Questions for Christmas and Epiphany

During Advent, I found myself seeking new directions in my devotional practice. I found that I was less attentive during private times of prayer. After thinking on this for a while, I decided to begin using questions as a part of my prayer life. At a time when I wasn’t sure how to pray, I figured spiritual honesty was the best approach. So, during Christmastide, I reflected on three questions as a part of my devotional and prayer practice: what does Jesus’s Incarnation really mean? How is Jesus incarnate with us today? How can we live that incarnation? I say that I reflected on these questions, rather than “asked” them. I wasn’t seeking a straightforward answer–from myself or God. I wanted to really meditate on these questions, to enter the depth and mystery of Christian life.

Now it is the season of Epiphany, when we in the western Church reflect on the visitation of the magi (or “wise men”) who had been called to a new land to meet a new human who would inaugurate a new kind of life. So, I find myself reflecting on new questions: what New Thing is God doing with the birth of Jesus? How can we have eyes to see and ears to hear, so that we can understand this new thing? How can be be prepared for a New Thing to happen today?

What I have found interesting–and surprising–is that my Epiphany questions seems to almost provide answers to my Christmas ones. What does Jesus’s incarnation mean? It means that God is doing something truly, radically new in the world. How is Jesus incarnate with us today? By opening us to the possibility of more new and radically unexpected possibilities.

Jesus is so familiar to us Christians–and, indeed, even to many non-Christians–that we forget how strange, how uncomfortable, how truly and ridiculously new he was and is. We often domesticate him, make him an easy ally and friend, a crutch for our own personal or political beliefs. We lean on Jesus when it’s convenient, but ignore his inconvenient teachings, his challenges to popular ideas, his call to radical discipleship.

To say that Jesus is a New Thing that God is doing in the world is to accept and admit that, in Jesus, God is changing things. God is not only changing other things, other people, God is changing us. And that’s not easy to hear. We want God to be an insurance policy for who we are now, we want eternal life to be us staying who we are now, forever. But that isn’t what Jesus is offering. That isn’t who Jesus is.

Salvation means being changed. It means being made new. This is, I think, the hard teaching Jesus offers us in the third chapter of John, where we hear that we must be born “again” (or “from above”). Jesus is bringing a new life so radically new that it’s like being born again. We have to die to our past selves so that we can live as new selves, true selves, the selves that God always meant for us to be. This is the promise of God’s love, but it’s not easy. It’s not convenient. This view of Christianity doesn’t allow us to maintain the status quo and feel self-righteous. It forces us to be honest with ourselves, to ask how we have to change to be True.

So let us have eyes to see and ears to hear the New Thing God is doing in Jesus Christ. And let us be gripped by this New Thing, let us be changed, let us become who we truly are.

Talking About God, Part 5 1/2: Answers for Dianne

A reader named Dianne had a number of questions for me after reading a few of my “Talking About God Posts”. Her questions cut right to the heart of Christian theology, pushing a lot of the chaff to the side and getting right to the central questions. You can read her comments yourself, but I’ll summarize her questions here:

1. Why is the Resurrection so important? Why not just focus on Jesus as an exemplary moral teacher?
2. How can Christians have any confidence in the historicity of the Gospels?

Now, when I first sat down to answer her, I spent a good 2 hours writing, only to realize that what I had written wasn’t really an answer to these questions: I had jumped forward to discussing an ontology of the Resurrection, bypassing her more existential and historical questions. So I’m going to roll that work into a second post, and here try to hone in on what Dianne is getting at.

In response to her first question, why the Resurrection is important above and beyond simply appreciating Jesus’ ethical teachings, it seems to me the central answer is this: if Jesus was just an ethical teacher who got in trouble for those teachings and then killed, why should we listen to him? He might have been smart, kind, wise, and committed, but it’s arguable that an ethical system that gets you killed is not an ethical system one should follow. If Christianity ends on Good Friday–if there’s never an Easter Sunday–then the Gospels should be a cautionary tale: “don’t try this at home kids, you’ll get crucified.” It’s only in light of the Resurrection that we can say with confidence and hope, that though you very well might get crucified, in the end those who accept crucifixion in service of justice and truth are vindicated.

Reflecting on this leads us to wonder why Jesus’ followers themselves would have continued their community after Jesus’ death. What I said applies to us, but it would have applied much more so to Jesus’ disciples. He had just been killed for leading their community! The smart thing would have been to lay low. Instead, they begin preaching not only Jesus’ ethical and spiritual message, but asserting a crazy and ridiculous story: that he had died but had risen. Indeed, without Easter morning, it seems highly unlikely that any community would have been sustained after Jesus’ death. As the writer of the Acts of the Apostles himself realized when he included this passage (5:33-38)

When they heard this [the apostles’ claims about Jesus as the Messiah] they were enraged and wanted to kill them. But a Pharisee in the council named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law, respected by all the people, stood up and ordered the men to be put outside for a short time. Then he said to them, “Fellow Israelites, consider carefully what you propose to do to these men. For some time ago Theudas rose up, claiming to be somebody, and a number of men, about four hundred, joined him; but he was killed, and all who followed him were dispersed and disappeared. After him Judas the Galilean rose up at the time of the census and got people to follow him; he also perished, and all who followed him were scattered. So in the present case, I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone; because if this plan or this undertaking if of human origin, it will fail…

Whether this passage reflects a historical event or not, it communicates a clear truth: without understanding Jesus as having been victorious despite his death, it seems unlikely that the community around him would have blossomed the way it did in the decades after he died.

Furthermore, it’s important to remember how many of Jesus’ teachings weren’t a collection of easy ethical injunctions. He certainly insisted that we not judge one another, that we care for the poor and marginalized, and that love should be our guiding ethic. But he also spoke about a final judgement, about the need to take up one’s cross, and about the mysterious kingdom of God. Jesus was not just an ethical teacher. He was as interested in what we today would call mysticism and teleology as he was about social justice, precisely because he recognized that any real ethics had to be holistic: it couldn’t be, on the one hand, a bunch of feel-good, sentimental platitudes, nor could it function as a hard-headed utilitarian pragmatism. Only a view of the world that radically recognized the reality of God and our relationship with God could yield a lifestyle that would be transformative–both for society and the individual.

A Jesus relegated only to ethics lessons is a Jesus stripped of much–most–of what he was really concerned with. This is my central complaint against liberal theology: in an attempt to strip the Gospels of their more mysterious, challenging, ‘supernatural’ elements, liberal theology yields a ghostly apparition of Christ–and, importantly, one who is, conveniently, well suited for a secular, capitalist age. But I don’t think this reflects the reality of Jesus’ life and ministry. Efforts to build a view of Jesus in this vein, like the work of the Jesus Seminar, are often couched in terms of reclaiming the “real” Jesus. But like so much else, this effort seems blind to its own biases. Those who wish to see Jesus as an irreligious ethics professor–surprise, surprise!–find just such a Jesus, just as those who wish to see Jesus as a gun-toting homophobic racist somehow manage to twist him into that as well.

Placing the Resurrection at the center of our understanding of Christ is, at its most basic, simply being true to how his friends and disciples understood Jesus after his death. Whatever the Resurrection was, exactly–and I want to point out that asserting it as true doesn’t necessarily mean taking any hardline, specific “empty tomb” position–it was clearly an experience that radically reshaped the lives of Jesus’ community. To refuse the Resurrection its place as a historically real experience–whatever its ontological or scientific veracity–is to rewrite the history of the Christian community.

To summarize, what I’m saying here is that our historical understanding of Jesus and Christianity–no matter what our personal opinions on it might be–can never be separated from the communal experience of the Resurrection, because it was precisely that experience that has yielded the texts, ideas, and communities we now pore over and participate in. Addressing what we as modern individuals actually believe about the Resurrection will be the topic of a follow-up post. For now, though, let’s move on to Dianne’s second question.

We’ve just now talked about how the whole body of knowledge about Jesus is based on the experience of his Resurrection, that to separate that knowledge from that experience is to alienate that knowledge from the context in which it formed. But this knowledge, these stories about Jesus: what do we know about them? Are they valid sources of information, or just mythical nonsense?

Whereas there has (regrettably) been relatively little popular attention paid to the points I raised above, the historicity of the Bible is a totally different animal. For nearly two centuries, this issue has been front and center in theology. As I discussed in my post on liberal theology, it has shaped entire communities and schools of thought. If you really want to delve into this, you’re going to have to look somewhere beyond this blog, because this isn’t my specific area of interest! You’d do well to look up Rudolf Bultmann, Dom Crossan, and NT Wright for a start. The Jesus Seminar, mentioned above, also has a wide range of decorated Bible Scholars (in fact, Crossan works with them). Just searching on Amazon something like “gospels history” or “historicity of the gospels” will yield dozens of books.

But I can make some basic statements on the question of the historicity of the Gospels, if not as a Biblical scholar then just as an individual believer. For me, there’s one central perspective that needs to be born in mind. So here we go:

First off, I’m not a fundamentalist; I don’t think every word of the Bible is literally true–in large part because many of the words in the Bible are meant as allegory, poetry, and metaphor. But even when we look at those sections that do purport to be more directly historical, I’m more than happy to admit the presence of errors–because I worship God, not a book. The number of contradictions and errors are too many to count, really. Did Jesus overturn the tables in the temple at the beginning of his ministry, as in John, or at the end, as in the Synoptics? Was humankind created last, after all the other animals, or first, before them? Genesis chapters 1 and 2 don’t agree. Did the resurrected Christ appear to large bodies of his followers first in Jerusalem, or did he appear instead to disciples in Galilee? We could fill paragraph after paragraph with these questions.

But pointing out that a document isn’t 100% accurate in every statement is not the same thing as saying that the document is 100% false. Imagine if that was the bar we set for journalism, or science textbooks. Darwin didn’t understand the concept of punctuated equilibrium, for example. He assumed that evolution always occurred at a steady, even pace. Does that make his whole body of work worthless? Newton, likewise, knew nothing of protons and electrons; was his physics therefore complete bunk? Of course, the Bible isn’t anything like scientific writing, so maybe these aren’t the best comparisons. The Bible is more like history or journalism. But historians are constantly updating and improving their interpretations of historical events. And journalists often report on news with only limited information, piecing things together as best they can, improving their picture of events as more information is available. Should they not do this? Should we not report on events until years after the fact, when we can be 99% certain of every claim made?

Furthermore, it’s important to point out that not all claims–in the Bible or in anything else–are of equal weight and importance. Whether Jesus overturned the money changers’ tables at one time, or many months later, doesn’t substantially alter the faith of Christians. Likewise, when the opening chapters of Genesis are understood for what they are–allegorical discussions on the meaning of existence–the radically different pictures given by chapters 1 and 2 can be seen as differing ways of talking about that meaning, rather than conflicting claims about factual events. For the New Testament, much of what is in the Gospels is of a secondary or tertiary nature. When scholars–on either side of the debate–engage in years-long debates on a single word of the text, one can’t help but feel that they are spinning their wheels, wasting time on near trivialities. But there are also, clearly, claims made in the Bible that are of great importance: their truth or falsity radically determines the meaning and validity of Christianity. We might not be too concerned with exactly when and where Jesus was born–but that he was born is clearly crucial. Likewise, whether Jesus delivered the beatitudes on the mount or on the plain doesn’t really affect their meaning–but if he never said anything like them, that’s a whole different issue.

And here we come upon another important point. Humans often forget details. But we have exemplary memory for salient facts and experiences. As an example (a good one, at least, for Americans reading this), try to remember September 11, 2001. I imagine you can immediately remember one thing about that day: two planes flying into the World Trade Center. But what did you eat for breakfast? When did you get up? What were you wearing? I, for one, couldn’t tell you the answers to any of these questions. Does that call into question my claim that, in fact, on that day, two planes slammed into the World Trade Center? I don’t imagine anyone would make that argument (unless they were outlining a radically Idealist or solipsist ontology, but that’s a whole ‘nother discussion). So clearly, it’s quite possible that a person–and a community–could retain valid knowledge about some experiences while forgetting lots of other events, or some of the details surrounding those events.

And it seems to me that the experience of the Resurrection is just such a salient experience. Whatever else might be said about it, the idea that, because some of the details of the stories about Jesus’ life are in dispute, all claims made by the Bible are therefore bunk, is ridiculous. Of course, this is the very bar that Biblical literalists have set–and it’s really them, not critics outside of the Church–that bear the blame for this line of skepticism, since, as I said, I know of no other text that any secular scholar would hold to this high of a bar. But when we reflect on the differing degree of importance in the various claims, I think we can agree that the writers of the Gospels–and the memories which those writers were recording–don’t stand or fall all together. It’s quite possible that folks remembered certain events well, while remembering others less-so. It’s also important to remember that people will certainly remember events differently precisely because they were in different places, with different backgrounds, when a given event occurred. People living in Galilee would probably point to their experience of the Resurrection–again, whatever it was or wasn’t–as beginning in Galilee, while those in Jerusalem probably remember Christ having appeared there first. That doesn’t call into question the veracity of their claims, it simply recognizes a simple and obvious truth about human experience.

Of course, there is also the issue of whether we ought to have any confidence in the claims about the Resurrection itself. For me, this can be divided into two parts: addressing alternate explanations for the experience of the Resurrection, and talking about what exactly it means to speak of ‘the Resurrection’ in the first place. In my next post, I’m going to flop things around and actually address the second issue first. At a later point, I’ll delve into the first question, on alternate explanations–though I should point out that writers much wiser and more knowledgeable than I have already tackled the issue, and I’ll mostly just be summarizing their views, so you could easily search out that work on your own.

Dianne, I hope this post shed some light on my thinking on these issues! I know I have, at best, just knocked a tiny chunk out of the very tip of the iceberg, but of course this a blog, not a multi-volume textbook! Thanks again for your thoughtful questions and I look forward to further dialogue!

Paradox v. Dialectics; or, Milbank v. Žižek (but only barely!)

I just finished read the majority of The Monstrosity of Christ, a sort of position-and-response collaborative work by the Marxist literary-critic-psychologist-cum-philosopher Slavoj Žižek and the Anglican theologian John Milbank. They both diverge on a host of topics, oftentimes striding into tangents so long and circumloquacious that I ended up skipping the last 50 pages or so, as well as about 10 pages of Milbank’s contribution (Žižek wrote an opening position, Milbank responded in about 100 pages, and then Žižek responded to Milbank’s response). In any event, though I found the center of their disagreement interesting and relevant, they spent so much time on tracing out in excruciating detail that they never really honed in on the meat of the matter. Though the book itself is subtitled “Paradox or Dialectic” and this is indeed the crux of their debate, they never address the gap between them directly and explicitly.

I’m not well informed enough on dialectics to give any sort of systematic treatment of it–if you’ve never heard the term before, google it, and Hegel and Marx while you’re at it, and then rejoin me. I’m going to just jump right into what I personally find interesting in the dialogue between these two ontological approaches.

Žižek, unsurprisingly, applies a thoroughly dialectical treatment to reality, crafting a worldview informed heavily by Hegel, Lacan, and post-structuralist, almost hyper-existential thought. Ultimately, he finally rests his case on a sort of self-negating nihlism, at once denying any final unity to the world or ontological ground of hope and redemption while simultaneously committing himself all the more to need  for redemptive political and social action. On this socio-political emphasis he and Milbank, in fact, agree, but Milbank takes pains to paint out why exactly a human subject ought to have confidence that the struggle for meaning, justice, liberation, and enlightenment is more than a courageous fool’s errand. Centrally, where Žižek sees only the antagonistic conflict of polar opposites: transcendent v. immanent, objective v. subjective, impersonal v. personal, order v. chaos, form v. substance, etc., Milbank stresses the paradoxical identification of each of these opposites on a broader, unifying frame: granted that light and dark are counter-determined by one another, what is the underlying reality that allows them both space to be, or to act? Is there an underlying light-and-darkness, which allows each to play out, a stage, as it were, that opposites act upon?

Žižek seems to see only conflict; any two opposites compete in a zero-sum game of winner-takes all: when light appears, darkness is simply banished. There is, for him, no final unity “behind” or “above” or even “within” existence which binds all action, being, structure, and process. This forces him to propose an utterly “parallax” view of reality with no binding oneness, or being-in-itselfness, that accounts for the whole of existence. Each structure, each event, has only its own internal logic. Whatever reality is for me, yours is different, and they are irreconcilable.

This conflicts with the Christian view, certainly, but it also casts the whole scientific enterprise into doubt as well: is there a common logic of cause-and-effect that can be traced, probed, and relied on as we make sense of the world? Or is there only the subjective, existential moment in which we always exist: the “eternal now”? Žižek finally defines reality as the “non-All”, a contradictory term that attempts to build something out of nothing, meaning out of nihlism. It’s often hard to tell when he’s being authentic and when he might be engaging in self-contented sophistry: he is, after-all, a sort of philosopher-rock-star.

Milbank’s position not only preserves space for a teleological and theological discourse, but also–though I’m not sure he really intends or appreciates it–for scientific discourse as well. At the heart of the “paradoxical” vision of reality is a willingness to see things relationally rather than reductively. He refers to this as the “metaxological”, using an unnecessarily obscure term to point out that all existence is relational: the very forces of physics that comprise quantum mechanics explain what quantum particles do to and near each other and how they interact with space-time itself. They say nothing of any particle in isolation–and indeed they insist that such a particle would, for all intents and purposes, not exist. The reality of any one entity is always sustained, caused, contextualized, and valued by other entities in the universe: beings only exist alongside other beings. But instead of taking this to mean that all there is is the struggle of being v. being, Milbank recognizes the implicit ground of beings–Being-itself–that holds together all relationship, even, and infact especially, relationships of opposites. This ground of existence has been called non-dual, it’s been called the coincidence of opposites, but what Milbank stresses, when he cuts out the filler, is that this ground-of-beings–this Being-itself–can only be approached by a subject in a paradoxical–not dialectical–manner.

What interests me most about the distinction between dialectics and paradox is how the former seems to view the world outside of or without time. Hegel’s classic approach was to see the current thesis as existent in one frame of time, opposed to an antithesis in the same frame, and was resolved in a synthesis between them that came in a later frame, and became the new thesis. The old thesis and its antithesis were discarded. Dialectics is seen as a process between otherwise static states. Paradox, however, draws the states out over the stage of time, placing them in context with their causes, effects, and opposites in a network of existence that stands together. The past is not seen as a rubbish heap, but is seen as a necessary constituent in the present, and the future is what the present is doing, rather than an abstract and distant set of possibilities. The crucial difference seems to be that dialectics essentially treats time as exogenous, where paradox understands the opposites of past and future as yet one more polar set bridged by the unity of Being-itself…

…but I’ll be the first to admit my thoughts on this debate are far from worked out. I’m actually realizing the one could apply dialectical or paradoxical analysis to the distinction between paradox and dialectics itself…which, I think, only reinforces the hermeneutical nature of each approach: they don’t describe different realities, but different interpretations of the same reality. Still, I don’t think I’m saying anything that wasn’t already obvious if I throw my support behind paradox over dialectics, though I recognize the value of the latter. Anyway, I hope to have something more systematic and lucid to say about this later…sorry for the rambling!