Miracles and The Agony of Christianity
Sunday, January 9, 2011 at 8:41AM | by Otter A Nazarene friend on Facebook posted a note that probed the question "What Is The Gospel?" He was searching out the boundaries between what's sometimes still called "the social gospel" (doing good) and "the gospel" understood as deliverance from hell.
I might have been a little solipsistic in posting a link to my post on the madness of Christianity. I didn't explain why I posted it: but my intention was to suggest that Christianity, rightly understood, is off its rocker in the first place. Maybe also I wanted to suggest that divisions (so evident in post-Reformation theology but I think absent in New Testament theology) such as the one between "faith" and "faithfulness" or between "belief" and "works" are products of misunderstandings in the dialogues that the New Testament is having with itself.
Anyway, Facebook is not a place for intellectual exercises. And I was called to account because, "Following Christ is not madness."
I thought about letting that slide, but found myself writing this: "[Following Christ is a] belief in things that are not evident, by its own testimony. To believe in things for no reason, or for radically subjective reasons, is madness (though madness might be both beautiful and true)."
The rejoinder was that "Faith and trust is [sic] my reason" for believing in God.
Let me say that I understand that trawling Facebook for any political or religious sample is not a good way to do theology, and I'm really only using his comments for illustration purposes. I am neither surprised nor outraged by this guy's sweeping denunciation of reality. For if "reality" has any meaning, it has to do with things that are accessible to our senses. If faith and trust is reason enough, then my belief in elves and fairy giraffes with butterfly wings is warrant enough for their reality: after all, the very existence of the sun is evidence that something magical with wings is there. Right? Right? Right? Well, why not?
What I do want to say about my friends' friend's comments though is that they articulate nicely a tendency in Christianity to slip out from under history, to evade it, and in so doing to destroy itself. This is not "faith" but "fantasy." The person seeking to understand Christianity, when confronted with this sort of talk, is left scratching his head and wondering if in fact it means anything.
To their credit, Paul and the other New Testament writers knew you needed reasons anchored not in "my faith and trust" but in history. Therefore they appealed to prophecy first and miracles second.
The argument from prophecy is a bit of a dead letter in my opinion, because of the problem of intertextuality: that is, the gospel writers "wrote up" the life of Jesus less with an eye on factual accuracy (look at the significant variations in the gospel's factual accounts) and more with an eye on persuading the reader from prophecy.
Which is why I think that Mark and John are far and away the most "true" gospels. Mark takes a real Jewish life and presents it specifically in the pattern of Israelite history in order to make his point that Jesus is the Messiah. It's a composition so breathtaking in its simple elegance that Matthew and Luke tried to clean it up a bit and improve upon it, with (I think) unhappy results.
John meanwhile writes a complex but highly accessible allegory of the soul in its encounter with the logos through Jesus.
Putting it another way, the gospel writers read the Hebrew scriptures, and wrote their materials specifically and unabashedly to demonstrate that Jesus fulfilled them. Which is not good evidence.
But the miracles that inhabited the early church are another matter. They're written about so strongly and frankly in the earliest Christian writings, continually through at least the second century, that it's impossible to think that Paul or Clement could have the balls to fake them up. I mean, you could write with a wink and a nudge about just about anything in Christianity, trusting your audience not to take things too literally... but when you start telling your readers how to administrate their miracles, you have to have the gall of an Army mule to send the letter if there are no miracles.
And so when Paul wants to give evidence to the Galatians for his belief that the Torah does not hold sway over the Gentiles who have been accepted by God, he appeals specifically to the historical, visible evidence of the miracles (Galatians 3:1-5).
Putting it another way, some freaky shit was going down in Corinth. There was a long strange trip in Galatia.
For my Facebook interlocutor to say that he's sorry for me because I do not see "evidence" for God must be equivalent to him saying that he does see miracles, and credits them.
At which point, if it were not Facebook but a place for real conversation, I might well probe this. Which miracles? What if I haven't seen them?
As it happens, I have seen miracles, a few persuasive, most a lot less: I've been asked at times to talk about them, but typically do not simply because it puts the listener in the position of either calling me a liar or believing on my word alone (which is a slender hook to hang faith on). We could go on at length about the position that puts us in, but it's getting late.
But one thing I can say pretty definitely: I cannot find much to talk about with somebody whose faith and trust are reason enough.
All over America right now, people are getting up and getting ready for church. They are not fools. Not all of them. It sort of depends on what one finds coming out of one's mouth.
Reader Comments (9)
What is the Gospel? This question, perhaps more than any other, has been the pivotal inquiry as I have come back to Christianity. The classic Evangelical answer of crucifixion-as-substitution-to avoid-eternal-torment just doesn't hang together for me. It is an answer that might make sense of Jesus life in hindsight (though it is not one that nourishes me spiritually) but it can't have been the message Jesus was teaching and sending his followers out to teach during his lifetime.
Of course we can never know (in the intellectual, historical sense) what Jesus said and what his disciples heard, even if you subscribe to the New Testament as literal Gospel Truth. But we can reasonable recreate a sense of a message that is neither a mere social gospel nor a mere fire-insurance policy and really pretty radically transformative.
I like the way you phrase this part, Sandra: "The classic Evangelical answer of crucifixion-as-substitution-to avoid-eternal-torment just doesn't hang together for me. It is an answer that might make sense of Jesus life in hindsight (though it is not one that nourishes me spiritually) but it can't have been the message Jesus was teaching and sending his followers out to teach during his lifetime."
That's very well put, and very accurate, in my opinion.
Thank you.
Setting aside the “no reason” reason for the nonce (as I'm not sure what that would look like), please tell me more about these radically subjective reasons. Are you of the tribe that say they only believe in the sort of facts that can be verified by the scientific method? Science, of course, leaves untouched huge swaths of reality—politics, economics, beauty, relationships, religion—in fact, I’d argue that science can’t address any of the questions that loom largest in the lives of most of us. Nonetheless, the scientific method is the gold standard--perhaps the only nearly-universally acknowledged standard--of “objective reality” in the developed world . . . so, once we venture beyond the thin strip of life that can be addressed by the scientific method, what, in your opinion, might a human being legitimately base one’s faith upon? What basis for belief is available that is not radically subjective?
Great question, Susan. (I need to rubber stamp your comments that way.)
I don't think science is the only way to know things. Not at all.
I do, however, think that it's the best available tool we have for sorting out the meaning-if-any of claims that we make about truth and The Way Things Are ®.
As you say, there are six million things we do every day that are funded by our imagination and intuition and "subjective experience."
But the Christian is less in the position of someone who has (subjectively) fallen in love and much more in the position of someone who has fallen in love and demanded that everybody else should fall in love with the same girl.
In other words, his subjective experience of faith (which I believe to be totally valid and real) has become a claim upon "truth," whatever that might mean.
If your Muslim friends have true, real subjective experiences of Islam's power and beauty, it doesn't follow that Mohammed made his midnight ride on a winged horse. To reduce or reject that story would be offensive to Islam, but in making their subjective experience of faith ("Islam has been wonderful for me and proven itself true") into an objective truth-claim ("Islam, its Book, and its Prophet are the definitive voice of God") is just a non-starter. It's a claim for which the subjective evidence does not answer.
In the case of my interlocutor, I can see your point: it's a bit mad, say, to fall in love and get married. But people do it all the time. It might even be the right thing to do, which is why I quickly add that it might be beautiful and true. But the beauty and truth are generally not guaranteed by the madness that bring them about. They're a happy accident. And if Christianity turns out to be true and beautiful in some objective sense that justifies the words, "It is all true," it will be a happy, happy accident, undetermined by the faith and experiences of those who hold to the faith.
GREAT parallel example re: Islam. It raises a really, really interesting question (OK, maybe not objectively interesting, ;) but a personally relevant one as I think this stuff through):
Does the subjective experience that our Muslim friend has of Islam’s power and beauty lend credence to the idea that Mohammed made a midnight ride on a winged horse?
I’d prefer to say, “no, it doesn’t,” but I think that before I could answer “yeah” or “neigh” (oh--ouch! how'd that pun get in there?) I would want to know more about the connections between the experience and the myth and the power.
Because as I reflect on what makes me a believer, I find there are many, many factors weaving together. One of the most compelling clumps is that my personal (subjective!) experience is—or “seems to be”, if you prefer—connected to the Christian story reflected in scripture, and that the older I get, the more often and significantly this is the case.
Now, we don’t know, of course, if this is the case 1) because more years of discipleship lead to greater access to and a fuller experience of real truth, or 2) because I’m getting more progressively brainwashed by the story I’m immersing myself in, and thus my perception of real truth is getting more and more distorted as I “see” things that aren’t there.
But returning to Mohammed’s story: beautiful/intriguing stories are a dime a dozen (OK—not quite that common, but we can think of many, many examples), and beautiful/intriguing stories that act as explicators and guides to one’s experience of life are certainly not unheard-of either, so I think that when these stories plus these experiences plus power (both profound personal/societal transformation and signs'n'wonders, or “freaky shit”, if you will) combine in a significant manner, well, that’s when I would start to pay attention.
It’s not, of course, that one can reason backward from power + experience + story and deduce that the flying fairy giraffes in your story must exist, of course. But if one acknowledges the existence of real objective truth of a sort that can’t be validated by the scientific method—and we do—then obviously, we have to start somewhere in determining what wacked-out universal truth claims we will attend to and what we will dismiss out-of-hand. That’s where I start.
Do you find that to be a reasonable place to start, and if not, where do you start? We agree that the scientific method is the best tool we (as a culture) have to work with regarding objective truth—the question is, what do you do when that tool is inadequate for the task at hand? Where does one even begin?
Susan,
I love this question: how does one ascertain universal Truths if the only measures are subjective experience? Kinda like the question: how do you know Great Art?
I don't have a good answer (and to judge from the violent disagreements in the art world, neither do they!) but it is a good meditation after leaving the fundamentalist thinking that "God said it, I believe it, and that's good enough for me."
Thus the Incomparable Soozin:
First of all, for the pun you are evil and must be destroyed.
Second, for the question you are sublime and must be preserved at all costs.
My own experience is that to believe in the myth frequently makes the myth true. I think faith is a curious thing that way.
To really believe in a god (or even another person) tends to make that faith concrete and actual in the real world. I've observed that, anyway, and Mark's gospel seems to make it stick when it says that Jesus could do no great miracles where he was not believed in. A strange little comment in a gospel that emphasizes the authority of Jesus. But there it is.
And this is a colossal problem for "knowledge" or science or whatever, which cannot add the precondition "If you believe" to its observations.
And, as we're observing, a colossal problem for faith, because it disjoints what we mean when we use words like "truth" and "believe." To say "Jesus is the Truth" and to mean really "Jesus is the Truth [for those who believe]" is to say two different things.
And putting it slightly differently, you can't easily simultaneously believe in a myth and not believe in a myth. If I say, "God does miracles through the power of Jesus' resurrection" and wink at myself, believing this is a story for the untutored masses, I'm in for some letdowns. It's the nature of myth that you sot of have to live in the story. And to wink at oneself while doing that is a tricky business: that ironic distance represented by the wink most often represents a form of disbelief in the myth, often (but not always) at some crucial level that just turns the whole thing into fantasy.
So we can start there.
Or:
Well, I'm not sure what you mean by "objective truth" since the definition of objective truth sort of involves the ability of ALL sane and reasonable people to see it by looking.
If I have to have faith to see that a bowling ball takes X ticks to get to the bottom of the Tower of Pisa, if I have to want to see it accomplish the journey in X ticks, then "objective truth" has no meaning.
And religious truth (especially where it lays claim to unverifiable facts) of the sort you're claiming here (objectively true, but not verifiable) would have to sit in a category well to the south of "objective," if that word's to have any meaning.
I think here you're playing a game that the fundamentalists like to play: "It's all fact," except it cannot be verified as fact must be verified to count as fact. That hasn't served the fundies very well, and maybe you can persuade me that "objectively true" and "fact" here mean different things, but I'm not sure how yet.
We _could_ separate objective truth from "knowledge," but I kind of think that's cheating by introducing a distinction that clouds the issue. "Well, it's true, we just don't KNOW it's true" would be a kind of scary statement to commit to.
Scary because it's sort of insane.
But that's where Christianity's crazy comes from, in the absence of miracles.
Prof Otter,
Join the club. I’m not sure what I mean by "objective truth" either. Ditto “fact.” Ditto “knowledge.” I suppose if we were being really rigorous, we would hammer out the distinctions for the purposes of this conversation. We could copyright the definitions and make our fortunes as philosophers.
I’m cool with that. Objectivity does have meaning, but I suspect we have different notions of what that meaning is, and even how meaningful it is. Let the defining of terms begin: My philosopher’s dictionary (Yes, I have one. I keep it on the shelf next to The Shopaholic Takes Manhattan to lend me an air of urbane sophistication.) seems to allow for your usage (which “involves the ability of ALL sane and reasonable people to see it by looking.”), but only for part of my usage. When I say “objective truth”, I refer to truth that “exists in itself independently of any subjective viewpoint.” However, the entries on “objective” all go on to say things to the effect that objective truth is truth “we can come to know about independently of any subjective viewpoint.” But this is where I take issue with that notion of objectivity. With every type of knowledge, there is an object—the thing that is known—and a subject—the thing that knows. In that sense, all knowledge is both subjective and objective. What human being is capable of forsaking his or her “subjective viewpoint”? It works as an abstract, philosophical ideal, but it does not connect with the world you and I live in. We are subject—we see everything through a subjective viewpoint. There are ways to offset that subjectivity—and that’s precisely where community consensus and the scientific method are so very critically useful—but there is no way to entirely escape it.
Ah, yes—I think this is where our main disagreement lies. I agree that it’s a scary statement, but I believe it is our common predicament that there are some things (many and important things) that we cannot KNOW for certain in a material, sensory way. That’s not insane, that’s just life as a finite human being. I view the insistence of fundamentalists that they have the edge on the rest of humanity when it comes to knowledge as a sort of neurosis along those lines . . . but it’s not that far removed from the shockingly prevalent neurosis of those who worship science. In fact, I’d argue that the modern obsession with facts of the scientific sort is a coping mechanism of sorts, a defense against uncertainty, an attempt to escape the horror of fundamental uncertainty by relentlessly trying to push all of life into quantifiable entities—things that can be totted up and have price tags slapped on them.