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Through days that soar or plod

In spring of 2016 I received some good news. I had been hired by a local private school known as “TMI – The Episcopal School of Texas”. (Side note: “TMI” doesn’t stand for “too much information” but instead “Texas Military Institute” which is what our Corps of Cadets [think ROTC] is named to this day. Second side note: we’re not one of those military institutes that exists to reform behavior. I know, it’s very confusing branding but it’s an effort to pull together more than 130 years of tradition.) At that point, I had teaching experience but no high school teaching experience. Thankfully, the chaplain at the time who spearheaded my hiring, Fr. Nate Bostain, gave me a chance. Today in spring of 2024, I end my eighth year at “TMI Episcopal” (we opted for the less braggadocios name being that there are many Episcopal schools in Texas).

When I was hired, I was struggling to wrap up my Ph.D. Like many doctoral students, I was petrified by the weak job market I faced. I worried that it was all for nought; I wasn’t going to be able to use my years of study. I remember the relief that I felt when I was hired. I had pay. I had benefits. I could do something with my religious studies degrees! A huge weight was lifted from my chest.

Every year during our school’s baccalaureate service (which we had this morning), we sing a song we call “The School Hymn” but that’s actually named “For the Splendor of Creation”. That first year, as I reflected on how happy I was to be working where I was working, the lyrics hit me particularly hard. Here they are:

For the splendor of creation
that draws us to inquire,
for the mysteries of knowledge
to which our hearts aspire,
for the deep and subtle beauties
which delight the eye and ear,
for the discipline of logic,
the struggle to be clear,
for the unexplained remainder,
the puzzling and the odd:
for the joy and pain of learning,
we give you thanks, O God.

For the scholars past and present
whose bounty we digest,
for the teachers who inspire us
to summon forth our best,
for our rivals and companions,
sometimes foolish, sometimes wise,
for the human web upholding
this noble enterprise,
for the common life that binds us
through days that soar or plod:
for this place and for these people,
we give you thanks, O God.

That year the words “for the common life that binds us through days that soar or plod” made me teary eyed. I had a community. They had given an unproven person a chance to teach the subjects that matter to me. Yes, some days were rough, but I was grateful.

I’d be a lying hypocrite to say I’ve felt this way every day the past eight years. But this morning as we sang this song, I was reminded, as I have been reminded for nearly a decade, how elated I was to be given a chance. I’ve sometimes struggled to identify with my institution. I’ve sometimes felt out of place. I’ve sometimes felt disregarded and overlooked. But on the whole, the common life that has brought me together with my colleagues and students has been a life-changer. Whatever our institutional strengths and weaknesses, I see TMI Episcopal as the place that gave me a chance and for nearly a decade the place that has given me academic freedom and trusted me to teach young people religious studies. As we know, the discussion of religion, whether in a church or at the dinner table, can be as fraught as talking politics. That I’ve had the support of our administration, and especially our former chaplain, Fr. Nate Bostain, and current chaplain, Fr. Ben Nelson, means the world to me.

School years are long. Very long. There are days that soar. There are days that plod. On days like today though, when you see the graduating class prepare for college, and you know that you and your colleagues did everything in collaboration with their parents and guardians to prepare them for the world, it feels good. It feels like home. As former students greet you—often the siblings of current graduates who you taught years ago, marking your history with various families—you’re reminded how institutions can be beautiful things, in all their imperfection. You’re reminded how few opportunities we have in our modern society to build long lasting community with people. You’re reminded not to take for granted that sense that you “belong”. Not everyone has that.

TMI could’ve passed me up eight years ago. It didn’t. For that reason, in spite of all my curmudgeonly grumblings from day to day, I’m happy to sing, “For this place and for these people, I give you thanks, O God”!

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Proselytizing for atheism?

It seems like every time I see a study on human happiness, there’s a common finding: religious people are happier, and often healthier, than irreligious people. For example, Religion News Service reports, “New ‘human flourishing’ survey links frequent religious practice to life satisfaction”. And this satisfaction seems to increase with the intensity of devotion. According to Ryan Burge, those who have invested their lives the most into their religion, clergy, report being very satisfied with their lives. Yes, we’re seeing more and more people who are identifying as “Nones” but this may not be for their betterment. And yes, clergy burnout is real but people from all sorts of vocational backgrounds experience burnout, identity crises, second guessing, doubt, etc. Whatever the trends, and whatever the trouble with religion, the data still points to the reality that religious people seem happier.

Personally, I’m a religious person with a skeptical bent. I’ve admitted numerous time that I can’t be an atheist more for emotional reasons than intellectual ones but I think there’s an intellectual reason to reject atheism even when it seems logical: being happy is also logical. If we can’t answer the question of “God” but we do see that belief in God tends to benefit believers, and that religious ritual and community tends to be better for people, then it’s logical to continue living a religious life while holding religious beliefs, even if tentatively.

One of my favorite “non-philosopher philosophers” is Albert Camus. I enjoyed reading his Myth of Sisyphus, but I found his critique of Kierkegaard unconvincing. In the face of existential angst, Kierkegaard advocates a “leap of faith”. For Kierkegaard, Christianity is the direction toward which we should leap but let’s say “religion” for our argument here. Camus said that in the face of existential angst, or “the absurd” reality that the universe is indifferent to us, that we have three choices in response to meaninglessness: (1) physical suicide; (2) philosophical suicide; (3) rebellion against the absurd where we create our own meaning fighting against the demands of a meaningless universe. My trouble with Camus was that his rebellion felt sort of…religious. If we can create meaning when it seems like there’s no inherit meaning, then philosophical suicide isn’t so bad after all. If a “leap of faith” provides me with socially constructed meaning prepared for me by those who have come before me that allows me to find a community of like minded people with which to live life, then philosophical suicide seem to lead to a heavenly place when compared with the other options. Personally, I don’t think Camus’ critique of Kierkegaard is as powerful as others do. And I can’t find a rational reason for trying to dissuade someone of the Kierkegaardian solution in favor of Camus’ or in favor of any other atheism. If one is convinced of their own atheism, this doesn’t trouble me but it seems heartless to make a mission out of proselytizing for atheism. Let people have their leaps of faith! The data indicates that it’s working for them!

I’ll finish David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss sometime this weekend. It’s a book that I’ve enjoyed and that has challenged my thinking. I want to share an extended quote that captures what I’m trying to say (from pp. 305-306):

To proclaim triumphally that there is no God, no eternal gaze that beholds our cruelties and betrayals, no final beatitude for the soul after death, may seem bold and admirable to a comfortable bourgeois academic who rarely if ever has had to descend into the misery of those who lives are at best a state of constant anxiety or at worst the indelible memory of the death of a child. For a man safely sheltered from life’s harder edges, a gentle soporific may suffice to ease whatever fleeting moments of distress or resentment afflict him. For those genuinely acquainted with grief, however—despair, poverty, calamity, disease, oppression, or bereavement—but who have no ivory tower to which to retreat, no material advantages to distract them from their suffering, and no hope for anything better in this world, something far stronger may be needed. If there is no God, then the universe (astonishing accident that it is) is a brute event of boundless magnificence and abysmal anguish, which only illusion and myth may have the power to make tolerable. Only extraordinary callousness or fatuous sanctimony could make one insensible to this. Moreover, if there is no God, truth is not an ultimate good—there is no such thing as an ultimate good—and the more merciful course might well be not to preach unbelief but to tell “noble lies” and fabricate “pious frauds” and conjure up ever more enchanting illusions for the solace of those in torment.

Earlier, Hart says that atheism “should be classified as one of those religions of consolation whose purpose is not to engage the mind of will with the mysteries of being but merely to provide a palliative for existential grievances and private disappointments. Popular atheism is not a philosophy but a therapy (p. 305).” Whenever I’m drawn to atheism, which is two or three days a week, I recognize this about myself. But I find theism brings me more healing than atheism can, so I remain theistic. I don’t think theism is “philosophical suicide”. In fact, I don’t think we can truly know whether or not the word “God” has a referent. So, if we can’t know one way or the other, but it makes us happier and healthier to assume that God does exist, then isn’t it logical to try to find reason for believing in God?

Yes, the concept of God can be used to harm but it can be used to heal as well. So, I see value in arguing for a more loving, humane concept of God and against some of the disastrous and destructive visions of God, but it’s not clear to me that atheism is the best antidote to bad theism. Good theism seems like a better antidote. More importantly, it’s not clear why anyone would want to try to convert a happy theist into an atheist for any reason other than the selfishness of disdain toward theisms that they hold no longer. If an atheist is satisfied with a universe without transcendent meaning but they know conversion to atheism may ruin someone else, shouldn’t that person be left alone? The “Four Horsemen” seem sadistic.

Atheism may be an accurate worldview. If I were to adopt it, I wouldn’t bother theists about their theism. I would think, “We have this one life and our goal is to be as happy and comfortable as possible before we cease to exist—it’s to find enjoyment in this existence—and those people seem to enjoy their concept of ‘God’ so why harm them?” Would I challenge ugly theisms? Yes. But theism in general? I see no sense.

In his book Is God a Delusion? A Reply to Religion’s Cultured Despisers, the philosopher Eric Reitan said this after a couple of chapters addressing theodicy and arguing that theism remains a more hopeful response to theodicy’s problems than atheism is: “To deny human beings this faith is to condemn many to a worldview according to which the horrors that shatter so many lives will never be redeemed. When religious experience gestures towards a transcendent and redemptive good, it’s not irrational to live as if that good is real—that is, to set aside cynicism and despair, and to love what is good wholeheartedly, without the timidity or paralyzing anxiety that so often accompanies the fear of loss (p. 209).” In other words, if someone has created a symbol of goodness and hopefulness, why try to remove it from them? If “God” isn’t real but the concept helps relieve suffering and pain for many, it’s inhumane to try to take this medicine from them. Reitan’s book addresses the dangers of theistic certainty and fundamentalism, and I acknowledge those are ideologies that atheists can helpfully interrogate, but there’s no good reason to tear it all to the ground completely in the name of atheistic certainty and fundamentalism. Our existence is difficult and painful. If “noble lies” and “pious frauds” are all that religious “truth” is, then there’s a therapeutic benefit to them. Why disturb that, especially if atheism provides atheists with their own therapeutic benefit? To each their own theistic or atheistic therapy!

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Movies that I show in my classes: Noah (2014)

In my class, “Introduction to the Bible I: The Hebrew Scriptures,” the first movie that I show is Noah (2014). As I said in my post introducing this series on the movies that I show in my classes, I’ll provide brief commentary on the following: (1) why I show the movie; (2) the strengths of the movie for what I’m trying to accomplish; (3) the weaknesses of the movie for what I’m trying to accomplish.

1. Why I show Noah (2014)

    During the first few weeks of this class, I introduce my students to the difference between reading the Bible in a classroom setting like ours and what they may have experienced in a church or synagogue setting, or during personal or family devotionals. Unit 1, “How We Read the Bible” doesn’t try to establish a universal, objective approach to reading the Bible but I do tell students that we’ll be wearing a few different “lenses”: those of historians, literary critics, sociologists, philosophers, and theologians. In other words, I try to familiarize them with the different “academic” approaches to the Bible. Usually, students are a bit confused still about these different approaches as we end this unit but the goal is to familiarize them with how we’ll be reading. The next three units practice these approaches, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. For students who take “Introduction to the Bible II: The Christian Scriptures,” the work continues and often I see that most students have gained a “hands on” understanding of how academic approaches to the Bible differ from what they’ve experienced at home or in religious communities.

    The content that I use to help them practice different approaches to reading is the First and Second Creation Narratives found in Genesis 1-2 and the narratives found in Genesis 3-4 where the humans interact with their environment and their Creator. During this unit, I introduce the concepts of “canonical” and “non-canonical” literature and I have them read from a historian’s perspective (considering the historicity, ahistoricity, and mythology of the passage); a literary critic’s perspective (structure, context, setting, characters, etc.); a sociologist’s perspective (gender relations, family structure, humans and their environment, attitudes toward violence, etc.); and the perspectives of philosopher’s and theologian’s (what messages do we find? what presumptions are in the text? what’s being claimed and assumed? what is this text saying about concepts like “God” and “humanity” and “animals” and “the world”?).

    To wrap up the unit, students read the entire Flood Narrative of Genesis 6-9. Then we watch Noah to see how Darren Aronofsky has read and re-imagined this text both in itself, in dialogue with non-canonical traditions, and in hermeneutically merging the ancient and modern horizons of this narrative and our own collective, modern narrative(s).

    2. The strengths of Noah

    First, Aronofsky helps students see how the narrative “gaps” in Genesis 6-9 have invited interpreters to “fill in” what’s missing. When I have them focus on the literary aspects of the Hebrew Bible, I point out how little we are told about what’s happening in the background, or the internal, psychological states of the characters. This gives the Hebrew Bible life. What’s Noah thinking when he goes about building an ark as all of his fellow humans prepare to experience an omnicide? Only the interpreters can fill in those details because they narrator provides us with nothing but silence.

    Second, I find that this visuals help many students understand the “ancientness” of this story. In a sense, Aronofsky makes Noah and company look very modern. The weapon technology is creative, to say the least. So is the clothing. But it still feels like an ancient, pre-historic world and the movie feels like mythology which helps students realize, consciously or unconsciously, that we’re not dealing with stories that align with modern historiography. Adjacently, elements of ancient patriarchy, ideas and values around reproduction, religion and mysticism, attitudes toward violence, etc., are different from our own, which corresponds to the sociological lens I ask my students to consider.

    Third, Aronofsky is familiar with Jewish tradition and non-canonical material. For example, there are places in this story that aren’t from Genesis 6-9 but are from Genesis. The Akedah tradition where Abraham is ready to sacrifice Isaac is imported back into the Noah story for creative reasons but also theologically rich ones as the Torah itself can be read as juxtaposing Noah, Abraham, and Moses when it comes to divine judgment and their response to it. Additionally, “the Watchers” are a somewhat silly, kind of “Transformers” inspired presentation of material from the Enochian tradition. This helps teach students about reception history and how interpretation of the Bible is never from “nowhere” but always from a point of view. The canon influences how we interpret material in the canon but non-canonical traditions, whether the Book of Enoch, the Protevangelium of James (with regard to the subsequent semester’s content), or even just denominational traditions, also shape our interpretation.

    Fourth, Aronofsky modernizes the message of Genesis 6-9 so that it speaks to a few contemporary concerns. First, those who have watched Noah become aware that in many ways, this movie is about human degradation of our environment. The “descendants of Cain” plummet the earth. They’re greedy. The environment is destroyed wherever they go. Meanwhile, the “descendants of Seth,” which is limited to Noah, his wife, and his sons, care for the earth, use only what’s needed, and practice a vegan diet. I point out to my students that Aronofsky isn’t just parroting the Bible’s story: he’s using an ancient story of environmental destruction and the “judgment” that follows to ask about our own rising waters (i.e. climate change) and how we humans are bringing about our own judgment—one that impacts us but also non-human animals and all the life on our planet. This corresponds to the philosophical and theological lens that I ask my students to consider.

    3. The weaknesses of Noah

    As always, students often conflate the movies that I show with the texts themselves. I’ll catch in later assignments times when students talk about what happened in the Book of Genesis but they’re describing what happed in Noah. For better or worse, “Noah” is the movie’s Noah who experiences a psychotic break and tries to kill his own grandkids, rather than the vague, 2-D Noah of Genesis 6-9. I try to prevent this by having them read Genesis 6-9 while listing 25 observations about the text that they juxtapose to the movie when we’re done but the influence of visual art is strong!

    The Transformers quality keeps their attention but when I ask students if they picked up on Aronofsky’s environmental message, very, very few ever have. Once I make it evident, they see it, but they don’t see it as the descendants of Cain storm the Ark while fighting against the Watchers!

    Some may be concerned that the movie departs too far from the Bible’s source material. Other than what I mentioned above about how students conflate the two, I think every sermon, every week, in every church and synagogue does this with the Bible and the Bible would be boring, dead, and meaningless if people didn’t expand on its content interpretively. But I do know that it is a very creative interpretation and this can offend some and confuse others.

    Obviously, something can be said for all these ancient people being English speaking white folk. I think this is less problematic with a mythological, prehistorical movie like Noah than it was with the other 2014 biblical epic, Exodus: Gods and Kings that is set in Egypt in the middle of the second millennia BCE. But I do recognize how it can create a subconscious assumption that the Bible is about white people when in fact it very much isn’t!

    Overall, the strengths outweigh the weaknesses. Noah starts conversations about the Bible and it keeps my student’s attention. They have strong emotional responses both in favor of and against how it interacts with the Bible’s materials, which I see as a good thing either way. It gets them thinking and doing their own interpretive work!

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      The movies that I show in my classes

      Movies are a teacher’s friend. They give you a reprieve from lecturing. They shrink the amount of time that you have to invest in lesson planning. They provide visuals for students to help them better understand what you’ve been trying to teach. They act as helpful summaries of previous material. I could say more.

      I want to write a few short posts explaining why I’ve chosen the movies that I’ve chosen for my classes. It should be noted, I teach high school, so I’m limited in what I can show. Some of those limits are self-limits because I don’t want to have to address certain concerns or skip past controversial sections. For example, Life of Brian is a film that I would like to show in my “Introduction to the Bible II: The Christian Scriptures” class but it has enough controversial content that I’ve decided it’s not worth it. I do show a couple of “R” rated movies so my students have to have parental consent forms signed but they’re not the type of “R” rated movies that upset parents. Here are the movies that I’ll discuss over a series of future posts:

      “Introduction to the Bible I: The Hebrew Scriptures”

      1. Noah (2014)
      2. The Prince of Egypt (1998)

      Also, I supplement my lessons with the first five episodes of the miniseries The Bible.

      “Introduction to the Bible II: The Christian Scriptures”

      1. The Star (2017) or The Young Messiah (2016)
      2. Mary Magdalene (2018)

      Also, I supplement my lessons with the second five episodes of the miniseries The Bible.

      “Religion in Global Context”

      1. Free Guy (2021)
      2. Seven Years in Tibet (1997)
      3. An American Pickle (2020)

      “Religion in the United States”

      1. Malcolm X (1992)
      2. Cesar Chavez (2014)
      3. The Apostle (1997)

      When I write my posts, I’ll explain (1) why I show the movie; (2) the strengths of the movie for what I’m trying to accomplish; (3) the weaknesses of the movie for what I’m trying to accomplish.

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      SBL paper proposal accepted + panel discussion

      I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email this morning with this greeting:

      As many scholars have begun to question whether the Q hypothesis makes the most sense of the relationship between the Synoptics, I’ve been wondering what it would mean for John the Baptist scholarship if we remove Q from our historical reconstructions of the Baptist. That’s what I’ll explore in the paper.

      Additionally, I’m excited to see that the “Educational Resources and Review Committee” of which I’m part has had our panel approved: “Why I Love Teaching Secondary Education with my Ph.D. in Biblical Studies, and You Could Too.” I’ll be on that panel. I look forward to a fruitful discussion with those who may be considering applying for jobs in the fun and wacky world of high school teaching!

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      “Goodness,” “Outer Darkness,” and “Hell”

      This afternoon, I was providing my students with an overview of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I wanted them to see how the Mormons relate to the rest of Christianity, broadly speaking, but also I wanted them to learn about what makes Mormon theology unique. One of the topics we covered is the afterlife. In Mormon eschatology, it seems like few will find themselves in “Outer Darkness,” i.e. the Mormon vision of “hell”. Most humans will be placed in one of the three “Kingdoms of Glory”: (1) the Celestial Kingdom; (2) the Terrestrial Kingdom; and (3) the Telestial Kingdom. Some of my students wanted to criticize this eschatology (probably because they came to class with a negative posture toward Mormonism). I don’t jump into theology in my classes that often but I did push back a little bit this time, pointing out that in some way this is a more humane vision than the binary heaven-hell with which many of my students are familiar (though, as you’ll see, even the doctrine of “Outer Darkness” remains unsatisfactory to me). One student replied, “But all you have to do is believe in Jesus to go to heaven,” implying that avoiding hell is easy in the true Christianities that teach it. There is a lot to set aside here—what about those who never hear about Jesus; what about the influence our cultures, families, mental states, etc., have on how we interpret what is true and false; what about the problem that our Creator gave us rationality and there’s something about the traditional vision of hell that defies that rationality. Instead, I asked them to consider one thing specifically that troubles me about the traditional view of hell and how the Mormon vision of eternal judgment might be an improvement, all things considered.

      Now, let me put my cards on the table: I’m either (1) a Christian Universalist or (2) an agnostic/atheist. I say Christian Universalist because there’s no such thing as a view from nowhere, and I’m not intelligent enough to create a religious system out of the blue, free of the paradigms provided to me by the religions that exist already. (Though I don’t deny that some other system of truth, one that transcends our systems, could be reality.) I can’t escape the influence of Christian mythologies on my religious imagination. Nor would I claim that at this stage in my life that my study of other religions has led me to want to abandon Christianity wholesale in favor of buying wholesale some other metaphysical/theological system (though I’m happy to borrow ideas from those religions). And since I don’t think I’m unlike many Americans who have become “Nones” in recent years, I presume like most Americans, my religious views come down to accepting or rejecting Christianity (or more specifically, the available Christianities). This tends to be what the demographic trends show has been happening (for example, we don’t have many Christians rejecting Christianity in order to become Buddhists or Muslims in the United States; they reject Christianity to become atheist, agnostic, or “spiritual”). I’ve chosen to remain Christian, recognizing that this worldview continues to shape me as I ponder “ultimate concern,” as the theologian Paul Tillich called it.

      With that being said, here’s what I asked my students to consider, especially the one who said that getting out of “hell” is easy enough (implying that those who reject this easy path might deserve what they get). I presume that most of us Christians understand God to be good. Additionally, we understand torture to be bad, and we understand disproportionate retributive justice to be unjust. (Though I guess there may be some who think torture is good, and disproportionate retributive justice is just, which means I don’t think we have a starting place for conversation at all.) “Hell” as many envision it is eternal torture. I don’t buy the idea that anyone would select eternal torture if they understood what was at stake, so I reject the claim that hell is a free will decision. More importantly, even if it were a free will decision, a God who knew that some of his creatures would make that decision, and a God who set it up so that it was possible to fail with the stakes being that high, is not a God that we can call “good” in any meaningful sense.

      I’m aware that one response is that our vision of “good” is frail and flawed. God’s vision of the “good” is perfect. But this makes all of our theology meaningless. When I think of God, if God exists, my mind arrives as something akin Anselm’s Ontological Argument, except that I’m not using the “argument” apologetically. I think that if there’s a God that’s anything like we imagine, then this God must be the greatest Good that we can fathom, and if our use of the word “good” has any meaning, then this God can’t be the type of deity who would torture humans forever. If such a being exists, I don’t think the word “God” is appropriate. What we have is a devil. But if our understanding of what’s “good”— i.e. that which is “good” for living, sentient creatures who want to live, want to thrive, want happiness and pleasure, peace and comfort, relationships and meaningfulness—means anything when we speak of God then God would be a being who wants what’s best for his creatures. It’s twisted logic that I won’t waste time entertaining to suggest that something like eternal conscious torment is a good that God offers his creatures.

      If our understanding of “good” is so far from God’s that by “good” he might mean “eternal torment,” then we must realize that “truth” or “trustworthiness” may be as far away. If this God can find “good” in eternal torture then this God can find “truth” in misleading Christians to believe what we might call a “lie,” such as “all you need to do is believe in Jesus”. Why would this God have any qualms misleading people toward hell. This God may find goodness in tricking us. Christians who believe that their God can remain “good” while tormenting people for eternity might want to consider whether this God can remain “good” even as he deceives them toward hell. What if the only way to salvation is a different form of Christianity that they’re not practicing? What if it’s a more morally demanding form? What is it’s another religion, like a fundamentalist version of Islam? Anyone who argues that God is just in eternally tormenting souls because God’s “goodness” is so far superior to our own must accept that God would be right and just in misleading them into damnation as well, and they wouldn’t be able to complain because what they mean by “truthfulness” and “trustworthiness” is not what God means. Their understanding of these words were human, frail, selfish.

      And if God can do this to them, then God can blame them for making the free will decision to choose the wrong Christianity, or the wrong religion. They can’t whine that they were sincere. They’d have to accept that they were just unlucky because the traditional doctrine of hell makes this claim about all the people it puts there.

      If we move down such a path, then theologizing is worthless, and our words mean nothing. If “goodness” means nothing like what we know is good, then neither does truth, faith, hope, love, etc. If we humans have been endowed with a sense of goodness and justice, then I’d propose that we know in our hearts that something like “Outer Darkness” or “Hell” as eternal penalties for temporal behaviors makes no sense, and we know it. And if we were on the wrong side of realizing the “correct” religion, or making the “right” free will decision, we would have a sense of injustice that would be justified.

      (Now, these ideas are unpacked by David Bentley Hart in his book That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, and I highly recommend reading this book if this post has you pondering what I’m saying. Hart is more articulate than I am and he’s written a whole book on this topic. I’ve bought his argument as the most reasonable Christian view of these matters, and much of my thought is derived from his. I’m unlikely to be convinced that the traditional view of hell [the “infernalist” view, as Hart calls it] has any merit, so it’s not worth anyone’s time debating me on this. I’m writing this post for the purpose of putting my own thoughts into words and for the person who may stumble across it as they ponder the claims of universalism. Personally, I’ve found peace reading everyone from the Apostle Paul on through Gregory of Nyssa as theologians who provide us with reasons to consider that divine grace abounds to all if it’s available to any.)

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      Belief beyond propositions

      A couple of months ago, I wrote about how Carl Schleicher’s painting Eine Streitfrage aus dem Talmud works as a visual analogy for how I read the Bible as someone who (1) is committed to the methodologies associated with various academic approaches to the Bible who (2) happens to identify as a Christian as well (see “Carl Schleicher’s Eine Streitfrage aus dem Talmud and Reading the Gospels”). In that post, I stated that I want to “share one of two examples I use for students who wonder how I remain Christian while reading the Bible critically”. That post provides my first example, as I talked about Schleicher’s painting. In this post, I want to talk about the second example that I provide.

      In the Gospel of John, there’s a scene that strikes me every time I read it. In John 20:3-10, we read the following:

      3 Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. 4 The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5 He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. 6 Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, 7 and the cloth that had been on Jesus’s head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. 8 Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed, 9 for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. 10 Then the disciples returned to their homes.

      Mary Magdalene discovers the empty tomb. She tells the male disciples. Peter runs to the tomb with that mysterious, unnamed “other disciples” who is known as “the disciple Jesus loved” in other passages. That disciple looks in the tomb and sees the wrappings from Jesus’ body. Simon Peter enters the tomb, seeing the same thing. Then that other disciple entered the tomb. When I read this passage with my students, I stop after v. 8: “Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in and he saw and believed…” Then I ask them, “What did he believe?” They respond, “That he had resurrected from the dead.” I tell them that this is a reasonable answer but then I continue with v. 9, “for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”

      Many commentators talk about how this idealized disciple believed in the resurrection. They present this disciple, “the Beloved Disciple,” as the one who believes without seeing (contra Thomas in 20:26-29). That may be accurate but I think it needs to be qualified. As Lidija Novakovic writes about v. 9 in John 11-21: A Handbook on the Greek Text:

      The main problem, however, is that this clause describes a situation that is not yet characterized by the proper understanding of scripture, which forms the basis of the resurrection faith. This verse thus stands in tension with v. 8, which seems to claim that the Beloved Disciple believe that Jesus had risen from the dead. If, however, ἐπίστευσεν in v. 8 refers to incomplete resurrection faith because it is based on seeing rather than hearing, the explanation in v. 9 becomes intelligible if it describes a fully developed resurrection faith that can only be derived from the correct interpretation of scripture. This tension with v. 8, however, is thereby not completely resolved because the implied subjects of the γὰρ clause are both the Beloved Disciple and Peter, whereas the subject of v. 8 is only the former.

      I don’t think you can avoid the reality that the narrator tells us that the Beloved Disciple believed and “did not understand” along with Peter. If he believed that Jesus had been resurrected, he didn’t quite understand what it was that he was believing. He wasn’t believing a mere proposition like “and the third day he rose again” as we see the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. When I read that the Beloved Disciple “saw and believed” (καὶ εἶδεν καὶ ἐπίστευσεν), I think there’s more to it. I think he believed in Jesus. Yes, maybe he had some foggy concept like “Jesus has risen” but if we’re to take v. 9 seriously, it’s not a fleshed out belief.

      Honestly, akin to what I said about my own Christianity being more comfortable with Good Friday and Holy Saturday than Easter Sunday (see “A Žižekian Good Friday”), this captures my state during this Easter season. I believe…but I don’t know, nor do I understand. We see something similar in Matthew 28:16-18: “

      16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted.

      Likewise, in Luke 24:41a, the disciples are described this way:

      41 Yet for all their joy they were still disbelieving and wondering…

      Worshipping while doubting. Feeling joy while disbelieving. Believing but not understanding. These are the narratives that Christians have inherited about the people who are reported to have seen the resurrected Jesus.

      Because of this, I see no contradiction in applying the critical tools of scholarship, of questioning the texts we’re studying, and all the while maintaining a rootedness in Christianity. I see no contradiction in feeling agnostic while believing, or even atheistic at times, while believing. Are there days when my studying leads me to think, “I’m a fool and this is my mythology”? Yes. Are there other days when I think, “My mythology gives me life”? Yes. Is this contradictory? Probably but it’s a tension I’m willing to accept. I can’t find it within me to abandon the traditions that have given me hope and a language for expressing that hope. I can’t pretend that I don’t live in 2024 which is a universe away from the world of the first-century. And I don’t think we have to choose, contrary to fundamentalist thinking pulling us one way or the other. I think we can rest in the tension, sometimes quite comfortably.

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      Don’t stop believing? Religious demographics in the United States in 2024

      Mostly, I’m writing this post so that I can have this information in one place in case I want to come back to it at a later date. But I guess this is an opportunity for me to process some of the data as well. First, I begin with the new PRRI study, “Religious Change in America”. This was the major finding:

      Around one-quarter of Americans (26%) identify as religiously unaffiliated in 2023, a 5 percentage point increase from 21% in 2013. Nearly one in five Americans (18%) left a religious tradition to become religiously unaffiliated, over one-third of whom were previously Catholic (35%) and mainline/non-evangelical Protestant (35%).

      This isn’t fueled by a growth in the “Nones” i.e. people who answer “nothing in particular” when asked what their religious affiliation is. Instead, it’s because we’ve seen atheist and agnostic identity double in a decade:

      While the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as “nothing in particular” is similar to a decade ago (16% in 2013 to 17% in 2023), the numbers of both atheists and agnostics have doubled since 2013 (from 2% to 4% and from 2% to 5%, respectively).

      This doesn’t minimize the demographic impact of Nones though. Earlier this year, Nones became the largest single block in the United States when it comes to religious affiliation: see NPR’s “Religious ‘Nones’ are now the largest single group in the United States”. Many headlines make it sound like this should be a moment for Mainline Christianity to shine, especially when we read titles like Texas Public Radio’s “People say they’re leaving religion due to anti-LGBTQ teachings and sexual abuse”. But the Mainline continues to die quickly. PRRI found, as mentioned above, that “over one-third of” the previously religiously affiliated “were…mainline/non-evangelical Protestants (35%).” The branch of Christianity that has had the most openness to LGBTQIA+ peoples is disappearing.

      This appears to be due to the reality that most people who are leaving their religions are doing so because they have stopped believing the teachings of their religion, plain and simple. PRRI summarizes:

      The reason given by the highest percentage of religiously unaffiliated Americans for leaving their faith tradition is that they simply stopped believing in their religion’s teachings (67%).

      While Evangelicals have been able to limit the bleeding since 2016, they’re not growing. As Religion News Service presented it: “Study: Unaffiliated Americans are the only growing religious group”. But the PRRI study does note that, “The net loss of members among white evangelical Protestants has declined since 2016. In 2023, white evangelical Protestants have one of the highest retention rates of all religious groups (76%), an improvement since 2016, when white evangelicals retained just two in three members (66%).”

      On the whole, we’re becoming secular, even among the religious: “A slim majority of Americans (53%) say that religion is the most important (15%) or one among many important things in their lives (38%) in 2023, notably lower than it was in 2013 when 72% of Americans reported that religion was the most important thing in their lives (27%) or one among many (45%).” While only 22% of Republicans say that religion is the most important thing in their lives, increasingly, being religious and being Republican are coming to be seen as one and the same: “Americans continue to lose their religion as GOP pushes it”.

      Ryan Burge, the political scientist that I’ve referenced on this blog a few times, released an interesting find last week just as all of this PRRI information was being made available. His research shows that religiosity (as measured by attending religious services) among high school seniors (which in turn reflect high schoolers, the demographic with which I work) is plummeting. Here’s his graph:

      But he found a strange correlation: religiosity is strongest where GPA is highest. What to make of this? His article is “The Religiosity of High School Seniors, 1976-2022”. But for those who want to see what he thinks, just know that most of this article is behind a pay wall. (Also, remember, Burge has estimated that 49% of Gen Z is atheist/agnostic/religious unaffiliated, as I discussed in my post “The Fading Bible of Dying Churches”.)

      That religiosity is declining because people have stopped believing may indicate that religion is being understood as increasingly anti-intellectual or irrelevant in our scientific, Information Age. That high schoolers who attend religious services are the ones displaying the highest level of “smarts” (as measured by GPA) may push back against that. But high GPA could mean that religious families are more stable, or supportive. It could mean that the type of kid who will do well in our education system is one who can conform and regurgitate the “correct” answers. And who knows how many of these high performing religious teens remain religious during and after their college years?

      A final, somewhat related note. This week my podcast feed included an interview with Dr. Neil Van Leeuwen about his book Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity on the Data Over Dogma podcast. I want this book. This interview made me add it to my Wishlist:

      Eric Schwitzgebel wrote some comments about the book on his blog: “Religious Believers Normally Do and Should Want Their Religious Credences to Align with Their Factual Beliefs”. Schwitzgebel summarizes Van Leeuwen’s main point helpfully when he writes:

      Neil distinguishes factual beliefs from religious credences. If you factually believe something – for example, that there’s beer in the fridge – that belief will generally have four functional features:

      (1.) It is involuntary. You can’t help but believe that there’s beer in the fridge upon looking in the fridge and seeing the beer.

      (2.) It is vulnerable to evidence. If you later look in the fridge and discover no beer, your belief that there is beer in the fridge will vanish.

      (3.) It guides actions across the board. Regardless of context, if the question of whether beer is in your fridge becomes relevant to your actions, you will act in light of that belief.

      (4.) It provides the informational background governing other attitudes. For example, if you imagine a beer-loving guest opening the fridge, you will imagine them also noticing the beer in there.

      Yesterday, as I celebrated Easter, I wondered whether most of the people with which I was saying, “He is risen!” thought of this as a factual claim along the lines of how Van Leeuwen defines factuality. (I was in an Episcopal Church, for what that’s worth.) Do they think of Jesus’ resurrection as something that’s as clear to them as the fact that if they don’t eat all day, they’ll feel unwell, and if they don’t eat for many days, they’ll die. Is their believe falsifiable in any way? Could they be convinced that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. Do they live as if they know that no matter what happens in this life, resurrection awaits them in the future? Does it shape their ethics and morals, what job they work, how they spend their money, or how they raise their children? Or do they accept that their beliefs are a different category: religious credence? Back to Schwitzgebel’s summary:

      (1.) Voluntary. In some sense – maybe unconsciously – you choose to have this religious credence.

      (2.) Invulnerable to evidence. Factual evidence, for example, scientific evidence of the non-existence of Hell, will not cause the credence to disappear.

      (3.) Guides actions only in limited contexts. For example, it doesn’t prevent you from engaging in the condemned behavior in the way a factual belief of the same content presumably would.

      (4.) Doesn’t reliably govern other attitudes. For example, if you imagine others engaging in the behavior, it doesn’t follow that you will imagine God also condemning them.

      I mention this because I think of Mainline Christianity as a way of practicing Christianity that’s sees the doctrines as more akin to poetic knowledge than scientific knowledge. Mainline Christianity has been a way to continue to participate in the communities and rituals that provide meaning without being forced to assent to the irrationality of fundamentalism. But the Mainline is vanishing. And I think this may mean that religion as poetic knowledge is vanishing as well. This makes me wonder whether the debate over religion, and who participates or doesn’t participate in religious community, has begun to boil down to rationalism (for lack of a better word) v. fundamentalism. People like me—people who see the doctrine of the resurrection as a poetic symbol pointing to the hope I have that we’ll experience some form of continuation after our death—may be going extinct in America. On the “rationalist” side (again, for lack of a better word), I’ll be seen as kooky because I haven’t abandoned all forms of my inherited superstition. On the fundamentalist side, I’ll be seen as heretical for doubting the literalness of Christianity’s claims. If most Nones have left because they don’t believe the doctrines any more, then this makes me think that they were told that they have to choose between these two poles and when forced to choose, they chose the rationalist worldview (and I don’t blame them). But again, the Mainline seems unable to keep people, so if they’re making space for a more poetic religiosity, is it a failure in marketing or have we arrived at the point where most people, especially younger people, feel like even poetic religion is basically a fundamentalism?

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      Lucretius, resurrection, and bodily regeneration

      Yesterday, I was reading some excerpts from Lucretius, the first-century Roman philosopher. He is considered to be a central contributor to the philosophy of Epicureanism. He was an “Atomist” which was akin to modern materialists. In his On the Nature of the Universe (De rerum natura ), he declares that “death is nothing to us” since his understanding of death is that it’s a mirror to our non-existence prior to birth. We don’t feel sadness about all of the cosmic history that we missed before our birth, so why should we care about all that we’ll miss after our death? He states, “…when the union of body and spirit that engenders us has been disrupted—to us, who shall then be nothing, nothing by any hazard will happen any more at all.”

      Then he says something that has stuck with me since I encountered it as an undergraduate a couple of decades ago. He writes,

      If any feeling remains in mind or spirit after his has been torn from our body, that is nothing to us, who are brought into being by the wedlock of body and spirit, conjoined and coalesced. Or even if the matter that composes us should be reassembled by time after our death and brought back into its present state—if the light of life were given to us anew—even that contingency would still be no concern of ours once the chain of our identity had been snapped.

      Except found in The Good Life edited by Charles Guignon, p. 45

      Lucretius’ statement causes trouble for people who believe in religious/philosophical concepts like resurrection and reincarnation but also for some post-humanists who imagine someday uploading our consciousness into a digital utopia. For Lucretius, even if this body or this body and mind combination would be reconstructed, it wouldn’t be “me”. I ended. This is someone new with recycled parts!

      This raises the “Ship of Theseus” (Greek) or “Chariot Simile” (Buddhist) problem. If discontinuity is measured by change, then how do we have any continuity. In both the Greek and Buddhist ways of framing the problem, we have an object made of parts—either a ship or a chariot—that can have parts replaced. Since theoretically each part can be replaced to the point that there’s no original ship/chariot parts, we must ask, what’s essential to the identity of Ship A or Chariot A. If Ship A’s parts have all been replaced, how can it be Ship A still? But if it’s now Ship B, when did it become Ship B? And if we can take all the old parts in a pile that was made as Ship A was being deconstructed, would rebuilding it make it the real Ship A?

      An answer to this that comes from the Buddhist monk Nāgasena is that we’re thinking of identity wrong. He claims in the Chariot Simile that the name “Nāgasena” isn’t referring to a singular static person but an observable process. The child named Nāgasena isn’t the adult named Nāgasena but they’re connected in that the child is part of the same process that led to the adult who will lead to the old man before the whole process ends with death. Nāgasena isn’t a fixed object; Nāgasena is an organic movement.

      I don’t know that I had encountered Nāgasena in college (pretty confident that I hadn’t) but I do remember doing a presentation that made a similar argument in favor of the coherence of the doctrine of bodily resurrection. If we’re a process now, why can’t that process resume at the eschaton? My criticism of Lucretius’ idea is that he sounds like he assumes we’re static now, but we’re not. If we’re not static now, but our modern self has a sense of continuity with our former self, then why wouldn’t our future resurrected self, as different as it may be from our previous self, maintain that same sense of continuation. Now, obviously, we’re talking about taking a logical argument only so far before having to use a God-of-the-gaps to get us from death to resurrection, but I was proud of the argument nonetheless.

      In some way, this could work for reincarnation or post-humanism too. But does it work or does Lucretius’ critique hold? I think there remains a problem. Often we hear about how the human body regenerates new cells every seven years, on average. And this gives us a sense that we experience something like complete bodily renewal every seven years but that’s not quite accurate. Here’s a summary of what happens in actuality:

      Some parts of our body are renewing constantly but some parts of our heart, brain, eye lens, and another source I read said cells within our spinal cord, last a life time. Therefore, unlike the Ship of Theseus or the Chariot Simile, we never quite get to the point where we’ve been completely replaced. Until we die, there is some stability though not much. What does this do to undergraduate me’s argument that our existence is dynamic already therefore a resurrected identity (or reincarnated or uploaded) isn’t a massive discontinuation as it may have been claimed. It would seem that if our bodily life is anchored to even a few bits of continuation, then when those end we lose what we were and Lucretius’ point stands centuries later.

      Obviously, I’m pondering this on Easter Sunday when Christians celebrate Jesus’ resurrection. I’m wondering what it means for our understanding of the doctrine. I know that the Pauline interpretation in 1 Corinthians 15 makes it clear that discontinuity is built in. He talks about how Jesus’ resurrected body is animated by spirit and how our bodies are “flesh-and-blood”. Whatever we may do with his language, his point is that Jesus resurrected body, while a body, isn’t like our body. The Evangelists do something similar when they talk about Jesus appearing and disappearing but also being able to be touched and even consume food. But this brings me back to Lucretius: if this is the resurrected body, how is this not a new Jesus? How does the resurrected Jesus related to Jesus of Nazareth?

      Analogously, let’s imagine that in the future people can map our brain patterns. As we die, they scan our brain and upload that pattern to a computer. My body dies but my “code” awakens in post-humanist, digital bliss. Is that me? Is that a copy of me? If my current bodily state is impacted by everything from my synapses connecting to my gut bacteria to my external stimuli, would merely reproducing my brain patterns be preserving me? This may be where religious thinkers retreat to a dualism: the soul (or “Atman” in Indian philosophy) is the real me, it interacts with my body, but it’s independent of my body in some way even now. But that pushes us to deal with the problems of dualism, and there are many! But is dualism the only escape if you want to preserve concepts like resurrection or reincarnation? Or does the Buddhist claim that we’re processes already, even if there is a portion of who we are that remains static, continue to hold in some way that I’m not considering?

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      A Žižekian Good Friday

      I have a confession: the two days of the year when I feel the most at home within Christianity are Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Triumphalistic Christianity troubles me. I don’t mean to say that the hope that Christianity provides is what troubles me. I mean to say that when Christianity is taken as a given, empirical metanarrative that explains away our human experiences, then it troubles me. I dislike apologetics for this reason. I’m not interested in “proving” the “truth” of Christianity. For this reason, sermons that say something like, “it’s Friday…but Sunday’s coming” bother me. Let Good Friday be Good Friday. Let Easter Sunday be Easter Sunday.

      Good Friday and Holy Saturday resonate with me because my “belief” or my “faith” is more attuned to the mood of these days than it is to other days on the ecclesial calendar. Our religion has existed for two millennia. It can be argued that it’s brought more good than bad to the world, though I don’t know how to measure such a claim. What I do know is this: what Christians thought had happened and what they thought it meant for the near future has proven false, or at best unprovable. The Apostle Paul was in error when he wrote (in 1 Thessalonians 4:17), “we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever.” Yes, I understand that there’s a hermeneutical move that can extract a deeper meaning from this text, something like, “This is the attitude that all Christians everywhere should have always, until Christ does return,” but I doubt that’s what Paul meant. Paul meant that he suspected he would see the parousia of Christ occur, and soon.

      More than nineteen centuries have passed. There has been no “Second Coming”. When Christians proclaim the “Memorial Acclamation” that “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again,” we must admit that we understand one of three acclamations: Christ has died. We understand death. We debate the meaning of resurrection but as the evolving Resurrection Narratives of the canonical Gospels show, and how later interpretations like that in the Gospel of Peter intensify, our story about Jesus’ resurrection is actual a plurality: stories. Those stories differ in their presentation and interpretation of the Resurrection. They add details about his appearance, about his being touched and heard by this or that person, about him eating, but also about him appearing out of no where and then disappearing again. He’s a ghost; he’s not a ghost. As we return to Paul again, when we read his exposition on the Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, we see someone wrestling with how to understand what he is convinced that he has encountered: an embodied man who had died but who is embodied in a way that is different from our own embodiment.

      I say all that to say this. Whatever assurance we Christians have must be understood as something felt, something hoped, but not something known. The Evangelists didn’t know what it meant for Christ to have risen. Paul didn’t either. We don’t, surely. If we understand death to a degree, and resurrection hardly at all, then what to make of the claim that there’s a future hope that will occur in cosmic space-time as Christ “returns”? I have no answers though I have heard many.

      On Good Friday, we have something concrete. We have a man who has brought us hope. His life has impacted us generations later. He has inspired us and he has challenged us. We’ve never seen him. Some claim to encounter him, to hear him speak, but the subjectivity of such claims aren’t helpful for those of us who lack such ecstatic visions! On Holy Saturday, we have the divine silence that is characteristic of many of our lives—I suspect most but who am I to say?

      This is why I want Good Friday to have its place and Holy Saturday too. Don’t push me toward Easter Sunday. When I have to proclaim, “He is risen,” I do it with doubts and I don’t know if I know what I’m saying. But I understand, “he has died”.

      In his collection of essays, Heaven in Disorder, Slavoj Žižek includes one titled “Christ in the Time of a Pandemic” (pp. 128-131). In it, he claims about our shared life during the pandemic, “We live in some kind of hell, caught in a permanent tension and depression, the pandemic having destroyed the daily life we were used to. And here Christ enters—but how?” He rejects the “standard answer” that “especially in times of trouble…there is a higher almighty power that loves us and protects us” (p. 128). As all those who died during the pandemic testify, if they were loved, they weren’t protected. With this reality in mind, Žižek takes inspiration from Meister Eckhart, saying, if we have to choose heaven with God or hell with Christ, we should choose hell. And for Žižek this is a real choice, as I’ll explain momentarily.

      For Žižek, the crucifixion is the moment when “God is abandoned by Himself” (p. 129). He quotes G.K. Chesterton, the Catholic philosopher and critic, who says that on this day, “God has forsaken God”. Žižek comments, “…in Christianity, God dies for himself—in his ‘Father, why have you abandoned me?’ Christ himself commits what is, for a Christian, the ultimate sin: he wavers in his Faith (p. 130).” But for Žižek, this makes Christ our model. He writes:

      Christ’s death on the cross signifies that one should drop without restraint the notion of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts, the guarantee of historical teleology—Christ’s death is the the death of this God, it refuses any “deeper meaning” that obfuscates the brutal reality of historical catastrophes (p. 130).

      In Jesus’ cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Žižek finds Christ present with us, though notably from a materialist perspective. “Christ is now present here more than ever, He is suffering here with us. When we curse our fate in despair, when he courageously accept that no higher force will help us, he is here with us (p. 131).”

      For Žižek, this means that “we act with Christ only if we assume our responsibility for the pandemic and other catastrophes, and act together in global solidarity, aware that no higher power guarantees the happy outcome (p. 131).” He calls this “global solidarity” “Holy Spirit,” reinterpreting the Third Person of the Trinity to be “the community of believers bound by love”. In this, Žižek writes, “Christ returns as a link of love between his followers, not as a higher power uniting them (p. 131).”

      This may be too depressing an interpretation of Christianity for most Christians. Admittedly, there are days when I can’t settle for a materialist reading like the one Žižek offers here. Sometimes I need the hope that even though I don’t understand what we Christians are saying about Jesus’ resurrection, reappearing, and other concepts like a future resurrection, I hope that these ideas maybe point to something. But today isn’t the day for that. On Sunday, I’ll force myself to hope. I’ll declare, “He is risen, indeed!” But not today. Today is Good Friday. Žižek is correct: today, we’re alone, except for each other.