Marta's Mathoms

Christ has died; Christ has risen; Christ will come again.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about some of the ironies, tensions, and outright contradictions connected with the way we Christians think about Easter.

To start, there’s the tribal god thing. The way we talked about the Bible in the churches I grew up in, one of the bit distinctions between the Old and the New Testament was who God was the God of. In the Old Testament, God was God of the Jews. I mean, obviously God works with humanity before the Jews come on the scene, like with Noah and Adam, and in a few other cases – Job springs to mind, and God’s sending Jonah to the Assyrian city of Nineveh – but for the most part the Old Testament is the story of a unique covenant between God and the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. If you were born into that tribe, you had to convert or YHWH was simply not your God. Compare this to the New Testament, where Jesus explicitly reached out both to the margins of Jewish society as well as non-Jewish society (Samaritans and even the Romans), and where the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) explicitly said that Gentile Christians didn’t have to convert to Judaism.

(Out of fairness to Jews, I get that this isn’t quite the way they see it; most Orthodox Jews I’ve known don’t believe you have to convert to Judaism to relate to God, and some even point to the Noahide Covenant, which applies to all humans, comes in. But as a Christian I was taught that when Christians came on the scene and opened up the Gospel to all peoples, this was a new thing.)

Here’s the thing, though. On the one hand, Christians point to Christ’s ministry as the point in history when God was no longer a tribal God. He became open to everyone. But at the same time, Christians have used this ministry to set up a sort of new tribe. It’s not a genetic tribe, to be sure, but if you don’t affirm certain very specific beliefs, if you don’t express them in a certain way or worship in a certain way, the thought is you’re not “really” a Christian. Even if you’re trying to interpret and live out the same revelation, even if you’re interacting with the same community and history. I’m small time as far as blogging goes, and this means the people reading this blog almost all know me and are friends in some capacity or other. That means I’m less subject to the gatekeepers of Christianity (I simply don’t attract enough attention for it to be worth anyone’s effort to call me out on my heresies). But look at how Christians question whether liberal politicians are really Christian (Obama jumps to mind, but there are also the Catholics who have been denied the eucharist over being pro-choice) because of some policy position they take. Christianity has become its own tribe, bound by doxastic lines rather than genealogical ones, but it’s a tribe all the same.

Then there’s Christian teaching about the law vs. mercy. Jesus spent so much of his ministry railing against the legalism of the Pharisees, on how they would obsess over the speck in their neighbor’s eye without seeing the plank in their own. He chose to disobey the finer details of the law (like healing on the Sabbath) when doing so was warranted. Then at the Cross Christ is willing to die in order to satisfy the law’s demands. To hear some Christians describe it, you’d think that assenting to certain theological propositions – God exists; Christ is God; I need saving; Christ’s death saves me; etc. – is what matters, what gets us into heaven, more than the stuff Christ actually seemed concerned with in his parables and teachings, that is, helping the vulnerable. Moreover, in many quarters the true mark of being a Christian isn’t healing the sick, feeding the hungry, caring for the widows and orphans, forgetting not the prisoners, or anything like that. Rather, it’s trying to get as many people as possible to go along with those same beliefs and claim the label of “Christian” as we possibly can.

I get why Christians focus on this. It actually comes out of a place of love, at least in many cases. If you truly believe that we’ll face heaven or hell after death, and our Christian credentials are our gate pass into heaven, then what could be more important than making sure those people that matter most to you are actually saved? And I also get why Christians are uncomfortable with saying everyone will be saved whether they want it or not, because that seems to take the choice away from people. But there’s something about this focus that just seems… off, somehow. It turns the Passion into a way to plug up the ultimate loophole: God wants to save us, don’t you see, but can’t quite manage it without Christ’s sacrifice, and without the appropriate password you can’t get past St. Peter after you die. It just seems to run against the Christ portrayed in the Gospels, outside of this one weekend of his ministry.

And finally, my personal bugabear: why is it that a death that was supposed to rob death of its sting instead makes so much of us more fearful of damnation than ever?

I remember giving my life to Christ at a friend’s church’s VBS (I must have been at most seven years old) and coming home and proudly declaring I was now saved. I then spent most of my teenage years alternately rolling my eyes at altar calls and having to sit on my hands to keep from raising them as someone who needed to accept God into her heart. And I didn’t come from a particularly evangelical background. You just get it hammered into you often enough that you’re nothing without God and that you’re hell-bound if you don’t believe the right things. Eventually I got to a point where I realized any God who would chuck me out in spite of my lifelong, sincere efforts to live well and worship Him, wasn’t worthy of my worship so I got over the obsessing over whether I was saved or not. But honestly, this focus on sin and salvation? It’s enough to give any impressionable, eager-to-please kid an inferiority complex.

On the flip side, though, one of the things I’ve always loved most about Christianity is the security it offers. Jesus says (in Mark 3:28-29) that we can be forgiven of literally anything except blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Different Christians interpret this verse in different ways, but the way I read it, if you are capable of asking forgiveness that recognizes the Holy Spirit’s role in reconciling you with God. The only person who can’t be forgiven is the person who doesn’t realize they need forgiving. More than that, we don’t forgive people (or get forgiveness ourselves) because they deserve it; rather, we forgive them because we were forgiven when we didn’t deserve it. The Gospel seems to be about radical forgiveness and radical love and radical mercy – the giving people more than they deserve on their merits.

Now, I know there are probably answers to these points that make sense on an intellectual level but I’m not sure that’s what bothers me here. It’s more that the way Christians focus on the Resurrection, the way we focus on the Christian label and having the right beliefs presented in the right way… it all just seems like such a departure to what the living Christ was getting on about. This understanding of the Passion just seems like a distortion of Christ’s message to me, a perversion of Christian love.

What are the alternatives? If the Passion isn’t about ripping the Temple veil and taking away any need for sacrifice, any pretense that we can pay for our sins and make ourselves good, what is it about? That’s the question Tony Jones asked progressive Christians to write about, and which first got me thinking about these ironies. And true to form for a #progGod challenge, I find myself perfectly happy to reject the old but without having much of anything to offer in its place. It’s patently obvious to me that the old way of talking about the crucifixion – a glorified get-out-of-jail-free pass that lets Christians pass into heaven at our death while those who never prayed the Sinner’s Prayer get an eternity of hellfire and brimstone – is inadequate. I just don’t quite have the courage to offer up anything in its place. But let me at least try.

I once heard a story from a friend about some theologian explaining the resurrection. (I forget which one particularly.) The resurrection, according to this theologian, wasn’t about making us lovable; it was God’s way of convincing us that we always had been lovable. God was willing to die on a tree to show the doubters and the nay-sayers – and really, that’s all of us at times – that we were worth saving, even if it meant that God had to die on a tree. In its way, this goes back to Adam’s original sin: that there’s something missing if we don’t understand the nature of good and evil, that we need to improve on how God made us. Don’t get me wrong, I love the refinement-of-creation aspect of human nature, the need to understand. But the thought that we are incomplete as we were created, that we’re not good enough and that in our present state we’re not even lovable – maybe the resurrection is God’s way, once and for all,

Another possibility: it’s easy to look at God and think that He is so high above our situation that he couldn’t really understand it. The Resurrection gives us a God who not only died but died as a criminal, in one of the most cruel and shameful ways to execute someone in his time.  Now, maybe God really didn’t know what it was like to die and be turned into such an “other” – He is after all God, and so while He might know every fact, this is an experience He could hardly have ever had. Or maybe it’s more subjective than that. Maybe we need to be convinced that God really can understand our these things, and having a God who is also a Suffering Servant drives home that point a bit: that while we may suffer, God really and truly does Get It.

And finally, maybe there really is metaphysical work being done here. Maybe God couldn’t forgive us humans without a perfect sacrifice. (Personally, I’m not sure – seems like an omniscient God should be able to forgive without such restrictions, or at least created a world where we wouldn’t get into this mess – but I’ll leave that point aside.) Even if the Passion really was necessary, does that mean we have to think about it like we do? I mean, is there a way to believe Christ’s death is necessary, even central, without turning Christianity into a new chosen people, a separate tribe from the rest of humanity?

I think so, if we keep in mind that Jesus’s ministry was so transformative to the culture he lived in. The widow with her two mites gave a greater gift than the rich and powerful who let their coins jangle as they dropped into the offering-box. Looking lustfully at the cute woman walking down the street is just as bad as if a husband actually had an affair with her. To have a new life you must be born again. (How the heck do you manage that, quoth Nicodemus.) You don’t just have to just love yourself and your neighbors but your enemies as well – and forgive them seven times seventy times, no less. And perhaps the most countercultural message of all: God could not only be born in a stable but could die on a tree. Even if the Passion was metaphysically necessary, even if true forgiveness was impossible without it, I still don’t think Jesus would recognize the way we turn it into an entry-exam for heaven as what he was trying to get at in his ministry.

But then, the disciples were first-class dunderheads at times, too, and that seemed to work out all right in the end. So maybe there’s hope for us moderns as well. I hope so, at least.

The word of God, for the people of God. All of them.

Over at his blog, Tony Jones has a series of “questions that haunt” – tough questions sent in by his readers (who include a full spectrum from orthodox Christians to atheists), which Tony invites everyone else to discuss, and a few days later offers himself. It makes for some very interesting, almost haunting, conversation. And this week’s is an interesting one. I thought I’d take a stab at it.

Judi asked:

Recently have read a number of your blog entries. Grew up evangelical. Dealing with doubt. I’m trying to figure out why progressives hold to Christianity at all. Why not just be agnostic? I hope this question makes sense.

It’s a question I’ve been asked before, both by other people and even by myself. I talk a lot about God being beyond my ability to completely figure out. Heck, I’m writing a dissertation on (among other things) what we can say about a God so great he can’t quite be conceived by us humans.

First, just what do we mean by agnostic? Linguistically, it just means “not known.” I can be agnostic about lots of people – who will win the 2016 election, whether intelligent aliens exist, or (to borrow Bertrand Russell’s example) whether a magical teacup exists just on the far side of Jupiter that magically grows smaller than our best telescopes can pick up on, no matter how good they get. In fact, I am agnostic about all of these things right now, and I expect to stay agnostic about them until one option becomes more likely than the other. (I suspect I’ll have a more definite opinion in October 2016 than I do now over who will win that election.) Sometimes, there are also questions we simply can’t know no matter what evidence we gather. And we can – and should – be agnostic here as well.

Of course, when most people talk about agnostics they’re talking about religion. As I understand it, in this context, agnosticism is kind of like an atheism lite.* Agnostics recognize that theism is a logical possibility – they can’t prove God doesn’t exist – but they don’t see a good reason to believe in God either. We can think about lots of things we can’t disprove without taking them seriously. In the Harry Potter books, there’s a train platform at King’s Cross station where you can catch a train to Hogwarts. There’s nothing per se impossible about this, but that doesn’t mean I need to fly to London and run into the platform barrier to decide I don’t believe it really is. Some possibilities are worth taking seriously, and some aren’t. So many agnostics will admit they can’t prove God doesn’t exist, but that doesn’t mean they’ll build their life around that possibility.

I actually am an agnostic in the first sense. When it comes to God’s existence, I have to admit I don’t know. That’s because knowledge means I can completely wrap my head around the concept, completely understand it and develop an argument that proves things about it. One of the real difficulty you run into in philosophy of religion (and I assume theology, though that’s not my bailiwick) is with trying to come up with ideas of what God really is. Without that, we can’t really develop arguments to prove God does exists, but how do you get a concept that humans can understand, that truly represents God?

This is where faith comes in, and I do choose to believe God exists. Is this irrational? That’s a huge question in philosophy, whether you can believe something without evidence and that still be a good belief. Ask me in thirty years and I may have worked out my answer. But if it’s irrational, it’s not irrational in the same way as (say) 9/11 truthers or Obama birthers are. There, you have counterevidence – the video of planes hitting the towers, the released birth certificate and newspaper announcements – that those groups just deny exists. With God, I don’t think we have evidence one way or the other.

But is this knowledge? I don’t think so. That means I can’t say I know God exists, though I have faith, I hope, I believe. God is just too big for human knowledge. That means I’m an agnostic, at least the first sense, but I’m also in no rush to give up on Christianity. If you know me, you know I talk about religion and theism a lot, probably more than a lot of people want to hear. But if I’m an agnostic, why am I so involved with religion? I have three answers: the good, the bad, and the personal.

First, the good: Judi’s question was directed to the ex-evangelicals, which isn’t me. I grew up in the United Methodist Church, in what I thought of as the mainest of mainline Protestant churches. We read the Bible and took it seriously, and I was expected to change my attitudes and beliefs to reflect it rather than the other way around. But I also grew up with the idea that the way we interpreted the Bible should be guided by reason and experience along with church history and the literal meaning of the Scripture. (This is basically the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.)

My faith encourages me to take science and philosophy seriously even when it’s uncomfortable. It’s integral to Methodist Christianity that, if you want to know God and live the bes kind of life, you need to understand the world around you, too. And morally, a lot of my social progressivism – my feminism, my commitment to economic justice, my pacifism – starts with the idea that all humans are uniquely worthwhile, not just those I know personally. I’m sure you can fight for these causes without being religious, but in my case it’s taking my religion seriously and thinking hard about the Biblical stories and church history that drives my position on these issues. I don’t want to lose this.

(By the way, I don’t think this is just me. Connor Wood recently blogged about a spike in suicides among the elderly in South Korean. One reason: the nation has become increasingly secularized and has lost a lot of its Confucian underpinning, leading to elderly people spending their golden years isolated from their children in a culture where this was pretty well unheard of a generation ago. Religion provides useful ways to structure your life, and when we try to do away with religion, this can harm people if not done rightly.)

Next, the bad: I’m not blind to all the harm done in religion’s name. I’m perfectly aware that it was a Christian pastor (John Piper) who encouraged abusive women to submit to their husbands, and another (Doug Wilson) who defended American slavery. There was also the non-pastor journalist who argued the Bible encourages us to own and be willing to use guns. And of course we’ve all heard about Christian groups fighting against gay marriage, gays in the military, anti-bullying laws, and other things in this vein. These people use the same Bible I do, and they use it to fight – often quite effectively – for the exact opposite of my moral ideals.

So why share their name? Because I believe they are misusing Christian theology. One of the things I try to do with my blog is show how the Bible supports racial equality, gender equality, economic equality, resistance of violence, and other ideals I value are consistent with – even draw upon – Biblical themes and texts. It’s the work of a lifetime, probably more than one lifetime, and I won’t claim to be there yet. But if I simply renounced Christianity because it was anti-woman, anti-LGBT, whatever, that actually helps people like John Piper and Doug Wilson by letting them define the terms.

If you tell a Christian she must choose between supporting (say) feminism and calling herself a Christian, that the two don’t go together, suddenly you make it harder for her to support women’s rights. Because in this situation she can’t make that choice without giving up something important to her. So I have two options here: I can fight against religion, try to get people to become more secular, or I can fight for a better kind of religion, one that helps people fight for a more just world. For some people, the first option makes more sense. But for me, given that I actually see a lot of value in religion, it’s door number two.

Finally, the personal. I’ve actually tried to give up on God. I went through some things some years back that would have been a lot simpler if I hadn’t believed the universe was so ordered that things happened for a reason. I actually prayed to lose my faith, once upon a time, as odd as that may sound. But for some reason I can’t quite nail down, I’ve never been able to manage this. I can think about God not existing, of course, but that’s just never seemed real to me, no matter how hard I’ve tried. It seems like an interesting fiction, an intellectual exercise, but not the kind of thing I could truly accept.

Maybe that’s the cultural conditioning we all get as children at work. Maybe some people are simply more inclined to believe in something beyond themselves. Maybe I’m so intellectual, I need an excuse so I don’t have to work everything out myself. (I have a powerful drive to figure things out and solve all the world’s problems). But for whatever reason, at some point I had to make my peace with this belief. It’s about managing the belief, so I can use it for good rather than have it be a weight around my shoulders.

So there you have it. That’s why I’m an agnostic – and also why it hasn’t driven me away from Christianity. I’m sure my atheist friends will disagree on some points, like my assertion that theism isn’t irrational, or that religion has at least some good parts to it. And maybe some of my religious friends think you can know things about God – that you don’t have to be an agnostic, or maybe even that you shouldn’t be one. For me, though, agnosticism is about recognizing there are some things that are beyond my ken.

For me, my agnosticism is ultimately about faith. Maybe it’s not so surprising      I can believe this and still call myself a Christian.

ETA:

*Above I described agnosticism as atheism lite. After discussing it with my friend Aearwen over at LiveJournal, I’ve decided this phrase probably sounds dismissive. I don’t mean it that way, and apologize if anyone was offended.

I’ve encountered two types of atheism in my life. Some are trying to participate in a spiritual or religious tradition but for whatever reason don’t think they can say they know God exists. These people are every bit as committed to doing the serious work of being a conscientious member of their religion. Sometimes they have philosophical issues with religion and knowledge-claims (like the making-room-for-faith aspect I described above); other times this is just about being intellectually humble when it comes to fundamental questions. I’m happy to identify as this kind of agnosticism as a label. I don’t consider it derogatory, nor do I think of it as putting me outside my own faith tradition, which is Christianity and in particular Methodism.

I’ve also encountered another kind of agnostics, who tend to act more in line with what I’d describe as atheists – people who don’t see any reason to suppose that God exists and quite often (but not always) think religion harms society and want people to become less religious. They may have philosophical reasons for thinking we can’t know God exists or they may simply consider it the more moderate form secularism that keeps them from having to call their religious neighbors wrong or ignorant. And in many cases, it’s simply a desire to get on with their life rather than becoming a philosopher of religion. They don’t feel compelled to explain why God doesn’t exist but instead point out they don’t see any compelling reason to think God does exist.

When I read Judi’s question, I thought she was talking about this second type of agnosticism. In particular, I imagined her asking a disillusioned ex-fundamentalist Christian who clung to protestant Christianity, if she was so disappointed with Christianity why not go to the logical extreme and give up on religion as a whole? Become a de facto atheist without having to bother with whether God existed or not, and live the more secular lifestyle your movement toward progressive Christianity seems to point you to. That was the context I referred to agnosticism as atheism lite. But even there, that’s more dismissive than I should have been. I know many agnostics within the freethought movement who are conscientious and intelligent and working hard to form reasonable beliefs and are not practicing simply a watered down atheism. I’ll try to be more careful with how I use my descriptions in the future, and I really do apologize to anyone who found that offensive.

I’m not changing the phrase because I try not to make substantive changes after posting. But hopefully this note will explain what I did and didn’t mean by that phrase?