Paying Attention To The Sky

It’s amazing how reading one thing answers a question to another or gives an interpretation to a third.  I spend some of my time on religious forums and from time to time run across atheists whom I engage in dialogue. You get used to the things they say and I have spent not a small amount of time on these pages digging up answers to their questions (accusations).

A familiar charge I run across is the Jesus-against-Christianity game, as Bottum refers to it. To whit (he explains): Critical scholars often explain the overlay of Christological affirmations in the gospel by recourse to a theory that, to a great extent, St. Paul theologized Jesus, and, under his influence, there emerged the doctrinally rigid faith of the Church.

R.R. Reno has explained the rationale for theological exegesis by way of this syllogism:

The true Church of Christ teaches the gospel.
The Bible is the sacred and canonical witness to the gospel.
Therefore, the teachings of the Church accord with the teachings of the Bible.

The above would appear to be simple and straight forward, were the teachings of the Church to accord so easily with the teachings of the Bible. But recall the Catholic doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the bodily Assumption of Mary to see the problems that occur between doctrine and scripture. “Difficulties stimulate the mind,” as Reno puts it, and the assumption that  Scripture and doctrine teach a single, unified truth is simply one of the challenges of being a thinking Christian. Needless to say, atheists enjoy exploiting some of these difficulties to form a rationale for undermining of faith by establishing the general unreliability of the gospels.

Theological exegesis is a legitimate activity and a perfect example of it can be seen in the early Church Fathers seeking to explain The Easter Faith and Its Meaning in History, the post that precedes this one.

Joseph Bottum, the editor of First Things, was reviewing a particularly nasty book by the man who poses as an anti–C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman. I had never heard of the fellow but it appears he is the author of the Dark Materials Trilogy, a set of children’s books written between 1995 and 2000 with the express purpose of undoing Christianity for the young, and to refute what he called, in Lewis’ Narnia books, “one of the most vile moments in the whole of children’s literature.” Let me take up Bottum’s review here:

This is not an uncommon story – the-Jesus-had-a-brother-who-died-on-the-Cross-while-he-escaped has been told before. I think John Updike referred to it somewhere and the Japanese have even cashed in on the retellings . I always wonder where these stories come from, and, for that matter, where the thought “Paul invented Christianity.” or “The only true Christian was Jesus.” Well I found a wonderful little exposition on this in Bottum’s review of the Pullman book:

“[For] this is, after all, pretty tired, old stuff — very tired, and very old. Over the last century and a half, the impulse has often found root in the gardens of critical history, sifting through the gospel stories with the promise of identifying the “real Jesus,” as distinct from the figure so thoroughly embedded in the Church’s account.

In 1892 the Lutheran theologian Martin Kähler gave this project its most influential expression, distinguishing between the “Christ of faith”– the figure found in the Church’s belief in his saving death and resurrection — and the “Jesus of history.” The idea is to come up with a critical principle that allows a scholar to determine when the New Testament authors are reading later theological formulations back into the remembered stories of Jesus’ life and ministry. And the purpose is to allow the modern commentator to filter out the dogmatic content of Scripture.

The problem is that we tend not so much to discover the historical Jesus as to create a blank spot on which to project our spiritual fantasies, as Albert Schweitzer recognized when he surveyed the nineteenth century’s efforts to get back to the “real Jesus” in his famous 1906 book The Quest for the Historical Jesus. The historical Jesus turns out to be whatever the questing historian wants to find: a moral teacher or revolutionary prophet or kind preacher of love (see, for example, Marcus Borg’s picture of Jesus as a 1960s anti-establishment activist).

Critical scholars often explain the overlay of Christological affirmations in the gospel by recourse to a theory that, to a great extent, St. Paul theologized Jesus, and, under his influence, there emerged the doctrinally rigid faith of the Church. F.C. Bauer, for example, speculated in the nineteenth century that Paul was in conflict with the disciples. Nietzsche and others latched onto the idea, boldly declaring that Paul had “invented Christianity” and thereby betrayed the real Jesus.

In fact, in the Jesus-against-Christianity game, it’s usually the inauthentic Paul who gets played off against the authentic Jesus. You can see it from Ernest Renan’s nineteenth-century “The writings of Paul have been a danger and a hidden rock, the causes of the principal defects of Christian theology,” to George Bernard Shaw’s “No sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition than Paul boldly set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus,” to the Episcopal Bishop John S. Spong’s “Paul’s words are not the Words of God. They are the words of Paul — a vast difference.”

There is, of course, an intrinsically anti-dogmatic and anti-ecclesial undercurrent to all these readings of the Bible. D.F. Strauss set aside the miraculous and supernatural dimensions of the New Testament in The Life of Jesus to achieve the effect, and Reimarus, whose On the Intention of Jesus and His Teaching was published posthumously in 1778, expressed a historical skepticism about the reliability of the gospels that was shocking in its day.

The key here is that phrase in its day. The frisson of blasphemy has grown too thin in all this stuff; it’s worn down to nothing. Nothing, except the author’s self-congratulation at his own bravery — a feature with which Philip Pullman’s comments about his novel abound. The slow, patient work of scholars has undone this goofy storyline so many times, and still it comes creeping back every twenty years or so. Pullman’s Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ mostly proves that no idea dies, no matter how soundly defeated.”

So it seems all of this was wrapped up together: My struggles with a Christologically pure Gospel teaching; Fr. Jose Granados’ story of the Easter Faith and Its Meaning in History; and the taunts of atheists telling me that Paul “invented” Christianity. Talk about three birds with one stone…