Let us start with the beauty. It is a post on hypocrisy by PoserOrProphet (or, as is his real name, Dan). It’s not about others being hypocritical, but is very much focused inward – on the temptation to use the appearance of being ‘radical’ rather than actually living out a godly life (Dan works in the inner city and is thus often seen as a Christian ‘radical’). I can’t recommend you enough to go read the whole thing – this is precisely the kind of Christianity that I can respect and still, in some way, aspire to its goals.

Now for the wingnuts. I found this little gem on women from the ever-informative Challies, whom I use as a sort of Christian wingnut repository. What is it about this article you may ask. Well, the author – one Dr. James MacDonald, who holds graduate degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and Phoenix Seminary, and is the founding pastor of Harvest Bible Chapel, a conservative evangelical megachurch in Illinois – begins with the observation that men are (generally) physically stronger than women. He then assumes that relative physical weakness means vulnerability and it is part of God’s ordained plan for women to be ‘vulnerable to’ (and thus – though he does not come out and say it explicitly – inferior to) men. Of course, there are a couple of obvious upshots of this: a woman is either vulnerable to/beneath her husband, or if she is single, to her father or male church leaders. The raw patriarchy in this post is astonishing, and I say this quite despite the talk about honoring women in their weakness. Money quote:

God created the woman to be vulnerable and dependent upon the man as a reflection of the Church’s vulnerability and dependence upon Christ. It should not be our goal to help women be less vulnerable before men—which is physically impossible anyway—but rather to work toward the realization of the image of Christ’s self-sacrificial relationship to the Church. Women by their very nature will always be vulnerable before men. The call of Christ is not to pursue an ill-fated attempt to abolish this vulnerability, but rather to protect and honor women in the midst of it.

To put his metaphor in more explicit terms, man is the God to woman’s humanity. This is not just scary because it’s something that one man believes, but because it is something that a large number of people (not a small percentage of evangelicals) in this country believe, and what its implications are for how they live their lives, teach their children, and how they treat and view women. However, living in what is largely an egalitarian society (or attempting to be one), this leads to some odd paradoxes in worldviews (e.g., women, who represent the church, are weak before men, who represent God, but Sarah Palin is nevertheless fully capable of being president).

The next and last wingnut is none other than our very own Focus on the Family, and in case you thought they weren’t crazy, just you wait. Focus on the Family Action – the political arm of the organization – released a fictitious letter from a conservative Christian living in the year 2012 after four years of an Obama administration. The letter, which you can read a synopsis of here, or download the entire 16-page pdf here – details an end-of-the-world scenario in which activist liberal judges actively persecute Christians (and Boy Scouts – no joke!) by making up laws forcing gay marriages and abortions upon unsuspecting Christians. Since the letter is long and I do not expect you all to read it (though I encourage it), I will proffer a few quotes from it, in order, to give you an idea of the tone:

We are not “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Many of our freedoms have been taken away by a liberal Supreme Court and a majority of Democrats in both the House and the Senate and hardly any brave citizen dares to resist the new government policies any more.

On (Focus’ favorite topic) homosexuality:

The most far-reaching transformation of American society came from the Supreme Court’s stunning affirmation, in early 2010, that homosexual marriage was a “constitutional” right that had to be respected by all 50 states because laws barring same-sex marriage violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. … This was a blatant example of creating new law by the court …

The Boy Scouts no longer exist as an organization. They chose to disband rather than be forced to obey the Supreme Court decision that they would have to hire homosexual scoutmasters and allow them to sleep in tents with young boys. …

The Bible can no longer be freely preached over radio or television stations when the subject matter includes such “offensive” doctrines as homosexual conduct or the claim that people will go to hell if they do not believe in Jesus Christ. …

While churches are still free to turn down homosexual applicants for the job of senior pastor, churches and parachurch organizations are no longer free to reject homosexual applicants for staff positions such as part-time youth pastor or director of counseling.

On homeschooling:

The Court declared that home schooling was an illegal violation of state educational requirements except in cases where the parents (a) had an education certificate from an accredited state program, (b) agreed to use state-approved textbooks in all courses, and (c) agreed not to not to teach their children that homosexual conduct is wrong, or that Jesus is the only way to God, since these ideas have been found to hinder students’ social adjustment and acceptance of other lifestyles and beliefs, and to run counter to the state’s interest in educating its children to be good citizens.

On foreign policy:

Since 2009 terrorist bombs have exploded in two large and two small U.S. cities, killing hundreds, and the entire country is now fearful, for no place seems safe. … In early 2009 [Russia] followed the pattern they had begun in Georgia in 2008 and sent troops to occupy and re-take several Eastern European countries, starting with the Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. … Then in the next three years Russia occupied additional countries that had been previous Soviet satellite nations, including Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria, with no military response from the U.S. or the UN. … In mid-2010 Iran launched a nuclear bomb which exploded in the middle of Tel Aviv, destroying much of that city.

And much, much more, including the shutting down of Christian booksellers due to the popularity of the pro-homosexual agenda (the menace behind everything!), the author reprimanding naive evangelicals for voting for Barack Obama, Christian leaders thrown in jail for non-compliance with the new liberal laws of post-apocalyptic America, children unwillingly exposed to pornography, and that’s just the start! If this isn’t a piece of populist, Christianist (tip o’ the hat to Andrew Sullivan for the word) drivel, I don’t know what is. I particularly enjoyed the fanciful thoughts about what the Supreme Court could and could not do, and the link drawn (as is common in these spheres) between homosexuality and pedophilia. I can tell you I’ve worked with kids a plenty and not once thought anything less innocent than ‘oh, I really do want to be a father, don’t I?’

I don’t criticize this out of any great love for Barack Obama – viewing myself as something rather close to a libertarian, I have problems with many of his positions (and that does not mean anything about whether I support him or not). But seriously people… I mean, are you serious?

Nevertheless, this is the kind of material put out by a leading organization within evangelical Christianity, and one of the wealthiest, too. This sort of thing, along with my own reflections, has led me to believe that religious fundamentalism of whatever stripe (Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and yes there are Hindu and Buddhist fundamentalists) is one of if not the most dangerous challenge of our time. And if you want more information on fundamentalism as a worldwide phenomenon, might I suggest looking in your local library for the University of Chicago’s Fundamentalism Project, a multi-volume set of on-going releases looking at various aspects of all sorts of fundamentalisms – examining their differences and their similarities. As the ideologies of fascism and (a very loosely Marxist but in reality totalitarian) communism were destructive forces in the 20th century which had to be resisted in order to secure the future of the globe, so is fundamentalism in the current era. The answer is emphatically not, as much as men like Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher may like to think otherwise, the destruction of religion. Human beings are religious creatures – and have been since the beginning. But rather, the alternative is for religious moderation and rationality, a religious perspective that seeks to understand and integrate itself into reality and to be for the positive, demonstrable benefit of mankind, rather than the harmful attempt at molding both mankind and reality into its pre-conceived agendas (and this is what, at some level, all fundamentalisms aim to do).

Rant over.

I have heard by now many stories that go along these lines: 1) I accepted I was gay, which 2) led to a crisis of faith, which 3) led me to abandon that faith, but after a time I 4) reconciled my faith and sexuality, and 5) came back to some form of Christianity. But my journey has been that: 1) I accepted I was gay, which 2) led to a crisis of faith, which 3) led me to reevaluate my philosophical assumptions, which 4) led me to a different (and admittedly liturgical-emergent) form of faith, but 5) textual criticism, historical and early Christianity, and philosophical problems led me to 6) uneasily abandon the forms of that faith that were known to me. Casting about, it doesn’t seem as if those who share similar stories to mine typically end in happy reunion with religion. I am not opposed to reuniting with my mother-religion, and I am very much in the middle of my story, and I am going to be spending a significant amount of time this semester seeing whether such a reunion is possible. But to use technical jargon, this is a semi-decidable problem: if the answer is yes it is possible, then my search will at some point return a yes, but if the answer is no, because the search space is (nearly) infinite, I will never return an answer, neither yes nor no. That is, if the answer is in fact that such a reunion is not possible, I could search – futilely – forever. I do not think that there is a solution to this problem (there isn’t in the theory of computation), which is why I have a time limit, at least for the time being, on how long I will spend on this matter before moving on with my life. No doubt if I don’t find anything in the allotted period (this semester), I will come back to look at times, but I do not want to waste my life on what may be an infinite loop, so there needs to be a time when I, however tentatively or temporarily, make an end.

But I wonder, and I wonder very much, about not finding anything by the end of this semester, but only exhausting the commoner paths to Christianity. At times I am laid back about it – and increasingly so. At times I have apprehensions – but less and less. Time will tell, and life will go on, and will be good, and the Bottomless Pit (which is one name I have come to call the object of my periodic existential fits) will be vanquished. And if God is real and God is merciful and good, don’t I have to walk the best I can and trust in his mercy in the end, since none of us are all that good ourselves? I don’t much fear leaving what I know, only to be surprised by a loving God, and to say without hesitation ‘My wonderful God’ at the end of all things.

For ethics, I suppose it shows how few secular gay friends I have, but I am continually surprised at what seems to be the commonly accepted sexual behavior among secular gays. Although a discussion of those reasons would be rather lengthy and I will not go into them just now, I still think fidelity, monogamy, and abstinence are the most fruitful, and philosophically defensible ways to live. And because I know my reasons for this (unlike other things such as religion) I think it is somewhat less likely that I would significantly change my mind.

Sexual ethics are an interesting thing. We are sexual beings – or most of us are (I have met one or maybe two gentlemen who I genuinely believe are asexual). And because both sexuality and emotion are part of our biology, and are themselves intertwined, one can’t very well separate the two. I see those who are gay and trying to live without acting on their sexual orientation often making one of two mistakes: getting emotionally involved and invested in people of the same sex, which not uncommonly leads to a sexual misdeed; or becoming increasingly emotionally detached and guarded from the outside world, a sort of numbness that does in fact avoid misconduct and a lot of temptation, and closeness and intimacy, too. The best solution to this seems to be monastic living, which allows regular, intense (I would even perhaps go so far to say sexually-grounded or sexually-rooted, though not sexually active) fellowship guarded against misconduct by strong communal taboo and agreement. But such a life is not practical for most people, and I do not see any Christians seriously suggesting that those who are gay should adopt a monastic life.

While I do respect those seeking a celibate life, I still don’t understand how one accepts what this says about God. For I do see much good come of healthy spousal intimacy (and likewise much ill from unhealthy spousal intimacy), and, for those of us who are not asexual, much bad from prolonged spousal isolation. So for what does God demand permanent homosexual chastity? For to say that he is not interested in the benefit of human beings means that he is cruel or capricious, neither of which is appealing or worthy of worship. And I am suspicious at the reasoning and (lack of) evidence for inherent harm in homosexual relationships (and further, for such case to be made ethically, gay relationships must also be shown to be worse for the person’s well-being than the alternative of permanent celibacy). Perhaps then there are other considerations to take in hand that are more important than personal human benefit, such as the development of virtue (or congruence with the divine character, same thing), or treating others with justice and mercy. But homosexuality does not violate justice or mercy, and for it to violate virtue, one would have to state that heterosexuality-itself is a virtue, and this seems to me rather wrong. For then those who are inclined toward the opposite sex are inherently more virtuous. But even assuming this were so, why should heterosexuality-itself be a virtue, bound as it is to particular biological realities, when the other virtues (justice, self-control, self-discipline, mercy, truthfulness…) could conceivably be applied across any physical or biological system? I do not see any way of coherently incorporating an understanding of an ethic of heterosexual-expression-only into a larger system of ethics. And so like other issues in the Christian Scriptures (including items such as slavery or banking) while it may at first glance appear a straightforward command, I think the matter of the morality of homosexuality is complex and can and should be properly contextualized and understood holistically within the framework of all ethics. And in the end such a view creates a more coherent system of ethics in general and Christian ethics in particular. (And in the latter case, it creates a nuanced understanding of the interplay of Scripture, experience, context, and authorial intent.) This was part of what drove me to a Side A position (that gay sex in circumstances equivalent to heterosexual marriage is not a sin).

But virtue development is something I do find important, along with chastity in singleness and fidelity in marriage, and these I do not see highly extolled in gay culture in general and even, to my great consternation, among a majority of Side A gay Christians. (An active concern for virtue development I also find astonishingly lacking in heterosexual marriages too, by the way.) Though there are some gay Christians I do have a respect and occasionally even a fondness for, there are a great many whose position I find only personally convenient, and the depth of their religious and philosophical (and even sexual-moral) convictions shallow. They were, the vast majority of them, raised in the church and found that the church’s position in their lives was inextricable, and that settled the question of the nominal place of Christianity in their lives (if the question was even raised).

How’s all that for cynical and blunt?

Besides, I can’t exactly call myself a Christian at the moment. And I don’t.

On the matter of the church’s position in people’s lives, I often find myself thinking that it exists simply as a facilitator for socialization, itself a complex thing I will not dare to try to consider in detail here. As a theist and a good friend of mine has put it, most people have three places in their lives: work, home, and church. Each of these serve their own purpose: productivity, relaxation and safety, and socializing. For this reason, the church could persist in a variety of forms so long as it is meeting this particular need in human life. But what is the third place for those of us without church? I don’t know. But I don’t like dishonesty for the sake of convenience, and so may find myself seeking out a new third place.

And I’m still thinking on all this.

First things are first, and it was very well written. Northern Lights (yes I will be pompous and use the proper English name for The Golden Compass) especially did what I have seen so rarely done in fantasy: it showed me its world rather than telling me about it first. Pullman does not start off with ‘And what is a dæmon?’ though that is a perfectly legitimate way to begin a novel. No, he drops you straightaway into Lyra’s world and, rather than expositing its workings to you in detail, he shows its workings as the story permits opportunity, and he does so quite skillfully. It was refreshing. As the series went on, however, this diminished. New discoveries about the universe were handled more clumsily, or just plainly told to the reader. And the overall narrative consistency of the story faltered, as well, creating an uneven experience at times. That said, there are parts of The Subtle Knife (the second book) that far outshone Northern Lights, but again the narrative feel was inconsistent sometimes – a problem that worsened in The Amber Spyglass, where I got the feel that even with the book’s lengths there were parts that were too rushed. Nevertheless, the ending was quite perfect, and even choked me up a bit.

On to the matters of philosophy. The goal of His Dark Materials is quite clearly to kill God. And Pullman is not circumspect about this. He does use ‘Magisterium’ and ‘The Authority,’ but also ‘Church’ and ‘God’ and ‘Pope John Calvin’ (who, in Lyra’s world, moved the papacy to Geneva before abolishing it in favor of a bureaucracy). It is interesting that nearly every person in Pullman’s universe gets a three-dimensional character, who we may at sometimes love and at other times loathe, with the exception of God, and especially his zealots. The character who plays the role of Satan (I have said this is heavily inspired by Paradise Lost, no? though there is also not an insignificant amount of Homer, too) is allowed outs, heroisms, despite the odium of certain of his acts, and given character complications that God is not.

But I have been helped to understand, through Pullman and through a conversation with an ardent Calvinist (though really a nice guy), that what I have really rejected, with almost as much force as I can muster, is the God of Calvinism. Pullman’s God and Calvin’s God, despite their great differences, share this: that he is God only because he is powerful. In strict, logically coherent Calvinism (so far as I can discern it), God creates the rules and decides (arbitrarily) what is and isn’t good. God could’ve done this or that or the other, and any way he might’ve chosen would’ve been good, because he is God, the Almighty, the Sovereign. To say God is good is tantamount to saying God is God. And this is an argument I bought for quite some time. But now I think that it is extremely mistaken, for whether or not one is very powerful, and whether or not one is creator, right is still right and wrong is still wrong. Should mankind succeed in creating true artificial intelligence, we would have moral obligations in our interactions with them, though we would not be morally obligated to interact (this is actually a point my conversation partner argued against, saying we would have no moral obligations at all to sentient beings of our own creation). And there is no moral exemption for ‘holding all the cards’ so to speak – it is still a horror to willfully do injustice to another, and capricious to extend (when all circumstances on behalf of both parties are equivalent) mercy to one and not to another. Shall we say then that God, in his dealings with most of humanity, is like the priest or Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan? (In Christian theology, or at least that which I can appreciate, it is here that the freedom of the will, and the necessity for that freedom in forming what is human, permits the morality of the doctrine of hell.)

And yet it is all these moral concerns which I have heard vociferously denounced and even ridiculed, and spent a good portion of my time as a Christian, and also the time in my adolescence when my worldview was developing, in the company of those who denounced them, though some with more thought to what they were doing than others. And I find myself agreeing with Philip Pullman: I am not impressed with God’s power, and I have no desire at all to worship him because of it. He may very well damn me to hell for it, and I have no illusion of holding up under torture but I imagine that I would be absolutely torn to pieces under the weight of it. And so be it. If I am to worship God, I desire to do so only because of the far-surpassing excellence of his good character and his nature, not because of his power, though no doubt his character and nature move through and are expressed by means of his power. And I hope that in so saying, that if God were not the all-powerful God, and Satan were God instead, I would still despise Satan and love God. But I will not worship a monster.

Now that brings up the question of whether or not a human can tell what is and is not a monster. I think it is fairly obvious that finite beings, much smaller than the universe they live in, cannot fully appreciate or understand goodness, with all its various shapes in an endless sea of possible circumstance. But that does not mean that we cannot know any of it. In order for me to be able to worship God I must be able to see and perceive not only that he exists, but that he is also good, even if the entirety of that goodness passes out of the realm of my understanding. And if he is Creator, and Sustainer, and if he is good, then there should be no problem in my being sufficiently enabled to see enough of his goodness to know it.

I am wary of writing off God altogether, for two reasons best elucidated through quotes, one Scriptural and one Lewisian. The first, a parable I’ve written about before: the parable of the talents, in which Jesus judges poorly the man who expects him to be ‘hard,’ but well those who expect to see him well (and live their lives accordingly). It may seem silly at fist blush, but I have no qualms at the possibility of my inner expectation of the deity shaping my own character, and thus my response to that deity on that Day (permitted, of course, that this deity exists). It should be no surprise that thinking the foundation of goodness to be bad should warp a soul beyond its ability to savor or accept the presence of God.

And the other is the quote I shall leave you with, veering wildly from Pullman’s His Dark Materials with its (in my view, somewhat proper, if inappropriately generalized) indictments of Calvin’s God, to the end of Lewis’ The Last Battle where a circle of dwarfs sit in the open fields at the gateway of heaven. Lewis’ God inspires more affection and awe in me than Pullman’s, and so do Lewis’ heaven and hell inspire more love and fright, and here I am pondering their different concepts of the Almighty:

‘Aslan,’ said Lucy through her tears, ‘could you – will you – do something for these poor Dwarfs?’

‘Dearest,’ said Aslan, ‘I will show you both what I can, and what I cannot, do.’ He came close to the Dwarfs and gave a low growl: low, but it set all the air shaking. But the Dwarfs said to one another, ‘Hear that? That’s the gang at the other end of the stable. Trying to frighten us. They do it with a machine of some kind. Don’t take any notice. They won’t take us in again!’

Aslan raised his head and shook his mane. Instantly a glorious feast appeared on the Dwarfs’ knees: pies and tongues and pigeons and trifles and ices, and each Dwarf had a goblet of good wine in his right hand. But it wasn’t much use. They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn’t taste it properly. They thought they were eating and drinking only the sort of things you might find in a stable. One said he was trying to eat hay and another said he had a bit of an old turnip and a third said he’d found a raw cabbage leaf. And they raised golden goblets of rich red wine to their lips and said ‘Ugh! Fancy drinking dirty water out of a trough that a donkey’s been at! Never thought we’d come to this.’ But very soon every Dwarf began suspecting that every other Dwarf had found something nicer than he had, and they started grabbing and snatching, and went on to quarrelling, till in a few minutes there was a free fight and all the good food was smeared on their faces and clothes or trodden under foot. But when at last they sat down to nurse their black eyes and their bleeding noses, they all said:

‘Well, at any rate there’s no Humbug here. We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.’

‘You see,’ said Aslan. ‘They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out. But come, children. I have other work to do.’

The first thing I would like to address is that evil actually does exist, whether or not God does. It is interesting to me that Christian apologists will try to make the claim that without a God there is no such thing as evil, only atoms moving and waves waving which happen to do things we dislike. I find this claim absurd. Just because evil may boil down, in the end, to the materials of the physical universe does not make it any less than evil, any more than that the functioning of your brain boiling down to chemistry and biology makes you any less intelligent. When I speak about evil, what I mean is nothing less than, and nothing more transcendental than, the doing of harm to sentient, self-aware beings. This includes, in many cases, the animal as well as the human realm. So on a personal level, the dying of a baby in its mother’s arms is an evil; also, the torturing of a cat. On a more corporate level, the systematic genocide of a group of people (or the same accomplished by a malicious and deadly disease or set of diseases, such as what decimated the American populations) is an evil. I think these things being recognized as evil should be evident regardless of one’s theistic or atheistic beliefs.

On a final note, I’ve tried to keep this post from rambling and making it more coherent, but it is difficult to do, so apologies in advance.

Why Worship God?

I think this is a good question to ask whenever dealing with evil. Ought God to be worshiped simply because he is powerful, or is there another reason he is worshiped? To the answer that God ought to be worshiped because of his omnipotence, then if Satan were more powerful than God, should Satan be worshiped instead? My point – as I tried to make in the Euthyphro posts – is that God should be worshiped for the supreme excellence of the quality of his character. There are many governments in the world that wield a power over their people, some mostly for good and some mostly for evil. At present there is a government of the country ‘Myanmar’ which through its policies has knowingly and willingly killed many of its citizens in the aftermath of the recent typhoon. Should these citizens still respect (or ‘worship’) their leadership because of the absolute authority they have over their lives? Hell no! It is not by reason of power that we worship or even grant respect to individuals, but by the quality of their character. Why should this be different with God, or do we wish merely to be sycophants and cynics, doing at all times what will get us most ‘on the in’ with the powers that be? But for God to be a worship-worthy god, he must (in my view) possess a character the greatness of which cannot be imagined or surpassed. This does not mean human beings must be able to understand this character in its fullness – on the contrary, such would be impossible – but that his character must, inasmuch as it is fathomable, be manifestly good.

And this is much the picture the Jewish and Christian Scriptures give, from Psalms to gospels, though they often intermingle fear (of his power) with goodness (of his character):

The angel of the LORD encamps around those who fear him,
and he delivers them.
Taste and see that the LORD is good;
blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.

A certain ruler asked him, ‘Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ ‘Why do you call me good?’ Jesus answered. ‘No one is good—except God alone.’

That last passage – found both in Mark and Luke – alludes to the transcendent goodness of God about which I spoke: that he must be (and is) good to the highest extent which it is possible to be good, so that no one is ‘good’ as God is truly good. And so you may fear him for his power, but God is to be worshiped because of his character.

In A World Such as This, Can There Be a Good God?

By ‘a world such as this’ I mean one which, as experience proves, contains evils. The typical atheistic argument is that a God who is good, and is both omnipotent and omniscient, would be able to prevent evils. That there are evils means that God is not good, or he is not omnipotent and omniscient. Hence, if he exists, he either ceases to be capable of solving our problems (benignly benevolent), or becomes the source of them (malevolent).

This argument is however a gross simplification. There is a caveat that it omits: that a God who is good, omnipotent and omniscient would prevent evils unless he had a significant moral reason to allow them. Humans allow this caveat all the time – especially in medical procedures – and it may well be that, just as by omnipotence we shouldn’t mean to say that God can make a being more powerful or ‘better’ (in any sense) than himself, there may be some things for which even God requires the existence of evils. Nevertheless, to be good, God must use these evils, as a doctor administering pain amid a medical treatment to save or drastically better a patient’s life, to capitalize on a greater good.

Sub-Problems: Unintended and Natural Evils

The greatest problems associated with evils are not those that one brings upon oneself, but evils capable of completely destroying one’s life that are outside one’s control. While intentional evils are bad enough (such as the holocaust of the Jews under Hitler), unintended evils are at least as common. For a child to be born during a famine in sub-Saharan Africa is quite outside both that child’s control and that of his parents, as is the hunger he feels as he dies at the age of four, severely undernourished and ridden with intestinal worms (skeletal images of children with bloated stomachs come to mind). On the other hand, some children are born in wealthy countries and never know life-threatening hunger, living to a ripe old age. Now suppose we could trace the source of this famine to the over-farming of the land fifty years ago by inept farmers living under the partial-disinterest of a colonial government. Even then, the death of that child cannot be laid wholly at the feet of those farmers, for what they did they did not out of malevolence but largely from ignorance not having the capacity to understand the ramifications of their agricultural decisions, and likewise the colonial powers did not foresee or intend the long-reaching ramifications of its policies. And so while it might have been prevented, the evil of the painful life and death of this child, and thousands like him, is the unintended consequence of the actions by others. And this does not even touch on entirely well-intended perpetrations of evil, such as ignorant or experimental attempts at medicine (or failed surgeries), or, as a book I am reading is fond of citing, the father who unintentionally and non-negligently runs over his infant child whom he loves.

Natural evils on the other hand are those not caused by any choice, but merely by the structure and fabric of the world we find ourselves in. There are many parasitic worms which are human-specific: that is, in order to complete their life cycle, they must have a human host. I do not know what it means to call God ‘good’ and acknowledge the existence of creatures whose lives only cause pain to others, particularly to humans (though if one has ever seen an animal in pain, they must also be included in this). And aside from specific creatures, it is the same physical laws of this universe that allow for combustion and cellular metabolism that cause hurricanes and tornados, which by their co-existence with humanity and animality cause much pain and difficulty to both. The nature of the material universe is self-destructive. Stars live out their ‘life cycle’ through nuclear fusion of their own materials, continuing to exist at the expense of their own substance until it is nearly all turned to iron, at which point they die, destroyed by the very process by which they lived. And similarly for biological organisms: we exist, at least most of us who are capable of thought, by the destruction of other organisms to provide our metabolism, by the division and recycling of our cells which each time are slightly degraded; species make their existence in ecological niches at the expense of other species vying for those niches; these species evolve at the expense of many genetic screw-ups, individuals being born deformed and not quite working out, the better ones doing better and progressing at the expense of the poor. Simply put: matter builds itself up by tearing itself down. The universe is inherently self-destructive, and if the laws of thermodynamics are to be believed, not for a greater end. And it is by this process that we live.

In the face of both of these it becomes difficult to affirm the existence of a good God. The first – the far-reaching consequences of choice, both malevolent and not – seems to fly in the face of the notion of a present and participatory God. The second – the natural evils seemingly built-in to the universe – seems to fly in the face of the notion of a creator God. These both are in need of answering, the first for theistic claims in particular, the second for deistic claims in general.

The Non-Answer of the Fall

The most typical Christian answer to these two sub-problems under the big problem of evil – unintended evils through choice and natural evils – is that, to quote a cliché, ‘we live in a fallen world.’ The notion is this: our forefathers (foreparentalunits?) disobeyed God and, as a result, we live in a world with the terrible and persistent evils that we currently see. It is not because God created the world that way nor that God delights in evil, but that we have (in some mysterious way, corporately through our forebears) disobeyed God, and these are the natural consequences.

However, I think this actually fails to explain the natural evils it sets out to explain – particularly those of the sort including the parasites that I mentioned above. If God is Creator (and most adherents to this explanation would emphatically say yes), where do these bits of creation come from? Did God ‘just get pissed off’ at Adam and Eve to such a degree that he went off and specifically created hundreds of species for the specific purpose of inflicting misery on them, and the rest of creation as well? These sorts of living creatures take some time to just ‘arise’ (if we are to hold to the scientific theory of evolution), and so their simply coming into existence as a result of the withdrawn presence of God after the Fall and within the scope human history is simply not a possibility. No, these creatures had to come into existence concurrently with the species they live off of; or otherwise God created them out of an act of spite. And a God who acts out of spite is, arguably, not good. A further warning against this explanation (of punishment or, as I would say, of spite) is that God’s wrath and judgment, at least in the New Testament, is described not as active retribution but as his withdrawn presence: ‘I tell you the truth, I never knew you’, and as a place of ‘darkness,’ e.g. outside of his presence.

As I said earlier, these natural evils are simply a result of how matter works, including how we function as a biological species. These are so deep-seated in the laws of the universe that it is just not enough to say that God made specific alterations, but to account for a prior existence sans natural evils, we must say he reorganized the entirety of the universe’s composition, raising the ‘punishment’ from specific consequences to a basic recreation of Created order. Furthermore, given the ‘Tree of Life’ imagery both in Genesis and Revelation, and the existence in both places of a ‘wilderness’ or a place that is ‘outside the city,’ I would propose that the Bible itself suggests not that the material universe has fundamentally changed in its structure but that its participants (namely, human beings) were sustained in it and despite its inherent self-destructiveness in a supernatural way by God. This meshes nicely with the concept of wrath described above, but leaves outstanding the problem of Creation containing natural evils in the first place.

But worse than all this, even if God is good in such retribution for Adam and Eve’s sin, he is still at least partly morally culpable for the Fall, and so also culpable for evils. Imagine that I take a child into an active nuclear silo. I set her down in the room, which contains many colored knobs and blinking buttons, and warn her not to touch any of them or else she will unleash a holocaust on many people. I then leave the room. Now suppose she does push buttons and turn knobs, and kills millions of people. When I return to the room, how much can I blame the child? Surely some, for she did what I had told her not to. But am I not chiefly to blame for putting a child at these controls? One might say that if she was fully aware of her consequences, she is to blame, but I don’t think such is possible for a child. Nor for Adam and Eve. Our ability as human beings to perpetrate evil far outweighs our ability to be held accountable for it. I may describe for you the death of a person’s child as they hold them in their arms, and I may do so quite vividly, but your ability to commiserate with this is limited by your experience of it. So also with the evils we perpetrate, we are incapable of fully understanding the depths of what we have done unless we have already experienced their equivalent at the point we commit them. Surely Hitler, though one of the most evil human beings in history, was not capable of fully understanding the evils that his policies perpetrated; and so forth. As we grow older, through the wear and tear of the world, we are more able to relate with those experiencing evils, and so understand them, but when we are younger, this is less true. How much more so for Adam and Eve, human beings who had never experienced evil and so could not have had any true conception of the horrors of it! So without serious modification being made to this argument, a portion of responsibility falls on Adam and Eve, to be sure, but the great bulk of it still falls on God.

The Non-Answer of Calvinism

Though often building on the previous answer of the ‘Fall,’ the answer of Calvinism is separate and distinct from it. The Calvinistic response runs something like this: but people deserve the evil things that happen to them. This means that the four year old who dies from hunger, because of his ‘sin nature,’ fully deserved the wretched end that he came to. And while it may be tempting to dismiss this answer as too horrific and making a monster out of God, it was an answer I held to for some time, and I think it is one that deserves serious consideration and a serious response.

One problem I see with Calvinism is its attempt to pass off moral blame for stative conditions. They say that people are ‘by nature objects of wrath’ where ‘wrath’ is imputed with moral valuation. Even given that human beings are ‘born evil’ it is not possible to blame the individual for how they were born any more than it is possible to blame a dog for being a dog. We may make the argument that the world is better off without dogs (I would disagree, but I do think the world is quite possibly better off without tapeworms and viruses), but we cannot place moral blame on each individual dog – or tapeworm or virus – for their being what they are. It is silly to say that a child ‘deserves’ death in any moral sense because of her putative sin nature, though this is precisely what I hear most Calvinists try to pass off as true. It only makes sense, given the theory’s premise, to take a utilitarian view of humans as objects and leave moral judgments out of it.

Which leads me to the greater problem I see with Calvinism, and that is that it incorporates malevolence into the nature of God. The Calvinist typically responds by saying that, without divine intervention, we are all damned, and in that situation God is still just. So if God intervenes and scoops some but not all from the jaws of hell, he is still just, and also now he is merciful for he did not let them all perish. One can argue all day about the meaning of justice and mercy in these thought-experiments, but the short of it is that such a God fails Jesus’ ‘Good Samaritan’ test. Remember, Jesus gives this story in Luke as a response to questions about righteousness and the Law! So like the priest and Levite in the story, God, seeing and knowing the man on the side of the road dying (for he is after all omniscient), passes by on the other side, saying ‘I have not chosen you.’ Worse yet, that ‘it is to my glory for him to suffer thusly forever’ – blatant malevolence. But the Samaritan – that dirty heretic – is better than God, for he stops to assist. Shall we say then that Jesus is less good than the heroes in his own moral parables? And what of the Sermon on the Mount, loving and doing good to one’s enemies, and giving to the needy? If God’s enemies are truly incapable of turning to righteousness apart from his intervention and saving themselves, then there too he also fails to live up to Jesus’ morality in failing to help them. There are more reasons I have abandoned Calvinism – taking Romans 9 out of context proves nothing (and that book may suffer more than any other from having complex arguments taken out of context!) – but I found this one, to me, to be a compelling reason. Making malevolence part of the character of God is not an answer to anything, least of all an answer to evil.

Grasping for an Answer

For God to be good (benevolent), omniscient, and omnipotent, and for there to be a world such as ours in which there are great and life-destroying evils uncaused and unasked for by their victims, God must make good to the individual, inasmuch as he is capable of doing, on their life experiences. How that may be possible is quite outside the capabilities of my mind. For God to be good, he must somehow (as the Good Samaritan does) assist every human being in their need, regardless of their personal sin. And for there to be a hell, or place without God – as I believe there probably is, should theism be correct at all – that hell can only be populated after the Samaritan’s object of affection has, being picked up from the road, said thank you very much but if this should mean spending time with you I would rather find my help somewhere else. And so they may be free to do so as long as they wish. This is why I love Lewis’ ‘The Great Divorce’ so much: he takes seriously God’s goodness and the doctrine of hell, and he does so in the only known way how, and that is taking human individuality and freedom to make choices seriously.

Another way to overcome the problem of evil is to say that God is impersonal, and so not beholden to personal concepts of morality. One way to do this is assert a complete Tillichian God-as-Ground-of-Being. Though Tillich would say that God is supra-personal, he is nevertheless impersonal, and so God has no moral obligations toward Creation, but only sustains it being by his Being. (How Tillich squares this with the Incarnation I do not know, but I think he would have to accept docetism.) Although I find God-as-Ground-of-Being to be a tantalizing answer, I can only accept it partially without becoming a deist. I see very little substantive difference between the God of Being and Einstein’s God of Order. While it is one answer, it destroys the ability of a person to relate to God, pray to him or feel anything from him. He becomes the background across which the universe moves.

But to make God personal, and good, I find it difficult to conceive of him as Creator in any specific sense, largely because of the natural evils I mentioned above. At best, I can only say that he set the universe into motion and largely let it do its own thing, in order to, at a later point in time, come to it and woo it and unite himself with it. That this material universe is not the product of a God who spent tender loving care in its creation, but the product of its own ungodly rules and regulations, producing good and evil, and that an otherworldly God comes now from outside of it, into its chaos, to unite himself with it in a particular way, namely with its greatest product, sentient and competent beings capable of comprehending and communing with the divine. And to make this process occur, God must become more earthy (incarnate), and matter (via people) must become more divine (self-giving, rather than self-destructive). This is a partial solution which very much intrigues me, whatever it does to the biblical Genesis account.

The Upshot of All This

I cannot adhere anymore to the common Christian and theistic answers to the problem of evil. I believe evil is sufficiently deep, sufficiently integral to the universe, and sufficiently problematic that it deserves greater attention and better answers than I have seen it given in theistic systems. This is not to say we should not fight evil: most certainly we should, bettering the world as much as we are possibly can, whether or not there is a God. But the universe as we find it is a great challenge to the notion of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and good God.

An Uncertain Way Forward

In case this post and its predecessor have not been explicit enough, I am at this point in my life an agnostic. I know where I have come from and I know what I have rejected, and I know my reasons for rejecting them. And so being clear of the reasons, the likelihood of my returning to any of the precise systems I have rejected is slim to none. This is not to say I am rejecting Christianity altogether: I have detailed the items I do reject, and do not understand how to hold to Christianity as a whole without them. However, in the realm of beliefs this leaves me with more problems than solutions, and seeing the problems are so great, I wonder whether they have solutions. I very much appreciate Christian thought, and in general I find it so far superior to other religions (or at least the ones of which I am sufficiently aware) that it is almost not worth comparing with them. But, in my heart, not being able to accept biblical testimony carte blanche, even about Jesus (thinking it eerily likely he was a mistaken apocalyptic preacher), and not quite being able to say that God exists, given this universe, I cannot claim myself currently as a participant in Christendom. That may someday change; I certainly would not protest to a change. There are many things about Christianity I would like to be true: its kernel – Incarnation, Atonement, and Resurrection – is beautiful to me almost beyond expression. But I do not want to accept something because it is convenient for me or because I would like it to be true, but only because I believe it to be true. And if I do return to the faith, I fear I will be so far outside of the mainstream it will be difficult for me to commune with other Christians (in a way in which I can actually let them know me or what I believe), and I will almost certainly be heretical to most – if not for the gay part, then for something else along the lines of what I’ve mentioned. But for now, I am a better skeptic than believer.

What I do know about life is that theism alone is not the only reason to live well. Other reasons in particular are another topic altogether. I desire still to do good to others with my choices in life, and may and shall still pursue that, falteringly, in what I do. My morals are surprisingly very similar, if not the same (minus the morality of worship), to what they were. How to go about fellow-human relationships, further inspection of belief and reality, how and whether to relate to the communion of religious believers of which I have made myself a participant, and pursuing the betterment of others, is mostly an uncertain way forward. But that I do want to pursue such things, at least, is certain.

I questioned whether to voice these thoughts, but in the end I have found too much doublespeak in Christianity, people affirming in public what they do not really affirm in private, going along with the crowd mostly to save face, asserting confidently that they have no doubts while, among those they know, confiding that they are haunted by doubt, and I at least do not find that hiding one’s beliefs or thoughts for the sake of popular acclaim to be an altogether healthy or worthy enterprise. Simply put, I typically find it cowardly. My intention is not to cause others’ beliefs to crumble – far from it – but to articulate the doubts of my own. So if at any point in reading this you feel an uncontrollable urge to call me a heretic, shout out that this is proof that people cannot be both gay and Christian, or simply feel too uncomfortable, please jump ship and hit that X button or back button on the browser window (though you are of course free, as always, to skip it all and leave feedback). But if reading this is not of any benefit to you, and it is a harm to you, then there is no point in continuing. So with that said, let us walk boldly into the realm of doubt…

My problems with the Christian religion are twofold, though I do not say this to limit the tremendous problems this religion faces to a mere number of two (I am quite sure there are those I have not yet thought of or encountered), but I mean to say that these two are of sufficient magnitude and seriousness to disturb the foundations of what I believe, or what I thought I believed. And the problems are these: the text of Scripture, and the existence of evil. The problem of Scripture is that it is not inerrant, it discusses differing concepts of God amongst its various books and authors, sometimes making contradictory claims in these, others portraying God in radically different manners; the problem of evil is that the world contains evils of such magnitude and distribution that, on the surface, are incompatible with a God who is omniscient and omnipotent, as well as good. While the first is Christian-specific, the second applies to all theistic and deistic systems, and neither is negligible in terms of constructing one’s view of the world, or considering the possibility, probability, or reality of God. And so while a complete answer to either is not necessary (though a sufficiently partial and reasonable one is), I do not feel I can honestly proclaim God with these left outstanding. I am splitting these two issues into two posts, since they are each the size of a baby rhinoceros, and if I combine them in a single post, their combined weight might cause a singularity in my database and collapse my blog.

I. The Text of Scripture

Examining the Christian Scriptures thoroughly, it is difficult for me to understand how claims of inerrancy can be made outside of ignorance. I do not mean this to suggest that all those making such claims are ignorant or that they are stupid – they may well have attained an understanding of Scripture which my mind has not – but that I simply do not comprehend how this is possible. Sticking to the New Testament (which is more my stomping grounds than the Old), I think it will be sufficient to show, from my understanding, a lack of literal, moral, and foundational inerrancy.

Literal inerrancy

The matter of literal errancy can be shown in cross-references (such as the infamous Mark 2:26 debacle), but a trivial, yet important example, can be taken from the three Synoptic accounts, in the sending out of the Twelve:

Do not take along any gold or silver or copper in your belts; take no bag for the journey, or extra tunic, or sandals or a staff; for the worker is worth his keep.
(Matthew 10:9-10)

He told them: ‘Take nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra tunic.’
(Luke 9:3)

These were his instructions: ‘Take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in your belts. Wear sandals but not an extra tunic.’
(Mark 6:8-9)

The Matthean and Lukan accounts agree in what they say, but Mark is at odds with the other two.

If we are to say, along with most scholars, that Mark is earliest, are Matthew and Luke working with a corrupted version of the story, or do they correct the error contained in Mark? Whatever the case is, I think the contradiction is pretty evident in the text and it is not possible to work around it. There is no manuscript data of which I am aware that harmonizes these. I have heard with surprising frequency from those holding to biblical inerrancy that the original documents were inerrant, but what we have are not those originals, so that the documents at first agreed on all matters, but later were corrupted (even if there is no evidence for specific cases, we may take on faith that God inspired them perfectly, though we cannot tell in every situation how that plays out). But whether this is just me or whether it is a more important consideration, I do not understand the practical difference between an inerrant canon now-corrupted and an errant canon. Was God just negligent in his upkeep of the text (being sovereign one moment over its inspiration but not over its preservation)? And how does it mean anything to appeal to a hypothetical, largely imaginary inerrant original when we do not have that original nor any way of appealing to it besides the critical methods which have gotten us even this far? That is, I see no way that the interpretation of an inerrant canon now-corrupted and an errant canon differ from one another. And I further fail to see how an inerrant canon now-corrupted makes anything but a mess out of God’s interaction with mankind for the sake of his self-revelation.

But this error is pretty negligible, right? I mean, none of this affects the interpretation of the passage but only that some details may not be exact. This is a fair assessment, but this example cannot be passed up, I don’t think, without conceding the literal errancy of the Scriptures.

Moral Inerrancy

But what about moral matters? Surely there is agreement there. Again, for sake of simplicity (and sticking to where my knowledge is more complete), I will only look at New Testament examples, for considerations about Old Testament moral commands, their relevancy, and the scope of what is called Covenant Theology is very complex. But let us take one issue: the eating of meats sacrificed to idols. The first instruction concerning this matter comes in the book of Acts, in the letter from the Jerusalem council to the Gentile believers.

It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things.

I think it is clear from the context this occurs in that this was more of a command from church authority than a suggestion. And I think it not without reason (as some do on other matters) to say that ‘contextually speaking’ we cannot affirm eating meat sacrificed to idols without bringing the morality of sexual immorality into question.

Paul, however, takes another view of this altogether, alluding to this matter in Romans and more fully addressing it in 1 Corinthians, essentially saying the same thing in both places:

Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, but it is wrong for a man to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble. It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother to fall. So whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God.

Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat such food they think of it as having been sacrificed to an idol, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled. But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do. Be careful, however, that the exercise of your freedom does not become a stumbling block to the weak. For if anyone with a weak conscience sees you who have this knowledge eating in an idol’s temple, won’t he be emboldened to eat what has been sacrificed to idols? So this weak brother, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. When you sin against your brothers in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall.

Paul is saying, clearly, that eating meat sacrificed to idols is a non-moral issue, but that those who do this need to be sensitive to their fellow believers who do view it as a moral issue, for these persons and their consciences are more important than an individual’s freedom. But in saying this, does he not explicitly flaunt the decree given only a few years earlier by the council at Jerusalem? Is he not suggesting that those who made this ruling were brothers with ‘weak consciences’? And what of the other matters in that decree? Or do the Scriptures not always speak with one voice on moral matters?

But the New Testament is not done addressing this topic, for we have two more mentions on this from the mouth of Christ himself, in the book of Revelation, first to the church at Pergamum and then the church at Thyatira:

Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: You have people there who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin by eating food sacrificed to idols and by committing sexual immorality.

Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols.

In the above passages from Revelation, as is arguably the same in the Acts passage, eating food sacrificed to idols is inextricably linked to sexual immorality (I suspect, particularly given the OT references in the Revelation passages, that this refers to the context of pagan mystery cults). However, there is not an out in the passage to say that food sacrificed to idols is wrong only when it leads to sexual immorality, but both are unequivocally condemned. Like my friend from whom I stole the title of this entry might say about other matters, it is not that eating causes sexual immorality per se, but that there is a link between rejecting giving thanks to God by eating food sacrificed to pagan gods, and rejecting the true God’s instruction on other matters, including sexual ones. Only because of Romans and 1 Corinthians can we, strictly within the scope of Scripture, seriously question this reasoning. So what are we to say? Shall we say that Paul disregards the clear instruction of the church and the Lord Jesus Christ? Or shall we say that Christian thought developed on this matter over time, to approximate the truer morality of the matter, and that likewise the commendation in Acts did not represent God’s perfect will, but a first attempt thereat, hedged by invisible (in the text) cultural constraints, even though the council claims this ‘seemed good to the Holy Spirit’? (For we cannot easily contextualize away the command given in Acts, seeing that it was to the whole of the Gentile communion.) Shall we also then say, despite the most straight-forward hermeneutic of the Revelation passages, that food sacrificed to idols is condemned only because of its fundamental link, in that context, to sexual immorality, and it is not condemned for all people at all times, such as to the Corinthian and Roman churches to whom Paul wrote? My purpose here is to show that despite clear moral injunctions, Scriptural commands change, are reevaluated, and evolve over time and in the minds of its various authors, creating anything but a clear moral standard on all issues, but a complex and altogether human dialogue between authors, authorities, and congregants, at the very least obscuring, if not destroying, any universal moral inerrancy inherent in the text.

Foundational Inerrancy

Surely then, if literal and moral inerrancy are in question, we can depend on Scripture to tell us without erring the most important matters. The Resurrection, which along with the Incarnation and the Atonement forms a necessary trio for the Christian faith, would fall easily within this category. This, I fear, I also find more complex than meets the eye, and quite possibly lacking in inerrancy. The post-resurrection accounts have, to say the least, given me great pause concerning the validity of Christian claims. The variance in the accounts are rather infamous, including who was at the tomb and what they saw there, whether there was an earthquake, whether holy men from the past wandered around Jerusalem in-between the Lord’s death and resurrection, as only Matthew mentions – a rather noteworthy occurrence one would think for the other gospel writers! But there is one fairly large discrepancy I want to hone in on. Matthew, Mark, and John all have appearances by Jesus to the apostles in Galilee. Though the original ending to Mark is lost (that note in your Bible that ‘the earliest manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have Mark 16:9-20’ is quite correct, though the details are outside the scope of this document), the trajectory to Galilee is evident from 14:28 and 16:6-7:

But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he [the angel] said, ‘You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, “He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” ’

Matthew and John have similar accounts at the end of each of their gospels, which I (rather grotesquely) abbreviate here:

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said […]

Afterward Jesus appeared again to his disciples by the Sea of Tiberias [Galilee]. It happened this way: […]

It is striking to notice agreement between two Synoptics and John with one Synoptic missing out, for usually the Synoptics agree and John is the odd man out. One might say there is a gap in Luke except for the way he recounts Jesus’ first (recognizable) appearance to the disciples at the end of his gospel:

While they were still talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. [… Jesus speaks, eats a fish to prove his corporeality …] Then he [Jesus] opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. He told them, ‘This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.’

(emphasis mine)

Luke-Acts does not record any apparition of Jesus in Galilee, though the other three gospels say there was such an apparition. Furthermore, unless we are to assume the disciples disobeyed their risen Lord (which does not much fit the literary mood at the transition from Luke to Acts) or that their Lord rescinded his command and led his followers to Galilee (which does not much fit the description of him), there is not much room for Luke’s account to agree with the other three. The geography makes sense within the thematic scope of Luke-Acts – a Jewish messiah and his message spreading from the Jews to the world (thus beginning in Jerusalem, the center of Judaic life) – but I’d rather not think the evangelist altered the story to suit his theme. And as I mentioned, there are other notable discrepancies on the matter of the Resurrection. How could God, in a divinely-inspired writing for the purpose of giving men and women his truth, allow such contradiction in narratives seemingly necessary for his message to lodge themselves into his canon?

The Upshot of All This

The examples I have given are only that: examples of a class that exceeds the particular instances given here. I did not even touch authorial issues in the New Testament, which are another very difficult can of worms. But the gradual accumulation of examples – an umbrella I think it is fair to call ‘textual criticism’ – has wreaked on my faith a damage I did not anticipate, and has crept up on me and surprised me unexpectedly. I should not attempt to say anything other than that I was raised in a fundamentalist belief system that placed highest possible value on the inerrancy of Scripture, and that this background has, no doubt, significantly shaped how I have handled all this. Like every human, I am influenced by my upbringing. But the result is that the faith that I was brought up to have – that what the Bible says is true and beyond doubt, and it is the only source from which one can truly come to know God – is no longer tenable. The Bible is all too much a human document, containing our errors, our disagreements, our disputes…

This leaves me, hermeneutically, on unsteady ground, or rather on ground that has already collapsed and left me nowhere. In order for me to still consider the Bible ‘of God’ in any real sense, it must hold to a certain set of standards, and while it may be a mixture of human and divine elements (much like orthodox voicing of Jesus’ dual human and divine natures), it must at minimum speak about true interactions between God and the physical world. The Incarnation, Atonement, and Resurrection are non-negotiable: for any of these to be less than real material interactions between God and mankind, to which we have some reliable testimony, Christianity is ruined (for the Atonement, the material interaction may possibly be postponed to a future, glorified state, alongside the present experience of the Holy Spirit). I am not content to water away the narrative as internal personal experience, for internal personal experience is notoriously subjective and tells us more about ourselves than it does about God. No: we are material beings and as such any story giving glimpses into the character of God must ground itself in the same matter that our beings are made from, so that it becomes approachable to us.

What such a hermeneutic, or such a requirement, looks like when it pertains to the Christian Scriptures is quite beyond me. But I certainly know that if it is synonymous with the old requirements, then the very religion flounders before them and is thrown out altogether. I think that, to pursue this, I might be well-advised to pick up some Karl Barth (perhaps ‘Church Dogmatics’), for he along with many neo-orthodox theologians of the 20th century is one of the few who I know to have taken this matter seriously, and he and his kin may offer the only way of answering such questions. Nevertheless, at present this matter remains to me an incalculably high impediment to a conviction on Christianity containing the remotest degree of certainty.

When Jesus came into Jerusalem on the day we now call ‘Palm Sunday,’ crowds gathered around him, shouted after him, and as Matthew says ‘spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road.’ This looks like messiah worship, doesn’t it? But most Protestants are unaware of the Maccabean revolt, which happened a little less than two centuries before Christ, and I will admit that I am less aware of it than I should be. In the revolt, the Jewish people rose up and fought against the Seleucid empire and defeated them, winning for a short time their independence from any foreign power. When the Maccabean forces recaptured Jerusalem and cleansed the temple, 2 Maccabees records this:

Carrying rods entwined with leaves, green branches and palms, they sang hymns of grateful praise to him who had brought about the purification of his own Place.

Sounds astonishingly like the Jesus incident – save that I doubt the Maccabean forces rode into Jerusalem on a donkey (stallions are more likely). Palms were not something people happened to have available; it had a very specific political significance tied to a specific nation’s history (like throwing tea out of a ship in Boston harbor). This is not the recognition of God-dwelling-with-us, it is the people of Jerusalem asserting what they expect of Jesus – a prophet who will lead the Jewish people to political freedom from their Roman oppressors! Matthew’s gospel is saturated with the politics of Jewish independence, from the Maccabean expectations of Jerusalem toward Jesus to the later questioning by the Pharisees (to trap him – much like our current political journalists) about paying taxes to Caesar. Jesus himself gives acknowledgment of this at his arrest, ‘Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture me?’ Indeed, a rebellion was the expectation of the city at large.

Jesus spends his time between the triumphal entry and his arrest countering this expectation. There are many things he does in the Matthean account of Holy Week, but I want to look particularly at the six parables Matthew records in this time. He enters the city and clears the temple (in many ways, adding to the parallel with the Maccabean revolt!), and shortly thereafter tells 3 back-to-back parables; the author takes a break to record other happenings, and then gives 3 more parables. My contention: that all six of these parables reflect a soteriology based firmly on how one lives one’s life, not on faith alone. But let us take a look at these parables.

I. Parable of the Two Sons (21:28-32)

The first parable is simple enough: there are two sons to whom a father gives an instruction. One says he will obey, and one says he will not, but they each do the opposite of what they said. Jesus makes clear his meaning at the end of the parable:

I tell you the truth, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did. And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him.

‘Repent and believe’ is another tricky bit of word-politics. In AD 66, Josephus was sent to Galilee in order to put out a rebellion. (Galilee must have been quite the trouble spot.) Josephus upon meeting the leader of the rebellion told him to ‘repent and believe in me.’ Now Josephus was not leading a religious movement and asking the leader to convert. He was an army commander telling the leader to stop the rebellion and trust that Josephus’ way of sorting things out was better. Especially given Matthew’s (and the Synoptics’ in general) heavy emphasis on the Kingdom of God, there is no reason to believe that Jesus’ words ‘repent and believe’ had any other meaning than those of Josephus: a change in alliance and a change in actions.

The parable is straight-forward, and it is about following the way of righteousness, which Jesus says first was announced through John, and it particularly brings out the hypocrisy of those who say they will follow the way of righteousness but do not.

II. Parable of the tenants (21:33-44)

The second parable is more complex: a man has a vineyard which he rents out, and having gone away he sends servants to receive the vineyard’s crops. The renters abuse and kill the servants, and finally the owner’s son, and the conclusion is reached (by the crowd) that the owner should kill the renters. Jesus again makes the meaning explicit:

Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.

Matthew here adds that the Pharisees and chief priests ‘knew he was talking about them,’ which gives additional insight into the meaning of the parable.

In Jesus’ response to the crowd, he quotes Psalm 118:22 – ‘the stone the builders rejected has become the capstone’ – which is a standard in the Synoptics as well as in Peter’s writings and speeches (Acts 4:11, 1 Pet 2:4, 2 Pet 2:7). The Petrine view, as well as that begged by the parable’s reference to the owner’s son, is that Jesus is himself the capstone. Integrating this into the rest of the parable, the interpretation seems to be quite clearly that God expects certain behaviors out of people – the reception and working out of what he requires and rightfully demands ‘in his vineyard’ – and opposing this results in his extreme disfavor; and in some manner not wholly explained in this passage, Jesus is the pinnacle of this, and the religious order typified by the Pharisees is in opposition to it. Nevertheless, in addition to not accepting the master’s son, it is the actions of these individuals that causes their end.

III. Parable of the wedding banquet (22:1-14)

The third parable is more complex still. As in the previous two there is still the imagery of family, particularly a father and son (and the implication is like the previous parable, that the son is Jesus and the father is God the Father). The king/father invites many people to his son’s wedding banquet, and some reject him while others, like the previous parable, abuse and kill those who invite them. And these people meet that same bad end. The king/father then invites everyone who is left – the rejects, ‘both good and bad.’ The unusual part, and what I rarely hear expounded upon, is what happens next. The king finds a man who is not wearing wedding clothes and asks him why this is. The man cannot answer and is thrown ‘outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ Unlike the previous parables where a clear explanation is given, Jesus closes enigmatically with ‘many are invited but few are chosen.’

From the symbolism it appears that this parable follows the same trajectory as the other two. There is again the father/son relationship, and the relationship between king/landowner and servants, servants who are abusive toward the king’s messengers and are destroyed. At least in Matthew’s telling, it is not possible to separate this parable from the two before which frame its context. And given the two parables before it, and especially the ones that follow, the parable is very synergistic. The man who was dressed inappropriately was dismissed: though the invitation went out to many, some level of appropriateness was expected for the feast. Though Jesus talks about ‘few’ being ‘chosen,’ the context of this is the invitee’s inappropriateness for attending a wedding banquet, to which the king reacted in not ‘choosing’ the man. It seems to be that those not meeting this kingly expectation, though they may come from both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ of society, are barred from participation in the rewards of God.

Interlude

Between these two sets of parables, Matthew relates many incidents of Holy Week comprising several chapters. These are not my subject here, but I do want to mention them from a 40,000-foot vantage point. We first have the politico-religious questions from the Pharisees and Sadducees, about taxes and resurrection and marriage and law. Once done addressing these things, Jesus responds to all this with a question and quotation about the Messiah. The next two sections are far beyond the scope of this post, but they are the Seven Woes, and the End Times, marking two important points of the Holy Week message (criticism of the Jewish people and religious system as they then stood, and God’s eschatological end).

IV. Parable of the Ten Virgins (25:1-13)

Carrying on with the end times (a theme which now persists through the remaining parables, and exists before but now made more explicit by the context of chapter 24), this parable rejoins the themes carried by the previous parables on the common thread of a marriage banquet. Ten virgins are waiting for a bridegroom, who ‘is a long time in coming.’ Five of them have enough oil to last the night and go in when the bridegroom comes, but the other five are out buying oil when the bridegroom comes and are left outside, begging to be let in. The bridegroom’s response is ‘I tell you the truth, I don’t knew you.’ Jesus then tells his audience to watch, but he does not give an explicit interpretation; he is done with interpreting these for us.

Like the previous parable about the wedding feast, we also see people in this parable excluded from a banquet. It is safe to assume, from the previous parables, that the bridegroom is Jesus, the banquet is his kingdom in its fullest, and the rest of the cast are women and men as they respond to Jesus. If this is the case, then Jesus certainly is talking about people who get into his kingdom because of their preparedness or ‘fitness’ for the occasion, and people who do not get into his kingdom because of their lack of preparedness or appropriateness (like the man without wedding clothes). That is, the failure for the virgins to enter the feast is a direct consequence of not having enough lantern oil, whatever that may represent, if anything, and so entrance to the kingdom is contingent on one’s deeds.

Jesus’ words to these damned (for that must be what they are), they are significant, surprising, but not without precedent in the Matthean account, for they derive, if not verbatim, then from the same spirit, as the Sermon on the Mount. In 7:21-23, again teaching on God’s eschatological end, Jesus says,

Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’

As in the symbolism of this parable, though more explicitly, Jesus says that ‘only he who does the will of my Father’ will enter the kingdom of heaven. But the odd relationship is this: that there is a connection between doing the will of the Father (or having enough oil in one’s lamp) and knowing Jesus. In both places, those who fail do not only fail in deeds, but fail in the relational knowledge of (not merely ‘knowing about’) Jesus. These parables about deeds and salvation ought not to lead us to think that salvation is a result of deeds only, for that is not what they say, but rather that there is an intimate and complex and absolutely necessary bond between knowing Jesus in a relational way and producing the works of the kingdom of God.

V. Parable of the Talents (25:14-30)

This story echoes the parable of the tenants (II) very closely, for again a man takes a journey entrusting that which is his to his servants. But instead of land, this parable talks about money (talents), and the investments made with it. The money is unevenly distributed, and to those who received some and made more with it, the master congratulates them and promises greater rewards. But to the servant who did nothing with the money, the master becomes angry. The servant, seeing the others, says to his master,

I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.

To which his master replies:

You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest. Take the talent from him and give it to the one who has the ten talents. For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Like the parable of the virgins, this ends with a fearful punishment for the one whose deeds are not accepted – and in both the street outside banquet in the previous parable and in the ‘outside’ in this parable, we see ‘darkness’ in that place. I can think of no clearer parallels for hell, or for a messianic return and judgment.

Unlike the prior parables, here we are given a look into the motivations for the one who is damned: he believes that his master is harsh and cruel, and this led to his behavior (or so he claims). The master’s response is sarcastic, and ends with the opposite valuation: that the servant is worthless. As noted above, there is a close relationship in these passages and in the Gospel of Matthew in general between knowing Jesus and acting in accord with the kingdom of heaven. This parable provides more insight into the part that is knowing Jesus: and that is that the damned have a wrong conception of God. The man assumes his master is harsh – because he takes what he did not work for (a rather silly thing to assert, since the servant is paid or at least given recompense for his work!) – and so acts wrongly. To the man who thinks he is harsh, his master shows himself harsh; but to the one who thinks he is diligent and good, he shows himself diligent and good. The connection drawn in the parable of the virgins is re-emphasized here: the blessed have relational knowledge of the character of God, while the damned do not.

On a final note here, like in the parable of the tenants, the very clear assumption is that men have free reign for the current time over the things that belong to God, and may better them or destroy them. This is not a master who manages his estate from afar, but who genuinely turns it over, and returning to it expects to see more made of it than when he gave it over.

VI. Parable of the Sheep and Goats (25:31-46)

The final parable gives the clearest setting of all, no longer working through metaphor to talk about a final judgment, but making it explicit that this is its subject. Jesus separates sheep from goats (two very similar-looking animals) and tells the sheep that they did various good deeds towards him, and then later tells the goats that they did not do the same deeds toward him. Both groups express surprise at this and ask what he is talking about, to which he responds that ‘whatever you did (not do) for one of the least of these [brothers of mine], you did (not do) for me’ (the reply to the goats does not have the words ‘brothers of mine’). Then the goats go ‘to eternal punishment’ and the sheep, which he calls ‘the righteous,’ ‘to eternal life.’

Here again, we see salvation based clearly on righteous deeds. And here Jesus makes these righteous deeds about how one treats others. And in treating one another, either well or poorly, one treats Christ, either well or poorly. Here again is the connection between acting righteously (here, doing good to others) and knowing Christ (here, encountering him somehow in one another). Some commentators make a big deal out of the word ‘brothers’ as meaning that Jesus only self-identifies with the sheep, but I am more hesitant to do so since this word only occurs toward the sheep and not the goats (who still ‘did not do’ toward Jesus). Other commentators make a big deal out of ‘the least of these,’ as if it is only to ‘the least’ that Jesus is referring. But I again am hesitant to accept this as it seems just as likely to me that he is leveling the field of societal statuses and speaking of all the actions of the sheep and goats – even, and especially, those for whom it is least easy in society to do good to and for whom it is most necessary: the dregs, the untouchables, the least. I do not say this to make salvation seem like a balancing game, the weight of one’s deeds good against bad making one a sheep or goat, for then I think we should all be doomed and damned and I do not want to ignore grace and forgiveness and restoration, but I do want to state once more the irrevocable interdependence between salvation and good works, and here in this last of Matthew’s parables those good works are associated fully with the positive good one does to one’s fellow women and men in their need.

Conclusion

Matthew’s account of Holy Week is an answer to the Jewish expectations of a political revolt. Jesus answers and rebuts these expectations in part through parables, describing his kingdom of heaven, and not the earthly kingdom it was presumed he would establish. In the six parables Matthew gives us, Jesus speaks of the kind of people who will inherit that kingdom, and the kind who will not. He does not bring beliefs or confessions into play, but actions and deeds predicated on and inseparable from knowing himself. In an era of Christianity which obsesses over beliefs and confessions as a way to salvation, propagating these confessions to bring others into the kingdom of heaven, Matthew’s account of Holy Week and the parables therein should at least prompt sober reflection on the assumptions we have laced our soteriology with, and cause us to re-evaluate the complex dependencies between faith and works in the Gospel message which are so often glossed over.

When it comes to matters of religion, we also have incomplete knowledge. There are many holy books, all of them containing what appear to be errors and mistakes, all of them with defenders pointing out that these aren’t really errors or mistakes. Muslims, Christians, Orthodox Jews, and adherents of every religion (and even adherents of no religion) all feel at times a euphoric connectedness to the divine, and offer this as proof of their claims. All have histories that are dark at times, brilliant at others. All have intellectual men and women throughout time who have defended them. As to the existence even of God, there is no mechanism he has left us by which to test and see his existence, and he does not make himself physically manifest to each individual being. So when it comes to claims concerning religion, we are left to determine, according to some set of metrics for truthfulness, what seems most likely among a wide number of possibilities.

Let us suppose that there is a God who desires to and does communicate with men and women in the world, and we want to determine which of the competing claims about God is true. This is where Euthyphro’s dilemma comes in. If morality is what it is, and is acknowledged by God, then we may leverage the moral claims of the various religions and systems of philosophical thought to determine which is most likely to be true. If, on the other hand, morality is determined only by what God “likes”, or happens to choose, then moral claims (possibly the most important ramification of a religion) are irrelevant in our search for religious truth.

Consider the following scenario: It is the evening of September 10, 2001. You are speaking to what you once thought was a very nice middle-eastern man but who has now you tied up in his apartment because you came over to borrow some sugar at the wrong time and intruded on an argument between him and his friends about what was happening tomorrow and who was going to drive to the airport. In trying to dissuade him from what he is about to do, you plead with him, saying, “But would God really want you to kill so many people – children visiting their parents, those who are Muslims themselves with loved ones even in your home country?”

“Do not question the will of Allah!” he replies. “It is his will that the infidels be brought to repentance or be destroyed. They have already failed to come to repentance by wallowing in this country’s greed and rebellion to the will of Allah which is given in the Holy Quran.”

“But would Allah really want you to murder?” you say. “Is he so vindictive to want you to kill? Are you sure you are understanding him right? Is this who God is, so evil?”

“Allah is not evil. What he says is right because the will of Allah is always right.”

Do you see how futile it is to reason about God if it is only God’s might that creates morality? It is impossible to determine between one system of belief about God versus another except through factual accuracy – and as I already noted (all too briefly), all systems I know of have some explaining to do, all being radically placed in that area of the world in which our knowledge is woefully incomplete. If might makes right, it is impossible for a Christian to stake Jesus’ divinity on the quality of his character, and likewise impossible to impugn other systems for the character of their god(s). A priori, fundamentalist Islam is just as valid an option as any form of Christianity. Reverse the above situation: assume that you are the terrorist, raised in a background of fundamentalist Islam, saturated with it, and someone is trying to reason with you. Assuming Allah’s will is all that makes an act right or wrong, there is no way for you to leave your beliefs for moral reasons, for there is no such thing as moral reasons to consider. And so I think that, in order for human beings to able to determine to any degree who God is in a world of incomplete knowledge, morality must be at least to some extent determinable apart from God. This does not necessarily mean that all of morality must be determinable by human means (this is part of the problem of incomplete knowledge), but some of it must be.

Consider another scenario: I wrote about a show I’ve been watching about a serial killer who kills other killers. If morality is determined by what God chooses, then this serial killer is not by his nature any more or less moral than God himself, just less powerful. In fact, in a strict interpretation of double predestination Calvinism, this serial killer may actually be more benevolent than God – choosing his victims based on their own benevolence or malevolence (and thus promoting benevolence), whereas God chooses his victims and friends based on no criterion at all concerning the individual at stake (thus promoting… what?). That’s not to say there aren’t Calvinistic answers to this charge (though I personally find them weak), but it is to say that in defining moral rightness strictly as what God chooses, we can rapidly end up with a human being – even a disturbing or morally ambiguous one – having greater benevolence toward humanity than God! (Necessarily, this means that benevolence is divorced from morality.) This is particularly true if, alongside double predestination, we take a punitive view of hell.

All this is to say, in order to know about God when we ourselves live in a world of incomplete and imperfect knowledge, and in order to know about a God who is good to humanity, I believe the answer to Euthyphro’s dilemma must be that God loves that which is holy because it is holy. But I hold that this does not necessarily mean that humanity always has the capacity to determine holiness (or moral rightness, I am here using the terms interchangeably) in all cases, and this leaves me with another, subtly different dilemma which I feel inadequate to solve.

Secondly: Candy for your brain. Bart Ehrman and NT Wright talking theodicy; there are few discussions among men (=humankind, a word I wish would not have supplanted wer) that I would find more provoking, stimulating, or satisfying. Not satisfying in the sense that it solves any problem, but satisfying in the sense that an excellently cooked meal is satisfying.

I. Anti-intellectualism

Mere ignorance is simply that: a lack of knowledge. But anti-intellectualism goes well beyond incidental ignorance to embracing it. Knowledge that challenges previously held assumptions is viewed as a threat, not a learning opportunity; ignorance is viewed as safety, and so anti-intellectualism fosters an environment of not just circumstantial but willful ignorance.

Though this is evident in a wide number of arenas of evangelical life, Intelligent Design is a particularly potent example. From the ID materials I’ve been introduced to, as well as from the talk I went to, the movement is flagrantly unscientific and abusive of scientific methods.

The thesis of Intelligent Design is that the mechanisms of life are too complex to have arisen naturally and without an intelligence actively designing them. The first thing to notice about this is that it is not a scientific claim, but a philosophical one. Science is the investigation of the natural world, producing theories and hypotheses that can be tested and disproved. Intelligent Design’s entire thesis – that something is too complex to be randomly assembled – and all its derivative claims neither provide testable hypotheses (predictions about unobserved phenomenon) nor offer the chance to be disproved. Quite contrary to this, evolutionary biology makes predictions (which have largely yielded themselves to be true) and can be quite easily disproved (for example, finding a rabbit in a layer of Cretaceous rock). So the claim that Intelligent Design is a scientific hypothesis is false: it fails to produce the two chief requirements of a scientific hypothesis.

Often used to support the claim of “too much complexity” are two arguments: probabilistic impossibility, and irreducible complexity. The former is easily deconstructed by examining at the presumptions used to come up with the numbers. The gentleman whose talk I attended claimed that the chances of an environment arising which is suitable for life is 10 to the minus 388 (several orders of magnitude above the number of atoms in the universe). The number, however, is misleading. It was calculated for a planet being a certain distance from the sun (earth’s distance) and a certain size (earth’s size) around a star of a particular heat (the sun’s heat) with an oxygen-rich atmosphere (like earth’s), and so on. The calculation does not take into consideration that a star hotter than ours with a planet a little further away may also be inhabitable; or that a larger planet with greater amount of greenhouse gases could survive outside the so-called “habitable zone”. That is, this calculation treated interdependent variables as if they were independent, and in fact was not a calculation for the chances of a habitable planet, but for the chances of a planet in every way exactly like earth. Besides the smuggled-in assumptions to make the number bigger (such as an oxygen-rich atmosphere, which is a byproduct of living unicellular organisms, mostly phytoplankton, and not natural to a lifeless earth), the assumption that such a number is even calculable is manifestly false. I asked the speaker if he was familiar with the Drake equation, to which he assented that he was. The Drake equation is supposed to calculate the number of expected civilizations in our galaxy, and it is more a statement of our ignorance about the universe than anything else. The equation contains 7 constants, only one of which is known to any degree of certainty (the rate of star formation). The second constant – the fraction of stars containing planets – is only just now beginning to become known, and the other 5 are a mystery (included among them: what a habitable planet is and is not, and the chances of life arising). To give a number calculating the chances of life boldly and arrogantly goes against the known limits of current human knowledge. This behavior I would label anti-intellectual not because it is ignorant but because it selectively chooses parts of human (scientific) knowledge while ignoring others in order to appear as if it is intellectually rigorous, when in fact it is not.

The second argument – that of irreducible complexity – rapidly devolves into an appeal to prima facie reasoning. The argument goes something like this: because a phenomenon is too difficult to conceive of being produced gradually, and it is impossible for us to now understand how pieces of it are independently functional, it could not have come into existence gradually. Favorites of ID proponents are bacterial flagella – now being slowly debunked – and woodpecker tongues. While I feel the issue of complexity is a completely valid point to raise, I would not base any theory on an inability for current knowledge to explain something (I very much doubt ancient peoples could fathom how lightning was generated). At the end of the talk, the presenter showed us a video of an AI project called BigDog and asserting to us that we all accept it as designed, and yet real dogs are more complex. The insinuation was that it is impossible to say that the one is designed and the other is not. This is an appeal to snap judgments without looking at the matter more carefully, and is a favorite tactic of evangelicals. “Let’s abstract complexities away and go with what seems most obvious.” By the same token I could take time-lapsed videos of the sun, moon, and stars moving across the sky, compare that to people moving through a busy city, and say, “Isn’t it obvious in these what is actually moving? The people are moving… and so is the sun!” First blush, this is what it looks like, but we all know that that reality is more complicated than this, and cannot be determined by snap judgments of it.

(This does not even bring up philosophical problems with Intelligent Design – namely, if something that is complex necessitates an intelligence sufficiently complex to have created it, doesn’t the creating intelligence necessitate a creator, and so on forever.)

But this last point of prima facie reasoning is I feel the most crucial and problematic part of anti-intellectualism. The philosophy asks its followers to ignore complex arguments and reality not because they are wrong, but because they are complex. This argument riddles evangelical analysis of the Bible: how often have you heard the plea to follow the clear word of God? What if reality isn’t so clear? What if the word of God isn’t always so self-evident? What if it’s muddy, and what if it’s difficult to determine? Such questions are ignored in preference of simple answers. And for these reasons evangelical Christianity has historically been troubled by matters of science and textual criticism, and will continue to be troubled by them so long as it continues to adopt a strain of anti-intellectualism in its reasoning.

II. Appeal to Sensationalism

The talk included a plug for a new movie coming out called “Expelled”. The movie purports to be a documentary of scientists unjustly losing their jobs for questioning Darwinism. I have no doubt that many of the injustices they bring up are real and inexcusable. The problem I had with the film was not this, but its appeal to emotion and sensationalism to elicit a response from the audience: an image of a cheetah devouring a meal as the narrator (Ben Stein, of all people) talks about Darwinian theory in the classroom; appeals to Nazi Germany as an example of the outworking of believing in Darwinian evolution; chalkboard writing and scared looks by Ben Stein as if a grown man is being unduly punished as a schoolchild; etc. You can watch the trailer for it here. The most ironic part is probably the mention of Darwinists believing human beings are “nothing more than mud animated by lightning”, when we know our Jewish narrator’s own Scriptures say something about human beings created from mud animated by breath, or at least from some sort of dust that at one point had to get wet.

I would pass this by as particular to the ID issue, but it is not, as groups like Focus on the Family will appeal to sensationalism as reasons against gay marriage, or abortion, and so forth – and I have personally found this to be quite common in evangelical churches when it comes to hot-button topics.

III. Demeaning one’s Opponents

The last and most damning portion of the talk, following the plug for “Expelled”, was a guffawing and mockery by the people present of popular atheists and evolutionary biologists. The gentleman giving the talk spoke about how he thought it not at all a problem to have these atheists get their come-uppance. One prominent critic of ID attended a preview of “Expelled” in a not-at-all confrontational manner, and yet he was kicked out of the theater. The gentleman giving the ID talk said he was fine with this atheist getting “to know what it feels like”. This was followed by more laughter, derision, talk about court cases, and so forth. It all felt a bit like the Two Minutes Hate from George Orwell’s 1984, only lasting for much longer than a mere two minutes.

In most evangelical circles, a demeaning attitude is not so blatantly hateful. Nevertheless, those who disagree with the evangelical line are often looked on with pity, as not being able to come to grips with (either spiritually or mentally) with truth. Be that as it may, it is one thing to believe you are correct in your beliefs and another to allow this to cast doubt on your neighbor’s capacities. I remember being told in church to have compassion on non-Christians because they need Jesus just as much as any of us. In real life I have too often seen this worked out as a sort of patronizing sympathy, with the Christian not being able to treat his non-Christian neighbor in spiritual or philosophical matters as a coherent human with just as much dignity and consideration to be given him as to a Christian.

IV. Disregard for the Poor

I couldn’t help but wonder what the purpose of this gathering was. After the presentation of Intelligent Design, there was a foray into when exactly a soul is imparted to a human embryo. Besides the presumptions laden in such a question, what good would it do to be able to determine such a thing? The same gentleman and his wife who did the ID talk did a discussion on biblical gender the next day (I was unable to force myself to attend). These are the serious matters of import which this Christian organization is facing. And my answer to this is: are you shitting me? No, evangelical Christianity, seriously: are you shitting me?

This is from the 2007 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. It is on the country of Rwanda. Here are some quotes:

Small numbers of impoverished girls, typically between the ages of 14 and 18, used prostitution as a means of survival, and some were exploited by loosely organized prostitution networks.

Due to the genocide and deaths from HIV/AIDS, there were numerous households headed by children, some of whom resorted to prostitution to survive.

The law does not specifically prohibit domestic violence, and domestic violence against women, including wife beating, was common.

Where is the Christian outcry against this and efforts to improve it, or countless similar cases all over the world? What about poverty in the US which, while not so extreme, also destroys lives? And we sit here talking about the evils of evolution and women pastors and wonder when a fetus gets a soul? Let me confess something: I live daily in the sin of almost total indifference to poverty and suffering. I need help; I need to be more like Jesus, a Jesus who cared for and cured human horrors. I need a radical change not just in my heart but in my actions, and I fear I am too weak to do it on my own. But any religion or religious movement which does not concern itself with real, physical human need is not one that I have a desire to be a part of.

Such is the gospel of the Bible.

Don’t pretend you don’t know who ‘they’ are who say this. ‘They’ are the women with red lipstick and big smiles who so readily volunteer to teach Sunday School and raise our children up in the Lord. ‘They’ are the men who bemoan complicated ethics and theology, and plead with mankind to just believe the simple words of the Bible. ‘They’ may not use the trite little words ‘life’s answer book’ or ‘God’s manual for life’ but they treat the book just the same. ‘They’ are a good majority of the Christians I’ve met, and certainly those in the church I grew up in.

But I think this mindset represents a very real grasping at an answer to life’s difficulties, to the present management of horrors. We receive no instruction manual in our growing up years of how to navigate the world properly (receiving a mixture of advice and commands from our elders), or how to raise children, or respond to tragedy or uncertainty. We simply come into the world, without prior consent and without explanation, and we must figure out what to do about it. Living and developing into a coherent person is a messy process, and psychologically trying each time our paradigm is dismantled, complicated still by the stochastic troubles wrought on our material bodies by virtue of the type of world we live in. In the face of the horrors of life – even the ones that, filtered down through the nets of middle-class American convenience, still reach us through chance, harming our loved ones or ourselves – it does bring a degree of comfort to be able to turn to a to-do book.

Unfortunately, the Bible fails miserably as an answer to horrors. It is a complex document written by an array of different authors in an array of different cultures, and as a document both finite and static, it is incapable of addressing all the issues I or anyone may face in life. On modern topics as diverse as the appropriate use of biotechnology, how to date properly, the ethics of banking and interest rates, and the use of anti-depressants, to the specificities of choosing a degree, or a job, or having power of attorney over one’s disabled sibling, the Bible is silent on the management a number of very important matters, not to mention how it may address me in the specificities of horrendous evils I face on earth. On some matters it seems to offer contradictory advice; on still others it presents enigmas and riddles, hints of a way but not a clear path. Compounded more by significant issues raised by both the higher and lower biblical criticisms, disentangling from the web of material Christians dub ‘Scripture’ anything like an answer to every horror in life becomes an intractable, if not impossible, feat. When faced with true horrors – mental disease to the point of the destruction of a person, starvation, and all the various things lesser and greater which rob a person utterly of the possibility of positive meaning in life – to this most crucial matter, the Bible has no saving power. It is a false Messiah.

It is possible to protest that the Bible does, insofar as an honest prima facie reading of it goes, promise a future state that is not susceptible to horrors, and so offers us some method of coping. However, as I stated before and now restate: a final ending is not a complete solution, for in order to be saved from horrors (I would say, from hell), it is necessary for this salvation to be experienced subjectively and in the present. Rescue is an act inherently dependant on the rescuer’s perspective: if the rescuee does not believe he has been rescued then he has not been, for his capacity for positive meaning in life is still held captive. For Christ to rescue his beloved only in the future at the resurrection is to fail to rescue him now, to fail to do good to him now, and so to drain the cross and its gospel of all possible meaning beyond a hopeful pining for the future – for what God really has in mind to do, never you mind that occurrence some two thousand years ago. For Christ’s death to save us from horrors, while the final summation of that may be at some future point – Christ the firstborn from among the dead – it must also be initiated and be carried out through the present life.

While the Bible does not and cannot present a systematic answer for overcoming horrors, it does, to the Christian, present a unique view on the intrusion of God into this horror-filled world. In this story, of which we have four fleshed-out accounts, we see that God’s coming into this world is by a man called Jesus, living out a brief public ministry, subjected to an awful death, and if the accounts are to be believed, resurrected. In these accounts we see Christ’s own susceptibility to horrors, according to his full participation in human nature: the inconsolable grief over the death of a loved one (Lazarus), fatigue, being rejected and misunderstood, experiencing uncertainty (to the ‘day and hour’ and even, according to John, to the time and event of his first miracle), and (on the cross) the feeling of abandonment by God. While this is not an exhaustive list of every horror experienced by Jesus – and I don’t believe that the gospel accounts are meant to give an exhaustive list, leaving the better part of thirty years of his life out – it is sufficient to show that Jesus experienced many of the meaning-draining horrors both common and uncommon to the human existence. If Jesus is God, and if he experienced the horrors of a humanity that is radically vulnerable to horrors, and if he overcame this in his resurrection, both for himself and as a down-payment for an ultimate victory for mankind, we may and we must look to him in trying to understand how we, presently and on this earth, overcome horrors subjectively in our own lives.

The resurrection of the Son of God comes only after the subjugation of the Son of God to the horror of complete and utter abandonment: cursed not only by the political powers but by the religious powers, both their and his Scriptures (Deut 21:23), becoming an anathema to his friends, and experiencing the feeling, and perhaps the reality, of being forsaken by God. The cries uttered on the cross are not that of someone radically in-tune with the spirit of God, but of someone forsaken and alone, who has lost his capacity for making positive meaning by means of the destruction he finds himself in.

And so the resurrection surprises. The resurrection vindicates and places meaning on the lack of meaning in the cross. The earliest days of the Christian church saw a celebration of the resurrection weekly. It is the celebration of God working for purpose in and despite the very act that has drained the individual’s capacity for meaning-making. And more than this, they curiously participated in a ceremony called the eucharist, where they symbolically consumed their savior, a rite so sacred it was administered by the local church even to those sick or in prison. My suggestion is that this rite connects the death and resurrection of the Son of God not just to God’s horror-defeat within the Son’s life, but also to God’s horror-defeat presently being worked out in the eucharistic participant’s life. The present overcoming of horrors requires a present union with the resurrected (and victorious) Christ in a radical way.

But the story is not so simple. These eucharistic participants, and those who took the name of Jesus as the one who rescued them from their present circumstance, did not continue to experience defeat of horrors. Some went to the sword, and some to the lions; some died by painful cancers or diseases still unknown; some in their service to their neighbor during the Black Plague contracted it themselves and as their reward died in excruciating agony; some witnessed such devastation to their loved ones that they abandoned their faith altogether; some never realized the horrors they themselves were perpetrating, with their slavery and fear of foreigners, or their degradation of their wives. How is it possible in light of this that they have overcome, in any sense of the word, the horrors of life through participation with Christ?

I do not know of anyone who will not admit to feeling, at some point, a lack of meaning in life. It is precisely on this that language-game religions thrive, offering a system of rules to plot one’s meaning against, giving (as we have seen in the case of the Bible-based solution) a farcical answer to personal horrors, although sustainable for a time in certain contexts. But the eucharist suggests, horror-defeat is possible only through a radical union with one who has already defeated horrors. But union with Christ must necessarily entail, at present and in a continuingly imperfect human situation, an incomplete victory. Unlike the final defeat of horrors, and the recreation (or re-sustaining) of humanity such that we are impervious to the threat of horrors, the present victory is subjective and progressive, truly knowable only from the inside. Who besides the individual herself can state the relative effect of one horror over another in her life (such as serious questions of faith versus death of a parent)? Is it not possible that the victory – the valuation of positive meaning in the face of horrors – is a complex process the progress of which may be obscured by simultaneous advancement in the difficulty of horrors one is facing? Her subjective defeat of horrors is an incremental, personal, and creative process between herself and Christ within her. And if Christ is both example and source, then the apparent extinguishing of individual positive meaning (a la the cross) does not necessitate the victory of horrors over the individual.

In the ministry of Christ, and particularly the miracles recorded in the gospels, I see is a Jesus who at every point of his brief public ministry works for the solving of horrors in other people’s lives. Whether it be the healing of a woman who had been bleeding for over a decade, or giving sight to the blind, or working legs (and with them a place in the world) to the lame, or in whatever capacity, Jesus demonstrated his role as horror-defeater. And if we are to believe John, Jesus tells his disciples to

at least believe [in me] on the evidence of the miracles themselves. I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.

How is it that a divine miracle-worker might say that his followers will do greater things than he himself has done? But Jesus has been in the business of defeating – physically, and not just in some ethereally spiritual sense – the things in people’s lives which have deprived them of meaning. And so it may be that the atheist working for and achieving treatment for cancer or hemophilia is doing ‘even greater things than these’, and the person who gives his ambitions for wealth for the sake of assisting the poor or down-trodden, and the one who makes it his own private ambition to bring true help in whatever way possible to those around him, it may be that these are following after Jesus’ assertion a hundred times more than the preacher who gives good sermons, or those who are only religiously pious. In personal horror-defeat, I suggest that like Christ, this also means assisting to defeat horrors in the lives of those around us.

I admit to giving a sketch more than a solid doctrine. That is because I do not have a solid doctrine on this issue. This has been more than anything a journey in experimental theology, grappling with what I believe to be the most difficult problem in the Christian religion, or any religion. But what I do want to bring out is the necessity for working through the problem of horrors in the here-and-now, recognizing the necessity of union with Christ to overcome this. The practice of religion in a world such as this must find a God working in personal horrors, overcoming them as the God above horrors, ultimately toward sustaining a fragile humanity through and into the eradication of susceptibility to all horrors and evils, into the meaningful perfection that is necessarily union with him.

This is part 3 in a 3 part series.
Part 1
Part 2