The Shackles of Christianity
Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 8:40AM | by Otter I thought about posting my reply to this excellent comment by Natalie in the comments section of this post.
But it's an energetic enough topic for several posts. It's a two-bottles-of-Riesling discussion.
Here's Natalie, sounding off on my response to the Blair-Hitchens debate on the resolution that religion is good for the world:
I was poised to start a discussion elsewhere about this debate, and one of my key points addressed tribalism as well.
Blair said several times that Christianity isn't really about divisiveness, us vs. them. But is that a universal? What about the increased tribalism associated with poverty? History demonstrates that as times get tough we define Our Own more stringently. What responsibility do people well-off enough to state confidently, "Christianity is really about loving your neighbor" have toward people not well-off enough to get past Take Care of Our Own?
Religion's ugly divisiveness seems to rear its head more as education and overall quality of life go down. Do people like Hitchens and Sam Harris carry the point when they speak of the massive potential energy of such divisiveness?
I think they do carry the point, but not as a matter of necessity.
Religions are not all the same this way, or shouldn't be.
A religion that claims that the foundational truth of the cosmos is love of one's neighbor and one's enemy, that this love is self-sacrificial and not coercive, stands a much better chance of evading Hitchens' charge than one that founds itself on having the exclusive means of avoiding judgment. Hitchens rightly replies to that by saying, "Yeah, but right from the first Christianity obligates itself to the god of the Old Testament," which more or less short-circuits its ability to speak with moral clarity.
In other words, there is a structural problem that Christianity creates for itself, an internal contradiction that it seeks endlessly to evade, but really cannot. It doesn't have to be there. But it is. You cannot be both non-coercive and coercive, and Hitchens is (I think) right to point this out.
Christianity created this problem for itself early on by committing itself to the very dubious "proof" of Jesus' divine anointing from prophecy. That is, it looked at such Hebrew Bible passages as Psalm 22 or Isaiah 53 (the examples are endless) as clear evidence that God had from the first been speaking about Jesus, shaping and planning the history of Israel and Judah around Jesus' coming.
That strategy is unpersuasive now for one really good reason: intertextuality. That is, Jesus and the gospel writers had read the Hebrew Bible carefully, and understood that the messianic hopes of the Jews were bound up in such verses. Putting it bluntly, you couldn't have a messiah who didn't cleanse the temple of foreigners / traders. (The Hebrew idiom for both was "Canaanites." See Zechariah 14:21.) Similarly, in the earliest and most Semitic gospel, Mark, Psalm 22 becomes already the pattern for the cross, probably not intentionally as a slavish historical "fulfillment," but as a literary imitation. Putting that another way, I think that Mark intends to take all of the Hebrew Bible as a pattern for his story, to rewrite the Hebrew Bible through the new experience (which conspicuously had a fairly pale though I think still-distinct resurrection account in its original form.)
Add to that the claim reiterated several times in the New Testament that Jesus fulfills the scriptures, and that the early church (which grew up obviously in a much different intellectual climate than we have now) considered the fulfillment of prophecy its ace in the hole for apologetics, throw in a pinch of inerrantist theology that considers every syllable of scripture to be immutable and divine.... well, you get the idea.
And it's a hopeless muddle for Christianity, because you can't merely take the New Testament without the explanatory material. To his credit, in last night's debate, Tony Blair distanced himself from any sort of absolutism about scripture. That is, he tried to make clear that one can distil the important part of faith from the texts that inspire it. But he was painfully conscious that you can only do that so far. And I can't recall whether Hitchens pointed this out to Blair or to the befuddled and hopeless William Dembski in his painful debate with him, but that awful god of Joshua and Judges and Deuteronomy is not "interpretation." It's Christian scripture, and nobody (except Marcion) has come forward to say, "... and we reject it, root and branch." They can't, since they excommunicated Marcion, since the "branch" is (they claim) their own faith.
I really do not think it has to be that way.
But the twin shackles here are a belief in the plenary inspiration of scripture (including the Hebrew Bible) which is written into their story from the beginning, and an unwillingness to correct the ancient texts.
Without those, the majestic, sweeping, and truly transformative lines of the Gospels and epistles about the love of God really do become what Hitchens says: a protest against Christianity itself. As attractive as it might be that "God is love," you can't really do it in the presence of injustices such as those committed by God.
Religion chooses what it will be. So far, I think where Hitchens is wrong about Christianity, it's because Christians choose not to be serious about their own antecedents but to be very serious about what's best about them. They give the lie to their own dogmatics and doctrines in order to give birth to a god worth worshiping.
Reader Comments (8)
Keep in mind, though, that the later gospels written more for gentiles DO set Jesus up as trying to fix the old way of doing things, such as when he declares all foods clean by saying that it's what comes out of your body that matters more than what goes into it.
That's a great point, Victoria (and whoever taught you literary analytical skills should be paid a lot more).
But notice that this "revision" of the Old Testament only goes so far. You get comments like, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets...." And these are clearly (?) guards against a wholesale revision of the OT.
I would say that it varies from book to book really where the emphasis in that tension (or contradiction) lies: the Gospel of John and John's epistles are pretty aggressively on the side of totally rewriting the Torah. But other gospels are more cautious.
Otter, when you say
it begins to sound as if you have a fairly well-crafted vision for a kindler, gentler Christianity (as opposed to simply supplying critiques of the current state of Christianity).I feel like I’ve been following Riparian Church closely enough to take a good guess at what the exit strategy looks like—the exodus from our present shackled, muddled state and into . . . well, one thing at a time.
The Route Out, then: 1) Cut ourselves free from the OT (entirely, a la Marcion, or maybe by jettisoning the problematic chunks). 2) Then, though I don’t know that you’ve addressed this explicitly, I imagine there is some rearrangement of the NT that needs to happen, as we do not want to maintain a link between Jesus and the God of the OT. I’m not sure where this leaves us regarding the divinity of Jesus. 3) I’m pretty sure the crucifixion remains, as long as it is cast as an exemplary act of self-sacrificial love and not as propitiation. 4) We affirm the resurrection as a metaphor, minimally. A bodily resurrection does not have to be ruled out but cannot be insisted upon, so I think that means that we simply suspend judgment on the historicity of the resurrection. 5) Love is paramount (but I’m unclear on whether there are strong boundaries around what is perceived as loving vs. unloving behavior, or if that is left to the discernment of the individual).
All of the above is, I think, to be accomplished by way of letting go of the notion of the inerrancy of Scripture, but I thought it best to be as specific as possible about what that might mean.
So. There we are. Is that accurate, as far as it goes? And if so, let’s move on to the more interesting question: what does the newly deconstructed/reconstructed church look like? (You will correct me if I’m wrong, but because you have spoken with enthusiasm for both ritual and community, I assume you would be in favor of some sort of organized religion—a “church” of one sort or another.) My—ahem!—extensive resource on Wikipedia tells me that Marcion himself founded a church that lasted a few hundred years, and some of the above puts me in mind of the Unitarian Universalist Church. Would the Riparian Church resemble either of those churches?
Susan, excellent excellent excellent.
First, I'm pretty sure there's no going back to Marcion, but I think that the church has to be really clear about what inspiration does and doesn't mean. It has to take seriously that, as the community of the Holy Spirit, it isn't the slave of scripture but its right interpreter, and then it needs to rigorously and boldly interpret the hell out of the Old Testament (and parts of the new).
Has it done that? Not until it's crystal clear to the seeker, "No. We do not worship the god of Joshua, and wouldn't even if he showed up in a chariot of fire and said, 'Kill your enemies right down to the child that was born yesterday. But keep the women for yourselves, on pain of Our Extreme Displeasure.'"
I don't recommend throwing out the OT, as the conception of Messiah becomes dangerously loose if disconnected from its Jewish roots. I think Christians need to constantly emphasize the way in which Jesus does not only "fulfill" those hopes but the way in which he does that by overturning a lot of those hopes. As I write in the post, I'm not terribly persuaded by the arguments from prophecy, so I don't mean that so much. But I mean that the messiah that suffers and dies totally rewrites the hopes patterned after Joshua.
I do have a hard time taking Unitarian Universalism very seriously. It does a lot of good, probably: as a bit of an outsider I can't speak to that. But having read the premises and the precepts, I'm not sure it's really got all that much to do with Jesus in the end. Which I guess is fine, if you're inclined that way, but I'm looking at Christianity here: and a Jesus without the miraculous and without some sort of authority over one's thoughts and actions is hardly a Jesus worth inclusion in your religion. (I might be wronging UU's here and would welcome correction.)
I really love the way you articulate the importance of the Resurrection though:
I just really like that phrase "a metaphor, minimally." You have to begin there, I think. Whatever experiences move one towards a more "strong" view of resurrection are naturally important and can and must shape that experience. But I just think it's really evil to demand a belief in something as highly counterintuitive in the physical historical resurrection with no evidence whatever.
It does seem to me that we are mythic at heart, though. Or many of us are. If you tell a kid of fifteen that there was a historical resurrection, he might well believe and see some pretty unusual things. Anything that focuses our faith tends to waken parts of the mind that otherwise are dormant or less active. I'm not sure how desirable that is... but I'm very, very sure that to insist on that person believing in a historical resurrection without further evidence as he grows up is to demand that his mind remain that of a child.
And perhaps that should remain intrinsic to Christianity. I'm not qualified to say. Perhaps that's a way of "preserving" the myth, but I think rather it's become a way of tangling "myth" with "fact," much as transubstantiation tangles myth ("this is the body of Jesus...") with fact ("... literally, in every sense.")
So glad to see that I'm tracking with you accurately, Otter. But to be clear: I am not nominating myself for membership at the Riparian Church, just trying to get a handle on what it's all about.
The sticking point here seems to be the relationship between the reader (believer/follower/seeker, whatever) and the scripture. I totally agree that the community of the Holy Spirit has the responsibility of interpreting scripture, but there is a great deal of tension between your understanding and mine, I think, when we look at the nature of that relationship. By virtue of my humanity, I have been given a certain sovereignty over myself--I can only believe what I can honestly believe, etc (I don't know if that's clear; I haven't parsed out what I mean very well), and I have the responsibility to bring my whole self honestly into understanding and engaging with the text--well, with all of life, really, but scripture also.
So, when I hear you and others saying, "I do not and cannot believe X. I believe X is wicked, and more than that, it is unconscionable for you to insist that I do believe it," I really think I get that, and I respect that. But I can't join you there. While I can understand folks that look at scripture and see irreconcilable differences in the revelation of God's character such that they feel honesty demands that people stop trying to reconcile them and move on from there, for me to do that would be to do violence to my own sense of reality. I have submitted my sovereign self to the authority of . . . well, of many things, I suppose, but the Spirit, the scriptures and the church are chief among them, and my reasons for doing so spring from my beliefs about reality. And what is true and good and worthy. Those beliefs are then shaped by the HS, the scriptures, and the church over time, of course, and so we grow further into (or out of) our beliefs, but however I got here, here I am, and . . . Here I stand. I am what I am. Fill in whatever appropriate quote springs to mind.
What you propose in the way of relating to scripture is an obvious and natural course of action for you, but for me it would involve not just a reshuffling of my understanding of the proper way to interpret scripture, or even reshaping my identity as a Christian--it would literally require a change in my understanding of reality. I can see others trying to smash all of scripture into a cohesive whole, only to see it spring apart as soon as they let go, but that is not my experience. I receive it as a whole--an aggravating, mysterious whole--but it stays together as whole and actually lives together as a whole unless I begin plucking out organs and dismembering limbs and basically vivesecting it. The bodily resurrection of Jesus is--to switch analogies abruptly--the lynchpin, and the moment you remove it, all of it--all of everything--falls apart and becomes a bunch of junk that frankly just isn't even that interesting. (Hence the curiousity about what a Riparian Church would look like--would I like it, would I fit in, is it appealing.)
Does that make sense? I have no idea how much of what I'm trying to express is actually communicable and would appreciate your honest feedback on what makes sense, or doesn't.
Susan,
I don't think there's any "joining" Riparian Church. The name is awfully ironic, in that it's just sort of hanging out by the riverbank. I'm not interested in followers, though I am interested in people like me for whom it is NOT true that:
And I think most people who are "recovering evangelicals" or whatever recognize such receiving-scripture-as-a-whole. Not in an "Oh, you'll get over it, Sooz" way, but rather, "Yeah... I remember thinking that way."
I doubt seriously that I would want you or anybody else to change, if you are content in the church. Most of the people I know who are in the church lead more productive lives than those who are outside of it, and that might be the best argument for just sucking it up and making peace with the Deuteronomistic Historian.
But I can't quite get there.
I just wouldn't want you to think that there's some new congregation in the offing. I sort of rake over the coals of Christian faith because I really want to understand it. I know there's a lot there. But I hate what it's done to me and people like me, asking us to be mad for the sake of goodness instead of so good we become mad.
"It's your turn to pay. I paid last time, and you drank more than I did, you insufferable hound."We are on twin missions, then, as we cross paths at Riparian Church—looking for an understanding of what the hell is going on when the Church deals out evil, crippling, soul-killing blows instead of life-giving healing. God bless you in that, my friend.
Not sure how to do the nifty little quote thing, but
"I don't think there's any "joining" Riparian Church. The name is awfully ironic, in that it's just sort of hanging out by the riverbank. "
To me, that would be the best kind of church.