• The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World
• Dalai Lama & Desmond Tutu, with Douglas Abrams
• Published by Hutchinson, London, 2016
• ISBN 9781786330444 (hbk.); 9781473538351 (ePub ebook)
• 351 pages

Two humanitarian giants sit for a week to discuss "joy," while a third writer audits the conversations: the result is this book.

The occasion for the book is the Dalai Lama's 80th birthday. He has invited Desmond Tutu with a benign vengeance. Four years earlier, when this, the 14th Dalai Lama, was invited to Tutu's 80th birthday, South Africa refused to grant the Dalai Lama a visa. Tutu was outraged, saying the government was "worse than apartheid." Now, at last, they get together, a long journey for the archbishop who is battling prostate cancer. The topic for their conversation: how may one experience joy in this troubled world?

What impressed me most by the book was not what was said, but who said it, and how playfully Tutu and the Dalai Lama interacted throughout the dialogue. When Jesus said to allow the children to come to him, "for of such is the kingdom of heaven," he elevated childhood. When you become really mature, as are these two men, you can afford to act like a child.

They respect their philosophical and faith differences (Tutu, a Christian, and the Dalai Lama, a "nontheist" Buddhist), all the while laughing with and at each other mischievously. From one of their earliest encounters, apparently, the Dalai Lama enjoyed grabbing Tutu's cap and wearing it himself. While Tutu insists he cannot imagine Jesus sending the Dalai Lama to hell, the Dalai Lama insists he prefers to go to hell, where there are more people he can help.

According to the narrator (who is Abrams), the book is structured like a three-layer birthday cake (a fitting metaphor, for the occasion):

1. The teachings on joy, provided by Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama
2. The contributions of science toward validating the teachings on joy
3. The "stories of being in Dharamsala with the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop throughout the week" (5)

In addition, a useful appendix ("Joy Practices") is included, providing practical guidance on maintaining joy. The practices are a series of meditations, several of which nearly anyone could practice, independent of his or her beliefs.

As is true with all cakes, this one is a matter of taste: the middle layer may appeal to some readers, although, with few exceptions,^[1] I found the references to science frequently interrupted and diluted the true merits of the book (the teachings and the stories).^[2]

At one point Abrams himself recognizes the possibility that some people prefer a two-layer cake. The Dalai Lama was stating that humans, being social animals, must pay attention to each other's needs in order to be happy, that is, to keep an inner equilibrium. At that point he mentions a study of mice where, if one were wounded, another would lick the wound. At this point Abram's writes, "The Archbishop laughed at all of this discussion of mice and the need for scientific justifications for what, to him, was so obviously at the very core of our humanity" (254).

The core of our humanity is the important focus in the book. Grossly oversimplifying the teachings of the book: the Dalai Lama and Tutu agree that "mental immunity" is necessary to prevent oneself from being terrorized by reality. The Dalai Lama says this is gained by learning to avoid destructive emotions; Tutu says it is achieved by tempering one's faults with a generous application of mercy; they both agree that reframing our personal (and global) experience in a new, wider perspective mitigates being overwhelmed, becoming obsessively negative, and ultimately losing our joy. Some personal suffering may, ten years from now, prove to have shaped us into compassionate people that we would not have otherwise become. Internationally, we hear of daily tragedies, both natural and social. We also hear of hundreds of people joining to rescue and heal the injured (but it requires discipline to focus on this).

Perhaps the most important ingredient for all reframing is paying attention to others. This habit supports both the ability to realize one is not alone in one's sufferings and, better, to forget about oneself in acknowledging the value of others. For Tutu, death is an acceptable end. He had a beginning, a middle, and will have an end, all the more acceptable because his departure will make room for others.

The complete list of virtues that lead toward joy (and help structure the concluding "Joy Practices") is stated in this way: "As our dialogue progressed, we converged on eight pillars of joy. Four were qualities of the mind: perspective, humility, humor, and acceptance. Four were qualities of the heart: forgiveness, gratitude, compassion, and generosity" (193).

One way to appreciate these pillars is to consider the way their opposites separate one from others and, in the process, separate one from joy. Without perspective, we see the costs and the benefits of existence relative to ourselves primarily, and to the groups of humans with whom we identify, thus pitting us at odds with the rest of the world (whom we do not know). Without humility, we cannot see the grandeur of life—as C.S. Lewis wrote that one cannot see anything above if one is constantly looking down on everything. Without humor, we become heavy, recalling G.K. Chesterton's statement that "Satan fell by the force of gravity." Humor makes us light enough to dance (at least verbally). About acceptance, the archbishop explained, "'We are meant to live in joy . . . this does not mean that life will be easy or painless. It means that we can turn our faces to the wind and accept that this is the storm we must pass through. We cannot succeed by denying what exists'" (224). By denying reality, we are constantly disappointed, courting bitterness and anger.

Even more clearly alienating would be the absence of the "qualities of the heart." Whereas forgiveness implies some act of untying or releasing, a lack of forgiveness involves a perpetually binding relationship to one's enemy. Ingratitude ignores all the people who have contributed to our lives, including ancestors, carpenters, tailors, teachers, farmers, sanitation engineers—the people on whom we depend the most yet forget the most easily. Since we live in a world where widespread suffering is a fact, the refusal to suffer with others (i.e. to be compassionate) exiles us to a world of petty cares and pleasures. Stinginess, if that can be considered the opposite of generosity, precludes building emotional bridges with our time, money, and affirmation. In short, the absence of these pillars leaves us prisoners in Paul Simon's lyrics, "I've built walls / A fortress deep and mighty / That none may penetrate / I have no need of friendship, friendship causes pain / It's laughter and it's loving I disdain."

Obviously, the man who oversaw the Truth and Reconciliation Hearings in South Africa and the man who at a young age had to flee the country for whom he felt and feels the most responsibility have much to say about these eight pillars, having lived them in many respects for many years. We should listen.

____Footnotes____

^[1]As an example of an exception, "A more recent study conducted by researcher Johannes Zimmerman found that people who more often use first-person singular words—I and me—are more likely to be depressed than people who more often use the first-person plural—we and us" (200).

Even here, though, the causality is not questioned (though perhaps it is in the recent study): those who are depressed, which literally means they live under an unbearable weight, would be more likely to talk about themselves. The relationship is obviously circular, in that case, but it is not described that way. In the example of this study's summary, I trust the point being made, not because of the summary's persuasiveness, but because of personal experience and the assumption that singular pronouns, dominating one's thinking, would likely increase one's sense of isolation.

^[2]There is some justification for the inclusion of science, in that the Dalai Lama shares an interest in its bearing on spirituality.

What I found lacking with the scientific interjections were (1) the lack of detail in the scientific summaries, and (2) the consequential absence of problematizing the scientific discourse—such as a discussion of the difficulty of isolating causes where human emotions are involved, the methodologies employed in the studies, and the counterarguments to the conclusions. The book was obviously avoiding academic appearances, but the relevance of science to the humanities would have been served better if the material were relegated to lengthy endnotes…available for those interested and detailed for those skeptical.

reviewed: 2018/02/10 | last updated: 2018/02/10  

• Essential Guide to Biblical Life and Times
• Martin C. Albl
• Published by St. Mary's Press, 2009
• ISBN 978-0-88489-898-6 (pbk.)
• 168 pages

Many years ago at the University of Colorado, I sat in a graduate course in Latin with Martin Albl and can assure the readers that he is characteristically accurate in translation and scholarship. Couple this virtue with his penchant for clear writing and The Essential Guide proves to be a very useful introduction to the cultural influences that color fifty biblical topics, ranging from food to holiness to women. Alphabetically arranged, the book provides a few pages to each of these topics, cross referencing other "articles" that are related.

The theory of scriptural inspiration underlying the Guide is that humans, who were subject to their times, expressed their vision of God and God's workings with the literary, historical, and cosmological tools (and biases) at hand. The Guide avoids all discussion of higher criticism, putting its focus on the things described in the Bible and how they reflect certain cultural trends at the approximate time of their writing.

The "Bible" is defined by the Roman Catholic canon (meaning that books such as Maccabees and Tobit are included in the discussions). While the Guide is a Catholic publication, the inclusion of these books is called for no matter one's concept of the canon: Greek mythology is drawn upon as a source of cultural information; a fortiori the deuterocanonical books. Moreover, outside of a handful of comments on Catholic interpretations, the book maintains a denominationally-neutral view (excluding dominations that take the Bible as a direct transcription of God's thoughts).

The pre-publication reviews stress the usefulness of the Guide for new believers and students. No doubt it is primarily directed to that audience, and, if read at the beginning of one's interest in the Bible, would prevent overreactions to, and/or overly ingenious defenses of, certain biblical passages. That said, it's a useful book for anyone.

Perhaps a wider intended audience would have licensed the author to tease out interpretations from passages that are too readily taken at face value. The best example occurs in two articles, "Atonement" and "Sacrifices and Offerings." We read in "Atonement" that "The concept of atonement was prevalent in ancient religions and was closely connected with sacrifices offered to the gods. In Greek and Roman religions, animals were sacrificed; human sacrifices occurred in the Aztec and Canaanite religions" (21). Again in "Sacrifices and Offerings" we read " . . . offering such sacrifices was essential to virtually all religions throughout the ancient Mediterranean world" (112).

Behind those two statements lies a long and bloody history of humans and animals being killed collectively by humans who believed that god required—and was satisfied by—the death of a victim. At this juncture, a book devoted to showing the influence of culture on sacred writings could question the compatibility of blood sacrifice with the father of Jesus. But instead of questioning, the Guide smooths over the fact that "killing an animal on an alter seems bizarre to us today" by drawing analogies to individuals who choose to sacrifice themselves for a cause (i.e. soldiers) and by suggesting that, because our (human) sense of justice is satisfied by the death of an evil doer, so must God's sense of justice be satisfied.

Questioning the sacrificial tradition could show how the Jewish-Christian scriptures record a long but successful departure from the world of blood sacrifice.

First, animals were substituted for humans. This fact is mentioned by the Guide, citing Abraham and Isaac ascending Mt. Moriah, only to find that God provided a ram to prevent Isaac from being sacrificed. The Guide goes further, to show that Jesus' concept of hell was taken from "Gehenna," a "valley that runs southwest of Jerusalem," where, in earlier times, "children were offered in this valley as burnt sacrifices to the Canaanite gods Molech and Baal" (12). The Guide (and much Christian thought) stops there, however, not considering that perhaps the crucifixion was more complicated than being simply one-more-finally-satisfying sacrifice to God.

Second, the next departure moves from animals to inanimate objects, even to intangible elements. And this, hinted at in the book of Jeremiah, is what we find in the New Testament, the command being to offer the sacrifice of praise, nothing more: "By him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name. . . . for with such sacrifices God is well pleased" (Hebrews 13). According to Romans 13, we are to be "living sacrifices" (quite the opposite of the ancient sacrifices).

After moving to animals, and ultimately toward praise, why, one must ask, would the Judeo-Christian tradition return to human sacrifice? Could the cultures that produced those bloody practices have been in better tune with God than the Jews? Could the ancient cultures have presciently prepared the tools for human redemption, tools that could be brought back to use at just the right time according to God's desire? I doubt it.

If humans-to-animals-to-praise is the true trajectory in the Bible's treatment of sacrifice, the crucifixion demonstrates that the violence arose entirely from humans (Romans and Jews in an unwritten pact of cooperation) while the suffering was entirely that of the son of God, whose father is perfect, causing the sun to shine on the evil and the good. That the death ended a very bad lineage and history is clear, but the appetite that motivated the death was human. The fact that the death turned out to be exactly what would end the sacrificial world is appreciable, but not to be confused with the "justice" of that world.

Having written all that, I return to the fact that Mr. Albl wrote a book for students, mostly Catholic students. He wasn't looking to reform tradition, just to clarify it, and he succeeded at that. He succeeds even more in a book he published in the same year but revised in 2015, Reason, Faith, and Tradition

reviewed: 2016/08/04 | last updated: 2019/02/11  

• Hunting the Divine Fox: Images and Mystery in Christian Faith
• Robert Farrar Capon
• Published by Seabury Press, New York, 1974
• hardback
• 167 pages

Overview:

• Why I Love this Book
  
• Mystery and Transactions
  

Why I Love this Book

It is not uncommon these days to hear people says things such as "The universe smiled upon me…" or "I prayed to the universe…" when something unexpected yet helpful happens in their lives. This substitution of "universe" for what, in other times, would have been "God" strikes me as inevitable.

"God" and "the Lord" have picked up so much baggage over the last two or three millennia that a much lighter, happier, and more authentic set of expectations are raised by "the universe." After all (and after Carl Sagan), "the universe" resounds with plenitude and with creative power, with mystery and with infinitude.^[1]

Here in the universe, we are not alone. Between and beyond all the material elements—atoms, molecules, space and stars—resides a universal spirit that looks out for our welfare, an intelligence that need not be defined nor separated from the rest of existence, but can nevertheless be trusted.

I like it. In several ways. It's a fresh metaphor that rises above the requirements of political correctness. It's a way to introduce a higher power without either attending AA or bowing down to some god whose moral integrity seems questionable. While I like it, however, it doesn't lead very far without one being steered down the path to Urantia or theories of higher consciousness that rope a person into thinking with a new set of baggage, perhaps of eastern origin but nevertheless baggage.

And for these reasons, I love Hunting the Divine Fox—both the book and the gerund.

Capon breathes life, not into God (Capon's not that good) but into thoughts about God, fulfilling the true role of a theologian. Put differently, he brings God back into the universe, not as an impersonal pantheistic energy, but as a Mystery worth hunting, as one who according to all signs (aka sacraments) is eminently available and close to his creation. This Mystery is the fox that is hard to catch and is more beautiful for being so.

Putting one's religious or nonreligious preferences aside, wouldn't it be wonderful to see life—including all its flaws and failures—as being nevertheless undergirded and overarched by a loving spirit that offers union and communion without any condition further than accepting the gift?^[2]

This book awakens in me my original interest in finding the Jesus of the gospels, transformed perhaps, and hidden in many ways, but no less real and accessible than he was while in his natural body. And it does so without even throwing out the bathwater of Christianity, but instead by re-filtering it to make it sparkle.

Put differently, the book undoes the classic "bait and switch" that religion performs. On one hand, religion in general, and Christianity in particular, offers a new life and new world to the young believer. Sooner or later, though, that life becomes enmeshed in—and suffocated by—institutional and moral chains:

"Yes, this is the wonderful way, but…"—and then the switch occurs—"you are not quite as good as we hoped and need to improve," or "we didn't mention the institutional dues for which you are already in arrears," or "yes, you are forgiven for past sins, but the recent ones…" or—and this is particularly odious to me—"now God works differently, mysteriously" (meaning that whereas Jesus brought the kingdom by healing and delivering people, God now brings the kingdom by making people sick and enslaving them to the cares of this life).

Mystery and Transactions

~ to Overview ~

Hunting the Divine Fox, for some readers at least, provides the Jaws of Life for those caught in the trap of what I will call religion. But even a relaxed agnosticism or a defiant atheism may be released by these jaws, all other conditions being ready. Two key concepts may be outlined by the book's use of "mystery" and "transaction."

The Mystery permeates the book (and the universe). Capon could use the word "God" or "Godhead" or "heavenly family" I suppose, but he is keenly aware of how easily analogies get mistaken for literal descriptions and so, I think, he wants to keep his readers on their toes with the mystery. It is all that which is unavailable to our senses. It can be characterized by the difference between "pass the salt" and "you are the salt of the earth." It is probably what St. Paul referred to when he said he walked by faith not by sight.

The way to approach or access the mystery comprises much of the book. There are no simple rules, but there is a lengthy caution against Transactions or interpreting our access to the mystery transactionally. The reason? As soon as something is a transaction it is humanly possible. It is reducible to—or confusable with—a moral code concerning which stronger humans may be capable of upholding. A transaction is in short the great thief of the grace and love of God.

One of the great transactional misconceptions are theories of the atonement. Assume an atonement, the great reconciliation between the human race and the Father of Jesus, the Master of the Universe. That is fine, essential even…and beautiful when handled well. But add onto that event or impulse an explanation of how it works, and you may be going down the wrong road quickly, a path that reduces the Father of Jesus to an abstraction of justice that must be satisfied. Enough railing.

And once that transaction is accepted, bizarre and awful rules of compliance kick in, so that instead of a simple, "have mercy on me, a publican," we discover a lot of unwritten rules about obeying God that usually do little more than blind us to his love for us through Jesus.

Before explaining further the downside of transactions, I must clarify Capon's notion of sacraments. While Capon obviously likes language (see the first half of the book), he also loves those other signs, sacraments. Being an Anglican, he lists several sacraments: baptism, the Eucharist, confession, and marriage. Jesus is the main sacrament:

The Church, Baptism, the Eucharist, the Priesthood—all these should probably be spoken of with a little reserve. Jesus, on the one hand, may be seen as the great Sacrament of the Mystery—the Mystery itself supremely and personally present in the flesh. The Church, on the other hand, / while it may be seen as just as real a presence, should not be viewed as so eminent a one. The church is a sacrament once removed, as it were: Jesus is the effective Sign of the of the Incarnation; the church is the sacrament of that Sign. (118-119)

If Jesus is the non-transactional sacrament, never having started nor stopped being Jesus, so much more are the lesser sacraments non-transactional. They represent a reality that has always been and will always be. Otherwise, one backs into some really harsh—and unnecessarily harsh—territory: making absurd claims that only those lucky enough to be baptized are joint heirs with Christ. All those from other times and other lands and other cultures are ineligible precisely because, transactionally speaking, the Father's heart began in Bethlehem and could not find full expression until Jesus expiated our sins on the cross, which of course he did but not in the purely local and temporary sense we reductively assume.

Here's how Capon words the idea in terms of the Prodigal Son:

"But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him." He doesn't earn forgiveness by a transaction called Coming Home and Saying You're Sorry. He just walks in and finds he had it all along. The father doesn't forgive him because he made his confession, privately or publicly. He forgives him just because he's his father.
And when the elder brother—another dyed-in-the-wool transactionalist—shows up with his bookful of self-righteous green stamps and complains his father never gave him any premiums, the father, with a touch of impatience, explains he doesn't accept trading stamps: "Look. He's my son; you're my son. Neither of you has to earn any of this stuff; you both already own everything I've got. So what the hell are you standing out here complaining for? Wipe that look off your face and go on in and fix yourself a drink!"

I'm tempted to recapitulate how Capon describes confession (either with a priest or with one's self) when it is performed transactionally (and it is usually done just that way). As well as to describe the sacrament of marriage when understood transactionally, a potential prison-house indeed.

But I will not. For now, I just say there are few books as worth reading as Hunting the Divine Fox—as least for me, now, as I begin to look down the hallway toward the end of my life and hear myself asking, "Was it worth it?" I believe faith is worth it, but I believe it's pretty easy to lose sight of, and should never be exchanged for anything.

____Footnotes____

^[1]I remember listening to Carl Sagan's Cosmos years after he died, realizing that in many instances he spoke of the cosmos or the universe just as I spoke of God, except that he spoke more enthusiastically.

^[2]For anyone worried I'm soft peddling a gospel of cheap grace, be it noted that there is nothing inherently easy or cheap about "accepting the gift." It may take some people less time than a flash of lightening to accept the gift, but it takes many of us—both because of pride and fear—something like a lifetime. But to accept the gift of God is the real thing and well worth the wait, no green stamps involved.

reviewed: 2019/03/13 | last updated: 2019/03/13  

• Miracles: A Preliminary Study
• C. S. Lewis
• Published by Harper Collins, 1947, revised 1960, digital 2009
• ISBN (digital) 978-0-06-194976-0

The logic of Miracles is stunning. Within this framework, C. S. Lewis creates more than a work of apologetics. Exploring ways in which the supernatural may exist, he provides a vision of a different, better reality than the one our senses alone provide. Rarely do I encounter someone who takes human reason and logic as seriously as does Lewis, and rarely does he display this thinking as well as he does in Miracles.

Writing as a philosopher, Lewis deftly allows scientific knowledge into his argument. In one long paragraph toward he beginning of chapter 3, "The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism," he summarizes the relation of "sub-natural" quantum mechanics to Newtonian nature better than other books might do in a chapter or more. He suggests that quantum mechanics, if true, represents something indifferent to natural law, something that could form the basis for a different conception of nature as being the self-producing, self-contained, law-governed entity it is assumed to be.

Lewis explicitly chooses not to follow an argument dependent upon quantum theory. But his brief engagement with the theory contrasts refreshingly with God and the New Physics (Davies). From a philosophical perspective, God and the new Physics ends about where C. S. Lewis' Miracles begins. In Chapter 17, Davies construes the mind of God as a cosmic consciousness that encompasses but in no way transcends the universe. Positing this purely immanent divine consciousness, Davies fails—if Lewis' argument is sound—to defend the validity of rational thought in a universe that constructs itself through a singularity. He fails because any consciousness generated by the universe alone would be subject to the laws of that universe and, being subject, would not possess the freedom that logic provides in being our arbiter between truth and falsehood.

Miracles rests upon the line of reasoning it continues to establish in chapter 3, "The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism." So important is this chapter that it was fully revised and enlarged in the 1960 revision.^[1] If successful, the argument allows one to conclude that there is at least one thing independent of the natural order. This thing—human reason—possesses an existence of its own. Although not a "miracle" in the sense that readers expect (and Lewis later provides), rationality is beyond nature, and in this respect is super-natural.

Lewis assumes (by definition) that a naturalistic universe is a self-contained, fully determined entity with no external support or agency working upon it (i.e., no miracles). He finds a crack in this universe in rationality: the ability of humans to qualify and clarify thoughts according to the rules of logical coherence. Not that every inference is true (since either the logic or the facts underlying the inference may be incorrect), but every inference assumes and describes a mental event that cannot, by definition, arise solely from the neurological and chemical agency of the brain. If, indeed, thought were, along with the rest of the universe, fully determined by antecedent events, then thought would remain nothing more than compulsory reactions to one's environment. If thought were fully dependent on neurological antecedents, then there is no basis for proofs. Each proof, in that case, would simply assert its own confidence in its veracity without any appeal to a higher standard, such as logical coherence. An argument against reason is self-contradictory and is therefore unable to usefully participate in the discussion between materialists and supernaturalists.

The Cardinal Difficulty in More Detail

Since the whole of the book rests on chapter 3, it is worth discussing his revision of chapter 3. After explaining the independence of logic from natural, deterministic causes, Lewis realizes he must confront rebuttals from evolutionists.

For argument's sake, Lewis entertains the possibility that not God, but evolution developed what we call rational thought—developing that thinking on pragmatic grounds alone. Pragmatic grounds have the advantage, for the naturalist, of making the claim, "It is useful," without having to support the claim, "It is true." Accordingly, it could be that over an immense amount of time, conclusions we think we make through logical inference are no more than the result of a coincidental agreement between our pseudo-logic and our environment. The right guesses (being determined by chemical/neurological reactions), according to this scenario, would accumulate over the ages to form what strikes us (falsely) as rational truth. It would be false to accept a purely pragmatic trend in thinking as rational truth because it lacks an explanation for its own explanation. Put differently, it lacks an explanation for its own power to superimpose on inanimate causes a theory that rises above them.

Lewis refuses to accept this explanation. He takes his evolution seriously, but not as authoritatively as he takes his logic. It is logic that says not only that some relation is true, but that it is always true. Simple empirical observation could never obtain the conclusion that something is always true, only that it appeared true at one or more historical moments. Lewis insists that rational thought is structurally different from typical cause-and-effect relations. While natural events can be broken down to a series of causes and effects, rational thoughts must be broken down to a relation of ground and consequent. If a man experiences pain because he steps on a nail, the nail is the cause of the pain (causal relation). If we know a man is in pain because of his scream, his scream is the ground and our knowledge of his pain is the consequent (logical relation).

Where cause-and-effect meets ground-and-consequent we have the human condition. It occurs on the boundary between nature and supernature. Each thought must be the result of some cause in order to exist in nature, and yet each thought must be connected as a ground and a consequent in order to claim an understanding of nature:

Unless our conclusion is the logical consequent from a ground it will be worthless and could be true only by a fluke. Unless it is the effect of a cause, it cannot occur at all. It looks therefore, as if, in order for a train of thought to have any value, these two systems of connection must apply simultaneously to the same series of mental acts.

But unfortunately the two systems are wholly distinct. To be caused is not to be proved. . . .

Acts of thinking are no doubt events; but they are a special sort of events. They are "about" something other than themselves and can be true or false. Events in general are not "about" anything and cannot be true of false.

The co-incidence of the dynamic connection between cause and effect, on one hand, and the logical connection between ground and consequent, on the other, is of chief interest to the argument. To the extent each thought is an event in nature, it causes other thoughts, but they do not necessarily arise from a logical relation. The relation can be merely associative. However, "one thought can cause another not by being, but by being seen to be, a ground for it" (Chapter 3). This is the thinking that arises from outside nature and is in a very modest sense supernatural.

This argument from reason provides a logical framework for the rest of the book. From this framework, one could examine historical evidence of miracles without prematurely concluding they do not exist as a result of a foregone assumption that they can not exist. The role of rationality also provides not an analog, but an anagoge for the incarnation—not just a mental picture of the incarnation but a lower, more generalized form what is a higher, more specialized act of something from outside entering into human existence.

Once a supernatural event, such as rational thought, is admitted, the reasonableness of any particular supernatural claim can be considered. Those who believe in the supernatural need not believe in miracles, for they may find them unnecessary and artificial to a degree that a deity should never stoop. This is not Lewis' view, however, insofar as some miracles "fit" with the natural order. The miraculous may speed up a natural process, condense it, or expand it, but the miraculous is never out of character with nature.

In the next chapter, "Nature and Supernature," he summarizes what I have attempted to explain: "The distinction we have to make is not one between 'mind' and 'matter,' much less between 'soul' and 'body' (hard words, all four of them) but between Reason and Nature: the frontier coming not where the 'outer world' ends and what I should ordinarily call 'myself' begins, but between reason and the whole mass of non-rational events whether physical or psychological." Much thinking can be understood as originating within nature, such as sense perceptions and emotions. It is only reason (and later he places morality as a type of reason) that cannot be the result of deterministic causes. Put differently, reason is a self-sufficient cause that calls into question thinking that is governed by nature. When nature affects our thinking, such as through fatigue, disease, or alcohol, thinking becomes more chaotic. But when our rational thinking affects nature, it becomes more orderly. Rational thought, accordingly, bears an unsymmetrical relation to natural events.

If this brief summary is dissatisfactory, I am not surprised. Hopefully, it gives the flavor of the argument. After all, it took Lewis a significant revision and extension of his original edition to make his case, at least to his satisfaction.

The Rest of the Book

To the extent the unique status of rationality is proven, the rest of the book follows fairly smoothly, and, for me, persuasively. If reason exists, then we all experience something beyond nature (i.e., beyond the self-sufficient totality of the universe). If something-beyond-nature, why not an intelligent creator?

Lewis, though, is too good a polemicist to leave his ultimate conclusion unquestioned. He discusses, first, whether nature would be amenable to extraordinary events from the outside. He then discusses whether a respectable creator would interfere with nature.

Concerning the effect of an external (i.e. miraculous) cause on nature, Lewis shows that a miraculous event, while originating outside nature, is, once within nature, subject to the laws of nature just as if it had originated within nature. His primary illustration—and indeed the crux of the book—is the incarnation. Conception may come from outside, but every developmental step of the foetus, child, and young man is subject to natural laws. In this respect, the event is absorbed by nature. A miracle possesses a different origin from the long train of causality that reaches back to something like a singularity, but once this cause enters nature, it remains subject to the laws in a way that reinforces them.

Even if nature can admit the supernatural, can a respectable creator dabble with nature? The response is that random interruptions in the natural chain of events would not represent a creator worth attending to. The fittingness of miracles justifies their existence. The miracles of the New Testament have a homologous relation with nature (all wine is made of water, physical healing is what bodies do, bread multiplies as grain grows, etc.). So, yes, a nature-respecting creator could inject events into the natural realm, particularly if the intent from the beginning was to inject the creator itself into the creation as a human.

However roughly this summary outlines the argument, it behooves anyone who seeks to rationally accept or reject miracles to consider it in detail. While good counter-arguments can and have been made, fallacious ones are precluded along the way in several chapters. Chapter 10, "'Horrid Red Things'," for example, tackles the relation between Christianity, the miraculous, and metaphor. It does so in this way. First, it admits that for Christianity, the miraculous is essential, whereas, "All the essentials of Hinduism would, I think, remain unimpaired if you subtracted the miraculous, and the same is almost true of Mohammedanism. But you cannot do that with Christianity. It is precisely the story of a great Miracle. A naturalistic Christianity leaves out all that is specifically Christian."

Next, it admits that on the surface Christianity presents a local heaven, a father, and a son—the stuff this life (and not another) is made of. The argument moves to the role of the imagination. The obvious stumbling block of Christianity to the modern mind is its primitive imagery, and not necessarily its thinking. To imagine and to think are two different things. Simply put, at best I can imagine only about a dozen objects at once (a couple of die with sixes up—but even then, I'm probably imagining two things and attributing 6 dots to each). But I can extrapolate the meaning of "10,000" without ever being able to picture it. As with numbers, so with cosmology. We may picture something pastoral when we picture heaven (a cabin by a lake with nice people sitting on the deck), but we know better. We know it's just a picture that neither validates or invalidates our belief that a better existence awaits us.

All talk about things that lie beyond our senses is metaphorical. Economics and psychology are filled with metaphor. Christianity is too. A modern person may admit this truth, but at the same time feel the urge to reject or change the Christian metaphor, making it less conspicuous. Thus, in the hands of someone unable to recognize the metaphoricity of all discourse (and not just religious discourse), "energy fields" replace spirits, great flashes of light may replace the throne of the King of the Cosmos, and cosmic consciousness replace the mind of Christ. Words such as "ineffable" and "inaccessible" replace "heaven."^[2] All the while, one is still thinking in metaphors.

None of this is to say all metaphors are equal. Often, Lewis sides with the Biblical choices, but he admits the early Christians probably did not consider the apparent contradictions of their metaphors. "The difficulty here is that they were not writing as philosophers to satisfy speculative curiosity about the nature of God and of the universe. They believed in God; and once a man does that, philosophical definitiveness can never be the first necessity. A drowning man does not analyse the rope that is flung at him, nor an impassioned lover consider the chemistry of his mistress's complexion" (chapter 10). Over time, the church corrects naive conceptions of God and the universe. (Obviously, it is often too slow at that business.)

What the church should not correct—and what Lewis' book stands in opposition to—is effacing the miraculous outlines of the faith in order to replace them with a generalized religion that a naturalist might feel comfortable with, an interplay of symbols and moral sentiments that have some value but depend very little upon the gospel texts for their existence.

By the end of the book, the miracles of the New Testament are categorized according to miracles of the old creation and the new creation. Those of the old creation repair or mimic the natural order. Healing the sick falls among these.

Those of the new creation anticipate the new natural order established by the resurrection of Christ which—to any who have read the gospels carefully—retained many elements of the old (a substantial body that could eat and drink) as it introduced elements of a new order (where recognition of identity seemed conditional and the density of walls variable). It is the new creation that remains the final focus of the book, with some imaginative forays into an existence that (1) is barely outlined in the gospels, (2) is misconstrued in popular traditions (as pure spirituality), and (3) is unavailable in liberal theology that interprets the resurrection as symbolic of things that can and should be enjoyed in the natural order (renewal through forgiveness and hope). For Lewis (and for many passages in the New Testament), the resurrection heralds a new order that, when fully realized, will bear a relationship to the present somewhat as a visit to a forest bears a relation to a painting of that forest.

____Footnotes____

^[1]In the original (1947) edition, chapter 3 was named "The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist." In the 1960 revision, the argument was expanded and more carefully qualified, with the result that chapter 3 received the new title, "The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism." Throughout this review, I cite the 1960 revision of the book, and, as a result of my copy being digital, I refer to chapter locations, not page numbers.

^[2]While Lewis doesn't admit this, there may be some metaphors worth refining, particularly patriarchal ones. However, with a binary distinction such as sex, for anything gained, something will be lost. God, I'm sure, is also a mother as we understand the nurturing elements of motherhood. Perhaps more for historical reasons than theological ones, the father metaphor is the primary one. That's a discussion for another time, another book.

reviewed: 2017/01/08 | last updated: 2022/23/09  

• Reason, Faith, and Tradition: Explorations in Catholic Theology, Rev. Ed.
• Martin C. Albl
• Published by Anselm Academic, 2009, 2015
• ISBN 978-1-59982-632-5 (pbk.)
• 398 pages, including Glossary and Index

Overview:

• Laying the Foundation (the value and limits of reason)
  
• Meet Charles Darwin
  
• Knowing the Unknowable
  
• "Your Dusty, Historical Jesus"
  
• Christology & Ecclesiology
  
• The Catholic Church & the World
  

Laying the Foundation

When I reviewed Martin Albl's Essential Guide to Biblical Life and Times, he promptly sent me a copy of his Reason, Faith, and Tradition. And no wonder: the Essential Guide is his Hobbit to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Although one may enjoy the Essential Guide over the longer work, Reason, Faith, and Tradition is the more serious piece. It tackles in sufficient detail the tough issues of a belief based on first- and second-century texts whose adherents nevertheless claim its absolute relevance today.

While I'm not a Catholic, and, based on the non-institutional trajectory of my faith, will not become one, I wish I had read this book when I was first introduced to the Gospel in high school. It would have provided me with a larger landscape against which to forge my faith, helping me avoid my early anti-intellectualism and its consequent intellectual dishonesty. It would also have kindled a better understanding of Roman Catholicism.

The book nicely outlines the ways a Christian-Catholic thinker might navigate through the some main currents of a post-Christian society. The level of detail, though, leaves quite a bit to be explored for those who are interested. For an extreme example, the first chapter raises and dismisses both Marx and Freud in a two-paragraph span (19-20)—although, of course, Albl knows he's making cursory introductory notes.

Frequently, the book outlines arguments, presents the beginnings of a Christian line of reasoning, and then moves on to a new point, leaving the reader the option of pursuing the abbreviated argument on his or her own—or continuing with the exposition. The book's length (just shy of 400 pages) and scope (apparently a survey textbook) require this approach, allowing interested readers to pursue lines of thinking through footnotes (often referencing online videos and documents).^[1]

Though some arguments are compressed, the chapters themselves stand on their own as informed, concise expositions of Christian beliefs and thinking. Although the book is clearly Roman Catholic in focus (subtitled "Explorations in Catholic Theology"), Albl makes it clear that much of the discussion applies to all Christian thought. At times he distinguishes interpretations unique to (or common to) the Roman and Orthodox churches, as well as the Protestant communities.^[2] Wherever possible, he avoids sectarianism, because "openness to recognizing truth in other traditions is a fundamental characteristic of Catholic theology" (25).^[3][4] That said, the emphasis on faith and reason lends itself to Roman Catholicism, insofar as that tradition has closely followed in the footsteps of Thomas Aquinas.

As a foundation for his book, Albl uses a quote from the Summa Theologica: "Now the act of believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth at the command of the will moved by the grace of God" (ST 2-2.2.9, 38-39). Faith derives from the apprehension of divine truth through the intellect; hence, faith and reason. Reason alone is insufficient for a true knowledge of God because both the human will and the grace of God are required for a true understanding. Nevertheless, the act of believing is a mental act and cannot be divorced from rationality.

While reason is sufficient for demonstrating that God exists (Albl pays most attention to the First Cause argument), only revelation—utterances inspired by God—demonstrates what kind of God exists. Neither the physical world nor abstract reason can provide a clear understanding of the compassionate, communicative, relational aspects of God. Only scriptures (and writings based upon those scriptures) can provide those insights.

This thinking about divine truth, finally, arises within tradition, initially the Judaic tradition which maintained the scriptures and observations of the law, and later the Christian tradition, in which 13th century Aquinas followed the writers of the New Testament, "John Chrysostom (ca. 347-407 CE), Augustine (354-430 CE), John of Damascus (ca. 675-ca. 749 CE), and Anselm (ca. 1033-1109 CE) . . . " (49). Tradition provides an interpretive context with important checks and balances within which reason operates.

Meet Charles Darwin

~ to Overview ~

Working together, reason, faith, and tradition, these three pillars, provide the modern believer with the ability to confront modern critics and to reconcile the faith with scientific challenges. The pillars allow the development of what Albl calls the "hermeneutic of trust" (also known as the "hermeneutic of respect"). Using Paul Ricoeur to clarify this act of interpretation, Albl states, first, that the talking serpent in Genesis 3 must be recognized as a non-literal actor in a non-literal story. Thus the "first naivete" is abandoned in favor of reason. The "second naivete," however, re-examines the remaining elements of the story—those that are not self-contradictory—and takes from them a meaning that is both reasonable and unobtainable by the purely suspicious or skeptical reading (60).

Under sway of the second naivete, "The reader is now open to better hearing some of the fundamental claims of the text: that God created the entire universe (it is not the result of blind chance), that God created all things good, that humans are created in God's image and have been entrusted by God to care for his creation (Gen 1:26-28), that humans are free and can misuse this freedom to turn away from their Creator (Gen 3)" (61). Thus the second naivete brings the reader to a more significant and coherent understanding of the Bible.^[5]

This hermeneutic of trust attempts to throw out the irrational bathwater while saving the (Christian) baby.^[6] The baby, as we all know, has been at the center of evolutionary controversy for about a century and a half. Exercising a hermeneutic of trust that moves beyond the first naivete to the second naivete, Albl (and the tradition he represents) is amenable to scientific discoveries that force a re-consideration of texts once taken literally, including the creation stories in Genesis 1‑3.

For those who understand the Bible as divinely influenced, Francis Collins provides a bridge to evolution. Uniquely, this Evangelical Christian was the head of the Human Genome Project, which successfully mapped all the genes in the humane genome. As a result, Collins studied first hand the discoveries uncovered by the scientists on the project, discoveries that showed such a close correspondence between the genes of humans and animals that the inference of a common ancestor became inescapable. Though Albl does not refer to him, Austin Farrar's remark that God makes his creation make itself is perfectly applicable to this discussion.

While modern Catholicism remains receptive to the theory of evolution (unlike fundamentalist traditions of Christianity), Albl emphasizes that evolution should not be confused with the atheistic evolutionism promoted by Richard Dawkins and others (93). Yes, evolution may explain the biological diversity of this world, but, no, it cannot account for spiritual and intellectual elements that humans possess, elements having little in common with the animal world.^[7]

Knowing the Unknowable

~ to Overview ~

God reveals himself two ways: through nature (general revelation whose facts are available to everyone) and through history (special revelation whose facts are conveyed symbolically, through particular languages at particular times). As Albl writes, "Accepting revelation, then, is not a matter of blind faith. In general revelation, human reason is able to recognize a Creator and Designer behind the universe. In special revelation, people accept or believe revelation because they have reasons to trust the authority of the revealer" (101).

Natural revelation is self-validating (appreciable through the senses). Sense perceptions, such as the vastness of the night skies, coupled with reason (that the whole is greater than the part), allow humans to approximate an understanding of the magnitude of God (for example). While nature allows (but does not compel) humans to infer an intelligent and powerful creator, it presents a limited vision of God. First, it cannot convey what Christians consider the most important characteristics of God, particularly God's heart of love. Second, it provides contradictory data, including natural and social disasters that suggest either a twisted or absent commanding force behind nature.

While explanations can be offered concerning this problem of evil (free will, the effects of sin on natural processes, the benefits achieved through suffering), they clearly are not conclusive (hence the perpetual debates). A more sure way is provided through historical or special revelation.

How one comes to accept special revelation is a matter for much of the rest of the book, where it deals with theories of inspiration and historicity. But a preliminary concern is the ability of a truly infinite being to communicate with finite beings. For this, attention is paid to the role of analogy in special revelation. It is a commonplace that we can only know God through analogy, something Aquinas made clear in his writings. What this means, exactly, deserves attention. While God may be figured as a father or, less commonly, as a mother, the analogy (one hopes) is only partial. One must sort out the obviously fallible, human experiences of one's parent as one appreciates the caring, responsible, and, frankly, powerful aspects of the figure.

Even those who recognize the dependence on metaphors in discussing God do not follow Aquinas sufficiently, perhaps. "Aquinas also notes that the analogy between God and his creature moves in only one direction: 'a creature can be spoken of as in some sort like God; but not that God is like a creature' (ST 1.4.3 ad.4)" (112). But do not most of us do the opposite? Do not we find a father or mother or song or setting that we love and think, "God is like this?" or "Heaven is like this?"

If we were to think, instead, that my father is like God in his thoughtfulness or this place is peaceful, as heaven must be—if we were to think in that direction, we would have far fewer misleading images of God and heaven. We would have fewer images of God as either our aging, gray-haired father or as the Godfather (which is how Mary Daly sees the Christian God). We would, similarly, prevent heaven from being confused with a travel brochure. Sunday school curricula, sermons, and Christian artwork would be more accurate, cautious, and, I suggest, original.

Anthropomorphism (thinking about God in terms usually applied to humans) is necessary in order to envisage God as a relational being, rather than as an abstract energy field vibrating brightly through our being (a very metaphorical statement in itself). But we do well to recognize the metaphorical nature of our thinking. While Albl quotes Kallistos Ware, cautioning against carelessly switching metaphors, one should, nevertheless, exercise the freedom to play down the role of metaphors that, as a result of one's cultural specificity, do an injustice to considerations of God.^[8]

When we turn to the doctrine of the Trinity, we find ourselves waist-deep in metaphors. Prior to the assignment of personalities and roles to the godhead, the arithmetic term itself is metaphorical: coming from the Latin "triad" the term "trinity" presupposes a correspondence between human counting and divine being. The metaphor assumes that identity can be enumerated for the infinite that exists beyond time and space. What can it mean to enumerate without sequence (time) or order (space)? While the correspondence may be valid, it seems important to recognize that, referring back to the directionality prescribed by Aquinas, we maintain not that "God is like three" but that in some way "three is like God."

Albl's discussion starts downstream from this point. While the doctrine is never explicitly stated in the scriptures, it is nevertheless adopted by the majority of Christian churches and communities. Once the incarnation of God, through the spirit, in the person of Jesus is admitted (and this is in the scriptures), the doctrine unfolds haltingly yet logically. Remarkably, the first-century Jewish philosopher Philo intuited something close to the father-son relationship (131).

While I do not question the doctrine of the Trinity, I am perhaps like many readers who do not find it critical to my thinking. The quote from Thomas Jefferson that Albl uses to introduce his discussion gains surprising traction, in spite of its cynicism: "'It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet the one is not three, and the three are not one'" (121).

Because the doctrine's paradoxical structure pushes the doctrine beyond the imaginative grasp of many of us, it is particularly useful that Albl quotes C. S. Lewis' functional description:

An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get in touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him [the Holy Spirit]. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God—that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying—the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on—the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to the goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers. (137)

Far from being a creedal expression of the Trinity, Lewis' functional description has the advantage of drawing our focus to the usefulness of any doctrine: to increase our knowledge of the philosophically unknowable. If this had been the focus throughout the ages, perhaps there would have been fewer martyrdoms.^[9]

Chapter 7, "Human Nature and Human Destiny" ends the first half of the book, approximately. Another trinity, the body, soul, and spirit (with more emphasis on the body-soul) leads to a discussion of the body and how, though imperfect, it is not inherently evil. It, too, will some day be resurrected, not as physical body but as a spiritual one that, like Jesus' resurrected body, still possesses substance.

The truly unpopular topics of original sin and hell are dealt with calmly, with qualifications that smooth some of the edges on those topics which have been leveraged in the past in ways that appear to obscure the "love" of the God of love. Both Christian and Catholic voices suggest the possibility of some kind of ultimate reconciliation for all, allowing the reader to "own" a gospel without feeling compelled to entertain the image of an eternal hell populated with most of humankind (175).

The chapter concludes with some specifically Catholic teachings, purgatory and prayer for the dead, both of which are treated in a way that is amenable to my non-Catholic thinking.

"Your Dusty, Historical Jesus"

~ to Overview ~

Years ago, when Robert Hamerton-Kelly was participating in the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, he recalled one of his conversations with members of the Jesus Seminar. Very roughly paraphrased, he told one of them to "take your dusty, historical Jesus and I will take my resurrected Christ."

Perhaps in recalling that, I'm doing an injustice to both the Jesus Seminar and Hamerton-Kelly. The anecdote, however, captures the postmodern dilemma that confronts Christians.

An entire counter-narrative now exists that, until the 20th century, few struggled with: the scriptures, like any other texts, are cultural objects, and, being so, can be understood better by examining the material conditions through which they were created. The various genres guide interpretation, and the historical origins of the text help determine (or complicate) the authorship of the texts. While historical criticism does not necessitate skepticism, the result has often been that the scriptures' authorship, historical veracity, and inspiration—in short, their authority—require interrogation, reformulation and, if one so concludes, renunciation.

Usually, though, renunciation is not necessary. Rather, the story of Jesus is atomized into sub-stories, any of which may be more or less mythological than the others, allowing the believer to consciously pick and choose. Not only that, but non-canonical (i.e. apocryphal) texts are often proffered as reliable texts that were initially discounted because they were viewed as subversive by the ecclesiastical hegemony.^[10]

In the wake of this narrative, questioning the traditional canon becomes more likely than believing it. In the end, there is much less to believe when Jesus is demythologized to the point of being an above-average sage who only symbolically rose from the dead.

That, my reader, is the dusty Jesus. If the earliest dedicated disciples of Christ were considered to be of "little faith" by their teacher, where does the modern historical-critical method leave an aspiring disciple?

Thus the modern believer is confronted by the dilemma of remaining intellectually honest at the expense of one's faith or of willfully ignoring facts. What constitutes the "facts" of course is what determines whether or not the dilemma is actual. Four chapters of Reason, Faith, and Tradition tackle this apparent dilemma, along with ancillary issues.

In short, the book embraces the historical-critical tradition to the extent it remains compatible with the non-negotiable truths of the Catholic Church. In addition to reasons of intellectual integrity, it does so philosophically: the Catholic tradition has always recognized the incarnation of Christ as a historical event, and if Christ wore the weakness of human flesh, why could not the scriptures, then, coexist within the weakness of textuality?

Similarly, if "the Word of God" refers not just to scriptures but to Christ himself, speaking to and through the church, why protect or even idolize the written text? The Hebrew-Christian writings are not the Koran/Qur'an, nor need they be. The playwright has walked out on stage, making the written word subordinate to the divine presence. Finally, if many of the scriptures were authored over time through various contributions of the community, in what way can this collective authorship threaten the Church that relies on tradition as a living vehicle that preserves the truth of the scriptures?

Being inspired, the Bible is inerrant, primarily in spiritual and moral matters but also, under the limits of historical criticism, in historical matters.^[11] Albl notes the importance of generic differences, how in particular the books of Job and Jonas distance themselves from presenting historical narratives (197-199). One need not imagine a man-swallowing fish in order to dine at Albl's table.

He goes on to note an illuminating (and happily trivial) example of scripture both contradicting and correcting itself:

1. 1 Samuel reports that David killed the Philistine 'Goliath of Gath' whose javeline shaft 'was like a weaver's beam' (1 Sam 17:4015, esp. 17:7).

2. A later account, however, states that a man named Elhanan killed Goliath: 'There was another battle with the Philistines, in Gob, and Elhanan, son of / Jair from Bethlehem, killed Goliath of Gath, whose spear shaft was like a weaver's beam' (2 Sam 21:19)

3. The author of 1 Chronicles, who used the books of Samuel as a source, saw the discrepancy and tried to smooth it out: 'There was another battle with the Philistines, and Elhanan, the son of Jair, slew Lahmi, the brother of Goliath of Gath, whose spear shaft was like a weaver's beam' (1 Chron 20:5). (205-206)

Whether 1 Chronicles muddies the water further or sets the record straight is probably beyond our ability to determine, but two things emerge from the discussion: there are factual errors in the Bible and they do not threaten the message of the gospels. By contrast, every gospel celebrates Christ as ministering and teaching, crucified, and risen, facts that, if controverted, would have significant consequences on one's faith.

Albl traces the historical-critical method, beginning with the First Quest (for the historical Jesus), which had its roots in the Enlightenment, with Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768) often being credited as the pioneer. Interest died down until the Second Quest (1950s), led "by biblical scholars such as Bultmann's students Ernst Käsemann and Günther Bornkamm. . . . A third phase, sometimes call the 'Third Quest,' began in the 1970s and continues to this day" (245).

Throughout the variety of speculations concerning the relation between the early disciples of Jesus and the orthodox accounts (primarily the four Gospels), Albl claims, "Nevertheless, a strong case can be made that all four Gospels draw directly on apostolic eyewitnesses and tradition" (251). The liberal John Dominic Crossan (from the Jesus Seminar) is pitted in the Third Quest against the more conservative N. T. Wright. The aptly named "N. T. Wright" makes the obvious but important point that many historical arguments are built on a series of shaky hypotheses:

because there is not textual evidence for earlier versions, they [liberal textual critics] must hypothesize that there were earlier 'layers' of both the Gospel of Thomas and Q that included only the non-apocalyptic wisdom sayings of Jesus. It is especially questionable to hypothesize layers in Q, as Q itself is a hypothetical source. (258)

The ensuing discussion in Albl's book focuses on seeing the New Testament and early church within the context of "Second Temple" Judaism as well as first-century Palestinian life with its intersections with Greco-Roman culture. The picture that emerges is that the climate in which Jesus taught had a "strong sense that the eschatological kingdom of God would soon be established on Earth" (269). Forgiveness would be assumed to apply to a community instead of individuals. And that some kind of kingdom would be established (a mixture of the transcendental one established by the son of man and the immediate kingdom being established by Jesus the Messiah, healer and deliverer).

In short, this type of historicizing validates more-less traditional readings of the New Testament.

Reason, Faith, and Tradition makes a case that Jesus foresaw his death, burial, and resurrection (rather than those elements being added by church authorities later on). Most importantly the book emphasizes that the early disciples introduced a concept of "resurrection" that was new, fitting neither the purely spiritual resurrection of some first-century Jews (such as Philo) or a more ghostly continuation of life espoused by Greco-Roman culture. "The second-century orthodox Christian tradition is also remarkably unified in its insistence that Jesus was raised in a transformed body, ruling out the possibility that the appearances were regarded as visions" (285).

Much to the astonishment of the philosophical mind contemporary to Jesus—as well as the astonishment of early disciples—the resurrection was to be the physical resurrection of a spiritual body (whatever that means, one thing being clear that the body is not left in the tomb, another thing being clear that this body is capable of going through walls). Like it or not, this is the Christian concept of resurrection. Jesus was the first-born of a new order of humans that, in the end of time, will be resurrected and will reign in the universe.

Christology & Ecclesiology

~ to Overview ~

The groundwork has now been laid to give the logic of the Catholic Church's view of Christ (Christology) and of itself (Ecclesiology).

"Christology" introduces the incarnation and continues the discussion of the trinity. It is the concept of the trinity that prevents our misunderstanding of the relationship of the son to the father. It prevents us from committing our thinking to a definition that would logically fail in the long run—such as if the only knowable nature of Christ were human, preventing us from participating in a true knowledge of the father (296-305). Among other advantages, this discussion highlights the point that it is no simple task to define the god-man in a way that does not, later, take its toll on either his humanity or his divinity.

Next Albl turns to the topic of atonement, using C.S. Lewis as a springboard. Lewis' point is that it is more important for believers to trust that Christ's death is efficacious than to conceptualize how it works.^[12] From that point Albl quickly moves to the Roman Catholic view (Anselm's) that the atonement provided a substitution (Christ for humanity) that works because Christ, being perfect, can make the acceptable payment to a perfect, and perfectly offended God. (Yes, I'm anthropomorphizing with "offended" but see no way around the discussion of substitution without attributing to God's sense of justice an offense of some sort.)

By this point, I should admit that I stand clearly on Lewis' side of the question: the theory of how is not nearly as important as the confidence that Christ's death saves us. In short, I'd rather have no theory than the substitutionary one.

The reason for casting aspersions on the theory of substitution is provided by Albl's text where he writes, "The history of religions reveals how deeply embedded the need for atonement is within human religion" (307). The history of religions is, as Albl knows, paved with scapegoats and sacrificial victims whose deaths are justified to appease various gods, but whose fates are recognizably part and parcel with human violence. Perhaps we could call a moratorium on atonement theories, pausing to consider Jesus's insistence that his father was perfect, giving sunshine and rainfall to the just and unjust alike.

Once the book gets beyond assigning a motive to the father for allowing his son's death… the sailing is smoother: Jesus becomes a representative of the human race, laying down his life in love for humanity (which I interpret as his standing in front of a derailed locomotive to protect a village rather than climbing upon an alter in order to appease a god).

The only quarrel I have—and it's not with Albl, nor only with the Catholic theology—is with the entire tradition of sacrificial thinking that attributes to God the need for revenge that humans find themselves requiring. The problem is summarized by Hamerton-Kelly's "double transference": first the community blames the victim for making the community kill it, and then the community assigns to the victim praise for redeeming the community.^[13]

In "Ecclesiology" Albl raises the five main objections non-Catholics may have for resisting its claims, which I will paraphrase:

1. too organized (unlike, for example, a Quaker meeting),
2. too hierarchical,
3. too arrogant, insisting on being necessary for salvation,
4. too ritualistic, and
5. too confident in the pope's inerrancy.

The organic unity of the Catholic Church provides a set of answers to these objections: alienation from other humans is a root sin, and so it is important that redemption involve interpersonal relations, which in turn require some kind of organization. Accordingly, Christ instituted a leadership to take his place on earth (including his saying to Peter, which means rock in Greek, "on this rock I will build my church"). The leadership both brings believers together and has the authority (derived from apostolic succession) to bless the Eucharist, turning it into the real body of Christ. As a result, only those who attend a Catholic Mass will have the fullest experience of divine fellowship (which is a claim that sounds arrogant, although it is consistent to the logic of the Catholic Church).

The pope's inerrancy is limited to speaking "in his office as 'supreme pastor and teacher of all Christians,' not as a private person" (332). Albl lists two examples of "popes using their gift of infallibility to define a teaching": (1) Pope Pius IX's definition (1854) of Jesus' mother having been conceived immaculately in order to explain how she could have a sinless son, and (2) Pope Pius XII's definition (1950) of the Assumption of Mary into heaven with the result that she never experienced an earthly death.

While both instances of inerrancy suggest that a pope is never considered infallible in his (or her, if the day arrives) commerce with the pressures and difficulties of daily life, the two instances that Albl provides would give any Protestant pause, both sounding like arguments of infinite regress that require a prior set of miracles to explain a later set.

A primary strength (to the extent it is accepted) of the Catholic Church is its claim of apostolic succession from the disciple Peter down to the present day Pope Francis. This is a strength of course because to the extent one accepts the argument, the Catholic Church is endowed with an elegant lineage that, on the surface, suggests an unwavering authority.

Albl writes, "As an example, Irenaeus gives the names of the line of bishops of Rome from the time of the apostles Peter and Paul until his own day [approx. 180 CE] (Against the Heresies 3.3.3)" (326). Upon looking up that reference, I find that, just as Albl writes, both Peter and Paul are invoked as authorities (something my superficial understanding of Catholicism never prepared me for—the inclusion of Paul in the succession). There is a strong argument, with plenty of names (Linus, Anacletus, and Clement to name the first three),^[14] to suggest a continuity that comes close to Peter and Paul.^[15]

The lineage is offered primarily to claim that the churches that the Church at Rome recognize (such as the Church of Corinth) agree on the tenets of the faith (including the supremacy of the God of Genesis, ruling out other, gnostic gods). In conclusion, Irenaeus states, "In this order, and by this succession, the ecclesiastical tradition from the apostles, and the preaching of the truth, have come down to us. And this is most abundant proof that there is one and the same vivifying faith, which has been preserved in the Church from the apostles until now, and handed down in truth."

Irenaeus sees the value of "the Scrip-rural proof furnished by those apostles who did also write the Gospel" (Chapter V), as well as the value of tradition. Nevertheless, he takes a remarkable stand in favor of the protection the Holy Spirit provides those less closely connected to Rome:

Those who, in the absence of written documents, have believed this faith, are barbarians, so far as regards our language; but as regards doctrine, manner, and tenor of life, they are, because of faith, very wise indeed; and they do please God, ordering their conversation in all righteousness, chastity, and wisdom. If any one were to preach to these men the inventions of the heretics, speaking to them in their own language, they would at once stop their ears, and flee as far off as possible, not enduring even to listen to the blasphemous address. (Chapter IV, Section 2)

This passage has no direct bearing on the argument concerning the apostolic succession. It does, however, demonstrate a kind of latitude and trust in God to extend protection beyond clean institutional and discursive boundaries. I appreciate both the reference to Irenaeus and Albl's characteristic reliability in making it.

The Catholic Church & the World

~ to Overview ~

Albl concludes his book with a consideration of how the Catholic Church does and does not fit into our contemporary pluralistic world. For Protestants a mutual divide with Catholics exists as a result of the differing beliefs concerning the role of apostolic succession and the mystical dimension of the church offices, perhaps especially including the Lord's Supper. Catholics view the host as the Real Presence of Christ; nearly all Protestants consider it a symbolic presence. The Anglican community (whose nomenclature places it among other Protestants) may come closer institutionally to the Catholic Church, but is not recognized "within the line of apostolic succession" (346). "Despite these differences, the Catholic Church remains committed to an ongoing relationship and dialogue with Protestant and evangelical communities" (342).

In the case with the Orthodox Churches (which I assume includes Greek, Coptic and Russian orthodox churches), the differences are less marked. That is why Catholics bestow the title "church" upon Eastern churches, unlike the title "community" that is used for Protestant institutions. Finally, in "1965, Pope Paul VI and the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople Athenagoras declared that both the Catholic and Orthodox Church 'regret and remove both from memory and from the midst of the Church the sentences of excommunication' (Joint Catholic-Orthodox Declaration) that marked the split between Eastern and Western Christianity in 1054" (347).

Non-christians are, of course, less privy to the grace of Christ but, since Vatican II, are not entirely exempt of its influence. While merits of the monotheistic traditions (Judaism, Islam) lend themselves as easy links on one theological level, Hinduism and Buddhism are also not without merit. However, none of these traditions is unproblematic from the Catholic and Christian view of the indispensability of Christ.

Ongoing dialogue with outsiders is urged by the Catholic Church, as is dialogue with the secular society that is subject to many of the social issues that concern the Catholic Church. And it is with this that the book ends with a reference to Martin Luther King Jr., noting that "As Martin Luther King observed, the church is neither the master nor the servant of the state but its conscience, guide and critic. The Catholic Church [Albl continues] with its experience of 2,000 years of tradition and its trust in the harmony of faith and human reason, is in a good position to offer that guidance" (360).

____Footnotes____

^[1]The author is of course aware of this trade-off between being thorough and providing a survey. For example, in Chapter 2 he writes: "First, a caution: the following description of traditions closed to the transcendent is simplified. Intellectual traditions are complex, so the labels used—rationalism, materialism, and determinism—are general. Few individual thinkers, for example, are purely rationalistic, materialistic, or deterministic" (27).

^[2]Albl explains the terminological distinction between a "church" (Roman and Orthodox) and a "community" (Protestant "churches"): "Because they 'have not preserved the apostolic succession or the valid celebration of the Eucharist,' the communities with their roots in the Reformation are 'not Churches in the proper sense of the word' but rather 'ecclesial Communities.' Such terminology is not meant to denigrate the Protestant or evangelical communions but to protect the strongly mystical and sacramental Catholic understanding of the Church" (342, citing www.vatican.va [www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20070629_commento-responsa_en.html]).

^[3]Reason, Faith, and Tradition exemplifies the non-sectarian impulse that it attributes to Catholic thinking. Its reliance on Paul Ricoeur, C.S. Lewis, and Francis Collins illustrates this, as does the fact that the book concludes with a reference to Martin Luther King Jr.

^[4]Later in the book, Albl provides an example of a doctrinal reconciliation between Catholics and Lutherans, writing, "In October 1999, the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church issued a Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. The World Methodist Conference later officially adopted this same document" (167). In essence, the organizations came to agreement that "'By grace alone, in faith in Christ's saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good work.'" In short, one of the deepest divides arising from the Reformation has been worked through by these organizations. No small feat.

^[5]The Bible for Catholics consists of the Old Testament books that were included in the Septuagint, the early Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. Thus, the Catholic Bible includes several Old Testament books absent from the Protestant Bible, including 1st and 2nd Maccabees, Baruch, Tobit, Judith, The Wisdom of Solomon, and Sirach (Ecclesiasticus). The Bible for Protestants consists of only the Old Testament books found in the "official canon of Judiasm rather than the Septuagint" (from www.christianbiblereference.org). The New Testaments contain identical books.

^[6]If a believer cannot appreciate the argument of the book up to this point, he or she may be better off adhering to a form of fideism, a subjective assurance that one knows the truth by revelation alone, and that one's understanding needs no rational correctives. While fideism may work very well for some—and, yes, risk a complete break in communication with both believing and unbelieving thinkers—it is not the hermeneutic of the Christian-Catholic tradition about which Albl writes.

^[7]During the discussion of evolution, Albl (similarly to Collins) discounts Intelligent Design, first as a science because it does not provide a means of testable hypotheses, second as a sufficient refutation of biological evolution because it falls into the category of a "God in the gaps" theory (90). Its success depends on the immaturity of scientific knowledge and could easily be undermined as additional discoveries are made, just as the geocentric understanding of the universe was displaced by additional proofs of the solar system being heliocentric (Copernicus and Gallileo).

However (and I speak as a true novice in evolutionary matters), it seems Albl resorts to a God-in-the-gaps argument when he seeks to refute Dawkins' evolutionism. Albl writes, "evolution still cannot adequately answer two specific puzzles.
1. The origin of life itself.
2. The development of specifically human characteristics such as self-consciousness" (93).
The wording itself, "still cannot," belies the reliance on a "gap" in scientific knowledge.

^[8]Ware writes, "We cannot prove arguments why this should be so, yet it remains a fact of our Christian experience that God has set his seal upon certain symbols and not upon others . . . Like the symbols in myth, literature, and art, our religious symbols reach deep into the hidden roots of our being, and cannot be altered without momentous consequences. If, for example, we were to start saying, 'Our Mother who art in heaven,' instead of 'Our Father,' we should not merely be adjusting an incidental piece of imagery, but replacing Christianity with a new kind of religion. A Mother Goddess is not the Lord of the Christian Church" (115).

I am not convinced, however, that this is the end of the discussion since fathers, lords, mothers, gods, goddesses, and "Christian" itself are words with a good deal of baggage, increasingly as the years go by. Baggage—that is, accumulated meaning—in itself is neutral. Some is worth keeping and some is antithetical to a faith in a loving, strong, sensitive, just, and intelligent God.

^[9]The classic martyrdom over Trinitarian issues being Michael Servetus, who fell out among both the Catholics and the Protestants: "After being condemned by Catholic authorities in France, he fled to Calvinist Geneva where he was burnt at the stake for heresy by order of the city's governing council" (Wikipedia, "Michael Servetus").

^[10]For an example of an apocryphal gospel, Albl quotes the Gospel of Thomas:

Simon Peter said to them: "Let Mary go away from us, for women are not worthy of life." Jesus said, "Lo, I shall lead her, so that I may make her a male, that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself a male will enter the kingdom of heaven." (Saying no. 114) (259)

Against this, Paul the apostle shines: "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28, NIV).

^[11]While it appears Albl is arguing in favor of "limited inerrancy" over "strict inerrancy" at one point (196), I am not sure where he or the Catholic tradition ultimately stands. Soon, he states that a 2014 Catholic document urges that the concept "should not be understood to mean that biblical truth 'concerns only those parts of the Sacred Book that are necessary for faith and morality, to the exclusion of other parts'" (197, emphasis mine). This statement seems to urge a strict inerrancy, one that encompasses more than moral and spiritual facts. However, the following paragraph restricts "'biblical truth to divine revelation which concerns God himself and the salvation of the human race'"—suggesting once again a limited inerrancy. I believe the chapter (Chapter 8) as a whole allows readers to assume that in essential matters the Bible is inerrant but that a strict inerrancy is not required for genuine faith.

^[12]While Albl refers to Lewis but does not quote him, I'll take the liberty of quoting a passage from "The Perfect Penitent" in Mere Christianity:

Now before I became a Christian I was under the impression that the first thing Christians had to believe was one particular theory as to what the point of this dying was. According to that theory God wanted to punish men for having deserted and joined the Great Rebel, but Christ volunteered to be punished instead, and so God let us off. Now I admit that even this theory does not seem to me quite so immoral and so silly as it used to; but that is not the point I want to make. What I came to see later on was that neither this theory nor any other is Christianity. The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. A good many different theories have been held as to how it works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does work. (Quoted on the web site "I Have an Inkling")

^[13]Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, The Gospel and the Sacred: Poetics of Violence in Mark, 1994, Augsburg Fortress, p. 7.

^[14]See "Chapter III. - A Refutation of the Heretics, from the Fact That, in the Various Churches, a Perpetual Succession of Bishops Was Kept Up" (Irenaeus of Lyons, Book III, www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/irenaeus-book3.html).

^[15]I write "close" because the Church at Rome is now the seat of authority for Ireneus, whereas Jerusalem and Antioch share center stage throughout most of the Book of Acts. Nothing like, "and on this rock I will build my church," emerges from Ireneus, not that it was intended to. But for skeptics, that is the kind of scene that would ignite the imagination . . . .

reviewed: 2019/03/01 | last updated: 2019/03/01  

• The Reluctant Parting: How the New Testament's Jewish Writers Created a Christian Book
• Julie Galambush (forward by James Carroll)
• Published by Harper Collins, 2005
• ISBN 978-0-06-087201-4
• 326 pages including bibliography

Who would have thought that a Christian-turned-Jew would write a book on the New Testament that would inspire my faith in the gospel?
Not I.
My initial interest came from the title, The Reluctant Parting—poetic, thoughtful, selected with care. Then the subtitle, How the New Testament's Jewish Writers Created a Christian Book, provided what turned out to be a perfectly clear idea of the book's subject.

The book's two chief merits are: (1) it fulfills the subtitle's scope, taking each New Testament book and examining the Jewish underpinnings to the book
(2) it provides nuanced summaries of the arguments behind many passages in the New Testament, capturing the author's point better than sermons and Christian teachings often do.

While I do not share Galambush's skepticism toward the veracity of the New Testament, I assume she share's my respect for her skills as an able expositor of what is now considered Christian scripture.

The book is worth reading—so much so that I will forgo an attempt to belabor its merits when they can readily be found on nearly any page, such as this passage from her summary of the Gospel of Mark:

In the maelstrom of the First Revolt, Mark writes to create a new coherence, a new symbolic world wrought from the symbols of the world's end. The heavens have been torn open, the temple destroyed. But far from signifying the end of God's reign, these are the very portents of its beginning. The human world is blind to God's work in its midst, but human blindness, even hatred and desertion, are powerless to impede his coming. (58)

The reader can see the book's style in this single quote:

• historicizing, whereby the 70 C.E. destruction of the temple colors the narrative of an earlier day,
• literary awareness of how words work to "create a . . . symbolic world", and
• spirited exposition that runs with the author's point of view ("blind to God's work . . . hatred and desertion are powerless to impede his coming").

For the remainder of this piece, I'd like to address the roles of rhetoric and inspiration. Galambush looks at the New Testament primarily as an elaborate rhetorical framework. This framework provides a space for writers to re-work information about Jesus into a message that reflects the writers' own lives. Taken this way, the New Testament speaks, not an unfiltered universal truth to the ages, but a carefully crafted message intended to persuade the authors' local audiences of a specific tack to follow in order to remain faithful to the revelation of Jesus, even as the passing of time threatens to dull that revelation.

By contrast (though not mutually exclusive), as a piece of inspired writing, the New Testament surpasses the particulars of its authors' mental and social limitations, achieving more universality than they intended. Their literary allusions and rhetorical strategies, while useful, did not create the world they described, but instead described the world their story had created.

Galambush, taking both a scholarly and a Jewish point of view, does not allow for divine inspiration in the composition of the gospels and the letters. She takes as one starting point the need for those who do believe Jesus is the Son of God to stake their claims in a way that shows the claims to be an extension of Jewish history while at the same time shaping the claims to encourage Gentile conversions. Another starting point is the relationship among Jewish sects at the time (including Pharisees, Sadducees, and occasional messiah figures) and between Jews and Romans (who are breathing down the necks of the Jews, encouraging them to dispose of leaders who may represent a Jewish rebellion against Rome).

Because of the Jewish identity of the New Testament authors as well as the assumption by these writers that Jesus was providing a continuation of their Jewish identities, Galambush is situating her reading of the New Testament in fertile ground. No matter one's faith or skepticism, the Jewish concerns of what she refers to as the "Jesus movement" illuminate many passages of the New Testament that easily escape interpretations that focus exclusively on values that are transcendental and, being universally true, explicable in terms of modern assumptions.

She draws attention to the undebatable (but often under appreciated) fact that the followers of Jesus were often not concerned with non-believing Jews but instead with those Jews who both claimed to have faith in Jesus and to insist on continuing the rites and prohibitions of the Jewish faith. Here lies a large piece of her argument about how Jewish writers created a Christian book. Reluctantly, in an attempt to keep the Gentile converts assured of their new identity, the writers edged away from Judaism until their message reached a point of no return. Jews who had ignored Jesus would continue in their tradition, and Jews who had followed Jesus would find him increasingly the Messiah taken most seriously (numerically, at least) by the Gentiles.

In sharp contrast to her historicizing is the type of Christian interpretation that assumes the New Testament was divinely inspired in a way that enhanced the writers' abilities. This interpretation credits to the text more design and accuracy than perhaps the writers were aware of during the act of writing. For this kind of Christian interpretation, more of the message of the New Testament is taken at face value. If the Pharisees, being outshone by Jesus, are conspiring against his life, then…they are. For Galambush, the alleged authority of the Pharisees is not credible and neither is the animosity depicted as existing between them and Jesus. Therefore, it makes good historical sense to her to attribute the conflicts to a projection of the writers' own circumstances. Writing roughly between 70 and 110 C.E., the gospel authors are experiencing conflict with the Pharisees, and they validate their circumstance by positing it as a conflict undergone first by their leader.

Taking the texts of the New Testament as having purely human origin has the advantage of explaining better the passages that are an effluence of a writer's personal concerns and values. For this reason, Galambush is able to do more with Paul's letter to Philemon than most Christians can. Many other instances arise in her book where her historicizing illuminates otherwise opaque passages. Her explication authenticates the writers, not as inspired, but as thinking, passionate men—something their original readers probably took for granted but which is often ignored in Christian circles.

Taking the texts as having thinking, passionate writers who are also capable of being guided by a divine light as they write—if both approaches were combined the reading would of course differ from Glambush's. She explains the birth of John the Baptist in this way:

Any reader who has heard of Sarah and Abraham recognizes the reference [alluded to by the childlessness of Elizabeth and Zechariah], and expects God to bless the couple with a child. Luke provides the requisite miracle . . . . (80)

If, however, the writer had been inspired by God to write about a divinely inspired event (preparation for the entrance of the Son of God into the world), such passages would not necessarily be reduced to human terms. Sarah and Abraham would exist, not as a motif that had to be followed, but as a prelude to a second miracle that allowed the path for Jesus to be made straight (by getting people to look in the right direction at the baptismal waters, and by absorbing the violence of Herod for a while). Charges of anachronism would no longer be applied exclusively to the New Testament but would also be applicable to the modern readers who project onto the text their own historically limited view, one of extreme skepticism as things stand today.

Writing from a modern Jewish perspective, the author is deeply concerned about the use of the New Testament as a means of vilifying Jews. Although such a use of the New Testament strikes me as fully hypocritical, the abuse has occurred and probably will occur again. Thus, where I read accusations that the Jews killed Jesus as descriptions of a specific group of religious leaders in a specific locale at a specific time, the author sees a universal indictment being made. Where I see the Jewishness of those who plotted against Jesus as incidental, the author sees the Jewishness as stereotypically misleading. Where I see the important thing being the violence of the community directed against one more victim, she sees the violence of the texts being directed against the same old victim, the Jews. The last thing I'd want would be for either the Jews or the text to be scapegoated again.

reviewed: 2014/04/06 | last updated: 2014/05/04  

• The Sabbath: its meaning for modern man
• Abraham Joshua Heschel
• Published by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1951/2005
• ISBN 0374529752
• 118 pages including end notes

Not having read him extensively, I've always thought Abraham Heschel (1907-1972) a writer who could be appreciated by followers of the Torah and of Jesus, alike. A Jewish philosopher, he wrote with great respect for the Torah and the rabbinical traditions. He also marched next to Martin Luther King, Jr. in one of the Selma civil rights marches (1965). And in this book, he echoes Jesus, writing, ". . . the Sabbath was a union that no one could disjoin. What God put together could not be set apart" (52).

The central concept of the book is that the first six days of the week allow humans to build and achieve things in space, whereas the seventh day is set aside to allow humans to appreciate time. The difference between the two modes of being is great. Space, and all its belongings, are temporary—easy to engage in, being visible and tangible, and easier, therefore, to be misled by. Time, by contrast and by Heschel's definition, is eternal and is the palace where we meet God. It is also the palace where rest and celebration replace ambition and labor. Not the rituals, but the psychology and the spirituality of the Sabbath are the primary concerns of the book.

I recommend the book for anyone who, independent of their attraction or rejection of ritual and tradition, seeks for a calmer, more meaningful life that is not governed by pace but by a balanced rhythm. It is fairly short, and even brief if one chooses to skip the middle chapters on the allegorical meaning of Rabbi Shimeon's life. This allegory is carefully explicated, but for those who do not savor that way of thinking, the conclusions in the final chapters are compelling apart from the allegory that leads up to them.

Following are a few of Heschel's memorable aphorisms:

Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work. . . . The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of the Sabbath. (14)

The faith of the Jew is not a way out of this world, but a way of being within and above this world; not to reject but to surpass civilization. (27)

If God is everywhere, He cannot be just somewhere. (81)

One good hour may be worth a lifetime; an instant of returning o God may restore what has been lost in years of escaping from Him. (98)

The book offers a bridge between the drive for occupying space and the necessity of allowing time to be an end in itself. When we control space we are bound to things, and time evaporates; when we submit ourselves to time, we are courted by eternity, and space becomes silent. "To men alone time is elusive; to men with God time is eternity in disguise" (101).

The Sabbath, being defined as a day that is not only good but holy, provides a portal to eternity. Each individual occupies space exclusively, with the result the human relations are rivalrous, and our attention becomes frozen on what (and who) is—and is not—ours. In contrast, the entire race can share the same time, with the result that everyone can share will all their praise.

While many of us are not committed to the Sabbath with either the rigor or the eagerness extolled by this book, we all find ourselves stalked by time. But it is not time that stalks us; it is the lack of time. Each effort to buy time, whether through another finished task or another, faster electronic communication—each effort uses up the time for which we increasingly thirst. The book invites us to let go of time, to stop seeking to control it, and thereby to finally appreciate it and the eternity that stands behind it.

reviewed: 2009/09/27 | last updated: 2009/09/27  

• Thou Shalt Not Believe: A Refutation of the Basic Premises, Core Teachings, and Common Arguments in Defense of Christianity
• John Ubhal
• Published by Ecaiva Books, 2016
• ASIN B01M4JSLBD^[1]
• 312 pages, including Index

One night I had dinner with a man (not John Ubhal) to whom I was being introduced by a mutual friend. As we sat down, the stranger quickly entered into conversation. Within five minutes, he had informed me that the virgin birth was a myth and that political conservatives were—as I recall…it's been years—intellectually inferior beings. Around that point, I said, "Outside of the fact that I disagree with everything you've said so far, I think we shall get along well." And we do, years later.

Enter John Ubhal^[2] and his book, Thou Shalt Not Believe. They place me in a position to review a book by a friend with whom I disagree on nearly everything the books says. That pronouncement is an overstatement, but if one names a book about Christianity Thou Shalt Not Believe, one surely must be braced for a few rebuttals. I would hope that our friendship would continue and that as few readers as possible would allow this book to shape their understanding of the New (or Second) Testament.^[3]

The main contentions of the book are simple. Do not believe in Christianity. It is neither true nor good.

(Review) Contents

• The Story of Christ is Not True
  
• The Message of Christ is Bad
  
• The Author's Rules of Interpretation
  
• What's Missing from the Book
  
• Conclusion: The Story of the Author's Life
  

The Story of Christ is Not True

Christianity is not true because, among other difficulties, some of which reach back to the Old (or First) Testament, the historicity of Jesus is hard to establish. The only documents treating his life in detail are the documents in dispute by Ubhal. Only the Roman historian Josephus, in The Antiquities of the Jews, makes a fully supportive, non-Christian report about Jesus:

And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. (127)

Ubhal dismisses this record on the grounds that "there are significant problems with the historical reliability of this passage, the most glaring of which is that not one Church Father prior to Eusebius (late 3rd to early 4th century CE/AD), including Origen, Jerome, Tertullian, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Justin Martyr, ever mentioned this passage, despite its immense polemical value" (128). Ubhal follows Josephus with a few additional citations to other Romans (Mara Bar-Serapion, Pliny the Elder, Tacitus, and Eusebius). He concludes that about "all that can safely be said about Jesus" is that he "was a historical person who actually lived in the Roman province of Judea in the first century CE" and was crucified (134-135).

Consistent with this thinking, Ubhal rejects the claim that Jesus rose from the dead in a very dismissive manner: "There is no independent corroborating evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, so there is every reason to believe that the early Christians merely borrowed this motif in order to propagate their nascent religion among Gentiles" (32). To anyone interested in Christianity or Christ, this claim is perhaps the most important the book makes. It is both significant and bombastic:

• there's no "independent evidence" (independent of what? of the corroborating personal testimony recorded in the Second Testament?)
• the paucity of evidence nearly forces us to conclude the disciples manufactured the resurrection story, because the lack of evidence provides "every reason to believe" it's a borrowed motif—in short, the absence of evidence becomes the evidence of deceit, and
• the motivation was not ecumenical (to convert Jew and Gentiles, as Jesus commanded before leaving the earth), but was solely focused on converting Gentiles.

Neither Ubhal nor I were there, in Jerusalem, around 33 CE, and, so, really, neither of us knows what happened. He has "every reason to believe" the claim of the resurrection was a hoax. I have many reasons to claim it was genuine, including those that take the narratives seriously: the disciples didn't expect the resurrection and had to be converted to accepting it themselves, with the result that an entire community of believers in ancient Israel and Macedonia based their faith, their fellowship, and their sufferings on the veracity of the claim. In short, they believed the apostles.

Concerning the historical record for the existence of Jesus, Ubhal rules out the synoptic gospels and the gospel of John as reliable sources because "there is little independent corroborating evidence for their claims" (115). This requirement of "independent corroborating evidence" raises the question of the rules of evidence that are allowable to Ubhal. As soon as a document claims Jesus was both historical and supernatural, the document is inadmissible. On one hand, I understand the desire to have evidence provided by skeptical and/or indifferent writers. On the other hand, I do not see how the absence of a skeptical report that nevertheless agrees with the gospels is necessary.

When Ubhal states, "And again, their [the disciples'] testimony is unreliable because their primary goal in writing their various works was to convince people to convert to their nascent religion" (135), I wonder what kind of testimony Ubhal expects. It would be anachronistic to assume written communicators (mostly scribes, historians, statesmen, poets, and dramatists) in the first century CE were reporting on every claim made by rabbis and messianic zealots.^[4] It is also a difficult thing to be party to a crucifixion, whether one is a Jew or a Roman (or both), only to later document (or allow documented) the upsetting fact that the crucifixion failed (and with it the motivating religious and justice systems).^[5] It seems to me that nearly any report verifying the resurrection would involve a conversion, resulting in an already tainted account by Ubhal's standards.

Ubhal (and many others) would like a preponderance of secular evidence supporting the claims concerning Jesus—or silence altogether. A tacit statistical model emerges in the argument: The story is both "improbable" (134) and, in the hands of Josephus, "unlikely" (128). Some unspoken percentage of likelihood underlies these statements. Presumably there's a threshold at which point a sufficient number of historians weigh in on the controversy favorably, and at this point the claims can be taken more seriously.

Contrary to relying on measures of likelihood, it has always seemed to me that one of the strongest arguments on behalf of Christianity is how improbable and unlikely the appearance of Christ is. If this holy thing—this incarnated voice of God—truly lived on earth in the body of a human, the visit would be the least probable event imaginable.

The Message of Christ is Bad

~ return to contents ~

Early on, Ubhal declares that the First Testament is littered with instances of divine violence that are, to any feeling individual, shockingly intolerable. I do not entirely disagree with this. There are many passages that I can in no way imagine Jesus participating in, except in order to protest. Ubhal takes the criticism much further, "Yet while the God of the Old Testament is almost unfathomably cruel, the God of the New Testament is even crueler still" (56). He continues, "In fact, the New Testament is one of the most demented collections of writings ever penned by human hands" (56). Rhetoric has replaced reason at this point, but for what reason? Because of hell.

The heart of Thou Shalt Not Believe is that, if you do believe, you are believing in an omnipotent being who, not unlike Calvin's worst thoughts, actually enjoys putting people into hell. Not only that, even if this being doesn't enjoy it, this being remains guilty of designing an eternal punishment instead of designing a better existence altogether. Worse than the worst dictator in North Korea, this being disallows the one thing North Korea allows: one's ability to die. Instead one is consigned to a lake of fire forever, no dying allowed (67).

These are dreadful concepts, but let me pause here to acknowledge one of Ubhal's great merits: he takes the Bible seriously enough to reject it. Many of us who one way or another claim the Bible reveals the creator and redeemer of the universe have not thought hard enough about this problem of hell, and to that degree, we are in no position to dismiss Ubhal for overreacting.

Proceeding cautiously, I do not want to glibly skip over the hell question. In isolation—as it is in this book—it presents a stumbling block to most modern readers who take time to notice it. A stumbling block, yes, but the entire edifice, no. Ubhal focuses almost entirely on hell, as if that were the centerpiece of the gospels and of the epistles (letters written by certain apostles). He overlooks massive qualifications and characterizations of the Father, Son, and Spirit that, to most Christians, transcend the naked concept of hell. From Jesus' individual interaction with the woman at the well to Paul's assertions that Jesus descended to hell and ascended to heaven in order that he might fill all things and, in filling all things, share them with everyone who believes—from these and other points of view, Thou Shalt Not Believe omits so much from the discussion that I find nothing more than an ugly caricature of the Christian message in the book.^[6]

The Author's Rules of Interpretation

~ return to contents ~

This caricature arises from the author's hermeneutic. He brings to the biblical texts certain rules of interpretation that guide and, really, constrain the discussion. He insists that the Bible be read literally, which of course means that once the denotation of the words is established, the intended meaning is non-negotiably established also. If I tell my roommate to get lost, the hermeneutics of this book insist I really want this roommate to lose track of his location, as well as to be concealed from being found by others. One can understand how quickly a purely literal reading of any text can efface the nuances of a narrative, resulting in a list of often contradictory and / or vapid propositions.^[7]

When subjected to a literal reading, the Bible resolves into a highly regulative and punitive document, particularly when its passages are selected with a bias toward proving it is bad. There is no interpretive leeway, not even if a nuanced interpretation lends itself to greater consistency within the text. In this respect, I would agree with Ubhal: Yes, if you must read the Bible this way, particularly the gospels and the epistles, then, agreed, one should not believe.

But of course, I don't share Ubhal's hermeneutic. He inherited it from Christian and other traditions that do an injustice to the spirit of the law, concentrating entirely on the letter of the law. While I won't attempt to explain the references to hell in the Second Testament (and couldn't), I would say that the testaments contain much more than those references, including statements of God's unqualified desire that all people be saved, Jesus' continuous siding with the underdog (metaphorically of course), and Paul's assertions that, though through one man's disobedience, sin and death entered the world, through one man's obedience, life should come to all people. This list of good news could go on, and probably should.

In addition to the literalism is the assumption that the Bible speaks with one voice. It is a voice that Ubhal disagrees with, but it is monotonic and frozen in time. It involves no possibility for change or variation, such as for later scripture to correct earlier scripture, or for a prophetic utterance to trump a historical perception.^[8]

Attached to the ability scripture to correct itself is the assumption (that may be made but not acknowledged in many circles) that the revelation of God's nature is progressive. Take, for example, the role of sacrifice in the Bible. We know that nearly every religion involves sacrificial rites in the beginning, often starting with human sacrifice. In the Bible, what starts as small blips of light, such as the substitution of a sacrificial ram for Abraham's son (Genesis 22), grows brighter by the point in the Second Testament where the acceptable form of sacrifice is both praise (Hebrews 13:15) and a "living sacrifice" (as opposed to a dead one) (Romans 12:1). The light is radiant when Jesus, being crucified, says, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34). Clearly, Jesus is not letting Pilate or the Jewish leaders assume he deserves to die. While dying, the magnanimity of Jesus resounds when he says to the criminal being crucified next to him, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43). Thus, the earliest threat from Genesis that if one eats from the tree of life, on will surely die (Genesis 2:17) is transformed to the promise of life to a criminal dying on a tree of death.

To my hermeneutic, Ubhal may apply some colloquial terms he uses, such as "copout" and "sugarcoat." But I protest. One need not be a liberal theologian (Ubhal uses the word latitudinarian) to admit that language, being polysemous and flexible, invites more interpretive space than fundamentalist literalism allows. There must be a middle road, and I think most of us find it in our daily readings and conversations, where we read between the lines and watch the body language for further meaning. Language can at times be figurative (and there are a variety of figures of speech) without reducing Jesus to being no more than a symbol (as some consider him).

Similarly, one can believe the scriptures are inspired (God breathed) without insisting they all represent God with equal clarity. The Second Testament states as much, "In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word" (Hebrews 1:1-3). The "exact representation" simply was not available in the beginning of the Jewish tradition, and that is neither a fault nor an oversight. It is a part of the history of humanity.

There's a way to read the First and Second Testaments as linguistic constructs that employ different levels of literalism depending on the purpose of the discussion. Hell can be a reality (now and then) and yet need not be 212 °F and have yellow scum around its shores. Hell can be the presence of extreme regret or the absence of light, but it need not be something the Father of Jesus desires any being to be subjected to. It is a mystery that we should neither ignore nor obsess over. Similarly, the resurrection of Jesus may not be something I can explain biologically—who could?—but it may be the pivotal point at which the human race was given a chance to become a new race. It could be the antithesis of and the antidote to hell.^[9]

What's Missing from the Book

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As already touched upon, Thou Shalt Not Believe omits so much of the content of the Bible that it amounts to a caricature. But it does include more than simply the scriptures about hell. The book also includes many of Jesus' hard sayings concerning divorce, riches, purity, and non-violence. Often Christians would rather not think about these sayings, just as Ubhal claims. Some of these sections on the hard sayings, as well as some ad hoc discussions about various proofs for God's existence, are useful and fall outside any criticism from me.^[10]

What is really missing, from my point of view, is the role of the Holy Spirit in the gospels and the epistles. Any discussion of Christianity that doesn't mention the role of the Spirit as a paraclete (an advocate who protects the believer from condemnation) and as a teacher is failing to portray an important counterpoint to the dark passages Ubhal relies on extensively. It has never been on the merit of textual criticism or, closer to Jesus' day, on the basis of mass appeal that disciples followed Christ (not for long, at least). It was a result of being drawn to him, and being enlightened about him, so that his words could become words of spirit and words of life (John 6:63).

The role of the Holy Spirit in guiding the interpretation of the Bible and the interpretation of Jesus himself cannot be overstressed, and I'd be remiss not to mention it a bit further. It was, after all, revelation and not simple fact checking that Jesus affirmed in Peter in this passage:

When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”

They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”

Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. (Matthew 16:8-17)

Perhaps if we considered the Second Testament in its entirety, we would be stunned into silence. Perhaps we would wonder where all the divine fire has gone or how to find it. But few of us would think that God is on a mission to doom his creation to failure and then punish it with hell as a result. And we should not think the task of finding our way is ours alone.

Conclusion: The Story of the Author's Life

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Thou Shalt Not Believe formally concludes on page 267, but then continues with something like an afterword, "My Personal Experiences with Christianity." While I'm not suggesting Ubhal rewrite the book, I wish this had been the opening chapter or possibly had been expanded to comprise the entire book. It is incontrovertible, being autobiographical. It is priceless, being personal and vulnerable.

It portrays a child who grew up appreciating Christianity as "wholly positive" (270), being exposed to it in Lutheran churches. At the age of 12, his view began to change. First he was introduced to the concept of hell and then, in spite of being in a Lutheran setting, was told that "salvation is difficult and is based primarily on one’s works" (270). By the age of 13, Ubhal was convinced that the apocalypse was imminent and that the likely follow-up was being cast into a Lake of Fire, as described in the Book of Revelation. It was not only a fear of others going to hell but, in his words, a fear of himself going to hell: "Yet no matter how hard I tried to adhere to what I understood to be Christianity’s moral precepts, I feared I would be damned as one among billions of 'sinners in the hands of an angry God' holding us over hell and waiting to drop us in (to use the imagery of Jonathan Edwards)" (272).

His fear of hell motivated him to attempt moral perfection, which, among other things, invited bullies to take advantage of his attempt to turn the other cheek. All of these disturbances were overshadowed at the age of 15 by feeling he "had been possessed by the devil or another demon" (272). An internalized voice of guilt and condemnation drove him nearly crazy. He alternated between seeking God's help to sinking below the waves of despair. At this time, he writes, "I told a few people about my experiences at the time in very vague terms, as I knew that any specific description would likely lead to psychiatric therapy or even institutionalization" (273).

The sense of possession left him when he abandoned the eschatology that focused on hell, but new bouts of fear and depression arose as he studied the gospels, finding in them a rigor and morality that he had no hope of obtaining. The result was to fear "the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell" (275).

His interpretations of the scriptures did not change much throughout these years. Even in the present tense he writes, "In fact, if the New Testament is trustworthy, Christians should feel near-continuous guilt for failing to live up to God’s expectations and should feel gratitude to God for forgiving their sins when he absolutely does not have to do so" (280). It was simply the abandonment of the entire enterprise that gave him peace. He is now "relieved there is no rational basis for believing the New Testament" (280). Although free from some of the darker convictions (such as of possession), between high school and several years of college he oscillated between despair and guilt, on one hand, and confidence and optimism (even in Christianity) on the other.

By the time he graduated from college, he was done with Christianity, but not with the guilt he had contracted through it. His foray into Theravada Buddhism, he realized, left him with guilt, too. From this point, he ventured into mystical experiences, which perhaps cannot constitute one's daily bread (arising unpredictably and sporadically). While they provided a higher reality, they—being rooted in monotheism—did not offset the pain his earlier monotheistic beliefs had caused, and so he finally abandoned his perennial monotheist worldview (290).

Toward the goal of freeing himself from guilt, he therefore wrote Thou Shalt Not Believe, which at the time of its completion provided him the distance necessary to be protected from the pernicious effects of Christianity.

The account is incontrovertible, being his account of his internal life. One of the greatest ironies of history, from my point of view, is that the faith that was intended to set people free from guilt is, for many, the source of guilt. Countless sermons, books, and institutions fuel this fire. A friend of mine says forgiveness is not good business, but sin is: it keeps people returning (for the wrong reasons). I for one am sorry Ubhal felt so alone and tortured for so many years.

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____Footnotes____

^[1]This review is not based upon a Kindle purchase but on a review copy given to me. However, the review copy appears to be the print file for the book (available in electronic and hard copy), so the page numbers should match.

^[2] John Ubhal is a pseudonym, possibly of Welsh and Gaelic origins.

^[3]If I were to review the book on Amazon, I'd rate it as a very readable book—which it is, whether one is eager to find the next disagreeable assertion or something more positive.

^[4]While the fact does not cause me to doubt (my faith never having arisen from statistical probability), I understand Ubhal's comment that, "if 500 people really had witnessed Jesus in the flesh after his resurrection, as Paul claimed in 1 Corinthians 15:6, it would have been too incredible to keep quiet, even in educated Roman circles" (135). The number 500 has always puzzled me, not because of the lack of documentation, but because it is so unexpected. For the most part, the post-resurrection Jesus kept to himself, making himself visible to only the disciples (which included others besides the apostles, such as Mary Magdalene). Who these 500 were and the circumstances under which they saw Jesus in his post-resurrection state (which was not a normal state by any natural measure)—this remains a puzzle.

^[5]The "Book of Acts" in the Second Testament provides a rare glimpse into the thinking of at least one individual who (1) stood outside of the community of Christians, (2) was aware of their claims, and (3) did not feel compelled or able either to falsify or verify their claims. The opinion of the Jewish teacher, Gamaliel, is recorded as follows:

But a Pharisee named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law, who was honored by all the people, stood up in the Sanhedrin and ordered that the men be put outside for a little while. hen he addressed the Sanhedrin: “Men of Israel, consider carefully what you intend to do to these men. Some time ago Theudas appeared, claiming to be somebody, and about four hundred men rallied to him. He was killed, all his followers were dispersed, and it all came to nothing. After him, Judas the Galilean appeared in the days of the census and led a band of people in revolt. He too was killed, and all his followers were scattered. Therefore, in the present case I advise you: Leave these men alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.” (Acts 5:34-39)

^[6]Ubhal senses this as he concludes his arguments, writing, "Others will regard my viewpoint with curiosity because they do not think of Christianity in the terms in which I have presented it. They may even think that the version of Christianity I have presented is a straw man" (267).

^[7]Ubhal's hermeneutic is sincere and does not arise as part of a rhetorical stance. If it were part of a stance, it would be bad rhetoric. Those who share Ubhal's fundamentalist literalism are seldom going to read a book entitled Thou Shalt Not Believe. Their literalism, which is often accompanied by a desire for an unshakable, fixed truth in which to believe, would deter such an act.

^[8]By contrast, even within the Second Testament (let alone between the testaments), I am always juggling one statement against another. The juggling is not arbitrary, but has evolved over time by learning what are the most encouraging and instructional points. This hermeneutic must evolve over time because of the paradoxical relation between the part and the whole: the entire text (such as a novel or the Bible) cannot be understood apart from its individual sentences. However, the individual sentences cannot be understood apart from the entire text. The result of the paradox is that one must frequently suspend judgement and keep reading, reviewing, and revising one's interpretation.

^[9]To this proposition Ubhal may agree, but only with derision: the fact that God makes us need Jesus is, to him, a further example of his totalitarian nature.

^[10]Having said these sections in Ubhal's book escape my criticism, I note in passing that when Ubhal stresses the gospel of Luke's insistence on poverty and being without property (Chapter 19 "Some Blatant Examples Of Christian Hypocrisy"), he fails to mention that in Luke 10, Jesus enters Martha and Mary's home and he never insinuates that there is anything wrong with them owning a home in which to live. A reader of Ubhal's book who was ignorant of the Bible would never guess such a passage existed.

reviewed: 2017/11/19 | last updated: 2017/11/19  

• The Triple Victory: Christ's Temptations According to Saint Matthew
• Austin Farrer
• The Faith Press, London, 1965
• ISBN NA
• 96 pages, paper

Almost everything I appreciate about the three temptations of Christ derives from this book. Working with the account in Matthew, the author draws parallels between Christ and Moses, which in turn lead to a contrast between the failures of Israel and the success of Christ in the wilderness.

Just as Moses fasted 40 days, so does Christ. Moses does so to address three of the Israelites’ sins: bitterness about eating bread, tempting God about water, and, in Moses’ second fast, worshipping an idol (16-17). When Christ fasts, he is tempted to make bread from stones, tempted to tempt God to save him, and, finally, tempted to worship the devil, the ruler of the world, an obvious form of idolatry. If Christ overcomes these temptations, he then corrects the repetitive and crooked past in order to create a different future.

Such passages from the Pentateuch enable Farrer to tie the baptism of Christ into the temptation scenes, reading them as a coherent whole. The baptism of the Israelites into the water and the cloud are revisited as Christ’s baptism in water followed by the descent of the Spirit upon him. This resemblance draws attention to the presence of the Spirit hovering over the water at creation, another instance where the voice of God spoke, saying there should be light. So in Christ’s baptism the Spirit descends, the voice speaks, and it is good, it being the beginning of a new creation.

These types of connections typify Farrer’s thought and, likely, the thought of the writer of Matthew, whose gospel is most clearly tailored to Jewish readers. The temptations, simply put, make more sense when read in this context rather than as an anticipation of the modern readers’ situation.

The book demonstrates what a philosophical mind, exercised in the literary practice of close reading and informed by a background in biblical hermeneutics, sees when it reads the gospel of Matthew.

Nothing in way of summary can demonstrate the book’s richness. Written for non-specialists, it nevertheless requires concentration, each sentence adding something new to the discussion. The following paragraph, already touched on in this review, provides an example of this rich textual analysis of Matthew’s account:

[At Christ’s baptism] the rending of the heavens [by the voice of God] is the most obvious symbol of divine event; it is not, however, the most significant. Before the Voice itself speaks, the Spirit or Breath of God descends over the waters. This had not been recorded to have happened since the world was first created. When there was nothing but a restless chaos, and darkness over the abyss, ‘the Breath of God fluttered on the face of the waters and God said, Let there be light.’ The Baptism, then, is a second birth of light, a new creation of the world. (28)

While it is clearly stated in Matthew that Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, it is easy to mistake the temptations as taking place in another location. Still in the wilderness, Christ is taken to the temple, still in the wilderness, Christ is taken to a “very high mountain” (Matt. 4:8, NIV). Farrer, neither dogmatically a literalist nor a demythologizer, sticks to the text in these matters. He assumes both that the temptations take place in the mind of Christ (where else can temptation occur?), and that the scenario presented is indeed consequential, symbolically and realistically. To give into the temptation, howsoever mental, would be a betrayal of Christ’s devotion to God and, finally, an act of idolatry.

I recommend the book for anyone interested in understanding the role of the baptism and temptations of Christ. I also recommend it for anyone interested in what a close analysis of intertextuality meaning can produce.

reviewed: 2015/12/05 | last updated: 2015/12/05  

• A Wideness in God's Mercy
• Clark H. Pinnock
• Published by Zondervan, 1992
• ISBN 0310535913
• 217 pages

This book offers an antidote to all those who have been poisoned by a pessimistic view of God's interest in—and ability to redeem—every human being, no matter where or when that person lived. It puts the "good" back into the news about Jesus, who is represented as the clearest representation of the God who in all times and places beckons people to follow the light they have been given.

"Sinners are not in the hands of an angry God" (177) the book concludes, after showing multiple ways to meet your Maker whether or not you have been exposed to an adequate portrayal of Christ. Where there is wrath, it is the anger of a loving Creator who sees his creation ignoring what is best for them and instead destroying each other. A person who seeks to do right and to honor God apart from the Christian tradition(s) is in a far better place than a person labeled as a Christian who eschews the opportunity to seek the Creator.

In times past, it was perhaps not so troublesome to think narrowly about Christianity, in exclusion of the merits of other religions. But, as the world is shrinking as a result of global communication, it is absurd to ignore the claims and values of other religions. This book urges Christians to open up dialogues with members of other religions, to look for grace and truth wherever they occur, and to openly share what is so appealing about the life of Jesus. In this way, Christians may be delivered from bigotry and those in other religions may be exposed to something truly worthwhile in the gospels.

Neither a universalist, nor a restrictivist, the author seeks to show that from the beginning God planned for the salvation of humankind. In executing this plan, God spoke to various people and nations in whatever way possible, and that these intentions were furthered, not countered, by the coming of Jesus into the world. When the purpose of God is understood in this way, then hell is logically understood as "not the prison from which people are longing to be freed, but [as] a sit-in where sinners have barricaded themselves in to keep God out" (180).

In addition to undoing the damage of overly pessimistic, conservative evangelical thinking, the book also insists that religious pluralism ignores important differences between religions. Not all religions are equally true or noble. Even if God has spoken to various people in various cultures, it does not follow that the voice was as clear or as final as it was when it declared Jesus the "son in whom I am well pleased." Just as there is nothing arbitrarily exclusive about the salvation offered by Jesus, there is also nothing arbitrarily dispensable about his role in the human future.

It is fashionable and politically correct to preach a loving God who cares infinitely about every human being, independent of that person's lifestyle or beliefs. This concept thrives on an ethical sensibility that is shared by many of us who have no patience for bigotry or pettiness projected on a divine plane. However, the book suggests (but doesn't develop) the assertion that this appealing portrayal of God arises from the Christian revelation:

Ironically, the proposal of theological pluralism, which would undercut the normativeness of Jesus Christ, removes . . . at the same time the very basis for knowing God as personal and gracious, loving and forgiving. The paradox lies in the fact that the universality of God's love is known through the particular event of the Incarnation. One can only be sure there exists a gracious and loving God if it is the case that Jesus Christ is Lord. (45)

While I recognize that this assertion is not beyond dispute, it strikes me as a worthwhile inquiry. Before Jesus there was talk about a just and loving [if not personal] God, but the signal-to-noise ratio was usually pretty low. One does not always see the source of light itself but what the light illuminates. Similarly, our conception of a truly loving God (if there is a God at all), may be much more indebted to the words and actions attributed to Jesus in the gospels than to any other single source. Think about how God or the gods come off in ancient creation myths; in Greek and Roman myth, religion, and tragedy; or in the other ancient eastern and African faiths. Do not we gain something from the Sermon on the Mount, something that establishes a perfect Father who does not reciprocate evil for evil, who causes the sun to shine on the righteous and the unrighteous?

I think we do.

reviewed: 2009/05/30 | last updated: 2009/05/30