godblog

What I’ve learned from posting 110 posts on my godblog*

1. I’ve come to think about the Bible as symbolically dense stories about what it means to be one small, vulnerable human on this earth for a little while. It means that I am part of a larger story about what it is to live out the promise of the crucifixion and the cross. The promise is that one day the world will end, and we, and with it all our suffering and loss, will be redeemed (parousia). Trouble is, I’m not always sure what these words mean.

Albert Camus says that the absurd is born of the confrontation between human need and the “unreasonable silence of the world.” I would say that Christianity (indeed all religion) is a conversation to fill that silence, still our angst, and so create meaning for our lives. That we make the meaning we subsequently discover is fine, as long as we don’t think that it explains more than it does. It doesn’t explain the mystery and wonder that is every human life.

2. The ethics of Jesus Christ are the right ethics: love, humility, care for the widow, orphan, and stranger. These represent the downtrodden of today, such as the mother who can’t pay her rent and feed her children at the same time.

For forty years I taught ancient political theory, particularly Plato and Aristotle. I learned a lot, but I learned almost nothing about the ethics of love and care, the Judeo-Christian ethic. Love and care were simply not Greek and Roman virtues, though friendship was. Without the Judeo-Christian tradition, Western civilization would be bereft.

Jefferson’s Bible abstracts the ethical teachings of Jesus from its religious context. Trouble is, that leaves open the question of “why?”, as in “why should I care about anybody but myself and my family?” People don’t often say it so bluntly, but many people act as if this is what they believe. Christianity has a good answer. In loving others, we rehearse the love of God, who sacrificed his son so that we might live.

3. God is essential so that we do not become idolaters. It’s really that simple. The only alternative to God is idolatry: of money, sex, power, self, the great leader, or whatever. Václav Havel had it just right.

The relativization of all moral norms, the crisis of authority, the reduction of life to the pursuit of immediate material gain without regard for its general consequences . . . do not originate in democracy but in that which modern man has lost: his transcendental anchor, and along with it the only genuine source of his responsibility and self-respect . . . . Given its fatal incorrigibility, humanity probably will have to go through many more Rwandas and Chernobyls before it understands how unbelievably shortsighted a human being can be who has forgotten that he is not God.

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How God becomes real

How God becomes real.

People don’t worship because they believe in God. They believe in God because they worship. So claims Tanya Luhrmann, author of When God Talks Back, the subject of my previous post. In the current post I discuss her anthropology of religion—all religion, not just Christianity.* Ideally, these two posts should be read together.

One reason practice precedes belief is that because on the face of it belief in God is preposterous.

The idea that there is an invisible other who takes an active, loving interest in your life is in many ways preposterous and takes effort to maintain, even in a community that has never been secular. (2020, p 17)

For humans to sustain their belief in invisible entities who care about us requires that God must be made real again and again in the face of a stubborn world that rarely cooperates. It takes groups of people to do that.

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A God who talks back?

In When God Talks Back, Tanya Luhrmann writes about the Vineyard movement, a relatively small denomination of evangelicals, sometimes called neo-charismatic, which means that it shares a number of beliefs and practices with Pentecostalism. Pentecostal-lite is my impression, but individual churches vary.

The problem, for Luhrmann, is how to make sense of a church which is not so much Bible-based as it is based on personal experiences of God. She concludes that it survives in the modern world because it caters to the needs of individuals for a personal relationship with God, one in which God cares about what I wear and who I date.

Vineyard churches seem remarkably unconcerned with religious issues that have troubled other denominations, such as the justice of God: why do the good suffer and the bad prosper? Neither is it concerned with charity for others. It is almost wholly concerned with supporting its members in their search for a personal relationship with God, one in which God responds in words and signs.

How in this rationalized day and age can Christians know that God is there? Because he speaks to them about everyday things.

These churches that treat God like a cozy confidant and call a near-tangible Holy Spirit into their presence on Sunday morning exist in great numbers in the United States. (p 15)

I find this almost impossible to comprehend. There’s nothing cozy about God. It trivializes God; it removes the awe and mystery when God becomes a buddy. But like most groups, not every member buys into all its beliefs. One told Luhrmann how to fake glossolalia (speaking in tongues). Just repeat “She bought a Honda” over and over again, faster and faster (p 25). He was joking, while making a serious point. The group exerts subtle pressure on its members to have exotic experiences of God.

An American God

The goal seems to be to make God a big brother, a best friend. He is

a deeply human, even vulnerable God who loves us unconditionally and wants nothing more than to be our friend, our best friend, as loving and personal and responsive as a best friend in America should be. (p 35)

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On two plagues: Bishop N. T. Wright & Albert Camus

On two plagues: Bishop N. T. Wright and Albert Camus.

Bishop N. T. Wright has written a challenging book about Covid, titled God and the Pandemic. It’s challenging because it requires us to rethink God. We tend to think of God, if we think of him at all, as all powerful, able to fix Covid in a moment if he wished, as Jesus healed the sick and the lame. So why doesn’t he?

Wright’s answer, though it takes a while to figure it out, is similar to that finally arrived at in several places in the Bible. God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, God’s ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8-9). Job comes to a similar conclusion. The best way to understand God in the face of Covid is to accept that we shall never understand.

Wright does not stop here, however. He says that God’s non-answer is really an answer. God is a God of suffering and lamentation. Until we understand that God is not a mighty warrior who exists to vanquish our enemies, we shall be lost. Consider what Jesus first did when he learned of the death of Lazarus. “Jesus wept,” the shortest sentence in the Bible (John 11:35). Consider Jesus hanging on the cross, crying out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34)

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Jefferson’s Bible and the Old Testament

Jefferson’s Bible and the Old Testament

Thomas Jefferson edited an abridged version of the Gospels. Using razor and paste, he eliminated all those passages in the Gospels that referred to the miracles of Jesus. He removed the resurrection, as well as those portions of the Gospels that imply that Jesus was divine. Or at least this is how Jefferson’s Bible, formally known as The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (1820), is often described: as a Bible in which Jesus becomes a human teacher and exemplar of the highest morality. But that interpretation is wrong.

if you read Jefferson’s Bible (a PDF is available online) there are countless references to God the father, and Jesus as the son of God. Heaven and Hell remain, and Jesus refers twice to the second coming (Matthew 24:36-41; Mark 13:32-33). Angels remain (Matthew 16:27), sinners burn in hell, and one small miracle finds its way in (John 18:6).

Jefferson restricts his Bible to the story of Jesus, but because Jesus is always talking about his filial relationship with the father, there is no way to remove these references without removing Jesus. It matters not whether you were born to a virgin; if you are a son of God, then you are no mere mortal. If your authority stems from your status as son of God, then yours is supernatural authority. See, for example, Luke 12:40, Matthew 13:37; Luke 9:58; Luke 17:26-27; Matthew 9:13.*

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On Jesus as zealot

On Jesus as zealot.

Reza Aslan’s Zealot is the best book on the historical Jesus I’ve ever read. Part of what makes it so interesting is Aslan’s ambivalence. Had Jesus not been transformed from a zealot whose only interest was the liberation of the Jews from Rome into a universal man-God, Christianity would not have survived. It would never have been created in the first place. But the survival and prosperity of Christianity came at a cost: the loss not only of its Jewish roots, but its political program of equality and justice. Or so Aslan argues.

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David Hart’s defense of God turns religion into philosophy

David Hart’s defense of God turns religion into philosophy.

David Bentley Hart has written a book that proves that God exists. However, by the time I finished reading it I no longer cared, for the God he writes about has nothing to do with any God I would bother worshiping. For Hart, God becomes a Platonic form (eidos, είδος).

Hart writes that “it is impossible to say how, in the terms naturalism allows, nature could exist at all.” (p 18) By “naturalism” Hart means materialism, and the scientific method by which we study matter. I think what he is trying to say is that science can’t answer a basic question that puzzles a lot of philosophers, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The universe didn’t have to exist; why does it? An answer like “the universe was brought into existence by the big bang” doesn’t answer the question, because the big bang is part of the story of existence. One might as well ask “why did the big bang exist?” I’m sure there are scientists puzzling over this question right now, but no answer they come up with could satisfy Hart.

It’s kind of like the question about “what does the earth rest on?” The shoulders of Atlas, ancient Greeks replied. And what does Atlas stand on, one might respond? A giant turtle? And what does the giant turtle rest on? Another giant turtle. And what does the second giant turtle rest on? “Hey, man, it’s just turtles all the way down.”

To some people this answer, or rather its philosophical version, is deeply upsetting. It is to Hart.

An honest and self-aware atheism, therefore, should proudly recognize itself as the quintessential expression of heroic irrationalism: a purely and ecstatically absurd venture of faith, a triumphant trust in the absurdity of all things. But most of us already know this anyway. If there is no God, then of course the universe is ultimately absurd, in the very precise sense that it is irreducible to any more comprehensive “equation.” It is glorious, terrible, beautiful, horrifying — all of that — but in the end it is also quite, quite meaningless. (p 19)

What’s so bad about that? The universe is absurd, in the sense that it has no meaning other than that given to it by humans. God didn’t write the Bible; humans did. Even belief in God is absurd, in the sense that we give meaning to life by positing God. (Which doesn’t say anything about whether God actually exists. Perhaps God put this posit in us.) Albert Camus, the foremost absurdist, has shown us how to live meaningfully in an absurd universe, one that does not respond to my demand for recognition. Humans create a meaningful world by giving it meaning, beginning with human basics such as love and attachment, and then trying to overcome what we experience as the hostility of nature, “fighting against creation as he found it,” as Dr. Rieux says in Camus’ The Plague, a tale for our times.

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Are all religions basically the same?

The Perennial Philosophy is the title of a book by Aldous Huxley (1945), but it’s an idea that’s been around for a long time. It says that all religion is based on an original experience of oneness. In all its different varieties, from Protestantism to Hinduism, religion is an ineffable, inexpressible experience of one divine reality in which we all share. Not only do we all worship the same God, but we all seek to reach the one reality beyond all appearances. Most don’t succeed, a few do, and we should follow and learn from these few, who are sometimes called saints, or bodhisattvas. We are God, as the perennialists put it, in the sense that we know God only by becoming one with him.*

Christian mysticism frequently expresses this ideal.

My Me is God, nor do I recognize any other Me except my God Himself. (Saint Catherine of Genoa, in Haught).

God became man in order to make me God; therefore I want to be changed completely into pure God. (Saint Catherine of Genoa, in Haught)

In those respects in which the soul is unlike God, it is also unlike itself. (Saint Bernard)

The goal of life?

The ultimate reason for human existence, says Huxley, is “unitive knowledge of the divine Ground.” I’m not quite sure what this means, but what Huxley says it that this knowledge is available only to those who are prepared to die to the self in order to make room for God (p21).

What happens to the living? And to life? What happens to the hungry and the poor? It seems as if they hardly matter, that the goal of human existence is essentially and profoundly self-centered. Huxley says not one word about dying to the self in order to better care for others. That’s not what Huxley is about.

One can see this more clearly in a book he wrote almost ten years later, The Doors of Perception, an account of his experiences taking the hallucinogenic drug, mescaline.

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