The Questioning Christian

Suggested reading: Bibles and other religion books

A reader sent me an email this week, excerpted below:

... Today, I happily stumbled upon your blog via a web search regarding the possibility of being Christian while not believing in the divinity of Jesus. I have spent the past hour or so looking over your previous posts, and I am finding them most helpful in my current faith journey.

I particularly value your definition of faith as: (i) accepting that a Creator exists and (ii) trusting that, in the end, all will be well. This resonates deeply with me.

... I realize you have not posted much lately, but I hope you can assist me. Could you please recommend: 1) books that reflect your views on Christianity and faith, and 2) a good English translation of the Bible?

(Extra paragraphing added.)

 

Many thanks to that reader, whose email inspired me to put together the following lists.

 

(The links below are not "affiliate" links, incidentally.)

 

Bible

I normally quote from the New International Version, for two reasons: (1) It's fairly readable, and (2) it's a favorite of evangelicals and conservatives --- if I quoted from a more-"liberal" translation, that might give those folks an excuse to discount or ignore the point I'm trying to make. 

 

My own personal favorite Bible is the New Revised Standard Version, especially the HarperCollins Study Bible, which has lots of footnotes and annotations. 

 

I've found useful the NKJV Greek-English Interlinear New Testament. ("NKJV" stands for New King James Version.)

Books

The following list of books is in no particular order, from scanning across my bookshelves:

• Gregg Easterbrook, Beside Still Waters -- a journalist's critical study of the Bible while his wife was a diplomat stationed in Pakistan.
• Nevada Barr, Seeking Enlightenment Hat by Hat -- a memoir of the author's personal journey to faith; see this short excerpt.
• Geza Vermes, The Religion of Jesus the Jew -- Vermes was born a Hungarian Jew, baptized Catholic at age seven, became a priest, but later returned to Judaism; a professor at Oxford.
• Geza Vermes, The Authentic Gospel of Jesus
• Geza Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus
• Richard Rubenstein, When Jesus Became God -- a historical examination of the christological battle between Athanasius and Arius that led to the adoption (and imposition) of the Nicene Creed.
• Bart Ehrman - Misquoting Jesus -- Ehrman, an academic, was an enthusiastic evangelical in his youth but his study of original texts led him away from faith.
• James R. Adams, So You Think You're Not Religious? A Thinking Person's Guide to the Church -- Adams was an Episcopal priest in Washington D.C.
• James R. Adams, From Literal to Literary: The Essential Reference Book for Biblical Metaphors -- I just ordered it and haven't read it.  In looking up Adams, I saw that he died in 2011, and his obituary in the Washington Post mentioned it.
• Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity -- this is an accessible historical treatment by a sociologist from that professional perspective.

I've omitted some writers whose works I found valuable but that I regard as less accessible, such as:

• John Dominic Crossan, a scholar and former Catholic priest
• Paula Frederiksen, a Boston University professor
• John Polkinghorne, a renowned Cambridge University particle physicist turned Anglican priest, but some of whose science-based arguments I find less than convincing
• A. N. Wilson
• Paul Johnson

I've also omitted writers whom I regard as assuming too many facts not in evidence or being insufficiently skeptical, such as N.T. Wright (conservative) and Marcus Borg (liberal).

 

Finally, I've omitted various translations of primary sources.

 

 

 

 

 

Karen Armstrong: Itinerant prophet of the Golden Rule

My wife and I enjoyed hearing renowned religious historian Karen Armstrong last night at Houston’s Wortham Center, as part of a Progressive Forum of Houston lecture series. Some observations:

• Armstrong is delightful.  Her lecture style is passable; to me, though, the most enjoyable part was her living-room conversation afterwards, in the style of Inside the Actor's Studio, with Progressive Forum founder Randall Morton, who posed questions previously submitted via the Web.
• Armstrong emphasized the commonality of the Golden Rule in world religions. That resonated with me, of course (see my various postings here on the fundamental importance of the Summary of the Law in human cultural evolution).
• She claimed that it’s only been in the last few hundred years that people took the Bible’s creation accounts lit­erally. She said that those accounts used to be re­garded — correctly, in her view — as mythos, a story setting out a program for action, as opposed to logos, a description of the way things really are. (Doubtless this one-sentence summary fails to do her justice.)
• Armstrong pitched the Charter for Compassion movement that it sounds like she’s spearheading.
• She pronounces her first name CAR-rin.
• The event looked to be sold out – I saw only a handful of empty seats here and there in the Cullen Theater, probably from no-shows. We ended up sitting in the mezzanine, which I think was our first time ever in that section. The seating there is pitched incredibly steeply, more so than any stadium I’ve ever been in.
• It was announced that Armstrong would do a book-signing for her latest, The Case for God, being sold on-site by co-sponsor Brazos Bookstore. I wanted a signed book, but the line was at least 30 minutes long, so we headed home.  I’ll check with the Brazos to see if they have any signed books there.
• I’ve never seen so many Toyota Priuses in one place as there were in the parking garage afterwards; draw your own conclusions about the audience ....
• Armstrong is not without her critics – see that section of her Wikipedia entry.

Redefining church

Here’s a proposition for debate, inspired by a discussion at TitusOneNine and a posting last week by Nick Knisely:

Resolved, that the members of ‘the church’ are those people — reasserter, reappraiser, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, etc. — who are willing:

1) to pray ‘next to’ one another, even if the prayer of the person next to you is no more than a grudging acknowledgement that maybe a Creator of some sort might indeed exist;

2) to treat each other's prayers with equal dignity, even when there’s grave disagreement over underlying suppositions; and

3) to collaborate in seeking the best for others as for themselves, even if for no other reason than that this seems to give a species a survival advantage over the long term.

Under this definition of ‘church,’ a given individual’s theological beliefs would be of no particular relevance, except of course to the extent those beliefs influenced the individual’s actions.

I know some would object to such a definition of ‘church’; I’m curious how you’d articulate that objection.

A gene may make you ‘look on the bright side’ – or not; might that affect one’s faith?

“[A] genetic variation is linked with the tendency to look on the bright side of life. This is a key mechanism underlying resilience to general life stress. The absence of this protection in the other forms of this genotype is linked with heightened susceptibility to anxiety and depression.”

So says University of Essex professor Elaine Fox, lead author of a paper published Feb. 25 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, “Looking on the bright side: biased attention and the human serotonin transporter gene.”  (HT: Scientific American, May 2009, “Half Empty or Half Full,” Briefs, p. 28.)

I wonder whether people having this genetic predisposition toward optimism are any more inclined to trust that in the end, all will be well.

I’m also curious whether people having such trust are more inclined to believe in the existence of a Creator resembling, at least somewhat, the God of the great monotheistic religions.

The Resurrection was probably a misunderstanding, but even so we have ample reason to celebrate Easter

Each of us has to make a bet on whether the Resurrection actually happened the way the church claims, as celebrated by billions this morning. What we’re betting is our lives, and the way we live them.

In essence, the church asks us to go “all in” on the proposition that Jesus was actually raised bodily from the dead. That bet has always been way too rich for my blood; I think there are more plausible explanations for the fact that Jesus’ followers found ‘his’ tomb to be empty on the morning after the Sabbath, and that later on some of those followers decided that they had encountered him — as recorded in questionable stories written down decades later in a different language.

Nor is it persuasive, at least to me, that some of Jesus’ friends and their later colleagues, by no means all of them, claimed —

• that Jesus had been the long-awaited Anointed One;
• that he was the ’Lord,’ who Any Day Now would return from heaven to make everything right — which didn’t happen, of course;
• that he was (so they said eventually) the Creator of the universe in the flesh.

In my judgment — and ultimately each of us has to make our own judgment about this bet — these claims are grounded, at best, in a misunderstanding that took on a life of its own; and at worst, in wishful thinking aggravated by a you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us obstinacy.

But that’s not the end of the inquiry. The Resurrection misunderstanding catalyzed both a belief system and a social organization. For nearly two millennia, that belief system and that organization have provided inspiration and assistance to billions of people in helping with the continuing creation of the universe. 

Not all of that assistance and inspiration have been positive by any means. But we do seem to do our best work in that area when we try to follow the Summary of the Law that was at the heart of Jesus’ teaching.  The Summary’s simple rules of thumb seem to capture something fundamental about the universe. Their utility gives us plenty of reason to try to follow Jesus simply because of what he taught, and because of his extreme faithfulness to what he saw as his call from the Creator.

(Although extreme faithfulness is not necessarily a good thing always, as seen in the example provided by Muslim suicide bombers.)

if we were so inclined, we could conjecture that somehow, directly or indirectly, the hand of God might have been at work back then — just not quite in the exact way the church claims.

So while, in all likelihood, the Resurrection didn’t happen the way the church says, that doesn’t mean we should belittle the Resurrection claim as false.

Instead, we should commemorate what likely did happen on that first Easter and in its aftermath. We can celebrate, with gratitude but also with open eyes, the immeasurable (if not unalloyed) good that has evolved from it.

* * *

This essay was inspired by a sermon posted by the Rev. Michael Hopkins on his blog (hat tip: Susan Russell).

Mars Hill’s approach to ministry: Taking the priesthood of all believers seriously

The Mars Hill Bible Church in Michigan must be doing something right, drawing some 11,000 worshipers each Sunday. One factor seems to be getting congregants to become intensely committed to particular ministries — including some traditionally-clerical ones such as weddings — explicitly labeling these congregants as priests, seemingly in the servant-of-God sense of Exodus 19.6, "you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation," and 1 Peter 2.9-10, “… you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, …. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God ….”

Here’s an excerpt from Gen-Next preacher - Chatting with Rob Bell, The Christian Century, March 24, 2009, p. 23, at 24 [emphasis is mine]:

… We believe that every person is a priest with a particular ministry. One family in our church that lives in an underresourced neighborhood started an after-school tutoring program for kids who are struggling. A 70-year-old nurse in our church who's tutoring realized that many people in her neighborhood have never had any basic health care testing. She began doing it for free. She's one of our priests. …

The job of one woman on our staff is to connect people with priests. She has a team of people in the congregation who are wired for mercy and eager to visit the sick. Other people love the whole wedding thing—premarriage counseling and so on—so we have licensed people to do weddings. We assume that the body will take care of itself and that the staff's job is to enlist and empower and encourage.

In the same issue, see also Bell's appeal - Ministry to young adults, p. 22, and the Wikipedia article on Priesthood of all believers.

Evolutionary explanations for religious beliefs?

From a Scientific American posting, Is Religion Adaptive? It's Complicated - A group of Darwinian theorists discuss religion in Edinburgh, Scotland, by Jesse Bering of Queens University, Belfast (links are in original):

... [T]he past decade has seen tremendous and quite rapid developments in the naturalistic study of religion. Topics such as God, souls and sin are no longer being treated as “outside science” but rather as biologically based emanations of the evolved human mind, subject to psychological scrutiny like any other aspect of human nature.  ...

Here is the fly-on-the-wall’s view of just a few of the topics discussed last weekend: [¶¶]

Political scientist and evolutionary biologist Dominic Johnson from the University of Edinburgh presented his argument that the idea of omniscient supernatural agents served an adaptive social policing function in the ancestral past. Johnson reasons that this would have encouraged individuals in groups to conform to group sanctions out of the fear of divine punishment, thus lessening the chances of social fission. This phenomenon would have been biologically adaptive since larger groups meant better chances of survival and reproductive success for individual members. It’s a bit like Santa Claus knowing whether we’re bad or good (but Santa doesn’t cause you to suffer renal failure, kill your crops, or sentence you to everlasting torment).

Anthropologist Richard Sosis summarized his “costly signaling” hypothesis of religious behavior. The gist of Sosis’s clever theory is that people engage in all sorts of costly religious behaviors—wasting time on rituals, wearing uncomfortable clothes, spending their hard-earned money—because, in doing so, they are advertising their commitment to the religious in-group. In other words, if you’re willing to do things such as cut off your child’s foreskin, pay a regular alms tax of 2.5 percent of your net worth or sit twiddling your thumbs for two hours every Sunday morning on a hard church pew, then your fellow believers will assume that you’re really one of them and can therefore be trusted.

Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers from Rutgers University, meanwhile, discussed the possible role of psychological self-deception in the realm of religion and reviewed the impossible to ignore evidence that religiosity positively effects human health. ...

Goyim for God: A reformed Judaism, open to gentiles, like Paul wanted in the first place

A few weeks ago, the preacher at our church explained how some churches focus on God the Father, others on Jesus, and still others on the Holy Spirit. It's been impossible not to notice that in the past 10 years or so, our parish has become almost totally Jesus-centered.

I'm not thrilled with this development. I don't claim to be a professional theologian, but my study of Scripture, informed in part by my professional training and experience, has persuaded me that Jesus likely was 'just' a good Jew and a uniquely-gifted prophet, who might or might not have aspired to rescue the Jewish people from oppression and usher in God's reign.

A church of theists, not focused on Jesus' person, but grounded in his teachings — especially his emphasis on the Summary of the Law — might be pretty appealing. (I rule out the Unitarian Universalists here; from what I understand, the UUs are generally nice people but many of them look down their noses at theists.)

That kind of theistic church wouldn't be nearly enough for most Christians, of course. But Christian-church membership seems to have been dropping among educated people; more and more of them simply don't buy traditional orthodox dogmas.  Where Christian churches are thriving, there's reason to believe it's not entirely due to their orthodoxy. Look at the success of the prosperity-gospel megachurches, such as Lakewood here in Houston: Every time I've heard Joel Osteen preach, he's barely even mentioned Jesus; he certainly doesn't seem to anchor his message to any kind of christological foundation.

Church-wise, what might hit the sweet spot is some version of Reform Judaism that's open to gentiles, and that doesn't require a commitment to The Law (Torah) or 'naturalized' membership in the Jewish people; Goyim for God, if you will. 

But hold on — a reformed Judaism for gentiles?  That sounds vaguely familiar, doesn't it? 

Of course: it's approximately what St. Paul seems to have had in mind (go re-read, for example, his letters to the Galatians and to the Romans), before the church transformed his and Jesus' teachings into worship of the Teacher as God incarnate.

That's what the church needs, I submit: A return to putting God first, and not getting so wrapped up in Jesus.

NT Wright's Lambeth lecture about scriptural authority reveals his exaggerated view of humanity's importance

At the decennial Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops, traditionalist English bishop N.T. Wright (known as Tom) gave a lecture yesterday about the authority of Scripture. He reportedly spoke to a packed house. The lecture is worth reading in its entirety; it's a wonderful blend of erudition and foolishness. (Hat tip: Thinking Anglicans.)

An unsupportably-provincial view of history

Bishop Wright urges us to read the Bible as though it were a five-act play. Hmm, an interesting concept. He says the play has "Creation and Fall as the first two acts, then Israel, then Jesus himself, and then the act in which we ourselves are still living, whose final scene we know from passages like Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15 and Revelation 21 and 22."

In other words, according to Wright, the story of the universe revolves around a collection of tribes wandering the land bridge between northeast Africa and southwest Asia. The climactic event — the execution of one Jesus of Nazareth, and its aftermath — has already occurred.  Since then, all the universe has been killing time waiting for the grand finale.

We're familiar with this view of history, of course. For nearly 2,000 years, that's been the narrative taught by the church.

The church fathers might have been excused for taking such a provincial view. In their day, humanity knew virtually nothing about the universe outside the earth's atmosphere. We knew nothing at all about the origins of our planet, and of our species. (Correction:  What we thought we knew was proved inadequate by later-revealed evidence.)  Indeed, it's not evident that the fathers, so focused on Israel and its putative history, were much aware even of other human cultures to be found in, say, China, India, and the Americas. The Jerusalem church fathers been taught that Israel was the Chosen People, and (all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding) that's all they needed to know, except of course "Christ and Him crucified."

We of today can't justify taking such a narrow, self-centered view of history. Unlike the church fathers, we know that on our planet alone, all kinds of diverse peoples each have their own history, and there's no plausible reason to privilege any particular one of those histories as the essential narrative of the creation.

Let's also consider that it might not be just our own planet that deserves our attention on this point. Astronomers are busily discovering planets orbiting other stars; it's estimated that some 10% of sun-like stars may have planets.  And we're fairly confident that what we used to think of as "the Sun" is but one of hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and that our galaxy is but one of an estimated 125 billion galaxies. Our observations (for example, this week's discovery of water on Mars) give us reason to think that the conditions for life may well exist on more than just our planet.

With all this in mind, you don't have to be a cultural relativist to be unconvinced that the folk tales of a single small people are truly the central narrative of the universe. Bishop Wright seems content to assume that it is, however, and that nothing else we have learned about the history of the universe is of any real consequence.  His Lambeth lecture reveals what Paul Zahl might call an extraordinarily-high anthropology; others might refer to it less charitably as cultural egotism.

For hundreds of years, humanity has been blessed with the steadily-increasing ability to observe the reality God wrought. We've likewise been blessed with inspirations about how those observations can be fitted together into coherent, testable models of the universe. Moreover, it seems eminently reasonable to conjecture that we are expected to put these gifts into the service of the continuing creation.

Yet the church insists on continuing to espouse an overly-simplistic narrative based on an exaggerated view of humanity's importance in the cosmic scheme of things. At best, this is self-indulgence; at worst, a breach of the First Commandment.

Wright's strong point: The unfinished narrative

Bishop Wright does come close to making an excellent point:  He argues that:

... scripture offers precisely the unfinished narrative of God’s heaven-and-earth project, God’s great design, as Paul puts it, echoing the Law and the Prophets, to join everything in heaven and earth into one in Christ. And the unfinished narrative functions like an unfinished play, in which those who belong to Jesus Christ are now called to be the actors, taking forward the drama towards its intended conclusion.

Within that unfinished play, he says, we human actors are supposed to be improvisers, "which as any musician knows doesn’t mean playing out of tune or out of time but rather discerning what is appropriate in terms of the story so far and the story’s intended conclusion."

In Japan, Buddhism may be dying - NY Times

Christianity in Western Europe isn't the only faith experiencing a net membership decline due to apathy and death:  The NY Times reports that Buddhism in Japan is likewise fading away.