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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John Yoder: a great theologian, and decades of sexual assault

John Yoder: a great theologian and decades of sexual assault.

John Yoder is not nearly as widely known as Karl Barth or Reinhold Niebuhr. Yet, he is as significant as they, primarily because he politicizes Jesus in a convincing way. “Christianity Today” ranked The Politics of Jesus as the fifth most important religious book of the twentieth-century (v. 44, no. 5).

Yoder is also a troubling character, having been accused by more than one-hundred women of sexual abuse. His status, institutional cover up, and the absence of the #MeToo movement in the 1970’s protected him. I’m not sure how important sexual assault is in judging a theologian’s contribution, but I can’t believe that the behavior of the man doesn’t matter. More on this later in my post.

Yoder’s thesis: Christ was a political actor in a political world

A Mennonite, Yoder argued in The Politics of Jesus (1972), his most well-known book, that if one doesn’t think of Christianity as a confrontation with corrupt power, and instead thinks of it in terms of personal salvation, then one has missed the point.

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The Lord’s Prayer puzzles me

Something about the Lord’s Prayer (Pater Noster) has always puzzled me.* First, let me remind you of it.

Our father who is in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.** (Matthew 6:9-13. Compare with Luke’s abbreviated version, Luke 11:2-4)

Jesus tells us that the Lord’s Prayer is a private prayer. Don’t be like the Pharisees who stand on the corner muttering long prayers for everyone to hear. Don’t be like the pagans and go on and on. Go into your room, close the door, and pray this prayer in private. That’s all you need to do, for your Father knows what you need more than you do (Matthew 6:5-13).

Private or communal?

There’s a tension here. If it’s a private prayer, then why do all the pronouns refer to more than one? Every reference to “us,” or “we,” or “our” employs the Greek term hēmin (ἡμῖν; Strongs G2254), a collective pronoun. There is no “I” or “me.” In terms of its content, it seems to be a prayer intended for collective use during worship. Yet, Jesus introduces it as a personal prayer. Is there any way to make sense of this?

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A brief note on temptation in the Lord’s Prayer

A brief note on the phrase “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” in the Lord’s Prayer. See https://godblog.org/the-lords-prayer-puzzles-me/ for the original post.

This phrase has puzzled many over the years, for why would God lead us into temptation in the first place? I don’t have a great answer, only a suggestion. My answer is basically the same as Richard Tyson’s of October 30, 2021. I simply suggest a paraphrase of the Greek.

Though almost all translations render πειρασμός (peirasmos) as temptation (Strongs 3986), the word could as easily be rendered “testing,” in the sense of “do not test our faith, for we know that we are weak.”

That would be a paraphrase, rather than a translation, but I see nothing in the context that contradicts it. The transliterated Greek is “peirasmos me eisenenkēs hemas eis peirasmon.” (Matthew 6:13)

There are many occasions in the Bible where God tests people. Job is perhaps the most dramatic example. I believe many people still see God as tempting their faith to make it stronger. It is not just the work of the devil.