How to read the Bible

There are, in my view, two erroneous perspectives on that collection of ancient literature that we have come to call "The Bible." The first, and perhaps most common, is that is is some kind of divinely authored encyclopedia. On this reading, the Bible comes straight from God as is therefore free from any scientific, historical, moral, or other errors.

Anyone who has actually read the Bible knows this is simply not true. The Bible contains every manner of human error. We know that not all of its stories are historical, that knowledge of science does not inform its pages, and that it frequently assumes a tribal and primitive morality that we cannot even begin to find inspiring.

This knowledge, unfortunately, leads some to reject the Bible as a horrid product. Such readers love to debunk and ridicule the Scriptures, pointing with glee to troubling or historically mistaken passages. They are correct that these passages exist, but they too beg the question on what the Bible is and how we should read it.

The problem is that both sets of readers assume that the Bible is either a divinely authored and error free text, or it is pure rubbish. This dilemma is, I suggest, a false one.

The way out of this false dilemma is to understand what the Bible actually is. The Bible is a fully human collection of texts. These texts were written, edited, collected, and canonized, copied and re-copied over centuries. They contain every human error one would expect from so broad and wide a collection of ancient literature. It might help if we ceased to speak of "the Bible" and instead spoke of "the scriptures." This is, after all, a collection of widely different texts from very different authors, in different times.

Far from undermining the Bible however, such an understanding of what it is should enrich our appreciation of it. Were we to believe that God truly authored the texts, we would have to face troubling events, slaying the first born of Egypt, commanding genocide against the Amalekites, stoning twig gathers on the Sabbath, striking Onan dead for the withdrawal method, and so forth. Unless you are willing to look into the face of your firstborn son - and I know I'm not - and think that such a being could deserve God's wrath because of the decision of your nation's leaders, or that God could command that your child be killed just so his "chosen people" could have their promise land, then you simply cannot be a Biblical literalist.

Seen as an ancient human product, on the other hand, we can appreciate the gradual transformation of Yahweh, a tribal war god, into the one universal God of mercy, justice and Compassion. For make no mistake, taken as a literary work, we can follow the Biblical Character of God from his origins as a fiery, vengeful deity who plays favorites (just read the book Judges or 1 and 2 Samuel) to the loving Father in Heaven who teaches Jonah the value of mercy. That transformation is a splendid and inspiring one. There were lot's of little war lord tribal gods, I can think of no other that transformed in to a loving God of universal justice.

Casting our gaze downward from Heaven to the Earth, we find that the Bible is a story of conflict. On the one hand stand the Kings of Israel and Judah. Again and again these Kings, and the elites who serve them, attempt to lord it over the "regular folks," to take their lands, their spouses, even their very lives; to become little dictators in the promised land. But again and again the prophets speak out to condemn them. Pleading for justice, making the case for the widow, the orphan, the resident alien, the poor, and the downtrodden, the prophets consistently equate God with justice and fair play, and religion with treating others, particularly the weak and marginalized, with respect, compassion, and concern.Whether it is the prophet Nathan damning King David for the murder of Uriah the Hittite (not to mention adultery with Uriah's wife!), Elijah defending the commoner Naboath against King Ahab's seizure of the former's vineyard, or Amos crying out to let "justice flow like water," there is simply nothing like the passion of the prophets for justice, equality, and fair play in all of ancient religious literature.

So read the Bible as a flawed, sometimes horrible, human creation. That is, after all, what it is. But in that realization the very power of "the good book" can hit home. A ethic of "the chosen people" turned into a universal ethic of compassion and justice for all people; a petty and jealous tribal god transformed into a loving creator wishing for all to receive justice, mercy, and blessings.

That is something truly inspiration, truly spiritual, and truly astounding, and - just perhaps - truly divine.

Spinozoan Spirituality

"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings." ~ Albert Einstein


The 17th century rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza is not usually regarded as a spiritual or religious thinker.  On the surface this fact is odd. Spinoza writes of "God" so frequently that the romantic poet Novalis dubbed him "that God intoxicated man." But Spinoza's God is not the divine lawgiver and potentate of traditional western theism. 


For Spinoza God is the infinite and eternal substance of which all finite things are but temporary expressions. His God is not person-like, not a law-giver nor a judge of human actions. Furthermore, his God did not create a world out of free will. For Spinoza the world is nothing more than the totality of all of God's necessary self-expressions. In fact, Spinoza goes so far as to identify God with nature itself - at least with nature understood as the active and creative power that is "reality as a whole", though not simply with the total collection of things in the world. Because of this, many have claimed that Spinoza's non-personal and absolutely non-supernatural God is really no God at all. This deity surely could never inspire us to dance, pray, love, or die for it.


And yet, there is much in Spinoza's writing to suggest that he is filled with a profound personal piety and deep spirituality toward his God. In part five his masterpiece the Ethics Spinoza argues that the ultimate fulfillment of human life is the love of God. This love fills the mind with peace, calm, and serenity. The greatest joy we can know comes from knowing God and loving God.


Commentators as diverse as the Catholic Father Copplestone and the atheist Steven Nadler have claimed that we can't take Spinoza's words too seriously here. All he really means, they argue, is that we should have an awe and appreciation of the rationality and order of nature. Spinoza, so they say, means by love "nothing more" than the joy that comes from understanding the natural world; he is not speaking about a personal relationship with a heavenly Father. 


They are right of course. Spinoza does think of loving God solely in terms of understanding and appreciating the workings of the natural world. He says as much, "He who clearly ... understands himself an his emotions loves God, and so much more in proportion as he more understands himself and his emotions." (E5P15) I must confess, however, that I fail to see why this disqualifies Spinoza's thought as spiritual.


It is certainly true that Spinoza's God is not the God of popular level Judaism and Christianity. It is also true, therefore, that Spinoza's understanding of "spirituality" cannot mean love for a person-like supernatural being who can love me back in the same fashion (indeed, Spinoza specifically says that God cannot love me in any human fashion (EVP18-P19)). But are we really going to insist that spirituality and even religion must be restricted to a relationship with a supernatural and person-like being? If so, then I fear we will have to qualify a great many Buddhists, Taoists, and even many Western mystics from our definition.


Spinoza is spiritual in the sense that Carl Sagan understood that term. In Sagan's words:

When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.

Albert Einstein expressed much the same sentiment when he claimed that: 

"The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of  human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection."

This captures Spinoza's attitude perfectly. Awe, humility, reverence and deep appreciation. These are the only conceivable feelings in one who has grasped the order, unity, and sheer rationality of reality itself. Furthermore, when we understand that we are are one with reality, a finite and temporary expression of that infinite and eternal power and process, we cannot help but rejoice in that. If such emotions are not spiritual, if such attitudes are not religious, then I have no idea whatsoever what they are. 


Appreciation of reality as a whole, joy in understanding our place in and unity with it, humble love for the power and awesome order of it: this is the heart of Spinozoan Spirituality. But it is not the whole of it.


In his Theological-Political Treatise Spinoza carefully argues that the truths of traditional religions are not ontological or historical, but moral. Religion is true to the extent, and only to the extent, that it teaches justice and charity. A religion that encourages a society where all are treated fairly, where everyone has a decent standard of living, and every person shows compassion to those in need is a true religion. A religion that teaches and preaches the opposite of these is a false one. 


For traditional Judaism and Christianity this moral imperative derives from being children of God. We love each other as God loves us. Spinoza would not put it that way. For him justice and charity arises out of recognition of the deep unity and interconnection of all things as expressions of one and the same underlying infinite and eternal power. Furthermore, it is our powerful connection to one another, our being "like each other" that compels us to be good to one another. 


This connection with each other, this connection with reality, this moral imperative to care for one another and treat each other with justice, charity, and compassion is the expression of true religion in actions, just as awe, humility, reverence, and joy are the expressions of true religion regarding that infinite and eternal ground of being. In both these senses, Spinoza is a deeply spiritual and truly religious man.


In our time when the conventional forms of our religions no longer satisfy many, perhaps the spirituality of Spinoza can speak to us. The alternative to traditional Western spirituality and religion need not be the secular atheism of Camus and Sartre. Unlike such emotionally unfulfilling  existentialism, Spinoza's brand of naturalism has a great deal to offer us. 


Samuel Beckett would have us believe that we are waiting for a Godot who will never arrive, searching for a meaning that simply is not there. Baruch Spinoza claims, on the other hand, that Godot is not what we thought, and meaning is not where we thought it was. We don't need to accept the tedium and meaninglessness of godless and horrid existence. On the contrary, we need to reconsider what God, meaning, and existence are.

A Den of Thieves - The Real Meaning of Jesus in the Temple

In the schedule of Holy Week, Monday is the day that Jesus "Cleansed the Temple." For those who don't quite recall the details of that event, here is the incident as described by the earliest gospel Mark:

Then they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying, "Is it not written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations'? But you have made it a den of robbers. (11: 15-17)

There is a long-standing, but misleading, tradition that sees Jesus as acting out of anger. On this view, he is angry that commerce is defiling the Holy Temple. Scholarship has largely discredited this common misreading of Jesus' action in the Temple. 

Rather than throwing a "temple tantrum," Jesus is acting out a deliberate demonstration against the temple and its authorities. The commerce performed by the merchants was necessary in order to keep up the sacrifices. You had to change impure Greek and Roman coinage for pure Temple coins. This was a legitimate and proper function for Temple sacrifice. The temple could not work without these merchants. 

In other words, by tossing over the tables of the money changers and prohibiting entrance to the temple (this would have had no real effect, given the temple's size. It is a symbolic protest), Jesus is symbolically destroying the Temple. His actions indicate that it's function is invalid. Jesus, acting in the name of the God of Israel, declares by his deeds that the temple and the authorities running it are null and void. They do not speak for God. They do not have legitmate status in the God of Israel's eyes.

But why would Jesus do this?

The Temple authorities were the native ruling elites who made a fortune by cooperating with Roman rule and power. As such, they profited by helping Rome exploit and demean the Jewish peasantry. In particular, Roman commericial agriculture robbed many Jewish peasants of their land, and pushed far too many people to the margins of society and beyond. Roman rule defied the Torah's notion of land ownership, and the distributive justice of the Jewish God. 

For many Jewish peasants, the Priests and the Temple, no longer represented the Jewish God of justice, but rather his opposite, the gentile overlords who harmed the great majority of Jewish Peasants.

So in the name of the Jewish God of liberty and justice, Jesus condemns the Temple and its leaderships. He declares that far from speaking for the God of Israel, they speak against him; as do their Roman masters.

The meaning of Jesus' Temple actions was not lost on the Temple leaders, nor on Pilate. They quickly arrested him and crucified him. They got the message and promptly tried to destroy the messenger.

It is clear to me that those of us who follow Jesus today must do as he did. We must stand against the power structures in our own society that, like the Roman Empire of old, exploit the masses of the population in order to benefit the wealth and power of a narrow few. 

For me that means we need to involve ourselves in Occupy Wall Street. This, in the United States today, is the true democratic movement (or at least has the potential to be) of our times. The 99% movement identifies the real problem, Plutocracy and Corporate power, calls it out, and seeks to find solutions to it. 

Let's do as Jesus did: let's toss the money lenders from the Temple and condemn the "den of thieves" for the crooks they are.

The Christ of Faith: The Face of God

Regarding my post on "the historical Jesus"A thoughtful reader asked me if I cared so much about what the Jesus of history said because, perhaps, I thought "he was God." This is a question I've heard many times "was/is Jesus God?" I think the very question itself misunderstands the issue.

In popular imagination God is a supernatural (and usually male) person who "lives" outside of the universe somewhere and periodically intervenes in it to perform "miracles." If one believes in this kind of God and adds to it the un-nuanced belief that "Jesus is God." On believes presumably that Jesus was not really a human being, but simply God visiting us incognito. This perspective sees the humanity of Jesus as some kind of costume that he temporally donned before flying up back home to heaven.

I might take the view seriously if a kindergartner suggested it, but it is far from the view of any sophisticated Christian theologian.

First I repeat my own position about the reality we appropriately term "God":

I ascribe to a theology known as panentheism. To sum up this position briefly: I understand panentheism as the view that the term "God" does not refer to a separately existing supernatural and person-like being "out there" beyond us. The term "God" refers rather to reality at its ultimate level, "Being itself," "The ground of being," the all-inclusive whole. The best way to understand what these abstractions signify is through an analogy: We know from physics that reality has levels of being which require ever deeper descriptions of the same object. Take, for example, a table. At the level of human interaction the table is a solid object of such-and-such size, weight, height and so on. But at a deeper level of physical description the table is properly described as a certain relationship of interaction between fundamental particles. Both descriptions are correct, the latter simply describes the realty of the table at a "deeper" level.

The panentheist takes this basic claim about the table and extends it to reality as a whole. The universe at the level of physical observation is the total collection of matter and energy interacting in space and time. If we go deeper, however, we can think of the universe as being reality itself only at a less than ultimate level of description. If we think of reality at its greatest or ultimate depth, we must think of it has having no boundaries or limits of any kind (after all what could limit it?). Ultimate reality would then be infinite (no limits), eternal (no beginning or end), and self-caused. All things in our universe can be seen as simply various expressions of the one ultimate reality at a level of less depth. Panentheists call ultimate reality "God" partly because it is eternal, infinite, and self-caused, but also because reality as a whole is so awe-inspiring, mysterious, and tremendous, that we can only feel reverence, humility, and awe when we contemplate it. In other words, for the panentheist all things are parts of God, but the reality of God goes deeper than reality at the level of things, though God does not exist apart from things as another being; God is, rather, the "ground of all being."

Now, let us try to understand the traditional idea of the "divinity of Jesus" in light of this panentheistic understanding of God. To begin with, a great many theologians and New Testament scholars would never say, crudely, "Jesus was/is God." The position is usually stated with far more nuance. Theologians tend to say things like "Jesus is the decisive revelation of God," "the place where we meet God most clearly," "our fullest of experience of the divine in our lives," or other subtly worded variants.

Usually the theologian makes the following moves: 1) The truest way to God for the Christian is through love and justice. In other words, in fighting for justice, in compassion, in loving others, we meet the divine. 2) Jesus is the clearest expression of a human being dedicated to compassion and love that we can know (more on this point below). 3) Therefore, to the extent that Jesus incarnates the very compassion and justice that is where we find God, he is the clearest expression of God to us and for us.

In short, theologians need not - and typically they do not - say that the historical Jesus was/is God; but they are committed to the view that, for the Christian, God is made known most clearly, most fully, and most powerfully in the life, deeds, words, death, and abiding presence (for my view of the resurrection of Jesus click here) of this first century Galilean.

This is my position as well.

Let me now consider two objections to it:

Objection 1: Christians for many centuries called Jesus God, so you can't be a Christian without saying it so bluntly.

Reply: It is not the case that all Christian theologians said, so bluntly, "Jesus is God." But even if they did, the claim that religions can never change, and must always and forever express exactly the same ideas in exactly the same sense is both absurd and manifestly false.

Objection 2: "Why do you choose to follow Jesus as the decisive revelation of God? Lot's of people are committed to justice and compassion! Can't the same claims be made for Buddha, Muhammad, Gandhi etc?"

Reply: Yes the same claims can be made for other figures. In fact, to the degree that anyone lives a life of justice and compassion, that person incarnates God. There is a necessarily subjective element at play here in seeing Jesus as the fullest incarnation of God. It's similar to my love regarding my wife. I often tell my wife that she is "the most amazing, or the most beautiful, woman in the world." When I tell her this I mean it and believe it. But I'm not claiming it as some kind of objective fact about her; rather, I am proclaiming my commitment to her. My statements are statements of my commitment to her; not objective facts about her person. Yet they are not totally subjective either. If my wife turned out to be very different than the person I thought she was, say she turned out to be a cruel and evil person (she is not- don't worry!), then my commitment would end.

Exactly the same is true of my commitment to Jesus as the clearest and fullest incarnation of God for me. In saying, "in Jesus is where I see God most clearly." I am making a claim about my commitment to Jesus; not simply stating facts about Jesus (e.g. that he was 5'3). But again, this claim is not without objective content. If historical research revealed that the Jesus who actually lives was not a man committed to compassion and justice, but was actually a violent sociopath, then I could not follow him, could not see God in him.

To use another analogy. Suppose I declare that Tolstoy is the greatest novelist in history. One way, perhaps the most helpful way, to understand that is to say that this is how Tolstoy effects me: the power and beauty of literature comes to me most clearly and fully in Tolstoy. Furthermore, although there are many other novelist I also find great, none quite effect me like Tolstoy does. This claim does require, I think, that Tolstoy actually be a remarkably great writer, but to call him the greatest instead of say Dostoevsky or James Joyce requires an element of subjectivity.

Similarly, I do see God made known in lives like Gandhi and Desmond Tutu, but other lives just don't quite bring God to me like Jesus does.

I believe that we all incarnate God to the degree that we are passionate about justice and have compassion for our fellow human beings. Jesus of Nazareth, both in the gospels and, as far as I can tell, in history was a person who manifested these traits to a remarkable degree. I do not, of course, claim he did so to an unparalleled degree. But, in a way similar to my love and commitment to my wife, or my personal view that Tolstoy is the greatest novelist of them all, I find that it is Jesus who most clearly makes God known to me.

That is how I understand the divinity of Jesus.

Update (8/24/11):

In conversation with a Theologian friend on this post, I mentioned to him that:

The suffering of Jesus and the failure of his mission is clearly part of this revelatory package too. In the brutal death of this man, his betrayel by those close to him, etc, we learn, clearly, that God is present - maybe even most present - in our moments of pain, sorrow, suffering, defeat, and loss.

He replied to me by adding:

I would add that in Jesus Christ God pronounces a final verdict on the choice human beings have made and continue to make for violence. But instead of inflicting violence on his enemies, God chose to absorb their violence in himself, in the one nailed to the cross.

It is clear to me that these insights have to be added and developed to my account of the "divinity of Jesus."

Jesus: Proclaimer of the Now and Future Kingdom

When I first created this blog my purpose was to discuss politics. But it appears that religion has come to dominate more and more of my posts. Things change of course and I will, no doubt, return to politics as a primary focus eventually. For now, however, I shall continue to post on the matters most in my thoughts, and presently those matters pertain to religion.

I want to write briefly about the central message of the Historical Jesus.* But first some necessary preliminaries:

1) By the term "Historical Jesus" I refer to the actual flesh and blood person who walked the dusty roads of ancient Israel, insofar as that individual can be reconstructed by means of historical-critical scholarship. This Jesus is not to be confused with the "Jesus of Faith." The latter is Jesus as he is experienced in the religious life of Christian believers. The difference between these two is crucial to solid scholarship.

2) The four New Testament gospels are not straightforward historical accounts. This is a fact that no serious Bible scholar or historian doubts and it has been well known for around 200 years now. The gospels contain myths and legends (e.g. the birth stories, the temptation by the devil, walking on the sea) exaggeration, theological musings projected into narratives about Jesus, propaganda, and so forth.

3) Despite (2) the gospels are not useless as historical documents. Two centuries of painstaking historical research has established beyond reasonable doubt that the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) have a solid historical foundation. The gospel of John is not close to history and is not accorded the same status as the synoptics by historians.

4) The narrative spine of Mark (and thus Matthew and Luke who used Mark as a primary source) is broadly historical: Jesus came from Nazareth, briefly followed and was baptized by John the Baptist, shortly after John's arrest went out on his own mission, chose disciples to follow him and do what he was doing, taught in parables, gathered people together around a common meal, worked as an itinerant healer and exorcist, and, at Passover in the year 30, journeyed to Jerusalem, confronted the leaders there with the judgment of God by word and deed (the demonstration in the temple) and was crucified by Rome for his troubles.

5) Scholars also generally agree that much of the teaching in a hypothetical document called "Q" is authentic to the Jesus of history. Q is a source that was used by Matthew and Luke (they also used Mark). We have no copy of this source as it is lost. But it is clearly visible in the passages that Matthew and Luke have in common but that are not in their other source, Mark. It is also fairly clear that the majority of the parables (though not the interpretive gloss gospel writers sometimes give them) go back to the Jesus of history as well.

6) But, even in "Q" and Mark we do not have unbiased plain history. And scholars are careful to point out that in those two early sources some material is still suspect. In particular, passages that too obviously reflect the theology of the later Jesus movement (as evidenced in, say, Paul's letters) is unlikely to go back to Jesus. Passages in which Jesus speaks to the conditions of his followers in the 50s and 60s (see Mark 13) are clearly not from the Jesus of history, nor are passages in which Jesus speaks of himself as a heavenly judge and one who will come again - this rules out all future "son of man" passages, which has very important ramifications, as will be seen below.

With these preliminaries in place we can now ask who Jesus was? Or better, what picture of Jesus emerges from our earliest sources (Q and Mark - excluding the obviously unhistorical passages)?

I will here restrict myself to the core image in the teaching of the historical Jesus: The Kingdom of God. Better translated as the "ruling activity of God" this phrase refers to the concrete activity of God in the world whereby He establishes that He is in charge. The phrase does not indicate a place or nation in which God is actually the king.

Though the phrase "Kingdom of God" could mean many things, by the time of Jesus it serves as an eschatological image. Eschatology is that branch of theology dealing with "end-times," death, judgement, eternal life, Heaven and Hell. But used in reference to the period in which Jesus lived it refers rather to the expectation and hope, shared by many of the Jewish people at the time, that God would soon act decisively in human history to once and for all end injustice, oppression, and evil and usher in an age of prosperity, peace, and harmony.

Some scholars misleadingly speak of the time that God would do this as "the end of the world." But that is not what most of these Jewish people expected (Crossan The Greatest Prayer, 79). What they expected, rather, was that God would transform this world, not end it. Many did expect that only a supernatural act could accomplish this and thought also that events like the raising of the righteous dead to new life would accompany the eschaton. Indeed, most early Christians thought that the kingdom would be decidedly established by a return of Jesus to earth, to end evil and usher in an age of everlasting peace.

Many scholars have claimed that Jesus' own eschatology was close to that of the early Christians. He too, so they argue, expected a supernatural event in the very near future that would transform the world forever. On this view, Jesus' message was simply "the kingdom is coming soon, so you better repent and get ready for it."

I don't think this position is particularly well supported for several reasons. First the only gospel passages in which Jesus speaks of an imminent and spectacular arrival of God's kingdom are in the passages in which he speaks of the coming of the son of man (himself) from heaven. But the work of such scholars as Geza Vermes and Norman Perrin (as well as many others) demonstrate clearly that such passages do not go back to the historical Jesus, but are products of the early Jesus movement and depend upon the belief that the executed Jesus is raised up to God's right hand and that he will return from there to establish everlasting justice and peace. These passages reflect the view of Jesus' followers after his death, not the view of Jesus himself.

Second, Jesus' message in Q and Mark is simply not "repent, pray and wait for God to act." On the contrary his message reads more like "This is what the kingdom is, you are called to live out and participate in that kingdom, so get to work!" (Crossan The Greatest Prayer, 90)

So the overtly apocalyptic or end-of-the-world Jesus is not the Jesus of history. Nevertheless, I cannot quite agree with those scholars who claim that for Jesus the Kingdom of God is only a present reality made known to those who realize it in themselves. Even without the son of man passages there are enough texts that show that Jesus did teach that the kingdom, though clearly a present reality to enter now, in its full glory lies in the future (Matthew 5: 3-11, Mark 14: 25, etc.).

Did Jesus then believe that the great eschaton was soon to come? That God would indeed radically act so as to transform the world forever?

It seems to me that a careful reading of the earliest sources does not support the claim that Jesus spoke of a Kingdom of God about to burst upon the world in the future, either immediately or at some unspecified time. Nor do those teachings support that Jesus denied this in favor of a mystical present kingdom. Geza Vermes has expressed the position I am reaching for well:

[Q]ueries concerned with whether the kingdom had come, was on the way, or would come later, must be irrelevant. At issue in New Testament eschatology is the actual movement itself of turning back, of entering into the kingdom. It is in the surrender of the self to God's will that his sovereignty is realized on earth (Jesus in his Jewish Context, 35).

And Norman Perrin expressed it similarly:

In the teaching of Jesus the emphasis is not upon a future for which men must prepare, even with the help of God; the emphasis is upon a present which carries with it the guarantee of the future (Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus, 205).

In short if we are to understand the eschatological mindset of the historical Jesus we must look to what he actually says about the kingdom. Jesus speaks of the kingdom as a reality that people can enter now (Luke 16.16), that is among us (Luke 17:20), but that will be our destiny in the future as well (Mathew 8:11). The kingdom is known in acts of healing (Luke 11:20) in the embracing of social outcasts, forgiving each other, in peace, non-violence, love for others, and the fight for justice (Matthew 5-7). In short, it is in healing each other, forgiving each other, battling injustice, and ending oppression that the kingdom is entered into by all who choose it here and now.

For Jesus, it appears, the full fruits of the kingdom do lie in the future, but it does not seem that his message is about waiting for that future. Rather than seeing the kingdom as imminent - as about to burst forth on the earth - it seems that Jesus saw the kingdom as ultimate. The Hebrew God of justice and compassion would, in the end, perfect the world, would eliminate injustice and usher in a time of everlasting peace and plenty for all. This is the heart of prophetic Judaism, and the core of the vision of the historical Jesus. Where Jesus takes his faith in God's kingdom a step further is in his clear conviction that the coming kingdom is even now already present. Like the leaven in the dough that has not yet risen, or the mustard seed that has not yet grown into a great tree, the kingdom is here, now and we may enter it, confident that the tree will grow and the bread will rise, and we must work with it.

So the message is not to wait for God to fix things. The message of the historical Jesus is rather, embrace the outcasts, combat injustice, forgive those who have wronged you, heal the sick. Do all this and you have entered the kingdom. As John Dominic Crossan puts it:

[Jesus called others] to do exactly what he himself was doing: heal the sick, eat with the healed, and demonstrate the kingdom's presence in that reciprocity and mutuality. It is not, he said, about intervention by God, but about participation with God. God's Great Cleanup of the World does not begin, cannot continue, and will not conclude without our divinely empowered participation and transcendentally driven collaboration (The Greatest Prayer, 90).

*My understanding of the Historical Jesus is most indebted to the work of John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg. But I also draw considerably on Geza Vermes and Norman Perrin. To a lesser but non-trivial extent I am indebted to the work of N. T. Wright and Richard Horsley. I find the Jesus of such scholars as Paula Frederickson, Ed Sanders, and Bart Erhman to be historically problematic (given its rejection of politics and its reliance on "the son of man" style eschatology), and the very non-jewish wondering sage (who seems to have no relation to Jewish politics or eschatology!) of Robert Funk and Burton Mack even more so.

Note: The Picture accompanying this post is from a BBC documentary which attempts to construct a face for Jesus that actually looks like a 1st century Galilean.

Touching the Eternal

Is there life after death?

I have briefly raised this question in an earlier post. Since life after death was the topic of my philosophy of religion class tonight, I thought I should sum up that discussion as a continuation of this topic.

Let us first consider the concept of an immortal soul. On this view we are essentially non-physical souls that inhabit bodies during this life only to "go to the spirit realm"- or something like that - upon the death of the body.

There are a few problems with this view. Most importantly, our consciousness and thinking processes are so intimately connected with our brains that is strains credulity to think that there is some non-physical substance that accounts for our minds. Furthermore, since I can explain mental processes in terms of bodily processes, it would seem that Occam's razor obliges us to reject any explanatory need for the soul in the first place. Indeed, it is a very good principle of critical thinking to avoid positing entities - particularly entities we cannot explain or understand - unless very compelling evidence forces us to do so.

On the other hand, should strong evidence for an immortal soul exist, we should embrace it. But there is no such evidence. The most commonly sighted evidence are the following:

1) Near Death Experiences

2) Ghosts

3) Accounts of past lives

4) Visits from recently deceased loved ones

5) Mediums

This evidence is simply not compelling. Near Death Experiences can be replicated in the laboratory, there is no hard evidence of any merit for ghosts, accounts of past lives are not confirmably accurate often enough to overcome skepticism, visits from the recently deceased could very well be grief hallucinations - they are impossible to confirm or deny - and mediums have far too often been exposed as frauds and never passed the rigors of controlled experiments (The case against all these varieties of evidence is nicely summed up by Paul Kurtz).

When all is said and done, given the strong physical evidence that our minds are, if not identical with our brains, at least strongly interconnected with our neural processes, and the very inconclusive - at best - nature of the above pieces of evidence, it seems that we must say the existence of an immortal soul is rather unlikely. I personally do not entirely rule it out, as I know that my knowledge and reasoning skills are limited, but I'm strongly inclined to disbelieve it.

Another possible belief in immortality rejects the immortal soul idea in favor of "bodily resurrection." On this traditional Christian view God will, at the end of time, raise up the dead to live again and forever in transformed bodies. The only evidence of this view is an appeal to divine revelation. But it is clear to me that human beings have never received any specifically articulated divine revelation. All holy books, creeds, etc, are clearly human inventions. We cannot argue from such sources.

Does this mean then that death is the end of us?

Not necessarily.

As I have often written on this blog, I ascribe to a theology known as panentheism. To sum up this position briefly: I understand panentheism as the view that the term "God" does not refer to a separately existing supernatural and person-like being "out there" beyond us. The term "God" refers rather to reality at its ultimate level, "Being itself," "The ground of being," the all-inclusive whole. The best way to understand what these abstractions signify is through an analogy: We know from physics that reality has levels of being which require ever deeper descriptions of the same object. Take, for example, a table. At the level of human interaction the table is a solid object of such-and-such size, weight, height and so on. But at a deeper level of physical description the table is properly described as a certain relationship of interaction between fundamental particles. Both descriptions are correct, the latter simply describes the realty of the table at a "deeper" level.

The panentheist takes this basic claim about the table and extends it to reality as a whole. The universe at the level of physical observation is the total collection of matter and energy interacting in space and time. If we go deeper, however, we can think of the universe as being reality itself only at a less than ultimate level of description. If we think of reality at its greatest or ultimate depth, we must think of it has having no boundaries or limits of any kind (after all what could limit it?). Ultimate reality would then be infinite (no limits), eternal (no beginning or end), and self-caused. All things in our universe can be seen as simply various expressions of the one ultimate reality at a level of less depth. Panentheists call ultimate reality "God" partly because it is eternal, infinite, and self-caused, but also because reality as a whole is so awe-inspiring, mysterious, and tremendous, that we can only feel reverence, humility, and awe when we contemplate it. In other words, for the panentheist all things are parts of God, but the reality of God goes deeper than reality at the level of things, though God does not exist apart from things as another being; God is, rather, the "ground of all being."

So how does this relate back to surviving our death?

Since, according to panentheism we are all a part of God, we are, like everything else, one with God at the deepest level of reality. This means that the core of who we are, that part of us that causes us to be, to love, to think, is nothing other than the very power of being-itself and since being itself is eternal, that core part of us is eternal. In a classic analogy we are like waves in relation to the water. The waves perish, but the water remains. In like manner, it may be true that our memories, personality, and self-awareness perish at death (though I am open to the possibility that something of these remains, I am not convinced that any of it does), but something of us, something that makes us who we are is eternal and imperishable.

Many find this less than reassuring. On this non-personal understanding of immortality, there is no reunion with departed loved ones, and probably no self-conscious awareness of an everlasting life. On the other hand, I'm not so sure that living forever with a conscious awareness like we have now would be enjoyable or rewarding. I could easily imagine it as a kind of inescapable tedium.

But I find the idea that the core of my being is eternally one with reality at its ultimate level to be quite inspiring. This means that my thoughts, loves, deeds, and joys have something of eternal value and meaning to them, that something of my true being partakes of the rhythm of the eternal dance, that the relationships I've had, the things I've learned, and who I've been are taken into and indeed part of the eternal creative act of Being itself.

In short, I am inclined to agree, to an extant at least, with Paul of Tarsus, when he says that

For none of us lives unto himself,

and no one dies unto himself.

For if we live, we live unto the Lord;

and if we die, we die unto the Lord.

Therefore whether we live or die

we are the Lord's (Romans 14: 7-8).

Indeed just as "we live and move and have our being" in the reality that is God (Acts 17:28), so we die into that same reality, our deepest being taken into and included in that divine essence.

Reflections of Eternal Life: Part 1

I've decided to do a few blog posts together as a series on the issue of - for lack of a better term - "life after death." I don't know how many posts this series will finish up with, although I'm sure I will write at least three. I should begin with a candid admission that I am agnostic regarding life after death. I simply do not know - and am pretty sure that none of us can know - anything about what might happen to us after death (other than the facts that our bodies will decompose).

I thought, however, that I ought to compose a few reflections on the topic, since it has of late become something of a newsworthy item.

A well known evangelical pastor has recently come out with a book questioning the existence of Hell. There is, predictably, much controversy over this. The Religious left has long embraced this universalist conclusion, and the religious right damns it as blasphemy. But in my opinion he is only half right. I think it is VERY UNLIKELY that anything like the traditional concept of a personal afterlife can be true.

The idea that after death we will hang out again with Grandma and the beloved family dog we lost at age 12 is without any support of any kind. And it requires a commitment to the view of God as a supernatural being "out there" somewhere in a equally supernatural heaven; a God who makes plans, has intentions, thoughts, feelings, and will judge our merit (or gracefully forgive us all our failings) based on our moral behavior.

Belief in such a person-like God is hard to sustain given the impersonal nature of the laws that govern the physical world, the vast age and size of the universe, and the rather obvious historical development of that concept of God over time together with its clear role as a psychological projection. This is not to say that I embrace atheism. I do not. But I think that any viable conception of God must recognize that the view of God as person-like and supernatural is deeply problematic. If we are to retain concepts of deity, they must be of a different nature. I've discussed this elsewhere and refer my readers to that earlier material.

The reader may already guess where I am going with this. Just as it is possible to reject a supernatural and person-like creator without eliminating God all together, it seems to me that it is possible to reject a continuation of ourselves as persons after death without rejecting some essential continuation of ourselves all together. What I have in mind is something like this: Perhaps it is true that we do not "go to heaven," do not continue to exist after death in the same person-like state (filled with memories, images, sense-perception etc.) after our death - at any rate I'm inclined to believe that we do not so exist; but this need not mean that we completely cease to exist. It could well be that there are important senses in which something non-personal but essential about us continues to exist for eternity.

It is such non-personal conceptions of eternal life that I will consider in my future posts for this series.

God, Reason, and Sam Harris

I have long been troubled by the fact that public discussion of and media attention to the existence of "God," assumes that the word "God" refers to a supernatural person who is rather like a super version of a human person, a "guy" who lives way "out there" somewhere, answers our prayers, and occasionally performs magical acts called miracles.

I do not understand the term God to be restricted to signifying this cosmic super-being, and many professional theologians and philosophers do not either. Just read Charles Hartshorne, Paul Tillich, J.A.T Robinson or David Griffith and you will quickly see that there are other possibilities.

I've posted on this before and I refer my readers to my previous posts on God and religion, for my own views. Public discussion, however, has very seldom recognized this distinction.

I am happy to report that Newsweek has changed this trend. In a recent article on so-called "atheist" Sam Harris We learn that for Harris

The answer to the question “Do you believe in God?” comes down to this: It depends on what you mean by “God.” The God Harris doesn’t believe in is, as he puts it, a “supernatural power” and “a personal deity who hears prayers and takes an interest in how people live.” This God and its subscribers he finds unreasonable. But he understands that many people—especially in progressive corners of organized religion and among the “spiritual but not religious”—often mean something else. They equate God with “love” or “justice” or “singing in church” or “that feeling I get on a walk in the woods,” or even “the awesome aspects of existence I’ll never understand.”

Even more encouragingly

According to a 2008 study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, a quarter of Americans believe that God is “an impersonal force.” Among Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox, and the unaffiliated, the number rises to a third. Among Jews, it’s half. In a Gallup study done in May, 9 percent of respondents said they believe in a God who doesn’t answer prayers.

When polled about God, “people substitute in their own ideas,” says John Green, senior research adviser at Pew. “People have a vague, fuzzy notion of transcendence, and they substitute God for it...When you try to make the definition more specific, fewer people answer in the affirmative.” Or put another way, “If you let the concept of God float a little bit, almost everybody is a theist,” says Stephen Prothero, author of God Is Not One. What Sam Harris believes in—rationality, morality, transcendence, humility, awe, community, selflessness, and love—meets a fairly common definition of God.

It seems that a sizable, though I confess a minority, of people who think that they believe in God reject the idea of a divine super person who answers prayers and performs miracles, they believe in "God," but don't believe "the old man in the sky."

Harris has a reason for his beliefs, a reason that will resonate with many spiritual people

Harris is ... promoting The Moral Landscape, his new book. Even here, he briefly explores the connections between spiritual experience—especially an experience of selflessness—and human happiness. “I see nothing irrational about seeking the states of mind that lie at the core of many religions. Compassion, awe, devotion and feelings of oneness are surely among the most valuable experiences a person can have,” he writes. Over lunch, he says with a smile how much he looks forward to working on the next project, which will allow him to pull back, after six long years, and focus on things that support human flourishing. “Ecstasy, rapture, bliss, concentration, a sense of the sacred—I’m comfortable with all of that,” says Harris later. “I think all of that is indispensable and I think it’s frankly lost on much of the atheist community.”

This is really quite astounding. I've very often been told by atheists and theists alike that because I don't believe in a rather crudely anthropomorphic conception of God, I am really, therefore, an "atheist," despite my claims to the contrary. It's refreshing to finally see a major news magazine, and a popularly known atheist, recognize and embrace the fact that the world "God" need not refer to merely one idea.

I hope this becomes far more common.

Crossan's Revolutionary Prayer Book

The Greatest Prayer: Jesus's Revolutionary Manifesto by John Dominic Crossan

John Dominic Crossan's newest book - besides offering tremendous literally criticism and poetic insight - provides much needed depth into a subject matter that those who ascribe to liberal theology sometimes struggle with.

Accustomed as we are to a Christian tradition that all too often reduces prayer to "asking God for things," but at the same time philosophically unable to think of God as a person-like being, we simply don't know what do to with prayer; or as Paul of Tarsus (quoted approvingly and used at length by Crossan) puts it "We do not know how to pray as we ought" (Rom. 8:26).

Crossan shares a rejection of any crude anthropomorphic understanding of prayer, "it is an immature view of prayer that addresses a Supreme Being radically apart from us who thinks, and wills, knows and hears, grants and refuses more or less as we do, but with infinite broadband" (28).

Noting that the Prophets of ancient Israel seem to reject prayer and insist that God requires distributive justice (care for widows, aliens, and orphans) instead of prayer and ceremony, Crossan nonetheless does not think we are faced with some either/or. For him, prayer and justice are distinguishable but inseparable. Like two sides of a coin, we cannot have prayer without justice or justice without prayer (20-21).

From this starting point, Crossan turns to the most well known prayer in the Christian tradition, variously called the "Our Father," or the "The Lord's Prayer." This prayer, Crossan argues, expresses the heart of the message of Jesus. The prayer asks us to come together as equals, to become heirs of God, and to work together to establish the divine reign here on earth. We do this by sharing with each other fairly and equally.

Crossan spends much of the book describing the vision of an egalitarian justice found throughout the pages of the Bible. Most striking is his thouhtful examination of the use of the Sabbath tradition. Crosssan argues, persuasively, that the Sabbath is the crown of creation in Genesis Chapter one, and that the later traditions of the weekly Sabbath, Sabbath year (every Seventh year), and year of Jubilee (a kind of super Sabbath every fiftieth year), is designed to recall and enact a world of unity, non-violence, equality, and peace. His discussion of the Sabbath is among the finest I have read.

Prayer, Crossan argues, is meditation on the divine vision of a just, fair, peaceful, and non-violent world. The message of Jesus is a message that we can and must work together with God to bring about such a world. When we pray, then, "The Lord's Prayer," we remind ourselves that God and God's kingdom are present only when share our resources, forgive others their debts, and work together for peace, and that God's kingdom will only be fully present when ALL have enough, when ALL debts are forgiven and when ALL people are free to live together and live peacefully.

The book builds on Crossan's earlier work, especially God and Empire, and most of the themes are found throughout his writings. Yet there is a freshness to the presentation here, an application that warrants attention. Although most of the themes are not new for Crossan, how those ideas effect our prayers, and particularly how we say "The Lord's Prayer" is a novel application of them.

If you are open to non-traditional Christian theology and a faith informed by reason and historical method, this is the prayer book for you.

Why do you seek the living among the dead?

For those who are not interested in Easter at all, this post will not matter. Also, for those who do celebrate Easter, but as a family (non-religious) holiday, or fertility festival, this post is not relevant either. I have no quarrel with these views, I merely am not addressing them here. Fertility festivals and family holidays can be very fine things, but I want to write on the importance of Easter as a commemoration of the resurrection of Jesus.

Let me state clearly that I affirm the resurrection of Jesus. There is, however, a twist. I do not believe that Jesus was physically raised from the dead. That is, I do not believe that on the third day the body of Jesus was physically transformed and his tomb found empty.

The reasons I doubt this are lengthy and complex and I will here only summarize them: 1) most crucified victims were not buried, and if by rare chance one was they were dumped in a common or shallow criminal's grave. The burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea reads like a contrived tale to (a) save Jesus from this fate, and (b) help account for the resurrection in narrative terms. 2) The stories read like symbolic accounts. The resurrection is said to happen at sunrise, there are angels, the stone is magically "rolled away." This reads like legend. 3) The appearance stories in the gospels cannot be harmonized and are the clear inventions of their authors' theology. 4) It seems clear to me that by presenting the stories as they do, the gospel writers did not intend to convey literal fact. 5) Paul, our earliest Christian writer and a self-proclaimed "witness" of the risen Jesus says nothing about an "empty tomb," and strongly indicates that the resurrection of Jesus - whatever it was - was not the transformation of a corpse.

Nevertheless, I don't want to press this issue. If you believe that Jesus really did bodily rise up from the dead on Easter Sunday, and the tomb was really empty, then fine. I have no desire to combat that belief. My question is this: can the resurrection of Jesus be affirmed by one who does not believe the empty tomb story? Who does not affirm bodily resurrection?

I believe that it can.

Here is how I understand what the earliest followers of Jesus were saying: When Jesus was crucified they were afraid and they fled in despair, but they soon found that the power that they knew in Jesus was still present in them! Not only that, they felt that it was still Jesus bringing this power. That is, the earliest followers of Jesus were somehow aware (visions were most likely involved here) that Jesus was still with them, empowering them to do what he did; to heal the sick, condemn injustice, champion the poor, and include the outcasts.

I do not mean by this that they merely continued Jesus' mission or that his teaching or ideas lived on. Rather, I mean to say that the disciples of Jesus felt the "living presence" of Jesus empowering them to do as he did, and this forced them to say "Jesus lives." Jesus, they now believed, was "with God" and "with them." And I believe they were right.

Don't get me wrong, I have no idea what happens after death. I do not think traditional views of heaven and hell are likely to be true. And I have no idea if any of our personality survives death, in fact I lean against that. But I do think that something of the essence of what we are is eternal and not merely mortal. It is this contact with and experience of the eternal aspect of Jesus' being that caused his disciples to say "He is risen!"

But "Jesus Lives" is only half of the Easter proclamation. These disciples affirmed also that "Jesus is Lord." For them, Jesus did not merely continue to be with them, but to call them and challenge them, and bring to them the very being and power of their God. The risen Jesus challenges those who encounter him to radically reorient themselves; not only his presence but his call to mission is the heart of Easter faith.

I do not profess to know what kinds of experiences these disciples had. I was not there, and what we have (other than Paul) are the purely symbolic accounts in the gospels. But I am convinced that they experienced the real presence of the real Jesus as a compelling power within themselves.

The success of the Jesus movement resulted in the fact that these experiences of the "risen Jesus" were not isolated, but could be had by others. Christians who had never known Jesus during his life, could and did experience him as a "living power" calling for their authentic response.

And what was the call of Jesus? The call to "follow him." And this meant, a life committed to forgiveness, inclusion, compassion, healing, non-violence, social justice, and peace. It is this life that the risen and living Jesus still can bring to those who look to him, and to me this is what faith in the resurrection of Jesus means.

So, what happened to the body of Jesus? Presumably one of the few horrid fates that befell most crucifieds. But it is irrelevant. As the gospels rhetorically ask us, "why do we seek the living among the dead?" The spirit of Jesus lives on calling us. If we answer that call he can empower us to walk as he did and follow his way.

He is risen indeed!

Happy Easter.


Note: Originally Published last year.

Good Friday: a Passion for Justice

On Good Friday Christians around the world commemorate the death of Jesus. I confess I've never been able to entertain the strange notion that Jesus' death magically takes away our sins.

There are various versions of how this works: the most common being a very primitive and barbaric suggestion that Jesus died in our place. Such a claim presents a view of God that is hardly lovable.

So I don't prefer to think of today as the day of remembering how Jesus "died in our place" or some other such weird notion.

What I choose to remember is that Jesus was crucified by imperial power. The reason, historically, that Jesus was executed - think about that executed! - was because he disturbed the status quo. In the name of the Kingdom of God - the Jewish God of justice and peace - Jesus condemned the ways of empire, and the system of domination and exploitation.

The death of Jesus was a direct result of his passionate commitment to peace, justice, and compassion in the name of God and God's kingdom. That is what ought to be remembered.

The great Medieval theologian Peter Abelard argued that Jesus' death should not be understood as a substitution or a ransom paid, but as an example of divine love. An example that, if we truly contemplate it, transforms us so that we become better people.

Abelard, it seems to me, was right. The importance of the death of Jesus is that it shows how committed he was to the central goal of his life, and inspires us to be just as committed.

The religious importance of this death, for Christians, is this: Jesus' death was not merely the result of his commitment to justice and compassion. Rather, it was also his firm conviction that God is found chiefly in a life of Justice and compassion; a life he himself embodied.

Note: I originally published this post last year. I thought it worth re-posting

Do this in Remembrance of Me

Today is Holy Thursday, the day when Christians remember the last supper, the foundation of that most sacred of Christian meals, the Holy Communion.

It is historically very uncertain if the accounts of the last supper actually go back to the Historical Jesus or if they are later constructions of the church. My own inclination is that Jesus did celebrate a "last supper" with some of his followers. I doubt he said the "words of the institution," but I suspect he asked them to "remember him while they ate and drank." But perhaps not even that is historical. There is something more important about this meal.

In standard Christian theology Holy Communion is deeply connected with Jesus "dying for the sins of the world." I'm not very interested in that theology. Jesus' death is very important. He was put to death by an Empire and a leadership that despised everything he stood for to make an example to would be rebels. That death is, in many ways, a profound conclusion to his life and mission. But I don't believe in vicarious sacrifice or magic rituals, so the "dying for our sins" part does not move me. I am, however, deeply moved by the ritual of Holy Communion.

Communion reminds as that we are all one, like cells of one body, and that we were meant for "life together" in Boenhoffer's phrase. It is also a reminder that God is intimately near to us, as near as the bread and wine we digest. But there is more to the ritual even than that. Eating together was a (perhaps the) central element in the ministry of the historical Jesus.

Historians and New Testament scholars are unanimous in recognizing an "all-inclusive table fellowship" or "open commensality" as a central practice of the ministry of Jesus. In the ancient world who you ate or did not eat with mattered very greatly. Table Fellowship was a microcosm of the lager society, you did not eat with the the "lower people" or "outcasts."

Jesus directly challenged this ancient table practice with his own. Jesus dined with all manner of people, rich and poor, righteous and sinner, outcast and respectable soul, tax-collect and harlot, P and scribe. For Jesus, all set together to dine as equals. Jesus, from all accounts, appears to have been principally concerned with undoing the divisions of society. His ministry of eating and healing appears to have been designed to radically transform human relationships from exclusive to inclusive, from hierarchical to egalitarian.

The practice of all eating together as equals was the realization of Jesus' vision. In having all dine together as equals, Jesus was not merely proclaiming, but actually destroying the boundaries that divide. No one was to be an "outcast" any longer.

It all probability that is what communion grew out of - Jesus' mission to unite us all; to break apart the divisions which cause strife between us.

So if you take communion tonight or anytime this Holy Week do indeed remember Jesus. But forget theological claims about his divinity or sacrificial death (I suspect that the Historical Jesus would have found such claims a profound waste of time) try to remember his mission to unite, heal, reconcile, and bring together.

In a world still so divided and marred by the violence of those divisions, perhaps it would be good to remember Jesus' call to unity and to try to live it a little.