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.

 

 

 

 

 

The unreliability of eyewitness accounts - Scientific American article

From Hal Arkowitz and Scott O. Lilienfeld, Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts, from the January 2010 Scientific American Mind:

The uncritical acceptance of eyewitness accounts may stem from a popular misconception of how memory works. 

Many people believe that human memory works like a video recorder: the mind records events and then, on cue, plays back an exact replica of them. 

On the contrary, psychologists have found that memories are reconstructed rather than played back each time we recall them. 

The act of remembering, says eminent memory researcher and psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, is “more akin to putting puzzle pieces together than retrieving a video recording.” 

Even questioning ... can alter the witness’s testimony because fragments of the memory may unknowingly be combined with information provided by the questioner, leading to inaccurate recall.

(Extra paragraphing added.)

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.

A theologian proclaiming the reliability of the gospel authors is like a lawyer proclaiming that first-century midwives didn’t need to wash their hands

Adapted from a comment I posted in a dialogue with “dwstroudmd,” a commenter at T19:

Setting up the analogy

Suppose that I, having only basic first-aid training, were to insist that it didn’t matter whether first-century Jewish midwives washed their hands before delivering babies. According to me (let’s suppose), the extant religious standards called for all devout Jews to wash regularly.  Surely that would have been enough to guard against infant mortality and death in childbed, right?

You, an experienced modern-day obstetrician, would smile tolerantly, or even laugh.  And rightly so:  If I’d had the benefit of your training, I’d have known that your profession has established (not without controversy) that mother- and baby-killing infections can sneak in via even the cleanest-looking unwashed hands. 

(We can’t mock first-century midwives for not knowing this, though; they lacked the necessary underlying knowledge about infectious microbes and their transmission.)

Ancient storytelling practices weren't necessarily a sufficient guard against distortion, just as ancient sanitary practices weren’t necessarily a sufficient guard against infection

Now let’s reverse the roles.  Certain modern theologians make the claim that it doesn’t matter whether the NT accounts are hearsay, or (if in fact they were eyewitness accounts) whether they were first written down decades after the witnesses’ observations, without the opportunity to dig into what the witnesses actually saw as opposed to what they claimed they saw.

According to these theologians, various first-century storytelling practices — "sanitation" practices, if you will — would have been enough to guard against distortion of the NT tales, even the most extraordinary ones.

It turns out, though, that at least so far as we can tell) these theologians have little or no training in interviewing actual, fallible human witnesses (let alone in cases having real-world consequences).

Our modern theologians apparently know little of the the vicissitudes of human perception and memory, as demonstrated convincingly by modern journalists, police detectives, and lawyers, not to mention by experimental psychologists.

That might give you an idea why I react the way I do when reasserters make such grandiose claims: When you [reasserters] make such confident assertions about first-century storytelling practices, to me it sounds just like a non-physician who claims that first-century midwives didn’t need to wash their hands.

It’d be sacrilege to insist that God has nothing more to say to us

From commenter "NoVAScout" in a discussion at TitusOneNine:

My hope and belief is that those choices [by the church of which writings to include in the scriptural canon] were guided by divine influence.

My opinions or beliefs cannot bind the future actions of God, so I have no view on what He will do to speak to us in the future.

If He speaks to us, I will try to be in a position to listen.

I cannot imagine that any Christian would take an adamantine position that God has nothing more to say to us. That seems tantamount to sacrilege.

Very well said. (Extra paragraphing added.)

When Jesus called Peter the rock upon which he would build his church – or was it pebble? - he might have had in mind the parable of the mustard seed

In chapter 16 of the Gospel of Matthew, Matthew, Jesus tells Peter: "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church."  The Roman Catholic Church has used this verse as support for its claim of papal supremacy. Protestants dispute the claim, in part on grounds that the word translated as “rock” might actually have meant “pebble”:

… In the original Greek the word translated as "Peter" is Πέτρος (Petros) and that translated as "rock" is πέτρα (petra), two words that, while not identical, give an impression of one of many times when Jesus used a play on words. … The traditional Catholic interpretation has therefore been that Jesus told Peter (Rock) that he would build his Church on this Peter (Rock).

… Some Protestant scholars disagree with this interpretation on the basis of the difference between the Greek words. In classical Attic Greek petros generally meant "pebble," while petra meant "boulder" or "cliff." Accordingly, taking Peter's name to mean "pebble," they argue that the "rock" in question cannot have been Peter, but something else, either Jesus himself, or the faith in Jesus that Peter had just professed. …

Wikipedia, Saint Peter (accessed Mar. 25, 2009; emphasis added). 

Suppose that the author of the Greek text fully intended to use the term pebble and not rock. That would have Jesus saying, “upon this pebble I will build my church.”

When I read this, it immediately brought to mind the parable of the mustard seed in Matt. 13.31-32: "Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree ...."  And then in Matt. 17.20, Jesus tells his disciples, “if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

So maybe Jesus fully intended to call Peter a pebble, not a rock, and to declare that just as a tiny mustard seed grows into a tree, on such a pebble would his church be built.

Jesus might not have really said it

From Tobias Haller:

Have you ever observed the extent to which people appear not to notice that so much of what the church is recorded to have gone through in Acts and the Epistles (I'm thinking of the debate on whether Gentiles should be part of the Church, and the discussion on eating meat offered to idols, or other unclean food) would not have been necessary if Jesus had actually said some of the things the Gospels record?

We know the Gospels post-date the Epistles in terms of time of composition, so were these passages in Jesus' teaching retrofitted? Or were they recollected?

Were the apostles not listening attentively when Jesus told them to baptize all nations, and not to worry about whether food was clean or unclean?

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

---

Related posts:

• Serious Inconsistencies in the New Testament Writings: Six Reasons for Skepticism About the Traditionalist Account
• Hmm — "The Apostles' Teaching" Didn't Seem to Include a Divine Jesus ....
• Another Reason to Explore the Apostles' Early Teaching

If Paul got it wrong, would God be any less God?

Few things piss off some traditionalist Protestants more than suggesting that maybe, just maybe, Paul might not have gotten it quite right about the mechanism of "salvation."  (This assumes for the sake of argument that there is such a thing.)   I'm oversimplifying, but in a nutshell these trads claim that, according to Paul, we can gain entry into heaven only by believing that Jesus' crucifixion bailed us out of the eternal torture that humanity's sin had otherwise earned for all of us.  The problem is that there are are no reliable reports of anyone returning from the dead and confirming that Paul's alleged view was correct.  So in assessing that view, we have to rely on indirect, circumstantial evidence.  Many traditionalists don't want to confront some of that evidence — for example:

• Paul had been a ferocious persecutor of the Jerusalem church, but after his abrupt 180-degree about-face, he claimed, with equal enthusiasm (or fanaticism) to understand Jesus' significance better than those who had actually known and followed the man in life. 
• James, thought to have been Jesus' brother and leader of the Jerusalem church, all but openly mocked Paul's faith-alone position, asking rhetorically, in his eponymous epistle, whether faith was worth anything if it didn't inspire one to help those who needed it. 
• A letter attributed to Peter (whose weak will seems to have led him to be pushed around by Paul on occasion) conceded that much of what his colleague had to say was difficult to understand. 

To many of those whom Kendall Harmon calls "reasserters" of the Faith Once Delivered, none of that matters:  Their understanding of Paul is, literally, Holy Writ. I've seen such folks go ballistic at even a mild suggestion that the mechanism of salvation might be different from what Paul allegedly imagined.

The question I like to pose to these folks is this:  Suppose Paul was wrong — would God be any less God?  Would we have any less reason to acknowledge, admire, and be grateful for what the Creator has done?  Of course not — so why all the anxiety?

Is the Bible of divine or human origin?

OK, I'll bite.  Reader Phil asks:  "D.C. : Would you care to debate whether the Bible is divine or human in origin?"

My own view:  We don't know the origin of any works of humanity, whether we're talking about the various books of the Bible, or Einstein's relativity papers, or Mozart's compositions. That's because we don't have a clue how the human mind gets ideas.

I suspect that God somehow has a hand in all of these. But I'm not overflowing with confidence about it. If I needed to make a case for taking action of any consequence, that certainly wouldn't do it — especially if the action might hurt others.

Related post: Do You Believe in God?  That's Only Half the Question

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."