A conservative Christian notion of "transcendental" values

One of my Facebook friends posted a conservative Christian article by Del Tackett, from a site rather pretentiously called The Truth Project: Truth Observed. The piece is called The Roots of Moral Authority 09/25/2011. The Truth Project is a effort of the major Christian Right group, Focus on the Family. (See Ginny Mooney, The Truth Project's Del Tackett Hosts New Program Christian Post 03/01/2011)

Tackett makes a conventional conservative Christian argument that only believers in God, and presumably only believers who believe in God in the correct Christian way, can be moral or ethical:

The only real basis for ethical standards must reside in that which is transcendent. ...

The ultimate basis for moral authority is found in the very nature and character of God. ...

Without God, there is no real ethic — only temporary, selfish ones, based on lust for getting our own way and power.

I certainly understand the argument that moral standards should be transcendent and in a religious context I would make that argument myself.

It's easy for people to fit that into their own religious frame of reference. But in terms of Christian theology as well as practical morality, it quickly gets more complex than that. After all, the Good Samaritan parable, which is central to Christian religious teaching, involves a man with the wrong transcendent values - the Samaritan variation of Judaism - doing the moral thing when those with the right transcendent values - the adherents of the majority Jewish religion - consciously refused to do the moral thing.

And, in practice, Christians understand the transcendent values of the Christian Scriptures in the context of Christian tradition and social standards. Without humility and good sense, people with the conviction that they understand God's transcendent will precisely can wind up doing very bad things thinking God is on their side. It's also not the case that only people who believe in God, or only people who believe in God in the Christian way, have "no real ethic." It may be satisfying for us Christians to think so, but it's not reality.

Tags: christian right, christianity, del tackett

Nietzsche and Christianity (2 of 2)

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

This is a continutation of yesterday's post on the two books Nietzsches Ideen zur Geschichte des Christentums [Nietzsche's Ideas on the History of Christianity] (1938) by Ernst [Wilhelm] Benz (1907-1978) and Nietzsche und das Christentum [Nietzsche and Christianity] (1938) by Karl Jaspers (1883-1969).

Jaspers' book is more focused on some critical observations about Nietzsche's broad views on Christianity.

Jaspers makes the argument that some of Nitzsche's key philosophical ideas were essentially Christian. This particular contention doesn't hold up well. Christianity is scarcely the only religion or philosophy that places a high value on truth, for instance, one of the aspects of Nietzsche's thought that Jaspers sees as deriving from Christianity. And the fact that Christianity was a decisive influence on the scienfic outlook that developed in Europe does not mean that science is essentially Christian. For centuries it was the Muslim world that was producing the key scientific developments while Christian Europe was pretty much an underdeveloped backwater in comparison. The revolutionary advances in European science didn't begin until Europeans began to integrate the Aristotlean materialist philosophy and scientific thinking from the Muslim world, to which the Muslim portions of the Iberian Peninsula were a key contact point.

Nietzsche saw Jesus as a special being who practiced a unity of life and belief, someone very like Buddha. But it's hard to see what's specifically Christian about it. A respectful non-Christian view of Jesus would be a better description. Nietzsche rejected the Resurrection as both a physical and spiritual event. He rejected the teaching of Christianity from Jesus' earliest disciples on. He rejected the teachings of St. Paul, the first great Christian theologian. Nietzsche's image of Jesus may be one that fits well in the mystical tradition from which Nietzsche drew so much inspiration. But his Jesus is an ahistorical one. He apparently viewed Jesus as having been scarcely effected by, much less consciously accepting, his own Jewish religion and as being virtually independent of the Christian religion his followers created. Good or bad, brilliant or muddled, it's hard to see how we could call that essentially Christian.

Along with the European concept of science, more specifically the notion that the whole world of existence is a proper object for human study, Jaspers also points to Nietzsche's belief in a fundamental flaw in human beings and to a world-historical vision that explains the movement of history as being beliefs basically derived from Christian thought. The belief in a fundamental flaw in humanity would seem to be the most obvious candidate for Christian roots, in the Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin. But Jaspers devotes only a few paragraphs to that belief of Nietzsche's, and does not specifically link it to Original Sin.

Although his claims for the particularly Christian nature of these parts of Nietzsche's thinking don't hold up very well, his discussions of those issues certainly sheds light on Nietzsche's understanding of Christianity. For example:

Aus dem christlichen Geschichtsgedanken ist durch eine Verwandlung die Geschichtsphilosophie all weltliches Totalwissen hervorgegangen. Herder, Kant, Hegel und Marx stehen in der Descendenz des christlichen Gedankens und mit ihnen auch Nietzsche. Immer ist eine Vision des Ganzen maßgebend, immer ein Bewußtsein des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters als eines bestimmten Ortes im Gesamtablauf, und zwar immer als Krise, als ein alles entscheidender Übergang; immer besteht die Neigung, irgendwo in der Vergangenheit den Höhepunkt, den Heilsursprung zu erblicken und diesen wieder als die Möglichkeit der eigenen Gegenwart zu sehen; immer wird als Grundform des Geschehens gedacht, daß wahre, gesunde Zustande durch ein Gift, durch ein den Menschen sich selbst entfremdendes Geschehen, durch eine Untat, ein Böses ruiniert, zersetzt und verkehrt worden seien und nun widerhergestellt werden müßten. Der Inhalt all dieser Kategorien wechselt, sie selber aber kehren ständig wieder.

[The philosophy of history [that assumes to be] a total science of everything secular came out of Christian thinking on history through a transformation. Herder, Kant, Hegel and Marx stand in the tradition of Christian thought and, with them, Nietzsche also. Always a vision of the whole is standard, always a consciousness of the present age as a particular place in the total order of even, and that always as crisis, as a trasition that will decide everything; there always exists the tendency to see in the past the high point, the holy origin to, and to see it again as the possibility of one's own present; always the basic form of events is conceived as that the true, healthy state has been ruined, corroded and turned upside down by a poison, by events that alienate people from themselves, by a crime, an evil, and now must be restored. The content of all these categories changes, but it itself returns again and again.]

I would note here that the notion of seeing a high point of history in the past would not apply to Karl Marx's view of history, which did not look to restore some ideal state from the past but rather to create a greater future beyond the capitalist stage of economic development.

Jaspers also makes a very perceptive point about understanding Nietzsche's thought. He argues that understanding Nietzsche means to join him in his distinctive critical process of thinking, of looking at ideas and historical processes in their dynamic development and at the many contradictory implications and meanings in them. As he puts it:

Jede Niederschrift, jeder Augenblickseinfall gehören bei Nietzsche zum Werk. Wenn Nietzsche selbst schon die Abgleitungen von seinen besten Gedanken vollzieht, wenn er abfällt in das Fanatische und in das Spielerische, wenn sich in seinen Sätzen ein dichtes Vordergrundsgestrüpp ausbreitet, wenn die Leidenschaft des Augenblicks ihn absichtlich ungerecht werden läßt, so ist alles das um so sichtbarer geworden, weil jede Notiz, auch alles von ihm nicht mehr kritisch Geprüfte, zu seinem Werk gehört, und es kein Mittel gibt, eine Trennnung zu vollziehen. Denn auch die wesentlichsten, ursprünglichsten Gedanken sind gerade in flüchtigen Notizen bewahrt. Man muß stets in dem Bewußtsein lesen, nicht ein Fertiges vor Augen zu haben, sondern in der Gedankenwerkstätte zugegen zu sein, wo das solide Werk und zahllose Splitter zugleich entstehen.

[Everything he wrote down, every brief vagary, belong with Nietzsche to his work. If Nietzsche himself already derives the derivatives from his best though, if he falls off into the fanatical and in the playful, if in his sentences a thick forground of brush spreads itself out, if the passion of the moment interntionally becomes unjust, so has all that become so visible because every note, even everything that was not critically proofread by him, belongs to his work, and there is no means by which one can draw a dividing line [between those and other parts of his work]. Because even the most essential, most original thoughts are evidenced precisely in fleeting notes. One must always read [Nietzsche] in the consciousness that one has not a finished work before one's eyes, but rather to be in the thought workshop where the solid work and innumerable splinters originate at the same time.]

Visiting Nietzsche's workshop and watching him go through the process is a great metaphor. You have to go along for the ride you realize all the places you've seen along the way.

What neither Benz nor Jaspers undertakes in these volumes is to evaluate to what extent Nietzsche's historical arguments about the history of the Christian Church make sense. Just as Nietzsche pointed out that the 19th-century biographers of Jesus substituted their own philosophical/theological notions for the historical Jesus, so Nietzsche envisions the historical Jesus as a kind of Near Eastern Buddha. It's not a fully implausible position. But Nietzsche also seems to picture the historical Jesus as virtually unrelated to the Jewish and Christian religions. And that is thoroughly implausible. Jesus understood himself as a Jewish teacher and his religious conceptions were derived from the Jewish understanding of God and the divine. And however much his later followers may have expressed their ideas of religion differently, the Christian religion was founded on the teachings of Jesus and his followers' belief in his Resurrection.

And key messages of the historical Jesus like the urgency of the coming Kingdom of God and the need for people to decide to change their lives and embrace that kingdom continued into early Christian theology. Certainly it evolved over time. But the idea of a radical break between Jesus and the theology of his earliest disciples or with that of St. Paul is historically more than a little doubtful.

Here Nietzsche's sources may have led him astray with their own perspectives derived from the Christian tradition. Christians of that time, and to a large extent in our own time, saw Jesus' teachings as a radical break from the Jewish religion. Even the more secular-minded practitioners of the historical-critical methodology were to some extent working within that assumption. The emerging Biblical criticism tended to judge the Hebrew Bible as representing a grimmer, more primitive view of God and to blame it for the violent aspects of the Bible. It takes some imagination to view the Book of Revelation as displaying God in a more merciful and kindly mode than the Book of Jonah. But Nietzsche did seem to extract Jesus out of his Jewish religious context.

This may also be reflected in the way Nietzsche viewed the break between Christianity and Jesus himself. He recognized that the Christian religion took over many of its concepts from Judaism. But because he imagined Jesus as virtually standing outside the Jewish religion, the Jewish aspects he saw in Christianity would have looked like a departure from Jesus. But when Jesus is seen as part of his Jewish tradition, that assumption becomes far more problematic. In that aspect of his view of Jesus, Nietzsche may well have been taking a "Christian" view, albeit one of the most problematic of Christian views.

Both books are strong reminders that however sweeping and careless Nietzsche's pronouncements may sometimes seem, his views of Christianity were based on a careful study of contemporary and earlier sources. He was familiar with much of the cutting-edge scholarly work of his time on the history of Christianity. Nietzsche was an intuitive thinker. But he wasn't receiving his intuitions on Christianity out of thin air or from some superficial "village atheist" thinking. Nietzsche pushes the reader to critical thinking. As Jaspers puts it, he constantly pushes us to think carefully, to look for contrary indications to our own conclusions:

Ständig kommt eine Zwei- und Mehrdeutigkeit in Nietzsches Denken. Er gewinnt nicht die Ruhe einer Wahrheit, nicht die Entspannung an einem erreichten Ziel. ...

Dabei schult uns Nietzsche in der Sensibilität eines intuitiven Wahrnehmens, dann im bewußten Auffassen der Zwei- und Vieldeutigkeiten, schließlich in der Beweglichkeit des Denkens ohne Fixierung eines Wissens! Es ist im Umgang mit Nietzsche wie ein Aufgelockertwerden. Möglichkeiten entstehen, aber nicht mehr.

Er zeigt uns nicht den Weg, lehrt uns nicht einen Glauben, stellt uns nicht auf einen Boden. Er läßt uns vielmehr keine Ruhe, quält uns unablässig, jagt uns auf aus jedem Winkel, verwehrt jede Verschleierung.

Er will uns, indem er uns ins Nichts stellt, gerade dadurch die Weite unseres Raumes schaffen; indem er uns der Bodenlosigkeit ansichtig macht, gerade dadurch die Möglichkeit schaffen, unseren echten Grund zu erfassen, aus dem wir kommen.

[A double and multiple interpretation comes regularly in Nietzsche's thought. He doesn't win the rest of a truth, nor the relaxation at a goal achieved. ...

Nietzsche thereby schools us in the sensibility of an intuitive perception, then in conscious comprehension of double and multiple interpretations, finally in the flexibility of though without the fixation of a science! Dealing with Nietzsche is like becoming limber. Possibilities develop, but not more.

He doesn't show us the way, doesn't teach us a faith, doesn't give us a grounding. It's more like he leaves us no rest, distresses us unremittingly, bolts out of every corner, refuses every deception.

He wants us, precisely by leading us into nothingness, to create the breadth of our space; precisely by putting us at variance with bottomlessness, to creat the possibility to acquire our true ground from which he come.]

Tags: christianity, karl jaspers,nietzsche

Nietzsche and Christianity (1 of 2)

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Nietzsches Ideen zur Geschichte des Christentums [Nietzsche's Ideas on the History of Christianity] (1938) by Ernst Benz (1907-1978) and Nietzsche und das Christentum [Nietzsche and Christianity] (1938) by Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) are two books from the same time concerned with Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas on Christianity and its development. Jaspers' book appeared somewhat later than Benz' and Jaspers references Benz' book favorably. Benz focuses specifically on the intellectual environment and particular sources on which Nietzsche relied in his writing on Christianity, my main interest in reading both books. Jaspers is more focused on critiquing some of the philosophical implications of Nietzsche's work on the Christian religion.

I didn't see until after I had read Benz' book that he became a member of the NSDAP (Nazi Party) in 1937. Jaspers, on the other hand, was married to a Jewish woman at the time and was banned from teaching because of that. Previously, he had been a professor of psychology and after the Second World War was able to return to teaching. Whatever his political convictions or affiliations were, Benz is recognized as an important scholor of mysticism. A prolific writer, he is particularly known for his work on the Eastern Church, Geist und Leben der Ostkirche (1957) and his Beschreibung des Christentums [Description of Christianity].

Benz relies heavily on quotations from The Will to Power, which was not prepared for publication by Nietzsche himself. He uses those quotes in the context of Nietzsche's other writing on Christianity, though.

Nietzsche viewed the Renaissance as a return to a vital classical understanding of human life. He saw Luther and the Reformation as having preserved Christianity in the Church sense because it reversed the trend represented by the Renaissance, both in the Protestant and Catholic Churches. He saw both the Renaissance and the Reformation as attempts of the human spirit to free itself from the dead, dogmatic religion he saw in the Church's Christianity, the Renaissance a vital and true attempt at such a liberation, the Reformation as a negative, reactionary one. Though both movements took the form of looking back in time to recover truth.

Jaspers describes Nietzsche's view of the Renaissance this way:

Fur Nietzsche liegt der Hohepunkt des Menschentums (in dem Glanze gesehen, wie der Christ durch die Evangelien die Fülle der Zeiten erblickt) im vorsokratischen Griechentum; die Möglichkeit unserer eigenen Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit liegt in der Wiederannäherung an dieses Griechentum des tragischen Zeitalters; — die Höhe der Antike ist durch Gifte zerstört, die — alle zusammengefaßt, summiert und überboten im Christentum ... — die Welt in den Ruin brachten, der nach zweitausend Jahren jetzt seinen tiefsten Punkt erreicht hat und endlich zur Umkehr auffordert.

[For Nietzsche, the high point of humanity (seen in the glimpse like the one in which the Christian catches sight of the fullness of time through the Evangelists) lay in pre-Socratic Greek culture; the possibility of our own truth and authenticity lies in again drawing near to this Greek culture of the tragic era; the height of antiquity was destroyed, which - altogether summed up and outdone in Christianity ... - brought the world to ruin, that after 2000 years has not reached its lowest point and finally invites a reversal.

Nietzsche thought Jesus' original Apostles had misunderstood his message and departed from his true teachings immediately after his death on the Cross. Later, he came to blame Saint Paul in particular for that result. He wrote of Paul, "er hat principiell das ursprüngliche Christenthum annulliert ...". (He annulled the original Christianity as a matter of principle.) In line with his own social-psychological theories that Judaism and even more so Christianity were "slave religion" with a strong underlying theme of revenge, he also said, "Paulus war der größte aller Apostel der Rache." (Paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge.)

Nietzsche saw this early falling-away from the teachings of Jesus himself as a continuation of a decadent trend in ancient culture which began with Plato and continued through the Stoics and the Hellenistic Mystery Religions, a trend which moved away from the life-affirming nature of the Greek religion. "Paulus wusste schwerlich, wie sehr Alles in ihm nach Plato riecht," (Paul hardly knew how much everything in him smells of Plato) according to Nietzsche. This vital nature of the Greek tradition was what Nietzsche saw as the true pagan religion, essentially the same as what Jesus and Buddha had found. Nietzsche called this trend that produced Christianity an "Anti-Heidenthum" (anti-heathenism) movement. He saw Epicurus as one of the classical philosophers who fought against that trend.

Nietzsche criticized Christianity and the Mystery Religions for, among other things, their emphasis on miracles: "gerade das Auszeichnende des Judenthums and des ältesten Christenthums sein Widerwille gegen das Wunder ist, seine relative Rationalität." (Precisely the distinguishing feature of Judaism and the oldest Christianity was their indisposition toward miracles, their relative rationality.) Nevertheless, he believed that Christianity preserved something of that vital essence of the ancient understanding, the "Universal-Heidnische" (universal-heathen), and that it was in fact the underlying reason for the success of Christianity as a world religion, despite all the ecclessiastical accretions and excesses that he so strongly criticized.

Nietzsche actually has a real point when he writes of St. Paul, "Dies ist der erste Christ, der Erfinder der Christlichkeit! Bis dahin gab es nur einige jüdische Sectierer!" (This is the first Christian, the inventor of Christ-likeness! Until then there were only some Jewish sectarians!) Paul was in fact the first great Christian theologian. As with much of Nietzsche's writing, his provocative and polemic style can obscure some perceptive and accurate observations. Paul's theology and remarkable mission activity did lay the groundwork through which Christianity became a world religion and not a brand of Judaism.

Nietzsche did name a number of figures like Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) as people who had managed to extract the essential, pagan/vital thread from Christianity, as distorted as he believed it had been by the Christian ecclesiastical traditon itself. He once described Pascal as "der einzige logische Christ" (the only logical Christian).

Nietzsche accepted the approach of the historical-critical school that had flourished in Germany in particular during the 19th century, which understood the Gospels as the product of the Christian communities that produced them. He interpreted the history of the Church as a continuing falsification and distortion of the original message of Jesus which began with Jesus' own immediate disciples. From his point of treasuring the "heathen" or "pagan" heritage of ancient Greece, Nietzsche declared, "Die Kirche ist die Barbarisierung des Christentums." (The Church is the barbarization of Christianity.)

Benz takes a look at the intellectual influences that seem to have been particularly important to Nietzsche in constructing his own original, provocative theories about these matters.

The Catholic historian Jannsen's Geschichte des deutschen Volkes [History of the German People] influenced Nietzsche's polemic style in his discussions about Church history and about Luther, but Nietzsche's view of Luther was significantly different than that of Jannsen.

Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) and his Kultur der Renaissance in Italien [Culture of the Renaissance in Italy] (1860)greatly influnced Nietzsche's evaluation of the Renaissance, Benz argues.

Nietzsche's particular view of Luther was supported by a trend within Protestant theology that saw Luther as embodying the medieval spirit of Catholicism. This was known as the "Tübinger" trend and was exemplified by writers like Heinrich Lang (1826-1876), the Protestant theologian and philosopher Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), and philologist Paul Anton de Lagarde (1827-1891).

Leo Tolstoy was often said to be an influence on Nietzsche. Benz, however, points out a number of ways in which Tolstoy's particular views on Jesus and on Church history differed notably from Nietzsche's. Tolstoy's view of the fall of the Church away from the true Gospel of Jesus was that it began with the Emperor Constantine's adoption of the faith, not with the first disciples of Jesus. Tolstoy shared Nietzsche's view of Paul as decisive for the development of the Christian Church, but Tolstoy had a far more favorable view of the functioning of Paul's theology and its relation to the original message of Jesus. Benz winds up questioning the significance of Tolstoy's rationalist theological views for Nietzsche's particular ideas on Christianity.

Dostojewski was clearly an important influence on Nietzsche's view of Christianity, as Benz explains. Benz argues that because Nietzsche praised Dostojewski most of all for his psychological insight and because in Beck's reading Nietzsche's view of Christianity was primarily a psychological one, that Dostojewski's insight were important to Nietzsche's views on Christianity in the last decade of his active scholarly work, the 1880s, which is when Nietzsche first discovered the Russian's work. But Beck argues that Dostojewski's influence was a negative one, in the sense that Nietzsche saw in Dostojewski the type of Christianity that Nietzsche denigrated, albeit expressed with great psychological insight. "Er [Nietzsche] liebt ihm [Dostowewski] als Enthüller des Gegentypus seines eigenen [Nietzsches] Menschenbildes." (He [Nietzsche] loved him as the revealer of the opposite type of his own [Nietzsche's] image of humanity.) Benz argues that the characters in Dostojewski's novels became for Nietzsche the basis of Nietzsche's psychological understanding of the early Christians, including the disciples, who failed to grasp the real meaning of the life and teachings of Jesus.

Nietzsche's mutual fan, the Left Hegelian Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), was a huge influence on Nietzsche's understanding of early Christianity. And, via Bauer, so was the early Enlightenment thinker and radical Pietist Johann Christian Edelmann (1698-1767). Including the idea of the earliest disciples having misunderstood and falsified the teachings of Jesus and the notion of Christianity being influenced by an historical movement of the kind that Nietzsche called "Anti-Heidnisch", a movement which represented the decadence of Hellenistic civilization. Both Bauer and Nietzsche rejected the central belief of the Christian religion, the Resurrection, and the interpretation of the Crucifixion as a sacrifice to reconcile sinner with God, as false and as "priestly" falsifications of the life and message of Jesus.

Bauer also argued for the intellectual continuity of Plato and the Stoics to Christianity. And he like Nietzsche put great weight on the popularity of Christianity in Rome first among the poor and the dispossessed, as did Ernest Renan in his biography of Paul. Benz makes a good case for the direct influence of Bauer on Nietzsche, as he also does for Nietzsche's friend the Protestant theologian Franz Camille Overbeck (1837-1905). Overbeck's influence seemed to have been more in his interchange of ideas, a "constant give-and-take" with Nietzsche more than Nietzsche adopting Overbeck's positions. Benz found that Overbeck was particularly helpful to Nietzsche in developing his ideas on the development of Christian morality, on the relation of Christianity to Hellenistic thought, on his understanding of Paul's and Luther's theologies, and on the theological assumptions of contemporary biographers of Jesus like David Strauß and Renan. Benz explains that Nietzsche departs significantly from the image of Jesus produced by the successors of Strauß and Bruno Bauer. His view of Church history and of Jesus himself was heavily influenced by the work of Strauss and Bauer in trying to distinguish the historical core of the life of Jesus. But Nietzsche also thought they had constructed their own Jesus in the image of their rationalistic theology, which Nietzsche rejected.

Paul de Lagarde, whose given name was Paul Bötticher, was and philospher and thosophist who became a leading Orientalist. His ideas on Christianity borrowed heavily from the German mystical tradition and Benz documents that Nietzsche was familiar with Lagarde's work on Christianity.

Lagarde was also a noted anti-Semite, representing the mystical/theosophist trend of anti-Semitic thought, which was generally less influential in the 19th century than the pseudoscientific brand of racism. Benz doesn't deal with the issue of anti-Semitism in this 1938 book. Nazi writers very selectively quoted Nietzsche critical comments on Judaism to promote their own anti-Semitism. But 19th-century anti-Semitism was not a trend that had much of any influence on Nietzsche's thinking in any other way but his emphatic condemnation of it. His book Nietzsche contra Wagner provided a lot of disapproving commentary on Richard Wagner's anti-Semitism, the main reason for the break of his earlier friendship with and admiration for the composer. That part of Legarde's thinking did not match up with Nietzsche's. Benz alludes to this when he writes, "Mit den positiven Zielen einer Erneuerung der Kirche, wie sie Lagarde verkündet, hat freilich Nietzsche nichts zu tun ..." (Clearly Nietzsche had no use for the positive goals of a renewal of the Church such as Lagarde had promulgated.) Lagarde notion for "renewal" of the Church had to do with the creation of a "German Church" based in part on anti-Semitic racism and nationalism.

Lagarde shared with Nietzsche the notion that Jesus' own disciples were the first to create a false version of Jesus' true teaching. Like Nietzsche and German mystical/Pietist tradition, he saw the Church itself as chronically hostile to the real message of Jesus. Lagarde shared Nietzsche's harshly critical judgments against St. Paul, and some of their ideas about Martin Luther were similar.

In the case of other thinkers Benz discusses, the direct influence on Nietzsche is less clear. But he draws some interesting analogies, which could indicate direct influence. Or it could be a reflection of the intectual environment in which Nietzsche lived and worked, the things that were "in the air".

For instance, Adolf von Harnack's (1851-1930) work on the Hellenization of Christianity was influential in the 19th century. Nietzsche and Harnack both took seriously the variety of historical and intellectual influences at work in early Christianity, but they drew very different conclusions from that understanding.

The French Orientalist Ernest Renan (1823-1892) was another who was generally influential at the time and whose influence at least was an important force in shaping Nietzsche's intellectual environment, though Nietzsche rejected Renan's disignation of Jesus as a genius and a hero.

Benz argues that Nietzsche's view of Jesus was very much "in dem alten Sinn des deutschen Spiritualismus eines Sebastian Franck [1499-1542] und Valentin Weigel [1533-1588]" (in the old sense of the German mysticism of a Sebastian Franck and Valentin Weigel). He saw Jesus as a figure who was in touch with the real inner life and who led a model outward life, a figure very akin to Buddha. Referring to the influence of Edelmann on Nietzsche via Bruno Bauer, Benz discusses several ways in which Nietzsche's thought was in line with the German mystical/Pietist tradition: their concept of the Church as a decadent institution; the notion that the Christian traditions had relatively early fallen aware from the true teachings of Jesus (Edelmann even dated the falling away to the earliest disciples as Nietzsche did); and, the emphasis on unity of life and belief as they understood Jesus had exemplified.

Benz mentions the historian Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) only in passing, as someone whose image of Paul of having been the first to really understand the message of Jesus was accepted by Overbeck but rejected diametrically by Nietzsche. Andrés Sánchez Pascual names Wellhausen as a significant influence on Nietzsche in Revista de Occidente Agosto-Septiembre 1973.

Jaspers' book is more focused on some critical observations about Nietzsche's broad views on Christianity. I will discuss it in a separate post tomorrow.

Tags: christianity, karl jaspers, nietzsche

Bob McElvaine on the Christianists and the national election

Bob did this post on 08/29/08. He reminds us that the Christianist movement is very much a partner of the Republican Party, however much they grumble in the occasional factional fight. He doesn't use the theological term here. But in addition to the politics, he's addressing one of the probably unsolvable problems of Christian theology, called "theodocy", the problem of suffering and the role if any that God plays in it. He also addresses a problem that was unknown at the time the Scriptures were written: how does the notion of God directing history fit with modern democracy? The Chrisitianists have their own answers. Democratic Christians generally have different ones, like the one he sketches out in this article.

"Bush & McCain & Pray for Rain"
by Robert S. McElvaine

It's a beautiful day
Don't let it get away
It's a beautiful day

- Bono

It didn't rain in Denver yesterday afternoon and evening. It was a beautiful day.

Christianist leader James Dobson

What does the weather have to do with faith? Nothing--unless you're a right-wing pseudo-Christian.

Could it be that God has placed a block on the prayer line from James Dobson? A couple of weeks ago, just down the interstate in Colorado Springs, Dr. Dobson's Focus on the Family organization put out an Internet video asking people to pray for rain.

Although one would think that a leading self-identified Christian might pray for peace, there's nothing inherently wrong with praying for rain . . . if the prayer is to bring rain to a region in the midst of a drought.

A genuine Christian would do that. It's not surprising, therefore, that Dr. Dobson's group chose not to pray for peace (which is of no particular interest to them; they are awaiting the Greater Gory of Christ in Armageddon).

Nor is it surprising that the weather they were asking people to pray for was "network-cameras-can't-see-the-podium rain" during Barack Obama's outdoor acceptance speech at Mile High Stadium last evening.

The weather turned out to be beautiful. We await a reaction from Dr. Dobson.

Dobson and the "Christian Right" are reduced to a variant of the slogan used by Boston Braves fans in the late 1940s, when the team had only two good pitchers, "Spahn and Sain and pray for rain":

"Bush and McCain and pray for rain."

It's nothing new for the pseudo-Christians of the "Religious Right"--the people I call Jesus Thieves in my new book, Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America--to be calling on God to use weather to further their political agenda. But they find it easier to see the hand of God in Weather of Mass Destruction after the fact than in praying for it in advance.

Dr. Dobson was calling for divine intervention in the weather for political purposes on the eve today's third anniversary of the devastation of New Orleans and the Mississippi coast by Hurricane Katrina. That terrible event on August 29, 2005, provided a gruesome opportunity for the amazingly disgraceful preachers of the Christian Right to vent their perversions of Christianity and promote their god of vengeance. Like 9/11, 8/29 became a number that distorters of the message of Jesus could use to transform that number they are always holding up at football games, "John 3:16" into: "For God so hated the world that he gave his death and destruction, that whoever does not hate gays should perish and have eternal damnation."

"We believe that God is in control of the weather," said Michael Marcavage, head of Repent America, an evangelical group calling for "a nation in rebellion toward God" after the Katrina catastrophe. His interpretation was that God decided to wipe out New Orleans because of homosexuality. "The day Bourbon Street and the French Quarter was flooded was the day that 125,000 homosexuals were going to be celebrating sin in the streets."

Following the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Pastor Ted Haggard asserted to his mega-congregation that the waves hit the "number-one exporter of radical Islam," Indonesia. "That's not a judgment," he proclaimed, "it's an opportunity." One of Haggard's congregants said "he was 'psyched' about what God was 'doing with his ocean.'"

There's a word for such claims that God is a Terrorist: blasphemy.

But the advocates of divine weather of mass destruction run into trouble when they call for it in advance. In 1998, another of my nominees for Jesus' Ten Most Unwanted List, Rev. Pat Robertson, predicted that hurricanes would hit Orlando, Florida, after the city displayed support for gay rights. God apparently had something other than smiting those who declined to hate gays on his/her mind at the time. Orlando remained dry.

So did Denver last night.

God is neither a terrorist nor a political partisan.

[Historian Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters at Millsaps College. His latest book is Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America.]

Tags: christian right, christianism, christianity, radical right, robert mcelvaine

Grand Theft Jesus video

This is a video taking off on the themes of Bob McElvaine's Grand Theft Jesus, which I reviewed in my previous post.



Tags: christian right, christianity, christianism, grand theft jesus, robert mcelvaine

Bob McElvaine's Grand Theft Jesus

Bob McElvaine's Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America (2008) is a polemic against the Christian Right and its version of Christianity. More than even his periodic columns and blog posts, this book displays the author's abundant humor and his fondness for word plays. And it's partly an autobiographical work in that it reflects his experiences in Mississippi with its many encounters with a truculent Christian fundamentalism.

Bob has been a professor of history at Millsaps College for around 35 years. Not a native Southerner, he has adapted well. Though he still manages to stand out in some ways. Not long after the publication of his 2001 book Eve's Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History, I attended a day-long conference at Millsaps on the book which featured, among others, Betty Friedan not long before her death.

Frances Lucas, the college president, introduced the conference. She said that one of the duties of her position was to field telephone inquiries when one of Bob's columns appeared in the Jackson newspaper. She had become accustomed to receiving calls from concerned citizens who wanted to know if she was aware that one of her faculty members was writing columns criticizing great men of God such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the like.

President Lucas has no doubt received a few calls and letters regarding Grand Theft Jesus. But those who can appreciate the sensible analysis and focused humor will find much of which to approve in the book. Two of my favorite Mississippi-type quotes:

While on the topic of the [Christian] Lites' preference for what Christians call the Old Testament, most of which was written more than five hundred years before Jesus' birth, I should address the seeming paradox of self-identified Christians identifying themselves with the pre-Jesus part of the Bible. I marveled years ago when students would refer to Moses as "an early Christian." I thought they were just uninformed. But it turns out that many of the XL [Christianity Lite] churches actually teach that people in the Old Testament were Christians. The students were not uninformed; they were misinformed.

It is, of course, far too late to nip the vine of religious misogyny in the bud, but if we can at last uproot this pernicious plant, which has overgrown religion much as kudzu does trees in the South, we can revitalize our religions.

One of the distinctive aspects of Grand Theft Jesus is that it uses the sort of world plays and abundant pop culture references that are favored by the more literate fundamentalist minister. And he applies this verbal technique to skewering the hypocrisies of our contemporary American Christianists. Yes, that's a task not unlike the proverbial sport of shooting fish in a barrel. There are no shortage of targets.

But Grand Theft Jesus is not a compendium of village atheist "gotcha" points. Bob has a theological agenda to argue that Christian principles actually oppose the approach that the Christianists take on various hot-button issues. He's making arguments from what is coming to be called the "Christian left". But while the book is peppered with quotes from people identified in some way with that religious trend, notably Barack Obama and Jim Wallis, Bob does not indulge the Republican-friendly game of scolding the Democrats for allegedly being insufficiently respectful of "people of faith". Instead, he takes the stance of a committed Christian focused on preventing the Christian religion from being wrongly identified with the religious and political positions of the Republican Party's Christianists.

The book is organized to take the reader from current in-our-faces manifestations of the power and prejudices of the Christian nationalists into the alternative framework of more conventional and progressive Christian viewpoints. In the 7th chapter, he gives brief sketches of leading Christianists: the recently-departed Jerry Falwell; the also recently-departed James Kennedy; the outspoken anti-gay pastor Ted Haggard whose career was sidelined by his carrying on with a male prostitute; our Dear Leader George W. Bush; radical cleric Pat Robertson; radical psychologists James Dobson; apocalyptic novelist Tim LaHaye; prosperity evangelist Joel Osteen; Southern Baptists ethical leader Richard Land; baby-faced Ralph Reed; snarly-faced Tom "the Hammer" DeLay; radical cleric and McCain supporter Rod Parsley; and, Alabama politician Roy Moore.

My own marketing guess is that the skewering of Christian demagogues is what will most impress reviewers and many readers. But I was particularly impressed with the religious/theological framework from which he is working in this book.

Bob has a Big Concept about Christianity, which he elaborates at length in Eve's Seed. I'll summarize it in the context of Grand Theft Jesus as the argument that the Christian religion has been badly distorted by male dominance, which has manifested itself in both theology and practice. His theory also recognizes a contradictory trend, which is that much of the Christian religion aims at restraining some of the more dysfunctional aspects of characteristics particularly associated with men, such as physical aggressiveness that results in wars. (His Big Concept is much broader than that and involves some major assumptions in historical interpretation, but it isn't the primary aim of Grand Theft Jesus to argue those larger points.)

The Big Concept is very useful in describing what is a central point of Christian fundamentalism and its political manifestations in Republican Christianism, such as its focus on restricting the role and power of women. As he puts it in a paragraph that concludes with one of those preacher-style word plays:

Abortion. Embryonic stem-cell research. Cloning. Birth control. Homosexuality. Women in the clergy. Married priests. The plain fact is that a great many of the major issues—many of which have become political— facing us today involve the interplay of religion and sex. The intersection of religion and politics is, to a substantial degree, actually an intersexion.

He makes an important association of the "born again" concept that is emphasized in evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity in America with the rite-of-passage rituals that symbolically have young men be born a second time in conditions controlled by men, rather than by women who actually do give birth. The psychoanalyst Theodore Reik elaborated on this aspect of the Genesis creation story in Myth and Guilt: The Crime and Punishment of Mankind (1957).

The Genesis story of Eve being created from Adam's rib is an example of a role-reversal in which the man gives birth to a female, instead of what happens in real life. This is surely a major reason that Christian fundamentalists obsess so much about the Genesis story. I would argue that it's not only opposition to the power of women but attitudes toward sex itself - the sinfulness of which the fundis project onto women. But Bob's point about the association of Christianist politics with their desire to restrict women is correct and very important. I would say his determination to refute fundi interpretations of Genesis leads him to dismiss the creation story too easily; if the story isn't read through the Christian lens of Original Sin, Eve's role looks much less negative.

Another theological point he makes is directed against the crass materialism of the "prosperity gospel" as well as the willingness of Christianists to embrace militarism and war. He doesn't mention that it was a favorite text of Latin American liberation theology, but in refuting Christianist warmonger and materialism, he cites Mary's Magnificat from the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke:

He has shown strength with his arm,
He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts,
He has put down the mighty from their thrones,
and exalted those of low degree;
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent empty away.

As he rightly point out, the Republicanized gospel of the Christianists on the issues of "wealth and war turns Jesus upside down in order to support thee worldly hierarchy and exalt the mighty".

One of the lines of argument running throughout the book relates to the notion of "once saved, always saved" to which Baptists adhere. The idea is that once a person is "saved" and "becomes a Christian", they will always be saved (entitled to go to Heaven) no matter what sins they later commit. It's kind of a backdoor predestination doctrine. Protestant churches that don't adhere to Calvinist ideas of predestination mostly hold that a person's acts and his relationship to the Church will affect whether one remains "saved" and one's soul bound for heaven.

Bob makes the challenging argument that the Christian Right in practice teaches a doctrine of release from personal responsibility, particularly in regard to protecting those in society who are vulnerable, weak and unjustly treated. He calls this type of argument Christianity Lite and "easy Jesus". But he also emphasizes that even in issues of personal morality, in practice this approach gives it adherents permission to sin, a permission denied those outside the charmed circle of the Christianists.

Tags: christian right, christianity, christianism, grand theft jesus, robert mcelvaine

Happy Easter

The Resurrection as pictured by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld

Jesus said to [Martha], "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die." - John 11, 25-26 (RSV)

The Christian faith in the Resurrection does not deny death, though it can be used in that way at some level. Rather, it affirms that people can experience eternity in our earthly lives, through life and love themselves. And that this experience of our lives is not solely related to the material facts of our earthly lives.

Jesus appears to Mary of Magdala

Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it. - Mark 16: 9-11

"Gregory of Antioch (d. 593) portrays Jesus as appearing to Mary Magdalene and the other Mary at the tomb and saying to them: 'Be the first teachers to the teachers. So that Peter who denied me learns that I can also choose women as apostles'." - Ann Graham Brock, Mary Magdalene, The First Apostle: The Struggle for Authority (2003).

Image from St. Martinskirche, Messkirch

I say, to believe in the Resurrection is to trust in God that His love will survive death. But it's not done with such statements. The Bible lives by pictures, and only he who understands the language of these images can preserve the truth of the faith. Even the empty tomb is an image for a truth of faith. - Eugen Drewermann, interview with Der Spiegel 52/1991 (12/23/1991 issue)

A Reubens version of the Resurrection

Spiegel: Was Jesus' tomb empty? Did Jesus rise physically from the dead on the third day after his death? That is what is celebrated on Easter.

Drewermann: If I say the Easter stories are legends, some will say that, therefore, they didn't happen. But that is thinking too simplistically. Even legends have their own value. But one can't avoid the findings of exegesis - therefore of New Testament research: the Easter stories did not provide the basis of the belief in the Resurrection, rather they only want to explain it. They are meant to proclaim in images that the story of Jesus did not end with His death on the Cross.

Spiegel: Therefore pious literature instead of truth?

Drewermann: Literature instead of historical reports, not instead of truth.

Matthias Grünewald's cosmic vision of the Resurrection

Spiegel: Only an image, not a report. Therefore you agree with [Biblical scholar Rudof] Bultmann: "A corpse cannot come to life again and climb out of the grave."

Drewermann: So it is. That goes for the grave of Jesus, and it goes for all other graves: in Verdun and in Vietnam, in Paderborn [where Drewermann's parish was located] and in Hamburg [where Spiegel is published]. The Resurrection is just so little visible there as three days after Easter in Jerusalem.

This interview of Drewermann's with Der Spiegel didn't make the Vatican happy, to put it mildly. But although most Christians probably assume that the Resurrection involved the physical resuscitation of Jesus' body, Christian doctrine understands the Resurrection as a spiritual event.

Drewermann's formulation emphasizes a key element of the Christian understanding of the Resurrection and eternal life: the emphasis on the importance of life in this world. Whatever the fate of souls may be the other side of death, the Christian religion insists on recognizing that something important and vital and irreplaceable is lost when people's lives are terminated prematurely.

The 1994 version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, prepared under the direction of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, insists on the certain physical aspects of the Resurrection experience. But even the Catechism hedges its language carefully. The Catechism notes that the empty tomb "is not a direct proof of Resurrection" because "the absence of Christ's body from the tomb could be explained otherwise." (Item 640) Even the disciples themselves are recorded in the Gospels as reacting to the news of the empty tomb by asking whether Jesus' body had been stolen.

Hans Küng observes in Credo (1992) that the earliest mention of the Resurrection in the Christian Bible comes in St. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians 15:4 and does not mention the empty tomb in connection with the Resurrection at all:

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the twelve. (1 Cor. 15:3-5)

Nor does Paul rely anywhere in his writings, Küng notes, rely on the "empty tomb" as part of the Resurrection doctrine. And St. Paul was, after all, the first Christian theologian.

But even in what seems to be a direct description of the Resurrection as a physical event, the Catechism's language, at least in the English translation, doesn't quite insist on the physical resuscitation of Jesus' body: "Given all these testimonies [in the Gospels], Christ's Resurrection cannot be interpreted as something outside the physical order, and it is impossible not to acknowledge it as an historical fact". (643)

I'm not focusing on this as some sort of argument against village atheists or hardline philosophical materialists. It's a question of the religious, theological meaning of the Resurrection, however closely one might wish to parse how "historical" the event was.


The language of the Catechism can be easily misread if one forgets that for Catholic Christianity, there is a distinction between spiritual and material, but not between spiritual and real. Thus, the Church recognizes an essential continuity between the physical body of Jesus and his post-Resurrection body, while nevertheless insisting on a fundamental difference between the Resurrection of the Lord and the physical resuscitation of others in the Scriptures (645-646):

By means of touch and the sharing of a meal, the risen Jesus establishes direct contact with his disciples. He invites them in this way to recognize that he is not a ghost and above all to verify that the risen body in which he appears to them is the same body that had been tortured and crucified, for it still bears the traces of his Passion. Yet at the same time this authentic, real body possesses the new properties of a glorious body: not limited by space and time but able to be present how and when he wills; for Christ's humanity can no longer be confined to earth, and belongs henceforth only to the Father's divine realm. For this reason too the risen Jesus enjoys the sovereign freedom of appearing as he wishes: in the guise of a gardener or in other forms familiar to his disciples, precisely to awaken their faith.

Christ's Resurrection was not a return to earthly life, as was the case with the raisings from the dead that he had performed before Easter: Jairus' daughter, the young man of Naim, Lazarus. These actions were miraculous events, but the persons miraculously raised returned by Jesus' power to ordinary earthly life. At some particular moment they would die again. Christ's Resurrection is essentially different. In his risen body he passes from the state of death to another life beyond time and space. At Jesus' Resurrection his body is filled with the power of the Holy Spirit: he shares the divine life in his glorious state, so that St. Paul can say that Christ is "the man of heaven". (my emphasis)

It is this aspect of the Resurrection Jesus as "the man of heaven" which Grünewald's depiction shown above emphasizes. The Catechism also recognizes a distinctive feature of the Resurrection as presented in the Gospels is that the post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus often found people who knew him extremely well not recognizing him at first:

[Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb] turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?" Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if you hhave carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." Jesus said to her, "Mary." She turned and said to him in Hebrew, "Ra-bo'ni!" (which means Teacher). - John 20: 13-16 (RSV)

The Catechism recognizes the essential mystery in the Resurrection:

Although the Resurrection was an historical event that could be verified by the sign of the empty tomb and by the reality of the apostles' encounters with the risen Christ, still it remains at the very heart of the mystery of faith as something that transcends and surpasses history. This is why the risen Christ does not reveal himself to the world, but to his disciples, "to those who came up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses to the people." (647)

Hans Küng writes that although the term "mystery" is often misused by Christians, the Resurrection in a mystery in the truest Christian sense of the word, because it deals with "God's fundamental realm", that being "in the resurrection to new life". The Resurrection of Jesus is not theologically about a return to earthly life but "in the apocalyptic-Jewish horizon of expectations, has to do directly with the raising of this executed and buried Nazarene from God to God, to a God that [Jesus] himself called "Abba", "Father". (bolding in original)

Psychedelic apocalypse

Tanker's post Apocalypse next week? 02/16/08 reminded me of one of my favorite psychology books, Power: The Inner Experience (1975) by David McClelland. Despite the New Agey title, it's a mainstream psychology book. McClelland is probably best known for his organizational studies that look at the dynamics of participants' needs for power, "affiliation" (community) and achievement.

One of the chapters of his book is called "Visions of Power". It looks at various examples of what he calls power visions: the dream of the Sioux mystic Black Elk known from the book Black Elk Speaks; the Christian Bood of Revelation; some contemporary Christian power visions; and, a power vision from Richard Alpert, aka, Ram Dass. (Okay, maybe it's a tiny bit New Agey!)

The Book of Revelation is my favorite book in the Christian Bible for literary value. One of these days I'm going to post about how I myself have stood on the "throne of Satan" mentioned in Revelation. No, really. (Hint: it's in Berlin.) McClellan gives a great description of the book:

Revelation is a strange book. It reads like a dream - or, more precisely, like the experiences of someone who has just taken LSD or some other psychedelic substance.

Although I'm guessing most people would consider that a "bad trip", as the hippies used to say.

It is full of bizarre visual images - of dazzling thrones and angels, of horrible beasts and tortures. Difficult to understand in terms of ordinary interpretations of reality, it has led to considerable confusion among theologians who have tried to make sense of it. From the psychological point of view, however its thematic content is farily easy to understand. John, a disciple of Jesus Christ, reports the vision to seven Christian churches in Asia Minor whose members are being persecuted by Roman officials. His purpose is clearly to encourage them, to help them remain loyal to the church despite their sufferings. The whole first section of the book reports a message received directly from Jesus Christ stating unequivocably that He is planning to come again quickly. His followers, therefore shoud remain loyal, because when He comes He will reward them and punish forever those who do not believe in Him.

Such visions from the Bible obviously still speak to people today in some of the same ways that the presumably did in John's time. But there can easily be major translation problems, not just from the koine Greek but even more so from their conceptual world to ours. Dreams, visions and miraculous healings were a part of the lives of people in that time in a way that they are not for contemporary people, even mystical-minded Christians. And Revelation does indulge in an extreme polarization of good and evil.

To Frederick Nietzsche, the Western concept of evil originated in situations like those faced by the persecuted Christian churches. In his view, the Greek societies depicted in Homer and the classical tragedies knew good and bad, not good and evil. Or rather, the aristocrats who ruled those societies viewed the world that way. What was aristocratic was good, what was not aristocratic was bad. Not evil, in the sense of being despicable, horrible, repulsive, awful, etc., but bad. Bad to them primarily meant non-aristocratic.

He thought that Judaism developed a "slave morality", in which that aristocratic values were inverted but also changed. What was good was the life values of the slaves, the oppressed Jews. Their oppressors and their values were not just other, not just "bad", but "evil", absolutely to be condemned. And Nietzsche thought the Christian religion intensified that sense. His concept of the "slave morality" fits pretty well with the perspective of Revelation. The persecutors weren't just opponents, they were evil agents of Satan who must be destroyed and cast away into eternal fire.

McClellan summarized some of the psychologically valuable things and also more problematic implications of the power visions he studied, include Revelation. On the beneficial side of the ledger:

The virtues of power visions are self-evident. They deal effectively with the problems that originally bothered Buddha - the problem of suffering that arises from desire, the fear of death or non-being, and the impermanence of the material world (in Pali, dukkha, anatta, and anicca). Ideally through meditation and other techniques, one is able to experience union with the ultimate ground of being and to recognize desire, the ego, and material possessions as transitory and unimportant. One transcends them. In our psychological framework, the individual is released from the self as an origin of powerful acts and experiences submission to a power beyond the self. In a culture like the contemporary American culture, such an orientation has particular value, since Americans tend to overstress the self - the importance of self-reliance, of self-actualization, of making right choices for which the individual will be held accountable. (my emphasis)

But then there are definite down sides:

The limits of the power vision are equally apparent. It does not deal directly with problems of action and social organization; if it becomes the overwhelmingly dominant form of expression of the power need, it can even draw attention away from these problems. Black Elk found that his power vision was of little assistance in helping his people prosper as a nation. Personally it made him more effective, particularly in healing people, but as a means of helping to save his Sioux nation as had seemed possible, it was a failure. The same can be said of the Christian power vision in the early days after Jesus' death. It helped many people individually, but as a group they continued to be martyred and persecuted. John's vision promised that Jesus was to come quickly and straighten things out in the Day of Judgment. Yet He failed to come, at least in the worldly sense, and the church was left to solve the problems of action and social organization in other ways. Ram Dass' vision makes no promises about producing a better social order. It is oriented towards individual rather than social salvation. (my emphasis)

Then there's this:

Furthermore, the power vision works best in a social organization that is hierarchically arranged and run by one supreme authority, whether at the level of the ashram or of the nation state. In such situations, organizational matters are taken care of by a simple chain of command, and there is no necessity for committees to plan what should be done, for discovering methods of sharing power to make decisions at various levels, and so on. Although such organizations have an appealing simplicity, and often produce high morale, moder organization theory shows their limitations for accomplishing many tasks.

The sort of power vision that polarizes good and evil an such an extreme way as the Book of Revelation fits very well to authoritarian organizations and movements. We see it not only in many elements of the Christian Right but in cult groups of various kinds.

Tags: authoritarianism, book of revelation, christianity, david mcclellan

Brother Al and the Muslims

Here is a story that gives us some insight into the prevailing American fundamentalist Christian view of Islam.

Evangelical Leaders Pledge Common Cause with Islam by Stephen Adams, CitizenLink (from James Dobson's Focus on the Family Web site) 01/03/08. the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), an umbrella group of conservative Protestants, recently wrote a conciliatory public letter to Muslims. The petition was a response to a statement by a number of prominent Muslims, that was called A Common Word Between Us and You. The Christian petition originated with a group of Yale Divinity School scholars and is titled A Christian Response to "A Common Word Between Us and You".

This kind of exchange seems to be very much in the spirit of ecumenical dialogue to promote world peace that Hans Küng's Global Ethic Foundation promotes.

Evangelicals in the American sense means conservative Protestants who adhere to a "born-again" theology. Fundamentalists are evangelicals, but not all evangelicals are fundamentalists. Former President Jimmy Carter and Billy Graham are non-fundamentalist, evangelical Christians. (Billy's son Franklin may be another question.)

Conservatives regularly complain that "moderate" Muslims aren't doing enough to counter violent jihadism. But you don't have to listen that closely to see that in many cases, what the conservatives are really saying is that the real enemy is Islam and that the "moderates" are either useless against the jihadists or actually support them.

This exchange of public statements gives an example in practice of how this works out. If the conservatives were serious about wanting "moderate" Muslim to step up to promote peace, one would think they would embrace such a moment. NAE President Leith Anderson gives an example of this in the statement he about his support for the Christian public letter at Signing the Letter to Islam NAE.net 11/2/07:

What are my hopes from this dialogue [between Christians and Muslims]? First, mutual respect between the two largest religions on the globe. This includes a freedom to state what we each believe without pretending that there is comprehensive mutual agreement. Second, peace in places and between peoples who are hostile toward one another. Third, religious liberty where every nation allows its citizen to freely believe and worship even if that means changing what is believed and how worship is rendered. Fourth, an opening for future dialogue with the conviction that it is not good to live in either ignorance nor isolation.

The CitizenLink news report notes that prominent Baptist theologian Albert Mohler has attacked the Christian statement:

Their response [the Christian petition] — initiated by Yale Divinity School and endorsed by other liberal Christian leaders — apologized for the sins of Christians during the Crusades and for "excesses" of the global war on terror, without mentioning Muslim atrocities. It appeared to leave the fundamentals of Christianity — especially the deity of Christ — open for discussion.

It even seemed to acknowledge Allah as the God of the Bible. "Before we 'shake your hand’ in responding to your letter,” it stated, "we ask forgiveness of the All-Merciful One and of the Muslim community around the world."

The very name of the Muslim communiqué — A Common Word between Us and You — is from a verse in the Quran that condemns “people of the Scripture” (Christians) for alleged polytheism (the doctrine of the Trinity).

Mohler said the agreement “sends the wrong signal” and contains basic theological problems, especially in "marginalizing" Jesus Christ. He also condemned the apology for the Crusades. (my emphasis)

While the theological buzzwords may not be immediately obvious to all readers, this position essentially rules out all ecumenical dialogue between Chritianity and Islam (and Judaism) that isn't a sales pitch of Christians proselytizing believers of the other faith.

There are different motivations for people to learn about someone else's religion. The kind of dialogue sought by Hans Küng and the Global Ethic Foundation is one that would help believers understand what the other religion believes and to seek common ground in the interest of world peace. A genuine ecumenical dialogue, that is.

Learning about another religion for the purpose of proselytizing means that one is seeking to understand the other religion from a sales standpoint, i.e., how can I convince the other side to give up their own religion and adopt mine?

The former means understanding the other religion on its own terms. Not accepting it or converting to it, but understanding it in its own terms, not just from the standpoint of one's own religion. Christianity and Islam are both religions that historically emphasized winning converts. So such an approach can be challenging for both.

The latter means understanding the other religion in order to discredit it, at least in the eyes of those targeted for conversion.

This is where the fundamentalist view converges with the desire of those who wish to demonize Islam for more earthly reasons than saving the souls of Muslims. The quote above on criticism of the Christian petition provides some good examples of how that works.

First of all, saying that Christians should never make a statement that would have the effect of "marginalizing" Jesus Christ is pretty much the same as saying that Christians should never talk to Muslims about religion except to convert them. Or maybe to anger and humiliate them during torture sessions in the Bush Gulag. The reality is that Christians have never won a lot of voluntary conversions from Islam or Judaism, in part because the doctrine of the Trinity doesn't make any sense to them.

For that matter, it doesn't make sense to Christians either. Any minister who is remotely respectful of the religious complexities of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is going to wind up explaning it by some version of saying, "it's a Mystery", and that believing it is a matter of faith. My own pastor, who takes his theology pretty seriously, explains it as a type of dialogue of God with Himself. Then he reminds people that they're never going to really understand the doctrine and that you shouldn't beat yourself up over it. (Kind of like a native English speaker attempting to master German, for instance.)

Muslims and Jews believe that there is one God. Not "one God in three Persons" as the Trinity doctrine describes it. But one God in one Person. Historically and theologically, that one God is God worshipped by Christians, Muslims and Jews.

Maybe someday She'll explain to us how many Persons She really is in a more understandable way. Meanwhile, we can't understand the doctrine. But we can do the math. The belief in one God is a common belief among Christians and Muslims. The belief in Jesus as a prophet is also common to both faiths. The belief that Jesus is God is common only to Chrisitians. And, for that matter, the Western and Eastern Christian Churches split nearly a thousand years ago (theoretically and at least in part really) over how to define the doctrine of the Trinity and have never reconciled over it. But let's not even go there.

So, saying, "I'm not going to talk about your religion on any kind of equal, respectful basis until you acknowledge that Jesus is God", is pretty much eliminating the possibility of Christians talking to Muslims about their faith on any kind of equal, respectful basis. It's very similar to Cheney and Bush telling Iran, "Do everything we tell you to do with nothing in return, and after you've done it then we'll hold negotiations with you."

It's a particularly brainless fundamentalist habit to talk about Allah as though the word designates a particular deity different from the one worshipped by Christians. "Allah" is the Arabic word for "god". Arabic-speaking Christians also pray to "Allah".

The defense of the Crusades is particularly ironic coming from hardline Protestants. The Crusades were for a long time a standard item in Protestant polemics against the Catholics, wars of conquest in the name of God that Protestants claimed with the doing of the vile papists, not some common and dubious legacy of the religion of Christianity. Brother Al, though, is more than happy to embrace the Crusades.

If you can stomach a half hour of this, Brother Al did a radio program on this. He spends the first ten minutes on anti-abortion. The segment on the evangelical letter to Muslims begins around 11:15 in the excerpt.

There's a telling moment near the end that gives the listeners a brief exposure to the limited nature of fundamentalists' alleged fondness for Jews. A caller to the show asks a reasonable question: if fundis can recognize that Jews worship the same God as Christians, why is that not the case with Muslim. Brother Al responds, with a minimum of mealy-mouthing, that Jews do not worship the same God as Christians.

Tags: albert mohler, christian fundamentalism, christianism, christianity, hans küng, islam

Why democracy and Christianity need science

John Locke (1632-1704)

Mari, following on your posts In Defense of Science and And Better Yet, It's Free!, I just wanted to mention that Skeptical Inquirer magazine has been fighting the good fight for science against superstition and pseudoscience for a long time. And continues to do so, with articles like Debating Creationists (May/June 2007) and Fighting the Fundamentalists (Mar/Apr 2007). Their articles are written in a "popular" style, meaning you don't have to have a Ph.D. in biology or physics to understand them. (I read not long ago that Robert Oppenheimer, father of the A-bomb, used to complain that the articles in Scientific American were often too technical for him to follow.)

I've lately been reading a book with the New Agey-sounding title, The Meeting of East and West. It's written by F.S.C. Northrop, who was a Professor of Philosophy and Law at the Yale Law School. It was published in 1946, during that brief period after the Second World War when there was still an immediate possibility for a more cooperative international environment than the Cold War turned out to be. His not-modest goal in the book was to suggest ways in which the major assumptions of Eastern and Western civilizations could be drawn upon to produce a new philosophical foundation for a more free and peaceful world. Like I said, not a modest goal.

This kind of history of ideas has its limits, but this is one of the better examples I've encountered. One of the things he stresses about Western civilization (I'm just getting to the Eastern part) is that the notions of democratic political liberty and human rights which the rising capitalist orders in European countries brought to some degree of realization - aka, "classical liberalism" - were philosophically based on the implications of physical science. The Jeffersonian notions of freedom of speech and religion and the need for rule by a democratic majority were heavily based on the ideas of English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704), who derived his basic understanding of human equality from working out the implications of the physics of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton.

I won't go into the more excruciating details here. But basically, Locke's philosophy addressed the nature of the observer in the theoretical scheme of the physics of his day, in which "the sensed qualities in sensed space and time" are not considered direct qualities of the object being observed, but qualities perceived "indirectly by way of the observer".

There are obviously quite a few intermediate steps to get from there to the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence and the Continental Congress. Freedom in practice had to be obtained through a political and military revolution against the British, not by arguments over the philosophy of science. But Northrup's point is valid and important. Our democratic notions of freedom stem from a scientific understanding of the world, as well as from moral and religious notions of the dignity of the individual human. Science is an integral part of democracy, not a luxury that can be treated as a fad or partisan preference without undercutting the basis of democracy.

Northrup also argues that sound Christian theology requires sound science. This one takes me more words even to summarize the argument than the one about Locke and physics. But here goes.

Northrup has a chapter on "Roman Catholic Culture and Greek Science" in which he essentially polemicizes in favor of Catholic religious tradition which, despite its well-known conflicts with some scientific ideas like Galileo's, based Christian theology on scientific philosophical foundations. St. Thomas Aquinas (1224/25-1274) founded his theology on Aristotle's philosophy, an approach adopted by the Roman Catholic Church, replacing the previous Platonic conception of Christian theology.

This Aristotelian doctrine later had a reactionary effect when Church leaders refused initially to accept important developments in physics like those associated with Galileo. But in the 13th century, it was a process of assimilating the most advanced findings of the most modern science, which of course came to Christian Europe from the Arab world, largely through Al-Andalus (Spain). Ibn Rushd of Al-Andalus (1126-1198), known in the West as Averroës (or Averrhoës), was the leading commentator on Aristotle of his time. And Ibn Rushd's exposition of Aristotle's ideas and his use of Aristotle's ideas in his Islamic theology, were very influential on St. Thomas.

Northrup argues that Thomistic/Aristotelian theology gave Catholic Christianity a theoretical grounding in the material world that is lacking in Protestant Christianity in general. Aristotle understood the human soul (Greek: πνευμα, pneuma) as being intimately bound with the physical body though not identical to it. The heart was the seat of the soul, in his view, because it was where blood mixed with breath. The blood flowing through the body binds the various parts of the body to the soul. He identified spirit as a part of the soul, though in English we tend to use the terms as synonyms. (The Greek pneuma means "breath" as well as "spirit" and "soul", suggesting that for the Greeks the concepts were closely connected.)

In Thomistic theology, the soul also functions as what is called the "final cause" in Aristotle's philosophy, i.e., it defines what the whole human being becomes. As Northrup summarizes it, "Thus the final cause or rational principle in Aristotelian science defines not merely the content of human reason and the nature of the human soul and the divine perfection, but also even that divine perfection as it is known by revelation."

In other words, Catholic Christianity does not draw the radical, existential difference between the material and spiritual worlds that traditional Protestant thought does. Where Aristotle argued that "the soul must fall within the science of Nature", Catholic Thomist theology considers a person to be one substance, the human being's "body and soul [as] being merely the material and the formal components of this one substance". By contrast, Protestant theology makes a different assumption. He writes:

Instead, according to the modern Protestant theory, the individual human being is an interacting aggregate of a tremendous number of substances, one of which, the mental substance, is his soul, the remaining substances being the many material atoms making up his body. Thus it must be emphasized that when both Catholic and Protestant Christians talk about a human being as having both a body and soul they mean quite different things. It is to be emphasized also that the Catholic or Church of England conception of the human being is very much closer to the Marxian conception [!!!] than is that of the traditional Protestants. The reason for this is that for the Roman Catholics following Aristotle, the soul is the form and organization and final cause of the body as actually determined by scientific observation and inquiry conducted by means of the senses. There is nothing esoteric about it. Thus a human being for the Roman Catholics, as well as for the Marxians, is a person who, by his very nature, has material, physical needs of a definite, formal, material kind. Nor is an inquiry by scientists which shows human beings as well as other individual substances to be material in character quite the bugaboo and moral horror for the Roman Catholics that it tends to be for the Protestants. For to be a concrete substance on earth is to be composed of a material as well as a formal principle. The soul is the form of the material body. It is not a completely independent mental substance of a purely immaterial kind having nothing to do in its own nature either with the atoms of the body or with the form and organization of the body. (my emphasis)

Because of these different conceptions of the person as a spiritual being, Catholics have more of a sense of continuity between the divine and human realms, which makes intermediate entities acting between God and humanity (angels, saints) more acceptable for Catholics than Protestants. Protestant Christianity tends to minimize the significance of angels and saints and to dismiss Catholic reverence for figures like Mary as the Mother of God as being idolatrous.

Buried in academic philosophical language though it is, Northrup brings out an important point that may explain a good deal about why many Protestant fundamentalists are science-phobic. Scientific findings elaborating the natural state of human beings are more of a threat to their conception of the individual human soul and its relationship to God than they would be to someone holding the kind of Catholic viewpoint Northrup describes.

He argues that a Christian philosophy "must be adequate to the totality of present empirical evidence, and do for our time what the Aristotelian science and philosophy of the Thomistic theology did for the final stage of Greek science and the later Middle Ages."

Or, in other words, sound Christian theology requires sound science.

Tags: christian theology, christianity, christian fundamentalism, john locke, thomas aquinas, f.s.c. northrop, meeting of east and west