William James and the Varieties of Religious Experience

William James and the Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

The book I’m reviewing, over one-hundred years old, is as important today as when first published, maybe more so, as its arguments against what James calls scientific materialism speak to the aggressive atheism of today.

James argues that religion gets its energy from spiritual experience. Religion itself is an “over-belief,” an elaboration of spiritual experience. The elaboration, such as the teachings and doctrines of Christianity, are relatively unimportant. Important is the spiritual experience that gives rise to belief structures. James, however, was unable to hold to this view. The “belief structures” of Christianity may have saved his life.

The book was so important and remains important because it redirects the argument from “does God exist?” about which we can argue, to spiritual experience itself. It doesn’t matter where it comes from, it doesn’t matter to what it corresponds. If some people have what James calls spiritual experiences, then spiritual experience exists. The experience itself is real, even if its object remains in doubt. Possibly it has no object but itself.

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How to study the psychology of Jesus. Don’t.

It’s both impossible and undesirable to study the psychology of Jesus. I say this in full awareness of some of the interesting work that has been done on this topic by Albert Schweitzer (1913), and John Miller (1997), among others (Darroch, 1947; Lee, 1948; Besdine, 1969). As the dates suggest, the psychoanalysis of Jesus is not currently a hot topic. However, the question of whether it can and should be attempted remains important.

The primary sources for the life of Jesus, the Gospels were written between 40 and 90 years after the death of Jesus. They were written with an agenda: to show that Jesus is the Messiah referred to in the Hebrew Testament (Tanakh).

Knowing this gives us a criterion for deciding how much to rely on particular statements by and about Jesus. If they further this particular agenda, they are less likely to be genuine Jesus. But only “less likely,” for we do not know the degree to which the historical Jesus (in contrast to the Jesus of the Gospels) regarded himself as the son of God. Aside from a brief mention by the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, we know almost nothing about the man outside of the New Testament.

Scholars reconstructing a historical Jesus rely primarily on the synoptic Gospels, as they are called: Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Mark seems to have been written first, and there are passages in Matthew and Luke that are virtually identical to Mark. Other passages in Matthew and Luke are virtually identical to each other. About one hundred twenty years ago, scholars decided that there must have been a document, now lost, that contained the material relied upon by Matthew and Luke not found in Mark. It is called Q, German for Quelle, the source document. It seems to have consisted almost entirely of the sayings of Jesus. Whether the sayings are genuine the document does not resolve.

Is Jesus sane? Does the question even make sense?

Consider the question of the sanity of Jesus. The most famous work in this genre remains Albert Schweitzer’s The Psychiatric Study of Jesus, originally published in 1913.* Schweitzer argues, as does Miller, that Jesus was sane because many of his otherwise psychotic beliefs were widely held at the time, above all that a Messiah was coming who would descend from heaven with an army of angels and establish a new order among men and women, in which the last would be first.

Neither author adequately distinguishes between believing in such an order, and believing that one is the Messiah who will usher in this order. It’s the difference between believing in the divinity of Jesus Christ, which millions of presumably sane people believe today, and believing that I am Jesus Christ. To believe this is to be mad, though it’s worth noting that dozens of men were running around at this time claiming to be the Messiah. It’s one of history’s mysteries why Jesus won out over the others. Much of the credit must go to the indefatigable Paul, but that’s a story for another day.

Shared madness and the charm of Jesus

The genius of Jesus is found in the way his madness fit the needs of his followers. Most madness is expressed in a private language, one generally not shared with the world, such as the “influencing machine” as it is called. My thoughts are being controlled by the CIA, Antifa, or whomever. While not entirely unreasonable (the media are an influencing machine), the mad hold that the degree and extent of this influence is total.

Some mad men become leaders, and Jesus was one according to this theory. His madness was expressed in a language his followers could share: the Messiah is coming, and Jesus is it. Jesus’ distant nearness, the way he drew people to him while resisting their embrace, charmed the poor who desperately wanted to be saved from their suffering. Evidently a man of enormous charisma, a term that was later seen as a gift of the Holy Spirit, Jesus shared his belief in his divinity with those who wanted to participate in it. He was the creation of oppressed peasants in desperate need of salvation from their greedy landlords.

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Stories about God

Stories about God

Jack Miles has written a couple of books about the life of God. They are not new books. New, or rather recently renewed, is my appreciation of them.

What’s different about Miles’ books is that he assumes that the Bible, Hebrew Testament and New Testament, can be treated as literary works, biographies that tell us about the development of the protagonist. No historical criticism, no redaction criticism, no textual criticism (who wrote what when). He treats the Bible as you would a biography you pulled from your bookshelf. What type of person (that’s really the term for how he treats him) is God, what does God learn along the way, how does God develop and change in the course of his encounters with man, particularly but not exclusively the Jews? Miles’ God is a Trinitarian God, particularly in the sense that whatever we learn about Christ we learn about God, for they are one. “Jesus is Lord.” While God: A Biography stands alone, it is only complete with his second volume, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God.

A harsh God

Though the God of the Hebrew Testament can be loving toward his people (1 Kings 10:9), he is fundamentally a warrior God, which is what his people wanted.

In rage you stride across the land, you trample the nations in anger as you advance to save your people, to rescue your anointed one. You stave in the sinner’s roof beams, you raze his house to the ground. You split his skull with your bludgeon. (Habakkuk 3, quoted in God: A Biography, p 98)

God is praiseworthy because he smashes the heads of Israel’s enemies. Pity the poor Amalekites.

The Lord swore to Moses: “Record this in writing, and recite it in Joshua’s hearing, that I will utterly wipe out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.” (Exodus 17:14)

Now, go and crush Amalek. Put him under a curse of total destruction, him and all that he possesses. Do not spare him, but slay man and woman, child and babe, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” (1 Samuel 15: 2–3)

Miles comments, “what the Lord swore and Moses solemnly witnessed was, in more modern language, an oath of genocide.” (p 101)

What changed with the New Testament?

What changed is that God was confronted with his own weakness. His strong right arm could no longer protect the Israelites against Babylon, and then Rome. But rather than admitting defeat, God changed the terms of the covenant.

God does have, however, one alternative to simply bringing his storied career to an ignominious close. Instead of baldly declaring that he is unable to defeat his enemies, God may declare that he has no enemies, that he now refuses to recognize any distinction between friend and foe. (Christ, p 108)

To make this argument, to exemplify and die for it, is the job of Jesus.

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Albert Camus, the Plague, and Belief in God

Life in the midst of Covid seems like a good time to revisit Albert Camus’ The Plague, his fictional account of life in an Algerian city overrun by the bubonic plague in the 1940’s. Sometimes read as an allegory of the German occupation of France (the German occupiers were called the peste brune, the brown plague), it’s not a very good political metaphor. But it’s a great account of what it would mean to live a good life without believing in God.

A common argument in favor of religion is that it gives meaning to life. Without belief in God, there can be no meaning, and hence no firm basis for morality. I don’t think it’s true. God doesn’t give life meaning. It is we who use the presumption of his existence to give life meaning. Which at least suggests that creative humans might find other ways to give life meaning.

Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, is his most serious philosophical work about life in the absence of belief.* But it is The Plague that tells us what that life without religious belief would look like at its best.

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Why did Jesus teach in parables?

What did Jesus use parables? Parables comprise about 35% of the teachings of Jesus (Tyndale Bible Dictionary). They are not illustrations of his teachings; they are his teachings. There are about 33 parables, depending on what counts as a parable. Experts differ. I’ve posted twice on parables , but more needs to be said, and I’ve changed my mind about why Jesus says that he speaks in parables so that his followers won’t understand him. For if they understood him, they would be saved (Mark 4:10-12). It’s an extraordinary statement: Jesus doesn’t want his followers to understand and be saved. What could that mean?

No one has ever taught using parables as extensively as Jesus. No one even comes close. Almost all experts believe that parables are as near as we can get to what Jesus actually said. Nevertheless, it’s worth remembering that we know not a single one of Jesus’ parables. We know Jesus’ parables as they are recounted by Mark, Matthew, and Luke, writing decades after Jesus’ death. They recount many of the same parables, but each adds his own twist, sometimes significant, generally not. There are no (or one) parables in the Gospel of John.

What’s a parable?

A parable isn’t a correspondence between one thing and another. It’s not an analogy. I like Snodgrass’ definition best.

At its simplest the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought. loc 466

There are a few parables in the Hebrew Testament, almost all in the prophetic books. This turns out to be important, for it helps explain why Jesus said he didn’t want his followers to understand. More on this later.

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Making Sense of Karl Barth

My previous post on Karl Barth was concerned with the historical era in which he lived, his unorthodox three-way marriage, and how that might have softened some of his views. This post focuses on his theology. His key point is that religion is the problem. “Religion is unbelief; religion is a business, one has to say: the business of the godless man.” (Church Dogmatics, his emphasis)

Religion is at the mercy of society. Any society. However, this was particularly true in Nazi Germany, where the church capitulated to the Hitler, allowing him to appoint the chief bishop of the German (Lutheran) church. Barth led an attempt to establish an alternative “confessing church,” but it too capitulated, rejecting converted Jews.

Scripture and revelation

Religion tames God, fitting him to our current needs. Barth wants to return to an original experience of God, which is possible only in revelation. But what he means is not his revelation, or yours, but the revelation that is written of in the scriptures, and testified to by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The Gospel of salvation can only be believed in; it is a matter for faith only. It demands choice. (Barth, Letter)

Scripture is holy and the Word of God, because by the Holy Spirit it became and will become to the Church a witness to divine revelation. (Barth, Answer)

Barth does not assume that authors of the Gospels were divinely inspired, but he assumes away the vast problems of different interpretations in different ages and cultures. Barth does not completely reject the historical critical interpretation of the Bible (form and redaction criticism), which looks at the historical circumstances in which the books of the New Testament were written. For example, redaction (a fancy word for editorial) criticism has found that each of the four Gospels is the work of many men revising the work of their predecessors. There is no eyewitness testimony. The first gospel, Mark, was written no earlier than 40 years after the death of Jesus Christ; its attribution to a man named Mark is purely conventional.

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What is religionless Christianity? #2

In a previous post, I explained Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s idea of “religionless Christianity” primarily in terms of its institutional structure, such as the absence of the church. Here I try to explain the concept itself, while admitting that it still puzzles me. Bonhoeffer elaborated the concept of religionless Christianity in the two years before his murder by Hitler’s Gestapo, and it was undeveloped at the time of his death. I think it remains a puzzle for which we have, at best, no more than half the pieces.

Religionless Christianity is based on “a world come of age,” which began with the Enlightenment (early eighteenth century). Even before then, the Western world found less and less need for the “God hypothesis,” as Bonhoeffer calls it (Letters, pp 325, 360). Every thinker from Machiavelli to Hobbes to Galileo, and every discipline from science and technology to medicine and law, created worlds with no place for God. In some ways this is good, for in a world come of age people take responsibility for their own fates, instead of blaming God.

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer: An unlikely hero

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: an unlikely hero.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), a German theologian who rejected theology, was an unlikely hero. Murdered by the Nazis for his participation in the plot to assassinate Hitler, one would never have guessed his ending from his beginning.

His father was the most important neurologist in the most important hospital in Germany. His twin sister Sabine was tutored by the daughter of Thedor Mommsen, Nobel prizewinner and classicist. As a student he commuted to the Humboldt University of Berlin with his neighbor, Adolf von Harnack, the most distinguished scholar of the German Protestant Church. Put simply, Bonhoeffer belonged to the Protestant elite. (p 45)

Bonhoeffer was financially dependent on his family almost his entire life. When he wasn’t traveling, he generally lived at home. Throughout his life he would mail his dirty laundry home, to be washed by servants, and returned by Deutsch Post. When he was running an underground seminary during the Hitler era, his parents gave him an Audi convertible so he could more easily come home on weekends. Not your average revolutionary.

He would never disown the advantages of birth or pretend to have surpassed them. It was an aristocratic confidence, he would insist, that helped him see through propaganda and resist mediocrity. (p 74)

The statement is, I believe, absolutely correct.

A theologian at 15

At the age of 15 he read a two-volume book on the beginnings of Christianity, and began signing his name “Dietrich Bonhoeffer, theol.” (p 17) By the end of his life he would reject both theology and the university. He was blessed with a large family and many friends, but never had a girlfriend. Finally, at the age of 36, he became engaged to his 17-year-old niece, whose mother insisted they wait. They never married; three months after his engagement he was jailed. He met Eberhard Bethge, his first real friend, when he was twenty-nine, ten years before his death. They were exceptionally close. Bethge married another of Bonhoeffer’s nieces while Bonhoeffer was in prison. Their first child was named after Dietrich.

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