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Karen Armstrong, the new physics, and religion

Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God is an impressive, impossible survey of beliefs about God from 30,000 BCE to the current God wars between the new atheists (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, among others) and Christian fundamentalists. Armstrong synthesizes an enormous amount of material, including basic introductions to Buddhism and Confucianism, while concentrating on the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Her work is aimed at the well-educated lay person.

Where she goes wrong is in imaging that developments in the new physics, such as indeterminacy, can change the way we think about God.* She’s wrong because while the new science of sub-atomic physics, strangeness, string theory, and quarks may inspire us to think more flexibly about God, there is no reason that it should. The same may be said of astrophysics, and the fantastically beautiful images of distant galaxies brought back to us by the Hubble and Webb telescopes. The situation laid out by Albert Camus remains. We call out for the universe to tell us that we are not abandoned, isolated, and alone, and the universe is silent.

The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. (Camus, p 28)

The new science is a source of the sublime, that experience that shatters our previous categories of experience. “Beauty is the beginning of terror we are still just able to bear,” said Rilke. The new science is beautiful; the new science is terrifying. But unless one is looking strictly for inspiration, it does nothing to change the absurdity of human existence. Humans long for a world that cares about us, and the world cares not. Camus calls that the absurdity (absurdité) of the human condition, and it’s as good a word as any.

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On Eliot’s Journey of the Magi

Eliot's T. S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi, a poem of 43 lines, was one of a collection of poems with Christmas subjects “suitably decorated in colours and dressed in the gayest wrappers,” published by Faber and Faber to celebrate the season. However, if one bothers to read the poem there is nothing gay or celebratory about it. It reflects the dark musings of a pagan king who has seen the Christ child, knows that his birth will upend the world, but is hardly thrilled at the prospect. Perhaps the magus would be better off dead. First, the poem, and then a few comments on it.

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Eternity again and again

I’ve posted before on eternity, but there is much to say on this endless subject. The first thing to figure out is what eternity is. There are two main contenders:

Eternity is time without beginning or an end, sometimes called sempiternity.
Eternity stands outside of time. It is a perspective on time, but not time itself. Eternity is nunc stans, from the Latin meaning remaining now, unchanging. Ordinary time is nunc fluens, time that flows or passes.

The second way of thinking about eternity is often attributed to Plato (Timaeus 37c-e), but it became theologically significant in the work of Augustine (Confessions, book 11). God, and only God, is eternal. Earthly time, temporal time, is so insubstantial and illusory as to border on non-being (Erie, p 62). Just as humans can only find fulfillment in God, so they can only find fulfillment in eternity. God and eternity are virtually the same thing.

Now is a ceaselessly moving point between past and future. It is ephemeral, and totally lacking in substance. For this reason, time has no value. I was going to write, “ordinary time just is,” but the thing about time is that its substance, moments, have no substance. They are gone the instant they have begun.

Eternity is the opposite. It is always present and everywhere. In eternity all time is now. How to make sense of this? I like the simple explanation of C. S. Lewis. He is answering the question how could God hear every prayer uttered by all who are praying at the same time.

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A History of the Bible

Normally I detest 600 plus page books, but John Barton’s History of the Bible is an exception. If the story he tells is not always compelling, it is almost always interesting. I focus on his account of the New Testament. Barton tells a story familiar to Biblical scholars, but I’m not one, and I assume most of my readers aren’t either. Mine is not a book review, but I stick closely to his text.

Paul or the gospels?

Paul wrote first, about twenty years after the death of Jesus. The first gospel, Mark, was not written until about forty years after Christ’s death. Surprising is that Paul has a more developed Christology, a theory of the divinity of Christ. The Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke) never identify Jesus with God, and have nothing to say about the Trinity. The only exception is Matthew 28:19, which most scholars think was an addition by later editors.* (The term gospels refers to the Synoptic Gospels unless John is specifically included. They are called that because there is so much overlap in their content.)

The gospels openly puzzle about who Jesus is. Jesus himself is not very helpful, claiming only that he is not God. “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” (Mark 10:18). So, who is he? The son of God, you say, but this subordinates Jesus to God, which is incompatible with the doctrine of the Trinity, which says that Jesus is God. The point, and Barton makes it again and again, is that Christian doctrine, such as the Trinity, is not supported by the Bible. The doctrine came later.

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Is eschatology important?

Is Eschatology Important?

Eschatology is the study of last things (εσχατολογία). Most often it refers to the end of the world, particularly Jesus’ prediction that within the lifetime of some of his disciples he would return to usher in the end times. The prediction is found in Olivet discourse, referring to the Mount of Olives where Jesus delivered his prediction in Matthew and Mark. It is found in all three synoptic gospels in similar form (Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21).

At that time people will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. . . . Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away. (Mark 13: 26,30-31)

Jesus was wrong. He didn’t return within the lifetime of some of his followers. He hasn’t returned yet, and doesn’t seem likely to. His return is unlikely because we live in a different world, in which the magical reappearance of the Lord is unbelievable.

A great deal of energy and ink has been spent justifying Jesus’ claim. Rudolf Bultmann states the problem clearly. Modern man no longer believes, and can no longer believe, in the cosmology of the biblical world, the world of myth, magic, and wonder, where heaven is above and hell below. The return of Jesus on clouds of glory only makes sense in that world. In today’s world, the hope that someday Christ will return is impossible even for many who want to believe. What is a deeply religious man like Bultmann going to do? What are the rest of us who long to believe going to do?

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It should have been a good book by a dying man.

It should have been a good book by a dying man. Review of The end of Christian life, by J. Todd Billings

This should have been a good book. Billings is dying of a slow-growing cancer. He will not die young, but he will not die old either. Billings’ reflections on death have an urgency lacking for most authors. But the book doesn’t work. He criticizes the prosperity gospel, but a heavenly version takes its place. Why can’t people just die? Is the question too simple? Too harsh?

The pit

Sheol, misleadingly translated in the Septuagint* as Hades, is the pit, Gehenna, a burning garbage dump outside Jerusalem, generally considered a metaphor for Hell. Sheol is mentioned 66 times in the Hebrew Bible (Strong’s Hebrew 7285). Most of the time it sounds like Sheol in the Odyssey (book 11), where feeble shades float around in what we might call a semi-conscious state. Eleven times Jesus refers to Gehenna, only once to Hades (Luke 16:19-31). Never does he go into detail, for he is far more interested in heaven, the kingdom of God on earth. That’s what the Sermon on the Mount is about (Matthew 5-6).

“In general, I suspect that no mortal lives for long without visiting Sheol for a time.” (p 30) Billings makes a good point. If Sheol is alienation from God and man, then one might say that it is the living, especially when confronted with the death of a beloved, but also in states of serious depression who are in Sheol. For some, a diagnosis of incurable cancer will be enough to send them there.

But we are the ones wailing, not the deceased. It’s almost as if we are the ones who have gone to Sheol, not them. (p 34)

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Heaven can wait: Three Views of Heaven

Heaven can wait: Three Views of Heaven.

If you’re good, then when you die, you’ll go to heaven. This seems to be the traditional Christian view. In fact, Jesus never said any such thing.

The ideas of a glorious hereafter for some souls and torment for others, to come at the point of death, cannot be found either in the Old Testament or in the teachings of the historical Jesus. To put it succinctly: the founder of Christianity did not believe that the soul of a person who died would go to heaven or hell. (Ehrman, p 16)

Ehrman is correct, but he is making some implicit distinctions that are not obvious. Jesus believed in the resurrection of the body, not the soul. Jesus also believed that the Kingdom of Heaven would be established on earth, not somewhere in the sky. So, one could just as well say that Jesus believed in a glorious life after death for some, and death for others. Hell plays a relatively small role in Jesus’ teaching.

Three views of the afterlife

Three views of the afterlife are present in the Bible. The third is implicit, and probably the most important. The three are:

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What’s wrong with a secular world?

A Secular Age, by Charles Taylor, is 874 pages long. A critic says “its size is preposterous. No work of philosophy needs to be anywhere this long.” (Larmore). A Rumor Angels, by Peter Berger, is 104 pages long. It makes much the same argument as Taylor, and makes it more clearly. Clarity is almost always a virtue; in this case, because it allows us to see where each goes wrong. Berger appears more obviously wrong than Taylor, but that is mostly because we can see his argument more clearly.

Both seek an experience of transcendence that lifts us out of a strictly secular world. Both use human needs as the basis of transcendence, indeed as the basis of belief in God. And both have it backward. Founding the experience of transcendence in human needs makes the experience of God a strictly human affair. Perhaps this is not such a terrible thing, but it is not what they are aiming at.

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