Thine Eye Be Single Preparation Part One

I had not intended another exhausting write-up at this point, but yet another post from the Think Theology blog has presented itself, and it seems uniquely suited to my next task.  I will try to write about the way that we persistently decide to assume (or, without a decision process, persist in assuming) a posture of lordship over our souls.  I am not talking about our tendency—lamentable though it is—to usurp the Lordship that should be God’s.  Rather, I am talking about the more fundamental problem (not all that surprising, when we think about it) of our mistakenly thinking that we know ourselves to begin with.

Andrew Bunt, in “In Praise of Brainwashing” (Tues., May 19, 2020), contends that:

...all of us are constantly being brainwashed. My situation is no different; it’s just that fewer people have been brainwashed into the beliefs I have. Those who hold to majority beliefs are no less brainwashed than the rest of us.

And later:

There is good brainwashing and bad brainwashing. The key is distinguishing between the two.

Actually—No.  The “key” of real importance here announces itself with its merest mention: There are lives with more brainwashing in them, and then there are lives with less.  The latter lives, as an aggregate, are infinitely to be preferred.  Brainwashing is bad.

We could, I suppose, conjecture that lives might be good for having just the right amount of brainwashing in them, of just the right kind, and of just the right application, but I fear that such an argument would stagger along for a few steps and then collapse under its own weight.

And then there is the very idea of “more” or “less” or even an “equivalence” of brainwashing (as opposed to the aspired goal of none at all.)  To repeat one of Bunt’s contentions:

Those who hold to majority beliefs are no less brainwashed than the rest of us.

Manifestly, Bunt’s view would seem comforting in the face of a jaded and unbelieving majority (if some such thing is indeed what they are), but this argument as well bears a staggering burden.  It is one thing to state that an agnostic outlook and a theistic one are both postulations about the unprovable; it is quite another to decide that agnosticism—the question of its validity aside—can claim no greater transparency than the thickest theology.

Or to illustrate the matter in a snippet of conjured dialog—a certain type of believer to a generic agnostic:

We are both products of our upbringings.  You believe that God and the origins of our world are unknowable.  I believe that God created the world in 4004 B.C., with a garden of perfect serenity situated among four headwaters that geologists can only guess at, the surface of the earth having been rearranged by a cataclysm that oceanographers have yet to be able to comprehend.  I could go on like this all day.  Scoff if you will, but each of us being products of our upbringings, you have no more warrant to throw around the word “brainwashing” than I do.

The situation is simple.  Brainwashing is bad—the more of it, the worse.  Bunt himself intends to argue his points, not to “brainwash” us.  Or at least that’s where he ends up:

I’m happy to have been brainwashed into Christianity because I have examined it and found it to be coherent; I have experienced it to be beautiful and life-giving, and I think there are very good reasons to believe it’s true.

The part about Christianity being coherent (think two millennia of “mystery,” “paradox,” “miracle,” “prefiguration;” “ineffable,” “inscrutable,” “symbolic,” “prophetic”—you get the idea) is a bit of a stretch.  And Bunt is entirely welcome to his take on what is “beautiful and life-giving.”  And, lastly, for a person like Bunt—having had the fortune to be “brainwashed into Christian belief” and the very good fortune to realize it—it is all to the good that he can say of Christianity:

I think there are very good reasons to believe it’s true.

However, it would only be fair to note that—if brainwashing can put a person “into Christian belief”—then Bunt by his own estimation can expect that (given the likelihood that many others are less rigorous intellectually than he) many of his co-religionists believe it’s true for very bad reasons, or perhaps for none at all.

And so, to extend to Bunt no more than his due, we can see that he intends merely a loose and illustrative use of the term “brainwashing”; his post describes at least three different ways that a person might crawl out from under brainwashing.  What is more, his contention that we are exposed constantly to (perhaps unacknowledged) influences cannot be denied.

The question then becomes one, I would say, of “Well, now that we know that we are all brainwashed—what do we do next?”  Mine is not a novel question; Bunt in his post has been going about addressing it, and I do not want to miss the chance to use his presentation of “three different ways” that I mentioned just above.  Bunt lists “three questions that should be asked of any belief system.”

But before I begin (with the next post) to ask Bunt’s three questions, I need to make sure that I do not lose sight of some other questions that I think we all need to address—not just questions about “belief systems,” but about believers as well.  Or as I wrote above:

I am talking about the more fundamental problem (not all that surprising, when we think about it) of our mistakenly thinking that we know ourselves to begin with.

Just who we people are (the “ourselves” in question) is obviously an indispensable element of any examination of an overall belief system.  Of course, we cannot imagine having godlike knowledge of such a murky subject as our mortal souls, but that does not mean that the subject is any murkier than most others, or any less likely to be an unfolding mystery.

I am reminded of John the Baptist in Matthew, singling out the religious parties as the target of his taunt (which apparently he used regularly): “O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (3:7, KJV)  The Pharisees and Sadducees had tight and well-tested belief systems—so much so, that John directs his thrust not at the intellectual lives of those divines, but at the possibility that undiscovered (or perhaps denied) elements of their souls could be keys to their repentance.

We can ask the same questions of ourselves.  Indeed, both Bunt’s approach and mine hinge on barely-asked questions (or unquestioned assumptions—it can be hard to tell which), and upon rigorous examination all belief systems vocalized by humans are attended by inescapable (though perhaps variable) contentions about who humanity really is.  To give a preview of one of Bunt’s questions about any belief system:

Is it good, beautiful, and life-giving?

This question helps us think about whether we want the belief system to be true. It might be coherent but unattractive and damaging. We want to be shaped by beliefs that will do us and others good.

We do?  We really want that?  Bunt is right, of course, about us wanting “to be shaped by beliefs that will do us and others good,” but that is of course a generalization, one perhaps most consistent with the innocence of youth (think of Jesus and the little children.)  But the desire itself—for human connection; and the value itself—human connection as a good thing; are we talking about “brainwashing” here?

We really don’t know what to make of “origins”—the beginnings of our attachments, our values, our memories—the beginnings of our lives, our history, our species.  We can go back to Genesis for answers, but not without hauling along with us the predispositions of untold centuries, and not without a responsibility for considering how that or any book might have been written under clouds of humanity’s turmoil in centuries preceding.

I contend, therefore, that an essential element of inquiring into any belief system is the simultaneous process of un-learning things about us ourselves.  I will try to describe this more particularly in the next post.

Thine Eye Be Single Introduction

I just thought of the silly title I’ll use for this next blog post series.  I’ve long wanted to go through a Gospel theme in an unhurried fashion, bit by bit.

In this series I’ll go through the Synoptic Gospels simultaneously, exploring the relationship between our conscious selves, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the true, Scripture-based version of ourselves that is the real beneficiary (we would hope) of Jesus’ salvation.

Also, this way we’ll only have one Cleansing of the Temple.  However, as I mentioned last time, there are two streams—poetry and prose—in John, and read through as narrative progressions they are amazing.

Our Present Situation Part Three

I must try to describe the present state of mankind (employing, as I indicated in the previous post, the four canonical Gospels.)  In so doing I will draw few particulars from the Gospel of John.  The reason for this is not because John avoids the subject of our situation; on the contrary, John is about little other than that subject, and John is best viewed in its entireties.

By “entireties,” I refer to the two-part nature of John, often presented in text as poetry and prose.  Each of those parts has its own progression.  For now, I can only say that John suspends before us the barest essential elements of our state.

On the predicament of humanity, as voiced by Jesus:

I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.

I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.

They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.  (John 17:14-16, KJV)

Given that the very next verse has Jesus ask, “Sanctify them through thy truth,” we can take it that being “not of the world”—believer or no—is at best aspirational.

“Aspirational” is probably the best term to describe the Gospel of John’s take on humanity’s attempts to understand this world or the next.  John’s pages can scarcely contain Jesus’ amusement when a new disciple, the open-hearted Nathanael, exclaims,

Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel.

Jesus answered and said unto him, Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under the fig tree, believest thou?  (1:49-50)

A more somber note attends the disciples’ declaration, mere hours before Jesus’ death:

Now we are sure that thou knowest all things, and needest not that any man should ask thee: by this we believe that thou camest forth from God.

Jesus answered them, Do ye now believe?

Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone.  (16:30-32)

So this is the situation of humanity, suspended between heaven and earth, comprehending neither:

If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?  (3:12)

That is what this blog is all about:  Roused, Readied, Reaped—with the initial, jarring element both first and, usually, foremost—because each of our thoughts and experiences has a beginning—a rousing—and never a crisp one.  We are dragged or prodded through life, stumbling along—moment by moment, episode by episode—if we are lucky enough to get to our feet.  What is more, and of even greater import, is the inescapable fact that our deeper selves assert themselves with a speed and a scope we cannot hope with our conscious will to encompass.

I have attempted to describe this before:

We are sinful because our fleshly—and I mean fleshly—natures issue forth behaviors and utterances that our conscious selves can scarcely own.  Jesus is at great pains to declare that sinful behavior comes from the heart and not the mind….The very concept of religion is meaningless in the teachings of Jesus, because the foundation of the teachings of Jesus is the fleshly, the (for want of a better word at present) “infra-cognitive”—that is, that which precedes and undergirds all concepts.

And also:

The ephemeral yet ever-poised primal nature of the soul exerts itself more often than we can consciously acknowledge; indeed it is that very self of which our pitiful consciousness pretends to be master—a pretense that sends us on the quest for wisdom beyond understanding when yet we have decided that what we find will subject itself to our capacity, as we imagine, to understand.

The approach I am using to the situation of humanity differs, I contend, (and as I wrote last time) from that used by the author of Hebrews.  Hebrews goes about explaining the inexplicable—a favorite undertaking of theologians, knowing they always have a backstop in some other inexplicable notion.  God knows of Jesus’ perfection; the inspired writers and teachers (perhaps even of Jesus’ “other sheep”) know of Jesus’ perfection—who does that leave?  What do we know of perfection?  What do we make of Hebrews and the perfecting of the Savior?

What application is there to Hebrews’ contention—attested nowhere else, excisable from Scripture without scar or seam—about what supposedly happened “to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings”?  Arrogating to himself the capacity to opine on the nature of God and man, making a clean philosopher’s slate of our cragged and blasted existence, the author of Hebrews has set himself up to be the “captain” of his own salvation.

This sets up what I—in my fitful imaginings—would hold to be a prospect worth envisioning.  Even the least-acquainted student of Christian theology knows of the incredible and interminable debates that have occurred over the nature of the Savior.  How often might any of us have wished—interspersed with real or feigned hesitations from horror—to have witnessed the Crucifixion?  (Perhaps not best to assume we would have been boldly at the foot of the Cross.)

What an awful, wonderful thing that would be.  Imagine as well, being blessed—I said this was fitful—to stand next to one of the angels who are intermittently invoked in the Gospels.  What a purely wonderful thing that would be, to have a chance to settle the sort of thing that people have tortured and killed over.

Then one of us might ask of the angel, “Sir, can you tell me,—our Blessed Savior—is He fully human?”

“Of course, child of Adam,” comes the answer, “but what makes you think you are?”

We are not, of course, fully human.  The “of course” just comes out naturally; I cannot pretend to justify it, except that it comes out more and more as I study the Gospels.  And our lack-of-being-fully-human is not a dangerous notion, as long as it is frankly recognized.  What is dangerous is the fact that we can tend immediately to proceed to some arrogant pronouncement about any aspect of ourselves, even if the aspect in question is ostensibly humbling.

I am reminded of the oft-repeated tales of Victorian patriarchs being horrifically cruel in church or at the dinner table, moments after begging mercy from the Almighty for being miserable sinners.  We can all be tyrants over—and, ultimately, victims of—our own stunted souls.  If we recognize that we are lacking as creatures of God, still we want to describe that deficit as it pleases us.

I must turn next to the Synoptic Gospels, because in many particular ways they describe the true difficulties of our souls’ situation.  To foreshadow, I will describe such difficulties in general.  We imagine that we—the “me” who writes this, some (few) other people’s “me’s” who read this—are the truncated souls in question.  We’re not; we’re on the outside, looking in.

Our Present Situation Part Two

I will try to continue describing what I think to be the correct belief system of the Gospels. I know my talents are very small, but I will not fail to mention that I believe the task before me is very large.  So many people are so much invested in the prevailing modes of Gospel interpretation.

My decision to pursue the matter through the Book of Hebrews came when I read a Think Theology blog post by Matthew Hosier (“Believe Jesus: The Perfect Man,” Tue., April 2, 2013.)  Hosier, like the author of Hebrews, pursues the matter of interpretation of the Gospels through the matter of understanding the relative situations of Jesus and of the rest of us.  However, on both counts I think both authors are wrong.

Hosier, to begin with, starts off on the wrong foot.  He refers to Hebrews’ use of Psalm 8, which says, “When I consider thy heavens….What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” but the psalm also says, “Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet.”  Hosier gives his position all the best of it, conveniently describing Psalm 8 as “a psalm that describes the smallness of man”—surely an oversimplification.

Hosier does not appear dishonest, but is nonetheless intent on working only one side of man’s situation.  He says, “The reality is, that for all our global dominance, on a cosmic scale we are nothing.”  One might wonder if, to the psalmist’s “sheep and oxen…beasts…fowl…and fish,” our cosmic significance is all that negligible.  This is more than a quibble; physicists are never ceasing to test the bounds of the infinitesimal, or of the dimensions that define such things.  The psalmist is not going about minimizing man, and there is no profit in using a regard for God’s largeness as a lever to make a rhetorical point.  After all, is the God of Jews and Christians a God who defies dimension, or one who is just really, really big?

As I said in my previous post, the psalm is evocative poetry.  It is a precarious business, to employ such things in logical argument.  To realize this, it is only necessary to test any Scripture verse’s applicability to various logical (or logical-sounding) arguments.  I am reminded of the endlessly overworked passage in Daniel 12:4, “many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”  That passage has been thought for ages to mean that the end is just around the corner, and small wonder.  Let any supposed End Times crisis period be an era short (and long) enough to span the lifetimes of a man’s father and his still-living son, and you have—from the ancients on down—scarcely a moment in which it could not be portentously said, “many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”

A similar point can be made about Psalm 8, with its descriptions of man and how his God has “crowned him with glory and honour” and “madest him to have dominion.”  If Psalm 8 had eschatological implications, or was employed as such in Scripture (rather than as in Hebrews), is there any doubt whether doomsayers would be saying that man’s dominion (negatively-cast, of course) had been established to the hilt?

It is of no greater comfort to realize that the author of Hebrews has misused Psalm 8 in the opposite direction.  The matter is as simple as I said in the previous post.  Psalm 8 says Creation is subject to Man; Hebrews 2 says it is not.  There is nothing in the text of Psalm 8 (or in its quasi-textual attribution to David) that allows for any other interpretation.  The author of Hebrews would have us believe that a poet of the cruel and tumultuous Davidic age would employ the rare skill of literacy—to say nothing of rare and precious writing materials—to produce no more than a few copies of a fragile manuscript that he would then have to entrust to notoriously sack-and-lootable libraries—all so that the faceless author of Hebrews could look at the psalm and say, “Well, for a start, at least we know this isn’t true.”

To be fair, Hosier does his duty by Hebrews.  Hosier presents the notion (extracted, I contend, from Christianity’s well of wishful thinking) that “everything under their feet” was simply “God’s original intention for us.”  Hosier’s defense of Hebrews is not surprising, though it might be less surprising to contend that “God’s original intention for us” was possession of a coherent body of Scripture—and possession as well of the ability to clear-headedly delineate the Canon.

This brings us to the next point.  Hosier has not dodged the issue:

This actually becomes a gospel-testing question: If scripture says we are meant to have total rule, but we don’t, can we trust the scriptures to be true?  Thankfully, the scriptures also provide an answer to this question.

Hosier’s reference to “an answer” is the easy part to counter.  To put it bluntly, the scriptures do not provide an answer; the scriptures provide other scriptures, and any desired answer can be obtained by taking any one or a few of those scriptures as normative—the more scriptures to choose from, the better.

To distill Hosier’s question: “If scripture says we are meant to have total rule, but we don’t, can we trust the scriptures to be true?”  To distill the answer: No.

(Curiously, Hosier says, “If scripture says we are meant to have total rule….”  That is incorrect; the psalm says we actually have what Hosier terms “total rule,” not that we are merely meant to have it.  I don’t think Hosier intends deception, because intentionally rephrasing the psalm as merely God’s plan would obviate his question.  Again, it is inescapable: Psalm 8 says Creation is subject to Man; Hebrews 2 says it is not.)

The answer is still “No”—Hebrews does not comport with Psalm 8.  As I wrote in the previous post, Hebrews, with its “raising to perfection of an always-perfect Messiah,” conflicts with the Gospels.  And now we come to one of the silliest parts of scripture study, typified though scarcely invented by Hosier, when he poses the question from above:

This actually becomes a gospel-testing question: If scripture says we are meant to have total rule, but we don’t, can we trust the scriptures to be true?

Why does this have to become “a gospel-testing question”?  Can’t we just take it that we have four canonical Gospels?  So now we have to test the Book of Hebrews to see if it is “gospel”?  I know, of course, that “the Gospel,” as a name of long usage for the New Testament salvation plans of various descriptions, is not about to go away.  However, it is not therefore necessary to refrain from each and every reminder that there lurks an element of presumption in any denomination’s pronouncement about what constitutes “The Good News.”

One might think that four “Good News” editions would be enough, particularly since they seem not to have had enough copy without sharing.  The whole business of Christian theology being delineated through Acts and beyond gives the purveyance of Jesus’ message a grubby cast, as though Jesus is a superannuated company founder tolerated briefly at board meetings before the real business is attended to by sharp young types.

And so the ostensibly simple message of Christianity—Jesus being incarnated to explain and effect salvation, presented so by the denominations when it serves—is tinged with a mixture of fantasy and fraud.  One would think that the Christian divines somehow knew that the disciples were given advance copies of Paul’s letters, to pass back and forth as they walked with Jesus to Jericho or wherever.

However, the most important point I must make, which I can touch on only briefly now, is something I must contend that I have never heard before.  It is for a good reason that I mention this now; if I were merely agitating for the four Gospels without the rest, I would have to answer two thousand years of backward-reflection of the Epistles onto the Gospels.  That is not what concerns me now.  And that is not the most important thing about our present situation.

The author of Hebrews describes a salvation plan.  One of the most exasperating things about religion is the fact that—obvious as it is to say this—there can be very little discussion about whether Hebrews is more or less right.  It is sort of an all-or-nothing thing.  And the subject matter of Hebrews is by no means light.

Hosier grasps rightly what is at stake,

Death is the ultimate demonstration of our inability to control life and the claim made by the writer of Hebrews is that Jesus suffered death in order to deliver us from death.

Embedded in Hosier’s statement is a reference to the most important thing about our present situation.  It is not the second part of Hosier’s statement…

the claim made by the writer of Hebrews is that Jesus suffered death in order to deliver us from death

…though it is on that score that the centuries-long debate has been held.  The most important thing about our present situation is encapsulated in the tiny word “us” in “deliver us from death.”  The whole business of salvation—Hebrews or no—operates with the intention of saving somebody.  Theologians will argue until doom about the means of salvation, but it is all in vain if we who must be saved do not adequately understand ourselves.

I intend to deal with this more fully in the next post, but I must introduce it now: the “us” that must be saved is not the “us” that we arrogate to ourselves—it is our primal “us” that we foolishly imagine we perceive rightly.  It is this misperception that inhabits the first part of Hosier’s statement:

Death is the ultimate demonstration of our inability to control life.

What inability?  Sure, we die, but we live on. (Some unpleasantness might be involved.)  The trick would be to ever be rid of life.

No, Death is not the ultimate demonstration of our inability to control life.  Inability to control ourselves is the ultimate demonstration of our inability to control life.  Our present situation is one in which we do not even grasp the essence of the inner person who must be restrained.

That situation, as we will see, is addressed only in the four Gospels proper.

Our Present Situation Part One

This, the first part of the present post series, is something of a housekeeping chore.  Overall, I am going to try to address the state of humanity; at the moment, as a preparation, I am going to write about the first part of the Book of Hebrews.

Much of the first part of Hebrews is the unnamed author clumsily prating about the raising to perfection of an always-perfect Messiah:

For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings (Hebrews 2:10, KJV).

For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succour them that are tempted (2:18).

At present it is almost in passing that I mention those verses from Hebrews, though I will touch on them later.  In regard to their substance, however, it can probably suffice for now to note that the same befuddled author declares that Jesus is—in relation to God—“the express image of his person” (1:3), “by whom also he made the worlds” (1:2).

More to the point now—in regard to my task of describing our present situation—is the matter of how Christianity has described the state, and consequently the stature, of Jesus.  His perfection taken for granted, there remains for the author of Hebrews, and for us, to consider the ministry of Jesus in light of the Gospels—if, as I contend, we can take the Gospels as definitive.

I contend that Jesus did not have to learn about temptation and suffering.  It really comes down to quite simple considerations.  The Jesus of the Synoptics was straightaway led into the desert to be tested.  Did he show himself to be—as ever—the consummate master of temptation and suffering, or was he molded by a forty-day boot camp courtesy of the Devil himself?  Any contention, such as in Hebrews, that Jesus ever went through a process of qualification as Savior is surely mistaken.

Or as the Gospel of John maintains:

That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.

He came unto his own, and his own received him not.

But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God (John 1:9-12).

Yet still there remains the fact that Jesus was put through a great and formidable process, a process that altered his stature in respect to other beings.  This also the author of Hebrews describes, beginning with a passage from Psalms 8:

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.

Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet (Psalm 8:4-6, KJV—the KJV of the Book of Hebrews’ rendition of the Psalms’ passage differs inconsequentially).

At this the author of Hebrews sees fit to observe:

But now we see not yet all things put under him (Hebrews 2:8).

I, as neither Christian nor Jew, will not presume any particular Jewish response to that observation from Hebrews, though it is perhaps not too much to note that the psalm is evocative poetry, and that both the “man” and the “son of man” need refer to nothing more particular than “humanity.”

And, again, I am here concerned with our present situation—our situation as humans—our situation as regarding God and the Jesus of the Gospels.  My attempt, as an inheritor of the Western tradition, is bounded at the outset by the prevailing ideas about the Jesus of the larger Bible, and about the God of the churches.

And so this is the setting of the “housekeeping chore” to which I at first referred: New Testament sources such as Hebrews conflict with the Gospels, both Hebrews and the Gospels conflict with the Old Testament, and parts of the Old Testament conflict with each other.  Noting such conflicts no longer tends to get a person in trouble with the authorities, but perhaps it is more important to note that—both in Jewish and Christian traditions—formidable schools of thought have developed that have outright embraced such conflicts.

But that is not to say that the fault-lines of every conflict have been explored—far from it, I would say.  In fact, the very existence of apparent toleration of conflict (or toleration of, to use a more palatable term, “tension”) within a biblical belief system can be dangerous.  Nothing is more favored by preachers than to start off with some startling admission about the periphery of the Bible or the faith and then to proceed—under cover of that admission—to drive home centuries of uncontested dogma.

Of course the least-contested dogmas of the churches are the most central—and of these the most-central and least-contested are those that bear ostensibly on our situation.  The church tells the congregant that his or her conscious self-identity (that which can be preached at, made to feel afraid or guilty, and told it needs to be rescued by salvation-plan such-and-such) constitutes that which interests Jesus—no matter how many times Jesus says that evil comes from the heart.

So this is where the labor of the housekeeping comes in.  Mankind’s situation—in light of the Gospels—is inseparable from mankind’s relationship to Jesus.  In one respect the author of Hebrews is correct: nothing is more important to us than the stature of Jesus.  And yet Hebrews may be the chief example of an appraisal of Jesus that is demonstrably insupportable.  We must sweep it away.

To begin with, there is the phraseology from Psalm 8 that the author of Hebrews appropriates.  For the Book of Hebrews, the psalm is about the Messiah—or at least about a divine intention for man that was correctively fulfilled by the Messiah.  Fair enough; little in heaven or earth through those millennia was not associated with the Messiah.  That is not so much where the problem lies.

By the time the dutiful reader has made it through the Bible to Hebrews, he or she has plowed through dozens of scripture quotes or scripture-derived references or allusions plucked from one part of the Bible and used in another.  It is probably unnecessary to say that many such usages would not be thought proper in modern writing; today’s editors (to say nothing of lawyers) tend to have objections to altered quotes and misattributed authorship.

Of course, a dutiful reader with a sectarian study Bible will no doubt be assured therein that writing standards were different in those days.  Fair enough; but by the time the reader, especially the neophyte, has gotten to Hebrews, he or she might understandably gloss over the use there of the Psalm’s “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?...”  The author of Hebrews follows the quoted passage (that ends, “Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet” Hebrews 2:8a) with:

For in that he put all in subjection under him, he left nothing that is not put under him.  But now we see not yet all things put under him. (2:8b)

Psalm 8 is traditionally ascribed to David.  The writer of the psalm speaks of natural observation (“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers….”) and describes no pre-Fall state or future age.  Psalm 8 says Creation is subject to Man; Hebrews 2 says it is not.  If that conflict can be explained away by first- or second-century editorial standards, then surely outright falsehood could be as well.

Perhaps the problem circa A.D. 100 is the same today; just because something is Bible-sounding doesn’t make it the Gospel truth.

One more piece of housekeeping: The psalms are Jewish.  Any extent to which they are “also” Christian, or “also” anybody else’s, is beyond me.  The important thing for the moment is to make clear that the psalms are also (no quotation marks needed) part of an array of larger Jewish belief systems (with their own translations.)

I must be careful about picking around in someone else’s belief system, though I might beg indulgence in that I am presently criticizing the author of Hebrews for picking around in someone else’s belief system.  Next I will try to describe how the Gospels constitute their own belief system, distinct from others precisely in how it conceives of the present situation of humanity.

Do Narratives Have Meaning?

Andrew Wilson, in a blog post in Think Theology (Mon., April 20, 2020, “Does Life Have Meaning?  Four Possibilities”) refers to Steven D. Smith’s book Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac.  Wilson presents from Smith four possibilities about life’s meaning:

1. It might be that neither individual lives nor human activity and history as a whole have meaning in the narrative sense.

2. It might be that human history as a whole has no meaning, but individual lives do.

3. History as a whole might possess some kind of narrative sense, but individual lives might not.

4. It might be that both individual lives and human activity as a whole have some sort of narrative meaning.

Wilson then writes:

Answer (4) is the answer of Christianity, an answer which it provides by grounding objective meaning in a transcendent reality and a world to come. In a sense, Christians agree with the absurdists that this world does not make sense in and of itself; Wittgenstein’s remark that “the sense of this world must lie outside the world” sounds theistic, if not explicitly Christian. As Chesterton’s Father Brown quips, “We are here on the wrong side of the tapestry … The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else.”

Wilson’s contention, regrettably, seems accurate enough for Christianity as it exists, and as it presents itself as a source of “answers.”  Like too much of Christianity, though, it does not comport with the teachings of Jesus.  I addressed, in an earlier post, the unfortunate business of Christian theology ostensibly supplying a narrative of salvation:

We can try to make ourselves “readied” for salvation.  We can maintain that we believe this or that, and we can work on our minds so as to bend them into the shape of our desired beliefs.  We might simultaneously think that we cannot ultimately control what we think, but it is only the experience of undershooting in that regard that we register; in the final accounting we may find that we have often overshot in self-indoctrination, to our detriment.  We have decided how we will be “readied.”  And here it will perhaps suffice to say, given the fantastic constellation of proffered religious “salvations,” that we have also decided how we will be “reaped.”

But the business of being “roused” cannot be so easily transacted.  We are roused at each instance of the story-arc—instances tumbling one upon the other—and in these moments of responding to moments before conceptual moments have passed—in those pre-moments, as it were—we have revealed to us the unyielding substance of our souls.  It is for the sake of that soul-substance, not the substance of our doctrines, or of our hopes in various salvation-plans, that we are right to beg mercy from God.

We must ask that our responses to the moments of life spill forth rightly from the seat of an inner being only God can know and only God can tend—as God  would will.  Nothing figures more prominently in the Gospels than the necessity of the inmost self—the primal self, the infra-cognitive self—being predisposed to lunge for the light rather than the dark.

I know that I must provide a distinction between my “story-arc” and the “narrative meaning” that Wilson quotes approvingly.  In full, the Answer (4) that Wilson ratifies is: “It might be that both individual lives and human activity as a whole have some sort of narrative meaning.”  He then contributes, “Answer (4) is the answer of Christianity, an answer which it provides by grounding objective meaning in a transcendent reality and a world to come.”  The word to note here is “provides.”

I say that the course of our salvation and of our strivings is woven within us as something that “only God can know and only God can tend”; Wilson tells us that Christianity “provides” an “answer”—though he is only too willing to admit that the answer can often seem absurd.  I suggest that the narrative provided by God is not an absurdity; it is really none of our business.  Sure, it would seem that God has a narrative for humanity and for each of us—but what is that to the believer?

To step through a brief passage from Matthew:

He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.

He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth him that sent me.

He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet’s reward; and he that receiveth a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward.

And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward (10:39-42, KJV).

What then does “narrative” mean to the believer?  Our lives—our imperfectly grasped pasts and presents, our still more cloudy futures—are all forfeit.  We must be willing to lose our futures at any moment, and as for our pasts and presents—who is to say that the parts we think are the least absurd are not in fact the parts we have most misjudged?

Does not the one who receives a prophet’s or righteous man’s reward receive a share of that person’s life by adoption?  In narrative—if not in more-or-less certain fact—our lives hinge on a single moment: the elusive “now” in which responding to our savior is all-important.  The fact that every moment qualifies as that “now” is just too bad for us.  We never know which cup of water or which thirsty—or hungry or frightened or endangered—child will be the one.  Are we to consider each such moment as part of a narrative?  Are we to imagine in such a moment that there really is such a thing as a past or a future?

In truth, the narratives of our lives hang by single moments, ever-changing.  We are never entitled to the two fixed points it would take to define a line, much less a straight one.  Our reluctance to accept this fact clouds our views of God and his relationship to us.  We worship an omnipotent and timeless God, a God who can bend space and time, a God who can will space and time out of existence—and yet we seek meaning in—of all things—stories.

This Christian fascination with narratives reaches its height, so to speak, with the Transfiguration.  It is incredible, the extent to which the appearance of Moses and Elijah is treated in itself as a moment of great portent.  Of course those two men figured mightily in the history of Israel, and Jesus as Messiah was a fulfillment of that history.  On the other hand, Peter, James, and John were surely versed in that history well enough to know what disreputable characters had managed to haul Samuel out of the ground.

What is more, on the way down the mountain Jesus treads on the narrative of Elijah’s return, relegating it to the symbolic.  The communal story element of the Transfiguration—centered on Jesus as prophesied Messiah—is not merely sidelined in the episode; it is shown as malleable and dispensable, as God might will.  It cannot be for nothing, then, that God unceremoniously obliterates the scene on the mountaintop and directs the disciples, on his authority, to listen to Jesus—inescapably, to focus their attention on him.

If a narrative is to be drawn from the Transfiguration, it must surely be a negative one—negative in the sense of a story referred to precisely so that it might be minimized.  A good analogy might be an exasperated high-school baseball coach, working mightily to get the potential out of one of his players.  The coach sees that batting practice has become a rote exercise, so he creates a setting to challenge his player’s capacities.  A practice it will be, but like no other.

The coach organizes a scrimmage game on a breezy, sunset-approaching afternoon, with a drafted contingent of students in the stands, and still others gathered around car stereos in the parking lot.  The coach says it is the bottom of the seventh, with two men on, and the score tied with one out.  He puts the player in question at the plate.

The coach himself then takes the mound, and tells the player that if he strikes out, the player will have to wait in the batter’s box and watch all his teammates be subjected to twenty laps around the park.

The coach standing in as pitcher then holds up the ball for the player to see and says, “Hit this.”  The player at the plate ought then to know upon what his attention should be focused.

God whisks away Moses and Elijah, leaving only Jesus.  God’s instruction to the disciples is “Hear him.”  Does that focus our attention?

Jesus drew our attention to mustard seeds, to mites, to moments—moments such as a person reflexively reaching for a sheep in a pit on the Sabbath, so that the entire history of Sabbath-keeping might be diverted in an instant.  Far too much of our attention to the Gospels is predicated on our expectation—our demand, really—that the Gospels tell us a story.

What the Gospels present to us are non-stories, like the sheep in the pit.  Or diverted stories, like the inexorable progression of Jesus’ “time” being deflected because Mary felt bad for a wedding party short of wine.  Or anti-stories, like John the Baptist saying, “He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me” (John 1:15).  Or Jesus: “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58).

Whether in John, as in the two verses just above, or in the Synoptics with the Transfiguration, there is ample evidence that the Gospels warn against the lure of any story more complicated than the heart’s yearning—no, a heartbeat’s yearning—for the dark or the light.  Any narrative beyond that is dangerous, and scarcely to be celebrated.

Narratives are enticing.  Narratives are traps.

Atheism versus Theism

We humans are very likely to say that there are “two ways” to look at this issue or that one.  One of these dichotomies is atheism versus theism.  Of course that single pair-matching of ideas is not the only one that might command our attentions, but it is unsurpassed in its attachment to the ultimate questions of existence—is our sphere of existence understood to be in the realm of the divine, or not?  The question would seem to be foundational, and it would seem to have only two possible answers—though of course neither its foundational nature nor its yes/no construction is immune to possible objections.  (The philosopher’s duty to challenge us with objections to the above is where this piece is headed.)

I am reminded of the American tussle—played out in so many ways.  If our republic is to be based on a foundation discovered by people grasping and responding to the nature of the universe, then what form does that foundation assume?  If the world is not ordered by the divine, then by what is it ordered?

A person can embrace religious freedom—pressed ever forward as an ideal, and still maintain that our republic is founded on the divine.  As a person’s pursuit of the ideal of religious freedom in a theistic framework approaches a refined state, that person can be simultaneously assailed as a latent theocrat, on the one hand, and as a purveyor of neutered, empty religion on the other.  Similarly a proponent of a secular state can be simultaneously thought of as an enemy of the religious, on the one hand, and a temporizer with religion on the other—if, as has been the experience of nation-building—it is deemed necessary to declare some ultimate foundation of the state.  The brotherhood of man, for example, is a fine foundation for a secular state—though it might well be thought to presume a father.

Considered fairly and openly—theism versus atheism:  What is it but our unquestioning assumption that we deserve a settled state of belief, that leads us to claim this or that position?  Is not our belief that we can justifiably hold to a solid foundation the real creed of our religion or irreligion, and are not we—granted by ourselves the right and power to bless that attachment—the gods of our very own creeds?

Jesus said, “If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not.  But if I do, though ye believe me not, believe the works” (John 10:37-38, KJV).  Belief, in this context, is not understood as a positive assertion of the (unprovable) existence of God, nor is it even an assertion that our understanding of existence is such as would warrant belief in God (an equally unprovable assertion.)  Rather, the issue at hand is our willingness to consider whether the thrust of Jesus’ works (their historical verifiability being less provable than anything else) comports with our understanding of the ultimate.

That is the dichotomy that matters: our willingness (or not) to address the ultimate (the theism-versus-atheism question) in an enlivened fashion.

Neither fair-mindedness nor openness will permit us to state that we have decided once and for all.  In truth, we can only responsibly say that we hold to this or that side of any dichotomy when our predisposition is to challenge ourselves on whether we might attach ourselves to the other side.

When we die, the greatest evidence of a sincere belief in God is a demonstration on our part that our belief survives even our attempt to deconstruct our belief in God.  The opposite but complementary procedure is the one morally incumbent on atheists.  In the end the processes are one and the same—a dynamic endeavor.