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What the Lord’s Prayer Really Means

What the Lord’s Prayer really means.

It’s an odd thing about the Lord’s Prayer. Almost any religion could endorse it, or so it seems at first.

let heaven be the ideal for earthly governance
- - - - let there be enough food for all, and let all be free of crippling debt
        
        forgive each other and God will forgive you
        
        spare us from the temptation of evil.

It was first spoken by a Jew to a Jewish audience, but it has become a Christian prayer, though there is nothing particularly Christian about it. It became a Christian prayer because it is attributed to Jesus.

The Lord’s Prayer

Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we have forgiven our debtors.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. (Matthew 6:9-13)

The good householder

The Greek word used for father is abba (αββα), and while it is sometimes seen as equivalent to “daddy,” this is misleading, for there are other Greek diminutives for daddy, such as pappas (παππας). The term abba is best interpreted as the head of the Jewish household. God is the head of household earth, just as the father is the head of the family in the world Jesus was addressing.

The roles enacted by God as head of the earthly household correspond to those of the head of the family household: To help create life; to protect the members of the household; and to equitably provide for the household.

What horrifies the biblical conscience in all those cases is the inequality that destroys the integrity of the household and therefore dishonors the Householder. In what sort of household are some members exploited by others? (Crossan, p 43)

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Why do theologians write so much?

Why do theologians write so much? I’m going to take the case of Rudolf Bultmann because the problem is particularly acute with him, but it applies to most, including Karl Barth. Barth’s Church Dogmatics alone is over six million words. Together they are the most influential Protestant theologians of the 20^th century.

They write so much because they are writing about what cannot be spoken, or written. The kerygma (κήρυγμα), which means message or proclamation, refers in general to the gospels, and in Bultmann’s work to the decision to follow the message of Advent, that Christ is risen and we must choose to believe and act accordingly.

Trouble is, the kerygma is prelinguistic.

As counterintuitive as it may initially appear, the logical conclusion is that the kerygma is essentially prelinguistic. (Congdon, p 74)

This doesn’t make words irrelevant, but it sets their limit. If “the purpose of theology is to bring to speech the actual event in which one encounters the living God,” then Bultmann’s project is impossible.

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God and the meaning of life, part 1 of 2 parts

God and the meaning of life, part 1 of 2 parts.

This is the first of a two-part post. This first part criticizes a book by Tom May, A Significant Life. Much of the book concerns why God can’t be part of the answer. The second part is a list of things that contribute to a meaningful life. It follows this part.

Todd May can’t imagine that God can be part of the answer to a meaningful life because God only provides objective meaning, which doesn’t exist. His is a common error about God and the meaning of life, but it takes a philosopher to really make it confusing. May is a philosopher.

May’s idea is that an objective answer to the meaning of life can only come from the outside, given to humans by God. A subjective answer, on the other hand, is one which humans come up with themselves. The distinction doesn’t work. In fact, the whole distinction between objective and subjective meaning doesn’t work.

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The meaning of life, part 2. A list.

This is the second of a two-part post on a meaningful life. The first post addresses the role of God in a meaningful life. This post is more eclectic, considering a range of activities that may make life meaningful given the limits we face and the needs we have. I write in this way because people so often talk about a meaningful life, and so seldom specify what that means.

I assume that we find meaning in activity, though there is no reason this must be the case. A contemplative or meditative life may be deeply meaningful, but whether it is an activity I’m not sure. In any case, it’s not included. I also assume that meaningful activities are difficult, just as chess is more meaningful than checkers, and checkers more meaningful than tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses). Meaningful activities need not be impossibly difficult, however, and some difficulties, like the work required in establishing and maintaining a good sex life with one’s partner, can be fun.

One of the activities listed below would not be enough to sustain a meaningful life over the years, and some activities change so much over the years they are hardly the same thing. Raising a child is different from the task of maintaining a loving relationship with the thirty-year-old child. Everything I’ve said needs qualification. Common-sense is required. Being an excellent chess player, for example, can spoil a meaningful life if one sacrifices too much for it.

I think that a serious relationship with God is an important part of a meaningful life, but it is not required. Atheists and agnostics may live meaningful lives, and the religious fail, particularly if religion becomes just ritual.

Good lives fail not only because we fail to pursue them properly, diligently, and within limits. They may fail because of events beyond our control. Aristotle thought that a good man could be made less fulfilled (eudaimon) by events beyond one’s control, but that a good man will never be completely miserable (N. Ethics 1100a34-1101a20). I’m not sure if that’s true. Certainly, it’s wrong in the short run.

Depression, or PTSD, make a meaningful life more difficult, but not always impossible. Many famous writers suffered from depression (just google “writers and depression”). But writing is not identical with a meaningful life.

Some activities that make life meaningful, not necessarily in this order.

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But Jesus never said that

But Jesus never said that.

In my last post on Jürgen Moltmann, I pointed out that the passage he relies on so heavily, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani) appears in only two of the four gospels. In Luke, Jesus seems calm and in control of his own death. The same applies in John, where Jesus says that the power to crucify him comes from God, not man (19:11). The conclusion I draw is that one cannot rest an entire argument on a single verse from the Bible, especially if (as in this case) different gospels quote Jesus quite differently.

The problem arises because the gospels were written forty to sixty years after Christ’s death. They rely primarily on second generation oral tradition, a source called Q and Mark. The first to write about Jesus was Paul, who wrote the letter to the Corinthians about 53-54 CE, a little over twenty years after Christ’s death. But Paul, who was concerned with missionary matters, never wrote about Christ’s crucifixion.

The problem runs deeper than this. It’s not just a question of which gospel, but which of the hundreds of copies of the book in question are we going to rely on, each a little different, and sometimes a lot, from the other. We possess no autograph copies, as originals are called. We possess only copies of copies of copies of copies. The first copies of Mark (the first gospel) that we possess are fragmentary, and were written around 200 CE. Others come later.

How many differences?

In the early eighteenth-century, the theologian John Mill published a version of the New Testament with notes indicating about 30,000 variations in about 100 different manuscript copies he had drawn upon. Recently, Bart Ehrman, in Misquoting Jesus, estimates there are between 200,000 to 400,000 variants, based on 5,700 Greek manuscripts, and 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and other ancient translations (pp 87-89). Other estimates run higher, though it’s important to note that most of the variations are minor, and do not change the meaning of the text. But some do.

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Socrates and Jesus Christ

Jesus Christ and Socrates are often compared:

Both were put to death for their beliefs.
Both sought to make the people they lived among better, which is the reason they were killed.
Both believed in the immortality of the soul.
Both sought to teach humans how to be the best humans they could possibly be.
Jesus taught in parables; Socrates by asking questions. Not the same thing, but both subverted ordinary discourse.

Both lived at approximately the same time in the same corner of the world. Socrates died first in 399 BCE. Jesus died around year 4 of the Common Era, about a 400 year difference. There was contact between Judea and Athens. Paul’s longest sermon was delivered in Athens (Acts 17:16–34), where Socrates lived and died. People have wondered about cross-cultural influences, but there probably were little or none. Philo of Judea, a Hellenistic (Greek) Jewish philosopher, sought to harmonize the Torah with Greek philosophy. Evidently, he persuaded more Christians than Jews, but played no role in the development of Christianity or Judaism.

Western Civilization, it has been wisely said, is a combination of Athens, the home of Socrates, and Jerusalem, where Christ was crucified. Classical Athens valued reason, the examined life, or at least her philosophers did. Jerusalem represents the value of faith. It is this combination that has characterized life in the West for almost 2,000 years. For most of that time faith was dominant. More recently, faith has taken a back seat to reason, even if this reason is not always very reasonable.

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Does Hell exist?

It is not the way of the compassionate Maker to create rational beings in order to deliver them over mercilessly to unending affliction in punishment for things of which He knew even before they were fashioned, aware how they would turn out when He created them. Saint Isaac of Nineveh, circa 650 CE

Would God, who knows the fate of everyone ever born, or who will be born, consign some of his creatures to eternal torment in Hell? This is the question raised by those who believe in Hell. Can you really imagine a loving God who would do this? David Bentley Hart can’t, and I follow his argument in That All Shall Be Saved.

But doesn’t the New Testament tell us that bad people will go to Hell?

If you read the Bible closely, you will see that it says nothing about eternal Hell. Paul believed that all are bound in disobedience to God. But only so that God might show mercy to us all (Romans 11:32). Not one word in Paul, or the Gospel of John, refers to an everlasting Hell. First Timothy says simply that God “intends all human beings to be saved and to come to a full knowledge of truth.” (2:4) This is called the doctrine of universal salvation or universal reconciliation. People may go to Hell, but they will be redeemed like all the others when Christ returns.

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C. S Lewis, A Grief Observed and my grief

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed and my grief.

This is my second post on C. S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, the story of his loss of his beloved wife, Joy. Their relationship is portrayed in the movie, Shadowlands.

In my first post, I compared Lewis’ loss with the accounts of a pair of literary writers, Joyce Carol Oates and Joan Didion. In this post I compare Lewis’ loss with my own recent loss of my wife of forty years, E. This post feels different; my loss is still so raw.

Lewis lost his faith—for a little while. I have less faith to lose.

Actually, it’s not quite true to say Lewis lost his faith in God. He lost his faith in a benevolent God, imaging that God inflicts pain because he can.

Someone said, I believe, ‘God always geometrizes.’ Supposing the truth were ‘God always vivisects’? (p 41)

What reason, he asks, can we have, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is good? Doesn’t all the evidence suggest the opposite? What have we to set against it? We set Christ against it. But what if Christ were mistaken? “Almost His last words may have a perfectly clear meaning.” (p 42)

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