Pontificator discussion

My post about John Updike's Seven Stanzas at Easter provoked a discussion at Al Kimel's Pontificator blog.  I'm reproducing below some of my comments from that discussion, with light afterthought editing.

From comment #12:

... I’m not persuaded that Jesus was God Incarnate, but then again neither do I see him as merely another teacher of good morals and manners.

Judging by the evidence of Acts, the apostles regarded Jesus as the Anointed One, a divinely-appointed warlord who would imminently return to usher in God’s rule and restore Israel to its rightful place in God’s service. To the extent that Jesus himself believed that, it would seem that he was wrong, because it just didn’t happen (cf. Deut. 18.21-22).

But in stressing (what I called over at TitusOneNine) the dominical algorithm — that is, the Great Commandment, the Summary of the Law, facing the facts, and metanoia — Jesus seems to have put his finger on something truly fundamental about the universe, far more so than merely teaching good morals and manners. Whatever else he was (or was not), as a prophet he seems to have been well-named as a son of God.

Shulamite says:

Any buddhist or Muslim- certainly any Jew- could hold perfectly well to such things, and in fact many of them do.

Under the definition I’ve offered, I think a pious Jew could indeed rightly call him- or herself a Christian. Jesus (a Jew himself, of course) didn’t seem to be trying to start a new religion; the one he already had seemed to suit him just fine. He called on his co-religionists to be better Jews, not to adopt some new faith.

It’s not clear to me that Muslims could properly call themselves Christians under the definition I’ve offered, because I’m not sure their view of the Qur’an is compatible with the dominical algorithm. (I don’t mean to give offense, but I feel the same way about bibliolatrous Christians.)

As to Buddhists, I don’t know enough about their concept(s) of God to form an opinion whether they would meet the love-God-above-all part of the definition.

From comment #17:

B.  Pontificator writes: “God, as understood by Christians, is not a part of the world, is not an object of the world. His interaction with the world is of a completely different, transcendent order. Nothing that a scientist learns about the world can either prove or disprove the existence of a divine Creator. The big bang hypothesis may look like creatio ex nihilo, but it’s not.”

This would be where I ask my favorite theological question: How exactly do you know that? I’m not prepared to assume these things a priori.

It seems to me that, at this stage in human history, agnosticism (in the weak sense) is the proper intellectual view of the nature of God. We can make some good guesses about what God might be like. We can even make our bets on those guesses, conducting our lives as though they were true. But intellectual honesty requires us to admit that we simply don’t know.

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F. Michael Liccione [#15] writes: “Nobody would or should die for D.C.’s religion.”

Michael, it’s not my religion; I truly think of it as the religion of Jesus, as distinct from the religion about Jesus.

Whoever’s religion it is, I agree that no one would or should die for it, although for a different reason than you probably had in mind: There are things worth dying for, and matters relating to religion are among them, but but I’m not sure any particular theology would ever be one of them.

G. Michael Liccione [#15] writes: “I couldn’t help believing that the God and Jesus of mere [i.e., traditionalist] Christianity were either worth dying for or worth nothing at all.”

Ah, we see yet another mind falling into the trap of the false dichotomy, jumping to the conclusion that it MUST be either A or B, and then erroneously reasoning that since it obviously can’t be B, it therefore must be A.

From comment # 26:

Jonathan [#25] writes: “I suspect you are reflexively practicing what one would do as a lawyer, which is try to ‘reconstruct the story’ as it were …. [P]hilosophically, you seem to be assuming unconsciously that the assumptions you bring to the practice of law (or maybe the problem-solving mentality of engineering) are tenable in any other field of inquiry.”

You’re exactly right, in part: I do assume — explicitly, not unconsciously — that litigation tools and techniques can be fruitfully brought to bear in studying Christianity. The claims of Christianity purport to be based on history. Good litigators are nothing if not competent field-level historians; reconstructing the story — with real-world consequences if they don’t do a good job — is what they do every day. When a litigator scrutinizes the historical basis of the Christian claims, it’s a natural fit, a square peg in a square hole.

From comment #27:

Fuinseoig [#22] writes: “why then should we be Christians? Why not Jews? Reformed Jews, Jews who have adapted to the modern world and science ….?”

Why not indeed? Theologically, there should be no appreciable difference between a Christian and a Reform Jew. (As I’ve written elsewhere, some time ago I took one of those on-line tests that purports to tell you what your religious beliefs are; I came out a 100% match for Reform Judaism. But I wasn’t born into a Jewish family, nor did I marry into one, and the way I was raised, you don’t leave your family — your biological family, nor your church family — without a really good reason.)

From comment #40:

Perry Robinson [#29], I think your view of philosophy is quite a bit more exalted than mine. Unfortunately, time won’t permit me to digest and respond to everything you’ve said, so I’ll have to do so selectively.

A. Perry writes: “I don’t have to be confident to know. If I know, then I know.”

If all we’re talking about is what you (supposedly) “know” in the abstract, then fine, go ahead and make this claim. But that’s not how things work. At bottom, few of us really give a … what people claim to “know” in the abstract. What most of us care about is (i) how people act, or refrain from acting, on the basis of their knowledge, because their actions can affect not just themselves but us; and (ii) how much we can rely on others’ knowledge in determining how we ourselves will act or refrain from acting. That’s why it can be critical to assess how confident we are in our knowledge. Here are a couple of offhand examples.

(1) During your annual physical check-up, your doctor glumly tells you that you have cancer of the testicles. He says you need to have both of them removed to save your life. Stunned and distraught, you ask the doctor whether he’s sure. The doctor responds that he knows he’s right. If you’re like 99.9999% of the men in this world, your doctor’s “knowing” isn’t going to be enough for you; before agreeing to go under the knife, you’re going to ask for (i) a detailed explanation of the doctor’s diagnosis, (ii) an explanation of your alternative courses of treatment, and (ii) a second opinion.

(2) A police officer “knows” that it was Suspect A who committed a particular crime. Sorry, that’s not good enough — before we (society) will let the police officer lock up Suspect A in prison, he is going to have to adduce evidence sufficient to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Indeed, the fact that the police officer “knows” it was Suspect A isn’t even good enough for him to arrest Suspect A, or even to search his home — with only limited exceptions, before doing either of these things, the officer would have to convince an independent magistrate that he has probable cause to think Suspect A committed the crime. (Cf. also Num. 35.30 and Deut. 17.6, which prohibit putting someone to death except on the testimony of at least two witnesses.)

(3) A Navy SEAL team reports that they’ve located Osama bin Ladin in a house in a remote Pakistani village. Before calling in a missile strike from an aircraft overhead, the SEALs are going to do their best to confirm that the house they’re laser-targeting is indeed the one where bin Ladin is hiding and not the village schoolhouse.

So yes, confidence does matter. “If I know, I know” just doesn’t cut it.

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D. Perry writes: “DC’s “favorite theological question” is on the level of freshmen in a philosophy course thinking that they are asking me really hard questions. This kind of “gotcha!” attitude is found among village atheists and not epistemologists. ”

Perry, forgive me for saying so, but when it comes to epistemology, you philosophers are hothouse flowers. In the real world, people do epistemology for keeps, with real consequences; see, for example, scenarios A(1) through (3) above.

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F. Perry [#30] writes: “A field technology litigator [sic] isn’t a historian. DC simply doesn’t have expertise in history, let alone ancient history. Historiography isn’t as simple and straightforward as DC seems to think.”

I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree about that. Permit me to point out that when corporations and governments want to find out what really happened in respect of something important, it’s the litigators whom they call in to do the investigation — not historians, and certainly not epistemologists or other philosophers.

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G. Perry writes: “Under the most extreme duress, [the Apostles] were faithful to the end. Compare them with the Mormon eyewitnesses, practically all of them denied Joseph Smith, even when denying him meant physical retribution from the Mormons.”

Let’s assume arguendo that the church’s tradition is reliable about the Apostles’ faithfulness to the end. What about, say, Nicodemus and Lazarus and Joseph of Arimathea, who play important roles during Jesus’s time on earth but are strangely absent from the post-resurrection record. Were they faithful to the end? Or did they have a different view of matters than the Eleven and their later followers?

Also, what’s your point about the Mormon eyewitnesses? Are you saying that Joseph Smith stood alone against eyewitnesses who refuted his claims? If so, then the grown of the LDS church would just go to show that you can find people to believe just about anything.

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I. Perry [#31] writes: “If Jesus thought he would imminently return and he was wrong, then Jesus is a nut job and/or a false prophet. ”

There’s that all-or-nothing, false-dichotomy thinking again. People can be spot-on about some things and utterly wrong about others. Lyndon Johnson arguably did more good in the area of civil rights than any president since Lincoln, but he also led the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. William Shockley shared the Nobel Prize in physics for his early work on the transistor, but he later espoused racial theories that, shall we say, don’t sit well with most people. If Jesus thought he was imminently going to return from heaven and usher in God’s reign, he was wrong, but that doesn’t negate everything else about his life.

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J. Perry [#31] writes: “What is his justification for thinking that there is a God, God is good and God is concerned with puny human welfare? How does he know that God has some good end planned for humanity rather than a dismal whimper? This just seems like the leftovers of Christian eschatology.”

You’re right, we don’t know. But then neither are we without grounds for hope. The best I can say for now is that, on the whole (and not without major exceptions), we, humanity, seem to like what we’ve seen happening in the universe. That’s not conclusive by any means, but neither is it an insignificant point.

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Well, Perry, you’ve done it; you’ve worn me out; you’re a better man than I. No maas, no more

From comment #41:

Anna [#35] writes: “let’s say you’re a reformed Jew, the O.T. scriptures then have you awaiting the foretold Savior, the King but also suffering servant who shall take upon himself the sins of men.”

Anna, I’ve just finished reading the OT from cover to cover as part of a parish-wide adult-ed undertaking (and we’ve now moved into the New Testament). This is just my opinion, but I was strongly struck by one thing about the messianic prophecies, and that is how distinctly secondary in importance they seem. Yes, some of the authors seemed to think God would send a warlord as his viceroy. But the clear emphasis of Isaiah, etc., was that it was the LORD who would rescue Israel. That never happened, of course, which suggests a re-reading of Deut. 18.21-22.

(Also, a plain reading of the NIV and NRSV translations indicates that the suffering servant may well be Isaiah himself; this apparently is the view taken by a number of scholars.)

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Anna writes: “[I]t is not clear to me how you choose which testaments of Him [or him] you will believe, and which are to be discarded ….”

In analyzing laboratory data, you look for clusters, and you try to draw best-fit curves. With lab data, you can do it pretty exactly, with mathematical equations. With human testimony, you do the best you can, on the basis of education and life experience, to decide what (and whom) you believe and what you don’t.

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Anna writes: “[The claims of Christianity are] more thoroughly based on unbroken succession from those who walked with Christ.”

True — but those who walked with Christ and their successors were all humans, and as such could have been subject to the same failings of memory and story-telling that plague all of us. (There are good and sufficient reasons why we have a hearsay rule.)

Also, thanks for the kind words.

From comment #42:

Apolonio [#36] says: “In a culture where oral tradition was reliable (at least you must have read K.E. Bailey’s article on this) and the fact that there is no reason for them to make up the things they said about Jesus, I must say I have to trust the NT …. ”

I’ve read some of Bailey’s work, and N.T. Wright, who cites Bailey, says that (i) we can rely on what he calls “controlled oral tradition,” and (ii) the New Testament is an example of controlled oral tradition.

We know that oral tradition is not without its problems. That’s why we have a hearsay rule, for example. We know stories mutate. Sometimes that happens in the first retelling. I don’t see that we have any reason to think things were different in the first century.

Wright cites Bailey’s work to argue that the problems with oral tradition are overcome by “informal controlled oral tradition.” But Bailey’s work apparently is open to challenge. I found a long essay by one Ted Weedens, which raises some interesting challenges to Bailey’s scholarship. A Google search revealed that Weedens is an emeritus professor of theology at the Colgate Rochester Divinity School.

In his essay, Weedens looks at Paul’s letters to the Galatians and Corinthians, which complained that those churches were deviating from the “true” gospel. Weedens points out that those deviations, in and of themselves, show the uncontrolled mutation of oral tradition. Paul, he says, was forced to try to undo the mutations through written corrections.

Weedens also thinks Bailey misrepresented his sources when he gave examples of controlled oral tradition. Bailey cited a book by Rena Hogg, the daughter of a Christian missionary in the Middle East. He said the Hogg book confirmed various stories about Hogg’s father that were still being told in the villages where her father had served. But Weedens says that Rena Hogg’s book not only didn’t confirm some of the stories, as Bailey claimed, but flatly contradicted them. (Several times I’ve tried unsuccessfully to get a copy of Hogg’s book to read it myself.)

Weedens is a member of the Jesus Seminar. Some traditionalists will seize on that as a reason to dismiss his analysis. But Weeden’s challenges to Bailey’s scholarship will stand or fall on their merits. To me they have the ring of truth. If they are valid, they undermine some of Wright’s most crucial arguments about the alleged super-reliability of the NT’s oral-tradition sources.