Assumptions Putting Us In The Hands Of Crooks, Swindlers And Exploiters: Continuing On With L. T. Johnson's Critique of Critical Historical Method

Two important assumptions remain implicit in this commitment.  The first is that the recovery of origins means the recovery of essence; the first realization of Christianity is naturally the best.  It follows from this premise that any "development" of Christianity must be seen as a decline.  The second assumption is that history can act as a theological norm for the reform of the church; the recovery of "original Christianity" made available through the recovery of the "original Scripture" should naturally serve as measure and critique for all subsequent forms of Christianity.

So widely are precisely these assumptions held - and taken for granted - that it is perhaps necessary to pause in order to assert that they are, in fact, assumptions rather than necessary truths.  Only a little thought is required to realize the problematic character of the first premise.  Indeed, in most matters, we now assume that earlier forms are perfected by later development. Likewise, it is by no means our automatic instinct in other matters to measure the adequacy or integrity of present behavior against the norm of earlier behavior. Rather, we tend to measure adequacy and integrity in terms of other criteria.

IF YOU might have wondered what attracted me so strongly about this passage from Luke Timothy Johnson's The Real Jesus, this is one of the passages which when I gave it "only a little thought" it kept expanding to cover not only the context he gives it here, his critique of Biblical critical-historical methods and the "quest for the historical Jesus" but has obvious applications in so many areas, some of them extremely important because the thinking becomes dishonest and powerful and their results are so universally taken for granted.

Of course my mind immediately went to the double-speak, double-standard, double-dealing duplicity of alleged Constitutionalism in the United States.  Especially such smokescreens as "textualism" and "originalism" in which something so very akin to Biblical fundamentalism, invented by and taken up by many of the same people of the same mindset, and the "founders" fetish is made the law of the land by a corrupt Court.  The Roberts Court and the Rehnquist Courts' reimposing American apartheid and the re-subjugation of Women and others through that. I think the unconsidered assumptions and opportunistic hypocrisy of that kind are taken for granted and the norms asserted are as striking and are at least as dangerous as they are in the "historical Jesus" racket.  Probably more so because most of the "Jesus" historizing is religiously and culturally damaging but politically and legally impotent.  

Dealing with ill considered and clearly flawed thinking about origins, original forms, developments, the perfecting of forms in later development (something both constantly asserted and constantly denied in what is said) of course my other immediate parallel area for thinking about this is the extremely dangerous modern fantasy of natural selection.  

When I noticed this in my first re-reading of the book I felt like it slapped me in the face because I didn't notice its applicability to two of the major themes that have occupied my time for the last twenty years.  

Enough of that, though.

A number of excellent questions can be abstracted from this short section:

Is it true that it is necessary to recover the origins of something in order to understand its essence?  Why would that be the case?  If the origins are so important for understanding and applying the later development of something, that should certainly mean that those are present in some form in the later thing that developed from it.  Though it isn't necessarily true that that later manifestation of the original would still exist as a form which is a. recognizable as the developed original form of it, b. that that remnant, changed in time and circumstance and subsequent, intervening forms, would still function as the original form of it did.  It is entirely possible that the reason for that change and development was due to the inadequacy of the original form and the survival of the entity containing it was dependent on its transformation into something very unlike what the original was.  In which case, for our purposes, that original might not only be unusable, its identity might more confuse us or lead us to folly.  It might, actually, be far better to focus on the developed entity,  what came from those origins, instead of engaging on a likely futile quest to retrieve those origins.  I'd far more like my doctor to study human anatomy in order to understand my body than the dim fossils of our certain ancestors in the so variably interpreted but still highly evolved species between us and the theorized "Original Organism" from which we are rationally believed to have evolved.

And that is not to take into consideration that we, as part of a very changed milieu, might be incapable of recognizing or imagining what that original form was or how it worked.  The assumption that we could do that is taken for granted when I don't think there is any real way to test it, not in specific instances, not as a general rule that can be assumed to work in all instances.

That leads to the second assumption that any subsequent change must represent a "decline."  Which is certainly an assumption we make, probably most often opportunistically, in a few, chosen instances but which, as Johnson points out, we certainly don't hold as a general view of life.  When you think about it, it's rather incredible that our modern world, in which the ideologies of modernism replace traditional morality, even among those who claim to be dedicated to retaining ancient wisdom an morality.  Biblical fundamentalism is saturated with the thinking of modernism as Luther's assertions were saturated with his then modern Renaissance thinking about the nature of original texts.  It is certainly the kind of assumption that is reserved in the United States when people with the basest and most vile of motives, hoarding of wealth, stealing wealth generated by the labor of others for the already rich, making use of the mental debility of racism, misogyny, hatred of LGBTQ, make recourse to the "original intent" of "the founders," often proving they don't care about that by lying about the legislative record that gave rise to both the original Constitution and its amendments.  No one in the 18th or 19th or early 20th century, who died long ago in the long past had access to the experience of life and thinking well after they died.  They had no prophetic powers, they had no divine source of insight into a future they couldn't see.  To insist that their thinking must rule us now, centuries after some of them died, a century after some of them laid down their judicial fiats, is not only a guarantee of injustice, it is a hypocritical absurdity used on a sometimes basis by quite contemporary crooks, swindlers, exploiters and the lawyers and judges and "justices" who are in their pockets.

It is especially obvious that this worshipful regard for past and any subsequent development as "decline" among us today is massively disproved by the predominant form of pious observation in our purchase and consumption of new products and models, our ease with which we will buy a new computer or phone or car as we throw the previous object of our devotion into the enormous waste stream, the monument of our impious junking of original forms.  That is not novel among us, that is the history of the human species, not only objects but texts, interpretations of texts, editions of texts, translations of texts, etc.  The business of not only the publishing and scribbling industry is full of that and it is, in fact, the very essence of what modern academic scholarship is all about.  If you want to have someone look down their nose at you, cite an old edition of something which has been superseded in academic esteem by the latest model.

If there is one thing you can count on, even among those who in the English Speaking Peoples worship the "King James Version" is that they'll come out with a "new edition" of that idolized text but new commentaries on it, coming up with quite different claims about it, even new claims about what the original form might have been.  If you want to see how true that is, go look online at The Bible Gateway or other sources to see how many interpretations as translations there are, and that's not to mention the multiplying commentary on even some of those individual editions.  

You can certainly see it in the long and twisted interpretations of what Charles Darwin is alleged to have thought, which, among other things, proves that you can have an academic, even a career as a historian of science specializing in that modern idol, without having really read what he wrote in the many editions he, himself produced. I believe he published six editions of On The Origin of Species between 1859 and the last one he produced before his death in 1882.  Six editions in twenty-three years!  And they contain some radical differences, one of which I've pointed out is that he, himself refuted the modern lie that natural selection was not the same thing as Herbert Spencer's "survival of the fittest" in the 5th edition he pointed out, at the urging of A. R. Wallace, that when he said "natural selection" he meant EXACTLY the same thing as Herbert Spencer's "survival of the fittest."  And that's on top of what I said about Darwin and Lamarckian inheritance and its denial by alleged scholars of Darwin the other day.   You knew I couldn't just leave that aside back then, didn't you?

Considering the double-step academic and every-day life does around these issues raised in these two short paragraphs by Luke Timothy Johnson, I think that alone makes this trip worth it.  I am absolutely certain that as Johnson applies his questions and analysis to his professional focus and I apply it to the issues of my foremost fascination, there are probably hundreds of others.  You have to be really careful and work really hard to overcome such culturally implanted and accustomed lapses of coherent thinking as these.  It's so much easier to just ignore those lapses, even if you overcame those habits of thought, the extent you would need to to even notice that's what you're doing.

Back to Johnson on Luther next time.