Two Ways to Be Wrong

In my last post I wrote:

“The only commonality we might have with God is a sense of good rather than evil, and that sense is the only abiding torment that we face.  This is the architecture of the life that we must find in the kingdom of which Jesus speaks.”

And:

“In the world of Jesus, in the kingdom of God, right and wrong, good and evil, are all that exist.  Nothing changes but the notion of what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears.”

In the world that intrudes constantly upon us—the world to which we succumb too often, the world that distracts us—there are many challenges (and many of those challenges are constructed in the form of things that we need ostensibly to do in order to make our lives fulfilling.)  We will make many mistakes and missteps in addressing those challenges, and (it is to be hoped) we will maintain a healthy awareness that such things will happen.  As regards the kingdom of heaven, however, it is often the case that we will be thrown into panic or near-panic at the thought that we don’t know what we are doing.  Making mistakes about what God requires of us is what religion is supposed to allow us to avoid.

However, the notion that we must hear perfectly with our ears and see perfectly with our eyes is as ludicrous as the notion (as I have written before) that we can hear some truth once and enshrine it (or, rather, our conceit that we have understood it) once and for all.  We need to learn things over and over again, and we need to make mistakes over and over again.  Hearing and seeing are living things, and fallible things.

As I wrote in my last post:

“Adam and Eve were not thrown into a world of despair because they were given the ability to know what was right and what was wrong.  They were thrown into a world of despair because they were thrust into the realm of the challenge that Jesus has for us—our eyes were opened, the eyes of our race were opened, to know good and evil, not to know WHAT is good or WHAT is evil.”

We would do well to consider afresh constantly the predicament of Adam and Eve.  (This would stand opposed to the endless re-hashings of the “Fall” stories that are really told backwards—Adam and Eve did this or that because some fifth- or sixteenth- or twentieth-century notion of the “salvation economy” requires such a basis.)  At present, I would say that the growing sense of apprehension that would appear to afflict the first couple is really no different from that which afflicts us as we try to comprehend Jesus’ admonishments about the kingdom of heaven.  As I wrote last time:

“Our lives are good and evil, permeating everything about us and everything around us.  Our worlds are good and evil, permeating everything about us and everything around us.  We are angels and devils moment by moment.”

If we are really the duty-fettered progeny of Adam and Eve, we would not be surprised if the most basic admonishments related to us by Jesus would be well-understood to apply to the first man and woman.  Consider the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, and consider how it would apply most pointedly to humans—then as now and as ever—trying to wend their ways through the trials of life.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”  Being “poor,” it must be admitted, is no virtue in itself, but here Jesus is apparently describing detachment, and in view of his other teachings, it would be expected that “poverty” really equates to unconcern about possessions (and a willingness to celebrate others’ enjoyment of what the world has to offer) such that the believer can be held to possess all—in the sense that possession really means anything.  Adam and Eve had nothing at first (and we might in charity attribute to them mixed feelings about the raiment procured for them by the death of animals), and the beginning of possessions for them and their immediate family was followed hard upon by strife over how to sacrifice some of such possessions to God.

“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth”—a particularly poignant imagery if (as a timeless maxim) it is seen to apply to Adam and Eve and to all of us as their children.  Being the opposite of meek, of course, has been seen as the usual way to gain and to pass on an inheritance in the earth.  Jesus’ lessons in the Sermon on the Mount are certainly not practical guidelines on how to prosper in this world.

What is generally not noted, however, is the fact that the Sermon on the Mount also does not consist of guidelines appreciable for their particular content.  To be merciful, to be pure of heart, to be peacemakers—these are all descriptions of dispositions, rather than specifics of thought or behavior.  And to “hunger and thirst after righteousness”—that is a wonderful thing, but it still leaves the believer to find out what in particular is righteous.

In addition, it is the case that Jesus’ longer discourse here does not limit itself to descriptions of dispositions that are devoid of particular content.  Jesus actually supplies his listener with a source of content about moral requirements, and it is scarcely what one would at first expect.  The listener’s moral duties, incredibly, extend not only to what he or she might internalize individually, but also to what other people might through their own dispositions impose on the listener:

“Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.”

And if that is not enough:

“Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison.”

The simplest way to characterize Jesus’ approach to the moral requirements of his listener is to say that Jesus demands that the listener give himself or herself all the worst of it—not a particularly specific guideline, but at least a guideline that tends toward a starting point in meekness.  Perhaps the most helpful thing that this guideline provides is a bit of insight into the intractable nature of moral decision-making.  Such decision-making is so difficult that is usually as prudent as anything to grant one’s opponent’s position.

So we are really all just floundering around.  And we are supposed to be such wonderful things, made in the image of God.  If we are mindful of the “floundering around” part, however, we can begin to understand the best ways to conceptualize our place in God’s universe.  We are of course, flawed—but then all of Creation must be considered as “flawed”—since the only thing that is not flawed is God (even if the only flaw is not being God.)

And yet we are creations of God, presumably created exactly (that is, without flaw) as God intended.  Here it is really the case that our ability to understand is being exceeded.  We cannot imagine that God can do anything imperfectly.  Can we at least imagine that God went perfectly about conceiving of an imperfect Creation, and then went perfectly about creating it?

The key here is “conception,” as we might understand it—a thought process.  Of course, we can say that anything that God thinks of as existing can therefore exist—although that really exceeds our own thought processes.  One problem, however, with our thought processes is that—however we might claim to appreciate their limitations—we are led continually to ignore those limitations.  One source of this difficulty is the fact that—virtually by definition—thought processes are imagined to be separate from the rest of Creation, and in a position to opine about it.  Even a notion that we are pitiful parts of nature with pitifully inadequate naturally-derived intellectual capacities is a notion that places its holder metaphorically above, looking down.

But if all is connected (whether by participation in a divine Creation or a natural universe) then all thought participates in that connection.  In the realm of Jesus’ lordship, of course, the divine aspect would be that which controls—Creation is God’s, and by God’s volition—and humanity’s place and character both had God as their Designer.  Even the “man in the image of God” idea is entwined in our understanding with our lack of understanding, being an idea that is both more esoteric than we can comprehend, and also an idea complicated with the linguists’ warning that “in the image of God” as we say it might mean either “resembling God” or “as conceptualized by God.”

What I propose here is that, within the scope of Jesus’ teaching, the concept of “thought” does not possess the neatly-sequestered character we moderns assign to it.  Jesus, for example, does not merely utter a curse against an unproductive fig tree—he tells the tree that it is cursed.  In Mark, Jesus follows that up by telling his disciples that they might speak to mountains, and be obeyed.  Thought—as an intrinsic element of Creation—exists always and everywhere: here or there, more or less emanating from God or his creatures, more or less understood by us, more or less capturing our attention.

When the notion of thought is not parceled out in our conceits, not assigned by us here or there or granted by us as an aspect only of certain creatures, then “thought” and its attendant phenomena can be viewed in a manner more consistent with Jesus’ teachings.  If “thought” exists in gradations, then it can be understood as existing in more or less distilled forms.  In our modern Western conception, for example, there are such things as topics, and questions, and answers.

In a conceptualized Creation mediated by God, however, any situation impinging on an element of Creation is effectively a topic, any experience is a question, and any decision is an answer.  A stone consisting of a locus of chemicals proportionally distinct from its surroundings is approached by a lava flow, the stone becomes heated, the stone fractures.  Ridiculous it would be to describe that as the stone’s topic, question, and answer—or even to describe that as the stone’s situation, experience, and decision.

But what of a plant placed in unusual circumstances, subjected to stresses, and then—predictably, as a botanist might assess—flowering or not flowering?  Are those stages at least a situation, an experience, and a decision?  What of a female animal in heat, approached by an interested male, and submitting (or not) to his advances?  What of a chimpanzee presented with a puzzle, permitted to explore it, and then taking some course to solve it?  Are we not seeing the melding of situation into topic, of experience into question, and of decision into answer?

If the processes of thought are understood as potentially permeating Creation—the Creation formed at God’s thought—then the elevated notions we have of “thought” as a rarefied quality of humanity must come into question.  And so also must we question the even more rarefied status we accord to logical thought.  We all as humans live through situations, experiences, and decisions—and those things run riot in our internal lives, much though we might like to pretend they do not.

These contentions, then, can place us in a better position to view the competing variants of Jesus’ ministry.  At times—to the crowd—Jesus spoke in parables.  At other times he spoke to his disciples plainly.  The standard notion in Christianity has been that the disciples got the better, the more authoritative, and the more substantial teaching—though, to be fair, one must reckon that they got to hear the parables as well.  And we must also reckon with the fact, as I have said, that the Gospel of John has Jesus start and end his ministry despairing of his disciples’ understanding of the proper source of their belief.

Parables or explicit theology—they are simply two ways to be wrong.  Or to be right, though it is usually more prudent to assume that we are wrong.  Only on this basis, meek though it might be muddled, can we begin to construct a foundation for understanding Jesus’ teaching.  As I quoted myself above:

“The only commonality we might have with God is a sense of good rather than evil, and that sense is the only abiding torment that we face.  This is the architecture of the life that we must find in the kingdom of which Jesus speaks.”