The Price of Laughter

In my last post I wrote:

“Jesus’ divinity, in the agonies of his death, was not represented by his ‘understanding’ of what was happening to him, but rather by his unrequited yet unceasing reaching-out to God—'Why?’ he cried out.  Jesus could not fail to embrace God, even from the experiential distance of the Cross.  And this, in the finite scale of our own existences, is what is demanded from us as well . . . . We are not in this world engaged in a self/other conflict with elements of evil, whilst permitted to anticipate an eternity with a magnified, omnipotent figuration of ourselves called God . . . The great Other in this scenario is God . . . If we are to confront the mystery of our relationship with God, then let it be done in this basic sense, and let it be done—as I have described before—in terms of Adam’s initial forsaking of the Great Other who created him.  It is this seemingly hopeless fracture that Jesus was sent to mend.”

This “hopeless fracture” is the mystery of existence itself.  Things exist, and there is no discernable reason why this ought to be so.  On the other hand, of course, there is no discernable reason why the existence of things ought not to be so.  Things exist.  Moreover, if they were the creation of a God who exists independently of any concept we can grasp, then neither the things themselves nor any of the properties by which existence is gauged can be thought to possess existence in themselves.  Let God look away, and all else is nothing.

“Existence,” then, is a thing of times and places.  Let time stop and motions cease, and “existence”—conceived of as that which can be experienced—ceases as well, and the “ceasing” as far as we are concerned is the same as non-existence.  Or let everything happen at once, and it would be the same as if nothing ever happened.  And yet to God everything happens all at once, and takes forever to happen—or is there some other, more defensible version of God available to us mortals?

For want of better examples, existence for us is an ever-shifting playing field on which there are no rules.  Something, we are convinced, is supposed to happen, but the happenings of the game are indistinguishable from the administering of the game.  We have sensations and impulses that play upon us, yet they are only momentary and localized, while the venue of the game extends beyond our view and the timekeeper hoards a clock away from us.

This is not meant to be silly, for the playing-field of our experiences is littered with tragedies enough.  What I mean to describe is an experience-field that ranges from the most trivial to the most tragic in a proceeding that, to us, is alternately mundane and chaotic.  Authors enough have spoken of the ridiculous to the sublime.  It is unfortunate that theologians have not usually explored the matter in a similar vein.  Jesus begins his ministry making fun of the first disciples’ tendencies to believe, and he ends his ministry with the agony of experienced futility.  As critics have noted that the tragic—though deprived of the levity of the comic—is usually granted the final mercy of resolution, so the tragedy of Jesus’ despairing death ushers in the possibility of resolution to the—forgive me—“human comedy” that would be sad if it weren’t so funny, and funny if it weren’t so sad.

I know I have gone from the playing-field to the stage, and from the game to the play, but neither type of metaphor will suffice, yet each hints at the abiding informative quality of Jesus’ ministry, and of the scriptures that frame our understanding of that ministry.  

The form of Jesus’ ministry is satire.  There is no other way to put it.  The very idea of translating the existence of God into a testament of the existence of God is an idea of irreverence—once that testament is understood as a presentation to us mere mortals.  This hearkens back to the very beginning of the testimonies to Jesus, to the very beginning of Genesis, where the groundwork of the rationale for famine and fire and eternal damnation is littered with sophomoric word-play.

God made everything from nothing in an instant.  Or perhaps he did not, yet there is no other intellectual template available to us.  To us, something exists or it doesn’t, hence the “everything from nothing in an instant.”  This is also, as I have indicated, ridiculous—there is no other intellectual template available to us.  Everything comes from something else, and that original “something” must be bounded by the self-same framework of properties that bounds its product.  This, then, is the intellectual distance between us and “God made everything from nothing in an instant.”

Yet Genesis does not inflict that distance upon us.  “Creation” in its raw state is a pre-existing character in the narrative of Genesis, and the particulars of Creation are drawn out over a week.  At the end of the week God, who does not need rest, rests from the week-long process that would not take him the smallest part of a week.  This might seem an odd way for God to present Creation to mortals, but “God made everything from nothing in an instant” is a postulate, not a presentation.

So, we can take Jesus’ ministry (including those scriptures he treats as part of his ministry) as statement, or as satire.  Character after character in the gospels offers this or that statement, and is responded to by Jesus with question, puzzle, paradox, retort—while it is the small, scattered cohort of sincere people who stand before Jesus while trembling in conflict over the glib statements of theology who gain his praise.  In our exploration of this matter we must go back to the start of scripture—to its probing, piercing, sardonic, satirical bent—to understand the basics of what we call “faith.”

It takes a leap of faith for us to put ourselves in the place of Adam, simultaneously confronted and comforted by the God who made him, by the God who must be the ultimate Other to all else that exists (the confronter) and also the ultimate Understander of all else that exists (the comforter.)  The great moment of humanity’s fate was not the apple-story Fall, but the primordial moment in which God decided of Adam, “It is not good for the man to be alone”—when the element of “alone” reflected the dispositions of Adam, not the dispositions of the Creator who for eons has lamented a broken communion with the man and his progeny.

“Statement” cannot encapsulate for us—the children of the man—the sorrow of our distance from God.  “Satire” might seem, alternatively, to be irreverent, but it is entirely appropriate to the ridiculousness of Creation, and also to the ridiculousness of our attachment to the grime of Creation—in preference to the sublime aspirations with which we are haunted and which we cannot deny.  The drama of satire—the structure of Jesus’ gesticulations, for which both kin and stranger branded him mad—is also the drama of searing experience.  Satire is our method of holding onto otherwise unmanageable lessons and memories.  Satire is the essence of our life-long, moment-by-moment undertaking of remembering the unthinkable and of clinging to the repellent—the essence of the faith that soothes even as it burns, and that continues to soothe only because it continues to burn.

Faith is not believing in something despite a lack of evidence, and faith is not believing in something because of the presence of evidence.  Faith is believing in something as the chasm of the momentary experience yawns—as the initially-undeniable, say, tolling of a bell fades into waning echoes, and as the memory of the experience fades into the disappearing recesses of our recollections.  Faith is an experience of motion—even so little as tensing ourselves to raise up half-forgotten sensations.  Faith is an experience of motion—even as we quiver or dart or plod along—and we decide (or succumb to welling impulses) about motion, about what we will go toward or reach out for.  This is what the great satire of Jesus’ ministry was always heading for.  I do not mean the Jesus of calm Sermon-on-the-Mount imagery, or the Jesus of flaring and disappearing anger in the Temple, or the Jesus of the endlessly-reenacted Passion.  These are merely set-pieces, placed before the believer by theologians like oil-paintings (even by the Masters) with explanatory placards below.

The Jesus of the Great Satire is the Jesus whose derisive laughter echoes still—all the more chilling in that his scream on the Cross echoes as well.  This is the Jesus who could never stop moving toward God, who could never stop reaching out toward God, who could never stop yearning for God.  Between us and Jesus, of course (as between us and God) is a chasm.  Across the chasm come the dwindling strains of the screams and of the laughter, all of which—even together with every breath of Jesus—were bought for us at an inestimable price.

The First Asymmetry

Our existence, understood in its rawest form, is a cascade of asymmetries.  What we try to understand is greater than we are, or more profound than we are, or—something.  In any event, it is our conception of ourselves that we draw upon in order to try to understand our surroundings, or ourselves, or ourselves in our surroundings, or—as is my present fascination—ourselves as fading by imperceptible gradations into our surroundings.  Or maybe we simply cannot see where we leave off and where our surroundings begin.

Or maybe we cannot even see across the expanse of ourselves.  This is what I was getting at in the previous post, where I mentioned my “attempt to explore the possibilities that rise into view when we are willing to consider that we do not really know where our edges are.”  Descartes said of himself, “I think, therefore I am,” though it would have been more fundamental—though paradoxically longer—for Descartes to admit, “Something of which I am a part thinks, and I am the actualized locus of that process.”

This, then, is also the source of our first experiential asymmetry.  We cannot claim so much as a fundamental challenge from the self/other dichotomy—for in our perceivable existence, our “selves” are as outside of our conceptions as are any elements of those things we consider “others” in our environment.  Only the writhing mind-worm of our struggling knot of thoughts constitutes the self of conscious existence.

And so, we can learn things, or come to understand things, or perhaps misperceive or misapprehend things, and in each instance there is presumably alteration of the “self” of which we are partly cognizant and partly not.  This is not an interplay of symmetries, but rather of commingled interactions.  It is only by unsupported conceit that we can consider anything as “other” when any such “other” is only part of the whole of unbounded surroundings that washes against and intermittently inundates our thought processes.

And therefore, our notion of “self” as against “other” is an artificial construct if “self” is equated with consciousness and is held to be limited within the bounds of that consciousness.  No more pitiful creature exists, than the human being who considers himself or herself to be a coherent conglomeration of consciousness inhabiting a body and—if moral considerations are in view—battling against (or ratifying in detachment) emotions arising from that body.  Such a person is a godling, and is as much to be pitied as any prophet’s sardonic picture of a worthless idol.

In reality, human beings are selves who discover their own boundaries even as they probe the boundaries of their environments.  Moreover, the individual selves of human beings are as likely to frustrate their self-perceptions as they are to be frustrated by faltering and wavering understandings of their environments.  We (that is) are as unable to carry around conceptions of ourselves and our environments as we would be unable to carry our own individual weights and the weight of all Creation.  That is the only symmetry in our understandings: the realization that we are as unable to comprehend ourselves as we are to comprehend our surroundings.

And so we are led to conclude that the person who is the dispassionate driver of himself or herself (or the morally-laudable, philosophically-rational driver of the same “self” though it quiver at times with emotion) is a myth.  The “self” is a much a living thing as the body into which it imperceptibly disappears, and the thoughts and conceits of the self falter at the extremities of intellectual exertion even as the self will falter at the extremities of physical exertion.  This is the state of the human being, and a fair assessment of that state will inform our understanding of Jesus as God experiencing the personhood of a human being.  A conceptualized Jesus who rode around in the body of a first-century Levantine would be a moral grotesque—a godling play-acting in the husk of a man.

Jesus, when not exerting divinity, was the divine experiencing humanity.  When his mortal body faltered, it faltered.  When his mortal mind was burdened—and in the horrifying instance violently beset—with the human-intellect-defying question of God’s justice, he cried out, “Why have you forsaken me?”  For Jesus—reckoned to have set aside his divinity for this episode—to have understood as a man the totality of what was happening to him, would have been as unnatural for him as it would have been for him to be able to hang there and suffer as a man until the crack of doom.

Jesus’ divinity, in the agonies of his death, was not represented by his “understanding” of what was happening to him, but rather by his unrequited yet unceasing reaching-out to God—“Why?” he cried out.  Jesus could not fail to embrace God, even from the experiential distance of the Cross.  And this, in the finite scale of our own existences, is what is demanded from us as well.

We, on the other hand, prefer our neat notions of symmetry, of a nearly-equal battle between good and evil that is decided for us by the sovereign grace of a God who we can think of in terms of a familiarity, and who bought for us a neat supplanting of evil by good, thanks to Jesus.  Jesus will not allow us such a simplistic scenario, and in the light of moral scrutiny it is apparent that such a scenario would be illegitimate.  We are not in this world engaged in a self/other conflict with elements of evil, whilst permitted to anticipate an eternity with a magnified, omnipotent figuration of ourselves called God.  Rather, we are called to minister to the suffering of a larger self than us (a “self” in which we see Jesus) and to combat evil in a Creation we share with fallen creatures in which we must see our fallen selves.

The great Other in this scenario is God.  This must be so.  A God who is limited is not God.  A God who is unlimited shares nothing with us.  A God who exists in a framework of our conceptions is not God.  A God who defies all of our conceptions shares nothing with us.  If we are to confront the mystery of our relationship with God, then let it be done in this basic sense, and let it be done—as I have described before—in terms of Adam’s initial forsaking of the Great Other who created him.  It is this seemingly hopeless fracture that Jesus was sent to mend.

The Perfect Other

I ended my last post with:

“We are not creatures of thought saddled with the infirmities of bodily imperfection.  We are creatures who define our personal “we’s” as our consciousnesses, even as those consciousness-selves are but dependent and mutable components of our entireties—known but to God.”  I must attempt to explore the possibilities that rise into view when we are willing to consider that we do not really know where our edges are.

“Roused, Readied, Reaped” is all about viewpoints—or perhaps more accurately, about the limitations of viewpoints available to us in our finite creaturely experiences.  Or is it that we choose such limitations?  Are we really limited in our available viewpoints, or is it actually that the distractions and enticements of our creaturely experience draw us into arbitrarily confined notions of our viewpoints?

Or to put it another way: We have notions of ourselves, and in our grander moments we have notions of ourselves in communion with other beings, including—it is to be hoped—Jesus.  We also have notions of ourselves in larger settings and environments—The Universe, nature, time, place, community, any number of conceived identities—and our conceptions of ourselves therein are shaded by notions of ourselves possessing a greater or lesser share of belonging, either in settings and environments to which we aspire, or those we intend to avoid.  We define our experiences on a scale of belonging, belonging to ourselves and to larger entities, and considering that we do not belong to others.

That to which we do not belong we consider the “other.”  I gather I have even heard this phenomenon described as “othering,” and as I understand it, this use of a description is meant as part of a conscientious desire to question and possibly decrease the elements of alienation in our outlooks.

What I have described above is, I believe, pertinent to our lives—both individually and communally—but I am left to wonder if the notions we possess of things that we collect to ourselves, and of things that we understand as “others,” are applicable after all to notions of the divine.  What really are we willing to confront in the realm of our relationship to God?

Initially, one thing we must confront is the idea that there are other planes than our earthly experiences, and that our descriptors—rooted in our earthly experiences—are presumably lacking in some regards.  “Plane,” after all, is manifestly a sophomoric—though understandable—descriptor.  It is ironic that we would use one of the most basic elements of our understanding of creaturely geometry to attempt to evoke phenomena-realms that we imagine we can scarcely grasp at.

And it is important to note that there is a two-edged character to the understanding that the realm—or perhaps a terrain of multiple and overlapping realms—of the divine or of the supernatural is beyond our firm grasp: Such realms need not, virtually by definition, involve us being “grasped” by circumstances in the same way we see ourselves circumscribed by our bodies on this plane.

If there is a supernatural realm, or perhaps more importantly if there is a moral realm in which God’s sovereignty is more expressed than in our own, then it is entirely possible that our citizenship therein is pervasive—a rather sobering thought.  Certainly, Jesus does not think much of people citing the self/other distinction as being of import in matters of morals.  We are neighbors of all, we are kin of all, we are—if the gospels’ challenges of Abrahamic and other descent are taken to heart—ancestors of all and descendants of all.  Or perhaps it would be simpler to say that time and place mean nothing to what is right and wrong.

If time and place are meaningless—that is to say, if time and place simply do not necessarily “compute” in the realm of the divine—then it must be understood (if indeed we can “understand” it) that what is in play here is not some entertainment of science fiction that has us transported here or there or now or then.  What is in play is the dynamic of a realm in which we are always and everywhere.  This is a realm, for example, in which to claim ancestry from someone is to claim a similar origin and a shared effect—at least to some significant degree—such that the claimant shares an approximate locus with the ancestor and shares as well in the ever-diffusing and infinitely-complex effects of the forebear’s life.

When certain of the Jews told Jesus that they claimed descent from ancestors who had persecuted the prophets, and then claimed as well that they would have forborne from that persecution, they were thinking as the world thinks.  The world operates—or at least rationalizes—on self/other basis.  We will claim this, and we will disown that.  In the moral realm that Jesus describes, we all own everything.  For better or for worse, we partake of the evil and the good, and we shun the evil and the good.  If we emphasize some element of our ancestry, we do just that—we emphasize.  We can shift—or perhaps it might be more fitting to say that we can squirm about—within this larger moral realm, but we cannot “other” elements of that realm in any distinctive manner.

This is why the teachings of Jesus are a perpetual thumb in the eye of the “total depravity” and “basic goodness” camps—epitomized most explicitly in his assertion that we “who are evil” know how to give good things to our children.  The theologians do not get to have their neat bases for analysis, any more than all of us get to have neat bases for our lives.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the manifest difficulty of understanding our relationship to the evils of this world as a self/other dynamic.  Evil is what we attend to in its lesser degrees in our neighbors only after we have recognized it in its greater degrees in ourselves—the business of eyes and splinters and beams.

And, if it is true as I have maintained, that our viewpoints in any supernatural realm can be based anywhere and can come from any time (which is different from me saying that we display any skill in adopting those viewpoints) then the self/other mode of analysis must break down.  We do not need to collect to ourselves righteousness, and to shun others as evil, and to consider their evil deeds as “other-ly” (though such could in earthly terms be described as the effect.)  What we need to do is change what we consider to be the “other.”

What we need to do is change our idea of “other”-ness.  We are not God, and God is not us.  God made Adam, and Adam was not God.  We can talk all we want about how Adam was made in the image of God (and then some linguist, as I understand it, will come along and claim that “imaging” was maintaining in existence, not creating in similarity, but . . . whatever), yet the important point was that Adam was not satisfied—at least to a degree—until Eve was made in Adam’s image (“bone of my bones”.)  Adam rejected the perfect, benign “Other”—God—and clung to a facsimile of himself.  There is nothing wrong with Otherness.  In fact, there is really only one Other to us, and that is God.

All else that exists, all else but the totality and persons and potential manifestations of God, is to some extent evil, and is to some extent ours.  All that is evil is “self” to us, and it is the horror of millennia that religions have ever forgotten or neglected this.

Dependent and Mutable Components

I wrote in the last post:

“If ‘we’ are our thoughts, then our individual selves are as encumbered as our progressively-collected thought-lives: sometimes and in some manifestations handy and undeniable, and sometimes uncertainly and inexplicably wavering and fading and disappearing into what can be experienced by us as a distance.  Or sometimes inexplicably lurching again into view . . . . That is what it is to think, and that is what it is to have an idea of ‘self’ inseparable from one’s individual thought-life.  That ‘self’ is a glory of incompleteness, even as that ‘self’ clutches to a conceit of itself as a whole . . . . To ‘question’ anything, then—as being that elevated process of inspection with which we credit ourselves—is always to question that thought-basis we identify as our ‘selves.’  The first and most important part of questioning everything is to question every aspect of our thoughts by which we reckon ourselves to be individual ‘things.’”

It is this necessary notion of questioning everything that I believe we must apply to a question of Jesus that is generally held to be of importance: “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matthew 16:26, KJV).  I suppose—given our present theme of “questioning”—it might be fitting to question whether or not that passage from Matthew has to do with people being cast into hell, though I imagine the answer will be in the affirmative.  Nonetheless, it must be mentioned that some Christians will maintain that Jesus’ warning is against failure of "discipleship” (or some such) among believers, leading only to a loss of potential rewards.

More importantly, I will ask in connection with the passage, what is the “man” who is understood to be distinct from his “soul”?  Are we not our “souls”?  I realize that Jesus describes the possibility of us being cast into hell with our undiminished bodies when we might choose instead entering heaven with the loss of an eye or a hand, but we know from looking at our hands with our eyes, or in considering persons missing one or both eyes, that the “person” is distinct from the “body”.  But our “souls”?

Is it not incumbent upon us to consider the possibility that the soul with which Jesus is concerned is we ourselves, and that the “we” that we individually personalize as “me” is just a phenomenon of consciousness?  And is not consciousness partial and temporally-defined?  Who are we to imagine that what we “think” or even what we “feel” is the substance of our persons in the eyes of God?  The upshot of all this is the realization that we might—in our personal religious searchings—satisfy (or not) any number of acceptances of belief, or performances of ritual, or experiences or conviction, and yet possibly none of that might extend beyond that part of ourselves that is maintained in consciousness.  What yet do we know of our souls?

If we reckon that our soul-future is amenable to being fostered by what we think, or do, or attempt to train ourselves to feel, and yet we are not privy (at least as much as God is) to the entirety of our souls, then is it not prudent for us to consider that such soul-fostering must be attended to in every form possible?  Why, for example, would we fixate on the notion that there was some moment or some isolatable episode in which we “came to believe?”  Would that be sufficient for the “light” (or whatever) of that realization (or conviction, or conversion, or whatever) to “illuminate” in necessary fashion the required number of corners of our unmappable souls?

This is perhaps—even after my years of key-striking—the proper jumping-off place for my exploration of “roused, readied, reaped.”  Every question and every matter can be haunted by the notion of whether anything of substance in eternal significance is really being addressed.  “Did Jesus really exist?,” we might ask.  And what manner of criteria are we applying to the (purported) evidence, and what specificity of historical basis would be necessary to declare, “Yes, it is the case (or the preponderance of evidence would affirm it to be the case) that Jesus existed”?

Are we not affirming all along what we ourselves “exist”—as we understand existence?  Is not our affirmation premature?  After all, that—counter-intuitive though it might be—is really the sort of thing that religion must answer to begin with.  Jesus asks us to consider whether we can retain or lose ourselves, and we meanwhile reside comfortably in our notions of self and admit only to discomfort (or assert our squelching of discomfort) for the future of those selves.

If, however, the notion of our actual possession of our selves is the matter in question, then our proper approach would be organic, not cerebral.  Our ideas and our beliefs come and go.  We know this to be true.  To say that we “know” this or that, or that we “believe” this or that, is merely for us to take momentary situations of our thought-lives and brand them as “real”—and all the rest as momentary aberration.  What a ridiculous approach to fundamental and eternal matters.  In any analogous, lesser matter of our lives, we would resolve to stretch and practice and exercise and exert ourselves—yet to God we give only thanks for comforting that perhaps minor part of our selves that we comprehend at any given moment.  It is small wonder that Jesus convicts us simultaneously of awesome arrogance and of pitiful insufficiency.

We are not creatures of thought saddled with the infirmities of bodily imperfection.  We are creatures who define our personal “we’s” as our consciousnesses, even as those consciousness-selves are but dependent and mutable components of our entireties—known but to God.

A Glory of Incompleteness

I will confess that I believe I have a ready answer to the question with which I ended my last post:

“How then can we keep ourselves always questioning?”

The answer is found in placing the premise of “roused, readied, reaped” against the contention (perhaps seasoned with no small measure of conceit) that “thinking” in its most elevated manifestation is also “thinking” in its most unyielding manifestation.  We imagine we will discover the truth of all if we question the truth of all.

“Questioning,” however, as we can practice it, can be practiced only as a process, as much bound up with the mechanics of beginning-middle-end as any other process.  The cycles—from the life-long to the near-instantaneous—of thought are inseparable from the material and temporal elements of our existence.  We are born, live, and die, and in the course of being entertained, our thoughts similarly are born, live, and die.  The extent to which our thoughts are brought up or taken up by us and then filed away or incorporated into a larger whole—that extent can never be estimated with assurance.  If “we” are our thoughts, then our individual selves are as encumbered as our progressively-collected thought-lives: sometimes and in some manifestations handy and undeniable, and sometimes uncertainly and inexplicably wavering and fading and disappearing into what can be experienced by us as a distance.  Or sometimes inexplicably lurching again into view.

That is what it is to think, and that is what it is to have an idea of “self” inseparable from one’s individual thought-life.  That “self” is a glory of incompleteness, even as that “self” clutches to a conceit of itself as a whole.  One’s “self”—in relation to that which good conscience would reveal as a larger expression of one’s being—might be likened to the conglomeration of chromosomes that constitute the inchoate but usually persistent “half” of a dividing cell.  One moment, that conglomeration is intertwined and interacting with the “whole”, and another moment—never definable by any exact distinction of time—that “half” has congealed itself into a pole of a dividing organism.

To “question” anything, then—as being that elevated process of inspection with which we credit ourselves--is always to question that thought-basis we identify as our “selves.”  The first and most important part of questioning everything is to question every aspect of our thoughts by which we reckon ourselves to be individual “things.”

Kept to be Questioned

I ended my last post with the following:

“And so, the question of Jesus’ ‘existence’ is inseparable from the conventions—prevailing in our time and prevailing perhaps differently in other times—about the understood boundaries of the question.  I submit that this connection with ‘understood boundaries’ is far more crucial to our thought processes than is generally recognized, and I contend that defying those ‘understood boundaries’ is crucial in itself to far more fundamental questions (yes, they exist) about religion than whether or not by any particular criteria Jesus might be held to have existed.”

We might ask ourselves whether or not Paul existed.  Of course, the historians’ certitude that there was such a person as Paul is virtually unquestioned, but I contend that the application of such a notion as “person” in this matter ought to be questioned.  The main reason anyone believes that Paul existed is because his letters exist.  Enough of the collection of his letters exist—exhibiting common themes and style, as I understand—for them to be believable as the output of a single person—“Paul.”  Fair enough, but is it any more of substance to say that the letters exist because of Paul, or that “Paul” exists because of the letters?

(I am proceeding on the notion that the Paul of the Book of Acts is reckoned by his appearance there to be no more "historical” than the appearance of the Jesus of Luke/Acts.)

If all of the letters of Paul were outright frauds, written by a person of some other name and with some nefarious intent, would “Paul” exist?  If all of the letters of Paul were the ravings of a madman who invented the character out of his imaginings, would “Paul” exist?  If a real Paul of mundane habits had concocted an epistolary alter ego credited with the activities of the letters, would “Paul” exist?  If a real missionary teacher named Paul had embellished his accounts with the heroics which characterize the lionized apostle of Sunday School lessons, would “Paul” exist?  If a person named Paul had done all the letters claim, and yet had falsely claimed the specifics of his potent biography (Roman citizen, Jewish functionary, “Pharisee”) would “Paul” exist?

More importantly, if Paul was everything the New Testament claims (or at least it was not provable otherwise), would the contention that Paul “existed” differ in any substantial way from the contention that “Paul” might well have existed—leaving it to the listener to consider whether any germ of doubt is worth considering?  In sum, if the matter of Paul’s existence is contested, it will never be resolved, and if it is not contested, then it will be no matter at all.

I think it is crucial to view such matters in the active sense of “contested.”  Anyone, from the harshest skeptic to virtually the most ardent believer, can say that we will never really “know” (this side of the grave) whether or not Paul existed.  Certainly, in the generalized activities of religious scholars the existence of Paul is accepted.  Simultaneously, in the idealized activities of any scholarship, no matter is to held without question—“acceptance” of this or that is revealed to be flaccid (when placed under consideration) in any realm of strenuous and concerted inquiry.

How then can we keep ourselves always questioning?

Held to Have Existed

I have been thinking and reading lately about the question of the “historical Jesus” versus the “mythical Jesus.”  This phrasing is to some degree unfair, in that possibly it assigns the term “myth” to what might be potentially a phenomenon altogether different from what we in modernity call a “myth.”  That is, what we might call a “myth”—a belief directed toward a conceptualized person or thing that does not exist, though it is purported to exist—might in different times and places constitute a belief with much different implications.  "Heaven," for example, is called a myth typically by people who deny an afterlife, but even so by people who understand simultaneously that the proponents of heaven’s existence do not ascribe to heaven some localizable or examinable existence.  The people who claim that heaven exists do not usually claim that the heavens can be climbed to or flown to—regardless of the Genesis reference to the raising of water into the dome of heaven.

Similarly—particularly in view of the quite different time and place of early Christianity’s milieu from our own—it might well be maintained that the “myth” of Jesus was understood by some of his followers to be conceptualized as in—and taking place in—a higher realm than our own.  I imagine, then, that the proper application of the term “myth” to the understanding of Jesus in terms of the early Church—and in terms of those of us who might subscribe to the religious legitimacy of the early Church—has to do with the scope only of claims that he actually walked the earth.  In the twenty-first century, the question of whether Jesus existed is reckoned to be an existential one in regard to Christianity.  To us, if Jesus did not exist, then “his” teachings and story constitute at best an amalgam of philosophy, and at worst a horrid fraud.

This determination to test Christianity by whether or not its founder existed is nonetheless—though it seems eminently logical—poised over a trapdoor.  As others have pointed out with more clarity than I, the postulate of whether or not “Jesus” existed is only by habit or convention connected to any supposed criteria of salience.  It is of arguable substance to claim that “Jesus” never existed, and to claim that his story is pure invention arising from a fraught landscape of religious and political conflict populated by fiery apocalyptic preachers, when in the extremity of the argument one might point simply to that company of preachers and say, “There!  There you have your evidence of the historicity of Jesus!  There is the factual basis from which—no infallible degree of specificity being imposed—the entirety of his story (at least in its temporal facets) might be extracted.”

And so, the question of Jesus’ “existence” is inseparable from the conventions—prevailing in our time and prevailing perhaps differently in other times—about the understood boundaries of the question.  I submit that this connection with “understood boundaries” is far more crucial to our thought processes than is generally recognized, and I contend that defying those “understood boundaries” is crucial in itself to far more fundamental questions (yes, they exist) about religion than whether or not by any particular criteria Jesus might be held to have existed.

The Industry of Hebrews

I realize now that a thesis was working itself out in the course of my previous post:

“The two kingdoms to which I referred in the previous posts—the kingdoms of this world and of heaven described by Jesus—are ethical entities.  In practice, they are the playings-out of value choices, with the option in the first instance—the kingdom of this world—being devotion to the causes with which we define our belonging, such causes being particular and parochial.  In the second instance the focus is devotion to a greater singular cause attributed to the mediation of Jesus—to whom we belong and through whom we belong to all.”

Bearing in mind Jesus’ unsparing ethical demands, I wrote:

“The notion of a kingdom short of that of God is ridiculous in Jesus’ ethical framework, and he treats it as something ridiculous . . . . What is most important to our analysis . . . is the extent to which any of the history of the Establishment of the Biblical Nation of Israel can be thought to comport with the demands of Jesus.”

Moving toward a conclusion, I wrote:

“. . . . what I am getting at is attempting to show how Jesus’ ethical system is not merely a challenge to aspects of the religion of his birth, but is also a refutation of any theory of Jesus’ ministry as being ‘religious’ in terms of that heritage . . . . What Jesus calls us to do is fulfill the highest aspirations of religion, and in this regard Jesus obviously finds the highest aspirations of the religion of his birth to point in that direction.  The necessary dynamic, however, is for us to view all such things through the lens of his demands, not to view his demands through the lens of any belief system.”

In the course of considering the question of Jesus’ demands viewed “through the lens of any belief system”—an unfortunate aspect of so much commentary upon his ministry—I thought of the Book of The Letter to the Hebrews.  I think the book will be very instructive to the point at hand, in that its author dealt with just such considerations—without, I am afraid, much success.

The author of Hebrews comes very close to describing the kingdom of heaven as I did above: “devotion to a greater singular cause attributed to the mediation of Jesus—to whom we belong and through whom we belong to all.”  Hebrews, however, is centered on the notion that Jesus replaced the functions of the High Priest—a perfectly legitimate concept, though any substantive treatment of it must bear the weight of scrutiny such as in Jesus’ observation that the priests themselves, in a sense, violate the Sabbath every Sabbath.  Unfortunately, the author of Hebrews does not display Jesus’ propensity for hanging questions and pregnant silences.  The author of Hebrews tries to substitute industry for inspiration.

Any Old Belief System

The two kingdoms to which I referred in the previous posts—the kingdoms of this world and of heaven described by Jesus—are ethical entities.  In practice, they are the playings-out of value choices, with the option in the first instance—the kingdom of this world—being devotion to the causes with which we define our belonging, such causes being particular and parochial.  In the second instance the focus is devotion to a greater singular cause attributed to the mediation of Jesus—to whom we belong and through whom we belong to all.

The contrast between these two kingdoms cannot be understood by us until we address the meaning of “kingdom” used in the mundane sense versus its application in terms of ethics.  The resolution of this preliminary matter is not complicated, though it is strongly counter-intuitive.  In its most rarified application, the term “ethics” is incompatible with “kingdom.”  If we practiced ethics properly, we would have no need for the disciplinary function of a kingdom, and ostensibly debatable notions of proper social and public policy could be achieved by cordial conversation, not through the exercise of sovereignty.

None of that is going to happen, of course, because we lack the ability to behave ethically.  What is most important for us to realize, however, is the fact that in the ethical system demanded by Jesus, no working-out of any defensible earthly kingdom is going to happen either.  The notion of a kingdom short of that of God is ridiculous in Jesus’ ethical framework, and he treats it as something ridiculous.  There is no answer to how King David, if he is going to be thought the “father” of Jesus, might possibly have called Jesus “my lord” in the psalms.  Jesus would have called David “my lord.”  (Or David, without genealogic relation to Jesus, would have called him “my lord.”  Whichever.)

It is of little matter that attribution of psalms to David might be nothing but a fancy, and it is of little matter that various sophistries might ostensibly “solve” the David and My Lord riddle.  What matters is that Jesus treats the matter as ridiculous and—though we must rely on the authority of extant, selected texts—the Gospels leave the riddle in its raw, unsolved condition.

That is by far not the least of the riddles that confront us once we try to apply Jesus’ ethic to the world of the devil.  Take the earthly kingdom of Israel, so important to the Jews with whom Jesus interacted, and so ingrained in the worldview that inundated the setting of Jesus’ ministry.  Nothing in the teachings of Jesus can be understand outside of the framework of Judaism—and nothing in the teachings of Jesus can be understood within the framework of Judaism.  We have another unsolvable riddle.

The family of Jacob—the family-nation of Israel—went down to Egypt in peace and lived there in peace for many years.  Then came the oppression, and the flight from Egypt, and the Conquest of Canaan, and the establishment of Israel the earthly nation.  In the orthodox interpretation, the sequence as understood here is peace, followed by oppression, followed by heroism, followed by peace.  (OK, there is a liberal portion of faithlessness and apostasy and cowardice, but such things simply figure into the moral adventure of the nation.)

Non-orthodox interpretations talk about uncomfortable things like genocide and rape.  What is most important to our analysis here, however, is the extent to which any of the history of the Establishment of the Biblical Nation of Israel can be thought to comport with the demands of Jesus.

This is the Jesus who tells us that faith the size of a mustard seed would allow us to (successfully) order a tree or even a mountain to plant itself in the sea.  We do not possess such faith, though of course without faith we cannot hope to enter Jesus’ kingdom.  Well, actually, we can hope (and try) but first and foremost we must come to grips with what Jesus demands of us—after we have come to grips with whether or not we believe he can legitimately make such a demand.

The Israelites were faced with a similar challenge with the Conquest of Canaan, an extended episode of openly recorded killing, destruction, and (in effect) rape that has earned in many quarters the name “genocide.”  One crucial element is usually left out of the equation, however.  The Israelites (in a vein that brings to mind the mustard seed) were ordered in the narrative to behave in such a noble and courageous fashion that the peoples of Canaan would simply flee, not resist.  (Whether they might have fared passably well in their resettlement is of course hypothetical—but after all this is a religious question, and God is omnipotent.)

God promised to drive the Canaanites out if the Israelites behaved appropriately.  The Israelites (as any people would) behaved to an extent inappropriately.  Hence the “genocide,” or at least the bloodshed and destruction that was so often described as if it were to the credit of the Jews’ ancestors.  Periodically, the conquering Israelites were even castigated for not engaging with sufficient vigor in bloodshed and destruction.  The Conquest happened, but it was not what it was supposed to be.

But what of the “peace” that the nation of Jacob enjoyed when first in Egypt, and then later (episodically, at least) when entrenched in the Promised Land?  Did they behave in such manner as to deserve such peace?  If we view the matter through the lens of Jesus’ ethical demands, the answer must be “No.”  (Of course, for all of us at all times, the answer is “No.”)

Even the idea of the nation (later, “kingdom”) itself would have to fall into question.  Jesus tells his followers that concerning themselves only about the welfare of those in this or that “in group” was to be no better than “the heathen,” though to be separate from “the heathen” was an ethical demand that weighed heavily on the Jews.

It would be unfair to the Jews to say that they cared only for their own (though Jesus felt it imperative at times to declare that there were those among the heathen who could rival any Jew in unfettered humanitarianism.)  It would also be unfair to pretend that the separation from the surrounding peoples demanded by the Jewish scriptures did not tend ironically to make the Jews act all the more like the heathen.

Yet the aspiration of much of Jewish thought was (and is) to behave so as to capture the admiration, and provide an attraction to, all the peoples of the earth.  This sort of millennial vision, however, would rely either on simple divine intervention, or on ethical refinement (and incredible courage) such that the Jewish people in any age might simply awe the peoples (and enlist the divine) in such a way as to make the world clamor to serve Jerusalem and support the Jews.  Such visions exist in the Jewish scriptures—they are as open-hearted as any sentiment in any religion, but surely we are in “mustard seed” territory here.

What I am getting at is not meant to alter or challenge our conceptions as mere mortals of Judaism or of Jewish history.  Rather, what I am getting at is attempting to show how Jesus’ ethical system is not merely a challenge to aspects of the religion of his birth, but is also a refutation of any theory of Jesus’ ministry as being “religious” in terms of that heritage.  In Jesus’ ethical system, the “peace” of Israel as a family or—later—as a nation was non-existent.  Let Israel (or, in the instance, Judea) be a wonderful nation with many wonderful people.  Let the gentile nations be wonderful nations with many wonderful people.  Let Israel call the surrounding gentile nations “wonderful”—even if that were to stretch the truth a bit charitably.  None of that would matter in light of Jesus’ ethical demands.

And let historians then or now argue about the gritty aspects of the Conquest.  That matter, as well, is irrelevant to Jesus’ ethical teachings.  Here we can begin to feel the rub.  In the workings-out of Jesus’ teachings, the history of the nation never happened.  Who cares who was high priest when the power-rapist-adulterer-murderer “man after God’s heart” David ate the bread he wasn’t supposed to?  Who cares which son of the concubine-ravager wife-pimp Abraham was to be the son of the Promise, when any old rock would do?

What matters in any event is what we are called to, and how we respond to what we are called to.  What Jesus calls us to do is fulfill the highest aspirations of religion, and in this regard Jesus obviously finds the highest aspirations of the religion of his birth to point in that direction.  The necessary dynamic, however, is for us to view all such things through the lens of his demands, not to view his demands through the lens of any belief system.

Two Things Out of Nothing

No sense can be derived from an ostensibly monotheistic ideology that considers the deity within a framework of co-existing or priorly-existing independent entities.  A monotheistic ideology considers a single deity from which all else flows—otherwise anything independent of the “single deity” would be characterizable ultimately as another deity.

The Abrahamic belief systems identify a single deity—leaving aside the controversy (in which my position will be clear)—over whether a monotheism can encapsulate multiple “persons” within the deity.  Generally, the Abrahamic belief systems reckon that entities can exist which are distinct from the deity, but it must be the case that such entities are created by him—leaving aside the controversy about the deity’s “gender” (in which my position must be clear already.)

So, all else besides God has been created by him—out of nothing.  It might also be contended that a certain logic would dictate that—there being no independently-existing substrate—God has created all out of himself.  My position on this is clear—postulation about any illogic of something out of nothing is coterminous with postulation about God himself being created out of nothing.  Either God exists or he doesn’t.  Arguments about how he could make something else exist are simply re-litigations of the original point.

Jesus refers to two kingdoms.  The first important point about the “two kingdoms” is the fact that their realms incorporate the entirety of our experienceable existence.  “This world” (often ascribed some practical or titular—though hardly un-contested—subjugation to Satan) is described along with the “kingdom of heaven.”  In that the kingdom of heaven is described by Jesus as existing within the believer as well as existing in rightful sovereignty over all, it is most logical to view the two kingdoms—in an ethical if not practical sense—as two states of being.  On a single plane, we are describable as citizens either of the kingdom of this world or of the kingdom of heaven.

In parallel with the idea of “two kingdoms,” I contend that our existence is understandable most clearly in terms of two things—and two things only—described for us in the scriptures as having been created out of nothing.  First, the original Creation was formed out of nothing.  As I have noted elsewhere, it is paradoxically the case that this necessary “creation out of nothing” is given an amazingly short shrift in the Bible.  The “original Creation” is not even described narratively.  We are greeted in Genesis first by the (narratively) pre-existing chaos.  “Let there be light” is counterpoised with the substrate of darkness, which is given a substance even though we call it simply the absence of light.  Then we are told how this produced this which gave rise to that, and so on.

And the Gospels proceed in similar fashion.  Jesus will make wine, but only out of water.  Jesus will come up with a coin that Peter can use to pay their tax, but Peter has to go literally fishing for it.  Even the return of Jesus to his body (certainly a “creation” of an event unextractable by us from any realm of experience) is framed in a narrative similar in one sense to all other of his miracles.  Here an event of unsurpassed import is not displayed in itself before any mortal’s eyes.  As far as any human’s eyes are permitted, it is as though the Savior was (re)birthed by the tomb.

This leads me to the second thing that was created out of nothing. This second thing, the unity of Creation—not just Creation itself—was created out of nothing.  There is no logical reason why anything we can perceive ought to have ever existed—true.  Such is a foundational tenet of any monotheism that acknowledges a sovereign deity—and certainly God has been lauded for his creative act throughout the ages.  What is also true is that there is no logical reason why everything we can perceive is understood necessarily to be in connection to all else.  I am not referring to the idea that we each possess single sensory systems such that our processing of information must necessarily presume to connect all input—whether by close or by distant association.  What I am referring to is the biblical assertion that all is connected.  God made Creation.  He did not make Creations.

God gave us bodies.  He also gave us to understand that our care for our bodies can be at the expense of our neighbors’ welfare.  God gave us children.  He also gave us to understand that our familial responsibilities can be at the expense of larger ethical demands.  God gave us lives.  He also gave us to understand that our care for our lives can be at the expense of our eternal fates, or those of our fellows.

In all those “gave us to understands” lies a certain presumption that I am attempting to highlight.  It is in a certain sense possible to maintain that the believer’s foundational premise—in trying to do what is right—can be to try to do everything possible, and to “cast the rest upon the Lord” (or some such.)  Certainly, prayer and trust are laudable, but it must be understood that the persistent tendency to which we are drawn is to delineate between what we can do and what we cannot.  That—within the logic of Jesus’ teaching—is impermissible.  There are no realms of ethical responsibility in Jesus’ teaching, just as there are no realms within the larger realms of the two coexisting kingdoms.

It would be ridiculous for me to speak of “ethical responsibility in Jesus’ teaching” and to ever act as though I was not simply relaying the message.  What I can do is try to draw attention to what are really two “created out of nothing” phenomena.  God’s hand can be seen in everything, but for us mortals God’s unaccompanied creative power can be seen in only two things.  First, there is the fact that Creation is described as existing.  Second, there is the fact that Creation is described as single.  This is possibly just for our consumption—certainly God can make as many Creations as he likes, but similarly he could at his pleasure have placed us in view of—perhaps even straddling—such diversities.  He has not.  There is one connected Creation for us.

And so we have bodies and children and lives.  There can be no notion that care for those things is mandatory, and care for other things is optional.  There can be no notion that any parochial value systems displayed by ostensibly godly men and women “in Bible days” can serve legitimately as templates for our behaviors.  There can be no notion that care for all Creation is creeping “pantheism,” or some such.  We can only try to do what Jesus requires, and in a single, connected Creation, what Jesus requires of us binary-oriented creatures is necessarily impossible—that is the upshot of his ethical system.

Jesus requires everything of us all the time.  The important thing here about his teaching of the two kingdoms is the fact that they are two modes of being.  The lesser mode is the realm of Satan, in which we can try to do our best.  The greater mode is the kingdom of God, in which we can also try to do our best.  We can submerge ourselves in the “earthly” realm of Satan, and believe ourselves to be on the right track, if we try to wend through an imagined landscape of the devil’s traps.  What Jesus teaches is that there is an entire coexisting kingdom, the “kingdom of heaven,” where our efforts dissolve before our eyes even as the arbitrary moral distinctions to which we are irresistibly drawn dissolve as well.

When we embrace the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of our personal dissolution, we can—haltingly, it must be admitted—address ourselves to Jesus’ demands.  Here it is absolutely essential to embrace as well the two conjoined elements of Creation and of interconnected Creation.  When we are the pitiful servants of a merciful master, all we might attempt will be impossible, but it is the extent of the impossibility that is crucial to any moral grounding that we might by his grace be granted.  Failing, as the kingdom of Satan will espouse, to do what we must for delineated causes—family, community, church, and the like—is not what we are truly to understand as failure.  We are to understand our failure in the vein of one great cause in one connected Creation.

The citizens of the kingdom of Satan and of the kingdom of heaven can be defined by precisely those implications of a connected Creation that are embedded in the teachings of Jesus, which will brook no notions of the sequestering of ethical demands.  In the kingdom of Satan, “hating one’s parents” is taken as some sort of admonition to be prepared to forsake all if necessary to serve God.  In the kingdom of heaven, “hating one’s parents” is an ever-present condition of existence.  To be “of” someone or “from” someone is to be of necessity not “of” or “from” the single Creation to which we are ethically bound.

To enlarge further on the subject of ancestry, there is Jesus’ denouncement of those of the Jews who maintained that they would not have joined their ancestors in persecuting the prophets.  In the kingdom of Satan, such an assertion would seem entirely reasonable, though of course entirely convenient when said by someone at a comfortable distance from the prophets’ age.  To Jesus, this contention of some Jews of his time—that they would have forborne from the evil deeds of their ancestors—is ridiculous.  To identify with being “of” or “from” something is always a trap—at least, that is the implication of Jesus’ teaching.

God created, as far as we know, two things out of nothing—two things that did not exist priorly, and that had no necessity of existence.  He created Creation, and he created one, single, interconnected Creation.  In the realm of Jesus’ teaching for us, God did not make Creation.  He made The Creation.