Re: Culture Wars, Old and New (Was: I Am Homophobic)

On Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 12:51:20PM -0800, Michael Zara wrote:
> Kendall,
> 
> that was great.  I've only known the very smallest amount about the way 
> the "Bible" was assembled (e.g., the Council of Nicea)  and absolutely 
> nothing about the heretics of the first few centuries.  I'll be giving 
> your post a closer reading over the weekend, for sure.

Thanks. It just sort of flew out; despite the superficial silliness I
indulged in, there really is an interesting history of ideas sort of point
lurking there, and I really meant it very literally that these two "culture
wars" (of the ones I've studied, these are the ones I know best), the engine
that was driving them is very similar: debates over reading strategies --
something I find nearly endlessly interesting.

And I just started a new book that looks like it's on point, from Harvard
University Press, Miguel Tamen's *Friends of Interpretable Objects*.

> Certainly, some things in the "Bible" are "not befitting"!  That is a 
> great phrase.  The whole bit might be more palatable (as indeed are the 
> personal theologies and acts of *many* Christians of every stripe, I 
> should point out) if it hewed to Christ's message of active love.

What I take to be significant about it today -- given that I'm no longer
actively a practicing (agnostic) theologian -- is that this impulse is
*very* early and runs straight through Christian history, and thus offers a
very nice alternative view of Christianity and, thus in a way, Western
history. From the *very* earliest days people have been making the same
kinds of objections, which are often falsely taken to be strictly *modern*
objections to Christianity. That's just so wrong.

My first dissertation adviser -- a Jewish woman who was doing a PhD in
religious studies at Temple (she did her diss on the Jewish philosopher
Franz Rosenzweig); who, when she was reading the Reformation Protestant
theologian Melancthon's stuff on the "benefits of Christ", had a sort of
all-at-once conversion experience, formally converted to Christianity
(Episcopalian), and became a Christian theologian -- and I came to grief
over precisely this point, actually. She sat on my diss proposal for a year
and refused to approve it, which screwed me pretty bad, because we couldn't
come to terms over this issue. (I finally bailed, found another adviser, who
approved my proposal, w/out any changes, in a week, and on the basis of it I
then won the most prestigious PhD prize offered by SMU. So it wasn't a *bad*
proposal! :> )

Our quibble was over the degree to which contemporary liberal Protestant
(and Catholic, too, but that wasn't our area) is critical because it is
*modernist* and Western (her view) or because (my view) some strands of
theology had *always* been critical, even if those strands were now dominant
(in what's called "mainstream" American liberalism, and certainly also in
both European and Third World theologies (because the latter were mostly all
Marxist and liberational) and were critical in a modernist and Western way.

To someone like my adviser, who was and is a very
history-of-doctrine-oriented systematic theologian, I appealed to the always
already critical strands of Christian thought going all the way back; but
she wanted to build a kind of pre-critical golden age view (of course, she
wouldn't agree to that sort of ideological description!), which my argument
very much threatened (not that I threatened her, since sociologically and
institutionally, I was in no position to do *that*).

This seems like a minor issue, but it was the underlying bone of contention
over what *she* thought my dissertation should look like, and what I thought
it should look like. I finally knew I had lost when I sort of broke down and
said, in her office, "Look, I just can't *write* that kind of work. I'm not
being merely stubborn, I just know I can't do it."

Anyway, sorry to ramble, but one of things we argued about endlessly was my
reading of Origen's De Principis and this notion of god-befittingness (which
is definitely ascertainable in his work; the argument was over the epistemic
status he afforded it.)

> That is, if one can get past the whole question of the existence of 
> evil.  Which I can't.  Regardless, a god who's wrath (and that of His 
> followers) is reserved for guys-who-like-guys, to the remarkable 
> exclusion of dictators, genocidistas, and those who rip off and penalize 
> the poor and imprisoned (2 of J.C.'s fave groups, btw) -- well that sort 
> of god really isn't worth the candle, is He?

Hey, I used to argue, only half-sseriously, to my students (all of whom were
training to be United Methodist ministers, of pretty much the most liberal
variety) that what the problem of evil really showed was that God exists and
God is a *bastard*!

Note, however, that, even though, yeah, Origen's idea was to peel off the
evil attributions to God, the problem of evil arises not simply because of
any evil actions attributed to *God*, but by the mere presence of evil in
the world at all. (Well, actually, by the confluence of a few religious
claims and a (broad pattern of) fact -- this is, near as I can recall it,
John Mackie's version in his (amazing!) The Miracle of Theism: 1) God is
infinitely powerful (God can do all that it is logically possible to do); 2)
God is infinitely good or omnibeneficent, and 3) there is evil in the world.
In general, there are three strategies to respond to problem of evil: a)
qualify or relinquish (1) in order to preserve (2); b) qualify or relinquish
(2) to preserve (1); c) qualify (or deny!) (3) to preserve (1) and (2).
Historically, most responses have denied that the problem really poses a
contradiction to theism by using some variant of (c); in the modern period,
especially since about 1950, many religious thinkers offer a variant of (a),
that is, they've argued that God isn't omnipotent, for a wide range of
reasons, and does all God can do, which is consistent with (3).)

> BTW, Kendall, what are your thoughts on what JC meant when he 
> (supposedly) said "no man comes to the Father except by me"?

This is a massively complicated question! :>

I recently read on some anti-IMF list that, unlike Islam, Xnty was a more
mythological religion because there was no historical evidence that "Jesus
of Nazareth" (though this person said "Jesus Christ", which is confused)
even existed, whereas there is, in this person's view, lots of historical
evidence about Muhammad.

Well, that's wrong, but there is an asymmetry. I don't think there remains
serious scholarly debate about whether some person known as "Jesus of
Nazareth" was crucified by the Romans in Judea in about <mumble-mumble, I
don't remember when; actually, I think a few years, ironically, *post*-BC
because of some weird historical and calendrical mixups or something...
unclear.>

That, of course, is really only a very small part of the story, but it's
worth knowing, if only for the sake of keeping up.

As for what this person said... I suspect it was rather a lot of what most
first century Palestinian Jews -- of roughly his social standing -- said. As
for what this person said that was *preserved* by some Jews of his day,
that's a very tricky question, historically ( -- I'll drop the
'historically' provision explicitly since, imo, it's the only interesting
way to discuss the issue and it's tiresome).

There are three practical ways -- and I'm only a tiny bit joking -- to decide
this issue: 1) take the KJV of the Bible and just assume everything in red
print was something Jesus said (not recommended, though); 2) assume
*nothing* anyone ever attributes to Jesus is at all trustworthy as something
he actually said, and then build whatever religious faith you need out of
not giving a damn; 3) keep up with the regular publications of The Jesus
Seminar.

That's really the only three options for non-experts.

I don't suspect anyone takes (1) seriously right through here, so we can put
it aside.

(3) is interesting and not too difficult, actually. Just requires you to
spend a few dollars (or trips to a good library) and some time. The Jesus
Seminar is a group of scholars -- started in mid-80s by a scholar named Bob
Funk -- who get together to decide on what there is good evidence to think
Jesus of Nazareth might actually have said and done; this, mind you, is done
without any explicit religious pretension whatever, simply as a matter of
historical-critical scholarship.

   http://westarinstitute.org/JS/js.html

As The Jesus Seminar puts it, "canonical boundaries are irrelevant in
critical assessments of the various sources of information about Jesus".

The theological tradition in which I was trained was sort of interested in
(3) but mainly took (2) as a basis. That is, it simply said that, whatever
else this historical person may or not have said or done, the authenticity
of any expression of Christian faith is normed by the earliest response to
(what is called) the "easter event"; i.e., the earliest apostolic response
to the death of Jesus of Nazareth. (And for any expression of Christian
faith to be a *valid* expression, it must not only be an authentic
expression, but it must also be *true* and *fitting* (i.e., aptly expressed
given the historical/social context of expression).) 

That earliest apostolic response is called the "kerygma" (the Greek word for
"proclamation" (both the act of proclaiming and the content of the
proclamation) and it's the kerygma which forms the norm of theological
authenticity. This is more or less following in the steps of Rudolf
Bultmann, probably the leading interpreter of the New Testament of the 20th
century. My major professor (an American named Schubert Ogden) had Bultmann
as one of his major professors and was the leading "left-wing Bultmannian".
This strand typically is not dismissive of efforts like The Jesus Seminar,
but it gives their results a different kind of weight.

So... now I've come to your question... :>

According to (2), one is free to ignore (heck, from a certain view, one is
obligated to give no normative weight to) any purported statement of Jesus,
canonical or otherwise, if it diverges from the kerygma, the chief content
of which is something like "God's primal love is the source and origin of
all that there is or that there could be". The "no man comes to the
father..." saying is divergent from the kerygma (for which God's love is
always already present and available to human persons, to whom it is
unmediated by Jesus).

I don't know the Jesus Seminar stuff very well any more, but I feel very
confident that they have rejected this saying as not something the
historical Jesus would have said, probably on some elaborate and hard to
quibble with textual grounds. However, there are probably two more
conceptual reasons: 1) this saying is *too* Christian, i.e., Jesus was a
first century Palestinian Jew, of probably some heterodox opinion, and would
not have talked like the Christian church was talking 150 years later, and
2) the content as near as can be determined of what Jesus really said was a
mixture of political and ethical, focused not at all on himself, but rather
on the idea that the 'kingdom of god is at hand', i.e., an apocalyptic sort
of message. Even before The Jesus Seminar was instituted,
historical-critical scholarship, since probably the mid 19th century, maybe
even earlier, had cast doubt upon the degree to which the content of the
historical Jesus's message would have been *himself*; there is, simply
textually, a tension in the canonical gospels between what the character
Jesus says about the kingdom of god being at hand and what he says about
himself as somehow bringing it about. The earlier one goes, the less one
finds the latter and the more one finds the former.

I hope that helps.

Kendall