Class, Day 1 – Origen: Your God Is Absurd

Following is a summary of a lecture given yesterday by my professor in Patristic and Medieval Theology.

To understand Origen of Alexandria – or Gregory of Nyssa or almost any other Greek-speaking early church father – you have to understand the concept of theoprepes. Plato introduced the concept of theoprepes when he went after Homer’s depictions of the gods. Because the gods/god are/is the ultimate Good, Plato has a big problem with the way Homer makes them act, but because Homer’s poetry is foundational for Greek culture, Plato can’t just dismiss it outright.

So he metaphorizes it. He maintains the truth of the moral lessons but rejects the historicity of the depiction, which he considered blasphemous because the gods did not act in a fitting manner. And that is theoprepes, the concept of what is fitting for the divine.

Origen is faced with a similar dilemma.

He believes in the inspiration of Scripture, which for him writing about 200 C.E. is still just the Old Testament, but he recoils at the anthropomorphism of God found there. And with good reason, from his perspective. When Celsus writes the criticism of Christianity to which Origen responds in Against Celsus, one of his prime concerns is the anthropomorphism of God – it’s just not fitting, in Greek thought, for God to act this way, and a literal reading of Scripture was a huge stumbling block to those educated Greeks to whom Origen was reaching out.

Not only that, he finds numerous places where the text contradicts itself or describes absurdities. So he argues for a metaphorical-allegorical reading of those pieces of scripture where theopedes is violated.

Jed Bartlet’s Job Moment

One of the themes on this blog lately has been the propriety – or not – of railing against God in times of distress. I tend to (surprise!) take a liberal view on this topic, that God not only can handle our complaints and frustrations but wants us to bring them to him. He made us to be emotional beings, and stifling our emotions is neither healthy nor productive.

Many Christians disagree, and I confess it’s difficult to listen when someone truly “goes off” on God – as happens in the Season 2 finale of The West Wing, which my wife and I are working through on Netflix.

Below the jump, I’ll post the speech in its entirety; most Christians, I suspect, will wince multiple times. You might even be offended. But the question we need to ask is this: Are we offended because God is, or are we offended because we have been taught to be?

[This paragraph contains spoilers] The speech occurs in the National Cathedral, after a funeral for President Jeb Bartlet’s longtime assistant, Mrs. Landingham, who had died in a car wreck. The death occurred after a string of crises and tragedies – including an assassination attempt that nearly killed his deputy chief of staff, Josh Lyman – that, let’s be honest, serve to make the show interesting, but would lead a normal person to consider whether she had been singled out to play Job in some sort of modern-day heavenly remake. [End spoilers]

Bartlett asks the Secret Service to close the cathedral so he can spend some time alone, and after some unnecessarily loud and echoey door slamming to let us know the cathedral has been closed, Bartlett begins walking up the aisle toward the vestibule.

Pope Francis and the Progressives

The defining moment in the papacy of Benedict XVI, at least for this Protestant, was in January 2012, when the Obama administration was getting set to release its regulations for what insurance companies must offer in basic health care plans as dictated by the Affordable Care Act.

It was no secret that contraceptives likely would be among those required to be fully covered; their role in reducing unwanted pregnancy, protecting women, fighting poverty and ultimately reducing abortions was too great to be ignored.

Yet Pope Benedict chose a different emphasis when addressing American bishops in Rome, decrying alleged threats to religious freedom, including what he called attempts to “deny the right of conscientious objection on the part of Catholic individuals and institutions with regard to cooperation in intrinsically evil practices.”

Two months later, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a letter they asked all priests to read in their Sunday mass, criticizing the mandate and painting it in the stark hues of religious freedom – this despite support for Obamacare by Catholic nuns, whom the bishops then attempted to muzzle. Later in the year, when Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan proposed budgets that would cut services to the poor to pay for defense spending and tax cuts for the wealthy, the response from the bishops was much more muted.

The message was clear: Under Pope Benedict the church would go to much greater lengths to protect its own power than it would the powerless.

The Toxic Assumption of the ‘Biblical Worldview’

I’m working my way through unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity … and Why It Matters, the groundbreaking book from David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons of the Barna Group. It’s taking a little longer than I expected because, surprise!, it’s tough to get through a book based primarily on survey results and data.

It’s also a tough read because I find myself disagreeing with it more than I thought I would. The data is the data, of course, but the conclusions Kinnaman and Lyons reach seem a little off to me. It reminds me of hearing Republican Party leaders talk about how they need to change their “message” and “tone” after getting shellacked in the 2012 elections without seeming to understand that voters have decisively rejected their policies.

Likewise, Kinnaman and Lyons have compelling evidence that traditional theology and practice have failed yet seem to argue that what traditional evangelical Christianity needs is a different message and tone. It seems they can’t quite face the fact that their own data calls into question their own doctrines.

A key example of this is their presentation of the results when they asked if a respondent has a “biblical worldview.” Here’s how Kinnaman sets it up:

Of course, this [fact that the about 70 percent of Americans claim to have made a personal decision to follow Christ] raises the question of the depth of their faith. If that many Americans have made decisions to follow Jesus, our culture and our world would be revolutionized if they simply lived that faith. It is easy to embrace a costless form of Christianity in America today, and we have probably contributed to that by giving people a superficial understanding of the gospel and focusing only on their decision to convert.

I have no problems with this paragraph at all. But note that he’s talking about needing a deeper “understanding of the gospel,” which is interesting, given what comes next:

At Barna we employ dozens of tools to assess the depth of a person’s faith. Let me suggest one for our discussion: a biblical worldview. A person with a biblical worldview experiences, interprets and responds to reality in light of the Bible’s principles. What Scripture teaches is the primary grid for making decisions and interacting with the world. (75)

What happened here? In traditional evangelicalism, “biblical worldview” is something of a code for “conservative doctrine” that treats the Bible as a fully applicable roadmap for life in the 21st century, notwithstanding its final authorship no later than the 2nd century. By linking “deeper understanding of the gospel” and “biblical worldview,” Kinnaman has forced together two different arguments. Certainly a deep understanding of the gospel requires reliance on the Bible; no one disputes that, I hope. But Kinnaman is implying a deep understanding of the gospel requires reliance on a specific method of reading and applying what the Bible says, which is problematic. I would argue it’s one of the reasons why Kinnaman’s own data show young people  abandoning the church.

The Trouble with Literalism

The problem with a strictly literal approach to the Bible, as people from Christian Smith to Rachel Held Evans have argued, is that it sets up a false dichotomy in which the literalist gets to decide what is worth taking literally and what is not. It allows the literalist to set the rules of a complex game in which she can only win and anyone else must surely lose. By ignoring the assumptions implicit in all of our approaches to the ancient texts of the Bible, the literalist can claim superiority through a “truer” reading of the Bible than those who take more critical approaches.

This isn’t new, nor is it groundbreaking. We all believe the way we read the Bible is the right way to read it. That’s why we read it that way! The hard part is understanding that others who read it differently may not be reading it wrongly. Although this is tough for me – it means acknowledging that, yes, no matter how unlikely I think that is, biblical literalists may be reading scripture correctly – but it seems especially difficult for the literalists, whose reading of the text essentially forces them to consider all other approaches not just misguided but influenced by Satan and potentially damnable. Kind of makes a conversation difficult.

But we do all have assumptions, and no one takes the Bible literally. Our assumptions play a foundational role in how we approach that text. I mention this because I’ve posted my paper for this semester, and it looks at the assumptions underlying one of the most transformative doctrines developed by one of history’s greatest theologians. I wanted to see where the doctrine of original sin came from, and I found that it really comes from Galen – or, more accurate, the biological-sexual assumptions propagated by ancient Greek doctors and philosophers. Augustine didn’t know that, or at least he didn’t acknowledge it. He cited passages like Romans 5 and Psalm 50:7, but more often he cited, albeit indirectly and apparently unknowingly, Aristotle and Galen.

Let me give an example.

Twenty

For all of the mass shootings that have plagued our country over the past 30 years – and even moreso in the past 15 – why does this one in Connecticut, the eighth of 2012, hit so hard? Because of one number. Twenty. The number of children age 7 and under killed in a simply incomprehensible attack.

Like many of you, I thought about those 20 (and the eight adults who died trying to protect them) in church yesterday. We opened the service with Joy to the World and its lyrics, “Joy to the world! The Lord is come!” and “Joy to the earth! The Savior reigns!” Does he?

We followed that up with Sing to the King, which states: “Satan is vanquished, and Jesus is king!” Is he?

Next was O Come All Ye Faithful, which follows up its title lyrics with, “Joyful and triumphant.” Are we?

It was a bold move to speak the hope, faith and expectation of Jesus’ reign during a weekend when any sign of it seemed so scarce. And, for me at least, it was a needed one. Advent is about acknowledging the wrongness of this world while also declaring the hope we have of its future rightness. In a weekend where the former was so clear, I’m thankful for our church leadership’s call to focus on the latter.

I’ve written a lot about theodicy on this blog (there’s a whole tag devoted to it, if you’re interested), so I’m turning the rest of this space over to folks who worked through this much more eloquently than I could.

A Lesson for the Church from the Horse and His Cousin, the Boy

“My good Horse,” said the Hermit, who had approached them unnoticed because his bare feet made so little noise on that sweet, dewy grass. “My good Horse, you’ve lost nothing but your self-respect. No, no, cousin. Do not put back your ears and shake your main at me. If you are really so humbled as you sounded a minute ago, you must learn to listen to sense. You’re not quite the Horse you had come to think, from living among poor dumb horses. Of course you were braver and cleverer than them. You could hardly help being that. It doesn’t follow that you’ll be anyone very special in Narnia. But as long as you know you’re nobody very special, you’ll be a very decent sort of Horse, on the whole, and taking one thing with another.

“And now, if you and my other four-footed cousin will come round to the kitchen door we’ll see about the other half of that mash.”

My oldest daughter and I continue reading through the Chronicles of Narnia. We’re in Book 5 (not Book 3, as the abominable new numbering system would have it), The Horse and His Boy. I’ve read each of these books many times, but there’s always something new to notice. This time I noticed the strange way in which the hermit of the Southern March addresses the talking horses Bree and Hwin: Cousins.

I notice this because, earlier, I’m sure I always took this as a squishy “brotherhood of life” kind of term, or one that signified the extraordinary closeness between humans and talking animals in Narnia and Archenland. But now, having made my peace with evolution as the method with which God chose to create the world and humanity, that phrase takes on a new light. Indeed, we know C.S. Lewis himself accepted evolution and did not think that a particularly big deal theologically speaking: “I don’t mind whether God made man out of earth or whether ‘earth’ merely means ‘previous millennia of ancestral organisms.’ If the fossils make it probable that man’s physical ancestor’s ‘evolved,’ no matter.”

But I don’t mean to make this a big post about C.S. Lewis and evolution, merely to note that when Lewis has one of his human characters – arguably the wisest one in the book – refer to horses as “my cousins,” he is perhaps giving us a way to look at the world and life around us. Indeed, how would we treat our planet and our fellow inhabitants on it if we thought of them as part of our family and not merchandise or product to be consumed?

Our family tree does not just include our own family members, but every person on the planet, plus hundreds of thousands of years of hominids, plus millions upon millions of animal species, some of whom are closer relatives than others but all of whom are our cousins.

In the same way, our church family tree includes far more than we perhaps acknowledge. One of the eye-opening things about the Christian History class I just finished is how closely related all of us who claim Jesus as Lord truly are. It’s easy enough as a New Testament restorationist, two significant movements (the Reformation and the Restoration) removed from the Catholic Church, to belittle the doctrines that branch of the faith still holds dear – things like transubstantiation or indulgences or purgatory or the assumption and perpetual virginity of Mary. They’re so illogical! They’re crazy! There’s not even a hint of them in the Bible!

Yet not so much if you follow the evolutionary patterns of the church’s first 1,300 years – and, further, not so removed from us.

Keep the Mithra in Christmas!

All right, people, it’s smackdown time.

My wife likes to watch this show called Drop Dead Diva. I know very little about it except that it involves someone dying and coming back to life in someone else’s body and now they’re a lawyer, or something like that. I also know that the other night, while I was studying for my final, I caught a moment of courtroom drama in which the prosecutor shocks the defense with some piece of evidence that makes the accused’s guilt all but certain. The defense, of course, had no idea this was coming.

This happens in courtroom shows all the time – the prosecution rocks the defense back on its heels with a stunning piece of previously unknown evidence. OMG! What will happen next?

In real life, what would happen next is that the defense would ask the judge to rule the evidence inadmissible and/or call for a mistrial, and the judge would almost certainly grant it. Because failing to provide a full disclosure of the state’s evidence to the defense, though certainly dramatic, is also prosecutorial misconduct and therefore tends not to happen much in real life.

So of course, I felt obliged to interrupt my wife’s enjoyment of this show to remind her of this fact, at which point she reminded me that it’s a show about someone being dead and coming back to life in someone else’s body, which also, last I checked, is not something that happens very often either. Touché.

Nevertheless, the feeling I get when TV shows and movies portray flagrantly unethical practices as commonplace occurrences to enhance courtroom drama is the same feeling I get when I’m cruising along on my Facebook wall, and I see this:

People, this has to stop.

Violence for Jesus (or: How the Church Went Rogue), Part 4

If you had been there, your feet would have been stained to the ankles in the blood of the slain. What shall I say? Neither women nor children were spared. — Fulcher of Chartres, A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem, 1095-1127

Perhaps the most alarming single fact that I’ve learned about the First Crusade is that after the Christians breached the walls of Jerusalem and slaughtered all who had sought refuge in the Dome of the Rock mosque (Fulcher actually called it the Temple of Solomon), the soldiers went immediately to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built by Constantine on the site believed to be where Jesus’ tomb had been, and gave thanks to God for the victory.

Has there ever been any series of events that were so strongly supported at the time of their occurrence only to be so thoroughly repudiated by later history? The crusaders believed so strongly in the divine support of their mission that they launched at least eight of them over the 180 years between 1096 and 1271.

As we’ve seen, the church began its life as an oppressed movement that forbade its members from even joining the army, in part because soldiers likely would be asked to arrest, torture or kill Christians. Power had changed much about the Christian comfort with soldiery and violence, especially violence in the name of God.

As recently as 1066, the famed Battle of Hastings that changed western civilization forever, the papal-backed soldiers of Normandy paid penance for the deaths they caused on the battlefield. Yet just 30 years later, Pope Urban II made a substantial shift in the relationship between killing and sin.

Violence for Jesus (or: How the Church Went Rogue), Part 3

Crowning of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III, c. 800

Last time in this series, we looked at the nationalization of the church in the era of Constantine and his successors, which led to a cozier relationship between Christians and all aspects of the state, including the military. After prohibiting soldiers from being baptized in the second century, military service was explicitly allowed by the Council of Nicaea in 325 – in fact, the council prohibited Christians from rejecting military service during peacetime.

We ended with Augustine, who in arguing against the ultra-rigorist Donatists, developed the notion of ex operate operatum, that sacraments like baptism are worked by the work – the baptism itself does the work of saving, not the person doing the baptizing. That worked well as a defense against throwing an unknown number of people out of the church because of the failings of an unknown number of priests.

But of course, doctrines that make sense in one context sometimes develop into something quite differently. Such was the case after the fall of Rome in the fifth century. The last Roman emperor – that is, the emperor based in Rome – was deposed in 476, although the Roman Empire itself continued in Constantinople for many centuries. Nevertheless, the decentralized collection of Germanic states that made up the former territories of the Roman empire led to a different understanding of the faith of Rome, which those states did eventually adopt.

Among those states were some small political entities, run by the pope himself, stretching across central Italy. The bishop of Rome as a political ruler led to entanglements with the various Germanic rulers, depending on the relative strengths of the personalities and offices involved. The first and most significant of these interactions was with Clovis, king of the Franks.