Theodicy Part 3: God is Better than Perfect

In parts 1 and 2 we established that the Universe is such that we are free to live our lives without God, and that the Universe is self-consistent. These two related properties combine to allow us to make our way in the world, and to frustrate us into doing so.

I use the word "frustrate" in a specific sense. The late psychologist Donald Winnicott developed the concept of the "good-enough" mother — the ordinary, devoted mother, who creates a secure enough environment for her child, yet is not "perfect" from her child's point of view, because she can not or will not satisfy the child's every wish. This "frustrates" the child enough to begin trying to do things for itself, and to establish its own identity apart from its mother. In this sense, "good enough" beats "perfect" hands down. A child with a good enough mother becomes a functioning adult. A child with a perfect mother remains dependent all its life.

Perhaps the entire question of theodicy stems from God being imperfect from our point of view. We want God to take care of our every want or need, to guard us from every harm. We might regard that as perfect, but we would be less than human. All we would be capable of is wanting and needing. Under such circumstances, who among us would be capable of doing or creating, and who would want to? Perhaps God is "good enough" to let us have a little space and time to become ourselves, which means that God better than perfect.

Yes, the Universe is a rough place. But within the constraints of freedom from God and self-consistency, could you come up with a better one? To quote Bob Dylan, "The answer, my friend, is blown' in the wind" — as God speaks it from the whirlwind in the Book of Job, chapters 38 and 39, of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.

Theodicy Part 2. Self-Consistency is a Bitch

At the end of Part 1, we took it as a self-evident axiom that the Universe is such that we are free to live our lives without reference (or deference) to any concept of God, gods, or divinity. In practice this means that if God exists, God refrains from jumping in to fix the Universe every time it functions in some way that causes us suffering. It means that we are on our own, except possibly for events so rare that the vast majority of us remain free to live without God nearly all our lives. Miracles may happen, but not so often that many of us can count on them.

This would be a mess if the Universe were random and unpredictable. An animal presented with aversive stimuli at random intervals, independently of its own behavior, soon cowers in its cage, suffering from what Seligman called "learned helplessness." Fortunately, the Universe is predictable in the following sense: it is self-consistent. Another name for self-consistency is the law of cause and effect.

Self-consistency has a positive side. It allows the Universe to function according to rules that we have been able to discover and to use to our benefit. We have developed agriculture, heating and air conditioning, cures to diseases, antiseptics and anesthetics for surgery, and so on. We have grown in autonomy and power as we have grown in scientific and technological knowledge. Consequently, we have grown in our average material well-being, worldwide. And these gains can be preserved and enlarged, because the world population is stabilizing.

On the negative side, self-consistency makes the Universe a rough place. It turns out that gravity is probably a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics and the existence of quantum fields like photons, leptons and baryons. In other words, if you want to have light to see by, a planet to stand on, and air to breathe, then self-consistency demands that the Universe be subject to the law of increasing entropy. Which means that things must run down. Which means that you (along with everything in the Universe, including the Universe itself) have to die someday.

To a religious person, it might seem as if we have been dumped into this Universe, where bad things happen, and where we do bad things to each other. God has dropped us from his embrace, kicked us out of Eden. This feels like a punishment, and theologians have rationalized that it happens because we deserve it. Or rather, our earliest ancestors did something to deserve it, which changed them in some way that we have inherited, which makes us deserve it also.

Any abandoned child will try to figure out what it did to cause its abandonment, so as to make amends and get its parent back. It is too threatening to think of the parent as bad, because the parent is the only one who can guarantee child's survival. So the child thinks that it must be bad, and that it must do something good to attract the parent to care for the child again. That, without commenting on its truth, is the level of explanation of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, and why the doctrine has such mythic, psychological power.

The truth of the doctrine of Original Sin is as a primitive, or rather primal, descriptive psychology. We act like the Doctrine says we act. We often treat ourselves, each other, and the world around us and its inhabitants badly, and we live most aspects of our lives as if God does not exist. Even those of us who are regularly attend church, synagogue, or mosque.

If we are being punished for it, the punishment was around long before we were. The overwhelming weight of the evidence is that evolution is the response of populations of living things to suffering and death. We humans are one instance of that ongoing response. For a religious person, that means that God used suffering and death to create humans. The Human Condition is not so much a punishment as an opportunity.

And, as I argued in the third paragraph of this section, we have taken advantage of that opportunity, at least in a material sense. We are beginning to do very well indeed. We have gone from a population of perhaps a few tens to 7 billion in just 200,000 years by learning to use the self-consistency of the Universe to change our world in our favor. This has been devastating to the world's mega-fauna, including the other human species (e.g. the Neanderthals - perhaps playing the original role of Abel, with our ancestors as Cain) with which we once shared this planet, but I'll just chalk that up to Original Sin for now.

On to Part 3.

Theodicy Part 1. All Things Dull and Ugly

I've allowed myself to be seduced into thinking about our (US, world) dysfunctional politics and going off the main topic of this blog: Religion, Science, and Society. Of course, as a theoretical physicist, I'm arrogant enough to think I have something worthwhile to say on almost anything, but I actually participate in those three things. So, to get back on topic, I'll let the dysfunctional politics remind me of theodicy - also known as the Problem of Evil.

Specifically, how can believers claim that God is the sole Creator of everything that exists, is all-knowing, is always present everywhere, and is also completely and uniquely Good — when there is so much Evil in the world?

The problem is thousands of years old, but I think the most entertaining statement of it is given by Monty Python in their memorable parody of the Christian children's hymn, All Things Bright and Beautiful:

Whatever else you can say about living in this Universe, it is simply the case that sh_t happens. You can even classify religions according to their Hermeneutics of Fecal Occurrence. Evil, in its natural (e.g., disasters, diseases, pain) and moral (e.g.,violence, crime, discrimination) varieties is woven into the fabric of our reality. If God is the ultimate source of everything that exists, isn't that ultimately God's doing? Does the existence of Evil mean that either God is not completely Good, or that God does not exist?

Having stated the Problem, let's make some observations from which we can ground our reasoning. The first one that I can think of is that it is possible for atheists to lead enjoyable and fulfilling lives, and die peaceful and dignified deaths. You can get through your entire life in this Universe without reference to any God, gods, supernatural influences or religious experiences of any sort.

Three hundred years of modern science backs this up and takes it a step further: All the progress science has made thus far has come about by scientists (even those who have been religious believers) avoiding the hypothesis that God is the immediate cause of this or that, and proposing some other immediate cause instead. Not only is the hypothesis of God unnecessary — in some contexts, it's a hindrance.

We might therefore accept as an axiom that the Universe is such that we are free to live our lives without reference (or deference) to any concept of a God, gods, or divinity.

For religious believers, this appears to be God's Will. On to part 2.

Answering the Hierophant

Ever since 1997, Patrick Mooney has posted The Hierophant's Proselytizer Questionnaire as a challenge to any Christian who tries to proselytize him. The deal is that the proselytizer must answer the Hierophant's 150-odd questions first. If Patrick likes the answers, he may get in touch.

A year ago, I decided to work through the questionnaire, even though I don't feel called to proselytize, so much as to apologize - as in apologetics, explaining Christianity to those interested. I wanted to use it to work through my own beliefs. My own health issues, my mother's death, and my grieving process all acted to delay my completing the project, but now, for any willing reader's comments, here it is.

How the Church Wounds its Members

Consider now the Gospel of our Lord. As he was about to be betrayed he said to his disciples:

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. - John 13:34,35

But the Church has grown beyond little groups of people who met secretly in each other's houses. Back then love was real, person-to-person, because people really can love each other. Now the Church is a vast entity, composed of people who do not and cannot know each other. As such the Church members can love each other only in the abstract. The Church on earth is a corporate entity, and as I wrote earlier, corporate entities are incapable of love.

And so we have the paradox of the Church's successful growth from a threatened and insurgent movement to a triumphant organization whose global scope has shaped the arc of world history. It has grown into an entity that, as a whole, simply cannot fulfill its greatest commandment, the commandment by which all disciples of Christ should be distinguished - "that ye have love one to another." The Church can't do it as a whole.

As a whole, the Church does not have a limbic system to feel or express love. In that it is less like a mammal and more like a reptile. Or rather a serpent. The serpent rewards those whom it finds useful and at best discards those whom it finds threatening. One has only to remember what the Church once did to those deemed heretics for one example. Or the way it still tries to cow into silence survivors of sexual abuse by clergy for another.

Are we then to declare defeat by our own triumph and disband the Church, either by group decision, or by individually walking away? I think not. There is hope in the great commandment. Jesus did not say that the whole should love the part. He did not give an impossible commandment. He said "ye have love one to another."

What if the Church would recognize, in all humility, that it cannot fulfill the great commandment as a whole, and would therefore delegate the responsibility to individuals? What if, when dealing with an abuse survivor, the Bishop were under orders from the Church that he "should do what is truly loving toward this person, in the place of Christ and of His Church?"

You see, the money settlements are only a surrogate, a way of forcing the Serpent to attend to these matters. To the survivors they are just signals that the survivors have been heard. To the Serpent they are just a way of containing the damage that can be done by what have become "foreign bodies" who have enlisted the power of the State to help them.

But if instead of damage control, the Church were bent on delegating individuals to "have love one to another," the healing might begin.

And a new-yet-old way of reorganizing and revitalizing the Church might be invented.

Nightmares of God: Theodicy, Miracle, and Analysis

Previously I wrote that Universe resembles a vast web of self-consistent thought, a kind of cosmic dream. But that raises the question of theodicy : if the dream is dreamed by the Abrahamic (Jewish/Christian/Islamic) God who supposedly loves His creation and His creatures, why is so much of the dream a nightmare?

The short answer is that you wouldn't take life seriously if it never hurt, or if those hurts could be fixed.

The universe imposes on us the discipline that actions have consequences, yours and everyone else's. And for actions to have consequences, there must be an arrow of time so that what is done cannot be undone. And for us to be unconstrained in our actions with respect to God - for us to have free will to experience those consequences - there must be cause and effect. The cosmic dream must be mathematically consistent. Miracles must be so rare as to be almost non-existent (a set of measure zero) compared to the set of all other events in the universe.

At least, that's my explanation for accidents and disasters - the kinds of thing philosophers used to call Natural Evil - and for the scarcity of miracles to provide relief and rescue from them.

Human evil - the ways in which we make each other miserable - is another story. Specifically, it is our story, the part of the cosmic dream that we make up. Couldn't we just dream something else?

Have you ever had a nightmare, and while you were having it, tried to just dream something else? Sometimes you can do it, and sometimes not. When you can't, the nightmare has you in its terrifying power. But that power is your power, because you are the dreamer. Maybe nightmares are your attempt to practice/process how to deal with your real fear in an unreal setting - safe fear. But the point is that the dream both is and is not under your control. You both make up what's coming next and are surprised by it. And most often you are stuck with it.

Does God, in whose Image we are made, also separate Himself into the Dreamer and the Experiencer of the Cosmic Dream? Does the Father know, while the Son must guess?

And then there is the question of how much we participate in dreaming the cosmic dream. Tom Ogden writes of the "psychoanalytic third," that part of the interaction that belongs neither to the analyst/therapist nor to the patient/client but to both when they are together, and leaves vestiges of itself in each when they are apart. The "third" is the field of interaction, where the real work of therapy is sparked, where the therapist and client lower their barriers to each other and risk being absorbed. Is the Holy Spirit a kind of psychoanalytic third that is arises between us and God when we experience God's presence? Is this how God enables us to re-dream ourselves, to experience conversion?

Is the Son how God experiences with us the nightmare side of the Father's Cosmic Dream, and the Spirit how God heals us of its evil?

And what about you know who?

Mormonism is Christian and then some

Just as I wade into Doctrine and Covenants, I pick up this month's issue of First Things and find a point-counterpoint article by Bruce D. Porter and Gerald R. McDermott entitled, "Is Mormonism Christian?" And tonight on PBS they are broadcasting, The Mormons, a four-part series. Guess I'll have to watch.

In the meantime, the First Things article supplies an answer to my earlier question about whether Mormons believe God is omnipotent. The word "omnipotent" is used as a title of Jesus Christ by the prophet-king Benjamin in Mosiah 3:17, The Book of Mormon.

Who is the Dreamer who Dreams the Dream?

Everywhere I turn, I seem to hear or read about how science has caused the "disenchantment" of the world, an opinion usually held by those who think this is a good thing. Yet underneath their confidence, they seem a little angry and disappointed, as if someone had stolen the magic of their childhood - and if they can't have the magic, then by golly, neither can anyone else.

They think the real world, the ordinary world, is simply a web of causes and effects that, if we ever learn enough, we will be able to untangle. The universe (or multiverse) is self-existent, and everything that happens in it is inevitable, at least in a statistical sense.

Western (and increasingly world) culture has come to this conclusion based two ideas. The first is an understanding of physics that has its origin in the mechanics of Isaac Newton (1643-1727), in which time and space were regarded as a fixed background in which the motion of anything was perfectly predictable (and retrodictable) provided one knew its position and velocity at some instant.

Physicists and laymen alike, now hear this: We've known for a century now that this idea of the world is only a gross approximation to how it actually works. Basing your epistemology (way of knowing) on it is like building a house of sand just as the hurricane arrives.

The other idea is that anything that cannot be measured (subjected to repeated, precise observation at our will) is not real. As I have discussed elsewhere, this is pure hubris and almost certainly false. And yet, it took hold of academic culture deeply and pervasively. At the height of our cultural infatuation with this idea, experimental psychologists declared that personality did not exist, which everyone now knows is false on its face. Personality is a non-quantifiable, immeasurable phenomenon that we encounter constantly.

The actual relationship between measurability and reality is this: If I can measure it, it is real. If I can't measure it, all I can say is that either I don't know how to measure it (yet), or it may be immeasurable in principle. I can't legitimately claim it doesn't exist, unless I can prove that it doesn't exist, and immeasurability alone is not proof. But since I can't offer a scientific explanation of anything I can't measure, my own hubris tempts me to sweep it out of my mental image of the universe.

So if the popular idea of the scientific world view is outdated and wrong, then what is the modern scientific world view as of today? For that we turn to theories of Quantum Information. What emerges from them is a consensus that every physical interaction is an exchange of so many bits of information. Indeed the emerging connection between fundamental physics and information theory makes the universe resemble not a machine, but an enormous, detailed, and mathematically self-consistent web of thought.

A dream.

"From desire start the skandhas, which resemble a dream," goes an old Hindu/Buddhist saying. Which leads us to ask, abusing the title of Grotstein's tome on psychology, who is the dreamer who dreams the dream? Hindus believe the dream dreams itself. Buddhists believe that you are the dreamer. Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe the dreamer is God.

In the great dream of things, these ideas are not necessarily incompatible.

God is knocking. Open your mind.

We construct our image of reality, but it is necessarily incomplete, because there is more to reality than our mind can hold. We paper over the empty places with prejudices that enable us to feel good about ourselves in the face of our own mortality. We defend ourselves by fighting those who threaten to tear through our prejudices. Including God. That's why we crucified him. That's why we crucify each other. That's why we crucify parts of ourselves. In the modern world, with its crisis of meaning, that's why we make war.

Religion has already provided time-tested tools to help us deal with all this. But it takes all the insights of science and human experience to use them with care. If we pick them up without thinking, we just use them to confirm our prejudices. They become intellectual weapons to fend off ideas, rather than spiritual windows to God. And we need to use our sense of humor to live with ourselves in the face of how often and how far we get it wrong, despite our best efforts.

What to do? Realize that the most common approach to Truth is by successive approximations. Each time, we make errors, which we strive to reduce with our next effort. And that some fine day, the Truth will reach us. Or as the Apostle Paul wrote, "Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face."

There. Does that help?

The Christology that won't be Reconstructed

The idea that the Genesis account of the Creation of the Universe and the Fall of Humankind is a myth is not new to the Church. I remember being surprised when my Episcopal priest told me that he thought the earliest historical person in the Bible was Noah. This would imply that he, too, thought the Genesis account was not historical, but rather, a myth. No doubt he believed, as I now do, that the myth carries a true message for us, despite its lack of historical truth.

But taking Genesis 1-3 as myth deconstructs the standard Christology (the theology of who Christ is, the reasons for the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, and their implications for all of us). The standard Christology is that of the Apostle Paul and St. Augustine, namely that God created the primordial couple (Adam and Eve) in a state of Grace, in which there was no suffering or death, and no need to labor to survive. Through disobedience to God's only prohibition - to refrain from eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve incurred God's punishment - they would have to labor for their food, clothing and shelter, childbirth would be painful, and suffering and death entered the world - for them and all their descendants, including us. In order to rescue us from this situation - in order that death not be final - God became incarnate as a fertilized human ovum in the womb of the Virgin Mary. The ovum grew to become the baby, and eventually the man Jesus, who lived a blameless life, and suffered death by crucifixion. On the third day after his death, he arose to a new life, met with many of his former followers, and then ascended to Heaven to "sit on the right hand of God." The reason for this drama, is that Jesus thus paid the price of the primordial disobedience for all of humanity (or at least all of humanity who would believe it and thank him for it). The effect of having this price paid, is that after death we will be blameless before God - our sins will be forgiven - and we, too, will be resurrected to new life with God. Jesus is the first of the resurrected, and will draw us after him.

Now if Genesis 1-3 is a myth, (which many thoughtful people find repulsive - God the Abusive Parent, they call it) where does that leave Christology? One can reconstruct Christology based on the Crucifixion itself, or one can simply use 20th Century history as prima facie evidence of humanity's sinful nature. Either way or both ways, one gets a Christology that is consistent, and consonant with (even faithful to) the original.

But for many people, it just isn't as compelling. Maybe that's why the mainline Protestant churches are declining in membership, while the so-called "Evangelical" churches are growing. People need for there to be magic in the world. People need their mythology to be their history. Maybe the church that grows is the church that does the best job of selling its fairy-tales.

Perhaps that last jab was too bitter. It just bugs me when churches mix God's Truth with obvious falsehood, and tell me that I have to swallow the whole package to be a real Christian.

The Truth of Myth

When I said in my last post that Genesis 3 has the truth of myth, I did not use that word in the dismissive sense that most people use it. I understand the word myth in the sense that the late Joseph Campbell used it.

A myth is a narrative literary form that expresses meaning that is otherwise inexpressible. A myth tells one or more truths that cannot be told any other way. A myth reaches not only our intellect, but also our emotions. It can be spoken or written, poetry or prose, said or sung or acted out, or any combination of these.

A myth need not be factually or historically true for its core meaning to be true. Indeed, sometimes the more a myth is like a dream, the more it speaks to what we our unconscious knows, but our conscious mind does not. As such, myths can help to make us into more whole persons, regardless to the facts they do or do not contain. Indeed, one of the sermons in VCBC's chapel is a minor myth which says something true about humanity's relationship with Jesus, even though it was simply made up by a modern science fiction writer.

It is only when we make the mistake of insisting that the imagery of our myths must trump obvious fact that we get into trouble. First, by making the myth literal, we allow ourselves to evade the truth the myth might convey to us. If the myth is really fact, then there is no need to look any deeper into its meaning. Or into ourselves. Second, by making the myth literal, we block the actual facts from reaching us. The old fashioned term for disconnecting yourself from facts was neurosis. In other words, by pretending that myths are necessarily facts, we don't merely make ourselves ignorant, we drive ourselves crazy.

So, back to Genesis 3. My take on it is in the pieces On Time and Reviving a Dead Language. It says some very sobering things about our relationship with each other, the natural world, and God, regardless of its historical truth. On the other hand, isn't it a bit much to proclaim that God became incarnate as the man Jesus because of what a myth says about us?

So, in order to make the meaning of the Genesis myth more immediate, I try to show how the Crucifixion stands on its own as a shocking indictment of humanity in That Old Time Religion. We are so twisted that, given the choice between our  theology and our God, we choose our theology and kill our God, over and over again.

The communities around John the Baptist and Jesus understood Sin in terms of spiritual pollution or uncleanness, and required that Sin be washed away. This is a much more gut-wrenching view of Sin than my alluding to it as being twisted or screwed up. The latter might make it easier to face one's Sin, and to talk about it,  i.e., to confess. But it also makes it easier to just live with one's Sin. The former conception of Sin as uncleanness or filthiness, is much more likely to compel one to do something about it.

I may disconcert some people when I remind them (in the closing paragraph of God's Reasons Reconsidered) that modern experimental psychology shows that "there is a little bit of Eichmann in us all," but I don't make them feel scummy because of it.

Maybe that's what I'm missing.

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Heresy or Postmodern Theology?

Of course the earliest verifiable Christian writer, St. Paul (aka Saul of Tarsus), believed that the Fall narrative in Genesis 3 was true as fact, as he alludes in his first letter to the Corinthians:

For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. - 1 Corinthians 21,22

The implication is that Sin and Death came into the world through Adam's disobedience of God's commandment not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

But as I stated in my last post, the Fall story in Genesis is false as history. Historically (well, pre-historically) Death and suffering preceded humankind into the cosmos. I elaborated on this in my review of The Passion of the Christ:

We, on the other hand, now know that hardship and Death were in the world from the beginning of Life, long before there were humans. Further, we know that evolution is the response of Life to hardship and Death, and that humans are one of the expressions of that response. In other words, God used hardship and Death to make humans. In response to hardship and Death, we often disregard others and look out only for ourselves. But, since we are evolved to be a social species, we know that it is wrong for us to do so. We know that we must do good for ourselves and our society, and that sometimes, we must sacrifice our personal desires and interests for some higher good. We know that this is what God's Justice has written on our hearts, yet we disobey, and we lie to ourselves about it. And we attack those who threaten to expose our lies — like Socrates, the Prophets, and Jesus. (Or anyone who challenges our way of seeing the world and ourselves.)

Maybe that's what gets the Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents so exercised about evolution. It exonerates the first humans from bringing suffering and Death into the world. Death has not been imposed on the cosmos as a penalty for the Original Sin of the first humans. But the idea that Death is penal was implicitly embraced by Paul, and explicitly argued by St. Augustine some 350 years later. Moreover, both men saw Jesus as having paid that penalty for us by his Crucifixion and Resurrection. That is, although we must still die, Death will not be final -- the resurrected Christ will resurrect us after him, and has the power to do so because he paid our penalty.

Yet I relegate the truth of Genesis 3 to the truth of myth. That is, it is true as a primitive psychology - it points out our predilection for being estranged from ourselves, each other, the natural world, and God - which I call being Sinful. It is true in the sense that it is as if we fell out of timelessness into Time. But I cannot accept it as historical fact, like Paul and Augustine. And that makes me a heretic.

Or does it? Up to now, I've been treating Christian Theology as the intellectual property of Paul and Augustine, two of its earliest and greatest formulators and expositors. But Christian Theology is the project of understanding the Gospel anew for each generation. The Church is bound, not by its doctors, but by the event of the Incarnation-Crucifixion-Resurrection, which means more than all verbal explanations can ever state. We need verbal explanations in order to talk about it, to place it in our understanding of ourselves, each other, the world, and God. As we learn more about ourselves, each other and the world, we need also to learn more about God - and thus we need to re-explain the event.

Part of that re-explanation is revising the doctrine of Original Sin in the light of recent advances in our understanding of Natural History. Is that legitimate? I would argue that it is, since Augustine incorporated Natural History as it was understood in the early 5th century into his theology. But we must have some criteria for accepting or rejecting these continual re-explanations. On the other hand, any criterion we could state in words would itself be subject to continual re-explanation.

Fortunately, a solution exists. The Church itself must judge whether theological statements are heretical in the light of its continuing relationship with God, and its Magesterium (divinely ordained teaching authority) and its Great Commission to make disciples in all peoples. At any given moment in time, the Church itself may judge wrongly, but over the course of time, the Truth will out.

As for myself, I think the Crucifixion itself is more than sufficient to establish the doctrine of humanity's sinful nature (so-called Original Sin), as I argued in my review of The Passion of the Christ. Moreover, the demand for blood sacrifice comes from ourselves. God demanded it because we needed God to demand it.

We don't want to be confronted with our lies. Which means we can't accept our true selves, and we don't believe anyone else can, either, unless we pay the price, unless we earn acceptablity by self-sacrifice to a higher cause. Yet we need to accept our true selves, in order to be able to tolerate God, in whose presence we confront the truth about everything. The price is beyond our ability to pay, for in the presence of God, we have nothing to offer but tainted goods — the selves that even we cannot accept. So God pays the price for us. God came into the world as one of us, to endure abandonment by God, and to be killed by us.

That is the price of admission for people like us into God's Presence — Paradise.

So I have to ask you. Am I a heretic, or just an amateur postmodern theologian?

Less So Intelligent Design

On the positve side, advocates of Intelligent Design try to use concepts from Information Theory that are divorced from physical reality. That is, information is physical - physical interactions must take place for information to be created, moved, or destroyed. And, contrary to the assertions of at least one ID supporter (William Dembski), all three things can happen to information. But that's the positive side. In this post, I want to look at the negative side: the arguments made by the IDers against Evolution.

First, they try to use the notion of irreducible complexity. This is the notion that if you take a part away from a machine, and it stops functioning at all, then that part could not have evolved from nothing through a series of small changes. They try to apply this to biological systems, heedless of its fallacy. For one thing, consider that a substitute, but inferior, part could make the machine work almost as well. There could be a whole sequence of such parts, stretching back into the past. Indeed there could be such sequences for every part of the machine, such that at some prior time, the machine looked and functioned rather differently. Such is the case with living things and their multiplicity of subsystems and parts, many of which are redundant, and many of which are flawed. (Indeed, the theory of systems with multiply redundant, flawed parts seems to account well for the phenomenon of aging.)

Second, they try to show that there simply hasn't been enough time since the beginning of the biosphere (about 4 billion years ago) for life as we know it to have arisen. They note the billions of parts of a DNA molecule, and point out that, given known mutation rates, random mutations could not account for the diversity of life that we now see. However, as I pointed out in my previous post on ID, mutations do not occur randomly. On this planet they are constrained by the stereochemistry of carbon compounds in solution in water. The process of change by mutation is neither random, nor even Markov. DNA , RNA, and their precursors, interacting with their environment are essentially computers with memory. Thus evolution proceeds far faster than the IDers (or most advocates for evolution) give it credit.

So, while evolution is an observed process, and people have testable theories concerning how it happens, ID is not yet one of those theories. It is instead an intellectual and political power-grab by people who would rather believe a comforting myth than stare into the abyss of uncertainty. In particular, by trying to force its way into school curricula, it is an attempt by my fellow believers to co-opt the temporal power of the state to shore up the weakness of their faith.

Well, we in Western Civilization have been down that road before. We have fought our way through the Protestant Reformation and the bloody wars of religion that followed. We should all know by now that when the power of Faith gets in bed with the power of the Government, their union breeds monsters. This is a simple fact of the Human Condition, and it applies to all religions, whether, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Secularist.

Not So Intelligent Design

"Why do the heathen rage so furiously together, and why do the people imagine a vain thing?" Rather than read that line in context in the Bible, try listening to Handel's version of it in his oratorio, The Messiah." Now we are ready to talk about the controversy over Intelligent Design (ID) as an alternate theory to Evolution.

My grad school buddy Adrian Melott once wrote, Intelligent Design is Creationism in a Cheap Tuxedo, which I fear is true of most of its advocates. Now, don't get me wrong. I would love to see a real theory of Intelligent Design - a mathematical/logical framework that would enable me to methodically estimate the probability that a given object is natural or artificial, that is made by artifice, according to some design. A way to tell whether a stone is just a stone, or the earliest handmade tool. Today we use various arguments to convince ourselves one way or the other, but we have no formal theory.

One of ID's brightest advocates, William Dembski, seems to start toward such a theory, in his online article, Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information. In it, he sketches the concept of Complex Specified Information (CSI) - which involves Actualization, Exclusion, and Specification. Actualization means that a possibility has been realized. Exclusion means that possibility excludes many other possibilities. Specification means that the possibility matches a pattern that is given independently of and prior to the possibility itself.

Since exclusion is measured in terms of probability, i.e., the likelihood that the possibility could have occurred by chance, Dembski adopts the standard convention in information theory that the amount of information in an event is proportional to the negative of the logarithm (to the base 2) of the probability of the event's happening by chance. The base 2 is a nod to the idea that information can be reckoned in terms of binary digits or bits. But the log has significance in physics that Dembski ignores in his short article - the formula relating information in a system to the probability of the system being in the configuration in which it is found is related (by a sign change) to the Entropy of the system. More about this in a moment.

Dembski goes on to say:

Natural causes are therefore incapable of generating CSI. This broad conclusion I call the Law of Conservation of Information, or LCI for short. LCI has profound implications for science. Among its corollaries are the following: (1) The CSI in a closed system of natural causes remains constant or decreases. (2) CSI cannot be generated spontaneously, originate endogenously, or organize itself (as these terms are used in origins-of-life research). (3) The CSI in a closed system of natural causes either has been in the system eternally or was at some point added exogenously (implying that the system though now closed was not always closed). (4) In particular, any closed system of natural causes that is also of finite duration received whatever CSI it contains before it became a closed system.

Not so fast, Dr. Dembski. There is a related law in physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that Entropy must always increase, which it seems to do in the Universe as a whole. But there are localized regions in the Universe in which Entropy can decrease for a time due to a large input of Energy. One of these is the surface of the earth, on which the biosphere decreases its Entropy by means of the input of a huge amount of sunlight. Now the Entropy of a system is just an expression of the disorder in the system, which is the probability that the system would be in some actualized state by chance. In other words, Entropy is the negative of Information. And, since Entropy is physical, so is Information, and any theory of information must be constrained by what we already know about physics. (Actually, it goes much deeper than this: the scientifically inclined who have Adobe Reader can read Quantum Information is Physical by Di Vincenzo, et al.)

Since we know that Entropy can decrease locally for a time, we know that Information can increase locally for a time. That is to say, there is nothing in the article cited above that necessitates a Designer for CSI to originate and grow on earth, at least for a while, say as long as the sun keeps shining, and the globe remains habitable. To put it simplistically, if the earth is getting more intelligent, it is because the sun is getting dumber.

In fact, this may be true of the entire Universe, which seems to have begun in an extremely low-Entropy, high-symmetry (high Information) state. The generation of what appears to us to be CSI in the Universe is merely the creation of temporary, relatively low-entropy regions of the Universe, such as earth's biosphere, such as ourselves. Or more accurately, what appears to be Complex Specified Information in our DNA is actually not specified, at least not in advance by a Designer.

To see this, consider that once you have a self-replicating molecule (DNA, RNA, or some prior molecule or molecules), you have a computer. By replicating or failing to replicate under different circumstances, it processes information about what allows it to replicate and what doesn't. If variations can occur in the molecule, it can essentially learn to replicate better in its environment, and it can learn to adapt to changes in its environment. Since learning involves structural change in the molecule, it keeps a kind or record of its past configurations. Now, sometimes parts of the record might get lost, and extraneous stuff might get in, but generally speaking the molecule (or more precisely, the current generation of the molecule) constitutes a record of its path of changes through time.

Because the molecule is subject to the laws of physics, its stereochemistry (its 3D structure and how it interacts with other molecules because of its 3D structure and their 3D structures) is constrained. That is to say, not all variations are possible, and in particular, once it has gone down one path of changes, many other paths become less accessible, because its structure now no longer permits those variations.

The forgoing two paragraphs imply that this process of changes cannot be strictly random, because the laws of physics and chemistry make it impossible for the variations in the molecule's structure to be completely random. Moreover, because the past changes in structure limit the possible (and the likely) future variations in the molecule's structure, the temporal process of successive variations is not even Markov. (In a Markov process, the current state of a system embodies all the information about a system - the future of the system is independent of its state at any other time in the past.)

Now this sequence of variations of molecular structure is the evolution of the molecule, which if the molecule is DNA, means that the evolution (variation of form through time) of life is neither random nor Markov. In other words, strict Darwinism is false - but what did you expect? Darwin knew nothing of DNA. On the other hand evolution is not a theory but a process which has been observed under controlled conditions, such as dog-breeding. What is theoretical about it is the details of how it happens.

So far, we see that Evolution is not equivalent to Darwin's idea of natural selection of the fittest random variations of living forms. Rather it is eqivalent to natural and/or artificial (in the case of breeding) selection of non-random and non-Markovian variations of living forms (and the biomolecular computers which generate and encode them). Essentially the biomolecular computers are mechanisms for turning inputs of energy into temporary and local decreases of entropy (increases of information). In other words, it is not necessarily the case that the information in our human DNA is specified by a Designer. Physics and chemistry may have brought about the first very simple biomolecular computers with some low but not infinitesimal probability, and then the biomolecular computers and their environment did the rest. There may be no CSI in humans as biological entities. It would not be the first time that humanity has had to dethrone itself.

But what about that low-entropy, high-information, priveleged state in which the Universe appears to have begun. Who specified that? Well, the state was a quantum vacuum state. Such states are characterized by so-called vacuum oscillations, in which virtual particle-antiparticle pairs spontaneously pop out of the vacuum and recombine to their original nothingness before the Time-Energy Uncertainty Principle is violated. In layman's terms this means that the original quantum vacuum state contained the virtual possibility of everything and its opposite. What changed this state was the spontaneous breaking of certain symmetries as the Universe expanded and cooled. The broken symmetries guaranteed that not all of the opposites would arise to cancel out all of everything. The universe began to differentiate into what we see today.

This rather dramatic over-simplification of current cosmological theory is I hope still reasonably faithful to the original. If so, it tends to support the Hindu/Buddhist idea of the "Ten Thousand Things" falling out of the original perfect unity of All in All. On the other hand, the emergence of the Universe itself, and the cosmic radiation from the Big Bang tends to add support to the Judeo-Christian, "Let there be Light." Or maybe not. The point is that I still see no logical/physical necessity for an Intelligent Designer. As a Christian, I happen to believe there is One, and that I experience His Presence, but here I stand to say that so far, I don't think Dembski has proved His/Her/Its existence.

Of course, the concept of Complex Specified Information is not all there is to Intelligent Design theory. But then, I'm not done with ID yet. It's just that this article is long enough for tonight.

Who do you say that I was?

Review: A Marginal Jew
Rethinking the Historical Jesus
John P. Meier

Updated 23 February 2010

He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?" Simon Peter answered him, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." — Matthew 16:15,16, NRSV

Many Hindus believe that Krishna, the most direct manifestation of God, decided to live on earth as a man for a single human lifetime. He was born, lived and taught, and finally died, returning to his unmanifested form. Christians have this much in common with them: Christians also believe that God decided to become born as a human being, but he picked a really bad place and time to do it. As a result, he was executed by crucifixion, a death so humiliating and horrible that nobody could bring themselves to depict it until a century after the practice of crucifixion had ceased. Yet within days after his execution, this Christian God began appearing to his disciples in a hyper-physical, yet recognizable version of his living human form, promising them that they would follow him after their own deaths in the general Resurrection into the life to come.

So who was this person, not as the Christian God, but as the man Jesus, and how was he perceived by his contemporaries during his public ministry? In other words, what can be known about the historical Jesus? Now the historical Jesus is not the real Jesus, any more than the historical Abraham Lincoln is the real Abraham Lincoln. There are plenty of things about the real, flesh and blood Lincoln that have not been preserved for discovery by historians. And if much has been lost to us regarding the historical Lincoln, even more has been lost regarding the historical Jesus. Despite the vast literature of historical Jesus research, including the 3,040 pages of the first four volumes of John P. Meier's A Marginal Jew (which itself cites hundreds of references), the pickings are slim.

Nevertheless, if one is careful (a substantial portion of the books is in chapter end-notes) and consistent in one's methodology, reads the ancient sources in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, is acquainted with Aramaic, and reads the commentaries on those sources in French, German, and English and keeps up with archaeological research, then pickings there are. The quest for them is long — the first volume of this work still in progress was published in 1991 — but the reader is rewarded with a greater understanding of, and consequently a greater awe of the man Jesus and the founders of his Church.

So how do we decide what comes from the historical Jesus? Meier uses the following criteria:

1. Embarrassment — is the saying or narrative in question something that the early Church would rather have concealed, but could not, because it was common knowledge at the time? Meier's example is the baptism of Jesus by John, which by the logic of the early believers, should have gone the other way around, considering that John was merely a lay preacher, while Jesus was in the words of Peter, "the Messiah, the Son of the living God."
2. Discontinuity — does the saying or narrative represent a break with traditions that went before (and often after) it? That is to say, is the saying or story unique or original in its place and time? Meier cites several examples, among them Jesus' sweeping prohibition of all oaths (Matt 5:34,37).
3. Multiple attestation — does the saying or narrative appear in more than one independent literary source, and/or in more than one independent literary form or genre (e.g., parable, dispute, miracle story, prophecy, or aphorism)? Meier cites the multiple attestation of both sources and forms regarding Jesus' proclamation of the kingdom of God.
4. Coherence — is the saying or story in question coherent with other material that is already judged as likely to be historical?
5. Rejection and Execution — this criterion does not directly indicate whether a saying or deed attributed to Jesus is authentic. But it does point out as Meier writes that, "a Jesus whose words and deeds would not alienate people, especially powerful people, is not the historical Jesus." One should note that the Crucifixion is something the early church viewed with embarassment (criterion 1 above).

Secondary criteria, that are more problematic, but sometimes useful are:

6. Aramaism — does the original Greek text in question exhibit traces of translated Aramaic, a dialect of Hebrew that was the native language of the historical Jesus?
7. Palestinian Environment — does the saying or story in question reflect "concrete customs, beliefs, judicial procedures, commercial and agricultural practices, or social and political conditions in 1st century Palestine?" Put negatively, accounts that get these details wrong are likely to be inauthentic.
8. Vividness of Narration — does the story in question present vivid details that are not necessitated by the story itself? The problem here is that any good storyteller inserts such details.
9. Redactional Tendencies — does the saying or story fit with the redactional (editorial) style of the Evangelist (Gospel writer) in question? If so, it may be an addition made by the Evangelist himself, rather than an account that goes back actual life of Jesus.
10. Historical Presumption — Meier discusses, but does not use this criterion, which presumes that the burden of proof is on those who wish to contradict what are presumably eyewitness accounts. Meier argues that, in regard to the historical Jesus, the burden of proof is on whoever wants to prove anything. [To this I add the observations of modern forensic scientists and psychologists that eyewitness accounts of even recent events can differ between eyewitnesses, and that the account given by any individual eyewitness can change over time. Hence the importance of multiple attestation, above.]

Despite all these criteria, Meier further states that in many cases one cannot decide if a particular saying or deed goes back to the historical Jesus. One must declare it neither as historical or unhistorical, but rather "non liquet," i.e., "not clear."

All of this methodology should immediately shock those who take the Bible on faith as if it were dictated, word for word by God. Now, one cannot automatically exclude Divine Providence from having the definitive role in the development of the Judeo-Christian canon. But the truth is that the canonical texts were written and collected over hundreds of years. In other words, the composition of the Bible is itself a historical process, and therefore subject to historical analysis. Much of this analysis has been done by scholars prior to Meier, and he assumes some acquaintance with the results of this analysis on the part of his readers.

In particular, the four Gospels in their final form were composed some forty to ninety years after Jesus' public ministry. Scholars note that there is a common body of material found in gospels attributed to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, hence they are grouped together as the "Synoptic" Gospels. Nevertheless, there is also material unique to each of these Gospels, which scholars attribute to independent (mostly oral) traditions labeled M (Matthew), L (Luke), Marcan, and for material that is found in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark, "Q," which stands for the German word Quelle, meaning source, as in the source of a stream. Finally, there is material found only in the Gospel of John, referred to as coming from an independent Johannine tradition. Thus, distributed among the four Gospels we find material from five source traditions.

These traditions developed orally and as fragmentary writings (Q is regarded as mostly a source of Jesus' sayings, rather than a narrative) during the first two Christian generations and were collected, edited, and written in their present form during the third. Each evangelist arranged the remembered and recorded incidents as seemed best to communicate the truth about Jesus as he understood it. The rewriting of narratives and rewording of sayings to suit a theological agenda are more pronounced in John than in the Synoptics, but Meier thinks that John may be more historically accurate than the Synoptics regarding the nature and date of the Last Supper, for example. As a consequence, there is no clear timeline or sequence of events on which any two Gospels agree. That is to say, we do not know the order of events during Jesus' public ministry. Of course, many have tried to reconcile the timelines in the Gospels to one another, constructing various "lives of Jesus," but they go beyond what can be established with reasonable probability.

There are other sources besides the Biblical canon. The literature of the intertestamental period can be used to shed light on attitudes in 1st century Palestine. Meier finds little to rely on in the so-called agrapha (the "unwritten" extra-canonical sayings and deeds of Jesus) and the Apocryphal Gospels. There are the two works of Josephus (a Jewish general who was captured by the Romans, and subsequently defected to them), Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities. Josephus' works, at least in some versions, contain references to John the Baptist and to Jesus, although at least one passage is almost certainly a later Christian interpolation. Meier also plumbs the Old Testament (OT) pseudepigrapha, and the Dead Sea Scrolls (attributed to the Essene community at Qumran), portions of the Talmuds, as well as other Roman texts.

To these sources and criteria, Meier adds an over-arching requirement. The conclusions to be drawn are those that could be agreed upon by an "unpapal conclave" consisting of a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew and an agnostic — "all honest historians cognizant of 1st-century religious movements" — locked together in the Harvard Divinity School Library. That is, Meier (a Catholic priest and professor of the New Testament at the University of Notre Dame) "prescinds" from his own faith. He is not seeking the Christ who makes Himself known through faith and theological reflection, but the Jesus of history that can be agreed upon whether or not one is Christian.

With all this attention to sources and methods, what can be said about the historical Jesus? Meier concludes Volume One: The Roots of the Problem and the Person by sketching a framework for future analysis. Jesus was born most likely in Nazareth (not Bethlehem) the first child of a pious family not long before the death of Herod the Great (4 B.C.). Meier notes that his family's concern for its Jewish faith is evident in its members names: Jesus [a shortened form of Joshua], and the Hebrew forms of the names of his mother, father, and brothers are all those of key figures from the days of the Jewish patriarchs. They may have participated in the reawakening of Jewish national and religious identity in Galilee, which longed for the restoration of Israel freed from the domination of Rome. This would have been especially true if Jesus' father Joseph was thought to be a descendant of King David.

His family would have had Jesus educated enough to read Biblical Hebrew, or at least to become familiar with the then-accepted Hebrew Scriptures, but their modest means and social station would not have permitted them to have him educated as a priest or a scribe. He joined the movement led by John the Baptist, but soon struck out on his own, moving between his home area of Galilee and the city of Jerusalem and its surroundings. He was most likely celibate (an unusual condition at the time, though not unprecedented — the OT prophet Jeremiah was celibate as a prophetic act consistent with his message). Prior to his ministry he had been a woodworker who did not consider himself "poor," and he probably spoke enough "tradesman's Greek" (in addition to his native Aramaic) to have interacted in Greek with Pilate at his trial. He ate the Last Supper with his disciples on a Thursday evening (the Day of Preparation, not the Day of Passover, if Meier's dates are correct), and was crucified, died, and was buried on the following Friday before sunset. He died between A.D. 28 and 33 (most likely April 7, A. D. 30). His public ministry lasted a little over two years, ending with his death at the age of about thirty-six.

This historical Jesus was "marginal" in many senses, of which Meier mentions six: (1) Jesus is almost unmentioned in the Jewish and pagan literature of the century following his ministry. (2) Crucifixion was a method of execution reserved for criminals of marginal classes. (3) By abandoning his livelihood and modest social status to take up the life of an itinerant, celibate, lay prophet, Jesus marginalized himself in the eyes of many of his fellow Palestinian Jews. (4) Some of Jesus' teachings and practices (celibacy, prohibition of divorce, prohibition of oaths) would have been off-putting to many, especially since Jesus had no external badges of religious authority. (5) Jesus' style of teaching was such that, during his final clash with the authorities in Jerusalem, he had alienated those of sufficient influence to protect him. (6) To the rich and aristocratic urban priesthood, Jesus would have seemed dangerously anti-establishment, both because he was from the "boondocks" and because he had no strong ties to any of them.

The astute reader may have noticed at this point, that I have not mentioned the "infancy narratives" in Matthew and Luke. These narratives differ from one another, and enjoy no attestation from sources outside themselves — indeed, Mark and John appear not even to know of such narratives. As such, and because some of their details conflict with the historical record from other sources, they cannot be established as historical, a point agreed upon by the vast majority of critical scholars before Meier. Moreover, many features of these narratives are similar to the infancy stories of various other "heroes" of other faith traditions. Here Meier agrees with current scholarship, and moves on to his main purpose: questing for who the adult Jesus was during his public ministry.

If Volume One "set the stage onto which the adult Jesus would step," Volume Two: Mentor, Message, and Miracles begins with John the Baptist, who helped Jesus make his entrance. John was an eschatological prophet who preached that a fiery judgment was imminent upon all Israel. While the historian cannot establish that John was related to Jesus (multiple attestation cannot be used since the only account of John's childhood is in Luke 1) it does cohere with John's message for him to have been the only son of a Jerusalem priest, and to have forsaken his duty to continue the priestly line (John was probably also celibate) in order to call Israel to repentance in the desert. Only true repentance together with a water baptism administered by John could provide protection from God's coming wrath. This baptism was both similar to the use of water for ritual cleansing by Jews, and discontinuous with it, because the water cleansing was heretofore administered by oneself. Moreover, the self-administered cleansing conferred ritual purity, while John's baptism conferred forgiveness of one's past transgressions of the halakha, the religious Law.

The Jews who came to the Jordan river viewed John as a prophet, if not the prophet sent by God to prepare his people for the last days. Jesus was indeed baptized by John, and may have spent some time with John's entourage, as a kind of disciple or apprentice. In any case, Jesus left John's circle to begin his own ministry, which retained the proclamation of judgment and the practice of baptism, but took a new and original tack. Jesus, without any formal religious credentials, proclaimed the imminent Kingdom of God — a relatively rare phrase before he used it — in both word and deed. He sought to begin the gathering of all the faithful of Israel (and even some upright and faithful non-Israelites) to prepare them for a glorious "eschatological banquet" which they would enjoy in the Presence of God and the Patriarchs. He made this eschatological banquet present to his followers in his table fellowship, which he offered to all, rich and poor, pious and sinners. He also made this imminent Kingdom implicitly present in his own astounding deeds: his exorcisms and his healings. When asked by messengers from the imprisoned John if he were the "Stronger One" that John had expected, Jesus alluded to Isaiah: "The blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news preached to them." [Note that raising the dead is different from Resurrection — the raised dead return to their former lives and must eventually die again, whereas the Resurrected rise to new lives over which death has no power.] Indeed, as a miracle-working prophet, Jesus would have been perceived, and would probably have perceived himself as an Elijah-like prophet who was fulfilling the prophecies in Isaiah. As Meier writes, "It was this convergence and configuration of different traits in the one man named Jesus — traits that made him the Elijah-like eschatological prophet of a kingdom both future and yet made present in his miracles — that gave Jesus his distinctiveness or 'uniqueness' within Palestinian Judaism in the early 1st century A.D."

Volume 3: Companions and Competitors widens the circle from a consideration of Jesus himself, to an investigation of his relationships to his fellow Jews. Meier's survey begins with the crowds around Jesus, and then turns inward to the disciples, and then to each of the Twelve, in turn. After this, he takes up Jesus' relations to his competitors for the faith of 1st century Palestinian Judaism: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. Finally, he surveys the Samaritans, the scribes, the Herodians, and the Zealots.

Again, the definitive conclusions are few. Jesus' preaching and healings attracted large crowds, which probably contributed to his arrest and execution by the temple priesthood (led by Joseph Caiaphas) working hand in glove with the Roman authorities (led by Pontius Pilate). While these crowds may have been enthusiastic at times, their commitment was not deep or enduring. This stands in contrast to Jesus' sedentary supporters and itinerant disciples. Both of these groups included women, although the lack of an Aramaic feminine form for the word that got translated as "disciple" has probably led to no women being named as such. The sedentary supporters provided hospitality, shelter and funds to support Jesus and his movement on his preaching tours. They did not follow Jesus physically on these tours, and were probably volunteers. The disciples, on the other hand, did follow Jesus physically during his itinerant ministry, and were chosen or "called" individually by Jesus. That is, he urged or commanded his disciples to give up their social station and means of support, and to depend only God — which in practice meant on each other and especially on him.

Within the disciples was the inner circle of the Twelve, whom Jesus chose to begin the in-gathering of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. The symbolic and prophetic act of calling and organizing the Twelve, as well as sending them out on a symbolic mission to proclaim the Kingdom of God, probably contributed to the nervousness of the priestly (mostly Sadducean) and Roman authorities. This circle became enough of an "institution" that it endured for a while after Jesus' death, and even chose another disciple to replenish their number after the loss of Judas Iscariot (who had betrayed Jesus to the authorities). They continued Jesus' practices of baptism and his special prayer (the Lord's Prayer, which Meier judges to come in its primitive form — Meier quotes Fitzmeyer's hypothetical Aramaic reconstruction — from the lips of the historical Jesus).

Though Peter and the Twelve (as well as unnamed disciples and the network of sedentary supporters) provided continuity between the ministry of Jesus and the founding of the early Christian Church, there are also elements of discontinuity. Jesus apparently never considered a formal mission to the Gentiles. Rather he seemed to think that the Gentiles would be brought into the Kingdom of God only at the consummation of Israel's history at the end time. He did not intend to create a separate or separatist community within Judaism like the Essene community at Qumran, but rather to gather all Israel together, including sinners and toll collectors, to prepare them for God's imminent kingly rule.

Meier then widens the circle from Jesus' supporters to his competitors, beginning with the Pharisees. The quest for the historical Pharisees could take up a volume of its own, but for the purpose at hand, our attention is confined to their relationship to the historical Jesus. Generally speaking, the Pharisees were known for their scrupulous observance of the Mosaic Law, including not only the written Law in the Torah — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy — but also in their own special oral tradition that they claimed originated with Moses. The Pharisees were concerned with rules about purity (what makes hands clean or unclean, for example), proper observance of the Sabbath, marriage and divorce. While they tended to be strict in their own observance, they tended to be lenient in judgment, and not to view their fellow Jews who were not similarly observant as enemies (unlike the Essenes, see below). They considered their interpretation of the Law normative for all Israel, but by the time of Jesus, they were out of power at Judea's Roman-controlled court. They had been replaced there for some generations by the Sadducees. The Pharisees reacted by becoming more active among the common folk, seeking influence in numbers. Thus, they more geographically dispersed than the Sadducees, and more likely to have direct encounters with Jesus and his followers.

The Gospels present the Pharisees debating with Jesus on the issue of divorce, which they permitted based on Mosaic Law, but which Jesus forbade because of his eschatological mindset. That is, in the end time God would restore the institution of marriage to its pristine state, monogamous and permanent. By banning divorce, Jesus was thus preparing Israel for the imminent Kingdom of God. [Thus one sees a distinction between the Resurrection, which Jesus claimed one experiences after death, and the Kingdom of God, which Jesus proclaimed was coming into this world.] Since it was common for theological debates to involve theological invective, it coheres with the usage of the time for Jesus to have used theological invective (prophetic woes) against them. Moreover, Jesus might well have used the Pharisees in teaching stories (parables) that turned the usual conception of honor on its head in the honor/shame society of his day — the parable of the toll collector and the Pharisee would be an example of this.

The other competitors of Jesus were:

• The Sadducees, who were active mostly among the Jerusalem priesthood. They had their own traditions and rules, and disagreed with the Pharisees on various points of the Law. In particular, multiple attestation indicates that they denied the validity of the Pharisees' oral tradition and they did not believe in Resurrection after death. Jesus and his followers would have encountered them during his visits to Jerusalem for the observance of various Holy days. In particular, it is likely that the high priest, Joseph Caiaphas, was a Sadducee.
• The Essenes, an obscure group founded by a "Teacher of Righteousness" sometime in the 2nd century B.C., and who established a monastic, celibate community at Qumran. They are believed to be the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Like the Pharisees and Sadducees, the Essenes were very concerned with purity rules and the details of Temple observance. Unlike them, their rejection of practices then current in the Jerusalem temple (and indeed of the Roman-controlled Temple priesthood itself) led them to separate themselves from the rest of Israel. Like Jesus, they had eschatological expectations, but theirs took the form of preparation for a final battle between themselves (The Sons of Light) and everyone else (the Sons of Darkness). They lost this battle to the Romans around A.D. 70, and disappeared from history. Because they isolated themselves from the rest of Israel both spiritually and physically, they would have had little interaction with Jesus, and indeed the Gospels do not mention them. If Jesus shared some concerns with the Essenes, it was because those concerns were common to Palestinian Judaism in the 1st century. It is unlikely that Jesus was an Essene at some time before his public ministry.
• The Samaritans, like the Jews, revered the first five books of Moses, but believed the religious center should be Mt. Gerizim near Shechem in Samaria, rather than Mt. Zion in Jerusalem. As religions, both Samaritanism and Judaism had emerged over several centuries as distinct expressions of the ancient Israelite worship of the one God Yahweh. It probable that Jesus did have interactions with Samaritans during his ministry.
• The Scribes were just that — people who could read and write — and consequently they found employment in writing legal documents for people who needed them. Some Scribes became prominent because they were retained by other prominent people, such as members of the Jerusalem priesthood. In particular, one scribal activity was the reading and interpretation of Jewish law. Jesus and his followers may well have considered them competitors, because Jesus had his own interpretation of Jewish law, which he justified charismatically — it was right because he said so (here Meier is looking ahead to Volume 4). Hence the woes directed against the stock phrase "scribes and Pharisees."
• The Herodians were merely people who supported Herod Antipas, many because they were his courtiers. They were not a political-religious party like the Sadducees and Pharisees, and could have drawn their membership from either of these groups, among others.
• The Zealots did not exist as an organized militant group during Jesus' time. That is to say, the disciple Simon the Zealot was merely a zealously faithful person. A generation after Jesus, a group called the Zealots committed mass suicide at Masada rather than be enslaved by the Romans.

Meier surveys these groups partly to establish that Jesus was not a member of any of them, and to establish the coherence of some of the Gospel accounts of interactions between Jesus, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees. More importantly, his survey establishes the relationship of Jesus, his message, and his movement to the religious milieu of his place and time. [Note added 1/09: A more detailed review of Volume III is here.]

In his fourth volume, Law and Love, issued in 2009, Meier considers Jesus as a charismatic teacher of the Mosaic Law. Operationally, charismatic means that Jesus did not routinely cite Scripture or other authority to make his points. Instead, he implied that what he said was true, because it was he who said it. And what he taught and debated was the halacha, the Jewish Law, because it was the prime point of contention between the various Jewish sects listed as his companions and competitors. In Meier's words "the historical Jesus is the halakhic Jesus." Just as he cannot be separated from his reputation for miraculous healing and other astonishing deeds, neither can he be separated from the Torah and its commandments.

One consequence of this concern for the Law is that Jesus most likely did not advocate the abrogation of Jewish dietary laws. These laws were one of the major ways in which the Jewish community maintained its identity, its separateness from the powers like Rome that dominated it. Had Jesus challenged the dietary laws, it is unlikely that his movement would have grown enough for him to attract enough attention to get crucified. Though he may have stated that what comes out of a person's mouth (evil speech), is what defiles a person, the phrase "thus he declared all foods clean," is a creation of Matthew to satisfy the needs of a largely Gentile Christian community well after the Crucifixion. Neither did Jesus advocate abrogating the Jewish laws concerning the Sabbath, or ritual purity, even though he was more humane in their interpretation as befits a peasant who is more concerned with the hard necessities of daily living, as opposed to the rigorous and extreme interpretations of say, the Essenes.

On the other hand, Meier argues convincingly that Jesus did make some unique pronouncements that astonished his fellow Jews, and were too widely known to be left out of the Gospels by their writers. Among these are the prohibition of divorce (despite the Torah's permission of it), the prohibition of oaths (despite the Torah's demanding the making of oaths under certain special circumstances), and Jesus' highly original double commandment to love God and one's neighbor. Only in the Q material and nowhere else in the OT, the NT or any of the relevant Jewish or pagan intertestamental literature does anyone do these four things together: (1) quote Deut 6:4-5 (love thy God) and Lev 19:18b (love thy neighbor) verbatim, (2) cite them both, back to back, (3) order them first and second, respectively, and (4) declare the ordered pair of these two commandments to be greater than any other commandments in the Torah. Based on the criterion of discontinuity discussed above, Meier believes this double commandment originates from the historical Jesus. Moreover it indicates that Jesus was knowledgeable of the Torah, and skilled in hermeneutical argument.

In the course of this investigation into the double love commandment, Meier emphasizes that the words "love" and "neighbor" bear some scrutiny. When used in the imperative, love means to will good and to do good to one's neighbor. It does not mean an emotion or feeling, because one can command thoughts and deeds, but not emotions. Neighbor has been enlarged by Christians reading the parable of the Good Samaritan to include everybody, but Meier claims there is no evidence that Jesus meant "neighbor" to include more than one's fellow Jews, one's fellow believers in YHWH, the one God. And yet, there is ground for such enlargement, because Meier argues (again from the criterion of discontinuity) that the historical Jesus did issue the laconic commandment "Love your enemies."

Having completed this very short and superficial survey of Meier's opus thus far, I suppose I could present a list of Jesus' sayings and miracles that Meier considered, and to what degree he found them historical. But the conclusion on any particular one of these is far less important than the discipline of considering all the arguments for and against its historicity, and the related historical/sociological and theological byways one must explore in the process. Moreover, simply listing Meier's often tentative conclusions might stimulate some readers to argue either with me or Meier over conclusions they dislike, without their having read the books.

Instead, I would like to foist upon the willing reader some of my impressions of the historical Jesus as sketched by Meier. To begin, I agree with Meier that the historical Jesus' apparent laxity regarding certain rules concerning purity and Sabbath observance may stem from his origins as a Galilean peasant. To an agrarian, accustomed to working on a daily basis with dirt and animals, and one bad harvest away from starvation, such concerns might seem far removed. On the other hand, Meier notes that Jesus, himself celibate, may have been very concerned with laws regulating sexual behavior and sexual purity. In particular, the historical Jesus may have been as scandalized as any of his fellow Jews by the sexual practices of Classical (i.e., Greco-Roman) civilization, including nudity in public and same-sex relations. Though the Jesus of the Gospels does not mention such practices, it may be that for a Jewish prophet preaching to his fellow Jews, such condemnation was unnecessary — it "went without saying." St. Paul, on the other hand, did condemn such practices in his letters, because he had regular contact with Gentile converts who may have needed reminders concerning these subjects. In any case, by using Jesus' condemnation of adultery (and by extension divorce), one might argue that the historical Jesus was concerned for the restoration of sexuality in general to its pristine state before the Fall of Man, though such concern has left little explicit trace in the Gospels. (A counter-argument could be mounted by claiming that Jesus' concern for the state of marriage came not from a concern about sexuality but rather from his prohibition of oaths — if one is to be bound by one's agreements, then certainly the agreement to marry should be binding.)

Indeed, the Fall of Man in Genesis 3 was used by Paul (1 Corinthians 15:21,22) to argue for the necessity of Jesus' death and resurrection. Further, in many places in the NT we see a siege mentality, an attitude that the Church is contending against a numinous spiritual Enemy, variously named Satan, Beelzebub, or "the Power that rules this world." Thus far in his analysis, Meier has not directly addressed this topic: did the historical Jesus view himself and his disciples as contending against Sin, Evil, or Satan/Beelzebub? Nor has he addressed the historicity and meaning of Jesus' threatening references to "Gehenna," which has been translated into "Hell." If these were not concerns of the historical jesus, they would represent two more major points of discontinuity with much of the early (and present) Church.

What I take from Meier's massive work of scholarship is an impression of the historical Jesus as a 1st century Palestinian Jewish celibate peasant layman, eschatological prophet and miracle-worker in the manner of Elijah who shared table fellowship with both religious insiders and outcasts, used prophetic invective against his opponents, who taught original syntheses of the Jewish religious law, and who organized a network of supporters to keep him in the business of proclaiming the imminent and yet present Kingdom of God which would restore Israel to its former glory and set the world in balance. Meier's historical Jesus gave up everything — his livelihood, his family, his honor (in an honor/shame society) — to proclaim and make prophetically real the coming of God's kingly rule over his people. He was even willing to give his life for this cause, and when it began to appear to him that such a sacrifice would be demanded of him by the priestly and Roman authorities, he consoled himself with the hope that he would have a place at the eschatological banquet at the end time. This is not the Jesus of the high christology in the Gospel of John, who is always supremely in control, but of an ordinary man who made a most extraordinary leap of faith — a peasant who could have lived out his days in a reasonably respectable obscurity, but who chose (or was chosen) to stake everything, including his life, on God and the Kingdom he was given to proclaim. If this was all the self-knowledge that Jesus was permitted to take to his Passion, I can only have the more awe of him for being willing to risk scourging and crucifixion, and for being unwilling to recant when that fate was upon him.

Such an odd, passionate, demanding (at least of his disciples) worker of astonishing deeds does not lend himself to portrayals as a kindly philosopher (as was done by Thomas Jefferson and some modern academics). I agree with Meier that Jesus without his reputation and self-image as a miracle worker is not the historical Jesus. Nor does such a figure lend himself to portrayals of Jesus as a revolutionary who sought political power. The historical Jesus was about prophetic, rather than military/political action. It is also apparent that the historical Jesus does not lend himself readily to the claims of either Liberal or Conservative Christianity.

On the other hand, the historical Jesus does not lend himself readily to the christology of the Church as a whole. This may be due to Meier's method: his over-arching premise that what can be said about the historical Jesus must be that which can be agreed upon whether or not one is Christian excludes christology a fortiori (to use one of Meier's favorite Latin phrases) — the historical Jesus is of necessity not the Resurrected Christ. But for Christians there is another possible reason why there is discontinuity between the historical Jesus and the early Church: maybe the Resurrection changed everything, even Jesus himself, his own self-understanding, and the understanding of his followers. [I must note that the Resurrection is not accessible to historians, because it cannot be corroborated by independent witness - all of the witnesses to the Resurrection were by definition Christian.]

Stepping back from the historical Jesus and forward into our own time, I also take away an impression of the present Church. The "sola Scriptura" (Scripture alone) of myself and my fellow Protestants seems like ill-informed bibliolatry (making the Bible itself into an idol into which we retroject our desires and expectations) compared to the disciplined and minute reading of Scripture one finds in Meier. The experience of reading A Marginal Jew has strengthened my conviction that the sectarianism of the Christian Church is both a consequence of and a defense against Sin. That is to say, when Sin begins to invade the Church it is walled off and contained by division until it subsides. The divisions between Eastern and Western Churches, between Western Catholicism and Protestantism, within Protestantism itself and between Liberal and Conservative Christianity were not meant to endure, and deserve no more than our provisional adherence. Instead of bickering with each other, we might do better to stand together and marvel how Jesus, at once the marginal Jew of history and the Christ of faith, changed the history of our world and the destiny of our souls.

For future volumes, Meier plans to explore the historicity and meaning of Jesus' parables, Jesus' self-designations (e.g., Son of Man, possible claim to be the Davidic Messiah), and the precise reason(s) why Jesus was crucified by the Roman Prefect Pilate on the charge of claiming to be King of the Jews. After working through Meier's first four volumes, I can hardly wait. My concern is that given his acknowledgements of his doctors for keeping him healthy enough to continue, and the length of time between volumes (which seem to cover fewer major topics, but in ever expanding detail), he may come to the end of his earthly days before coming to the end of his project.

Even if that should be the case, Professor Fr. Meier has already moved the quest for the historical Jesus far from where it had been before him, and created a valuable point of departure for further questers. And for us lay believers, he has provided an introduction to the "fully human" aspect of the Christ who is at once fully human and fully God.

Predestination is just a Word

"How can I be blamed for something that God knows ahead of time I'm going to do anyway?"

Good question. Those of you who believe in Predestination are welcome to take a crack at it. I, however, think the doctrine of Predestination is the kind of trip people put over on God because they don't stop to think that the Author of Time is not bound by Time.

Time consists of one dimension only, and we move along it in one direction only - but only in this Universe. Since the Creator of this Universe is not stuck in this Universe, the Creator is not constrained like a bead moving on the wire of Time. So, "knowing everything in advance" and Predestination are human ideas that may have nothing to do with the way God relates to us.

God's relation to us seems to involve kenosis, a Greek word meaning the "emptying out of oneself." I think God comes all the way into our lives to experience them as we do. I think God gives up any priveleged position (comes down off God's "Throne") to do so.

Predestination and "knowing everything in advance" are human philosophical constructs that have no meaning in this context. Since this is all the context we know, it is meaningless to speak of any other. But we can still speculate, and I speculate that in the Universe to come all of our Time is Redeemed and made whole.

In the meantime, God lives and co-creates our lives with us. And Predestination is just a fourteen-letter word.

Re-Dreaming Christianity

Beer and Belief

contributed by Peter J. Walker*

The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. — 1 Corinthians 2:14

 

Have you ever seen two babies try to have a serious, intimate conversation? Each baby is entirely wrapped up in what he or she wants and never listens to find out what the other baby is asking for. One baby wants milk and the other wants its diaper changed and neither is interested in the other, nor in learning how to walk the road ahead. A life of Faith often starts like that conversation. I'm learning to listen. In doing so, I hope I'm learning to walk.

Lots of my friends are not Christians. That is to say, most of them don't go to church or read the Bible often or identify themselves by any religious label. Most of my friends are spiritual, though. The Bible says that we are supposed to meet together regularly and share things about each other. The Bible says this will make us stronger. I think that's true, but Christians like to use this as an excuse to stay away from anyone who doesn't agree with their theology. This is a mistake. There are lots of Christians who aren't very close to God and lots of agnostics who are closer. I don't think God is a doctrine or denomination or political party. He's bigger than all of that.

Lately God's been moving me to listen in on what atheists and agnostics are saying about Christianity. Sometimes I find these revelations in bars or cafes. More recently, I sat down with two old friends, Chris and Bryan, over a six-pack of Fat Tire Ale.

Bryan is quiet, friendly and unshakably agreeable. In college, Bryan joined the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. He wasn't a Christian then, either. He just thought it would be a nice way to make new friends. Bryan and I have had numerous conversations about God but they always end in Bryan's openness to faith and his simultaneous lack of commitment. He doesn't feel any urgency to make a choice and it makes the fundamentalist parts of me squirm.

Chris is a self-identified philosopher and intellectual. He smokes lots of marijuana too. Once when he was high, Chris spent an hour explaining the beauty of human yearning that exists in the story of Pinocchio. When he gets started like that it's best to just let him go.

I began our conversation with a few questions: “I want to know what you guys believe about God and creation and eternity.” Not too broad, right?

“Well... okay,” Chris answered. He carefully began rolling a cigarette, first sprinkling his tobacco onto a small square of paper. “How about evolution first?” Chris licked the paper and sealed it tight. “I mean, if there's evolution, why is there still everything else? Like, why are there men and apes at the same time?” He flicked spilled tobacco leaves off his lap, “and why are fish and lizards and birds all here if they're all heading toward the same place?”

“It's random, so it doesn't affect an entire species,” said Bryan. He was staring out across the apartment complex. Not fully vested in the topic, I thought.

Randomly, Chris jumped on to a convenient tangent. He blurted out, “So, if God created Adam and Eve, maybe they were just super dope human beings! You know? Genetically! Maybe Jesus and Buddha and Gandhi were all in that bloodline,” he had a grin on his face as if that thought brought him some deep satisfaction.

I had little to say about Adam and Eve being “super dope.” I laughed and pushed into the subject Chris brought up himself with the Creation reference: “What do you think about Christianity?”
Chris thought again, paused, “Harmless.” Not what I expected. “Harmless... possibly benevolent. It's non-threatening to me… I guess the only threat is homogenization.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.

“If everyone became a Christian it would dilute the intellectual evolution of man. Just one big pool of similar ideas. No room to question things.” An interesting thought, since I've met few Christians who thought alike. I understood his point, though.

Bryan came in, “So what do you think happens when you die?”

Chris didn't answer. I followed: “Death? Do you think there's a Christian heaven?”

“That's a creatable thing,” Chris answered. “Either on earth or in actual heaven,” Chris paused on that thought, then, “If Christianity were good enough I'd be there now, but other things are good too. The path things enter my life through must be convenient. If I pick this beer up, it had better be convenient!” He gulped and Bryan rolled his eyes.

“Convenience,” Bryan chimed in now, “If you're looking for a spirituality, church doesn't have to be the end-all be-all of being spiritual. I can think about it on my own or hang out with friends like this. Church is fellowship. I can respect that. But there are so many ways to have that fellowship.”
I asked, “Then is there value in organized religion?”

“There's value in fellowship,” said Bryan. “It would have to be people whom I trusted and who were open minded. There's not a lot of value in going somewhere to have people tell you you're wrong.”

“Can I expand?” Chris asked. We nodded. “Churches are like support groups, you know, for people who want guidance... It validates them. I think marriage is a compact version of that. It's also easier for people to become excited when there are lots of people. It makes them zealous.”
“But some people go because they think they have to,” said Bryan.

“Yes. In Catholic church, my parents judged me from a standpoint of perfection instead of understanding I was imperfect,” said Chris. “I just wanted to sleep in on Sundays.”

“I wish people were more open-minded,” Bryan said. “It's intimidating to discuss all this with those who are so knowledgeable in their own religion. For me it's much more abstract. There's nothing I can gain from someone who doesn't value my questions.”

Something in that last statement rang true for me, like I needed to highlight it and pray about it and tell people to listen closely. No one had ever valued Bryan's questions; they had treated his curiosity as a battle to be won.

“And Hell is a good form of extortion,” Bryan continued, “Being good has a lot to do with it but it doesn't seem logical that someone could live an evil life and be saved on their deathbed,” A tough concept for us all. “I don't know. There are so many religions telling me so many things, and that if I don't choose one of them I'll go to hell. It just feels like extortion.” There was that word again. Extortion. Blackmail.

A part of me used to get frustrated that I couldn't “close the deal” with friends like Bryan and Chris. The other part was always left ashamed at the way my heart for God was still thinking in sales terms. That salesman will always be an embarrassing part of my inner-self, trying to turn my passions into marketable products.

So how do I make Christianity work for guys like Chris and Bryan? Do I tailor it to fit their comforts? Do I try to make it less offensive? I think not, but my humanism desperately tries to create a politically correct apologetic. Bryan himself said there was right and wrong — he even said that evil people shouldn't deserve heaven. So Christian or agnostic, we all have judgment hiding somewhere. God tells us to let that judgment go and trust Him to cover us with love. That makes all of this so exasperating: no matter how much I try to appeal to sensibility and logic, the Biblical God still flies in the face of all our wisdom.

* Peter Walker works with youth and worship ministries, desperately trying to forget the wrong answers and recover the right questions. He also creates the Essence Project.