Why I Refuse to Leave the Church

\In all the conversations about people leaving the church, I wrote up my own response until I realized that I was writing the wrong paper. I should instead be writing about why I refuse to leave the church. After all, I am a millennial (born in 1988) and I haven’t stopped going to church. In fact, I am vacillating between two churches right now (one being a UU-congregation, and the other being Presbyterian). For many in my age group, the unaffiliated and the non-religious are on the rise. What makes me stay? There are at least a couple of answers. 1. Christianity runs deep in my identity. Honestly, this sounds weird, but my favorite thing to do in church is to think of the Christian symbols (hymns, creeds, sermon, Scriptures, wherever) and the multiple ways in which one can interpret them (perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve graduated from seminary). The Christian symbols are the ones that have deep resonance with me. I may not interpret them literally (by that I mean ontologically), and I may not interpret them in ways that many others do, but I nonetheless find myself attracted to them. Even in my firm rejection of some of them (like the idea of God-as-entity), I am still very drawn to them. I keep coming back around to them. I find myself reflecting deeply about the universe, myself, the universe-in-myself, and myself-in-the-universe through these beautiful and rich and potent symbols of Christianity. 2. I want a community of faith. In today’s technological age, there are many possible communities to choose from. Even now, I am in book clubs, meet up groups, dating websites, and have a full calendar list of arts events (dancing, orchestra, theater, etc.) The sheer number of others that I could do is mind-boggling. But I have found that however much I care about justice, and however much I care about biking or reading or philosophy or other interests, I feel a need for a community oriented around faith and specifically the Christian faith. Having friends is nice; doing activities to get me out of the apartment is nice. No doubts about it. But I don’t need more friends, and honestly I don’t need more activities either. I plan myself quite full by myself. What I want is to go deep, and specifically, to go deep with others. Sure, depth can be accomplished in random conversations in between billards games with the recent college grads meetup group (as happened last week). But there is something almost easier in a faith community setting. This is why I love my spirituality group (at my UU church). This is why I love my Christian church. When we all come together, we come together specifically because we want to go deeply into our religious heritage, our spirituality, our religious narrative. This depth is intense. Sometimes it produces a lot of pain. Sometimes it is frustrating. Any worthwhile community is. But without a community of faith, I doubt my ability to find that type of deep community, and I find my investment in church to be worth the risk. At any rate, I don’t think it would be as likely to occur in a non-faith community. 3. I want spiritual and personal depth. Becoming good at something requires discipline, and gaining depth of one’s whole self is no different. Having a religion where I experience God in the sunset or the ocean is cool, and I certainly do, but it’s easy. Unless I have accountability, and unless I am being continually challenged by others (either with their ideas, their ways of having faith, their ways of experiencing the divine, or their actions that provoke reflection in me), all of which have happened to me in previous communities of faith, then I’ll be honest and say that my spiritual and personal life is going to be undernourished. Like I said before, community’s tough. But community can be worth the pain and the annoyances. I don’t believe we are individualistic creatures, and so I want the depth and discipline and new ideas by being active within a faith community. Narcissism may be easier, and maybe there is a time for that. But now is not that time for me.

Logos v Spirit Christologies

Talking with an Orthodox person about Christology made me think about some things. In particular, I want this essay to explore ways that Christology can be conceived of, and how various members of the Church have understood themselves in light of their view of Jesus Christ. By way of introduction, whenever “Jesus of Nazareth” is used, that title is normally used to describe the historical Jesus of Biblical scholarship), whereas “Jesus Christ” or “Jesus the Christ” is often used to describe the resurrected Jesus of faith. Now, the traditional Christian answer to “what makes Jesus of Nazareth be Jesus the Christ” has been, historically speaking, the combination of the Logos and the Spirit. However, though most doctors of the church (going all the way through Calvin who emphasized the two in his Institutes) would grant that both are important, I believe there has typically an emphasis on either the Logos or the Spirit. These emphases, or clusters of images, I believe, can lead to important differences in metaphysics, perceived value of other religions, and even Christian ethics. If one emphasizes the Logos cluster of images, one will tend to focus on the Johannine texts, which talk about the pre-existent Logos (or Sophia) that is incarnate of the Virgin Mary through the Holy Spirit in the fullness of time. In other words, Jesus of Nazareth was always Jesus the Christ, starting at conception through the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ ministry may have started later, but there will be visible signs of Jesus’ miraculous existence, as one sees in some non-canonical texts like the Gospel of Thomas. A strong Logos Christology emphasizes Jesus Christ’s uniqueness. Christ, and no one else, is the final redeemer because Christ, and no one else, is the incarnation of the Logos. Other religions will likely not be emphasized because they are not based on incarnations of the Logos, and a priority on Christian claims, and dogmas may occur. For instance, the church communities in Alexandria struggled with how to reconcile the Logos with human nature (was Jesus of 2 minds, 2 wills, 2 souls?), and many later-condemned heresies came out of Egypt because of that struggle. Also, because the Logos came down from heaven at the appointed time, in the fullness of time, there seems to be a view of necessity. The one Logos came down at the one appointed time in history. By contrast, the other cluster of images, the ones concerning the Spirit, will place priority on Jesus’ ministry as the starting point, perhaps even saying that Jesus of Nazareth became Jesus the Christ when the Holy Spirit came upon him in baptism, after the Holy Spirit empowered Him to rebuff Satan’s advances (in the 40-day wilderness period). Whereas Logos Christologies tend to be very metaphysical with all kinds of distinctions and clarifications, Spirit Christologies tend to eschew metaphysics. The divine and human spaces seem much more easily viewed as non-competing in a spirit outlook, and historically speaking, there are far fewer heresies associated with a Spirit emphasis. There also seems a greater receptivity for nonreligious or interreligious dialogue because the Spirit is more open and free and contingent. The Spirit is free, and the Scripture likens the Spirit to the wind, for no one knows where the Spirit is blowing. We can feel its effects, but we cannot control it. Moreover, Spirit workings are more easily viewed as consistent with miracle workers today. After all, when the Spirit comes upon someone, whether it be Jesus or the prophets of old, the Scriptural testimony is that miracles happened. To sum up: 1. Logos-centered Christology may tend to prioritize the Christian tradition to the extent that there is no need to dialogue with other religions because only Christianity is based on the incarnate Logos. 2. Logos-centered Christology will probably be more vulnerable to heresies because of its metaphysical and philosophical emphases. Perhaps, like the sacraments, there will be all kinds of distinctions and predicate/attribute clarifications, etc. 3. Logos-centered Christology will be more resonant with conceptions of necessity, unity, finality, design, and order. 4. Spirit-centered Christology seems much more open to other religious symbols and imagery because the Spirit cannot be controlled and chooses whomever it chooses. 5. Spirit-centered Christology seems resonant with conceptions of contingency, freedom, openness, receptivity, anointing, and empowering. 6. Spirit-centered Christology more easily views divine and human spaces as non-competing. Regarding Christian ethics, I think the difference between a Logos and Spirit-centered Christology becomes very important. Just consider these thoughts. A Logos-centered Christology is less likely to say we should imitate Christ because we can’t imitate Christ. Only Christ is the incarnate Logos. The best we can do is to be “in Christ,” which has historically been understood as partaking of the sacraments and being under the authority of the bishop. A Spirit-centered Christology, by contrast, very much affirms our ability to imitate Christ. The important marker in Jesus becoming the Christ was the anointing and empowering of the Spirit. Imitating Christ can thus be understood as being open to God’s Spirit and participation in the Spirit’s work of freedom and love in the world. As Gregory of Nyssa said in his Life of Moses, true virtue is openness to encounter God in God’s darkness. Virtue in this way can be developed in mystical contemplation or in political activism or in a myriad of other ways because of the diversity of the Spirit’s works. Whereas a Logos-centered Christology may affirm the incarnational sacraments (Catholicism) and/or kataphatic images of Jesus Christ (evangelicalism), a Spirit-centered Christology may affirm apophatic experiences. God’s infinitude and “darkness” seem more compatible with the freedom of God’s Spirit. Fewer rules and regulations may correspond best with God’s freedom. Openness, not determination and predication, are the ways for virtue under this cluster of images.

Ethics and a Human Telos

Is the point of morality to justify yourself? Because if you know the truth of how to act, then a necessary by-product of that is an attitude of judgment, condemning those who act wrong and feeling good that one acts right. If the point of morality and the study of ethics is to study how to act, then what is the point of claiming to not know the rules? Of not knowing how to act? If you say “well, we can’t know about morality”, then what’s the point of studying? Ethics seems to vacillate between both extremes: dogmatism and skepticism. Dogmatism makes us judgmental and critical, whereas skepticism leads us to apathy and despair. Surely, there is some middle-ground between the two. I suggest that one way in which ethics can strive for the middle ground is to discover goals for how to live without offering prescriptions for how to get there. And if one allows great ignorance in how to live, then one cannot have any set rules (without corresponding justification or judgment), which encourages a mindset of exploration and openness. That mindset is, to me, very valuable. By giving us a telos toward which to strive, but while allowing a number of paths to use to get there, we can avoid the problems of despair and apathy. How is one to discover a telos? Is it by reason, emotion, common-sense? Is it by cultural values and mores? Is it by metaphysics or a philosophical or theological anthropology? The Greeks were perhaps the first people (that we have records of) to emphasize goal-oriented behavior, argued that the good life is fulfilling one’s role. According to the Greeks, humans were made with reason to guide, and so the goal of human living is to live a life guided by reason. They used metaphysical assumptions regarding human nature to guide and shape their understanding of telos. Likewise, Karl Barth, the famous Protestant theologian, argued for love and freedom as our telos because of a metaphysics he derived from revelation concerning Jesus Christ. Both of these ethical systems, or anthropological systems, or as I term them “anthropo-ethical” systems are agent-centered because they are grounded in what it means to be a person and judge morality according to the fulfilled human life as an human agent. There are other systems of morality that are not agent-centered. For instance, utilitarianism (Mills or Bentham) and deontology (Kant) are not agent-centered. Do they involve metaphysical assumptions concerning human nature? Utilitarianism argues that the moral act is the act that maximizes utility (and they loosely claimed utility was happiness). There are various groups within utilitarianism – some advocate utility of all life, some for all sentient life, some for all human life. Some groups define pleasure as the operative principle, others invoke a more nuanced account of “flourishing”. What are the assumptions? First, there is a single scale of happiness on which there are quantitative but not qualitative distinctions. Secondly, pleasure is worth increasing, regardless of personal benefit or harm. But if one asks why pleasure is to be expanded, the typical reasoning (at least for Mill) is that all ethical reasoning and examples are essentially based on expanding pleasure. Utilitarians believe that our thoughts on most ethical issues are grounded in reality, and they find the principle of utilitarianism to be a rule that justifies and clarifies our already-accepted conclusions (at least if we were consistent and rational, they say). Utilitarians don’t necessarily believe that our sentiment (i.e. our feelings concerning moral approval or disapproval) is grounded in some metaphysical grounding concerning the universe, but they are commited to the view that human sentiment aligns with their view. Kantian deontology believes that truly-ethical rationality must be universal and objective. True moral reasoning must be based on a universal and necessary form, which guarantees its objectivity, but also must be empty in content which guarantees its universality. He believed that properly-moral behavior will have no bearing on one’s emotions. Kant came up with at least three distinct formulations of his categorical imperative, the first two being the most well-known. The first formulation basically says that pure reason requires us to act in a way that can be universalized into a rule without contradiction. Thus, if I wonder whether or not I can lie, I have to consider the consequences of universalizing the scenario. When I lie, I want the other person to trust me (presumably because I always tell the truth). But their trusting me requires me to always say the truth and never lie. Therefore, it would be contradictory for me to lie according to this universalizable rule. And therefore, I can never lie. His second formulation is that one must act in such a way that one treats others as ends and never as means. There are lots of rules that if universalized, do not lead to a contradiction – such as “always wear red” or “never drink orange juice” that don’t lead to a contradiction. But to ensure that these rules were ethical, he applied them to all reasoning agents (claiming that we must treat other reasoning agents as ends and never means). His ethics was grounded in a particular understanding of reason that required objective universality, whereas other competing interpretations of reason may not (for instance, Aristotelian teleology doesn’t require objectivity: in fact, it cannot support objectivity because it’s grounded in human behavior and habits). Kant’s ethics only required an assumption of human beings that are able to use reason to guide their motives. And if a human doesn’t have the potential to reason in that sense, for whatever reason, then Kantian deontology treats them as non-reasoning animals, like the rest of the non-human world. Thus, it seems that of the 4 aforementioned ethical systems, only Aristotelian and Barthian anthropologies involves metaphysical assumptions concerning human telos. Utilitarianism and Kantian deontology do not. To be fair to deontology and utilitarianism, they do envision a world in which rational agents will flourish. Kant explicitly writes in his 2nd Kritic that for humans to act ethically, practical reason dictates that we assume a moral lawgiver exists who will reward us for our efforts and punish evildoers. (Fichte, his disciple, argued in one of his earliest books that Kant’s system only requires a moral universe, not a moral lawgiver, after which he repeatedly defended himself against charges of atheism.) Mill and Bentham and other utilitarians write that a world governed by utilitarian principles will be a vast improvement over our current world, and some have even written about what that world might look like. However, whereas Barth’s theological anthropology (which argues being fully human entails being fully free and fully loving), and Aristotelian teleology (which says the completely-fulfilled human life involves enjoying one’s habituated and virtuous character in the community of close friends) both unite moral living with the best kind of human life, neither Kantian deontology nor utilitarianism unite the two. A rational person may or may not be rewarded by a moral lawgiver, though Kant believes we must assume so in order to act ethically. And a person guided by utilitarian principles may or may not flourish in this life as a human being. For deontology and utilitarianism, being moral doesn’t make one a better human. For Barth and Aristotle, being moral must make one a better human. How might the differences between our worldviews lead to practical differences on the ground? I believe there are at least 3 relevant points to continue our discussion. 1. Deontology and utilitarianism lose the agent-centered (and human-centered) approaches of Aristotle and Barth. I think this means that they, inadvertently or not, think in terms of rules and abstraction instead of the embodied, complex, and human-faced ethical systems of Aristotle and Barth. There may extend, unconsciously or not, less grace for special circumstances and for the many “gray areas” that many people recognize and accept. 2. Closely related to point 1, deontology and utilitarianism think more in terms of general roles and less in terms of individual persons. More importantly, they think in terms of one specific roles (i.e. a rational agent (Kant), a deliberative agent (utilitarian), etc. instead of the many layers of roles that is prevalent among Confucian culture (i.e. (1) ruler and subject; (2) father and son; (3) elder brother and younger brother; (4) husband and wife; and (5) friend and friend.) What makes humans and human societies and human systems distinct and unique are all erased for deontologists and utilitarians. a. For Aristotle, one can only be a virtuous and fulfilled/happy person within these particular and determinate human communities, relations, and systems. Part of Homer’s brilliance was the way he articulated roles as competing and allowed for tension within these roles. b. For Barth, one can only experience freedom and love through the Holy Spirit who works uniquely and freely within our social relations and situation. God has a particular relationship with us, and for Barth, God approaches us within our concrete and historical existence. 3. Role-based may have the problem of compartmentalizing the roles within one’s identity, but a person-centered approach implies a natural mediation and balancing-act of all the different roles together. 4. Perhaps Confucianism’s view of identity, and virtue, as the fulfillment of one’s numerous roles ends up being more person-centered. In other words, one can be explicitly person-centered or role-oriented or one can end up with a person-oriented system because of the sheer plurality of roles (which are united in a single person…the unity of the multiplicity of roles is the person).

Jesus and Moral Perfection

It seems to me that Christians, though perhaps this could be expanded to other religious groups, are trapped between two horns of a dilemma. On one hand, they want to say that Jesus’ divinity entails some conclusion regarding Jesus’ moral perfection. For some people, like my parents, Jesus’ divinity means that Jesus was morally perfect and blameless. And because their image of Jesus is perfection, I believe their image of moral perfection is wrapped up with a human face. This conscious or unconscious link between a human face and moral perfection may have important ramifications that aren’t being sufficiently appreciated by liberal Christians. I will go into that deeper later; for now, I want to talk about the idea that Jesus’ divinity does NOT entail moral perfection. There are some, like me, who are not concerned with defending Jesus’ behavior and do not care if Jesus does not satisfy my own ideas of moral perfection or justice. Jesus called a woman a “dog” (kind of like calling her a bitch) before he finally relented and gave her healing as she requested, in one story. Jesus may have prevented a woman from being stoned for adultery, but Jesus certainly didn’t do anything to address the systemic and cultural issues that may have forced her into adultery (such as the lack of women’s rights, prohibition on women owning property, lack of ability for women to be witnesses in court, and the plight of the poor under the Roman empire, etc.). In my mind, it’s easy for one to say “your sins are forgiven” without confronting and changing the societal ills and evils. Of course, one might disagree with me on that point, but the simple fact that Jesus didn’t bring about revolutionary changes in the society of the time to enact perfect justice means that I cannot attribute moral perfection to him. I believe we humans are embedded within cultural systems, and no one can be morally blameless if one lives within an oppressive and unjust social system for the simple fact that one’s collusion and cooperation, however tacit or unconscious or latent, will be sufficient to render one “unclean”. For liberals, and others who have a strong sense of “social sin”, Jesus and moral perfection are incompatible. However, I wonder if our strong sense of social sin comes at a cost. For instance, if one views Jesus as morally perfect, then one’s sense of moral perfection has a human face. Yes, the “human face” of justice will be remarkably similar to one’s view of Jesus, which probably conceals our own misogyny, sexism, classism, racism, heteronormativity, etc. but at least one’s sense of justice has a human face. When liberals get caught up in social sin, they may view the world as more complex and they may recognize the embeddedness of humans in their social webs – but do they have the human face when they have an image of justice? Because we liberals emphasize systems of power and oppression, I think that we may be prone to view humans as weak and without agency (including the capacity to resist and oppose systems of oppression). We often seem to encourage or envision vast social changes, even being sympathetic to revolutions, without, I believe, fully appreciating the complexity that accompanies wide changes, such as individuals falling through the cracks or individuals getting overtrodden when they cannot keep up with such changes. I think we liberals secretly entertain simplistic notions of “if this happened, the world would be so much better” even as we oppose “simplicity” when we think it leads to sexism and racism and empire. If and when this occurs, I think that religious conservatives have a lot to teach us liberals. Maybe in our struggle for justice, we lose the human element. Maybe we lose sight of the fact that people are intrinsically free, even free to oppose “universal” and “dominating” systems. I am amazed at people’s creativity in their resistance, and maybe us liberals are slow to recognize it, appreciate it and, hence, to encourage it. We liberals also need to remember to focus on love because sometimes love and justice seem to be opposing – even though they’re not. And when they seem to be opposing, I think our conservative brothers and sisters can remind us that justice, like love, requires a human face. There are dangers to both perspectives. The religious conservatives, who maintain a human face, may unwittingly hold racist, sexist, classist, and empire perspectives because we humans unfortunately view “human faces” like ourselves. The religious liberals, who may struggle to maintain a human face in our justice efforts, may be better at recognizing and calling out perspectives that hinder and silence others, but we may do so at the cost of viewing others as weak and without agency. Moreover, we may maintain justice without love, too easily dismissing those that fall outside of our system(s) (that we’re fixing or replacing). Both sides need each other, and the human life is, in the words of George MacDonald, an oscillation between two extremes. I think he was right.

The Lack of Agenthood in Christian Ethics

The Lack of Agenthood in Christian Ethics I was recently talking with my friend who’s a very conservative evangelical Christian. He told me that he doesn’t judge people even though he holds a very conservative viewpoint. When I asked him what that means, he said that he doesn’t treat people differently, even though he believes they live in a lifestyle of sin. Well, then I started thinking. First, besides holding the obvious contradiction “you’re judging them for being in a lifestyle of sin” while saying that you don’t judge others, I realized that there’s a deeper insight to be gleaned. What my friend means is that he doesn’t treat people differently on the basis of perceived sin. Rather, and which I confirmed with him in a later discussion, he has two ladders in his mind. One is the ladder of morality, where some actions are moral or immoral. This ladder is in accordance with very conservative thought (homosexuality is wrong, sex before marriage is wrong, stealing and lying are wrong in all cases, looking at a woman lustfully is wrong, etc.) However, he has a second ladder, a ladder that doesn’t intersect with the first ladder, and this ladder is the “response” ladder. While he may view someone who has sexual relations outside of marriage as immoral, he won’t treat them differently than someone who does because that action, that lifestyle, that particular sin, has no bearing on his response ladder. However, he would refuse to let a convicted sex offender work with the children’s ministry in his church. He told me it doesn’t matter if that convicted sex offender was a nice person, or claimed to have been healed, or is maintaining proper moral relations (to my friend’s mind) in all other areas of his life. His past is enough to constrain his ministry opportunities in the church. What my friend holds, essentially, is an ethical worldview that is completely divorced from agent-centered ethics. He holds an act-centered ethical perspective – some acts are immoral and some acts are moral. He believes certain things are moral or immoral based on his own reading of the Bible, which is in accordance with very conservative and evangelical thinking. However, when he makes choices regarding how to respond to others, he adopts a very cultural and common-sense approach. Convicted sex offenders, regardless of their current actions, cannot volunteer in the children’s ministry at church. And yet, he doesn’t treat homosexuals any differently than heterosexuals. He doesn’t treat people having sexual relations with others outside of marriage differently than people who are not. One of the potential problems with this perspective is that it’s subject to prevailing cultural norms that, at least in my mind, need to be deconstructed. How he responds to others isn’t based on the Bible – it’s based on common-sense, prevailing norms of rationality or cultural acceptance, etc. Maybe “common sense”, prevailing norms of rationality and cultural acceptance are good justifications – but maybe they’re not. His view raises the question of how to understand ethics. Is ethics based upon how you respond to others? If so, his ethics is based on cultural norms and values, regardless of his moral beliefs. If ethics is based on morality and what makes actions immoral or moral, then his ethics is divorced from practice in life. Another interesting issue is that he seems to neglect an agent-centered approach that is so important in my own ethical thinking. When I reflect on ethics, my images are of persons, of good character, of virtue. I think that someone who does bad things is a bad person, and so I treat them as such. I think actions reflect on character; therefore, I have a hard time imagining a good person doing bad actions or a bad person doing good actions. If a good person performs a bad action, then I tend to either downgrade how I view them (from good person to bad person) or I tend to dismiss the “bad” action is morally neutral or justified. And, if I reflect on how to treat someone, I do so based on an analysis of their character, asking myself “Are they a good person in whom I can trust?” or “Are they simple-minded and therefore likely to not backstab me for personal gain?” Moreover, I tend to assume that persons with one or two virtues are likely to be virtuous in other senses, even ones that have not been proven to me. For instance, if my friend is very kind to me, then I would tend to assign bravery or temperance to my image of him. And visa-versa. Like the classical Greeks, I tend to have a unified virtue theory of agents – if an agent has one virtue, then they have all of them. To me, wisdom is not easily segmented and boxed. Whereas my conservative friend seems to think that actions do not reflect on one’s character at all (one can be a brave, kind, and temperate homosexual in his mind), I think totally differently. Like my friend, I too have very strong convictions regarding what is moral or immoral. My overriding question for morality is as simple and as complicated as the question: does it promote love and freedom? My view of morality, insofar as it judges actions to be moral or immoral, is based upon whether those actions lead to greater freedom and love for themselves and for others. In other words, it’s consequentialist insofar as it’s agent-oriented. But not just regarding the agent that acts, but also regarding all agents in the world (does it promote love and freedom for all persons who are agents?). I suspect that my friend too has strong convictions regarding what is moral or immoral, but his is based on a particular reading of the Bible, without regard to consequences, to general norms (like love or freedom) and is not agent-oriented. There are at least 3 main areas of divergence that I have come up with between my friend’s ethical account and mine. 1. His is based on timeless decrees based on divine revelation. Metaphysically, he therefore has accompanying problems of how to account for divine revelation as well as a particular conception of God. Practically speaking, his ethical worldview will be rigid and uncompromising. This has important ramifications in the kinds of actions he performs (or is open to performing) as well as the kinds of people he hangs around with (typically people who believe like him since communities that are outside of prevailing cultural values tend to hang out together to reinforce and support that mindset). 2. His outlook will increasingly come under attack as cultural norms shift and change, both because cultural norms change (how we view homosexuality today is quite different from how we viewed it in the ‘80s and the ‘20s). As such, he may struggle with wanting to reconcile the divinely-revealed moral ladder with the how-I-act ladder, even though he has no bridge. 3. His ethics allows for justification pre¬-action. He can feel justified in acting in accordance with his principles of morality. This may lead to sharper feelings of condemnation and dogmatism. My ethical worldview is grounded in a strong commitment to the principles of love and freedom – namely promoting love and freedom for oneself and for all other ethical actors in the world. 1. Mine is based on growth in the Spirit, with the end result of greater experiences of love and freedom for oneself and for others. Because it is based on growth for ethical actors, it will place great weight upon context, trust in my own experiences, and a lack of judgment upon others. Someone with my worldview will be less likely to make moral judgments upon others because they are in a different context than I. My ethical perspective predisposes me against rigid and universal claims, which produces effects in who I hang around with (tend to align myself with open, exploratory, and non-judgmental people) 2. My ethical outlook will welcome deconstructionist and critical theory. Not only am I skeptical of cultural norms and values, apart from direct appeals to love and freedom, but my outlook will tend to be open and exploratory in how I treat people, not according to cultural values but according to deconstructed cultural values based on overriding principles of love and freedom. 3. My ethics does not allow for any justification before I act. Because love and freedom are principles, not easily-deciphered rules, I cannot know what action is the “right” one to do because I can’t know in advance which actions will lead to greater love and freedom for all ethical agents including myself. Rather, I must act given the best information I have and fall on the mercies of God (as Bonhoeffer said).

Jesus - our empathic High Priest

Hebrews 4:14 Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. 15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. 16 Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.


On Good Friday, my church (Metro Hope in Harlem) talked about the suffering that Jesus underwent on Good Friday and integrated it with our sufferings today. The pastor’s wife has been undergoing chemotherapy, and the pastor argued that Jesus, as our empathic high priest, understands what she is going through in ways that the pastor, nor anyone else, can.

I totally agree with this Scripture, especially through the Christian Scriptures and church fathers, but I found that my pastor’s discussion to be unhelpful, and I submit instead the following considerations.

First, God is not empathic because God is omniscient. My pastor argued that Jesus knows what we’re going through because God is omniscient and Jesus is God. This entire line of reasoning is false. The pastor was right to say that each one of us suffers alone. However, the pastor was wrong to say that God knows what it’s like because of God’s omniscience – no one else knows what it’s like for me to suffer because they know about my disease or about my body. They don’t know what it’s like for me to suffer because they don’t know what it’s like to be me as I experience suffering. Abstract knowledge about something will never put someone else in my shoes.

How might one understand the Hebrew passage then? I believe that Jesus is so important because Jesus became fully human. Allow me to introduce this topic with medieval philosophy. Jesus is the perfect example of what Aquinas termed “concursis” or the coinciding of God and human. The sacraments are specific examples of God’s promise to concur with the physical objects in fulfillment of God’s divine promise. The Catholic Church leaves open God’s work in concurring with other objects or actions or individuals, but the Catholic Church proclaims God’s guarantee of working through the sacraments. Karl Rahner, the most famous Catholic theologian of the twentieth century, said that Jesus is the supreme sacrament, and other sacraments are made sacraments only through their being united with Jesus Christ. I agree with Rahner’s view, and so I conclude that Jesus is so instrumental in being empathic because Jesus is God and God experiences the fullness of humanity in Jesus.

So far, this may seem basic, but deeper considerations arise. Jesus was not a woman. Jesus never had cancer or HIV or shame around being transgendered, so far as we know. Jesus never suffered a slow and agonizing defeat by Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. In fact, Jesus, despite being human, only suffered in particular ways within his Greco-Roman and Palestinian context. How can anyone claim, then, that Jesus is fully empathic with us as our High Priest, undergoing all temptations that we undergo but being without sin, as the verse claims? I have already argued that Jesus’ omniscience is not sufficient, instead claiming that Jesus’ human experience must hold the clue. But there are clearly problems with Jesus’ limited human experience.

I foresee two possible options. First, we could claim that Jesus’ experience of Godforsakenness makes Jesus completely empathic. Throughout Jesus’ life, Jesus experienced all kinds of pain and suffering – betrayal by his friends at his sentencing by the Sanhedrin, catching them asleep at his hour of greatest need in the garden of Gethesemane, frustration at the disciples’ lack of faith, bouts of hunger and existential loneliness, even being tempted by Satan! Jesus experienced all kinds of things that we, too, in our own lives, experience. However, on the cross, Jesus experienced Godforsakenness, crying out “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” If all suffering and pain are modes of experiencing Godforsakenness, which I believe one could claim on the basis of Scripture and church tradition, then Jesus, by experiencing Godforsakenness on the cross and entering hell (the realm of Godforsakenness) before experiencing resurrection, then Jesus could be claimed to experientially understand our pain and suffering because Jesus encountered the absolute culmination and fullness of suffering: complete Godforsakenness. I wish that Christians would emphasize Jesus’ descent into hell because this reminds us of Jesus’ experience of Godforsakenness, and if we did, then perhaps we could emphasize Jesus’ empathic love and grace and mercy towards us. Perhaps the focus on Mary and other saints is a necessary outgrowth of a view of Jesus apart from Godforsakenness, for we need other “mediators” or divine images to convey to us a sense of identity, participation, empathy, and grace. I could be wrong, of course – do I love and appreciate Mary in my own spiritual life because I don’t understand Jesus’ godforsakenness on the cross, or do I just need many images to approach the divine life? I don’t know, but it’s a thought.

My second thought is that we can understand God’s empathy towards us by emphasizing the “Jesus within” or the spark of divine life that operates within each of us. Christians are not going to adopt pantheistic conceptions, wherein the argument runs thus:

a) God is the world,
b) I am a part of the world
c) Therefore, I am God
d) Therefore, God knows what my suffering is like because God is me.

However, if Christians embrace a participation in Jesus, wherein all new creatures now are “in Christ”, as Paul reiterated over and over again, then there is a divine spark, a part that recognizes the “concursis” that occurs whenever we allow ourselves to be worked within and through by God. One way of formulating God’s working through us is, I believe, this notion of a divine spark within us. Not that there is a divine spark apart from us, or as if God and humans compete for ontological space (because I don’t believe divine space competes with natural and human space), but rather that God’s work “concurs” with human action, and the divine spark within is, I believe, one way of formulating that concept. If God’s actions concur with ours, then God knows what it’s like to be us because God’s space totally encompasses and transcends our own. We are now “in Christ” as much as a drop of water is “in” the ocean. This may sound pantheistic, which it is, but this is another way in which God can be truly be said to understand us in our situation and in our sufferings. As a pantheist, I find this understanding more appealing, but I believe that both this pantheistic-leaning conception as well as the Godforsakenness idea (which I grabbed from Jurgen Moltmann) are ways of understanding God’s empathy toward us.

And what is the significance of all of this? Well, as the verse says, now we can approach the throne of grace with boldness, that we may know that we will receive mercy and grace in our time of need. And, of course, so that we may hold fast to our confession. Understanding God’s empathy and great love toward us not only keeps us grounded in our faith, which is very important for our spiritual lives, but it also allows us to confront life boldly, with great confidence, knowing that we will receive mercy and grace. Instead of being “tossed to and fro by the winds” of ever-changing doctrines, and instead of being bowed over by a commanding and never-satisfied superego (Freud), we are confident. We do not have to wonder about our goodness being up to God’s standards. Our identity is secure in Christ, and in Christ’s salvific work on the cross.

Amen.

A rant on the historical Jesus

In this blog post, I am going to express my dissatisfaction with the Christian obsession with the historical Jesus.

In my experience, and especially here at Union Theological Seminary, students are especially eager to hear about the historical Jesus, as a way of reconciling themselves with their Christian upbringing. It seems to me that many Christians are disappointed with the ways in which they were disenfranchised within their previous Christian community (as I was…twice), but still have a love for Christianity and an appreciation of their upbringing. They thus choose to reconcile the two by figuring out what the “historical” Jesus believed and thought, as if this will help them become more convinced of their current (liberal/Protestant) viewpoint of Christianity and allow them to dismiss criticisms they faced at prior Christian communities because they now know the “real” Jesus.

I find this attitude to be extremely problematic on a number of levels.

First, I find it problematic that they believe there is a “true” way of understanding Jesus. Jesus is never apart from historical context, that is true. However, the historical Jesus is never apart from the interpreter’s context either. Albert Schweitzer, a famous scholar of the historical Jesus school, said that historians and theologians looked down into a well to find the historical Jesus – and they found only their reflection staring back at them. He wrote that the major German historians and theologians had made Jesus out to be just like them, with their own concerns. Jesus, for them, was one who was a moral teacher, an exemplar, a person that preached a message of love, forgiveness, and general capitalistic German ideology of the day. What the historians wanted to find, they found.

Schweitzer convincingly argued that writings about Jesus were best understood when Jesus was viewed as an apocalyptic prophet, a doomsdayer that believed the end of the world was in sight. The “historical” Jesus, Schweitzer felt, was completely unconcerned with morality or love or good works because the end is coming.

Nonetheless, Schweitzer did acknowledge that the “historical” Jesus is not good to believe nowadays; thus, his fellow German historians and theologians were right to preach a different Jesus, a Jesus of love, morality, good teaching, and exemplar living. Schweitzer’s only critique was that they should be honest and acknowledge that Jesus, in Jesus’ context and time, did not believe like them.

My reasoning for describing Schweitzer’s revolutionary book is primarily to show that there isn’t a “historical” Jesus apart from the interpreter’s context. The German theologians looked down into a well and found only what they wanted to find. Schweitzer, I believe, had good reasons for viewing Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet of judgment – that is, after all, how I personally view Jesus (mostly). However, the idea that we can leave our biases and our contexts and our upbringings and our wishes is naïve at best, and, at worst, will only cause us to become more secure in our justifications and our current views.

Secondly, I find the quest for the historical Jesus to be a fruitless venture. Not only do I believe we are going to be heavily influenced by our biases and our wishes for how we want Jesus to be, but I am convinced that there is too little information about the historical Jesus to even believe that the pursuit is worthwhile. The few fragments we have about the historical Jesus are written decades after Jesus died. Ranges for the Synoptic Gospels are between 40 CE and 110 CE, the Gospel of John is usually dated post-90 CE. In all cases, the writings are not designed to be historical anyway. Writing during the time was often polemical, and it was designed to convince one of a certain view. Historical accuracy, myth (often taken from other mythic ideas from other cultures), and personal experiences are all blended together. The idea that one could somehow, from the very few sources we have, decipher a code that will give us the infallible view of the historical Jesus is simply unbelievable. The Gospel writers were not intending to do so, and we should not strive to do so either. There is not enough evidence, as if evidence would be sufficient to convince anyone anyway.

Thirdly, I find the attitude that I described above regarding the quest for the historical Jesus to be problematic because it totally ignores the reality of the Christian Church. In all honesty, Jesus is not important because of who he was in the Judean context. Jesus is important because the Church proclaims his resurrection by God. My faith isn’t shaken if Jesus’ corpse got up, walked through walls, and then flew up into the sky behind some cloud where Jesus’ body is now hanging out in space. The portrayal of the resurrection and the ascension are vitally important for any Christian faith – but it needs not be literal corpse-raising. MAYBE Jesus’ corpse rose from the dead and flew into the sky, as the Gospel accounts say. I don’t personally believe that, and I find that idea to be ridiculous.

It seems to me that both a literal and an anti-literal view should be faulted for the same reason – they are missing the point. One does not feel secure in the Christian message because a corpse was raised, and neither is one devastated because a corpse wasn’t raised. The point of Jesus’ life and ministry, and death and resurrection, is bound up in the Church’s proclamation, as witnessed to in the Creeds, the practices, and the daily living of the Christian Church. I am not interested in Jesus, just as I am not interested in the historical fellow of Buddha or Confucius. (And at least Buddhists and Confucians do not care about the historical founder!)

But I do care about Christ.

Jesus the Christ is extremely important to me, and I will probably never lose this excitement and identity with Jesus the Christ. How one could choose to ignore church tradition (of 2000 years) is beyond me. The Christian Church makes up my identity. The Church’s followers have shaped me and my beliefs and my experiences of God. It is the height of arrogance to deny the multitude of saints any significance in the pursuit of one’s personal religion or “relationship with God”. The Confucians and the pagans were absolutely right to emphasize the importance of one’s ancestry, both for grounding of oneself but also for one’s personal edification. The idea that I would have to reinvent all of my spiritual practices, or investigate every single one of my beliefs regarding God and the Church and spiritual matters is the height of arrogance and naivete. A better response, I think, is to take what the Christian doctrines are concerning Jesus the Christ – and then compare them. Christianity is not monolithic, despite what anyone says. There are many competing traditions for understanding Jesus’ atoning work of salvation, for understanding the Ascension of Christ, for understanding the importance of Jesus Christ’s life and work. Holding them in tension, in their multiplicity, and understanding one’s experiences in light of them, and understanding others’ experiences and beliefs regarding them is, to my mind, a much greater and important and fruitful endeavor.

The Church must constantly be challenged by the revelation of Jesus Christ. The Church must always find itself in a state of confession, both of its sins and of its grounding in Jesus Christ. I feel great resonance with Barth’s emphasis on the Church proclaiming the Gospel as it has been revealed in its life and action, in holy Scripture, and, most of all, in Jesus the Christ. Though I do not agree with Barth’s conclusions, because he remains trapped in a dogmatic circle, I do nonetheless agree that one cannot separate the “historical” Jesus from Jesus the Christ, and I wouldn’t want to.

I am uninterested in the “historical Jesus.” I am, however, VERY interested in Jesus the Christ, as it has been handed down to me by Christians throughout the ages, and as it has been written down in holy Scripture. Far better to be challenged by the stumbling block of Jesus Christ than to use any historical research to justify my own position, even if I am justifying myself because of pain that I have suffered in my past. Yes, it is absolutely important to achieve healing over what others have done to you. I am still trying to do so. And yes, it is absolutely important to acknowledge where one has come from, and to appreciate one’s past for all the things one can appreciate. It is important to redeem one’s past insofar as one is able.

However, becoming attached to an impossible goal, which will only further strengthen one’s dogmatism and estrangement from Christians throughout the ages only results from misguided Enlightenment thinking and serves to undercut our unity with Christian writers and thinkers throughout the ages. The Holy Spirit binds us together, in Christ. Let no person put this connection asunder.