Category Archives: Religion

#51 Society Without God

01 Friday Apr 2011

Posted by in God, Philosophy of Religions, Religion

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The sociologist of religion, Phil Zuckerman, visited the closest thing to Nirvana for those who dream of living in a society without God—Denmark.  Zuckerman’s plan to spend several months in one of the most secular places on the planet was driven by his desire to demonstrate that there’s a link between a general lack of interest in God and the existence of a successful society in which people are happy and help their neighbors.

What did Zuckerman find after living in a typical Danish city and interviewing some 150 Danes and Swedes about their religious views?

  1. 25% believe in a personal God
  2. 10% believe in hell
  3. 7% believe that God the Bible is the literal word of God
  4. 100% identify themselves as Christians

In his book, Zuckerman argues, in part, against scholars of religion who claim that human beings are naturally religious.  Against this assertion, Zuckerman shows that Danes and Swedes do not look to religion or God for answers about the meaning of life and death.

Perhaps more interesting was Zuckerman’s discovery that these questions only rarely crossed the minds of Danes and Swedes.  His contacts simply lacked curiosity about God and about the meaning of life and death.  Indeed, the examples he provided, based on interviews and ordinary day-to-day interactions, reveal that, in Denmark:

  1. Questions about why bad things happen are not central to everyday life
  2. Religion, God, and the meaning of life rarely come up
  3. When asked about the meaning of life, people answered that there is no meaning
  4. When asked what gives them reasons to live, they cited friends and family
  5. When asked about death, they said it was part of life

However, this picture is in tension with several other facts:

  1. The majority of Danes and Swedes pay taxes to the Lutheran Church without complaint
  2. They tend to baptize their children
  3. They get married in Church
  4. They follow the Lutheran teaching of being kind to their neighbors
  5. Tensions exist between the Lutheran population and the growing Muslim population

Zuckerman postulates that, for Danes and Swedes, the religious practices and institutions of the Lutheran Church have become cultural, secular vehicles.  If his assessment is correct, then Denmark’s “cultural” religion—secular Lutheranism—resembles other “cultural” religions such as secular Judaism.

Nylars Round Church

Because hardly anything that appears simple, is simple, a reviewer of Zuckerman’s book, Michal Pagis, raises several thorny questions.  Even hardcore cheerleaders of Denmark’s “society without God” should pause to wonder whether important complexities and tensions remain to be identified.

Many of Pagis’ questions (which appear below) were posed by the intellectually-honest Zuckerman.  Although he attempts to address some of them, he acknowledges that they will require further research to answer:

  1. Are people around the globe less interested in ultimate existential questions than philosophers or religious scholars have long assumed?
  2. What is the connection between secularism and the lack of interest in the meaning of life and death?
  3. How do we explain the fact that novels, poetry, or philosophical texts tackle these questions (and that there is a market for them)?
  4. Why are secular Jews (and other relatively secular Europeans like the French and the Germans) attracted to these questions, but not secular Danes?
  5. Could the long religious monopoly of Lutheranism, and hence the lack of competition among religions have led to a loss of interest in religion among the Danes and Swedes?
  6. Could Denmark’s high degree of social and economic security explain the low interest in religion?
  7. Could the high percentage of independent women and the rise of feminism account for the decline of Christianity in Denmark?
  8. Is it possible that Scandinavian society was never a religious one?

Resource:  Michal Pagis, review of Society Without God:  What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment by Phil Zuckerman, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79:1 (March 2011): 264-267.

#50 Is OCD the source of religion?

15 Tuesday Mar 2011

Posted by in God, Philosophy of Religion, Religion, Theology

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Martin Luther (1483 - 1546)

Martin Luther, the Father of Protestantism, had OCD.  So what?

Robert Sapolsky, the brilliant professor of biology and neuroscience at Stanford, has made his field accessible and entertaining.  But he admits that he sometimes steps beyond his area of expertise–for example, when he prognosticates on Martin Luther, and on the relationship between OCD and religion.  Sapolsky, it turns out, is no fan of Luther or of religion.

The mysterious title of Sapolsky’s essay, “Circling the Blanket around God,” expresses his view of the relationship between religion and OCD.  It refers to the “fixed action pattern” of the dog who, inexplicably, but nonetheless predictably, circles her blanket several times before finally plopping herself down for the night.  A human being suffering from OCD is like a dog circling, Sapolsky writes, except that s/he is unable to stop circling and continues, “exhausted and bewildered.”  Thus, the theistic individual—in Sapolsky’s view—circles the blanket around God, circling around and around, “exhausted and bewildered,” but unable to stop.

By his own admission, Sapolsky offers a single original idea in this essay—namely, the idea that OCD individuals started religious rituals.  Their attempts, he postulates, to reduce their anxiety by performing set rituals “somehow turns into rules for everyone else.”  Somehow.  Somehow?  Although this is an intriguing idea, it is most certainly not original but rather has preoccupied students of religion for some time.  Too bad that Sapolsky doesn’t ask the next, and most important question: what exactly is the mechanism whereby an individual suffering from OCD “somehow” turns his or her anxiety-reducing rituals into “rules for everyone else?”

As an example of a religious figure whose “anxiety-reducing rituals” became “rules for everyone else,” Sapolsky selects Martin Luther.  Luther started his theological career as an Augustinian monk but made his way up the academic ranks until he became a professor, among other things, of the Old Testament.  His distaste for indulgences (a payment paid to Church authorities to shorten one’s time in purgatory) led him to try to reform the Catholic Church.  Instead, he touched off the Protestant Reformation and permanently fractured Western Christianity into its two major families.  Luther, scholars agree, and Sapolsky observes, suffered from a bad case of “scrups,” or in everyday speech, from a terrible, OCD-induced, case of scruples.

Monks were expected to meet higher ethical standards than those that pertained to the lay population.  His religious order required that he set aside time for an examination of his soul; he was expected to identify every immoral behavior or idea.  No matter how petty the behavior or idea, he was to react to them with true sorrow, to repent with true contrition, and to ask God for forgiveness.  These steps were critically important; if not followed to the letter, Luther could not hope to be restored, by God, to a state of grace.  If he were to die unexpectedly, he would, because he was reprobate, be condemned to eternal damnation.

Luther was convinced that he had failed to repent for every single moral breach. Terrified for his soul, Luther sought relief from his OCD-exacerbated scruples.  Nothing worked.  Until he discovered a new way to understand the Bible and salvation.

By then, Luther had embarked on academic studies in theology and, having earned a Ph.D., he served as Doctor of Bible at the University of Wittenberg.  He became such an adept translator of Scripture that his translation of the Bible into German continues to be widely used today.  His painstaking study of Biblical texts eventually led him to develop a novel, but compelling, Scripture-based theology of “salvation by faith alone” (the basic tenet of what would become Protestantism).  Luther believed that, because of his faith in Christ, God would not punish him.

Okay, fine.  But how did Luther manage to convince so many non-OCD-sufferers to adopt his radical message?  By the early 1520s, he had attracted a vast and passionate following, and by the time of his death in 1546, people of all social classes sided with him and with his new creed.

Explanations for this abound.  Some point to the wide dissemination of Luther’s books and pamphlets thanks to the advent of the printing press, others ascribe Luther’s ascendance to the spiritual crisis that gripped Europe during the late Middle Ages or to the disgust engendered by the widespread corruption of the Church hierarchy.

Clearly, OCD or not, Luther managed to convince many other, rational, non-OCD individuals, to adopt his way of looking at the world, God, and human beings.

Desiderius Erasmus (1466 - 1536)

The key observation Sapolsky left out of his essay is this:  no novel theologies can succeed, including ones influenced by the OCD terrors of their authors, if they fail to be persuasive.  Luther and Lutheranism have persuaded, and continue to persuade a significant number of people.  Surely Sapolsky does not wish to impugn the intelligence of the political and religious leaders who took Luther and Lutheranism seriously.  The best minds of the era were conscripted by the Catholic Church to challenge Luther, including the highly esteemed Christian humanist Desiderius Erasmus.  Most scholars agree that, for all of his learning, Erasmus had met his intellectual match; his arguments failed to erode Luther’s theological claims in any significant way.  Other, different arguments would be needed.

To dismiss Luther’s theology because Luther suffered from OCD is a deplorable tactic.  There are better, more helpful ways to evaluate Luther’s theology.

Sapolsky’s is a cautionary tale of how data, even when it matches our own opinions, may deserve a second look.  Unless, of course, our own most cherished opinions are too fragile to survive being called into question or too fragile to survive comparisons to other opinions.  If this is the case then they ought not to survive.

Resource:  Robert Sapolsky, “Circling the Blanket for God,” in The Trouble with Testosterone, 241-288 (New York:  Simon & Schuster, 1997).

#49 Reporting to God for duty

07 Monday Mar 2011

Posted by in Ethics, God, Philosophy of Religion, Religion, Theological Ethics, Theology

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When it comes to religion, some of us want to have it both ways:  when deeply religious people do bad things, we are quick to say that their religious beliefs are to blame, but when deeply religious people do good things, we take little to no interest in their religious beliefs, as if those beliefs were irrelevant.

Example?  The recent belief.net blog-post, “God in Wisconsin:  Scott Walker’s Obedience” authored by the scholar of religion, Diana Butler Bass.

In her post, the politically-progressive Bass slams Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s brand of evangelical religion.  For her, the most disturbing part of his conservative Christianity is his no-wiggle-room obedience to God’s commands.  Bass points out that, for evangelicals like Walker, “Once you know God’s direction, no change is allowed.  Doubt opens the door to failure.  Obeying Christ’s plan is the only option.  In this theological universe, hard-headedness is a virtue, compromise is the work of the Devil, and anything that works to accomplish God’s plan is considered ethically justifiable.”

This, she notes, is the same sort of evangelical religion that shaped George W. Bush–and led to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  She is of the opinion that President Bush’s obedience to God’s commands was the cause of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In spite of the ugh-producing situation of turning to someone like Walker or Bush to shed light on our own thinking, progressives, please take a deep breath (you may even need to swallow hard) and then ask yourselves this question:  is obedience really the problem here, or is the real problem the commands Walker or Bush claims to obey?  Because if Walker were obeying a different set of commands—say, God’s command that Wisconsin increase its minimum wage, would Bass (or you) object?  Or if Walker claimed to be obeying God’s command to work tirelessly on behalf of legislation to decrease the inequity between the richest and the poorest, would Bass (or you) object?

Most of us can name good people who have done good (defined here as progressive) things.  Yet, tsk tsk tsk, we rarely acknowledge their religious motives for doing that good.  Do we imagine that they were simply good people who would have done good things regardless of their religious beliefs?  Or is it simply that, because they did good things, their religious beliefs raise no red flags and so warrant no scrutiny?

But by overlooking the religious beliefs that motivate our heroes, are we ignoring some fundamental part of who they are?

Corrie ten Boom, raised in the Dutch Reform tradition, once said, “Don’t bother to give God instructions; just report for duty.”  For her, reporting for duty meant starting girls and boys’ clubs in her native Holland and eventually risking her life to hide Jewish refugees during WW II.  The risks were real; she was arrested but managed to survive Ravensbruck concentration camp.

And did you know that Florence Nightingale was a Christian universalist who believed that God wanted her to be a nurse?  In her journal, she wrote:  “God called me in the morning and asked me would I do good for him alone without reputation.”

Other religious do-gooders include Dorothy Day, John Newman, William Wilberforce, and Desmond Tutu.

Surely these report-to-God-for-duty folks would be troubled to learn that their religious commitment to serving others is being downplayed or ignored.  Surely they would be dismayed to discover that the force of their relationship with God is being excised from their biographies.

Though we may see ourselves as too autonomous or too agnostic to follow commands from God, we can learn something from the doggedness and zeal of those who report to God for duty.  Imagine for a moment that you believed, with as much conviction as a Scott Walker or a George W. Bush or a Corrie ten Boom or a Florence Nightingale that God commanded you to dedicate yourself to raising the average standard of living in the United States.  What if you could proclaim:  “Once I know God’s direction, no change is allowed.  Doubt opens the door to failure.  Obeying God’s plan is the only option.”

With a no-doubt, no-compromise, no-holds-barred, God-on-your-side-for-sure attitude, who knows what you might accomplish!  Would any effort seem too big, any policy-change impossible?

Maybe.  Maybe not.  Still, the point remains that disapprovers of the Walker and Bush brand of conservative religion can’t have it both ways when it comes to linking religious belief with good or bad actions.  Either religious conviction matters or it doesn’t.

If religion influences those with whom we disagree, then we have to allow that religion also influences those with whom we do agree.  To which Corrie ten Boom, Florence Nightingale, Dorothy Day, John Newman, William Wilberforce, Desmond Tutu, and many others would say amen.

#48 Better than milk: Got God

28 Monday Feb 2011

Posted by in God, Philosophy of Religion, Religion, Religious Philosophy, Theology

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Friends,

Long time no read!  Her Nakedness has been extra-busy these last few months with pre-dissertation requirements, writing academic papers, and attending conferences. Finally (finally!), full-time research and dissertation-writing are about to begin–with time set aside for blogging.  Look for a “real” post before week’s end.

But you don’t have to wait to read some new work. The Naked Theologian, aka Myriam Renaud, has a piece in the Spring 2011 issue of the UU World. To access it, click on this link: “Got God?” or cut and paste the following web address into your browser:  www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/175437.shtml

Want to support theological conversation in the UU World?  Here’s some ways you can let the editorial staff know that theology matters (even the fully-clothed kind) and that you’d like to see more of it in the World:

1.  Write a letter to the editor:  Christopher Walton, UU World, 25 Beacon Street, Boston MA 02108-2803

2.  Post a comment on facebook.com/uuworld

3.  Send an email to world@uua.org

Magazines look for internet chatter about what they’ve published so please mention the “Got God?” piece in your blogs (even if you don’t agree with my views) and include a link. The more chatter, the better.  So please, chatter away!

Be back.  Real soon.

#47 Men, please get as mad as hell!

21 Saturday Aug 2010

Posted by in Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, Religion, Religious Philosophy, Theological Ethics, Theology

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When women have gotten the right to vote or to divorce or to inherit property or to have legal protection from rape, it’s because men have agreed to change the law of the land.  A few forward-thinking women demanded those rights—some nicely, some not so nicely.  Allied to their cause was some of the menfolk, the forward-thinking men who were as mad as hell about women’s lack of rights and about how other men treated women.  Especially since the Enlightenment, these men, sometimes at great costs to themselves, have toiled to persuade other men to get mad too.

Forward-thinking men had to do the convincing since men who don’t already think highly of women aren’t likely to pay attention to what women have to say. They only listen to other men.

In the United States, men-to-men persuading rippled through the ranks of maledom until eventually enough men joined together to bend the arc of history.

For example, would American women have gotten the vote as early as 1920 if President Woodrow Wilson hadn’t publicly declared his support for the 19th amendment?  The Senate refused to vote on the amendment, so women went into overdrive to convince the all-male voters to elect pro-suffrage Representatives and Senators.  The men came through, and in 1919, the all-male House of Representatives and the all-male Senate ratified the amendment.

When it comes to religious teachings, however, righteous anger among men over the fate of womankind is harder to identify.  In Afghanistan, men granted women the vote in 1963.  No matter.  In 2009, the government of President Hamid Karzai passed the so-called marriage-rape law.  This law gives Afghan husbands the right to force their wives to have sex with them.  It also permits them to starve their wives if they refuse to have sex at least four times a week.  President Karzai pushed this law as a nod to the country’s Shiite minority and as a nod to hardline Shia clerics whose votes he needed to be re-elected.

When, oh when, will hardline Shia clerics get mad about the abuse of their mothers and of their sisters and of their daughters?  When will they speak out against it?  Because what’s clear is that until they speak out, the abuse will continue.

And really, what man could fail to get angry upon seeing the August 9,2010, Time Magazine’s cover with its photograph of Aisha, an eighteen-year old Afghani woman whose nose was sliced off by her Taliban husband?

Photograph by Jodi Bieber

In case you’ve been absent from the news cycle recently, here’s Aisha’s story in brief.  When she was twelve, her father decided to give her, along with her four-year old sister, to the man destined to become their husband.  This gift was intended to settle the blood feud started by Aisha’s uncle when he killed one of the future husband’s relatives.

According to the August 6, 2010, edition of the International Herald Tribune, Aisha and her sister were left in the care of their would-be husband’s family during the long periods when he went into hiding.  During his absences, Aisha and her sister were forced to live with the livestock and treated like slaves.  They were also beaten as punishment for their uncle’s crime.  When Aisha reached puberty, she was married to the Taliban fighter.  And when she was old enough to take care of herself, she ran away.

“Shamed” by her flight, her husband “lost his nose”—or so goes the Pashtun saying.  He tracked her down and dragged her back to his home province.  There, “on a lonely mountainside [he] cut off her nose and both ears.”  And there, he abandoned her.  How she made her way off the mountainside she still can’t remember.  Aisha, although angry about what happened to her, refuses to reveal her family name to protect her father from scrutiny and approbation.

American aid workers took Aisha to one of only nineteen women’s shelters (all run by private charities) in Afghanistan.  Although few in numbers, these shelters are already under threat.  After a TV station in Kabul complained that they were merely fronts for prostitution, President Karzai convened a commission to investigate these complaints.  If the charges stick, then the shelters will be shut down, leaving abused women with no place to go.  The man chosen by President Karzai to head this commission is a conservative mullah.  Although no official report has yet been released, the mullah has already spoken out in favor of the prostitution claim.  The mullah’s name is Nematullah Shahrani.  It has been shared with the press and so he, unlike Aisha’s father, is open to scrutiny and approbation.  And approbation he deserves.  As does President Karzai.

Now is a good time for a disclaimer.  This post is not a “cynical ploy” to “justify [the] occupation” of Afghanistan by American troops by “exploiting gender politics,”—a complaint launched at Time Magazine’s cover story of Aisha.  However, it is a ploy to get men who aren’t already angry—well, angry.  Why?  Because the more men get angry at the status quo the more likely they’ll attain the collective strength of will required to stop other men from abusing women.

Whether the violence done to Afghani women is justified based on religion, or culture, or both, makes little difference.  Let’s face it, attempts to tease apart religion from culture in these situations usually lead to stalemates.  But the fact remains that Aisha has no nose.  Her now ten-year old sister is still a slave in her husband’s household.  The shelter that rescued her may be shut down.  Married women raped by their husbands have no legal recourse.  Intra-family honor killings continue.  The stoning of women convicted of adultery continues.

One day, a few forward-thinking Afghani mullahs will finally get angry about the treatment of women—for example, they will get angry about the stoning of purported adulteresses.  Their anger will compel them to look for resources within the Islamic tradition to develop the kinds of authoritative, legal opinions that Afghani men take seriously.  This is the key.  Islamic cleric must speak out against violence.  To speak with authority, they must find support in Islamic sources.  And if they seek support in Islamic sources, they will find it.

Indeed, we need look no further than Iran—yes, Iran of all places—for how this might work.  Let’s look at the case of stoning.  Until the ratification of the Islamic Penal Code in 1983, stoning did not exist in Iran.  However, stoning became a legal punishment when the republic of Iran came under the rule of Muslim clerics.  Since many Muslim jurists shared the opinion that stoning could be considered Islamic, this sentence was included in the set of legal options ratified by the government.

Sharia Law is based on three authoritative texts:  the Qu’ran, the sayings attributed to Mohammed (the hadith), and Mohammed’s biography.  Stoning does not appear in any Shiite hadith, but it does appears in the Sunni hadith collected by Sahih Bukhari; according to this Sunni hadith, Mohammed ordered stoning more than 34 times as punishment.  However, the Qu’ran makes no mention of this form of punishment.

Women and men all over the world protested when Iran made stoning legal.  Faced with intense and persistent international criticism, the government of Iran, unlike that of President Karzai, reconsidered its stance on stoning.  Iran also faced intense domestic criticism (Afghanistan does not).  Thanks to both external and internal pressure, Iran eventually placed a moratorium on stoning.  A few judges ignored the moratorium and handed down stoning sentences during 2006-8.  But as of June 2009, Iran’s parliament has undertaken a review of the Islamic penal code, intent on eliminating stoning as a legal form of punishment.

Like Afghanistan, Iran is a nation where Muslim clerics have a great deal of influence on daily life.  Unlike Afghanistan, Iran looked for resources within Islam to justify removing stoning from the Islamic penal code.  Because it looked for those resources, it found them.

Because Iran is majority Shiite, it could disregard the Sunni hadith.  A country like Indonesia did not have that luxury—it is predominantly Sunni.  No matter.  Indonesia’s majority-male legislators made stoning illegal (except for Aceh province).  Some of its clerics looked for Islamic resources to ban stoning and found them.  By extension, if its clerics decide to look for Islamic resources to ban all violence against women, they will find them.

Afghanistan’s Muslim clerics could follow suit.  The war on Afghani women will not end until mullahs change their minds about violence against women.  The war on women will not end until Afghani men get angry and demand the mullahs change.  The war on women will not end until more men around the world get angry and demand that Afghani men and mullahs change.

And why focus all of the attention on Afghanistan.  Women all over the world continue to be subject to violence.  So men of the world, won’t you please get mad as hell!

Reference:  Rod Nordland, International Herald Tribune, 6 August 2010, p. 5.

#43 Countdown to exams, gotta go go go

24 Thursday Dec 2009

Posted by in God, Prayer, Religion, Theology

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It hardly seems possible, but a full year has passed since my first post!  Forty-two posts later, the time has come for me to set blogging aside.  With Ph.D. exams scheduled for February, 2010, I must focus on my studies and nothing but my studies.

When I launched this blog, little did I expect the number of visits it has received (more than 5000 to date) nor the number of comments (more than 100).

So thanks.  Thanks for walking with me and for sharing your thoughts.  I’ve enjoyed hearing from you!

I’ll continue to monitor this site so please don’t hesitate to leave more comments.

I may return to blogging sometime in March.  No promises though.  I’ll have to see what kind of demands there are on my time.

Good-bye for now.  May life treat you tenderly.

I leave you with the following prayer, written by one of my favorite authors, the Unitarian minister, A. Powell Davies:

Help Us, O God, in a world so full of what is wonderful, ever changing, ever surprising us with new revelations of life’s power and beauty, to accept with gratitude all that gladdens us, and with fortitude all that brings us grief.

Let us take time to watch the morning and the evening skies, to look often and long at the marvelous earth and all that lives upon it, to be with heart and soul a friend and neighbor and a part of humankind.

Let us rejoice in the heritage bequeathed to us from yesterday, and in the festivals of faith and hope.

Let us look at our world as it is, and seek a wisdom that is not censorious.

Let us look into our own hearts and be brave enough to separate the evil from the good.

Let us be learning always, from all that we see and do, and from all that happens to us.

And if shadows overtake us, let us not dim within ourselves the light that helps others to live.

Give us, O God, to carry with us the kindness that we look for, to be gentle as we wish the world were gentle, and by being loving, to bring closer to fulfillment all that is the fruit of love.

Amen.

#42 Inviting Jesus to his Birthday bash

17 Thursday Dec 2009

Posted by in Religion, Spiritual Exercises, Spirituality

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Are you satisfied with a purely secular approach to the Christmas season?  If not, you might consider spending some time reading the New Testament gospels and reflecting on the life and teachings of Jesus that they depict.

Skeptics will resist this suggestion but could soften their stance when they learn that respected thinkers like Thomas Jefferson and Martin Buber (yes, the 20th Century Jewish philosopher!) would have nodded their assent.  Both considered the gospels to be sources of immense wisdom.  They had no illusion about the human authorship of the Bible; this did not prevent them from engaging it energetically and with seriousness of purpose.  In so doing, they testify to its importance.  Both adopted unique approaches to Scripture; their approaches offer helpful examples of how we too might to read it.

Although he didn’t consider Jesus to be divine, Thomas Jefferson was inspired by the Biblical Jesus’ message—albeit in its distinctly human dimension.  New Testament verses concerning morality and sin met with Jefferson’s approval but the miracles and Jesus’ resurrection struck him as implausible.  Jefferson decided to extract the passages reflecting his ideas about Jesus from the four Gospels to create a single, unified gospel.  Over a period of several years, he selected passages from six different (hardcopy) Bibles, cut them out (with scissors—yup, the old, old-fashioned way), and pasted them together (with glue) to create his own, integrated gospel.  His Bible selection included excerpts from the King James Bible, a Greek Bible, one in Latin, and two more in French.  He entitled his cut-and-paste Bible:  The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.

What follows is the narrative of Jesus’ birth from Jefferson’s Bible.  Because this account only appears in the gospel of Luke, Jefferson relied on uniquely on Luke to redact his version of the nativity:

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.  Lk 2:1

(And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)  Lk 2:2

And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. Lk 2:3

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem (because he was of the house and lineage of David.)  Lk 2:4

To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.  Lk 2:5

And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.  Lk 2:6

And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them at the inn.  Lk 2:7

And when eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the child, his name was called JESUS,  Lk 2:21

And when they had performed all things according to the Law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own city Nazareth.  Lk 2:39

Although this passage doesn’t include the moral teachings so important to Jefferson, it does show that he had no qualms about altering sacred Scripture to make it his own–including the story of Jesus’ birth.

Given when and where he lived, it isn’t surprising that Jefferson considered Jesus, the man, a source of inspiration.  However, it is surprising that Martin Buber, best known for his book of Jewish theology, I and Thou, considered Jesus his great brother.  Buber found much significance in Jesus’ suffering, his self-doubt and his death.  Indeed, Buber wrote:

“From my youth onwards, I have found in Jesus my great brother.  That Christianity has regarded and does regard him as God and Saviour has always appeared to me a fact of the highest importance which for his sake and my own, I must endeavor to understand…  my own fraternally open relationship with him has grown ever stronger and clearer…  For nearly 50 years, the New Testament has been a main concern in my studies.”

In Jesus, Buber found a great son of Israel.  He found the genuine Jewish principle manifest in Jesus’ teachings.  He also felt a strong kinship to the Jesus depicted in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke—that is to say, a strong kinship for the plain and embodied man grappling with concrete situations.

For Buber, it was this Jesus, the one who, struggling in the depth of the actual moment, found eternity.  He had the highest regard for the man who lacked certainty about his nature, who experienced shocks to this certainty, and whose last question was ‘Why’?

If Buber had less affinity for the version of Jesus depicted in the gospel of John, this was because John’s Jesus entered the spiritual realm where he was no longer open to attacks of self-questioning.

Buber ascribed enormous importance to passages like the following one from the Sermon on the Mount (in the gospel of Matthew): “Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors SO THAT you may become the children of your Father in heaven.” Based on his research, Buber held that until Jesus spoke those words, nowhere else had love for others been described as the path to becoming a child of God.

In Buber’s view, Jesus’ statement rose out of Israel’s faith, it implied it, and yet at the same time, supplemented it.  It opened the door to all those who really love.  Buber celebrated Jesus as the religious leader who challenged human beings, for the first time in our history, to Love our enemies and pray for our persecutors so that we might become what we were meant to be, brothers and sisters to one another.

Should you, like Buber or Jefferson, decide to revisit the Bible during this season of Advent then, like them, you will want to acknowledge the ugly parts of the gospels, or of any other Biblical book for that matter, if that’s what those passages deserve.  Neither Buber nor Jefferson approached Scripture with naive reverence.  They relied on their analytic and critical skills to winnow “the grain from the chaff.”

Jefferson explained his approach in a letter he wrote to William Short, a Unitarian with whom he corresponded about religious matters during the years he worked to create his personal Gospel.  In one of those letters, he said:

“We find in the writings of [Jesus’] biographers matter of two distinct descriptions.  First, a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications.  Intermixed with these, again, are sublime ideas of the Supreme Being, aphorisms, and precepts of the purest morality and benevolence, sanctioned by a life of humility, innocence, and simplicity of manners, neglect of riches, absence of worldly ambition and honors, with an eloquence and persuasiveness which have not been surpassed.”

If you (re)visit the gospels, why not start with the gospel of Luke?  Not only does this gospel contain the story at the core of this season’s Christmas celebration, but it is prized for its literary elegance, its great interest in the poor, the “lost,” women, Jews, Samaritans, and Gentiles.  Luke’s book has received much praise for what has been called his universalism based on his willingness to be inclusive of a variety of interests and audiences.  Some have even speculated a woman wrote this gospel.

Who knows, after reading Luke’s account, you, like Jefferson and Buber, might discover beauty and truth in the Biblical story of Jesus.  You might even, in this busy and often spirit-draining time of Advent, find a meaning in Jesus’ birth that’s all your own, enabling you to invite him to the bash you’re throwing in his name.  On some level this holiday is universal–there’s something in it for everyone–Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Buddhists, Christians and atheists.

So go ahead, pick up a Bible and find the gospels.  Read a passage.  Or two.  What is there to lose–except the sinking feeling that Christmas is little more than an opportunity for gift-giving and sweets-eating?

References:  Thomas Jefferson, The Jefferson Bible:  The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (Boston:  Beacon Press, 1989); Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith, trans. Norman P. Goldhawk (London:  Routledge & Kegan, 1951).

#41 Christmas doubts–did Jesus exist?

09 Wednesday Dec 2009

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Some claim that Jesus—whose birthday Christians and plenty of non-Christians are preparing to celebrate—never existed.

The people of Jesus’ time displayed no such skepticism, but for those of us who demand empirical evidence, Jesus is mentioned in several important sources (other than the New Testament).  According to the New Testament scholars Dennis Duling and Norman Perrin, these references describe Jesus as a “wandering artisan” who traveled primarily in southern Palestine and lived in the early decades of what we now call the Common Era.

The principal, extra-Biblical sources about Jesus are Roman, Jewish and Christian.  Works written by the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius during the early 2nd Century are of interest because they confirm that Christian missionaries arrived in Rome during the timeframe in which Paul wrote his letter to the Romans.

More helpful on the question of Jesus’ existence are the Jewish sources.  For example, the historian Josephus (37-100? CE) mentions the execution of James whom he calls “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ.”  Because Christians preserved Josephus’ works through the centuries by hand-copying them, his references to Jesus are suspect—during the copying process, phrases were probably altered or even added to support Christian claims.  However, most scholars agree that Josephus’ brief remark concerning James came from Josephus himself.

Another, longer passage from Josephus is more questionable.  Phrases unlikely to have been written by a Jewish author were woven into the original.  The majority of scholars, however, are of the opinion that this passage was not entirely fabricated.

Here it is, edited to remove the phrases Christian copyists may have added:

About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man.  For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly.  He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks.  When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him.  And the time of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.

Josephus, then, confirms the existence of Jesus who, as Duling and Perrin summarized, “gathered followers, taught, worked miracles, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate.”

This should put to rest the most skeptical of skeptics’ questions about whether Jesus of Nazareth actually lived.  A birthday bash celebrating his coming into the world is, quite simply, based on fact.

Granted, questions about the actual day and year remain.   No one knows exactly on what day Jesus was born.  On this point, the sources are silent.

But, really, does it matter whether we’ve got the right date?

Even if you’re a Christmas-celebrating non-Christian, given the short, dark days of winter, isn’t a festive time of twinkling-lights and sweets-galore and family-time perfect right now?

All things considered, if we’re going to celebrate Jesus’ birthday, December 25 seems as good a day as any.

Reference:  Dennis Duling and Norman Perrin, The New Testament:  Proclamation and Parenesis, Myth and History, 3rd ed. (Fort Worth, TX:  Harcourt College Publishers, 1994).

#40 What do Jesus and Reagan have in common?

22 Sunday Nov 2009

Posted by in God, Philosophy of Religion, Religion, Religious Philosophy

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479px-Official_Portrait_of_President_Reagan_1981iStock_000000875965XSmall

According to Jonathan Chait, the author of The Big Con:  Crackpot Economics and the Fleecing of America, “In the conservative mind, the Ronald Reagan presidency lives on in the golden shimmering past, an ideal that Reagan’s successors must strive to approach but can never fully live up to, like the teachings of Christ.”

Although Reagan left the White House in early 1989, Chait describes how, more than two decades later, conservatives invoke Reagan with the fervor of religious acolytes, “seeking to spread his word to the faithful and beyond.”  As Chait tells it, the conservative press treats Reagan as if he remained a living, breathing presence.  They cite him almost daily, asking:  “What would Reagan do?”

Do you recall, during the debates between the candidates vying for the Republican Presidential nomination, how each candidate tried to distinguish himself from the others by claiming to be the most conservative and thus, the most Reagan-like?  In other words, WWRD has become the litmus test for deciding whether a particular issue or individual passes muster among red-state Americans.

So, take your pick:  WWRD or WWJD?

When the Washington Times listed the key lessons Americans learned from Reagan, the list included, most prominently, “lower taxes.”  In an editorial written for the Weekly Standard, William Kristol urged then-President George W. Bush to “start recapturing the Reaganite high ground of tax cuts and economic growth and opportunity.”  Any self-proclaimed conservative today aspires to emulate Reagan and cut taxes, cut taxes, cut taxes.

Why belabor the obvious, you say?  If you asked that question, then you’ve illustrated how narratives about the lives of public figures can be re-shaped for ideological purposes.  Because the written record, if one wishes to consult it, demonstrates the unthinkable—namely, that Reagan was far from the politician who epitomized conservatism at its purest.

True, Reagan enacted a substantial tax cut during his first year in office and “unapologetically targeted [it toward] the highest income levels.”  But here comes the gotcha moment.  “Panicked by rising deficits,” Reagan’s administration “signed on to the largest tax increase in American history in 1982 and another major tax hike in 1983.” No!  No!  No!  You say.  That simply can’t be!  But it is.  Did you really forget?

Despite the immense quantity of documentation (photographic, electronic and printed) pertaining to the Reagan Presidency, despite the constraining effects provided by the memories of millions of Americans who directly experienced the Reagan era, the life of Reagan is being re-imagined with virtually no protest.

Whether we’re progressives (who hate Reagan) or conservatives (who adore him), we nod our heads whenever Reagan is touted as the “cut-taxes-no-matter-what” President.   Still—if we earnestly wanted to ask WWRD today, the answer might not be that he’d cut taxes—at least, not if we turn to the historical record to formulate a possible answer instead of relying on today’s partly fictional account.

We have, in this re-imagining of Ronald Reagan, an example of how the collective memory of a public figure—in this case, of an American President—can be distorted (by some) for ideological purposes.

By analogy, we might wonder how much the narratives provided by Jesus’ disciples changed during the years that followed his crucifixion.  The earliest New Testament Gospel is the Gospel of Mark; most Biblical scholars assign it a date of about 70 CE at the earliest (a few scholars find evidence suggesting the early part of the 2nd Century).  Mark’s author makes mistakes about Galilean landmarks and customs during the time of Jesus; this supports the conclusion that he never, himself, traveled to Galilee.  Scholars also generally agree that the final portion of the gospel, Mark 16:9-20, which describes the encounter between the resurrected Christ and his disciples, is a later addition.

If two decades have allowed our collective memory of President Reagan to drift in spite of enormous documentary evidence, how did three decades minimum between Jesus’ death and the writing of the Gospel of Mark affect the collective memory of Jesus’ followers?  Note also that, today, skepticism is built into our worldview.  In the early centuries of the common era, belief in demons and magic was widespread, placing few checks on narrative renderings of events.

Until quite recently, most Christians assumed that the Gospels were sources of historical information.  Nineteenth-Century critical scholarship, however, witnessed an explosion of interest in reconstructing the life of Jesus.  Theologians like David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) studied the Gospels, intent on excavating the details of Jesus’ life.  Strauss hoped to write a historically-grounded account for his German audience.  Instead, he discovered that the Gospels contained only a few, truly historical fragments and these were so sparse that he decided it was impossible to reconstruct the personality of the human named Jesus.  The only Jesus accessible through the apostolic testimonies matched post-dated prophecies and proto-messiahs drawn from Jewish messianic literature.  Strauss’ efforts laid the groundwork for the research of later, highly-respected “life of Jesus” researchers like the Nobel-prize winning Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) who agreed with his conclusion about the irretrievability of the details of Jesus’ biography.

Strauss also realized that both supernaturalists and rationalists used faulty approaches when they attempted to construct the life of Jesus.  They read their own opinions about him into the thought-world of primitive Christianity.  Focusing on the passages that supported their views, and from these, they constructed the Jesus they wanted to find.  That Jesus was little more than the reflection of their own psychic faces, reproduced in the ancient, splotchy mirror of the Gospels.  Conservative theologians “found” a picture of the Jesus of conservativism; liberal theologians “found” a picture of the Jesus of liberalism.  Both pictures were, and remain, historically untenable.

Thanks to the research of scholars like Strauss and Schweitzer, the “life of Jesus” approach to reading Scripture was largely abandoned, although it was dusted off in the mid 1980’s and tried again by the (liberal) Jesus Seminar.

What can we learn from the Gospels?  Mostly, we find in them a record of the primitive church’s views about Jesus.  Read through the eyes of his early followers, Jesus rises from the page in the form of a visionary preacher with an apocalyptic message, the bearer of news about the immanent end of time and the coming of the Kingdom of God.

Is the absence of solid, biographical information about Jesus necessarily fatal to Christian theology?  Absolutely not.  Some Christian scholars—Paul Tillich, Gordon Kaufman, David Tracy, and Sallie McFague come to mind—acknowledge this absence and move on to develop compelling theologies in spite of it.  Nonetheless, too many theologians working today fail to acknowledge the abyss between the Jesus whose life story has been almost completely lost to history and the Messiah they claim to find in the Gospels.  Non-specialists follow their lead.

The similarity to the Reagan legacy is striking.  The press, right-wing Republicans, left-wing Democrats, and our fallible memories fail to acknowledge the abyss between the Reagan whose actual life was extensively documented, and the so-dubbed arch-conservative who “always” opted for cutting taxes.  Young people who didn’t witness the Reagan era follow their elders’ lead.

WWJD or WWRD, take your pick.  But to which J or R are you referring?  To a Jesus or a Reagan who reflects your own psychic face and who conveniently shares your opinions?  Or are you referring to a Jesus about whom you admit you know little?  Or to an Reagan whose historical record you’ve studied at least a little?

Post-moderns no longer believe that it’s possible to separate fact from fiction.  There is no such thing as “fact” post-moderns like to say; there are only “accounts” refracted through social norms and personal experience.  Perhaps.  But does this mean we should abandon the effort altogether?

There is a difference between the Gold-standard-for-cutting-taxes (wishful-thinking) Reagan and the author-of-the-largest-tax-increase-in-American-history (actual) Reagan.  There is a difference between the Christ-of-Christian-theology (speculative) Jesus and the Jewish-eschatological-preacher-about-whom-little-is-known (human) Jesus. Paying attention to the difference matters.  It saves us from mistaking the one for the other and dishonoring Truth.

And Truth, even if we can only hope to glimpse it imperfectly, is worth the effort, don’t you think?

References:  Jonathan Chait, The Big Con:  Crackpot Economics and the Fleecing of America (New York:  Houghton Mifflin, 2007); James C. Livingston, Modern Christian Thought:  The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Prentice Hall, 1997).

#39 Getting religious texts to fess up

08 Sunday Nov 2009

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iStock_000005845392LargeBecause they’re driven to find a few good answers, enquiring readers engage texts actively, whether that text is religious or otherwise.  Pencil in hand, they ask tough questions, follow arguments closely (looking for gaps), and watch for hidden claims and assumptions.  They interrogate texts much like a police officer interrogates a witness.

And in fact, books about religious matters are witnesses—to their authors’ points of view.

To get the most out of the investigative process, consider asking the following questions when you read religious texts (this list was drawn from a book by Alister McGrath):

1. Who is the author?

All writers bring to the page their personal experiences, existential questions, faith commitments, world-views, cultural assumptions, concerns, and agendas.  All of these factors shape an author’s writing, whether he is aware of their influence or not.  That’s why it’s important to learn something about the writer’s background.

2. For whom was the text written?

Most texts were written for specific readers.  Authors make assumptions about their readers’ shared knowledge, questions, and interests.  Trying to understand the audience for which a given text was written is especially important if you don’t belong to that audience.  In this case, you’ll have to make an extra effort to interpret the text—translating the unfamiliar into something familiar to you.

3. What is the historical and cultural context of the text?

Writers live in particular places at particular times in history.  They were shaped by the historical and cultural forces to which they’re subject, and their audiences were, too.  A work about God and evil may approach its subjects differently if it was written before World War II than if it was written afterwards.  Again, interpretation is required to understand how the issues the writer discusses are relevant to your own (contemporary) situation.

4. What religious imagery does the text employ?

Many authors rely on imagery from their faith traditions’ sacred texts.  A reference to a journey across the wilderness in a Jewish or Christian work might be elaborated upon by the writer, but she may also simply expect you to pick up on the allusion to the Biblical book of Exodus.  Be alert for such images since they are intended to enrich and deepen the impact of the written word.

5. What does the writer want you to think?

Writers have goals.  One writer may seek to persuade you of the importance of moving from an agnostic point of view to a theistic one; another might want to demonstrate the superiority of Buddhist meditation practices.  Try to identify those opinions a writer hopes you will adopt as a result of reading his work.  Some use rhetorical techniques like “Watch out, God condemns atheists to hell;” others use reasoned arguments—there are a variety of techniques authors use to sway their readers.

6. What does the writer want you to do?

Many writers want you to change what you do.  If they want to convince you to move from an agnostic point of view to a theistic one, they may recommend specific prayers to help you enter into relationship with God.  If they want to convince you of the superiority of Buddhist meditation practices, they may encourage you to incorporate such practices into your daily routine.  Try to identify what the writer wishes you to do differently.

7. What can you take away from your engagement with the text?

Consider what you learn (not necessarily new knowledge) from what you’ve read.  Did the book or passage help you?  Did it make you angry?  Did it encourage you?  Did it lead you to reconsider a cherished position?

So that you might not be left scrambling to find a passage on which to try these questions, one is provided below.  The author of this excerpt is the Lithuanian-French Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995).  During WWII, Levinas served in the French military but his brothers and father were murdered in Lithuania by the Nazi SS.  His philosophical work focuses on ethics—for him, ethics is a fundamental part of our experience when we encounter another human being face-to-face.  This passage comes from the published transcript of a lecture he gave at a colloquium in 1970 on “The Youth of Israel.”  In this lecture, he discussed two passages from the Talmud (Tractate Nazir—pp. 66a and 66b):

Saying Grace in the Third World

Saying grace would be an act of the greatest importance.  To be able to eat and drink is a possibility as extraordinary, as miraculous, as the crossing of the Red Sea.  We do not recognize the miracle this represents because we live in a Europe which, for the moment, has plenty of everything, and not in a Third World country, and because our memory is short.  There they understand that to be able to satisfy one’s hunger is the marvel of marvels.  To return to a stage of indigence in Europe, despite all the progress of civilization, is a most natural possibility for us, as the war years and the concentration camps have shown.  In fact, the route which takes bread from the earth in which it grows to the mouth which eats it is one of the most perilous.  It is to cross the Red Sea.  An old Midrash, conceived in this spirit, teaches:  “Each drop of the rain which is to water your furrows is led by 10,000 angels so that it may reach its destination.”  Nothing is as difficult as being able to feed oneself!  So that the verse “You will eat and be full and you will bless” (Deuteronomy 8:10) is not pious verbiage but the recognition of a daily miracle and of the gratitude it must produce in our souls.

References:  Emmanuel Levinas, “The Youth of Israel,” Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. by Annette Aronowicz, 120-135 (Bloomington, IN:  Indiana University Press, 1990),  132;  Alister McGrath, Christian Spirituality:  An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1999), 138-140.