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.