Tag: Jesus

Posted on

U2’s universal reconciliation

Inasmuch as I feel any amount of confidence in my theology as a Christian, I feel confident that if the Christian Gospel contains truth, or at least a truth structure that maps onto reality in ways that may be true (theopoetics), even when not literally true, then the doctrine of universal reconciliation, rooted in the epistles of St. Paul, and patristic thinkers like Origen of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa, is something I feel confident confessing (even if it’s debated whether those saints were committed to universal reconciliation themselves). I know it’s a minority position within the church, historically and presently. But if the logic of the Gospel is rooted in reality, i.e., we are reconciled to our Creator who prevented death from being the final word for created things by entering into our material reality in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, including the reality of dying, in order that even the dead may be alive in the Creator, then any created thing (or at least any sentient, created thing) over which death maintains a permanent claim would mean that the Creator has lost something of the creation to the finality of death, meaning that if the Creator is good, then this goodness has been proven limited in that the Creator didn’t redeem all that was brought into existence without consent because the Creator willed that we be brought into existence. If the Creator intends to bring all created things to a point of perfection (never finally reached, but always available to experience = theosis), or to encounter ongoing perfection, then I can live with the theodicy questions raised by Christian doctrine. If not, then I feel that Christian doctrine fails to adequately recognize the problem of theodicy.

I say all that to say that while I have no idea what soteriology is embraced by my favorite alternative rock band of all time, U2, I do find many lines that make my universalist heart happy, and I would like to discuss them through this lens.

Moment of Surrender
There’s a line in the song “Moment of Surrender” from the album No Line on the Horizon that has given me a phrase that encapsulates the message of Christian universalism: “It’s not if I believe in love/But if love believes in me”. This isn’t to deny the place of “belief” or “faith” or maybe more importantly “fidelity” to Christianity, but it is to say that there may be something to what I’ve heard others say about the soteriology of the Reformed theologian, Karl Barth, when he talks about how God has elected humanity in Christ. It seems from what I’ve read that Barth never made an explicit, undeniable claim to universalism (correct me if I’m wrong), but that his doctrine of election implied it. If Christ has united divinity and humanity so that God chooses us through Jesus’ humanity, then humanity will be redeemed, even ours. In this sense, what ultimately matters (and here the Reformed tradition may be on to something) is that God elects us, we don’t elect God. It’s not “if I believe in LOVE” (God is LOVE, 1 John 4:8, 16), “but if LOVE believes in me.” If we equate “belief” with “fidelity,” then it’s more important that God shows fidelity to humanity than that we show fidelity to God. God’s fidelity overcomes our infidelity.

Songs of Innocence
There are several locations in the album Songs of Innocence where I hear themes of universal reconciliation. In “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)”, we hear of the bands divine encounter with the music of the Ramones. There’s St. Paul’s conversion-like imagery “I woke up at the moment when the miracle occurred/Heard a song that made some sense out of the world” followed by the first line in which I hear hints of universal reconciliation: “Everything I ever lost, now has been returned/In the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard”. The idea of everything that has been lost being returned gets amplified toward the end of the song: “I woke up at the moment when the miracle occurred/I get so many things I don’t deserve/All the stolen voices will someday be returned/The most beautiful sound I’d ever heard”. Again, we have St. Paul’s conversion in the background, followed by a line about grace (“I get so many things I don’t deserve”) that spans out to include more people than Bono when he sings, “All the stolen voices will someday be returned”. The language of “stolen voices” captures beautifully the human condition, where most people who have ever lived have been silenced by forces greater than themselves.

The third song on that album has words that, for me, explain the logic of the doctrine of universal reconciliation. In “California (There Is No End to Love)”, U2 sings “I’ve seen for myself/There’s no end to grief/That’s how I know/That’s how I know/And why I need to know/That there is no/Yeah, there is no end to love/All I know and all I need to know/Is there is no/Yeah, there is no end to love”. The problem of theodicy, put simply, is that if God is Love, and good, and powerful, and has foreknowledge, then it’s legitimate to ask why there’s so much suffering, or as this song says, grief. It seems endless. The logic of universal reconciliation is that if there’s so much grief, then there must be “no end to Love”. Love (God) must out extend the grief/suffering we see, if we are to talk about Love (God) as good, powerful, etc.

Bono and the Edge performing “Until the End of the World” (via Reddit)

Until the End of the World
The song “Until the End of the World” from the album Achtung Baby has been one where I’ve heard hints of universal reconciliation. If my memory is correct, when Bono and the Edge used to perform this song live, they’d look as if they were clashing with each other. The Edge pushes Bono back as Bono makes his fingers into horns above his head. I’ve tried to find a clip, but I’ve been unsuccessful. If this memory is correct, and others online share this memory + interpretation, then the song has Jesus and Satan facing off. But the lyrics of the song are clearly about Jesus and Judas, his betrayer:

Haven’t seen you in quite a while/
I was down the hold just passing time/
Last time we met was a low-lit room/
We were as close together as a bride and groom/
We ate the food, we drank the wine/
Everybody having a good time/
Except you/
You were talking about the end of the world

I took the money/
I spiked your drink/
You miss too much these days if you stop to think/
You lead me on with those innocent eyes/
You know I love the element of surprise/
In the garden I was playing the tart/
I kissed your lips and broke your heart/
You/
You were acting like it was the end of the world

That being said, the Gospel of Luke claims that Satan “entered into” Judas before the betrayal (22:3), and the Gospel of John repeats this claim (13:27). So, a song about Jesus and Judas can be easily interpreted as one between Jesus and Satan, as I did many years ago in a post on my old blog: “Satan according to Bono and Mick Jagger”. Where it’s about Judas, Satan, or Satan/Judas, the end of the song is where I find an interesting hint of universalism: “Waves of regret and waves of joy/I reached out for the one I tried to destroy/You, you said you’d wait/’Til the end of the world”. The idea of Judas/Satan reaching out to Jesus is depicted in those Bono/Edge clashes, but as one commenter on my old blog observed: “in the concert I attended and others I have seen videos of their hands just about meet but then don’t meet. Bono is suddenly pulled away and the song climaxes with the Edges’ guitar and Bono sinking to the floor,” hinting at failed reconciliation. But I think they missed something key: the lyrics say “You, you said you’d wait, ’til the end of the world”. The reconciliation couldn’t happen now, but it would happen later. I know there’s much debate over this topic, so I would say that Origen suggested the ultimate salvation of even the devil, but it does seem apparent that some people thought Origen’s teachings might imply this.

I’ll stop here for now. If I think of more songs that carry this theme, maybe I’ll add another post! I think this gets across what I wanted to say though: U2 has some beautiful imagery for pondering the doctrine of universal reconciliation.

Posted on

When Jesus calls God “Father”

I have little trouble conceiving of “God” as something akin to “the Dao” of Chinese philosophy, or “the Force” of Star Wars mythology, or even “the Ground of Being” as the theologian Paul Tillich phrased it. This is why I can’t see myself ever identifying as an atheist. While I presume that the debate around what “mind” is will rage on for years to come, I find myself unconvinced that it’s merely an emergent property within a solely materialistic universe (as materialism is defined in the current discourse). It may be “material” in some currently unmeasurable sense, sort of like how the ancient Greeks would have understood pneuma, but it seems to be the highest form of reality to which we have access. “Mind” appears to be peak “Universe”. If there is nothing like a god out there, the fact that at some point in the Universe the Universe can ponder itself, through humans and other non-human animals, but especially through humans, appears to me to be the most amazing thing. This isn’t to say that humans and other non-humans animals are the most amazing things in the Universe. Maybe Jupiter has consciousness in some sense that we don’t understand yet. If so, Jupiter would be a pretty impressive being, and maybe the ancient Greeks and Romans would have been on to something by identifying it with their highest deity. For now, we’ve encountered only ourselves and other animals as clear expressions of beings with mind. What we exhibit as thinking and perceiving beings may be a glimpse of a higher reality. It would make sense to me then that we could use the word “God” to allude to that “Mind” with a capital “M” in anticipation of someday understanding that we merely mirror an aspect of the Universe that is foundational to the Universe itself, maybe causal. And concepts like “Dao,” “Force,” “Ground of Being,” “God” pointed correctly, though incompletely, in the right direction. I think the apophatic theological tradition in its various forms could prove to have been on to something important.

But the exemplar in my religious tradition wasn’t satisfied with this impersonal presentation of the “Cosmic Mind”. He taught us to look toward the “Ground of Being” in the same way we would a “Father”. I’ve struggled with this on two fronts: one historical; one theological. Historically, while I’m confident that first-century fathers felt much of what modern fathers feel about their kids, it seems that, in general, fathers in Jesus’ time and place weren’t quite as compassionate as many fathers are now. A book that I started but haven’t finished, Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies by the anthropologist Sarah Bluffer Hardy, seems to imply (if I finish it, I’ll know for sure!) that men have evolved to become more nurturing over time. Another book, Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power by Augustine Sedgewick, is one that I want to read, and it seems to offer a complicate picture of how fatherhood emerged, why, and what it has accomplished, both positively and negatively. In short, I allude to these two books to say that in Jesus’ context, I wonder how much God being a “father” meant what it means to us now. If it’s true that “Millennial dads spend three times as much times with their kids” as their fathers spent with them, then one might imagine that modern fathers (in certain contexts) are far more outwardly affectionate and caring than first century fathers in Roman occupied Judea and Galilee!

Maybe Joseph was an amazingly kind and compassionate man. Maybe this shaped how Jesus understood the concept of God as “Father”. We know so little about Joseph. Whether this was so, Jesus didn’t seem to limit his presentation of God as Father to what humans exhibit. In Matthew 7:7-11/Luke 11:9-13, Jesus reminds his audience that the father among them wouldn’t give their children something harmful, like a snake if they requested fish, or a scorpion if they requested an egg. Therefore, if humans being “evil” wouldn’t be harmful to their children in that way, it’s implied how much more can the Heavenly Father be trusted to do what is right by his children? That God is “Father” doesn’t mean that God is like human fathers in all ways. Yet Jesus chose this parental image of God to help his followers in their devotion. His teachings seem to present God as loving, as caring, as a protector, and as a provider, just as any child may expect from their fathers, and mothers, through much of human history. When Jesus died on the cross, he wasn’t Stoic about the sense of divine absence. He cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” implying his understanding of God was one of a Being who he expected to be there even in the darkest moments (Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46; cf. Psalm 22:1).

Maybe there’s a theological explanation rooted in Trinitarianism. Jesus being “one with the Father” (in Johannine and later creedal language) would reframe what God’s fatherhood looked like. But that doesn’t do much for us “normies”! Jesus taught us to pray “Our Father” (Matthew 6:9-13; Luke 11:2-4) and later creedal theology which situates Jesus as “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father” doesn’t help me, since I’m definitely not those things! It doesn’t help me understand the “our” part, since clearly within traditional Christology, Jesus’ experience of God as Father is categorically different.

There may be some among us who have had fathers that were amazing to the point that when we reflect on their fatherhood, it makes it easy to imagine God as a caring, benevolent Being. For many of us, this experience is lacking and difficult to conceptualize. Experientially, God as Father sometimes feels like the worst of human fathers. We may be grateful because God brought us into the world. We may be grateful because, in some sense, we might see God as providing for us. If that’s what the fatherhood of God boils down to—creating us; providing for us—then sadly our expectations of God amount to what we would expect a father who offers the bare minimum. I doubt that this is what Jesus wanted us to think when told us to imagine God as Father. One would hope that, as alluded to earlier, in whatever sense God is Father, God is far superior to human fathers.

But I confess that this remains difficult for me to conceptualize. It takes a great leap for me to move from “sure, there’s a Being that is the ground of all being, and we call that Being ‘God'” to “Our Father…” I can imagine a foundational “Mind” that provides us with our existence as the imagining Creator of all. I find it trickier to imagine this “Reality” as more of a “someone” than a “something”. Maybe I can imagine God as a “someone” in a sense so superior to me that I’d be like a squirrel trying to rationalize a human. But Jesus’ teachings ask us to see God as someone who relates to us, can be related to, and whose relationship with us is grounded in some level of caring benevolence, even love. Our world makes it difficult for me to understand this and to see “our Father”.

Posted on

Anthropomorphic speech about “God”, animals, and inanimate objects

I don’t know much about “God”. In fact, it would be better if I wrote “God” as God using the tradition of sous rature, or “under erasure”, developed by Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, where the strikethrough functions to retain a “necessary” word while acknowledging that it doesn’t represent the traditional metaphysics often associated with the word. I’m a theist, maybe more in the Spinozist sense than would make most of my coreligionist comfortable but not so much that I claim to have any lasting insights into what it is that the word God references. Christianity has made room for apophatic theology from the beginning, so it’s to the negative that I appeal if pressed to explain my own theology. Whatever ideas are floating in my head today may not be the same ones tomorrow, so you won’t find me being all that dogmatic in my “God-talk”. There is “God-talk” with which I’m increasingly uncomfortable though. More often than not, it’s anthropomorphic in nature.

Anthropomorphic speech about God
I was raised around Pentecostalism. Pentecostals find the divine presence everywhere and everywhere active, not in the aforementioned Spinozist sense that the divine animates everything, or according to some is one with everything (a type of monism, if you will). Pentecostals retain a stark natural/supernatural divide that fits within the very Enlightenment modes of thought that they reject. For Pentecostals, the supernatural breaks through the restraints of the natural. It does this frequently. You should expect it. But it’s still supernatural.

I was raised, in part, to expect to see divine activity in the world. I won’t say whether I have or not. I will say that I haven’t seen anything that I would say is clearly divine in distinction from nature—nothing clearly supernatural. I’ve had this or that pointed out to me. I may be unable to see it due to skepticism but I would presume that if it were evidently supernatural, my skepticism wouldn’t matter. If God were to part the Red Sea in front of me, I should be able to recognize this as something clearly unnatural.

My discomfort has to do primarily with what it means to claim that we’ve seen something supernatural happen and that we know it was so. For example, if I say that God gave me a job, this implies that God prevented someone else from getting it. We’re seeing terrible hurricanes hitting Florida this fall. If I claim that God spared one home from destruction, then this implies that God chose not to do the same for all the other homes. When we deconstruct language about an interventionist deity, it leaves us with something more troubling than encouraging.

One might reply that “God’s ways are mysterious!” This may be true. I don’t know. I do know that if we are going use this type of agnostic language about the people God doesn’t heal, or protect, or rescue, or feed, or house, or bless, etc., then we should retain the same agnosticism about whether God is actively healing, protecting, rescuing, feeding, housing, blessing, etc.

I think that some fear that such agnosticism will leave us with a lack of gratitude. Maybe. On the other hand, as I’ve discussed, in Plato’s Republic, Socrates says  (Lee’s translation, p. 71), “…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.” Similarly, in the Epistle of James in the Christian New Testament, we read the claim, “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” Both “Socrates” and “James” claim that goodness is from a divine source. This leaves us silent on the source of badness. We can affirm this if we want without saying that God actively gave me a parking spot near the front of the store while ignoring people starving due to a famine somewhere else in the world. In this sense, God is like the sun that shines down on us without intention or aim. It’s just the nature of the sun to do this. There are things that block the sun’s rays from us but this isn’t the sun judging us or withholding light from us. It’s just the nature of our reality.

In this vein, Jesus himself said (Matthew 5:44-46), “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” I’m not saying that Jesus would agree with my God-talk, per se. I’m saying that when Jesus encouraged his followers to do good and show love to even those who do not love them, his example was the generousness of the Father which is available to the just and the unjust alike.

This is where things get tricky for me. I see what Jesus was doing when he called God “Father”. While the anthropomorphic language can lead to all sorts of theological absurdities—e.g. if God exists, “he’s” “male” or he’s a “father” in the same sense of whatever that words means in your culture—we risk an opposite danger when our God-talk begins to sound like we’re talking about the Force in Star Wars or even the Tao of Chinese philosophy like Taoism. There’s part of me that’s more comfortable with these impersonal presentations of ultimate reality. I don’t mind speaking of the “Universe” but the minute I say the “Universe” did this or that, I’ve personified it and I’ve drifted into anthropomorphic language. This is a flaw but maybe a necessary one because I think we humans know our world only through what it means to be human. Therefore, as non-human as God would be, if there are aspects of the divine nature that are anything like our own (e.g. God is/has “mind”), we risk misunderstanding God further by choosing to speak of God as “Force” or something completely impersonal.

For this reason, as uncomfortable as I may be with anthropomorphic God-talk, I don’t know if there’s a better solution. Do we speak of God as a mathematical formula? It seems like this would make God irrelevant to most of us. Anthropomorphic ways of thinking have their strengths and weaknesses, no matter the context, including God-talk.

Anthropomorphic speech about animals
For example, I’m the type of person who doesn’t even speak of myself as a dog “owner”. Yes, I’m one of those who says that I’m “my dog’s human”. There’s a strength to this. When I anthropomorphize my dog, I see her as a being with emotions/feelings, motivations, and wants. Whether or not we can say she has a “will” or “thoughts” may depend on how we’re using those words. But when I think of her this way, it’s unlikely that I’ll mistreat her. In fact, she’s quite spoiled. My wife and I love her as a member of the family.

But this can be dangerous. If I interpret behaviors that I dislike as being done with “intention” like a human might do, then I’ll be holding her to a standard that’s unfair to her as a dog. As a dog, I need to value her “dogness”. This may mean seeing her dogness through an anthropomorphic lens at times. But she’s not like me in the same way other humans are. As Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in Philosophy of Psychology, 327 (or Philosophical Investigations II, 190), “If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it.” Lions live in a different embodiment than we humans. They see the world differently. If we could find a way to “translate” lion “speech” into human language, we may be lost still and unable to understand them. At least, Wittgenstein thought this was so. (Also, we could reference Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”)

Anthropomorphic speech about inanimate objects
A similar pro-/con- scenario can be applied even to inanimate objects. We’re a wasteful bunch, we humans. We throw away so many things. We create trash. Now, I’m not saying we should be unsanitary or hoard purposelessly. But maybe we can learn from say Japanese culture with the art of kintsugi. There are inanimate objects that we anthropomorphize which infuses those things with added value. We may think of stuffed animals or robots. Admittedly, it’s easier to do this when the inanimate object has been given humanish characteristics by its creator. But we do this with far from human things too. How many people name their cars?

On the flip side, if you treat your car better than your spouse or children, then you may have taken things a bit too far. Materialism (in the economic sense of the word) can lead us to dehumanize humans in favor of attributing excessive value to objects. With each category—God, animals, and objects—anthropomorphic thoughts can be positive or negative. They can lead us to undervalue or overvalue the reality about which we speak. This can lead to good theology (God loves me and God cares about me personally) and bad theology (“I’m favored by God which is why ‘he’ gave me this big house and nice car”). It can lead us to the better treatment of animals or it could drive us to expect things from them that are unfair. It can lead us to value objects, to be thrifty and grateful, and it can lead us to hoard.

We can’t escape anthropomorphic language, usually. We don’t have to. But we should be reflective when using it. We should have a mental asterisks next to each thought that attributes human characteristics to non-human realities. I try to do this with my dog but also with God. Whenever I hear a passage from the Bible read that makes God sound like a giant human, I try to abstract it. When I show gratitude toward God, it may be quite similar to how I’m grateful to the sun for its light. Yes, this may lead me to miss this or that divine reality, if God exists, but I’d rather miss in the negative than miss in the positive of wrongly attributing intention to God where such attribution would have to bring to question the goodness/justness of God.

Posted on

Socrates ponders his death

I teach religious studies. This means that I get the following question with some frequency: “What happens when we die?” My response is rarely satisfying: “I don’t know. I haven’t died yet.” I don’t say this to brush off a serious question or to be coy. This is the response that is most authentic. To claim to know anything more than this would be to lie, at least for me. Maybe someone out there knows what happens.

Answering with Socrates
I was asked the aforementioned question both this week and last. Incidentally, over the past few days, I reread Plato’s Apology. This is Socrates’ defense of himself before the Athenians who would vote that he was guilty of corrupting the young men of Athens and denying the commonly received gods. When it comes time for sentencing, we find Socrates rejecting an opportunity to be ostracized: “But surely, Socrates, after you have left us you can spend the rest of your life in quietly minding your own business” (Tredennick and Tarrant translation, p. 66 [37e]). But Socrates believes he has been doing what is right and what is good when he goes around challenging commonly held assumptions. He speaks of it as if it was a divine calling. To accept a form of exile would be to abandon this mandate and to fail to do what is right and good.

Here we get Socrates’ famous line about the unexamined life (p. 66 [38a]):

“If on the other hand I tell you that to let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and examining both myself and other is really the very best thing that a man can do, and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living, you will be even less inclined to believe me”

So, rather than save his life and undermine his own message and mission, Socrates accepts the sentence of the death penalty. He states that unlike the sophists who argue to win, “I would rather die as a result of this defense than live as the result of the other sort.” Also, “…the difficulty is not so much to escape death; the real difficulty is to escape wickedness, which is far more fleet of foot.” These statements (p. 67 [38d-e]) turn into a warning to the Athenians that he being slow will be caught by death but escape wickedness while they being fast will escape death but be caught by wickedness, which is far worse.

But what I want to highlight is what he says about death that is relevant to the questions I’ve received about the afterlife. Socrates warns that to assume that death is an evil is to make a mistaken claim because we don’t know (p. 69 [40 b-c]). Then he states (p. 69 [40c]):

“We should reflect that there is much reason to hope for a good result on other grounds as well. Death is one of two things. Either it is annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything; or, as we are told, it is really a change: a migration of the soul from this place to another.”

Socrates proposes it might be like the deepest, dreamless sleep you’ve experienced. How refreshing! “If death is like this, then, I call it gain: because the whole of time, if you look at it in this way, can be regarded as no more than a single night.” In other words, death puts us into a peaceful, everlasting state of rest (p. 69 [40e]). Or, “…on the other hand death is a removal from here to some other place, and if what we are told is true, that all the dead are there, what greater blessing could there be than this, gentlemen of the jury?” He imagines he might spend time philosophizing with the greats, like Hesiod and Homer (p. 69 [40e-41a]).

What About Scary Visions of the Afterlife?
Notably, he entertains no scary or torturous visions of the afterlife. I imagine that this may have something to do with his assumption that goodness is from the gods and that depictions of badness or wickedness coming from the gods should be rejected (see “Euthyphro and Goodness” and  “Would Plato approve of children reading the story of ‘Noah’s Ark’?”). Or, it may (also) be that he recognizes himself as a good man. He says (p. 70 [41d]), “…nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death, and his fortunes are not a matter of indifference to the gods.” If we entertain theories of divine evil or divine goodness that looks nothing like what we can recognize as goodness, then we must entertain horrific visions of the afterlife. Or we must be confident that we were good people, all things considered. Materialist visions of death, or certain Buddhist ones, or even something like Calvinistic ones seem to be a different discussion altogether.

Socrates and Christ?
I have hope that death isn’t final but I’m aware that it could be. I hope that there’s some sort of continuation of personality after death. But I don’t know what happens. I hope that I can reunite with those I love. I’m not sure how it would work though. Frankly, I don’t even have the faintest idea about what happens. I know what different theologians and religious systems have suggested but I can’t tell you who’s right and who’s wrong.

This confuses some because I claim to be a Christian but I’m a Christian who has drawn a bold line between what I want to happen and what I think I can say will happen. And I’m a Christian in the sense that I try to ask myself, “Do I want to see a world that looks something like what Jesus imagined when he spoke of the ‘Kingdom of God’?” As long as my answer is “yes”, then I’ll try to be a Christian. All veneration/worship of Jesus is an attempt to recenter my affections in a world that tries to draw our eyes to power, influence, wealth, etc. That said, the theology and metaphysics of my religion are to me what poetry is: (potentially) beautiful, symbolic speech about things we sense, feel, experience, seek, hope for, etc., but that we can’t explain concretely or logically or scientifically. It’s a categorical error to turn our poetic theology into something scientific and systematic, in my view. If you read about the resurrection of Jesus across the four canonical Gospels—ignoring non-canonical Gospels for this exercise—you’ll find an evolving narration of what can be categorized at best as an “apocalyptic” events. (To call it a “historical” event seems both misaligned with what historians are doing and underwhelming in light of what Christianity has been claiming.) On Easter, I’ll say “he is risen!” but what I think I mean is “I hope what Jesus’ followers experienced after his death is a small window into what might await us after death!” I hope but I don’t know. In other words, I feel greater kinship with Socrates on this matter than St. Paul. My hopes aren’t the same as epistemic claims. I’ve come to accept that I’ll live with the doubts of Good Friday until the day death comes for me.

Posted on

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”.

Posted on

St. Gregory of Nyssa’s eschatologically optimistic Christianity

A decade or so ago, I took a class on “The Greek Fathers”. I found St. Athanasius of Alexandria to be the most fascinating, biographically. I studied St. Basil the Great’s pneumatology closely. My professor made me curious about St. Maximus the Confessor (whose works I’ve not yet given adequate attention). For some reason, St. Gregory of Nyssa didn’t grab my attention.

A lot has changed since then. Presently, Gregory of Nyssa is my favorite ancient Christian theologian. I think he surpasses even Origen of Alexandria. But there’s a reason why these two names are #1 and #2 on my list: their eschatology. I’ll say more momentarily.

Personally, being Christian in the 21st century means living within the tension of knowing that the apocalyptic framework within which Christianity was conceived needs to be abandoned while trying to retain fidelity to what we find in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This is difficult. There’s part of me that agrees with G.K. Chesterton when he wrote that the problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and that it failed but that it’s never been tried. If humanity could collectively adhere to the Sermon on the Mount, the Kingdom of God might be here with us now. So far, it appears that we can’t. When I consider the apocalyptic expectation of Jesus’ context, it makes me wonder how much of the Sermon on the Mount can be lived reasonably if an apocalyptic in-breaking shouldn’t be expected.

Christians have wrestled with this since the first and second centuries. Whoever wrote the Second Epistle of Peter shows us that this was a problem early. He addresses those who scoff at Christians asking, “Where is the promise of his coming?” (2 Peter 3:4). His answer, “But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day..The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish but all to come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief…” (2 Peter 3:8-10) Well, it’s been a minute and still there’s been no “Second Coming”. If Christians were concerned back then with what to do with the question of the parousia, how much harder is it for us modern Christians to confess, “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again“.

I hold my theology loosely. I read the Bible and its interpreters as talking metaphorically, symbolically, poetically about the divine. I’m hesitant to interpret theological speak concretely. I hope for the “coming” or “appearance” of Christ, I just don’t know what this means, concretely. Maybe God is the Cosmic Mind from which all reality is derived and maybe we humans are embodied minds (souls), or minds who emerge from bodies, who will be reunited one day with the Cosmic Mind. Maybe “resurrection” means being known and recognized by this Cosmic Mind/God and by other minds so that future “embodiment” is nothing like our biological life now but instead something drastically different sharing only in the reality that we are recognizable, recognized, and able to recognize.

When I imagine death, I don’t imagine it as nothingness. I imagine that if there is a God, and that God’s existence is akin to “Mind” then “Mind” is the highest reality and our minds are united to that Mind. That Cosmic Mind is pure, holy, good. For those who lived saintly lives in our biological existence, their encounter with that Cosmic Mind is experienced as pure goodness but pure goodness that must be continually grown into/united with. For those who lived lives of selfishness, greed, hatred, violence, etc., the Cosmic Mind is experienced as foreign, even dangerous. But in the aeons of our future existence, both saint and sinner grow into continual unity with that Cosmic Mind. Some begin with more openness to the Cosmic Mind (what the doctrine of heaven tries to communicate) and some begin more closed to it (what the doctrine of hell tries to communicate) but all minds are connected to the Cosmic Mind into which we will be continually emerged. (Yes, this thinking comes from Greek theology, especially concepts like theosis and epektasis, but I was introduced to it indirectly through C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce.)

This line of thinking doesn’t deny the importance of this life. We can heed to the warnings of Christ and the Prophets to avoid living destructive lives now. We can speak of judgment, even future judgment. But also it’s aligned with Christian Universalism or the doctrine of universal reconciliation. As I’ve written, I despise and reject the “infernalist” doctrine, so any theologizing that I do will deny that the Divine Mind can be spoken of as “good” if the sentience/minds that they created were created knowing that it would be possible for us to suffer perpetually.

This is where Gregory of Nyssa enters this discussion. I’m not interesting in arguing whether or not he was a universalist in the same way that I’m one. I’m interesting in finding that points in his writing that when followed to their logical conclusion, give us a place to root ourselves as Christian Universalists.

In On the Soul and the Resurrection, Gregory writes some of the following:

  1. Quoting his sister, St. Macrina the Younger, he says that she said, “..we who are living in the flesh ought as much as possible to separate ourselves and release ourselves from its hold by the life of virtue, so that after death we may not need another death to cleanse us from the remains of the fleshly glue (pp. 75-76).” Here I understand him to mean what I said earlier: that those who live saintly lives have no need/less need to the purification of future judgment but for Macrina/Gregory, the “second death” purifies. As he writes of those who live this life poorly, “…such a man even when he gets out of the flesh is not separated from its experiences” and “the lover of the flesh would doubtless be unable to avoid bringing with them some fleshly odor, This makes their pages more grievous, as their soul has become partly materialized from such an environment (p. 76).” I read this as saying that what we do in our bodies impacts our minds, even if those minds continue after our bodies are dead. Our minds must be healed from the scars of our beastly existence. Gregory gives hope for such healing/purification.
  2. I’ve been saying we are mind that participates in Mind. This is akin to Hindu thinkers who have proposed that we are Atman who participates in Brahman. Gregory says it this way, “…the soul will not received any disadvantage in respect to participation in the good, if it should be freed from these impulses. It will go back to itself and see clearly what it is in its nature, and through its own beauty it will look upon the archetype as if in a mirror and an image. We can truly say that the accurate likeness of the divine consists in our soul’s imitation of the superior Nature (p. 78).” He calls this Divine Mind, “…Itself the nature of the beautiful” (p. 79). In this view, the Cosmic Mind is goodness, beauty, etc. We grow into it.
  3. The “fire” of judgment is a metaphor for the purifying experience of the Divine Mind. Gregory writes “…when evil is consumed by the purifying fire, the soul which is united to evil must necessarily also be in the fire until the base adulterant material is removed, consumed by the fire. Or if the particularly sticky mud is plastered thickly around a rope, then the end of the rope is led through some small space, and some one pulls forcibly on the end of the rope toward the inside, necessarily the rope must follow the one who pulls, but the plastered mud must remain outside the hole scraped off the rope by the forcible pulling (p. 84).” As the Divine Mind attracts us, the evils of our lives fade and fall away. We are purified. We are not destroyed. We are not punished forever. But this happens only in our state after bodily/biological death.
  4. St. Macrina taught Gregory that “the measure of pain is proportional to the quantity of evil in each person” (p. 84) so that “unendurable pain is extended to the length of this whole age” (p. 85) meaning that there’s a seriousness to the purification but the only thing that is destroyed is evil: “the complete annihilation of evil” (p. 87). No human came into existence to suffer or be judged: “Our rational nature came to birther for this purpose, so that the wealth of divine good thing might not be idle.” We exist to be “a container of good things” (p. 87).

This is a sample of what St. Gregory of Nyssa writes. I’ll share more soon. For now, this is a reminder that modern Christians can adopt and adapt the language we inherit, reinterpreting it through the paradigms of our own understanding, yet respecting what we inherit, even language that points to fire, judgment, suffering, punishment can be acknowledge as having value but value only in light of an understanding of the Divine Nature that is worthy of “God”.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

The historical context of Jesus’ crucifixion: two recommended podcast episodes

It’s Good Friday. As Christians around the world ponder the meaning and significance of Jesus’ crucifixion, here are two podcast episodes that take a look at the event within its historical context:

  1. Biblical Time Machine, Episode 58: “Crucifixion in the Roman Empire”
  2. On Script: “The Crucifixion of Jesus: Torture, Sexual Abuse, and the Scandal of the Cross”

The second recommendation includes a trigger warning due to the graphic nature of the subject matter.

Posted on

Carl Schleicher’s Eine Streitfrage aus dem Talmud and Reading the Gospels

I don’t know how other private high school teachers approach teaching the Bible to their students but since I work at a college preparatory school sponsored by the Episcopal Church, I introduce them to the best of scholarship available to us. For example, this means that my students encounter the Synoptic Problem. They come to see the similarities and differences between the accounts of the different canonical Gospels (and they do read some non-canonical Gospels as well). For some of my students, there’s an indifference to what they’re learning. For others, there’s a sense of adventure while being simultaneously overwhelmed because they’ve never studied the Bible before taking my class. (Often this is the case for students who aren’t raised by Christians.) For others, there’s an excitement, possibly because they’re being given a space to read the Bible critically without judgment, some for the first time. (Now, “critically” doesn’t mean disparaging the text but instead reading it thoughtfully: not taking the claims of the text at face value but instead putting in the intellectual work required to determine how I understand and how I receive what I’m reading.) For others, my class can lead to a bit of an existential crisis.

Now, I see my role as primarily that of an academic guide to the text. I don’t favor any particular confessional approach. I don’t try to pursued my students of the truthfulness of the text’s claims. I don’t try to convert or proselytize my students. When I’m asked what my religion is (because sometimes my approach makes them wonder), I’m honest that I’m a Christian because I don’t want to feign objectivity even if methodologically I try to be as objective as possible. Since I’m a Christian who has been studying the Bible academically for a couple of decades, and since I’ve found a way to find peace between my own religious commitments and the demands of scholarship, I’ll talk to students who want to think through how what they’re learning might impact their faith. And here I want to share one of two examples I use for students who wonder how I remain Christian while reading the Bible critically. I’ll discuss one here and one in a future post.

Eine Streitfrage aus dem Talmud via Wikimedia Commons

First, I share Carl Schleicher’s Eine Streitfrage aus dem Talmud (above). This 19th century oil painting provides me with a perfect visual for how I read the Bible, academically and religiously, often simultaneously. In this painting, five rabbis are reading the Talmud. They’re debating its meaning with some intensity. The fifth rabbi listens in from behind the group. This depicts one of the beauties of the Jewish tradition: internal debate about the meaning of sacred texts isn’t a bug but a feature. Christianity hasn’t done as well in this regard. Our obsession with orthodoxy versus heresy has killed much of our theological creativity.

Personally, when I read the Gospels, specifically, this image comes to my mind. As I told a student recently who’s troubled by the reality that non-canonical Gospels exist and that the depiction of Jesus differs between Gospels, I see myself in this picture. As I reflected on this further with a friend who I was talking to yesterday, I see myself as the man in the back listening to the debate. And I imagine the four rabbis as representing how I see the four evangelists. Who is Jesus? These four accounts present different pictures. I’m invited to listen, to ponder, and to decide for myself.

Now, as I told my student last week: this puts more responsibility on us. We can settle for a shallow “Bible-in-a-year” approach to reading the text that checks a box but never stops to truly wrestle with what we’re reading because we may care more that we’re reading than that we’re understanding and interpreting what we’re reading. But if we care to interpret and understand, this takes work. We must listen intently. We must hear the different presentations and then we must decide what we’re going to do with them. I understand why someone would want to outsource this responsibility to their clergy. I understand why someone might prefer to encounter the Gospels primarily through the filter of sermons and liturgy. That’s a legitimate approach. But if you take the challenge of reading—really reading—then you inherit the responsibility as well.

Again, this can be seen as a negative thing. Who wants the responsibility of sorting out who Jesus was and is for themselves? That may feel high stakes. But for others, like me, and I hope for many of my Christian students, this is an invitation to truly encounter what the Gospels are within their canonical setting: four sages exploring the meaning of Jesus of Nazareth.

(What about the non canonical Gospels? How does this fit my analogy? Well, I read those too. I find them fascinating. But on historical grounds even more so than theological grounds, I find their lateness less interesting and inviting. Note: I think even the Gospel of Thomas is a later second century text that derives from the canonical Gospels, as has been argued by scholars like Mark Goodacre and Simon Gathercole. It’s fascinating. Other noncanonical Gospels provide me with comfort knowing that Christians have been wrestling with who Jesus was and is to them from the earliest generations, and that sometimes their understanding of Jesus clashed with what they found in what became the canonized Gospels, but I find them less compelling. Maybe this means the concept of canonization has a greater pull on me than it should.)