echo,
And the heart its music bring,
Evermore and evermore!

Christ, to Thee with God the Father,
And, O Holy Ghost, to Thee,
Hymn and chant with high thanksgiving,
And unwearied praises be:
Honour, glory, and dominion,
And eternal victory,
Evermore and evermore!

I have no idea why this is considered a "Christmas carol." It is a song which literally summarizes the entire gospel--from Christ's divine identity, to his creation, to his incarnation, to his redemption of humankind, to his final judgment. It calls in the entire universe to praise him, reminding the singer that human beings are not alone in receiving this good news.

This isn't just a long complaint about how the church needs "better music." Every element of worship is a choice affecting what members of a congregation will fix their minds on and remember. Worship is a reflection of our beliefs about God, and attending regularly will tend to shape and reinforce our beliefs about God. Just as one needs to be concerned with eating a balanced diet, so also, it seems to me, we ought to be concerned as Christians, whether our worship gives a balanced view of the gospel.

It is rather trivial to observe that most people focus on themselves most of the time. I'm not actually sure how true this is, exactly, but I know that any pastor can easily proclaim it as an unquestionable axiom of human existence. What is perhaps less trivial is how focused we are on our need for acceptance from others. Human beings have always been social creatures, dependent on family and tribe for survival, and this is only more true in a civilization in which most of our professions depend not at all on nature and the elements but wholly on ideas, technology, and our relationships with others. Beginning as children raised in schools, and continuing on as adults whose survival depends on successful performance reviews, we are obsessed with assessment. Perhaps it is no wonder that we present the gospel in these terms--God's view of our performance.

While it is certainly comforting to know that God is not like our boss--that he is loving, compassionate, patient, and forgiving--I think it would be even more eye-opening to have our gaze turned toward something other than God's assessment of us. When God spoke to Job in response to Job's complaints about suffering, he gave Job a tour of the whole creation. There is something about being reminded of our place in this universe which allows us to flourish in ways we had not understood before.

If Christian worship does not direct our minds and hearts toward the majesty of all creation, what will? Modern life doesn't reinforce the splendor of creation. We are obsessed with human creations--democracy, economy, technology, popular culture. I think it is our Christian duty to direct the eyes of human beings back toward the heavens, so that we might say with the psalmist, "The heavens are telling the glory of God," and, "What are mortals that you are mindful of them?"

No king in Israel

"In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes." -- Judges 17:6

"And the Lord said to Samuel, “Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them."  -- 1 Samuel 8:7

One of the central tensions throughout the Bible is a lingering question: should Israel have a king? Deuteronomy law permits Israel to have a king and provides some guidelines for how a king should behave. When David finally does become king, he is considered a man after God's own heart, and a consistent theme in the prophets is that Israel's future hope will be found in his royal line. Judges 17:6, which is repeated in 21:25 (the very last verse), becomes a haunting theme framing the latter section of the book, which recounts one of the most disturbing stories I've read anywhere. So that seems like pretty strong evidence that Israel needs a king; it is dysfunctional without one, but under good king David, life is good.

On the other hand, we have the famous passage in 1 Samuel 8, where the people ask Samuel to give them a king, much to his disliking. In response, God explains that the people have not rejected Samuel, but rather God: "According to all the deeds that they have done, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also doing to you." Indeed, the whole story of the exodus is not merely a story about God saving his people, but about him coming to be king. (This explains why the whole second half of Exodus gives instructions, not only concerning God's moral code, but also on how to prepare the tabernacle for his dwelling place. The Sunday school version of Exodus most often fails to get this point across very well!) It is not hard to imagine that, especially in ancient times, when a strong warrior came and liberated a people, they were inclined to make him king. In the story of the Exodus, that warrior was God. The fact that the God of the universe was not a good enough king for the people of Israel, according to Scripture, says something rather unflattering about them.

This tension is resolved in Jesus Christ. The Son of David does show up to be king and liberate Israel from its oppressors. But who is he really? The answer is that he is the God of Israel. The one who led them out of Egypt has now returned to finish the job--now he will lead them out from the bondage of sins.

And what kind of king does he intend to be? "And [Jesus] said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you. Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. For who is the greater, one who reclines at table or one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at table? But I am among you as the one who serves." (Luke 22:25-27) This is a unique kind of king. On the other hand, it is important not to miss the continuity between Jesus in the gospels and God in the book of Exodus. Jesus gives the law and expects his people to follow it: "Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you?" (Luke 6:46)

All of this seems essential for thinking like a Christian about the concept of liberty. The point of freedom is to be free from human kings. But the divine king does not use force. He comes to us as a servant. He expects us to obey his commandments because his words have power, not because he has weapons to enforce them.

I've noticed that a lot of Christians talking about politics try to propose the question, "What would Jesus do?" This question seems to betray a lack of faith. The proper question would seem to be, "What does Jesus do?" Do we believe him to be alive or not?

Because as far as I can see, Jesus is the most libertarian king who ever existed. I have never known him to come down and enforce his will by physical threats or punishments. And yet he is seated on high, at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. Or does he rule us by his words? Just as he commanded the wind and waves, perhaps he also punishes us by merely speaking.

Yet I have never known the world to abide by a simple view of justice. Jesus himself did not deserve to suffer, yet he suffered a most gruesome death. Not only that, but he called us to follow him in suffering.

I am not saying Jesus Christ is a libertarian, certainly not with all the connotations that word carries in modern American politics. But what I would guess is that he is not very impressed with all of our political reflections and ideas to make government better. Maybe, just maybe, we should start taking him seriously as our true king.

The Bible is a book of war

The Bible is a book about war. Most of its stories are about a nation whose only known way of survival was to take up arms against surrounding nations, and almost every generation knew war.

The New Testament is quite different, of course. Jesus did not lead an army in a rebellion, but rather willingly handed himself over to be crucified. "My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here." (John 18:36)

War imagery reappears mainly in Revelation, where Jesus is depicted as having a sword coming out of his mouth, destroying Satan, and judging the nations. There are of course many references to judgment throughout the New Testament, but rarely are there explicit images of weapons and violence.

It seems there are many formulas for how to tie all this together. Some say that God is a God of wrath, and that both the Old Testament calls to holy war and the war imagery of Revelation are both consistent with his character. Rather than fret over these images, we need to respect them, fear God, and teach that his terrible wrath is a reality people will have to face unless they repent.

Rather than try to thoroughly critique this position, I will just state briefly why I have problems with it. To be clear, the main difficulty is not that God judges. It is rather the explicit commands in the Old Testament to (for example) kill women and children.

When you draw near to a town to fight against it, offer it terms of peace. If it accepts your terms of peace and surrenders to you, then all the people in it shall serve you at forced labor. If it does not submit to you peacefully, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword. You may, however, take as your booty the women, the children, livestock, and everything else in the town, all its spoil. You may enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. Thus you shall treat all the towns that are very far from you, which are not towns of the nations here. But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them--the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusite--just as the Lord your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God. (Deut. 20:10-18, emphasis mine)

When I take this passage literally, I simply don't know how to square it with the ethical teaching of Jesus to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. And I don't know why Jesus would have suddenly changed the strategy from war to self-sacrifice. We could argue about details all day long, but ultimately I just don't see how to form a coherent view of Scripture out of a literal reading of the Old Testament.

There is another way of reading the Bible which seems to be embedded in everything Jesus himself says. It is a spiritual allegory, a prophecy about him and his ministry, and about the ultimate destiny of those who follow his Way.

Jesus does indeed perform acts of war in the New Testament--against demons!

If Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself; how then will his kingdom stand? If I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your own exorcists cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges. But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you. Or how can one enter the house of a strong man and plunder his property, without first tying up the strong man? Then indeed the house can be plundered. (Matthew 12:26-29)

But spiritual warfare is not physical warfare, and Jesus did not come to lead an armed rebellion against the Romans. How then might we read the Old Testament (and Revelation) in light of his ministry and his character?

I read it spiritually in this way. The people of Israel is the human spirit. Once we were slaves in Egypt. This is a metaphor for our slavery to sin and death. Then God called us out of Egypt with might acts of power, and he gave us a new identity. He gave us his law, so that we might be united. But as everyone who has ever put faith in God knows, it is easy to stumble, right from the very beginning. Even after we are made free in God, we must then wander through the wilderness, just as the Israelites did for forty years.

The final mission is to go into the promised land and conquer. If in the beginning God did all the acts of power himself, liberating us by his own hand, so that we had only to stand back and watch, in the last act we must take up arms ourselves--against the demons of our own hearts. We must utterly annihilate them, wiping out even women and children, which means metaphorically that we must destroy even the possibility of our sins being reborn, thus coming back to haunt us ("so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods"). It is still God who fights for us, but his power is infused into our own efforts.

But why should the word of God come to us as such a long history when it would have sufficed to simply teach us this brief lesson? Well, I don't agree that it would have sufficed. First of all, we should not discount the fact that the Bible's historical books do indeed record events of history, even if it they are presented in a spiritual (and often mysterious) way. There is always value in such records.

Second, there is no end to all of the subtle lessons one can learn by meditating on the details of sacred history. For instance, I am quite fond of the story of the Gibeonites in the book of Joshua. Since they fear defeat by the Israelites, the Gibeonites dress themselves up in rags and pretend to come to the Israelites from a long distance. The Israelites make peace with them before consulting the Lord, and so they disobey God. In the same way, our sins often dress up to us as outsiders; we think that such faults could never come from our own hearts, but must somehow be the influence of our environment. Or they dress up as outsiders, in the sense that they are not a threat to us, and so we make an alliance with them and permit them to go on dwelling in our souls. "Show no pity," God says. If we do not consult him, our sins will remain, and we will not live long in the promised land (that is, spiritual life) as he desires for us.

That is how I read the Bible these days. It is not that I totally discount the literal meaning of texts--indeed, I take the story of Jesus's death and resurrection quite literally. And I don't think my lens of interpretation is out of line with traditional Christian reading. But at some point, I simply can't accept that all of the words of Scripture are literally true, in the sense that the God of the universe would actually order women and children to be killed (or, alternatively, taken as property). My conviction is that Jesus himself teaches us a new way to fight our wars, one that is spiritual and not literal. This does not require less strength, but more.

Between two worlds

One of the fruits of my reflections on Stephen Weinberg's The First Three Minutes is a renewed shock at the way modern people, especially scientists, can walk around knowing how pointless and inhospitable the universe is and simultaneously lead happy and productive lives. It is not so much that I think it surprising that human beings should be so self-absorbed as to ignore anything outside their own minuscule sphere of existence. Rather, I wonder how anyone who has gazed straight at the grandeur of this vast, pitiless universe can afterward return to diligently fulfill his daily responsibilities. Is there a sort of intentional amnesia that happens? Do scientists like Weinberg simply choose to forget how pointless their lives really are? Or do they instead have doubts about the validity of their own assertions? Perhaps there is some source of hope that they missed while they were looking through telescopes and performing calculations.

Christian faith trains the imagination to hold on to two seemingly opposite realities at the same time. Front and center is Jesus Christ, who is said to be both fully human and fully divine. In the same way he is both absent--seated at the right hand of God--and fully present, for the church is his body. It is a theme woven throughout the Bible. God is too big for even heaven and earth to contain him, yet he chose Jerusalem as a dwelling place. When Moses asks God what his name is, he responds, "I Am Who I Am," but then he adds that he is in fact the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. God is always making a bridge between the utterly unknowable and the known, the transcendent and the imminent, the universal and the particular.

Even if someone were to prove to me that Christianity is not true--if someone could identify the remains of Jesus, or find some other way to wholly discredit the New Testament's witness--I would still find myself compelled to search for this bridge between two worlds, like the God of the Bible. Somehow we humans are caught between the two worlds, scrambling to find ground beneath our feet, hoping against hope that we might live comfortable with one foot on either side. We live to satisfy temporal desires, for good food and entertainment, for success and prosperity, for meaningful accomplishments within our brief lifetimes. But we also gaze up at the stars, and down through the microscope, and wonder about the big picture. We try to measure the age of the universe and guess its ultimate destiny. We try to understand the laws of physics and how to master them. We try to answer questions about life's ultimate purpose, about what is really beautiful, and about what truly lasts forever.

In my daily life I find myself regularly called away from my ordinary tasks to contemplate just how little a difference it makes whether I complete them or not. True, as concerns my own life and the lives of those around me, it can make a tremendous difference. But on a larger scale, it makes practically none. One human life does not change the ultimate fate of humanity, and even if all humanity were to pass away, the earth would keep on turning, and even if the earth itself were destroyed, the sun would continue burning, and even if the sun itself died, the galaxy would keep on spinning, and the universe would go on as it always has...

Yet it is in these very tasks which I perform daily that I become witness to this grand spectacle. I perform calculations, and I write articles for journals of mathematics. Every theorem correctly proven is a small bit of insight into an eternal truth that will never be taken away. There is ground underneath my feet. The human mind is not adrift. There is a bridge, somewhere.

I wish scientists talked about this more, but I suppose that would involve matters of faith rather than rigorous empirical evidence.

Virtue and libertarianism

Reason posted a debate on virtue libertarianism, which is more or less defined in opposition to "libertine libertarianism," an ideology which is "radically indifferent to the choices that people make with their freedom." William Ruger and Jason Sorens define it as follows:

What we call virtue libertarianism is the alternative to libertinism of the stronger and weaker varieties. Virtue libertarians recognize that we have a duty to respect our own moral nature and to promote its development in others in proportion to the responsibility we have for them. Heavy drug use that destroys one's own moral or rational faculties is inconsistent with that duty. Sexual license, gluttony, and the ancient vice of pleonexia—an excessive desire to acquire material and other goods—can overpower the virtue of self-command, which Adam Smith astutely recognized as the key to all the other virtues. To respect others, we must act beneficently and generously toward them, not just refrain from taking their freedom. 

I'm not going to comment on how well Ruger and Sorens did in making their argument for virtue libertarianism. What struck me was how libertarians around the web reacted, particularly at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, a blog I like to follow.

I know this might not be such a charitable summary, but essentially it boils down to this: other libertarians accuse Ruger and Sorens of attacking a straw man, and then immediately proceed to behave exactly like that straw man. To be specific, we have libertarians saying that of course we ought to be virtuous, but who's to say that porn, drugs, and decadent lifestyles are really all that bad?

This is where I get off the bus with libertarians. I have absolutely no interest in debating these things with people who think themselves too enlightened, too sophisticated for traditional morals. If these thinkers wish for evidence that such vices are bad, I can only point to centuries of moral tradition telling us as much. Pornography and drugs are degrading, inasmuch as they treat the human body is nothing more than a pleasure factory, and not as a sacred gift to be appreciated and maintained respectfully.

That doesn't mean libertarian policies are wrong. Just because it is wrong to use cocaine doesn't mean that the government is justified using violence to prevent its use. One can never merely ask the question, "Is it wrong to do X?" in order to derive good policy. One must also ask the subsequent question, "What is the morally appropriate response to X?"

At bottom, I suppose I am really not a libertarian at all, insofar as I do not really believe in self-ownership. I support libertarian policies because I don't believe the government owns me. But as for self-ownership, I belong to God, not to myself. Indeed, I find the very concept of self-ownership incoherent. For if I own something, this means I can dispose of it as I will. Yet if I dispose of myself (i.e. commit suicide) then I have destroyed my ability to make any future decisions. My supposed freedom to do with myself whatever I will negates my freedom. (Yes, this does have policy implications. Unlike, I suppose, the majority of libertarians, I don't support the right to assisted suicide, although end of life issues can be tricky.)

By the way, I believe Christianity is the religion of liberty, but I think that deserves a separate post. What's really essential at this point is that I have no interest in libertine libertarianism. And yes, this is real phenomenon which can easily be found, among other places, at Reason.com. I have no interest in defending a college woman's right to become a porn actress in order to pay for her studies. I have no interest in defending the recreational use of drugs as a fun and therefore good thing. Neither do I have any interest, for that matter, in claiming that Americans ought to own as many guns as they want, or that they should have as much money as they want. All of these things--sex, drugs, weapons, money--very quickly become vices, and I don't think society is better for rejoicing at the abundance of such vices.

Again, I offer no defense of this proposition, because my opponents share none of the foundational assumptions on which it is based. If one approaches moral questions like a rationalist, insisting on scientific evidence that such behaviors really are destructive, then one is never going to be convinced. The only thing I can point out to libertarians is how ironic it is that they should take such an approach, given that one of their intellectual leaders is one such as F. A. Hayek.

Why proofs of God's existence don't thrill me

The other day one of my Catholic apologist friends (I have many online) posted a link to "An Aristotelian Proof of the Existence of God" given by Edward Feser. My friend claimed that atheists shouldn't start with the Bible, but rather with reason and logic, in order to arrive at belief in God's existence.

Now, I don't think atheists should start with the Bible, either. Most people don't when they come to faith--at least, not the whole Bible. If you try to read the good book cover to cover in search of some sort of proof of God's existence, you will only find it by a miracle (which I would not rule out, but neither would I hold my breath). Ordinarily, such a straightforward reading of Scripture will lead you to many scandalous passages and incomprehensible claims about God, and to stories whose meaning is rather obscure without some additional cultural context. Certainly the story of Jesus himself is provocative enough to sell itself, but even in the gospels one is as often perplexed as not.

But I'm not sure the classical "proofs" of God's existence hold much water. Professor Feser is certainly a brilliant man, and his exposition of the argument is solid, but I've just never been impressed with Aristotelian/Thomist arguments that The Unmoved Mover/Uncaused Causer/Purely Actual Being/whatever exists. The same holds for Anselm's Ontological Argument, and any similar methods of proof.

It's not that I wouldn't want to have such a proof. It's not even that I don't like entertaining the arguments. On the contrary, such abstract lines of reasoning are fun for me (which is why I chose mathematics as a profession).

The problem is, I just don't think abstract reasoning reveals God. As much as I love my profession, I don't think its tools are appropriate for theology. In fact, I think of mathematics as the simplest and humblest of all the sciences, whereas theology is the loftiest and most difficult. But I'll get to that.

The word "abstract" literally means "to draw away." It is well known that logical arguments in philosophy or mathematics lead us farther away from our direct experience. This makes them considerably less attractive as aids to knowing God, whose presence is everywhere and is therefore constantly part of our everyday experience.

Not that things which are omnipresent can't be the subject of abstract arguments. Atoms are everywhere, but we need theoretical physics to understand and know them. Yet the problem with atoms is that they are small, not that they are difficult to understand. In many ways, atoms are like numbers. They are highly predictable, following precise patterns expounded by the laws of physics.

Anyone reading this might find remarkable that I say an atom is not hard to understand. But I stand by that claim, and I say that math is even simpler. I appeal to a wonderful quote from the great John von Neumann: "If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is." Mathematics and physics have made such incredible progress by concentrating on things which are simple, meaning predictable, utterly bound by rules. Thanks to this form of simplicity, our abstract arguments are applicable no matter how "drawn away" they become from direct experience.

Neumann hit the nail on the head: how complicated life is! How amazingly different it is from proving a theorem! Living things are not utterly rule bound. Human beings make choices, act spontaneously, and often actively resist the rules which are supposed to apply. How, then, do we seem so comfortable with other humans, and how do we know them so well?

The question would really be a mystery if abstract reasoning were our primal way of knowing, but that is not the case. There is nothing more natural in the world than getting to know other human beings, and it is not because we know what they will do at any given moment. It is rather because we have a built-in desire to be with others. More is gained through the direct experience of their company than through being able to predict their behavior. Only marketers are interested in understanding human beings the way physicists understand atoms. The rest of us just want to be loved.

Which brings me to proofs of the existence of God. No son has ever asked himself, "How do I know my mother exists? What are the properties she should have? From what starting principles might I argue toward the existence of such a being?" A son knows his mother because she is there--to feed him, clothe him, clean him, comfort him--and she always has been. Before a boy can do any abstract reasoning whatsoever, he must learn words, most likely from his parents. The primal form of knowledge is the direct experience of someone. Their presence alone is the start of every other kind of knowledge we could possibly have.

It is true that a son whose mother has long been absent must reason abstractly, saying, "All humans are born to a mother and father, therefore I too must have a mother whom I don't know." This is, at best, the type of theological knowledge which Aristotelian/Thomist/Anselmian/etc. arguments can give us. It is a theology of orphans. It is only useful or necessary if God is absent, and has been for a long time.

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God." If I understand the Christian faith correctly, I would say that the only thing separating us from God is our sin. God's constant presence ought to be perfectly clear to us, but we are blind. Christ does not offer theorems but rather a way to see again.

I catch glimpses of God from time to time. If I really began to fully repent, perhaps I would see him all the time in everything. But "surely there is no one on earth so righteous as to do good without ever sinning." (Ecc. 7:20) I only know it is that direct experience which sustains me.

I don't want to say that "existence proofs" are a total waste of time. God does often feel very absent, and perhaps we need these arguments to give us a hint of his presence. But I think it's very telling that in Scripture, to know God is to do justice, more than anything else. Christianity's great intellectual tradition notwithstanding, I say it is more a religion of doing than of reasoning.

And I think our theology ought to be done accordingly...

Anthropocentric religion?

One of the criticisms of Christianity I've heard a lot is that today we know how vast the universe is, and how small a place humans have in it, and therefore how insignificant we are, and therefore how silly it is to think there is a Creator of the universe who cares about us, loves us.

I suppose that would be a strong critique, if only the Bible were not so full of similar sentiments. Whether it's Psalm 8:4, "Whare human beings that you are mindful of them?" or Ecclesiastes 3:18, "I said in my heart with regard to human beings that God is testing them to show that they are but animals," or Isaiah 55:9, "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts," the Bible is full of famous passages which demonstrate human beings' insignifance next to God. Job, the book of the Bible that most directly deals with the problem of evil, culminates with this haunting answer from God: "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?" If we cannot answer this question, the implication is that we have no right to demand an account from God for our suffering. In the Bible, human beings are very clearly put in their place.

Which is, of course, what makes its more "anthropomorphic" parts all the more powerful. The idea that God loves human beings is simply fantastic, as in Psalm 8:5-6: "Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all thins under their feet."

Now, let's be clear about something. No matter how much we increase in scientific sophistication, in our knowledge of just how vast this great universe is, Psalm 8 is still fundamentally accurate. There is a silly modern interpretation of the theory of biological evolution which states that human beings are not special, since we are just one of the many cousins descended from the same basic life forms billions of years ago. The silliness of this interpretation is self-evident. What other species even asks whether it is special? What other species has a word for species? What other species ever stops to wonder whether God is justified in creating this universe or not? What other species ever writes down extended arguments and passes them on, so that future generations may write back? What other species feels responsible for other species?

In other words, the Christian tradition is no more anthropocentric than mere common sense allows. The fact that the world is billions, not thousands, of years old and that our species emerged as a gradual process of evolution makes not a shred of difference. In fact, perhaps we should be all the more mystified and perplexed that humans exist at all. If intelligence is really the result of purely natural processes, why don't we see it more often? Why is it apparently so unique in the history of the world? And if it is not unique, what happened to all the other intelligent species?

(To be fair, it's a bit hard to know what a Christian would do if faced with intelligent species from other planets. But C. S. Lewis (as well as others, I'm sure) has dealt with this quite imaginatively in his Space Trilogy, so it's not as if Christians need be completely agnostic on that question. I have no idea if the Word became flesh on other planets. Would that be so troubling? It would certainly change certain doctrines, but to me that's hardly a concern.)

There is something troubling to me about a tendency in modern thought which, in a desperate attempt to get rid of theology, seeks to demean humanity as far as possible. Of course we are small, but we know we are small; of course we are insignificant, but we thirst for significance. "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." It is not to feed our anthropocentric pride that we so desperately need the gospel, but, on the contrary, it is to remind us how far down God was willing to come in order to satisfy this desire for the transcendent.

Or are we simply a meaningless clump of particles, searching for meaning where there is none? In that case, what sense does the word meaning have in the first place?

Morality in the abstract

There's a fascinating debate here between John Hare and Peter Singer, in which the latter opens by giving all the standard arguments why no belief in God is necessary in order to have a theory of morality. I won't rehash all the arguments. What I thought was fascinating was the point Singer conceded: the atheist has difficulty fully motivating a commitment to the moral life. The problem naturally arises once your ethical system makes high demands on you. Singer is a utilitarian, which, once you work it out, makes rather enormous demands.

What I found to be an amazing tension in his discourse was between his statement, on the one hand, that nothing could be more important than knowing how to live morally and, on the other hand, his answer to a personal question posed during Q&A. When asked how he dealt with moral failure in his own life, he revealed that he did not, in fact, feel guilt, but merely accepted that he is not as good as he ought to be. I suppose he also implied that he would try to improve bit by bit, which is fair enough. On the other hand, he was quick to add that, to be sure, he already gave more of his income than most people who call themselves Christian. It was truly striking to hear such an answer, coming as I do from a tradition which acknowledges human frailty, our constant need of forgiveness, and the need for humility.

The experience highlighted for me one common point of tension in these debates over God and morality. It is now a standard litany among Christian intellectuals debating the topic that "of course, atheists can be moral, too, and indeed some of them are so moral as to put most Christians to shame." All the same, we clearly do not quite agree on what really is right and wrong. So it's hard to know by what standard we're repeating this litany.

But that is not the point which stuck out most. Listening to Singer, I was left with a profound question: is morality nothing more than an abstract concept? It's important to mention that Singer (like Hare) emphasizes the central role of reason in determining right and wrong, and more particularly the necessity of taking the most universal point of view possible. By considering the consequences of our actions not only for ourselves and those around us but also for every other conscious creature in existence (an abstract form of the Golden Rule), we come to increase our ethical knowledge.

It is not the enormity of that task which particularly bothers me. Rather, the product of this process seems detached from reality. We get a theoretical vision of what might maximize something called happiness or utility or well-being. But the vision is ahistorical--it doesn't go anywhere. Commitment to this vision is entirely optional, as Singer concedes. If one commits to the ethical life, it is not in hope of any fulfillment, but merely because one is inclined to follow abstract principles wherever they lead.

The Christian vision of ethics, it seems to me, is entirely different. The point of Christian ethics is not to obtain a theoretical blueprint of how to maximize an abstract quantity, like happiness. The point is to be part of God's ongoing project of saving the world. Thus our commitment to live morally or immorally is not an arbitrary choice, but instead a response to a commitment that God has already made--we are either with him or against him. When we ask what it means to live ethically in the world, the question is not how to maximize an abstract quantity, but rather what will it look like to live in the world that God will one day realize.

Of course, the Christian vision is incomprehensible if one thinks of God himself as abstract and impersonal. Then one is left, as Singer is, with no plausible answer to the problem of evil. If God is defined by the three qualities of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence, then God does not exist. Yet I thank God that such a god does not exist, because if it did, I do not see how anything in the world would ever happen--everything would be predetermined by a set of principles, and the kind of spontaneity that characterizes all that is living and beautiful would not exist.

For the Christian, God is not known through abstract principles which define him, but through God's story. He, like us, has a history, which starts with glorious creation but also involves the pain and suffering not only if his creatures but also his own suffering and death. If the resurrection of Jesus tells Christians that God's victory over evil has finally begun, this does not mean that the victory will be easy or that it won't be messy.

Now, if Jesus really didn't rise from the dead, none of this really matters. But I think there are compelling arguments to suggest he did, and as a bonus I find it to be a much firmer grounding for ethical thinking than secular rationalism. I certainly don't begrudge anyone who wants to try and live morally for whatever reason. I simply find that when I contemplate the choice to make moral commitments, I can't help but feel paralyzed at the thought of how arbitrary such a choice would ultimately be--unless that choice is in response to a project which is already at work in the world. In other words, I have a hard time with morality in the abstract. The world is either going somewhere or it isn't, and if it isn't going anywhere, then I don't see much point in doing anything.

Edible words

And he said to me, “Son of man, feed your belly with this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.” Then I ate it, and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey. (Ezekiel 3:3)

And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. (Deuteronomy 8:3)

I have sometimes wondered whether the Bible's prohibition against idolatry was really consistent. After all, aren't words themselves symbolic windows into God's existence, a sort of image for the ears rather than the eyes? One could argue that using words to describe God's ineffable existence is just as dangerous as trying to depict it through images.

Yet recently I was once again struck by the Bible's description of words as food. Funny thing about food: whatever you eat was once a living thing, and then it died.

And isn't that exactly how words function in reality? A single word is so short-lived. It has hardly left your mouth before it is dead, yielding totally to the words or silence which come after it. Even the written word functions this way. You cannot read by staring at a single word; you must let it die, letting your eyes advance continually in order to gain the whole idea of phrases and paragraphs.

Images do just they opposite. They impose upon you. If an image is before you, even if you want, you cannot simply let it pass away. It demands that you at least allow it a place in the background of your mind. It can change your mood without you even realizing it. It insists on immovability, a sort of immortality, if you will.

But Jesus said, "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away." The most permanent fixtures in all of ordinary human experience will die, but these words--which die as soon as they are born--will live forever.

It is the great paradox of Christianity once again. "Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." Images insist on their own immortality, but they are in fact lifeless. Words exist only to die, and thus they feed us, and so they live forever.

I don't mean this meditation to be polemical, but I will confess that it confirms my iconoclasm, which is standard for Protestants. Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have good arguments in favor of icons. They argue that the incarnation of Jesus, the Son of God, changes and sanctifies physical reality in such a way that to prohibit icons would be to deny that incarnation. But I think these arguments nevertheless miss the most radical part of Christ's incarnation--he came to die. It is only because he died that he can feed us with himself. And let's not forget that when he rose again, he rose with a new body that was barely recognizable to his disciples. If there is an image of Christ to be used in worship, it is of course the bread and the wine; but even these are meant to be consumed.

Thoughts on Augustine's City of God

A while back I promised myself to read City of God. It was a bit like reading through Calvin's Institutes, in that it is a massive work written at a pivotal time in Christian history, and also in that Augustine and Calvin really do sound a lot alike (as much as two men separated by more than a thousand years can sound alike). I have not blogged through my entire reading of the book, as I did for Calvin, and I did not space my reading evenly over a year, but I think I still retain enough of an idea to summarize some of my reactions here.

Augustine was writing at a time just after Rome had been sacked. The world had changed. In light of that change, a defense of Christianity had to be given. I confess that I'm so underinformed about history that I still have trouble making sense of this--hadn't Christianity already become the religion of the empire? But perhaps this book alone sheds some light on how naïve it is to think that Christianity was ever really the religion of Rome. The Roman pagans gave what would be, I suppose, the natural response to Rome's fall: it's the Christians fault. And so Augustine launches himself into a critique of paganism in all its forms, followed by a philosophy of history based on the Christian Bible, in order to put historical events into a larger narrative.

I'm not an expert in how this book shaped history following that moment, but the very fact that we're here (Christians in the West, that is) means that it probably had a massive influence. After Rome fell, Christianity not only held on but continued to spread, eventually shaping all of what we now think of as "Western culture." (As an aside, I always find it terribly confusing when people think of Christianity as merely the "local religion" of something called "Western culture." As if there would be anything called "Western civilization" had it not been for the spread of Christianity which eventually united all of these European barbarians!)

Now to the text itself. The first ten books are devoted to refuting paganism, starting with gods and goddesses, then moving on to various pagan philosophies, and finishing with the Platonists, who Augustine says are the closest to the truth of Christianity. If you've ever engaged in modern debate on religion and theism, you've probably heard someone ask something like this:

"Why should we believe in the Christian God and not, say, Zeus or Poseidon? What evidence is there for one which there isn't for the other?"

It's true that in the modern world we don't feel the pressing need to refute the existence of Zeus. Augustine did. So if you'd like to know why Christians reject the existence of Zeus and other gods, you can read about 300 pages of painstaking refutations. Fair warning: you will, as a modern person, feel a bit silly reading them. Yet Augustine took the religions of his day seriously, as I think modern Christians take (or ought to take) Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and of course Judaism very seriously. (Note that Augustine never "refutes" Judaism, which was also an important competitor to Christianity. The implication seems to be that the only dividing line between Judaism and Christianity is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and I suppose that despite the divergent evolution of the two religions, that's still ultimately true today.)

What gives me occasion to reflect very deeply about my faith is the fact that Augustine's refutations of paganism rest largely on moral grounds. The gods were either immoral, or were worshipped in immoral ways, or were celebrated in tales of immorality. Is not the same charge leveled today against the Christian God? The argument worked very well for Augustine, because in fact Greek and Roman philosophers really did find the popular religion quite embarrassing (I recall that Plato wanted to ban poetry from his ideal Republic, because it gave people false impressions of the gods). In some sense that argument works today on Christians, does it not? In my experience, when you talk to more sophisticated Christian theologians, they tend to finesse difficult biblical passages until they are allegorized or spiritualized into oblivion, or else they flat out reject those passages! On some occasions you will find a very stern theologian willing to bite the bullet on every biblical passage, but these find it more and more difficult to get a hearing in today's world, even within the Church. And I think this is not without reason. It is just plain difficult to see how the same God who would lovingly die on the cross for our sins, refusing to fight evil with evil, would also order the wholesale slaughter of women and children or even of anyone at all, as we read in the Old Testament. To me this question remains perpetually unresolved, which is either part of the beautiful mystery of Christianity or else a grave weakness which will ultimately be its undoing. Yet this is not a new problem by any means--it has been there since the beginning of Christianity--and here we are after 2000 years.

So much, I suppose, for the first half of the book. The second half is Augustine's attempt to explain all of human history. I read in the preface that many scholars think of this is the first "philosophy of history" ever written, and I suppose that's one way to think of it. It's hard to imagine you'd ever consider a "philosophy of history" something worth writing unless you already had one given to you by Scripture or something else. And that is indeed the case for Augustine. He looks at the Bible as a whole, and from its contents deduces an outline to all of human history based on the presence of two cities: the city of man and the city of God.

I won't outline the whole argument. I will instead tell you to simply go read the Bible, cover to cover, with Augustine's basic framework in mind. The city of man is all the children of Adam after being expelled from Eden, and the city of God is all those who by faith in God lived and now live in the hope of new life to come in Jesus Christ. Indeed, one way to think of Augustine's work is as a "philosophy of history," but perhaps a more direct way to think of it is as a synthetic exposition of all of Scripture. In that it really is akin to Calvin's Institutes.

There are other ways in which Augustine's and Calvin's works are similar, and that is because they appear to have similar theological bents. First, they both emphasize regularly the power and foreknowledge of God, the weakness of the human will after the fall, and the sheer unmerited grace which allows us to attain to the hope of new life in Christ. Second, they both base their arguments on the sheer authority of Scripture as an unquestionable guide in matters of doctrine. I think it's good to put this second point after the first, though some might believe it should go first--after all, it's from the Scriptures that we know about God's power and foreknowledge, isn't it? Yet it pretty clearly acts as an interpretive framework over Scripture, so that any time God is said to change his mind or make a decision, this is interpreted as merely a way to describe God in human terms, and not literally true. Everything else in the Bible might be literally true, but not those parts! This comment is not meant to prove that Augustine and Calvin are wrong, but only to show which ideas they truly put first. In my view, there simply is no interpreting Scripture without some first principle(s) guiding you, which must come from outside of Scripture itself.

Now, the reason I am emphasizing similarities between Augustine and Calvin is mostly because of my own experience reading through Calvin, and not to do any favors to Calvinists, who will take such comparisons as a compliment. Personally, I find that the things Augustine and Calvin hold in common are what make them both difficult to read. Consider their view of Scripture. Now, their justification of the authority of Scripture is slightly different: Calvin emphasized the direct confirmation of the Holy Spirit, while Augustine uses a somewhat different argument. Isn't it amazing, he says, how the whole world has come to accept the authority of the Bible? And this, he says, is also a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, which only bolsters that accepted authority. The argument isn't circular in either case, but it is rather frustrating, because it seems completely inaccessible to reason.

Let me stay with Augustine's argument for a moment. It interests me, because its plausibility in Augustine's mind must have been related to the historical context. Christianity had just seen, over the course of a few hundred years, a breathtaking rate of growth throughout a pagan empire, despite (or indeed because of) persecutions, all by the transmission of these words of Scripture. It is commonplace today to insist that "many other religions" have had similar experiences, but how many are there, really? Buddhism counts, I suppose, and perhaps certain sects within both the Christian and Islamic traditions. And of course there is Judaism with its own rather unique story, but it bears repeating that the line between Christianity and Judaism has always been, frustratingly, very thin. I honestly can't think of many others which have spread and flourished in quite the same way that Christianity did in its early years. Given all of that, I think we should be sympathetic to Augustine's argument. The words of Scripture changed people in a way that suggests real power.

Yet of course it's quite a logical leap to conclude that the Bible is therefore completely accurate in everything that it says. This is an aspect of Augustine's thought that disappointed me. I was set up for this by modern pastors and theologians of a certain intellectual type who like to bang on about how we don't read the Bible today the way ancient Christians did. They bring this up in the context of modern debates about faith and science, claiming that the early Church Fathers never did take Genesis 1 literally, and so why should we do any different? We should relearn to give sophisticated, spiritual readings of biblical texts, not focusing on their historicity but on how they point to Christ. I find this approach attractive.

It's true that from what I've read of Origen, that man truly did not take Scripture literally. But Augustine, let's face it--he's a fundamentalist. Now, that does not make him less intelligent, nor does it mean that his philosophical reflections are any less sophisticated. Some of the most profound reflections on joy and suffering in this world can be found in Augustine. And of course, Augustine loves allegorical interpretations of the Bible--as everyone does! I find it absolutely laughable when modern Catholic and Orthodox Christians assert or imply that Protestants hate allegorical interpretations, insisting only on the literal. They have clearly never listened to a Bible-thumping Baptist sermon, full of allusions and comparisons between Scripture and present-day events. It is simply impossible to read the Bible and not draw analogies between the texts and our own world, or between different texts themselves. No one has ever seriously denied this. But Augustine, like traditional Protestants (and all traditional Christians, I suppose, depending on what you mean by "traditional"), believes that the Bible should also be taken historically. He leaves no doubt that he thinks Adam was the first human being, that the world is only a few thousand years old, and that every word of the Bible is to be taken as telling us how human history happened exactly. To be fair, he is not so simplistic as not to notice all the problems of translation, all the mysterious numbers that appear in certain texts, and all the competing historical claims from nonchristian sources. Yet to a modern reader, it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to share Augustine's confidence in the veracity of Scriptural history.

All of this causes me more and more problems as the book draws to a close, where Augustine finally deals with judgment and salvation. I will have to save that for another post, because there is a lot to unpack.

Let me conclude this summary post by saying what I learned about myself by reading City of God. I learned that I am truly (sadly?) unfamiliar with the Greco-Roman world, but perhaps more at home than I thought I would be in the ancient Christian world. When Augustine talks about Homer or Plato, I struggle to recall the few basic lessons I learned in school, and my reading is slow. When Augustine quotes Scripture, I find myself reading quickly. It is not just what he says, but even the objections he responds to, which I find amazingly familiar. Truly, there are few theological controversies which divide Christians today which did not already exist in the early Church. We may have new language in which to express them, and perhaps new reasons to find them important, but we are not the first people to think of such problems.

Finally, I have to mention that City of God is a very different reading from, say, Confessions. I learned to love Augustine from reading the latter when I was much younger, and so I assumed (perhaps naïvely) that reading City of God would only reinforce that love. That is not quite true. I find now that I both love and hate Augustine, much in the same way that I both love and hate Calvin. That is perhaps an inevitable reaction to anyone with enough gumption to lay out a definitive history of the human race. You will find incredible beauty in this book, but you will not be able to look away from all the things which perplex and terrify you.

If I find time, I will come back to some particular passages of this book, because they deserve some meditation, but I think I've managed here to touch on all my general reactions. It's a work that certainly makes an impression, and I'm glad I took the time to read it.