More Thoughts on Law and Morality

A professor of mine made an interesting comment in passing that resonated with a lot of my recent thinking on the idea of law and human fallen-ness. He remarked, "God had to write his law on tablets of stone because human hearts were too hard." I think sometimes Christians overlook the narratives in the Pentateuch leading up to the giving of the Law of Moses and assume that somehow people were "pre-moral" before this event. The book of Genesis is full of moral judgments, and as I mentioned in my last post, full of various "falls." From the fall of Adam and Eve through Cain and Abel, to the flood (and numerous other places in between and after), we see time after time human beings engaging in wicked actions, causing death and division to one another. This is a far cry from the created order that God proclaimed to be "very good," itself a moral judgment.

The laws of Moses then are not some new source of moral revelation that humanity was somehow unable to discover on its own. On the contrary, the created ordered is described in moral language and as such it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to see moral awareness as a feature of humanity. (the "knowledge of good and evil" that Adam and Eve gained from eating of the tree, as I have mentioned elsewhere, ought to be understood in the more wholistic sense of "knowing" that is frequently employed in the Old Testament, which would mean experiential knowing, in the same way that Adam "knew" Eve. What was gained was not moral knowledge of good and evil, but first hand experience of doing evil). By engaging in deliberately de-humanizing behaviors, humans have dulled their hearts to their own moral natures, and the law represents an attempt to reawaken these natures. Jesus makes this point in his teaching on divorce when he notes that the laws concerning divorce were given "because of your hardness of heart; but from the beginning it has not been this way" (Matthew 19:8).

Sometimes I hear the moral teachings of the Bible treated as if they are only meaningful if they represent original, heretofore un-thought-of moral principles. The claim seems to be that the teachings of the Bible should be things that could not be recognized independent of reading its pages. The problem with this is that it ignores the way the Bible itself presents moral judgments. Moral judgments are present in the very beginning of all things, they do no magically appear at Mt. Sinai with the giving of the Ten Commandments. What the law represents is a badly-needed reminder of the moral truths that humanity has time and again rejected. It represents an accommodation to the sinfulness of humanity that would seek to move them from morally destructive ways back towards God. This process is completed in Christ, who is the fulfillment of the law, but we see the beginning traces of it in the Pentateuch and its commands which seek to cultivate an attitude of intentionality towards one's behavior.

Yes, you can be "good without God" in the sense of never needing to open up the Bible to discover many moral principles, but a quick glance at the world (and at my own actions) shows that we constantly need to be reminded of things that we know. Virtue is developed through habit, and in order to develop habits we need reminders that prompt us to be intentional about whatever behavior we are trying to develop. In this sense, we need moral instruction and guidelines in order to soften our hearts so that they might once again become receptive to God. This is the purpose of the law in the Old Testament, I submit, and not an attempt to provide wholly original (or wholly perfect) moral instruction.

Thinking about Death

This week I read Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein's short and mostly humorous book Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between. Catchart and Klein have written other books in a similar vein, using jokes and philosophy to explore various topics. I was interested since death is one of those things that my mind seems to wander towards (perhaps to an abnormal degree). On on the one hand, it seems preposterous that I could continue to exist after death, while on the other hand, the idea that my consciousness could cease permanently seems almost absurd as well. I'm obviously not the only one who has wondered at the looming figure of death and what does or does not lie beyond it.

Cathcart and Klein make frequent reference throughout the book to Ernest Becker's influential book The Denial of Death. I have not had the opportunity to read Becker's book, so I anything I say is based off of reading a bit of secondary literature on it and from the summaries provided by Cathcart and Klein. Becker's thesis seems to be that fear of death is the most fundamental drive of human beings, and that as a result civilization itself is driven by the need to create structures that defy death. Catchart and Klein speak of "immortality systems" like groups and religions that are created to provide a means of escape from the looming spectre of death.

This is a provocative thesis, and Becker's book has been widely read since its publication in 1974. However, it makes me think some of the same thoughts that happen when I encounter the belief that the origins of religion can be rooted in wish fulfillment. Simply put, if religion is about creating an immortality system, then historically they seem not to have done such a great job. Ancient Greek and Hebrews both seemed to see the afterlife as Hades/Sheol, a place not of punishment or reward, but simply the place where souls went after death. It generally appears to be somewhat gloomy and not a terribly inviting place. If religion serves to provide an immortality system, it seems that many have gotten away with not offering their adherents much. This isn't even touching upon Eastern religions where "immortality," if we can even call it that, looks very strange indeed to Western eyes.

Plus, it seems that belief in immortality is not dependent on a belief in God. It seems, to use the Greeks again as an example, that they simply believed in an afterlife in which the things of this world (people, things, and yes the gods) continued to exist. The gods were part of this world and of the next. The gods did not secure the existence of the afterlife. Perhaps Becker was moving the right direction towards recognizing that a belief in immortality seems to be almost foundational for humans. I just don't think religions secured belief in immortality. Simply put, we don't seem to "need" immortality systems and religions to arrive at a belief in the afterlife.

Western civilization has produced many images of the afterlife through the works of Milton and Dante and a host of lesser known figures who have created deeply-ingrained images of heaven and hell that are easily called to mind. While these images have a basis in passages of the Bible, as Catchart and Klein show with tongue-in-cheek humor, they represent an enormous amount of exaggeration and extrapolation. This just shows that the New Testament really doesn't provide all that much detail about what the life to come will be like. If it's all about immortality, then why didn't Jesus focus more on it? Jesus speaks about a future resurrection as if its a foregone conclusion, not a new revelation and not something that seems to need additional fleshing out.

In light of Jesus' resurrection, Christianity has recognized the centrality of resurrection as the culmination of history and the sign of new creation and a reordering of the universe. When I die I'll do so in the hope of this resurrection that raised Our Lord from the dead as the first fruits of things to come, as Paul wrote. Until then, we live in a world where death is central and unavoidable, yet the inclination to believe that it is not the end remains difficult to shake. My specific hope for the future lies in Jesus Christ, but I think my belief in a continuation of life after death has a deeper history that may be a glimpse of God's presence in creation.

The Fall of Humanity

After reading Doug Chaplin's excellent blog post (No Adam, No Fall? Wrestling with Sin and Science) reflecting on the idea of the fall of man earlier today, I find myself reflecting more and more on the idea of the fall and sin. Chaplin has jogged my thinking, making me realize just how prevalent the notion of falleness is throughout the Old Testament, and questioning the "privileged" position we give to the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the creation narrative. Chaplin makes a number of great points about what the fall might mean in light of our modern biological understandings about human origins, but I won't focus on them here.

I think Chaplin makes an excellent point when he postulates that Paul's use of Adam as a prototype of human sinfulness is done out of a need to find a suitable counterpoint to the saving work of Jesus. This is an important point to keep in mind in general when we think of the apostolic use of the Old Testament in the writings of the New Testament. As has been pointed out by many, the writers of the New Testament were not using the Old Testament to mine for details of Jesus' life (contra those who would want to claim that the events in the life of Jesus recorded in the Gospels were made up by writers mining the Old Testament for messianic passages), but instead were reading the Old Testament through the lens of Jesus Christ. Peter Enns in particular stresses this point in his book Incarnation and Inspiration.

The centrality of Jesus can never be overlooked when we look at the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament (and, I would add, should never be overlooked in general). Those who were radically transformed by their encounter with Jesus and His followers read the Hebrew scriptures through the lens of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, looking for ways in which they could find parallels to it. I think we too often read the flow thought in the wrong direction, assuming that a belief in Adam as the source of sin necessitated a belief in Christ covering over this sin, but it seems that it is actually the reverse. It is Christ's covering of our sin that motivated Paul and others to find an appropriate parallel in the scriptures of Israel that could help encapsulate this important revelation. In doing so, he was looking for resources from within the Jewish tradition that could help frame the salvific work of Jesus.

The story in Genesis is clearly a story of man's fallenness, but to move beyond this and claim that it is THE FALL of mankind overlooks why Paul was using Adam in his discussion of Christ's salvation and the repeated theme of fallenness that runs throughout the Old Testament. Gary A. Anderson sheds important insights into viewing the concept of fallenness in the Old Testament. In his article "Biblical Origins and the Problem of the Fall," Anderson notes that the creation of the tabernacle strongly parallels the creation account of Genesis, and suggests that we see the creation of the tabernacle, and Yahweh's coming to dwell with the people of Israel, as the climax of the creation story. Israel's subsequent disobedience of God results in their punishment and exile from a land of paradise, a striking parallel with the story of Adam and Eve.

As Anderson notes, throughout the Old Testament we find God placing before Israel the promise of life and fulfillment if they only follow His commands, only to have the Israelites disobey almost immediately. Because of this

Indeed, "immediacy" may be the best way to define "original sin" in its Old Testament context. As soon as Israel receives the benefaction of her election, she offers not praise and gratitude but rebellion. This pattern defines not only the narrative of Israel's election but also other founding moments in the Hebrew Scriptures.(26)

As such, the story of Adam and Eve can be read as the story of Israel's later history in a microcosm:

Indeed it is difficult not to see the influence of a theology very similar to that of Deuteronomy; in that book God sets life and death before the Israelites and says the choice is theirs. Obey my Torah and you shall have life in the land, disobey it and you shall die in exile. Eden is Torah in miniature. (28)

In light of this, perhaps we should see the fall as not one single event that forever sets the course for humanity and covers all future generations, but as a series of events in which humans have again and again turned away from God's promises of life and blessing to embrace things that only lead to sorrow, pain, and death. This is the story that is recorded time and again in the Old Testament, of which the story of Adam and Eve is but one incident. And just as St. Paul did, we can look to Jesus Christ as the source of freedom and new beginning from a cycle of disobedience and the sorrow that inevitably results from this.

Truth in Literature

How can there be truth in something that strictly speaking is not so? This question is a crucial one when it comes to whether or not we can speak of a fictional/mythic/symbolic/poetic work as being "true." If the Genesis creation stories are not literal scientific and historical fact, then in what sense can we find truth in them? The key to understanding this, I believe, lies in recognizing different understandings of truth and not falling victim to a pernicious reductionism that seeks to formulate all things as scientific statements of facts and affairs.

Jean Jacques Lecercle makes an important point in his 2007 article "How to Articulate Genuine Experience In, Of, and Through Language":

A literary utterance or discourse cannot have the same relation to truth, in the simple opposition of the true and the false, as a scientific statement has (if only because it introduces a third term in the opposition: fiction). And here the philosopher of language, having read Wittgenstein, will remember that different language-games need different concepts of truth (judicial truth, being what the trial produces at its outcome, is not exactly the same as scientific truth, obtained through the protocols of experimentation and the determinative judgements deriving from the laws of nature). And the philosopher of language will remember that ‘truth’ is a concept which, in the philosophical tradition, is associated with at least three different paradigms, the poetic and ontological paradigm of aletheia, famously revived by Heidegger (1971), the judicial paradigm of verum, and the rational and scientific paradigm of truth as adaequatio. So there is scope for a specifically aesthetic paradigm of truth to apply. (264)

Lecercle argues that the kind of knowledge that literature captures and expresses is knowledge of experience, something that propositional knowledge cannot capture (this could probably be phrased in Polanyian terms as "personal knowledge"). This is an interesting point because it shows that there are forms of truth that escape articulation in a strict scientific sense. Literary works capture moral truths, truths about human nature and above all the human experience. To borrow another example from Lecercle's article, a poem describing the trenches World War I can capture the authentic experience of such a situation. Statements of fact could never do such a thing.

We should avoid the mistake of making all things collapse into a naive scientific realism, especially taking into account the fact that we are fundamentally limited by the language that we use. And language itself is fundamentally metaphorical; it is not simply one to one representations of objects in the world (Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblances is a useful illustration of this). We speak in metaphors, not in representations. Nietzsche was another who realized this, and he strove to make his readers cognizant of the way language itself smuggles in metaphysics:

Very belatedly (only now) is it dawning on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a monstrous error. Fortunately, it is too late to revoke the development of reason, which rests on that belief. Logic, too rests on assumptions that do not correspond to anything in the real world, e.g., on the assumption of the equality of things, the identity of the same thing at different points of time; but this science arose from the opposite belief (that there were indeed such things in the real world). (From Human, All to Human in The Nietzsche Reader, eds. Pearson and Large, 164)

This should give us some pause about the weight and force we try to give to any of our conclusions, not simply ones about God and faith. (One might respond that since we are so limited we must withhold all judgments about God since it is clearly beyond our capacity. And I agree to a certain extent with this view, which is why the idea of revelation is essential to faith. Simply put, I cannot derive all of the features of my faith from my own rational reflection. However, if there is a God who exists as a person then this is exactly the way things must be since in person to person interactions and communications, we must rely upon the other person to reveal or withhold things - communication cannot be compelled.)

If nothing else, we should be mindful of the different senses of truth and should avoid making a category mistake by dismissing something as untrue simply because it is of a different kind than something else. This doesn't make literary truth any less "real" than scientific truth: the authenticity of the aesthetic experience captured can correspond to the actual feelings of humans even if the tools used to craft it were metaphors, simile, hyperbole, parallelism, and repetition instead of experimentation and observation. Thus, I don't need to read the book of Genesis as a scientific treatise in order to find truth in it. I can find truth in its description of human nature and experience and of our relation to God. There is truth to be found and had in literature, and it need not entail an impoverished reductive view of the world.

Hell

Over at Logan Atone, there is a recent post on passages from the Bible dealing with the reality of hell and its nature. I am posting this here and as a comment over there because hell is a topic that I have planned on addressing for a while.

When we look at passages in the Bible dealing with hell, we need to be careful because so much of our mental imagery of hell owes more to popular culture and Dante than to anything found in the Bible. We need to be careful not to take these passages out of context and meaning (something that Christians have probably been more guilty of than any other).

The Old Testament word that sometimes get rendered "hell" is "Sheol" which is sometimes rendered "Hades" which is simply the place of the dead. The Old Testament is largely silent on what this is like and often implies that is the destination of everyone, good or wicked.

The New Testament word rendered hell is "gehenna" and this refers to an actual physical location: the valley of Hinnom. To take the entry from Funk and Wagnall's New World Encyclopedia:

"GEHENNA (Gr. Geenna; Heb. Ge Hinnom), Valley of Hinnom, near Jerusalem, where Solomon, king of Israel, built “an high place,” or place of worship, for the gods Chemosh and Moloch, according to 1 Kings 11:7. Because some of the Israelites are supposed to have sacrificed their children to Moloch there (see 2 Kings 23:10), the valley came to be regarded as a place of abomination. In a later period it was made a refuse dump, and perpetual fires were maintained there to prevent pestilence. Thus, in the New Testament, Gehenna became synonymous with hell."

Also, a similar summary can be found in the Wikipedia entry on Gehenna which also contains a helpful list of the occurrences of this word in the New Testament (12 times total, and only once outside of the Synoptic Gospels).

N.T. Wright has some interesting thoughts in his recent book Surprised by Hope on Gehenna/hell that bear quoting at length:

The point is that when Jesus was warning his hearers about Gehenna, he was not as a general rule, telling that them unless they repented in this life they would burn in the next one. As with God's kingdom, so with its opposite: it is on earth that things matter, not somewhere else. His message to his contemporaries was stark and (as we would say today) political. Unless they turned back from their hopeless and rebellious dreams of establishing God's kingdom in their own terms, not least through armed revolt against Rome, then the Roman juggernaut would do what large, greedy, and ruthless empires have always done to smaller countries . . . It is there only by extension, and with difficulty that we can extrapolate from the many gospel sayings that articulate this urgent, immediate warning to a deeper question of a warning about what may happen after death. The two parables that appear to address this question directly are, we should remember, parables, not actual descriptions of the afterlife. They use stock imagery from ancient Judaism, such as "Abraham's bosom," not to teach about what happens after death but to insist on justice and mercy within the present life. This is not to say that Jesus would have dissented from their implied picture of postmortem realities. It is, rather, to point out that to take the scene of Abraham, the Rich Man, and Lazarus literally is about as sensible as trying to find out the name of the Prodigal Son. (176-177).

As Wright alludes to, it is interesting to note that most of Jesus' sayings involving Gehenna are when he is talking with his disciples. If hell was such a pressing matter, then one would think Jesus might have included it more often in his more public teachings. The centrality of the kingdom of God to Jesus' mission and message should never be forgotten when we consider the words of Jesus.

This does not mean that there is no judgment or consequences for those who choose to live in wickedness through their dehumanizing behavior. I think there is much to C.S. Lewis' famous observation that if the doors of hell are locked, it is from the inside. However, we need to realize how little focus on hell (or heaven for that matter) Jesus provides in his teachings, and the danger of trying to read too much of anything into the passages. The word "hell" is full of all sorts of connotations and implications, and it takes some work to try to peel these accretions away and go back once more to the world of Sheol and Gehenna.

The Lost History of Christianity

I finished reading Philip Jenkins' excellent recent book The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Gold Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia - and How It Died last week, and was very favorably impressed by it. Jenkins, who teaches at Penn State and has written other works on the subject on religious history and global Christianity, presents a facet of Christian history that too often gets overlooked by a view of Christianity that sees it primarily as an European/North American/Western religion long since divorced from its Semitic roots.

These roots remained strong for far longer than the story of the Western Church would lead one to believe, and Jenkins shows how the history of Eastern Christianity (such as the Coptic Church, Nestorians, or Jacobites) provides a balance to many assumptions about the nature of Christian history. The growth of the Church to the East, its flourishing, its existence well past the emergence of Islam all paint a different view of Christianity, which is often assumed to be a majority faith closely allied with governments based on the course it took in the West. Jenkins' work shows that the course of Western Christianity is only one possible route, and indeed, is only one way in which it developed historically. He provides a balanced analysis of religious persecution, noting the extensive periods of peaceful toleration and coexistence under Islamic rule while also noting that periods of intense persecution and violence that did take place as well.

Jenkins' also discusses why faiths die in various regions, and what lessons this reality might hold for the faithful in those regions and followers of the faith observing it from afar. The idea that Christianity could be driven out of areas of the world that it had inhabited and flourished in for centuries is something that is deeply unsettling for believers, and The Lost History of Christianity forced me to grapple with this uncomfortable truth. However, this book also has much that is hopeful for a Christian, showing that Christianity can be practiced anywhere in the world without forcing Western culture as a part of it. Indeed, the ways in which the Eastern churches presented Christianity in ways that connected and fit with the cultures it encountered is an important lesson for 21st century Christianity, which once again is making major inroads in places like China and is growing at a torrid place in many parts of Africa. The re-Christianization of these lands that once before had important Christian centers is a reminder that the end of Christianity in a place is not the final word on the matter, as history has shown time and again.

Indeed, an understanding of this is key to beginning to grapple with the fact that Christianity died out (actually was killed, as Jenkins' shows. It was violence and persecution that brought an end to these churches). If we as Christians seriously believe that God's sense of time is different than hours and that there is any truth to be found in the simile "with the Lord a thousand years is as a day" then we must recognize that in view of God's time what we may see as a irreversible setback may be nothing more than a small shift. This doesn't mean that this is the end of all grappling with why Christianity may die or be killed in certain areas, and I think we should take seriously the need to develop what Jenkins' calls a "theology of extinction."

The history of Christianity in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia is a huge part of Christian history that gets overlooked and is a powerful antidote to a Eurocentric view of Christianity that leads to all sort of assumptions about Christianity that are often more to do with Western culture than anything inherent to Christianity. To give just one example, Jenkins' points out how knowledge of the history of the Church in the East can offer a valuable contribution to debates in Biblical studies:

The Syriac Bible was a conservative text, to a degree that demands our attention. In recent years, accounts of the early church claim that scriptures and gospels were very numerous, until the mainstream Christian church suppressed most of them in the fourth century. This alleged purge followed the Christian conversion of the Emperor Constantine, at a time when the church supposedly wanted to ally with the empire in the interests of promoting order, orthodoxy, and ecclesiastical authority. According to modern legend, the suppressed works included many heterodox accounts of Jesus, which were suspect because of their mystical or even feminist leanings.

The problem with all this is that the Eastern churches had a long familiarity iwth the rival scriptures, but rejected them because they knew they were late and tendentious. Even as early as the second century, the Diatessaron assumes four, and only four, authentic Gospels. Throughout the Middle Ages, neither Nestorians or Jacobites were under an coercion from the Roman/Byzantine Empire or church, and had they wished, they could have included in the canon any alternative Gospels or scriptures they wanted to. But instead of adding to the canon, they chose to prune. The Syriac Bible omits several books that are included in the West (2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and the book of Revelation). Scholars like Isho'dad wanted to carry the purge further, and did not feel that any of the Catholic Epistles could seriously claim apostolic authorship. The only extraneous text that a few authorities wished to include was the Diatessaron itself. The deep conservatism of these churches, so far removed from papal or imperial control, makes nonsense of claims that the church bureaucracy allied with empire to suppress unpleasant truths about Christian origins (87-88).

This is just one way in which knowledge of the broader history of Christianity has important ramifications for how we understand the faith today, and I appreciative of people like Jenkins' interested in telling this story in a way that is both academically rigorous and popularly accessible, sharing with a wider readership what has been circulating in scholarly circles for a long time. I am grateful for the way this book has helped me to appreciate the fuller history of the church and is continuing to make me grapple with why the faith has spread and contracted in different ways and different places throughout history.

A New Project for Me

My dialog with Harlan Quinn through QuIRP and the Logan Cres blog has turned into a new blog. It is a collaboration between us on the logical structure of the atonement. This will serve as an educational resource for things related to the atonement. It is not intended to be a debate blog, but comments and thoughts are strongly encouraged. We are interested in seeing some stimulating dialogue on the atonement! I am happy to be able to participate in this kind of dialog between a Christian and an atheist.

I have already posted two fairly substantial posts related to the issues of sin and law. You can view them here:

Sin and Community

Jesus and the Law

I don't want to post redundant content here and there, but these posts contain some thoughts that I think are important to the atonement and to gaining a better understanding of the Bible and Christianity in general, so I wanted to make links to them available here. A permanent link to Logan Atone is now available on the side, so feel free to check it out and see what is going on over there.