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Homework, rigor, and being the “chill” teacher

Earlier this week, our Head of School shared April Rubin’s Axios article, “Schools rethink homework” on Linkedin. I read it because I abandoned giving homework a few years ago. In the article, the pros and cons of homework are discussed. Two primary concerns regarding the giving of homework include (1) the ongoing mental health struggle of America’s youth and (2) the rise of AI which tempts students to find ways that may shortcut their learning. Between the risks of burning out our kids, and AI’s relativizing of homework’s value, some schools, even whole districts, have abandoned homework completely. California is asking schools to evaluate “the mental and physical health impacts of homework assignments”. I don’t know whether or not the complete removal of homework is good for our students but I do think we need to ask ourselves what it is that we think homework accomplishes.

Why I stopped assigning homework
When we returned from the pandemic, it was apparent to me that students struggled to learn at home compared to when they’re in school. I knew during the pandemic that many of my students were finding clever ways to check boxes to get the work done but it was less clear whether they were learning much. My reaction to what the pandemic taught me about teaching high schoolers was (1) to limit use of computers because I can’t compete the attractiveness of dozens of open tabs on my student’s browsers and (2) I decided that learning with me as their teacher was far superior to asking them to learn by themselves at home. Today, my students do a ton of handwriting. Almost everything is done on paper like it’s 1993. And I tell my students on the day that we go over the syllabus: “I want your commitment for the one hour and fifteen minutes we’re together every day and then when you leave this classroom, your time is your time, I won’t take any of that from you.” In my estimation, most of my students agree to this bargain and uphold their end of the deal.

My class in the school’s ecosystem
A related reason that I abandoned homework is that I teach religious studies. Don’t misunderstand me: I think that what I teach is as relevant to my student’s education as anything that my colleagues teach. What I don’t think is that they need to spend several hours at home going more in-depth in order to learn what I want them to learn. I could be wrong but my main goal has been to teach them ways of thinking, even postures toward learning, rather than just information. I teach them how to think about religion but not so much what to think about religion. This is best done in the community of my classroom. If students are curious to learn more about something we discuss in class—and that does happen—there’s no stopping them from learning more at home. But I haven’t found that by forcing them to take more work home that this has ever sparked their curiosity.

One reason that I don’t know if I’m against homework, full stop, is because I don’t teach math, science, languages, or AP (Advanced Placement) classes. Those classes may demand more day-to-day work. To be good at Calculus may require practicing every day. To learn Spanish may require practice every day. Now, if someone goes on to major in religious studies in college, they should be thinking about religious studies every day but for the purpose of high school religious studies—something most students in schools across America don’t study and if they do it’s almost always from a purely confessional vantage point—it seems unnecessary. If my students must have homework, I would rather that they work on their Calculus or Spanish at home. We can talk about Buddhist rituals in class tomorrow!

Is it bad to be the “chill” teacher?
Every semester, I have students who have taken my classes already tell me, “I miss your class!” Even students who seemed like they weren’t all that engaged. For many, this has to do with what we learned and how we learned it. But I get nervous at times because students will tell me that my class was a “GPA-booster”. (I’m not a difficult grader. Mostly, I grade for effort and work completed. If you show up, put forth effort, do the work I ask you to do, then you’re going to get most of your grade right there.) I had a student tell me, “Your class was so ‘chill’!” My immediate response was, “Oh no!” Why? Because I know humanities are often seen as less serious and less rigorous than STEM subjects. And many educators may see religious studies as frivolous or excessive. But when I asked the student to clarify what was meant, I was told that it had more to do with creating a low pressure environment where learning was enjoyable. My class didn’t stress them out.

Being the “fun” teacher isn’t always a compliment. But it can be. If students have fun learning, this isn’t bad. If they’re having fun because nothing academic is happening, then that’s a problem. I know from student testimonials and the observations of my colleagues that learning is happening, so I’ve learned to embrace the designation of “chill teacher” since I know what it means now: I’m not burning them to the ground. In part, I think the decision to ditch homework plays a role.

Do students know how to measure their own learning?
A colleague told me today that he overheard students talking about my classes that they took last year. In adolescent speech, one said something to the extent that “we didn’t have to do much for that class” to which the another student responded, “He did have us take a ton of notes.” I’ve had conversations with my students about how I teach and I get this sense: students measure classes by how (1) difficult they are and (2) demanding they are of the student’s time. My classes are neither. Yet students will comment on how much I drive the class and how I use all the time, often finishing right around the time of the bell so that there’s no wasted time. They’ll complain about all the reading and writing when they’re my students, and this is what I emphasis: a lot of reading and a lot writing. Not long papers. But a lot of note taking. A lot a shorter writing responses ranging from two, to five, to ten sentences where I ask them to put what they’re learning into their own (hand-written) words or to consider scenarios where they’d apply what they learned. It’s interesting to me that they find being in my class to be demanding, at the time, even stretching, but also “chill” and in retrospect one of the classes that gave them the most room to breathe.

When the road ends without major finals, or AP tests, or something like the SAT, there’s no “score” that helps my students see that they’ve developed a more sophisticated understanding of the complexities of religion or how to read the types of complicated texts we find in the Bible. For this reason, students don’t see something objective that shows them they’ve changed. That’s something that as a teacher I see (and sometimes don’t see) in their writing, in their discussions, etc. That my students go from expressing their frustration with trying to learn difficult, complex ideas, to reflecting on my class as one in which they felt comfortable, less stressed, and “chill” is a positive in my eyes. If I can teach them about hermeneutics, ancient history, genres of biblical literature, Hindu cosmologies, Buddhist rituals, the diversity of Judaism, etc., and they turn around and say, “that wasn’t so bad,” that seems positive to me. When they were done, like climbing a hill to see a beautiful sunset, the difficulty faded into the light of their new found knowledge and their reshaped worldviews. They forget how much their intellectual muscles were strained to get there. I’ll take that all day, every day.

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Can a religious studies class be a philosophy class?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my ideal list of classes for high school freshmen (see “If I could select the courses high school freshmen take”). More precisely, I wrote about the classes that I wish students at the school where I teach had to take. One key idea is that we would offer a class that helps students think deeply about what it means to live a good life, what human flourishing looks like, and how we should treat ourselves and others. I don’t have interest in teaching something preachy. The goal is to help our students learn to think about these types of things, important as they are. But it must be done in a way that encourages them to take ownership of the questions and what they might mean for their futures.

Now, I won’t say that my idea has the green light just yet. But we are having important discussions. Something like what I pondered could become a reality as early as next year, at least with a soft launch. I’m busy outlining this potential class while reading everything that I can to help me prepare the lessons I would teach if we decide to move forward with my proposal.

The class as I’m outing it is basically a philosophy class. The tentative title is “Philosophy of Human Flourishing” which takes its inspiration from “The Human Flourishing Program” at Harvard University. Today, I mentioned the possibility of this class to some of my students. You see, I have two rituals to start each class: (1) a “Song of the Day” that ties into the lesson and (2) a “Question of the Day” that sometimes is connected but at other times can be contextual (e.g. “favorite Halloween candy?” near Halloween) or frivolous (e.g. “what’s your favorite fruit?”). Today, for my “Religion in Global Context” students, I asked, “What’s one ‘big question’ that you would like to have answered some day?” They shared some excellent questions (e.g. “Is there a God?”; “What’s true success?”). This is why I told them about the possible class we may offer. Some students seemed quite excited. A couple of seniors in the class expressed disappointment that they’ll graduate before it’s offered (not that they’ll be graduated but that we didn’t offer it earlier).

Then one student asked a good question, one I’ve been asking myself: “And this is a religion credit?” He didn’t say it in a negative way. He sounded excited that such a class would count toward his religious studies requirement if he chose to take it next year. But it’s a question that I need to answer, whether it’s asked positively or negatively. Can a philosophy course be a religious studies course?

Let me provide a couple of reasons why my answer is “yes”.

(1) Paul Tillich’s definition of religion.
(2) Religion asks us to consider how we should live.

The Protestant Christian theologian Paul Tillich, wrote in his book Theology of Culture, pp. 7-8:

“Religion, in the most basic sense of the word, is ultimate concern.”

A philosophy of “the good life” or of “human flourishing” (A) is about ultimate concern as well, both in how we live for ourselves and how we live for others, and (B) religious answers can be explored philosophically. By this second statement I mean this: a religious answer doesn’t need to be mindlessly considered or submitted to because it’s “revelation” (if such a concept applies to a particular religious claim). All religious answers come from humans. Yes, the approach is often different when we come at things religiously rather than philosophically but that doesn’t mean that we can’t consider from a philosophical vantage point what religions claim. Religion exists, in part, because people have had questions about our existence. If Siddhartha Gautama thought that our primary problem was dukkha, i.e. “suffering” or “disease” or “dissatisfaction” we don’t have to dismiss his diagnosis just because it has been understood religiously. In fact, we don’t have to dismiss his prescription for healing, namely his Four Noble Truth and his Noble Eightfold Path, either.

Philosophy is a mindset that requires us to be reasonable, logical, open, critical in the best way. It asks us to question the traditions we’ve inherited not to ignore them. This means that even as a class is structured around asking students to think reasonably and critically and to be logical and sound in their arguments, not appealing to divine revelation or tradition as an easy escape from tough questions about how we should live, we can include the insights of the world’s great traditions and some of the most prominent minds like Jesus of Nazareth and the Prophet Muhammad. If they had opinions on how to live, and those opinions have shaped humanity, then we should consider them! Religion can be mixed throughout a philosophy-first course so that students are thinking about religious matters especially when ethics, morals, and values are involved.

This doesn’t depart from how we’ve taught religion at my school. Even in classes that are primarily “religious studies” there’s no side-stepping the rigorous demands of studying religion in an academic setting. For this reason, the dichotomy between religion and philosophy, at least when considered through a Tillichian definition, appears to be a methodological difference at best, and a false dichotomy at worst.

A final word on this from the perspective of someone teaching in an Episcopal school. The reason-revelation divide isn’t a strong one in my context. All texts, traditions, etc., that claim the status of “revelation” are engaged with “reason”. Anglicanism has the three-legged stool of (1) the Bible; (2) Tradition; and (3) Reason. Wesleyanism added a fourth: (4) Experience. Now, I’m aware that for many Anglicans and Wesleyans, these legs aren’t equal. The Bible and Tradition take precedent. But there’s an argument to be made that they’re equal because they’re mutually interdependent. The Bible contains reasoning about which we must reason. Tradition contains reasoning about which we must reason.

Episcopal schools face a unique double challenge. First, they serve as private religious schools that promote academics, scholarship, reason, science, and the Enlightenment values in a market where many religious schools don’t. Second, they serve as private religious schools in an increasingly—for better or worse—secular society. In all likelihood, the Episcopal Church must be prepared to represent an increasingly minority position both culturally, as the denomination shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, but also ideologically, as less and less space is made for those who value the benefits of a secular society, and who share a commitment to many Enlightenment ideals regarding rationality, science, and technology, but who remain drawn to religion/spirituality and what it offers us. Our culture is sometimes pulled between extremes like exclusivist Christian Nationalism on one side and religiously disaffiliated, even anti-religious, secularism on the other side. For those who don’t want to give up their Christianity, or maybe I should say their religiosity, but who also embrace what it means to be a modern person, what survives of the Episcopal Church will (hopefully) carve out this small space that will be an essential space for many. It must be a space that embraces pluralism and openness but also welcomes people to discuss, think, and practice spirituality and value-formation. For this reason, I don’t see a contradiction between offering a class that counts toward one’s religious studies in a private religious school that happens to be heavy on philosophy and that introduces and explores religious concepts from a philosophical perspective. It’s what I’ve been doing for over eight years now!

(Of course, there’s nothing that says we can’t reframe the requirement as “Religion and Philosophy” which would be something you might see in many Catholic schools where theology and philosophy have been in dialogue from the beginning; where Thomas Aquinas, arguably the greatest and most influential thinker within Catholicism, was shaped by Aristotle as much as he was the Bible and Catholic Tradition.)

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Asking good questions while reading…and while living

I’ve mentioned this in a blog post years ago (see “How I teach hermeneutics to my students”) but it’s something I’ve been thinking about recently, so I’m writing about it again. In graduate school, I had a professor named Gary Tuck. In one of my first classes, he had us get in groups during the week where we’d read the beginning of the Book of Genesis—the first couple of chapters if my memory serves me correctly—and we had to come up with a long list of questions. (My memory tells me one hundred of them but that may be a mistake. It may have been fifty? I can’t recall precisely.) It seemed peculiar at the time but once we were done, I realized why he had us do it. We were forced to just ask questions. This meant that we were forced to read the text closely. We were forced to cultivate an awareness of our ignorance rather than just seeking answers. We were forced to revisit a text that many of us thought we knew. Our questions showed us that great texts can be visited time and time again with each visit delivering something new, something fresh for us to see.

I’ve duplicated this exercise for several years now. I ask my questions to put on different “lenses” asking historical, sociological, literary, and theological/philosophical questions as they read smaller excerpts. It’s a tough ask. Simultaneously, I can see it wear out some students while enlivening others. The students who enjoy it must sense what’s happening, much like I did after I followed Dr. Tuck’s instructions. The students who don’t understand the value of the exercise often do later. I’ll read their reflections when they tell me about something important, something paradigm shifting they learned in my class (see “An assessment that I’m glad I gave [and how it relates to what I’ve been saying about biblical studies]”), and it’s almost always hermeneutics or even metacriticism. It’s almost always about how they used to approach the Bible and how they do it differently now. It’s rarely a random observation from the Bible but instead a discussion of their presuppositions and paradigms. When it is about something specific in the Bible, lurking in the background is a hermeneutical shift that allowed them to ask good questions about messianism or Markan Christology or something of the sort.

The other day, as I walked students through the Second Creation Narrative of the Book of Genesis, I had a student ask a brilliant question. In this story, “the Lord God” doesn’t want humans to have the knowledge of good and evil though he places a tree the fruit of which can provide them with this knowledge in their utopian, paradise garden and he gives them a commandment to not eat from it. They eat from it. There are consequences (some say curses) upon all the characters involved: the man, the woman, the snake. One student asked, “If the humans don’t know what’s good and evil, how could they understand that it was wrong to disobey a commandment.”

There may be a good exegetical answer for a question like this (though Hebrew Narrative is notorious for leaving massive plot holes, maybe intentionally) but I’m less excited about the possibility of providing answers to their questions than I am that they ask questions like this in the first place. Whether or not they read the Bible as adults is a secondary concern. In a sense, whether they’re all avid readers (which I would hope for them but I’m a realist) is secondary. It’s the openness. It’s the curiosity. It’s the posture toward a text and in a sense, all the world can be a text. If we ask good questions, we’re on our way to living a good life. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in a letter once (see Maria Popover’s “Live the Questions: Rilke on Embracing Uncertainty and Doubt as a Stabilizing Force” for a deeper exploration):

“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

I love this mentality toward reading, thinking, and living. I think it’s freeing. I hope my students don’t learn to ask questions thinking that I’m restricting an exercise like this one to reading the Bible. I hope that it’s a paradigm shift that shapes how they live their lives!

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“If people think you amount to something, distrust yourself.”

Major in the Being an Influencer?
Texas Public Radio reported this week that, “The University of Texas at San Antonio is launching a college degree program in becoming a digital social media influencer.” When I saw this news on my Facebook feed, I had to check to make sure that it wasn’t April 1st. It wasn’t. The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) received “Carnegie R1 classification,” so it’s a good university but this didn’t sound like the type of degree program that a good university would launch. I presume that the people putting together this program know better than I do whether there’s a market for it and whether or not such a program will enhance or harm their brand. So, the only thing I know to say about this is what I said on Threads last night:

I’m old enough to remember when blogs, and then social media like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, was fun. It was fun because it allowed you to connect and reconnect. It helped you find people with similar interests. It could turn ugly at times—especially blog comments—but most of the time it seemed like Internet 2.0 was constructive. Something changed with the ability to “Like” this or that. And when Twitter shifted away from calling connections “Friends” to calling them “Followers,” it felt like we entered an era where social media was performative, theatrical.

We’re constantly tempted to “build an audience”; to turn ourselves into a “brand”. I won’t lie, it would be nicer to get more than 2-3 responses on Threads. I would like to have more people reading my blog. But I don’t have in me what it takes to turn one’s self into something marketable; into a product. This may be why I don’t understand what people at UTSA appear to understand.

Plato’s Warning
In Book I of The Republic, Plato’s Socrates says the following of “good men” who will consent to lead others (Lee’s translation, p. 29):

“So good men will not consent to govern for cash or honors. They do not want to be called mercenary for exacting cash payments for the work of government, or thieves for making money on the side; and they will not work for honors, for they aren’t ambitious. We must therefore bring compulsion to bear and punish them if they refuse—perhaps that’s why it’s commonly considered improper to accept authority except with reluctance or under pressure; and the worst penalty for refusal is to be governed by someone worse than themselves. That is what, I believe, frightens honest men into accepting power, and they approach it not as if it were something desirable out of which they were going to do well, but as if it were something unavoidable, which they cannot find anyone better or equally qualified to undertake.”

I don’t think it’s true that people who want to lead should be completely adverse to pay, or honor, or even power. I do think there remains something to Plato’s/Socrates’ observation though. Many misguided people are drawn to leadership, politics, power, influence, etc., for the worst of reasons. Many good people have found themselves in the mud of politics for the sole reason that their opponent, if not defeated, would wreak havoc. As Socrates quips, “That is what…frightens honest men into accepting power”. They know that if they don’t do it, someone who shouldn’t do it will. They would be happy not leading, not influencing, but they lead/influence to prevent those who shouldn’t lead/influence from doing so.

I thought of this when I heard of UTSA’s program. Who will it draw? What kind of person wants to be an influencer for the sake of being an influencer? What kind of culture creates what has become, in essence, the job “influencer”? Have we lost the necessary fear of misleading people? Do I want people to spend money on a product just because it was given to me for free, or to take up a trend because by encouraging others to do so, I gain more attention? This seems unhealthy. It may be that it isn’t. I can’t know for sure. But if it’s to be done in a healthy way, there needs to be a lot more self-reflection from the students than we see from your average influencer.

Epictetus’ Warning
I’ve increasingly been thinking about what it means to live a good life—a genuinely good life. I presume that the nearness of fatherhood has intensified this for me. So, tonight, as I was reading excerpts from Epictetus’ Encheiridion (translated by Nicholas White) found in The Good Life edited by Charles Guignon, I came across these lines (pp. 57-58):

“If you want to make progress, let people think you are a mindless fool about externals, and do not desire a reputation for knowing about them. If people think you amount to something, distrust yourself. Certainly it is not easy to be on guard both for one’s choices to be in accord with nature and also for externals, and a person who concerns himself with the one will be bound to neglect the other.”

A footnote explains, “‘Making progress; (prokoptein) os the Stoic expression for movement in the direction of the ideal condition for a human being…” It’s implied that this saying suggests that those who truly want to experience full human flourishing can’t be concerned with how one is perceived. In fact, flattery and praise should give pause: “If people think you amount to something, distrust yourself.”

“
18th-century portrait of Epictetus, including his crutch” via Wikimedia

Again: “distrust yourself”.

I read in this the reminder to not let one’s ego become inflated by the praise of other. You can’t buy into your own brand. You must maintain a healthy sense of skepticism toward your own ideas, accomplishments, successes, and especially when others praise you. Distrust the part of you that, in the words of St. Paul (Romans 12:3), “think of yourself more highly than you ought”. As he said in the next part of that statement, “think of yourself with sober judgment”. Remain self-aware. Remain transparent to yourself. Remain honest about your flaws.

Our world is full of people who never second guess themselves when they should—the Andrew Tate’s, the Jake Paul’s of this world. And we’re becoming a culture that increasingly celebrates that stubborn narcissism. But I presume that such lives have dark, hidden areas that none of us would want to live with on a day to day basis and I predict that they’re untenable. Self-destruction awaits those who show no concern for wisdom. We need more of what Plato, Epictetus, and St. Paul offer us, so I hope students applying to UTSA will consider programs in higher education that cultivate their humanity

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Would Plato approve of children reading the story of “Noah’s Ark”?

I’ve been rereading through Plato’s The Republic recently. In Book II, as he has his characters Adeimantus and Socrates imagine the ideal society, they begin discussing what kind of books they would want the youth of their society to read as part of their education. They agree that education should focus on “mind and character”. And that this education should “include stories” of “two kinds, true stories and fiction” (Lee’s translation, p. 68).

But then Socrates asks:

“Shall we therefore readily allow our children to listen to any stories made up by anyone, and to form opinions that are for the most part the opposite of those we think they should have when they grow up.”

Adeimantus replies, “We certainly shall not.” Socrates goes on to say that the ideal society would have to supervise what books are read (p. 69). Now, at a time where our country is debating the banning of books in libraries and schools, this may sound a little fascist. I don’t know if Plato should be read as saying he wants this to happen, or just that this is what it would take to create an ideal society even if he’s not committed to the actions that Socrates floats. Either way, Socrates says, “The greater part of the stories current today we shall have to reject.”

For Socrates, this includes Hesiod (e.g. the Theogony) and Homer (The Iliad; The Odyssey). Adeimantus asks, “What sort of stories do you mean and what fault do you find in them?” To which Socrates responds, “The worst fault possible…especially if the fiction is an ugly one.” He explains this as “Misrepresenting the nature of gods and heroes…” (p. 69).

The Gods Aren’t Good
Anyone who is familiar with Greek mythology knows that the gods aren’t moral exemplars. They’re powerful but often they’re not nice, or honest, etc. Of these stories, Socrates says, they are “not fit as it is to be lightly repeated to the young and foolish” even if these stories were true! He believes only a small select group should be trusted with these stories and their memorization. But this would never include youth.

Socrates says, “Nor shall any young audience be told that anyone who commits horrible crimes, or punished his father unmercifully, is doing nothing out of the ordinary but merely what the first and greatest of gods have done before.” Additionally, “Nor can we permit stories of wars and plots and battles among the gods; they are quite untrue.” For Socrates, young, impressionable minds can’t discern how to interpret these texts. The gods are important. This is how they live. Shouldn’t they be mimicked?

Teaching Children Healthy Theology
A few years ago, I had a friend who said they were generally comfortable with the church they were attending because they knew that their kids were being taught things like “God is love” and “God loves everyone”. Like Socrates, this friend didn’t think his children should learn stories from the Bible where the theology is suspect; where God is violent or behaves in such a way that if humans mimicked the Bible’s God, we’d have problems! Socrates ays, “…we should therefore surely regard it as of the utmost importance that the first stories they hear shall aim at encouraging the highest excellence of character”. In other words, choose good and uplifting theology if you’re going to teach any theology at all (p. 70).

Later, Socrates argues that good theology takes precedent over stories about the divine (p. 71). He says, “God must surely always be represented as he really is…in reality of course god is good, and he must be so described.” Socrates’ god is the source of good and not evil: “…while god must be held to be the sole cause of good, we must look for some factors other than god as a cause of evil.”

What about Noah’s Ark?
A few years ago, I wondered aloud how old a child or adolescent must be to read, say, the story of “Noah’s Ark” with maturity. As I read Plato, this thought crossed my mind again. I agree with my friend, and Socrates, that if you’re going to participate in god-talk with children then your theology better be about love and goodness and all that nurtures, uplifts, and provided security to a child. Some of the trash theology that I heard when I was young—like the idea that the “Rapture” could happen leaving me on earth during the “Great Tribulation” to suffer divine wrath—shouldn’t be taught period but especially to young children. That can be traumatizing! And I know from experience that it harms adolescents as well.

In spite of these concerns, many parents read books like this:

The animals are so happy. Noah is so happy. Yet humanicide occurred and most of the animals are dead underneath those waters. I see no reason to sanitize this story just to share it with children. We can wait until they’re older. As Socrates said about the stories of Hesiod and Homer: even if they’re true, indelible minds shouldn’t encounter them during formative years.

How Old is Old Enough?
Four years ago, I asked these questions in the aforementioned post:

“So, when should children read the story of Noah and the Ark? When are they mature enough? Is it ok to introduce it to them as a happy story about God saving animals when they’re young and then return to it later to discuss some of the more complex, even disturbing aspects of the story later?”

When I consider the kind of media my students consume through YouTube and TikTok, I presume their readiness to read and critically engage stories like this one. But I’m not sure the middle schoolers at my school should be learning about stories like these. Maybe they’re ready. Maybe they’re mature enough. But we must remember that many people who read religious texts presume that the presentation of god in those texts is prescriptive to our theology in some way. If this is so, then maybe they should wait until high school to read Hesiod, Homer, and “Moses”. Until then, we should emphasize positive theology.

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Some inspiring reasons to read the Bible

In my last post (see “Some uninspiring reasons to read the Bible”), I outlined four reasons for reading the Bible that used to inspire me but that no longer do: (1) reading the Bible as an inerrant/infallible text; (2) reading the Bible as a source of doctrinal proof texts; (3) reading the Bible from an “originalist” perspective because it shows the “original intent and goals of Christianity” that should be pursued to this day; and (4) for professional development purposes. So, if these approaches that used to matter to me are inspiring no longer, what does inspire me?

The Bible as a tool for thinking about history
Much of the Bible is mythology. I don’t say that pejoratively. Myth teaches us truths. It teaches us about ourselves. But it doesn’t stand up to the rigorous demands of critical historical research, or our modern scientific method, etc. That being said, it can teach us a few things about history: (A) it does preserve some historical data; (B) it tells us about the historical roots of Judaism and Christianity; (C) it shows us that the world isn’t static; (D) it reminds us that if history doesn’t trouble you, then what you’re experiencing is propaganda.

Regarding (A), archaeologists and historians have used the Bible to help them discover and understand the past. I’m thinking about say some of the developments in the Kingdom of Judah during the reign of King Hezekiah. Or how the New Testament when paired with the writings of the historian Josephus give us most of our access to first-century Galilee and Judea. So, the Bible does have historical value, even if other major sections of the Bible, like the Exodus, or Jesus’ resurrection, are inaccessible through the tools used by historians.

Regarding (B), both Judaism and Christianity take and have taken inspiration/guidance from the collection called the Tanakh or Old Testament and Christianity has been inspired/guided by the New Testament. These aren’t the only sources of inspiration/guidance for these religions but they are prominent ones. If we want to understand the roots of these religions, the Bible’s presentation of history is valuable and if we consider how to Bible has been used in these religions, a.k.a. its “reception history,” then the Bible’s continued value helps us understand these religions, whether from the inside or the outside.

Regarding (C), an exercise that I’ll have my student do in a couple of week is a comparison between 2 Samuel 24:1-25 and I Chronicles 21:1-30. Both of these texts are about how King David took a census that upset Israel’s God leading to a plague on the people. 2 Samuel is believed by most scholars to have been written in the 6th century BCE whereas 1 Chronicles can be placed in 4th century BCE. In 2 Samuel, it’s Israel’s God that provokes King David to take the census and then judges David and the people for David’s sin. This is an uncomfortable depiction of divinity: God as both tempter and judge. In 1 Chronicles, a character known as satan (an “accuser” or an “attacker”) is the one who provokes David to disobedience. 1 Chronicles’s theology removes God from being directly responsible for human evil/disobedience which is a vision of God that better aligns with the theologies we find in most forms of Judaism and Christianity today. This exercise shows students that history preserves the evolution of theology because humans visions about “God” are continually changing and in some sense, this provides readers of the Bible with an impetus to continue in this tradition of rethinking what we mean when we say “God”. History and the history of our religions isn’t static.

Regarding (D), the Bible can be troubling. My students find themselves wrestling with God’s command to flood the earth; or the Akeda where Abraham seems willing to sacrifice Isaac to his god; or King David’s violence and sexual abuse. As if politicians in Oklahoma and Texas have their way, the Bible will be taught as uncomplicated history! But again (and I don’t know the original source of this very accurate quote), if what you learn about history isn’t complicated and doesn’t make you a bit uncomfortable, then what you’re learning is not history but propaganda. And to be fair, the Bible is full of propaganda: just look at how the Davidic line is presented in Chronicles compared to Samuel.

The Bible as a tool for thinking about literature
The Bible is excellent literature. This is what brings me back to it time and time again at this stage in my life. Have you ever read the Book of Job? The wisdom of the Book of Ecclesiastes? This stuff is brilliant. The characters are simple (e.g. we don’t see their thought lives or motivations) and yet somehow extremely complicated (maybe because we are responsible, as readers, for providing them with thought lives and motivation).

I doubt many English high school teachers expect their students to return time and time again 1984, or To Kill a Mockingbird, or Catcher in the Rye. Instead, these books are used to try to install a love of literature, reading, fictional worlds, narrative, etc. The Bible can be taught the same way. And with this in mind, it relieves me of some of the disappointments I mentioned in the last post, namely knowing that many of my students won’t read the Bible as adults. Most of them will engage the Bible through the filter of a pastor or a priest, maybe through the bubble-wrapped presentation of a devotional, but rarely from the challenging, in-depth perspectives that I try to acquaint them with.

The Bible as a tool for thinking about philosophy and theology
While I’m quite uncomfortable with using the Bible to create normative, constructive, prescriptive theology, especially because the God of the Bible is far to anthropomorphized for my taste, I think the Bible can remain provocative for our thoughts about God. Retiring to the Book of Job: I don’t think the author intended for his readers to come to the conclusion that human suffering can be the result of the Creator God having a petty wager with an angelic being. Instead, there are two message that I find probably: (1) the Creator’s world is full of suffering, pain, death, chaos, and you, dear human, are no freer from this reality than a whale, or an elephant, or a dog, all of which derive from the same creative power as we humans do; (2) most attempts to come up with a satisfying theodicy will be comical, at best, and harmful, at worst, just as the “God-Satan bet” at the beginning, or Job’s friends theologies throughout, show us.

Furthermore, the Bible can help us think philosophically. I’m reading Plato’s The Republic again right now. And while I get there are differences, I do think that just as this book can provoke us to think philosophically, especially regarding ethics and politics, so can biblical books like the Books of Daniel and Esther, for example. In fact, juxtaposing Daniel and Esther can be very helpful as both books appear to be Jewish texts written under Greek rule that look back on previous Persian (and to a lesser extent, Babylonian) rule. Daniel’s message is much like deontological ethics: stay true to your convictions no matter if it leads you to a fiery furnace or a lion’s den. (And maybe you’ll be divinely delivered but you do your duty even if no deliverance comes.) Whereas Esther’s message (at least in the original Hebrew version) leaves Esther making pragmatic decisions for her survival and the survival of her people with no expectation of divine deliverance no absolute fidelity to her ancestral laws and customs if those laws and customs leave her and her people vulnerable to extinction. A reader doesn’t need to share the theology of Daniel or Esther to wonder whether deontological ethics or consequentialist ethics are more valuable in the long run. These are philosophical questions that these biblical books can help us consider.

The Bible as a tool liturgical reflection
Finally, I admit this: the Bible is a book better preached than taught, sometimes. (This can be abused though.) It’s a book that’s better read prayerfully, whether individually or communally, than it is scholastically. It’s a book that’s better suited to get us thinking about the divine than it is telling us what to think about the divine. It’s better read like we read poetry than touches us than it is science, history, law, etc.

Maybe I say this because I’ve been around the Episcopal Church for nearly a decade and this view of the Bible sits well in the tradition that is unified not so much around a shared creed as around the type of practiced Christianity advocated by the Book of Common Prayer. Reading the Bible as a wisdom text, or as resource for meditation, makes sense to me. This means reading it openly, non-dogmatically, and in the vernacular of many younger people, spiritually but not religiously (a dichotomy that I don’t think holds when critically evaluated but a “feeling” that I understand).

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Some uninspiring reasons to read the Bible

In a few days, I’ll begin my seventeenth semester/ninth year teaching classes on the Bible in a high school setting. As I’ve mentioned in a few other posts, I’ve struggled at this stage in my life to find motivation for reading the Bible or about the Bible. (Start with “Is Biblical Studies Boring or Am I Just a Fox Now?” if you’re interested.) There is part of me that worries that this will impact my teaching; there is part of me that’s confident that I can continue to find joy in teaching the material, even as I adjust my personal rationale for engaging it. In this post, I want to talk about four reasons for reading the Bible that used to be inspiring to me at different life-stages but that no longer attract me. In a future post, I’ll provide a few reasons for continuing to read the Bible that are valuable to me now.

Inerrancy/Infallibility
When I began reading the Bible, it was because I had accepted the claim that the Bible is a divine book, the “Word of God,” and that it was perfect in all its claims with regard to history, science, morals/ethics, etc. It didn’t take too long to realize that this view was untenable, though in some of the evangelical circles with which I affiliated, it was a necessary “shibboleth,” so I did spend a few years trying to determine whether I could speak about the Bible this way by which I mean, I spent a few years trying to determine whether I had a place in evangelicalism. I didn’t. I can’t argue for the historicity of the Great Deluge. I don’t think the creation myths in the Bible should be held to the standard of our modern cosmologies or even read as doing the same thing. I don’t think there’s justification for the violent and genocidal theology of the Book of Joshua.

Admittedly, in retrospect, there was something very attractive about the doctrine of inerrancy. It’s a proud doctrine. Basically, it empowers people to say, “I may not be educated in [insert one of the many hundreds of fields of human knowledge from biology to physics], but I know the Bible”. This leads to a dangerous arrogance that can be heard over pulpits all across our country every Sunday, as pastors talk about everything from the origins of humanity, to gender and sexuality, to warfare and violence, etc. These preachers, usually men, act as philosopher kings ruling over mini-kingdoms justifying their foundationless claims by citing a random part of the Bible. It can be an addictive drug.

Doctrinal proof texting
Related to the previous motivation is the motivation to read the Bible as a source of doctrinal proof texting. I was raised Oneness Pentecostal. According to many in our circles, we were the “true church” with the “whole Gospel”. Since we began with “the Truth” (yes, capital “T”), we didn’t need to learn so much as learn to defend. This same phenomenon can be found in many Christian denominations, to a greater or lesser degree. The Bible serves as a repository of timeless, errorless truth claims, often of a metaphysical variety. Lip service is given to hermeneutics, so it’s acknowledge that interpretation plays a role, but the subtext is that we know the answer is “4” so our only real question is whether we need to use “3+1”; “2+2″; or 1+3” to get there. This is apologetics in a nutshell.

The book that rescued me from this admittedly terrible and boring way of reading the Bible was R. Alan Culpepper’s Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design. The realization that the Bible is more narrative than anything else was freeing. We read narrative differently than we read case law. The Bible turns boring really fast when all we’re doing is reading it to confirm that this or that proposition from the Bible is the right and defensible one.

Originalism
When I abandoned inerrancy/infallibility, and the desire to debate using proof texting, the next step was originalism. By this I mean something like “constitutional originalism,” i.e. the idea that the true meaning of a text is the meaning intended by its original author. But I should add that even after I had abandoned the idea that this text was without error, I was shaped by the idea that the parts of the Bible that continued to be normative and authoritative for my life were the parts that reflected historicity, especially around the person of Jesus of Nazareth. I spent many years obsessed with the field of study known as “historical Jesus studies”. It wasn’t a dispassionate interest. Instead, it had more to do with whether we could discover the “real” and “original” Jesus through the biblical text, and once he was found, he could become the hermeneutic tool for reinterpreting the Bible, Christian tradition, and theology.

For many liberal Protestants, this is a way to have the foundationalism offered by doctrines like inerrancy but with a little more sophistication. I’m thinking of scholars like John Dominic Crossan or the late Marcus Borg but also even some more conservative theologians like N.T. Wright who realize inerrancy is difficult to defend but who want to retain some source of authority that’s akin to inerrancy without falling back on “Christian tradition”. My problem is that historical Jesus studies has created hundreds of different Jesuses. We didn’t find the “real” Jesus. We won’t. We don’t know much about him, honestly. (This isn’t the same claim as the mythicists who think there was no historical person known as Jesus of Nazareth; instead, it’s the claim that what we can know about him through our sources is pretty sparse, though a lot more than most people from his social and ethnic grouping in his geographical reason during his time in history.)

The basic idea here is that if we can get back to Jesus, or get back to the “original” Christianity, then we can realign ourselves with the right, correct vision that Christianity offers. But this assumes that Christianity in the first-century CE had “arrived”. That the “original, apostolic church” got it and that we lost it and that we need to recover it. This is the inspiration of the Pentecostal movement that I left as well as every “restorationist” Christianity from the Latter-day Saints to the Jehovah’s Witnesses to the Adventists to twentieth-century American Fundamentalism…you get the idea. But what if Christianity has never “arrived” and what is there’s no perfect, correct Christianity to recover kind of like there’s no single, accurate, unified interpretation of the United States Constitution to which we can return? I’m of the persuasion that those of us who remain Christians at this time must (1) try to create a Christianity that makes sense for us here and now and (2) accept that this will never be the “correct” approach to Christianity because no such objective vantage point has or ever will exist.

Professional development
The first three are rooted in an epistemology. They’re rooted in an approach to knowledge and a desire to know, which isn’t bad in and of itself, obviously, but each approach puts more weight on the Bible than the Bible is able to bear. Once I realized this, my main interest in researching and writing about the Bible, attending conferences about the Bible, etc., was for professional development. I wanted to be the best scholar of the Bible that I could be. But this has lost its shine. For now, I’ll remain somewhat engaged with the Society of Biblical Literature but as I prepare to welcome my first child in November, I admit that I’m wondering to myself whether I want to travel during the first part of Thanksgiving Break every year, likely around the time of my child’s birthday, to hear academic papers about this or that bit of biblical minutiae. Not to disparage this field of study. It matters. States like Oklahoma and Texas are trying to shove the Bible back into public school curriculum and they’re doing it in bad faith. They’re not teaching the Bible as part of objective cultural history or to understand this or that aspect of our modern world; they’re doing it to indoctrinate. We need scholars of the Bible who can challenge and check this disingenuous dogmatism. And for those scholars to exist, they need to do increasingly specialized research on a limited collection of texts that has been mined over and over and over again for centuries now. This keeps them adding to human knowledge and making our colleges and university system what they are. But I’m not that person.

I work in a private high school. I rarely get questions about the text that are provocative or new. In a sense, the depth of my teaching remains more like an introductory textbook on the Bible than a monograph about “gender relations in ancient Persia as reflected in the Book of Esther”. I’m providing my students with the very basics and it’s rare that I’ll have any students who will go on to do a deeper dive after they’re left high school. (As I’ve mentioned, out of the hundreds of students that I’ve taught the Bible to, only one has gone on to study the Bible in college and then go to seminary.) This has made it difficult for me to want to do too deep a dive. It has become apparent that there are better uses of my time and intellectual pursuits not because the academic study of the Bible isn’t valuable but because I don’t have much of a professional reason to dive into the nitty gritty of John’s Christology or Paul’s vision of justification. Mostly, I provide general overviews of the interpretive options that my students have and mostly, they’re satisfied with that.

For years, I’ve tried to muster the energy to turn my doctoral thesis into something but I don’t have it in me. I don’t think another book on John the Baptist is a good use of my time since it won’t (A) do much of anything for the world and (B) satisfy my own curiosity. If it would be (A) or (B), then maybe I’d find the inspiration. Maybe this will change but it’s how I feel right now and honestly, it’s how I’ve felt increasingly since finishing my Ph.D.

All four of these reasons for reading the Bible were once my primary motivation. This isn’t the case anymore, so as I said above, I need to reflect on what does bring me back to these texts, which I’ll address soon.

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If I could select the courses high school freshmen take

Where I work, I’m part of an advisory cycle that sticks with the same students for their freshmen-sophomore years, then returns back to freshmen. I’m back to advising freshmen this year after finishing a two year cycle with my last group of now juniors. This has me thinking about what selection of courses I wish they were taking if I had the power to determine such things.

First, with regard to their English, Math, and Science classes, I wouldn’t make any changes. As far as I can tell, those department chairs have things handled and honestly, I don’t know enough about those disciplines to speak to how things should be. Our school has a structure called “core four” where each year they must take an English, History, Math, and Science class. Since students should have seven classes per semester, that takes three of the spaces.

Currently, we have a history sequence called “Global Studies I” and “Global Studies II” which are world history classes for freshmen and sophomores. A colleague of mine is teaching an elective this year on the Holocaust for juniors and seniors and he’s introducing them to historiography around the Holocaust and how to engage primary sources. This elective is great for theory and method. If it were up to me, “Global Studies I” would be more like that elective. The first semester may be a 10,000 foot overview of ancient history but the second semester should be theory and method. I’ve noticed that many high school students can’t articulate why we study history other than say, “avoiding the mistakes of the past”. This is one good reason but hardly the only reason. We need to teach students the “why and how” of history and not just the “what”. (As you can see, I’m impressed by what my colleague, a historian himself, is doing!)

That leaves three spaces for art and/or religion, a world language, an elective if they don’t take either their religion/art class, or if they’re in our Corps of Cadets, the class required to be involved. As with English, Math, and Science, I don’t have a strong opinion on what art class a student should take. Where I work, the world language option is Latin or Spanish. Obviously, depending on the student and their interests, they’ll do well to learn either of those.

This brings me to my arena: religion. In part, I’m happy to see that many freshmen take one of their two required semesters of religion, if not both. But there’s something that I’m more and more convinced, whether or not it fits under the umbrella of “religion” or not, would be even better for freshmen for at least one semester: a class on living the good life. In short, this would be a class focusing on what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, finding the highest good as a human. This would require a heavy dose of ethics, since, as Macklemore says in “Growing Up”: “The quickest way to happiness learning to be selfless/Ask more questions, talk about yourself less”. Thinking about others, which is a focus of ethics, is part of the path toward eudaimonia. But so is asking the question: what does it mean to be human? What are humans for?

Education in our capitalist society focuses a lot of how to give students the tools they need to succeed by the metrics of capitalist values but we fail to help students see that their value lies beyond this form of achievement. (I discuss this a bit in “Education as rooted innovation”.) We say this to them. For example, our chaplain says this to them every day in various ways in chapel. But do we give them the philosophical tools to help them evaluate their values in light of society’s values and how society values them? A class like this one would do that.

I’m one of those that thinks law students, biology majors, engineering students, etc., should take a class like this in college. Why? Because as we learned in the original Jurassic Park:

And we need to teach students to stop and think if they should. Will such and such a behavior be good for you and others? Will such and such a goal be good for you and others? If the college system won’t take on this challenge, then we must do so at the level of secondary education. (This is especially true in a school like mine that is tied to the Episcopal Church.) And we should do it as they begin high school so that they have the tools for self-evaluation, self-reflection, self-awareness, and self-acceptance from the beginning.

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Reading without comprehending

I’ve been reading Scott Soames’ The World Philosophy Made: From Plato to the Digital Age. As I near the end of chapter 6, I can say that it’s a great book so far and I imagine it will be through to the end. Its main thesis is that in spite of comments to the contrary (e.g. Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and parents of most philosophy majors), philosophy can be credited with shaping the world we have for the better and with continuing to do so. Soames shows his readers how philosophers have helped birth many other disciplines, including the sciences as we know them, but how it also continues to speak to our politics, our concepts of language, rational choice, mind-body relations, and much more.

There are two chapters that I’m confident are good ones but also that I found humbling: Chapter 5, “Modern Logic and Foundations of Mathematics” and Chapter 6, “Logic, Computation, and the Birth of the Digital Age”. Admittedly, much of chapter 6 left me lost, not because of anything Soames did wrong in writing it, but because I struggle with these concepts. I’ve struggled with mathematics since high school. As soon as they introduced “x” and “y” in the equations, my brain became allergic. There’s a reason why my primary philosophy/theological/historical interests have to do with things more social-science-y!

Gottlob Frege receives a lot of attention in both chapters; Kurt Gödel receives a lot of attention in chapter 6. These men seem brilliant. I understand the gist: their work in logic, and the logic of mathematics, laid the foundations for computability. The modern digital world owes them a ton. But the details escape me as Soames mentions this formula and that formula. My poor “it took me two attempts to pass Algebra I” brain tries to comprehend what I’m reading but I must admit, I’m lost most of the time.

This humbling experience has a dual silver lining though: (1) it reminds me to be patient with my students who try and fail to understand the material in which I have expertise; (2) it functions sort of like Umberto Eco’s “Antilibrary” reminding me that there’s still so much about our world that I have to discover and better understand. Let me say a little about each point.

Regarding (1), I’ve been reading the Bible since I was young. I’ve been around religion for the same amount of time. My undergraduate, two graduate, and doctoral degrees all focused on religion and theology. I’ve been teaching on these subjects for over a decade, including eight full years in a high school setting. (I began my ninth year this week). It’s the water I swim in daily. And it’s easy to see a student flailing and think, “Why is this concept so hard to understand? It’s simple, really!” But is it simple, really, or is it really simple for me? I have students in my class who can go to another classroom and take a physics or calculus exam who would do way better than me if I were put in the same situation. It’s not that they’re not smart enough; it’s that they lack familiarity. I need to be patient and provide them with the tools to make my discipline more familiar to them.

Regarding (2), I won’t say much because Maria Popova at The Marginalia has an excellent post on this topic that’s worth your time: “Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones”. But in short, the intellectual Umberto Eco argues that it’s actually good to have a library with books you haven’t read/won’t read. Those books sit there reminding you, “you don’t know everything; you have so much—so much!— to learn”. The aforementioned chapters are having a similar effect on me.

As I flip ahead to Chapter 7, “The Science of Language,” in Soames book, I feel like I’m on more secure ground already. I’ve thought about some of this. I can follow the argument. There are less formulae! But I’m glad I struggled through chapter 6 and that I’m doing my best to walk in complete darkness through the end of chapter 7. Maybe someday I’ll be able to understand this stuff but it’s the discipline of trying to learn, reading even when I need help comprehending, that eventually strengthens the mind to understand. But not to understand everything, and that’s ok.

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The apocalyptic Jesus is Plato’s just man

I live with a form of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, I find Jesus of Nazareth to be the greatest moral exemplar, likely due to my upbringing, culture, and religion. On the other hand, I’m aware that his morality was shaped in a context very different from my own, most importantly as a first-century CE Jewish person living in Galilee and Judea, which was under Roman occupation, who held to an apocalyptic understanding of the world which from our perspective seems to have been somewhat misplaced. For this reason, mere parroting of Jesus’ ethics may not be wise for most of us, if such a thing is even possible. So, as a Christian, I try to ask myself what it means to live in some form of alignment with Jesus’ vision of the good, though a version of the vision that is applicable to the twenty-first century.

The tricky business here is that this kind of mindset often leads to Christianities that may as well abandon any affiliation with Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, I would say that most American Christianities function in complete independence from anything related to Jesus. His “Sermon on the Mount” is critiqued as “woke”. His ideas are rejected by Christians as impractical (should we really treat people who are poor that way?!). Therefore, the label “Christian” retains a cultural significance as one that secures some form of status but it has little to do with the person that “Christians” have called “Christ”.

There is a part of me that thinks that only certain radical groups, like Anabaptists/Mennonites (with their emphasis on non-violence and simplicity), or the Christianities practiced by the oppressed and marginalized, are worthy of being affiliated with Jesus. This would leave me on the outside looking in, sort of like Nicodemus in the first part of the Gospel of John. But this might not be a bad thing. It reminds me of the American author and poet, Maya Angelou. When she was asked if she was a Christian, she responded:

“I’m always amazed when people walk up to me and say, ‘I’m a Christian.’ I think, ‘Already? You already got it?’ I’m working at it, which means that I try to be as kind and fair and generous and respectful and courteous to every human being.”

The long history of Christianity has shown that the word can mean anything. Therefore, the label “Christian” can mean anything. Christians can support unjust imperial power. Christians can be violent. Christians can demonize people because of their ethnic identities (think of the centuries of persecution of the Jews). Christians can be as addicted to wealth (think of the Prosperity Gospel). Christians can be harmfully superstitious (think of the “Word of Faith” movement or popular forms of “spiritual warfare”). Many brush this off by saying something like “Christians aren’t perfect, only Christ is” but that’s an excuse for maintaining the cultural value of the label Christian without taking seriously the demand that this word should have upon our lives (think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship*).

I live in South Texas where being “Christian” is an important label. To respond as Maya Angelou did would earn you suspicion from many. But when I say I’m a Christian, I mean something like what she did: “I’m working at it”. And honestly, many of the people who quickly and definitively name themselves “Christian” are the type of people who make the word mostly meaningless. I think, “if you’re a Christian, then clearly being a Christian means nothing for the world”. But I also think this of myself: if I’m a Christian, then Christianity needs help. I guess the important difference is self-awareness.

This being said, I find that Jesus can remain a moral exemplar even if his apocalyptic vision of the Kingdom of God coming to earth seems to have missed the mark. (Whether there’s some eschatological truth to his vision is impossible to address because we can’t know that truth until the end of our lives or the end of human history, so I find that debate unhelpful except to give people a reason to maintain a certain form of Christianity, which is fine if that works for others.) Jesus remains the type of person who stood not only for the marginalized and oppressed but with them. He wanted to see people restored, healed, and whole. He wanted to see oppressors regain their humanity. And he refused to contribute to our cycle of violence when he was cornered. (Whether Jesus was ideologically pacifistic seems beside the point; that he refused to engage his enemies violently when it really mattered says what needs to be said.)

"The Death of Socrates" by Jacques-Louis David (1787)
“The Death of Socrates” by Jacques-Louis David (1787)

In Book II of The Republic, Plato’s Socrates is discussing the meaning of “justice” and what it means to be a “just person”. Is “justice” just a construct that the powerful use to justify themselves? Or is justice something objective that can be measured over against whether someone has power? Socrates says to his interlocutor Glaucon, that the truly just man will be just for justice’s sake, not for the appearance of justice since being just for the appearance of justice is being “just” in order to gain a reputation that can be used for selfish gain. Socrates proposes that the most just a person can be is “to be and not seem good” (p. 45 of Lee’s translation). He states:

“We must, indeed, not allow him to seem good, for if he does he will have all the reward and honours paid to the man who has a reputation for justice; and we shall not be able to tell whether his motive is love of justice or love of the rewards and honours.”

For Socrates, the only person who can be clearly just, is the one “we must strip…of everything except justice”. He continues:

“Our just man must have the worst of reputations for wrongdoing even though he has done no wrong, so that we can test his justice and see if it weakens in the face of unpopularity and all that goes with it; we shall give him an undeserved and life-long reputation for wickedness, and make him stick to his chosen course until death.”

It has been noted that Plato likely has Socrates in view. Socrates was charged by the Athenians for being “impious” and for “corrupting the youth”. In a sense, these charges were accurate but the question is whether or not Socrates’ “impiety” and “corruption” were clearly evils or just evils perceived by the misguided worldview of the Athenians. Plato’s views seem clear here.

Jesus was perceived by his followers in much the same way. In short, Jesus is presented as a just man who was unjustly condemned by an unjust society. In fact, Plato writes something that is hard for Christians to read without thinking about Jesus, even though it was written centuries before Jesus** (again, from Lee, p. 45):

“…the just man, as we have pictured him, will be scourged, tortured, and imprisoned, his eyes will be put out, and after enduring every humiliation he will be crucified (or “impaled” depending on the translation), and learn at last that one should want not to be, but to seem just”

With those words, Plato’s Socrates draws a line between true justice and seeming justice. Justice exists, though rare, in the form of people who are so just that they will die for justice rather than take the easy path. Now, in a sense, this helps me with the question of whether or not Jesus’ ethics are completely relativized by his apocalypticism. If we read Jesus’ actions through Plato, what matters is that this just man Jesus was not rescued by divine intervention but went to his grave refusing to muscle the “Kingdom of God” into existence, which would only contribute to the cycles of violence that consume us. He used what life he had to try to bring the “Kingdom of God” by means of healing, care, forgiveness, empowerment, etc.

From this perspective, people like Martin Luther King Jr. are Christians. On the other hand, I’m in a category with Maya Angelou: “I try to be as kind and fair and generous and respectful and courteous to every human being”. I fail but I try. And I think Jesus’ vision, as read through Plato, remains worth our effort even if, as Jesus’ crucifixion, Socrates’ trial, and Dr. King’s assassination (not to mention all the other innocents) teach us, most of us must settle with wanting to be just rather than achieving it. More precisely, we must settle with wanting to want to be just, since is Jesus, Socrates, King, etc., are the measure of a just person, I think many of us would prefer to never be truly tested.

*Sadly, the copy of this book that’s available on Amazon has a forward by Eric Metaxes, who embodies how worthless the label “Christian” can be.

**For those who are curious about how Plato’s ideas about justice have been read with Jesus in view, see the very thorough article by Mateusz Stróżyński titled “Plato the Prophet? The Crucified Just Man in Republic and the New Testament”.