Before going on with the series I started on Easter . . .
In Unit F, chapter II, section 1. of Kung's Does God Exist, Hans Kung goes through a passage from one of the most popular of Bertrand Russell's books - which is typical of his anti-religious polemics - Why I Am Not A Christian, it is as good an example of the contrast between even that, for English language atheist polemics, high market example and the approach of the high end of mainstream theology. I'll give you the beginning and a few of the highlights of Kung's treatment because it goes on for many pages whereas atheists, English language sones, especially, don't make such in depth investigations.
Beginning on page 509 in the edition of the English language translation I have, Kung starts with a quote from Russell:
"To come to this question of the existence of God, it is a large and serious matter I should have to keep you here until Kingdom Come, so that you will have to excuse me if I deal with it in a somewhat summary fashion."
So "large and serious" that Russell signals his intention of not dealing with it. This is Bertrand Russell trying to get himself off the hook before he even starts, which, for someone of his reputation as an intellectual, should discredit him, not excuse him. It is the kind of pragmatic assertion of such vague modesty of intent that is so often found in popular polemics, especially, in my experience, when the polemicist is a self-declared rationalist, "freethinker" (which, of course no materialist can really be) and, typically, an atheist.
Kung continues:
We certainly cannot deal with it as briefly as Bertrand Russel does in this lecture, but we must first hear a little more of what he says: "You know, of course, that the Catholic Church has laid it down as a dogma that the exitence of God can be proved by the unaided reason. That is a somewhat curious dogma, but it is one of their dogmas. They had to introduce it because at one time the Freethinkers were in the habit of saying that there were such and such arguments which mere reason might urge against the existence of God, but of course they knew as a matter of faith that God did exist. The arguments and the reasons were set out at great length, and the Catholic Church felt that they must stop it. Therefore they laid it down that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason, and they had to set up what they considered were arguments to prove it." Russell himself thought that these arguments did not prove it, ad this was a decisive reason why he would not become a Christian. But what is the dogma about which Russell speaks here so vaguely?
Kung then goes on, not till "Kingdom Come" but for fifteen deeply informative, well cited and referenced pages, first on the actual declaration from the First Vatican Council which Russell distorts for his entirely more vulgar polemical method which declares it will not deal with issues he raises in depth - certainly in order to keep the attention of Russell's middle-brow audience who are interested in attacks, not ideas, least of all what is credible or even true. He gives it, verbatim
Basically, certainty comes from reason, to whcih of course the certaity of faith must be added. This is the position quite clearly adopted by the First Vatican Council in 1870. "If anyone says that the one true God, our Creator and Lord, cannot be known with certainty by the natural light of reason from created things, h is to be condemned." How did the Council come to produce such a harsh theological position?
And after that he goes into a full history of why the First Vatican Council (which he criticizes, in process, as largely a failure which didn't adopt any of the proposed reforms but did adopt such things that Kung so notably rejected, as a Catholic priest, including papal infallibility) adopted that language, the various movements in earlier 18-19th century theology, both would-be rationalist and fideist it was a reaction against, the actual meaning of the statement in context - which didn't mean what Russell characterized it as being.
Against Russell it must be pointed out that Vatican I asserts not that every human being actually knows God but that knowledge of God is possible in principle for every human being. Neither does it assert that God's existence can be proved, but only that it can be known from created things. Nor, finally, does it assert that even natural knowledge of God is acquired in fact without God's grace; only that natural knowledge of God comes about without divine revelation. Does this seem a ingenious solution to the problem of reason and faith" Is it bad or a fair compromise?
I don't know if Kung meant to use language that could fairly be used to characterize Bertrand Russell's polemical writing and speaking in which wit and cleverness (what passes as "ingenious" in mid-brow discourse) but I certainly notice that you could turn Russell's statement back on him on that basis.
After that Kung gives a Catholic critique of it, noting the enormous damage that it did within the Catholic church, before noting that the most intellectually rigorous criticism of it didn't come from a Catholic or a materialist-rationalist-atheist but the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth, then the reaction to Barth and then a recapitulation in which Kung - who is an authoritative voice in matters concering Karl Barth's thinking (Barth, himself, endorsed Kung's understanding of his work) notes that BARTH, HIMSELF made a substantial criticism of his earlier position.
It took others working within the fields of logic and mathematics to come up with the same kind of criticism of the academic work of Bertrand Russell. In just dealing with this one accusation against Kung and his intellectual honesty, it would seem to me that the same reservations that Russell makes polemically against the claim that you could come to faith in God through unaided reason are not entirely unlike his attempt to explain mathematics through pure logic. I wonder if anyone ever put that to him for consideration and if the ever abbreviating Bertrand Russell ever said anything about that.
Update: I should certainly have noted that Barth's criticism of it was a first rate intellectual criticism but that it was far more importantly a criticism that couldn't have been more timely and important for the moral and political consequences of the ideas he rejected.
Wednesday, April 15, 2020
Free Lying Press Dooms Us To Disaster
If the study talked about in this article is even close to right, the United States is in a lot deeper trouble than we might think right now because the conditions that are given in the quote contained in it certainly will not happen, or if tried will not succeed, because Republicans will use any attempt by a Democratic administration and Congress to do the right thing against them politically. Under the prevailing legal and media orthodoxy, their use of reason, science, moral responsibility against them would prevail.
The United States may need to endure social distancing measures adopted during the coronavirus outbreak until 2022, according to researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health.
The study comes as more than 2,200 people died in the United States from the outbreak on Tuesday, a record, according to a Reuters tally, even as the country debated how to reopen its economy. The overall death toll in the U.S. from the virus stands at more than 28,300 as of Tuesday.
“Intermittent distancing may be required into 2022 unless critical care capacity is increased substantially or a treatment or vaccine becomes available”, the Harvard researchers said in findings published Tuesday in the journal Science.
Giving examples of South Korea and Singapore, the researchers wrote that effective distancing could reduce the strain on healthcare systems and enable contact tracing and quarantine to be feasible.
The study acknowledged that prolonged distancing would most likely have profoundly negative economic, social, and educational consequences.
The study added that even in the case of “apparent elimination”, SARS-CoV-2 surveillance should still be maintained, as a resurgence in contagion may be possible as late as 2024.
"Unless critical care capacity is increased substantially or a treatment or vaccine becomes available," Republicans with the aid of FOX, Sinclare, ABC, and the media that would follow their lead would savagely attack Democrats who tried to increase critical care capacity and fund treatment and vaccine programs. If, as under our superstition promoting media and social-disease media would certainly mount an anti-vaccine crusade which the Republicans and the right-wing media would exploit for the 2022 elections and Democrats would know that that's what they could expect. They know they could expect billionaires to fund another astro-turf campaign like the "tea-party" media circus mounted in opposition to the Affordable Care Act. They could probably count on the Republican-fascist dominated federal courts and the Supreme Court to aid and promote the political interests that would do so.
And they will certainly try to gin-up and exploit people getting tired of social distancing. They're already doing that.
Democrats certainly know this is what they can expect to happen, they know that because it is the pattern of what the media, Republicans in office and on the courts have done over and over again, using their morally responsible acts against them.
And they know they can count on the same from the play-left which hate nothing so much as Democrats doing what is possible instead of delivering everything they can currently think to ask for and, as those are delivered, for ever more pie-in-the-never-to-be-reached-sky. I can guarantee you that if Bernie Sanders had become president and AOC had succeeded him as vice president, In These Times, The Nation, Sam Seder and Cenk would all be going after her. I don't trust any of them any more than I do the Republicans and the commercial media to do anything but stab us in the back.
The United States may need to endure social distancing measures adopted during the coronavirus outbreak until 2022, according to researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health.
The study comes as more than 2,200 people died in the United States from the outbreak on Tuesday, a record, according to a Reuters tally, even as the country debated how to reopen its economy. The overall death toll in the U.S. from the virus stands at more than 28,300 as of Tuesday.
“Intermittent distancing may be required into 2022 unless critical care capacity is increased substantially or a treatment or vaccine becomes available”, the Harvard researchers said in findings published Tuesday in the journal Science.
Giving examples of South Korea and Singapore, the researchers wrote that effective distancing could reduce the strain on healthcare systems and enable contact tracing and quarantine to be feasible.
The study acknowledged that prolonged distancing would most likely have profoundly negative economic, social, and educational consequences.
The study added that even in the case of “apparent elimination”, SARS-CoV-2 surveillance should still be maintained, as a resurgence in contagion may be possible as late as 2024.
"Unless critical care capacity is increased substantially or a treatment or vaccine becomes available," Republicans with the aid of FOX, Sinclare, ABC, and the media that would follow their lead would savagely attack Democrats who tried to increase critical care capacity and fund treatment and vaccine programs. If, as under our superstition promoting media and social-disease media would certainly mount an anti-vaccine crusade which the Republicans and the right-wing media would exploit for the 2022 elections and Democrats would know that that's what they could expect. They know they could expect billionaires to fund another astro-turf campaign like the "tea-party" media circus mounted in opposition to the Affordable Care Act. They could probably count on the Republican-fascist dominated federal courts and the Supreme Court to aid and promote the political interests that would do so.
And they will certainly try to gin-up and exploit people getting tired of social distancing. They're already doing that.
Democrats certainly know this is what they can expect to happen, they know that because it is the pattern of what the media, Republicans in office and on the courts have done over and over again, using their morally responsible acts against them.
And they know they can count on the same from the play-left which hate nothing so much as Democrats doing what is possible instead of delivering everything they can currently think to ask for and, as those are delivered, for ever more pie-in-the-never-to-be-reached-sky. I can guarantee you that if Bernie Sanders had become president and AOC had succeeded him as vice president, In These Times, The Nation, Sam Seder and Cenk would all be going after her. I don't trust any of them any more than I do the Republicans and the commercial media to do anything but stab us in the back.
If There's Ever Been An Uninformed Accusation It Is That Hans Kung "Cherry Picks" and, He's Swiss, Not German, You Bigot
I have no special love of astrology and much that is written in this area bores me to tears. But astrology is an excellent example of the way scientists deal with phenomena outside of their area of competence. They don't study them, they simply curse them, insinuating that their curses are based on strong and straightforward arguments.
Paul Feyerabend
The posts I've done in which the eminent Swiss theologian, Hans Kung answers four of the most commonly made arguments against the reality of the Resurrection of Jesus shows, among other things, that Kung didn't go for the low hanging fruit, he went to the top level of anti-Christian discourse and that was just a very, very short passage of what he has done throughout his enormous body of writings in theology and other topics. The three books often considered something of a trilogy, Does God Exist?, On Being a Christian and Eternal Life? are a very deep engagement, not with the popular level of atheist and anti-Christian invective but with the very best they can put up against religion. I think any fair person who reads them, really reading them in an engaged manner, looking up relevant citations, would find them to be excellent.* I think his fellow theologian, Elizabeth A. Johnson was correct, that Does God Exist? is if not the best one of the best responses to atheism in the literature.
I referenced Paul Feyerabend who in that quote was answering critics of a paper he wrote twelve years earlier, The Strange Case of Astrology, in which he compared the famous, or rather deservedly infamous petition against astrology signed by almost two-hundred eminent scientists and other figures of would-be intellectual life, comparing their approach with the deservedly infamous 15th century book about supposed witchcraft, the Malleus Maleficarum. Most interesting to me were the criticisms Feyerabend was making even as CSICOP was forming and the sTARBABY scandal incubating among its scientists and matematicians and philosophers. Feyerabend saw the potential for something like that to happen in the scientists' slip-shod, sloppy, uninformed declarations which were to be sold on the power of their authority and fame, alone. I think it's extremely impressive that he was able to see that even before he could have heard about the sTARBABY scandal which was the one and only "scientific" investigation and totally botched and covered up by Paul Kurtz and his fellow ideological atheists.
And the same can be said about the general approach of, certainly popular level atheism, the kind that is written by Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennet, Krauss, Coyne, and their like online but also in almost all of the higher levels of atheist polemics and propaganda. Bertrand Russell certainly could have done it on a higher level than he did but he didn't, his attacks on religion are kiddie stuff compared to what Kung addresses. I think some of the same habits of intellectual engagement in that debate, on the two sides, were the ones that Paul Feyerabend exposed about half a century ago.
Now what surprises the reader [of the Humanist anti-astrology statement] whose image of science has been formed by the customary eulogies which emphasize rationality, objectivity, impartiality and so on is the religious tone of the document, the illiteracy of the "arguments" and the authoritarian manner in which the arguments are being presented. The learned gentlemen have strong convictions, they use their authority to spread these convictions (why 186 signatures if one has arguments?), they know a few phrases which sound like arguments, but they certainly do not know what they are talking about.
Take the first sentence of the "Statement." It reads: "Scientists in a variety of fields have become concerned with the increased acceptance of astrology in many parts of the world."
In 1484 the Roman Catholic Church published the Malleus Maleficarum, the outstanding textbook on witchcraft. The Malleus is a very interesting book. It has four parts: phenomena, aetiology, legal aspects, theological aspects of witchcraft. The description of phenomena is sufficiently detailed to enable us to identify the mental disturbances that accompanied some cases. The aetiology is pluralistic, there is not just the official explanation, there are other explanations as well, purely materialistic explanations included. Of course, in the end only one of the offered explanations is accepted, but the alternatives are discussed and so one can judge the arguments that lead to their elimination. This feature makes the Malleus superior to almost every physics, biology, chemistry textbook of today. Even the theology is pluralistic, heretical views are not passed over in silence, nor are they ridiculed; they are described, examined, and removed by argument. The authors know the subject, they know their opponents, they give a correct account of the positions of their opponents, they argue against these positions and they use the best knowledge available at the time of their arguments.
The book has an introduction, a bull by Pope Innocent VIII, issued in 1484. The bull reads: "It has indeed come to our ears, not without afflicting us with bitter sorrow, that in ...." - and now comes a long list of countries and counties - "many persons of both sexes unmindful of their own salvation have strayed from the Catholic Faith and have abandoned themselves to devils ..." and so on. The words are almost the same as the words in the beginning of the "Statement," and so are the sentiments expressed. Both the Pope and the "186 leading scientists" deplore the increasing popularity of what they think are disreputable views. But what a difference in literacy and scholarship!
Comparing the Malleus with accounts of contemporary knowledge the reader can easily verify that the Pope and his learned authors knew what they were talking about. This cannot be said of our scientists. they neither know the subject they attack, astrology, nor those parts of their own science that undermine the attack.
The accusation that Hans Kung set things up or otherwise rigged the evidence or "cherry picked" what he addressed is a blatant lie that anyone who bothered to read his books that I can only excerpt would see, immediately. He has both read and studied and understood and SYMPATHETICALLY presents the arguments he addresses and refutes. He is fair and respectful of the atheists' and anti-Christain arguments, I think in no small part because he wants to do what most atheists and just about all materialists and the rather low priesthood of scientism have no real interest in, finding the truth.
His life-long habit of doing that hasn't been aimed at only atheism or anti-Christian literature, he has been one of the most exigent critics of the very Catholic church and tradition that he is a member of, indeed, under the JPII and Benedict XVI regimes, he had his credentials as a Catholic theologian removed in what was a blatant attempt to get him fired from his university teaching position. He has remained one one of the most informed, essential and insightful critics of the Catholic church even as he remains a Catholic priest. I have every confidence that if Hans Kung had had, on the basis of where the evidence led him, no honest choice but to adopt atheism he would have done so and, with his life-long engagement with the topics at the level he has engaged them, I am impressed that he has, so far as I know, never found he had to.
* I doubt anyone could possibly look up all of the citations he gives in just the first book, alone in less than a decade of heavy reading, those I've looked at are accurately represented by Kung.
This is an interesting article about Paul Feyerabend and the accusation that he was an enemy of science when what he was was the kind of critic that scientists not only are not used to facing, they are outraged that anyone would hold them up to criticism, especially those outside the fraternity. That is a habit of entitlement that I doubt theologians ever much develop since if there's an easy target in modern society, it's religion. Maybe I'll address some of what it says later.
Paul Feyerabend
The posts I've done in which the eminent Swiss theologian, Hans Kung answers four of the most commonly made arguments against the reality of the Resurrection of Jesus shows, among other things, that Kung didn't go for the low hanging fruit, he went to the top level of anti-Christian discourse and that was just a very, very short passage of what he has done throughout his enormous body of writings in theology and other topics. The three books often considered something of a trilogy, Does God Exist?, On Being a Christian and Eternal Life? are a very deep engagement, not with the popular level of atheist and anti-Christian invective but with the very best they can put up against religion. I think any fair person who reads them, really reading them in an engaged manner, looking up relevant citations, would find them to be excellent.* I think his fellow theologian, Elizabeth A. Johnson was correct, that Does God Exist? is if not the best one of the best responses to atheism in the literature.
I referenced Paul Feyerabend who in that quote was answering critics of a paper he wrote twelve years earlier, The Strange Case of Astrology, in which he compared the famous, or rather deservedly infamous petition against astrology signed by almost two-hundred eminent scientists and other figures of would-be intellectual life, comparing their approach with the deservedly infamous 15th century book about supposed witchcraft, the Malleus Maleficarum. Most interesting to me were the criticisms Feyerabend was making even as CSICOP was forming and the sTARBABY scandal incubating among its scientists and matematicians and philosophers. Feyerabend saw the potential for something like that to happen in the scientists' slip-shod, sloppy, uninformed declarations which were to be sold on the power of their authority and fame, alone. I think it's extremely impressive that he was able to see that even before he could have heard about the sTARBABY scandal which was the one and only "scientific" investigation and totally botched and covered up by Paul Kurtz and his fellow ideological atheists.
And the same can be said about the general approach of, certainly popular level atheism, the kind that is written by Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennet, Krauss, Coyne, and their like online but also in almost all of the higher levels of atheist polemics and propaganda. Bertrand Russell certainly could have done it on a higher level than he did but he didn't, his attacks on religion are kiddie stuff compared to what Kung addresses. I think some of the same habits of intellectual engagement in that debate, on the two sides, were the ones that Paul Feyerabend exposed about half a century ago.
Now what surprises the reader [of the Humanist anti-astrology statement] whose image of science has been formed by the customary eulogies which emphasize rationality, objectivity, impartiality and so on is the religious tone of the document, the illiteracy of the "arguments" and the authoritarian manner in which the arguments are being presented. The learned gentlemen have strong convictions, they use their authority to spread these convictions (why 186 signatures if one has arguments?), they know a few phrases which sound like arguments, but they certainly do not know what they are talking about.
Take the first sentence of the "Statement." It reads: "Scientists in a variety of fields have become concerned with the increased acceptance of astrology in many parts of the world."
In 1484 the Roman Catholic Church published the Malleus Maleficarum, the outstanding textbook on witchcraft. The Malleus is a very interesting book. It has four parts: phenomena, aetiology, legal aspects, theological aspects of witchcraft. The description of phenomena is sufficiently detailed to enable us to identify the mental disturbances that accompanied some cases. The aetiology is pluralistic, there is not just the official explanation, there are other explanations as well, purely materialistic explanations included. Of course, in the end only one of the offered explanations is accepted, but the alternatives are discussed and so one can judge the arguments that lead to their elimination. This feature makes the Malleus superior to almost every physics, biology, chemistry textbook of today. Even the theology is pluralistic, heretical views are not passed over in silence, nor are they ridiculed; they are described, examined, and removed by argument. The authors know the subject, they know their opponents, they give a correct account of the positions of their opponents, they argue against these positions and they use the best knowledge available at the time of their arguments.
The book has an introduction, a bull by Pope Innocent VIII, issued in 1484. The bull reads: "It has indeed come to our ears, not without afflicting us with bitter sorrow, that in ...." - and now comes a long list of countries and counties - "many persons of both sexes unmindful of their own salvation have strayed from the Catholic Faith and have abandoned themselves to devils ..." and so on. The words are almost the same as the words in the beginning of the "Statement," and so are the sentiments expressed. Both the Pope and the "186 leading scientists" deplore the increasing popularity of what they think are disreputable views. But what a difference in literacy and scholarship!
Comparing the Malleus with accounts of contemporary knowledge the reader can easily verify that the Pope and his learned authors knew what they were talking about. This cannot be said of our scientists. they neither know the subject they attack, astrology, nor those parts of their own science that undermine the attack.
The accusation that Hans Kung set things up or otherwise rigged the evidence or "cherry picked" what he addressed is a blatant lie that anyone who bothered to read his books that I can only excerpt would see, immediately. He has both read and studied and understood and SYMPATHETICALLY presents the arguments he addresses and refutes. He is fair and respectful of the atheists' and anti-Christain arguments, I think in no small part because he wants to do what most atheists and just about all materialists and the rather low priesthood of scientism have no real interest in, finding the truth.
His life-long habit of doing that hasn't been aimed at only atheism or anti-Christian literature, he has been one of the most exigent critics of the very Catholic church and tradition that he is a member of, indeed, under the JPII and Benedict XVI regimes, he had his credentials as a Catholic theologian removed in what was a blatant attempt to get him fired from his university teaching position. He has remained one one of the most informed, essential and insightful critics of the Catholic church even as he remains a Catholic priest. I have every confidence that if Hans Kung had had, on the basis of where the evidence led him, no honest choice but to adopt atheism he would have done so and, with his life-long engagement with the topics at the level he has engaged them, I am impressed that he has, so far as I know, never found he had to.
* I doubt anyone could possibly look up all of the citations he gives in just the first book, alone in less than a decade of heavy reading, those I've looked at are accurately represented by Kung.
This is an interesting article about Paul Feyerabend and the accusation that he was an enemy of science when what he was was the kind of critic that scientists not only are not used to facing, they are outraged that anyone would hold them up to criticism, especially those outside the fraternity. That is a habit of entitlement that I doubt theologians ever much develop since if there's an easy target in modern society, it's religion. Maybe I'll address some of what it says later.
No, Anyone But Any Republican 2020
I don't watch or listen to Trump's daily Nuremberg style mini-rallies that get covered live on TV, from what they sound like he's doing what Nixon reportedly was doing to an audience of presidential portraits in the White House to the TV cameras. And Nixon reportedly had to get drunk first before he got that soppily self-pitying, whiny and complaining about how no one gets his greatness.
We were still not so degraded a country that we couldn't get rid of a Nixon, we haven't been able to get rid of Trump. But, then, Republicans didn't control the Senate and the Supreme Court back then.
Tuesday, April 14, 2020
The Straw Man Of Total Historical Agreement
Note: I have decided that I will post an index of these pieces later because the list of them is going to get rather long to keep posting. For those who want to read the earlier ones, they started on Easter Sunday.
Fourth difficulty. A close analysis of the Easter accounts reveals insuperable discrepancies and inconsistencies. Attempts have indeed been made constantly to combine and harmonize them into a uniform tradition. But - to sum it up briefly - it is impossible to establish agreement about 1. the people involved: Peter, Mary Magdalene, the other Mary, the disciples, the apostles, the twelve, the Emmaus disciples, five hundred brethren, James, Paul; 2. the locality of the events; Galilee, a mountain there or the lake of Tiberias; Jerusalem, at Jesus' grave or a meeting place' 3. the whole sequence of appearances; morning and evening of Easter Sunday, eight days and forty days later. At every point harmonization proves to be impossible, unless we are prepared to accept textual changes and to minimize the differences.
The reverse side. Obviously no one at the time needed or wanted a uniform scheme or a smooth harmony, still less any sort of biography of the risen Jesus. The New Testament authors are not interested in any kind of completeness nor in a definite sequence and least of all in a critical historical investigation of the different pieces of information. From this it is clear that there is something more important to be stressed in the individual narratives; for Paul and Mark the calling and mission of the disciples; for Luke and John it is more the real identity of the risen with the pre-paschal Jesus (perception of the identity and ultimately proof of identity by the demonstration of his corporeality and his sharing food, with the constantly greater emphasis on conquering the doubts of his disciples). At the same time it becomes clear that any how, when or where of the narratives is of secondary importance by comparison with the fact - of which there is no doubt in the different sources - of the resurrection which in every context is clearly not identical with the death and burial. What is required is a concentration on the true content of the message and this in turn will make possible a renewed investigation into the historical discrepancies.
If the rule that all accounts of an event must agree in all ways, in details small and even large, were to be made universal, the same point I made this morning would be true, a huge amount of human culture and experience would have to be disbelieved. It is another special rule that is most applied in matters religious and in no part of that is that more true in contemporary academic and popular culture than it is for Christianity. There is, literally, nothing to almost nothing about which there will be a uniform account of it except those things for which there is not multiple attestation.
But we live with discrepancies even within what is supposed to be the hardest of science, certainly in 20th century physics the quest for a harmonization in a so-called theory of everything, our resting on the cusp of which is one of the most irrationally asserted and popular assertions very popular with ideological atheists in science. Though the very science they assert leads the to that so-called inevitability is the science that rather more convincingly leads to the conclusion that such a theory is never going to be had. And don't get me started on the discrepancies in the life sciences surrounding the origin if species.
It was one of the things I was most critical of the Jesus Seminar and other historical-critical projects that their use of multiple attestation as evidence of the authenticity of the words of Jesus and the events of his life were not uniformly applied but it seems to have become a matter of double speak, at times not used to support authenticity but, especially when there was not total harmony among multiple attestations to use that, as desired, to discount authenticity. When your goal is to support a desired conclusion, any way you can turn things would seem to be acceptable even within modern academic discourse.
The desire to come up with a harmonization of the Gospels is a very old one, the earliest known one was the Diatessaron of Tatian from just after the middle of the second century. That there was clearly no harmonized, uniform and self-consistent account placed into the canon of the Scriptures supports Kung's contention that that wasn't what the authors of the books wanted but, since it's clear that something like that was wanted, very much, that those with the authority to do that wanted to be honest about the texts they had received more than they wanted to avoid the refutations that would make use of discrepancies.
The other day I pointed out that there is no such a thing as an objective witness or recorder of events, something which science has established as a truth about the most "objective" of observations about a hundred fifteen years ago. There is certainly nothing objective in either believing in or disbelieving the Resurrection of Jesus, there is nothing that can be refuted on the evidence available and there is no direct physical evidence, the testimonies that have come down to us are the only available evidence to make a decision on. It would be claimed that a CHOICE to believe is based in a subjective choice to buy the claims made in the New Testament. But the choice to not believe is no less subjective, it is as fully fraught with aspects of choice on the basis of predisposition. A religious believer - one who really believes - will probably admit that their belief is a matter of choice, it is a rare non-believer who will admit the same thing.
Fourth difficulty. A close analysis of the Easter accounts reveals insuperable discrepancies and inconsistencies. Attempts have indeed been made constantly to combine and harmonize them into a uniform tradition. But - to sum it up briefly - it is impossible to establish agreement about 1. the people involved: Peter, Mary Magdalene, the other Mary, the disciples, the apostles, the twelve, the Emmaus disciples, five hundred brethren, James, Paul; 2. the locality of the events; Galilee, a mountain there or the lake of Tiberias; Jerusalem, at Jesus' grave or a meeting place' 3. the whole sequence of appearances; morning and evening of Easter Sunday, eight days and forty days later. At every point harmonization proves to be impossible, unless we are prepared to accept textual changes and to minimize the differences.
The reverse side. Obviously no one at the time needed or wanted a uniform scheme or a smooth harmony, still less any sort of biography of the risen Jesus. The New Testament authors are not interested in any kind of completeness nor in a definite sequence and least of all in a critical historical investigation of the different pieces of information. From this it is clear that there is something more important to be stressed in the individual narratives; for Paul and Mark the calling and mission of the disciples; for Luke and John it is more the real identity of the risen with the pre-paschal Jesus (perception of the identity and ultimately proof of identity by the demonstration of his corporeality and his sharing food, with the constantly greater emphasis on conquering the doubts of his disciples). At the same time it becomes clear that any how, when or where of the narratives is of secondary importance by comparison with the fact - of which there is no doubt in the different sources - of the resurrection which in every context is clearly not identical with the death and burial. What is required is a concentration on the true content of the message and this in turn will make possible a renewed investigation into the historical discrepancies.
If the rule that all accounts of an event must agree in all ways, in details small and even large, were to be made universal, the same point I made this morning would be true, a huge amount of human culture and experience would have to be disbelieved. It is another special rule that is most applied in matters religious and in no part of that is that more true in contemporary academic and popular culture than it is for Christianity. There is, literally, nothing to almost nothing about which there will be a uniform account of it except those things for which there is not multiple attestation.
But we live with discrepancies even within what is supposed to be the hardest of science, certainly in 20th century physics the quest for a harmonization in a so-called theory of everything, our resting on the cusp of which is one of the most irrationally asserted and popular assertions very popular with ideological atheists in science. Though the very science they assert leads the to that so-called inevitability is the science that rather more convincingly leads to the conclusion that such a theory is never going to be had. And don't get me started on the discrepancies in the life sciences surrounding the origin if species.
It was one of the things I was most critical of the Jesus Seminar and other historical-critical projects that their use of multiple attestation as evidence of the authenticity of the words of Jesus and the events of his life were not uniformly applied but it seems to have become a matter of double speak, at times not used to support authenticity but, especially when there was not total harmony among multiple attestations to use that, as desired, to discount authenticity. When your goal is to support a desired conclusion, any way you can turn things would seem to be acceptable even within modern academic discourse.
The desire to come up with a harmonization of the Gospels is a very old one, the earliest known one was the Diatessaron of Tatian from just after the middle of the second century. That there was clearly no harmonized, uniform and self-consistent account placed into the canon of the Scriptures supports Kung's contention that that wasn't what the authors of the books wanted but, since it's clear that something like that was wanted, very much, that those with the authority to do that wanted to be honest about the texts they had received more than they wanted to avoid the refutations that would make use of discrepancies.
The other day I pointed out that there is no such a thing as an objective witness or recorder of events, something which science has established as a truth about the most "objective" of observations about a hundred fifteen years ago. There is certainly nothing objective in either believing in or disbelieving the Resurrection of Jesus, there is nothing that can be refuted on the evidence available and there is no direct physical evidence, the testimonies that have come down to us are the only available evidence to make a decision on. It would be claimed that a CHOICE to believe is based in a subjective choice to buy the claims made in the New Testament. But the choice to not believe is no less subjective, it is as fully fraught with aspects of choice on the basis of predisposition. A religious believer - one who really believes - will probably admit that their belief is a matter of choice, it is a rare non-believer who will admit the same thing.
Evidence, What It Is, What It Can Do, What It Can't Do, When It Can't Exist
Third difficulty. There is no direct evidence of a resurrection. There is no one in the whole New Testament who claims to have been a witness of the resurrection. The resurrection is nowhere described. The only exception to this is the unauthentic (apocryphal) Gospel of Peter which appeared about A.D. 150 and at the end gives an account of the resurrection in a naive, dramatic fashion with the aid of legendary details: these -like so many apocryphal elements - entered into the Church's Easter texts, Easter celebrations, Easter hymns, Easter sermons, Easter pictures and were thus mingled in a variety of ways with popular belief about Easter. Even such unique masterpieces of art as Gruenwald's unsurpassed depiction of the resurrection in the Isenheim altar can be misleading in this respect.
The reverse side. The very reserve of the New Testament Gospels and letters in regard to the resurrection creates trust. The resurrection is neither depicted nor described. The interest in exaggeration and the craving for demonstration, which are characteristic of the Apocrypha, make the latter incredible. The New Testament Easter documents are not meant to be testimonies for the resurrection but testimonies to the raised and risen Jesus.
One of the things that was most surprising to me since coming online is that so many of those whose minds are formed by what they see on crime shows on TV and movies don't seem to realize that humans' testimony of their own observation and experience constitute evidence, especially when that evidence can be tested as is supposed to happen in a law court. That idiotic demotion of testimony contributed in the successful campaign to cover up the crimes of the Trump regime as the direct observational testimony of credible witnesses, in most cases corroborated by other witnesses and even physical confirmation and confirmation in the chronology of events was claimed to be inadequate by those who lied about the guilt that was proved.
Given how addled most people are by their addiction to entertainment, I can imagine a lot of reasons for the belief that evidence is something physical, testable in a laboratory, which some sexy plain-clothes cop happens to have fall into their laps in such abundance and is of such confirmatory strength as only happens in ridiculous Hollywood scripts, as written or as padded out by directors, actors and others. Though I could certainly go at length into the uses of evidence in popular atheist debunkery as opposed to its use in science, honest and dishonest, there isn't time to get into that enormous chasm between integrity and sham.*
But, in reality, often the only evidence that is available is testimonial, if we chose to withhold judgement, for or against, in those cases when only witness evidence could inform a decision, an enormous amount of what we consider to be true or even probable would be forever frozen in a state of indecision. I would note that for anyone holding out for more than is available who opts for disbelief is, as well, making a choice to believe because disbelief is also a belief and if they support their disbelief on the lack of any but testimonial evidence, they are doing exactly what they would claim is not allowed when the decision is to believe the testimony given.
Kung's proposal to test the claims by the modesty of what is contained in them seems to me to be a reasonable one to consider. But one thing that all of the sources, all of the Gospels and letters in the New Testament would seem to agree on, there were no direct human witnesses to the actual raising of Jesus from the dead. Kung gives a very long and detailed discussion of various points that are relevant to that later in this section. One of them is that in dying into God, what Kung says is the resurrection, the event would have happened outside of time in eternity. One thing that is clear about human testimony, it is only definable within the confines of temporality. I don't think we could possibly even have the language to construct evidence with that wasn't related to time.
This point seems to me to be somewhat like the point made yesterday about how Paul and the even earlier followers of Jesus who taught him made some of the hardest to believe aspects of Christianity, the crucifixion and Resurrection, the very centers of the faith when they could have made their job of converting people to their movement easier by making easier to believe claims. And that seems to me to be related to the fact that so much that is used against the Jewish and Christian religions is based on the confessions of wrongdoing and faithlessness that are found nowhere in history except within the Scriptures.
The point about the padding of the stories about Jesus in the later Apocryphal books is evidence that there was a hankering for more story than what would be chosen as the canonical books provided. Subsequent centuries have continued that creation of extra-Scriptural invention and filling in details. And that didn't end with the 18th century enlightenment but, especially in the Marioloatry of post-Baroque, romantic Catholicism it expanded absurdly. I may give Kung's short history of that which comes soon after this discussion in his book.
In looking for seasonal music around Easter, one of the most interesting things I've found is that most, by a large percentage, of the music of the season deals with the crucifixion and almost none deals directly with the Resurrection. Almost all of the Easter music deals with the encounters of the risen Jesus with his friends and followers, none with the event of his Resurrection. That could be due to the complete lack of reporting on the actual event and what it was like - how could it, one of the few things that can be said about it as given it is unlike anything in human experience - or how it looked, what actually happened, etc. But some of it is certainly a realization that any attempt to describe it will inevitably be as false as any fable or tall tale humans could construct.
As presented, as claimed, it is like the virgin birth claims, unlike anything else, something not knowable by analogy with other human experiences. Those who want to debunk it might not like that but it is clearly one of the claims that would be debunkers would have to get past in order to make a tidy case against it.
The first time I read this in the list of difficulties I didn't think it was a particularly strong one but that was before I considered this matter of testimony and how it is considered and dealt with.
Note: As someone raised as a Catholic and who remembers the pre-Vatican II church rather well, I found Kung's short but full history of Marian devotion and its devolution into Mariolatry quite interesting. Most of what I would bet most Catholics believe about that aspect of the Catholic tradition is based on very late and often openly political use of the very lightly documented life of the mother of Jesus. While there are aspects of that I am very sympathetic to, the visions of Juan Diego and Juan Bernardino, Mary as the "Brown Lady" and their importance to the poor people of Latin America and elsewhere, I don't happen to have ever found the stories of apparitions important or interesting. Many of the reported messages - an astonishing number of them in the form of "secrets" are so banal and so absurd and so self-aggrandizing that it is outrageous to believe they could come from someone in the state of beatitude that Mary is supposed to be in, especially after the dreadful and very likely mentally ill Pius IX embroidered the documented accounts of her out of all possible proportions.
I hope to go through what Kung said in that regard later. Maybe in May. In the meantime, get his book On Being Christian and read it for yourself.
* Also: I could also go, at length, into how people often speak out of both sides of their mouths in matters such as the rules surrounding evidence and what evidence they like and that which they don't like and how seldom that is based in the actual difference in quality between the two. The stupid slogan that Carl Sagan stole and distorted into a far worse form from the true skeptic Marcello Truzzi, that "extraordinary claims" require "extraordinary evidence" has been elevated, not only in popular stupidity but also in academic, even scientific ideology into a "rule of logic" or so the internet tells me.
That can't possibly be true. If you hold that standards of evidence are inadequate to support things you don't like, that you declare are invalid, they can't become valid merely because they are, also, applied to things you do like. That slogan is merely an insistence on the part of the "skeptic" (you may more accurately say "atheist" in most cases) that their ideological preferences and prejudices be introduced as a "rule of logic". Such is the degeneration of culture under materialist-atheistic-scientism and its PR methods that they have suckered a couple of generations of allegedly educated people into allowing them to do that and to call it "logic."
Marcello Truzzi is reported by some of those who knew him. to have been on the verge of writing a disavowal of the idea when he died. I don't know if that's true or not but the idea is obviously an ideological tool, not a rule of logical analysis that will lead to the truth.
The reverse side. The very reserve of the New Testament Gospels and letters in regard to the resurrection creates trust. The resurrection is neither depicted nor described. The interest in exaggeration and the craving for demonstration, which are characteristic of the Apocrypha, make the latter incredible. The New Testament Easter documents are not meant to be testimonies for the resurrection but testimonies to the raised and risen Jesus.
One of the things that was most surprising to me since coming online is that so many of those whose minds are formed by what they see on crime shows on TV and movies don't seem to realize that humans' testimony of their own observation and experience constitute evidence, especially when that evidence can be tested as is supposed to happen in a law court. That idiotic demotion of testimony contributed in the successful campaign to cover up the crimes of the Trump regime as the direct observational testimony of credible witnesses, in most cases corroborated by other witnesses and even physical confirmation and confirmation in the chronology of events was claimed to be inadequate by those who lied about the guilt that was proved.
Given how addled most people are by their addiction to entertainment, I can imagine a lot of reasons for the belief that evidence is something physical, testable in a laboratory, which some sexy plain-clothes cop happens to have fall into their laps in such abundance and is of such confirmatory strength as only happens in ridiculous Hollywood scripts, as written or as padded out by directors, actors and others. Though I could certainly go at length into the uses of evidence in popular atheist debunkery as opposed to its use in science, honest and dishonest, there isn't time to get into that enormous chasm between integrity and sham.*
But, in reality, often the only evidence that is available is testimonial, if we chose to withhold judgement, for or against, in those cases when only witness evidence could inform a decision, an enormous amount of what we consider to be true or even probable would be forever frozen in a state of indecision. I would note that for anyone holding out for more than is available who opts for disbelief is, as well, making a choice to believe because disbelief is also a belief and if they support their disbelief on the lack of any but testimonial evidence, they are doing exactly what they would claim is not allowed when the decision is to believe the testimony given.
Kung's proposal to test the claims by the modesty of what is contained in them seems to me to be a reasonable one to consider. But one thing that all of the sources, all of the Gospels and letters in the New Testament would seem to agree on, there were no direct human witnesses to the actual raising of Jesus from the dead. Kung gives a very long and detailed discussion of various points that are relevant to that later in this section. One of them is that in dying into God, what Kung says is the resurrection, the event would have happened outside of time in eternity. One thing that is clear about human testimony, it is only definable within the confines of temporality. I don't think we could possibly even have the language to construct evidence with that wasn't related to time.
This point seems to me to be somewhat like the point made yesterday about how Paul and the even earlier followers of Jesus who taught him made some of the hardest to believe aspects of Christianity, the crucifixion and Resurrection, the very centers of the faith when they could have made their job of converting people to their movement easier by making easier to believe claims. And that seems to me to be related to the fact that so much that is used against the Jewish and Christian religions is based on the confessions of wrongdoing and faithlessness that are found nowhere in history except within the Scriptures.
The point about the padding of the stories about Jesus in the later Apocryphal books is evidence that there was a hankering for more story than what would be chosen as the canonical books provided. Subsequent centuries have continued that creation of extra-Scriptural invention and filling in details. And that didn't end with the 18th century enlightenment but, especially in the Marioloatry of post-Baroque, romantic Catholicism it expanded absurdly. I may give Kung's short history of that which comes soon after this discussion in his book.
In looking for seasonal music around Easter, one of the most interesting things I've found is that most, by a large percentage, of the music of the season deals with the crucifixion and almost none deals directly with the Resurrection. Almost all of the Easter music deals with the encounters of the risen Jesus with his friends and followers, none with the event of his Resurrection. That could be due to the complete lack of reporting on the actual event and what it was like - how could it, one of the few things that can be said about it as given it is unlike anything in human experience - or how it looked, what actually happened, etc. But some of it is certainly a realization that any attempt to describe it will inevitably be as false as any fable or tall tale humans could construct.
As presented, as claimed, it is like the virgin birth claims, unlike anything else, something not knowable by analogy with other human experiences. Those who want to debunk it might not like that but it is clearly one of the claims that would be debunkers would have to get past in order to make a tidy case against it.
The first time I read this in the list of difficulties I didn't think it was a particularly strong one but that was before I considered this matter of testimony and how it is considered and dealt with.
Note: As someone raised as a Catholic and who remembers the pre-Vatican II church rather well, I found Kung's short but full history of Marian devotion and its devolution into Mariolatry quite interesting. Most of what I would bet most Catholics believe about that aspect of the Catholic tradition is based on very late and often openly political use of the very lightly documented life of the mother of Jesus. While there are aspects of that I am very sympathetic to, the visions of Juan Diego and Juan Bernardino, Mary as the "Brown Lady" and their importance to the poor people of Latin America and elsewhere, I don't happen to have ever found the stories of apparitions important or interesting. Many of the reported messages - an astonishing number of them in the form of "secrets" are so banal and so absurd and so self-aggrandizing that it is outrageous to believe they could come from someone in the state of beatitude that Mary is supposed to be in, especially after the dreadful and very likely mentally ill Pius IX embroidered the documented accounts of her out of all possible proportions.
I hope to go through what Kung said in that regard later. Maybe in May. In the meantime, get his book On Being Christian and read it for yourself.
* Also: I could also go, at length, into how people often speak out of both sides of their mouths in matters such as the rules surrounding evidence and what evidence they like and that which they don't like and how seldom that is based in the actual difference in quality between the two. The stupid slogan that Carl Sagan stole and distorted into a far worse form from the true skeptic Marcello Truzzi, that "extraordinary claims" require "extraordinary evidence" has been elevated, not only in popular stupidity but also in academic, even scientific ideology into a "rule of logic" or so the internet tells me.
That can't possibly be true. If you hold that standards of evidence are inadequate to support things you don't like, that you declare are invalid, they can't become valid merely because they are, also, applied to things you do like. That slogan is merely an insistence on the part of the "skeptic" (you may more accurately say "atheist" in most cases) that their ideological preferences and prejudices be introduced as a "rule of logic". Such is the degeneration of culture under materialist-atheistic-scientism and its PR methods that they have suckered a couple of generations of allegedly educated people into allowing them to do that and to call it "logic."
Marcello Truzzi is reported by some of those who knew him. to have been on the verge of writing a disavowal of the idea when he died. I don't know if that's true or not but the idea is obviously an ideological tool, not a rule of logical analysis that will lead to the truth.
Monday, April 13, 2020
The Resurrection More Than A Report Of A Miracle and Entirely More Than A Metaphor
First Part
Footnote
Second Part
Second difficulty. We tried to understand the numerous miracle stories of the New Testament without assuming a "supernatural" intervention - which cannot be proved - in the laws of nature. It would therefore seem like a dubious retrogression to discredited ideas if we were now suddenly to postulate such a supernatural "intervention" for the miracle of the resurrection: this would contradict all scientific thinking as well as all ordinary convictions and experiences. Understood in this way, the resurrection seems to modern man to be an encumbrance to faith, akin to the virgin birth, the descent into hell or the ascension.
The reverse side. It is possible that the resurrection has a speial character preventing it from being placed without more ado on the same plane as other miraculous or even legendary elements of the primitive Christian tradition. Virgin birth, descent into hell and ascension are in fact listed together with the resurrection in the "Apostle's Creed," which stems from the Roman tradition of the fourth century/ but in the New Testament itself, in contrast to the resurrection, they appear only in isolated passages and without exception in later literary strata. The earliest New Testament witness, the Apostle Paul, never mentions the virgin birth, descent into hell or ascension, but firmly maintains the resurrection of the Crucified as the center of Christian preaching. The resurrection message is not the special experience of a few enthusiasts, the special teaching of some apostles. On the contrary, it belongs to the oldest strata of the New Testament. It is common to all New Testament writings without exception. It proves to be central to the Christian faith and at the same time the basis of all further statements of faith. The question therefore may at last be raised as to whether in the resurrection we are faced with something absolutely final, an eschaton - something which does not face us in the virgin birth, descent into hell or the ascension - where it is no longer appropriate to speak of an intervention within the supernatural system against the laws of nature. We shall have to look into this more closely.
It was about the first time that I wrote anything about the new atheist fad when I pointed out that despite one of those things Richard Dawkins was saying to get into the news, that the Virgin Birth story was testable with science, not only the fact that there were no genetic or other samples of the mother, the son or any proposed human father to test - and so it could not be a claim testable with science - since, as told in the two Gospels that mention it present it as a unique event in the history of the world, as given no other proposed even testable claim of a "virgin birth" could reliably dispose of the claim. I did that while saying that I don't happen to believe the story or to consider it especially important I had enough respect for science to reject the claim that science could be used to either debunk or support the claims of the Virgin Birth.
As an aside, those atheists, uneducated and allegedly educated, who make jokes about the Virgin Birth being parthenogenic, expose their ignorance of parthenogenesis which, human beings having XY sex determination, would not have produced a male offspring, there being no male gamete involved. As I recall, Dawkins didn't make that mistake in anything he said but some people who did that surprised me. Some of whom had studied biology at a collegiate level. And it was a hell of a long time ago that I took that kind of biography course.
That said, it is clear from the descriptions of the Resurrection in the Gospels, in Paul's conversion experience, both as described by the author of Acts and in Paul's letters, the Resurrection of Jesus was not the reanimation of a dead body as is claimed in the other stories of Jesus raising the dead in the Gospels.
The descriptions of the experience of the risen Jesus, the sudden appearances in locked rooms, the sudden disappearances, his appearances to Paul during his conversion experience and as he was under detention make it clear that they were not claiming that his resurrected form was merely a physical body though as they went out of their way to talk about him eating with his followers, in giving the story of him offering to let the skeptical Thomas put his fingers in the wounds on his arms and feet, they were not claiming he was merely physical or merely physical in his new body, which was, though, related in some way with the body that died. What is being described is clearly nothing like the bodies of people as studied by science nor is it merely a metaphor for the emergence of the early movement, the Church.
I find the recourse to "metaphor" in recent biblical discourse to be far less convincing as something addressing what the texts actually say but, even more so as an explanation for the remarkable emergence of Christianity, something which, earlier, I showed surprised someone as sophisticated and gelid-eyed an observer as Tacitus when everything about the events of the crucifixion and subsequent persecution of those who not only stayed with a belief in the Jesus they had known but so many who never saw him in life. The emergence of Christainty in the context it started and emerged in is remarkable in a way that is even more unexplanable if the Resurrection of Jesus was meant as a mere metaphor for the very phenomenon it inspired. The only thing I can believe is that not only did those who heard Paul and the others talk about what they'd experience believe that Jesus had risen from the dead, but that those who report their experience of the risen Jesus were reporting their own experience, not indulging, as a group, in a literary device.
I have decided to go farther into this chapter of Hans Kungs On Being A Christian and so will pick up the posting of these sections as I get a chance to do so.
Footnote
Second Part
Second difficulty. We tried to understand the numerous miracle stories of the New Testament without assuming a "supernatural" intervention - which cannot be proved - in the laws of nature. It would therefore seem like a dubious retrogression to discredited ideas if we were now suddenly to postulate such a supernatural "intervention" for the miracle of the resurrection: this would contradict all scientific thinking as well as all ordinary convictions and experiences. Understood in this way, the resurrection seems to modern man to be an encumbrance to faith, akin to the virgin birth, the descent into hell or the ascension.
The reverse side. It is possible that the resurrection has a speial character preventing it from being placed without more ado on the same plane as other miraculous or even legendary elements of the primitive Christian tradition. Virgin birth, descent into hell and ascension are in fact listed together with the resurrection in the "Apostle's Creed," which stems from the Roman tradition of the fourth century/ but in the New Testament itself, in contrast to the resurrection, they appear only in isolated passages and without exception in later literary strata. The earliest New Testament witness, the Apostle Paul, never mentions the virgin birth, descent into hell or ascension, but firmly maintains the resurrection of the Crucified as the center of Christian preaching. The resurrection message is not the special experience of a few enthusiasts, the special teaching of some apostles. On the contrary, it belongs to the oldest strata of the New Testament. It is common to all New Testament writings without exception. It proves to be central to the Christian faith and at the same time the basis of all further statements of faith. The question therefore may at last be raised as to whether in the resurrection we are faced with something absolutely final, an eschaton - something which does not face us in the virgin birth, descent into hell or the ascension - where it is no longer appropriate to speak of an intervention within the supernatural system against the laws of nature. We shall have to look into this more closely.
It was about the first time that I wrote anything about the new atheist fad when I pointed out that despite one of those things Richard Dawkins was saying to get into the news, that the Virgin Birth story was testable with science, not only the fact that there were no genetic or other samples of the mother, the son or any proposed human father to test - and so it could not be a claim testable with science - since, as told in the two Gospels that mention it present it as a unique event in the history of the world, as given no other proposed even testable claim of a "virgin birth" could reliably dispose of the claim. I did that while saying that I don't happen to believe the story or to consider it especially important I had enough respect for science to reject the claim that science could be used to either debunk or support the claims of the Virgin Birth.
As an aside, those atheists, uneducated and allegedly educated, who make jokes about the Virgin Birth being parthenogenic, expose their ignorance of parthenogenesis which, human beings having XY sex determination, would not have produced a male offspring, there being no male gamete involved. As I recall, Dawkins didn't make that mistake in anything he said but some people who did that surprised me. Some of whom had studied biology at a collegiate level. And it was a hell of a long time ago that I took that kind of biography course.
That said, it is clear from the descriptions of the Resurrection in the Gospels, in Paul's conversion experience, both as described by the author of Acts and in Paul's letters, the Resurrection of Jesus was not the reanimation of a dead body as is claimed in the other stories of Jesus raising the dead in the Gospels.
The descriptions of the experience of the risen Jesus, the sudden appearances in locked rooms, the sudden disappearances, his appearances to Paul during his conversion experience and as he was under detention make it clear that they were not claiming that his resurrected form was merely a physical body though as they went out of their way to talk about him eating with his followers, in giving the story of him offering to let the skeptical Thomas put his fingers in the wounds on his arms and feet, they were not claiming he was merely physical or merely physical in his new body, which was, though, related in some way with the body that died. What is being described is clearly nothing like the bodies of people as studied by science nor is it merely a metaphor for the emergence of the early movement, the Church.
I find the recourse to "metaphor" in recent biblical discourse to be far less convincing as something addressing what the texts actually say but, even more so as an explanation for the remarkable emergence of Christianity, something which, earlier, I showed surprised someone as sophisticated and gelid-eyed an observer as Tacitus when everything about the events of the crucifixion and subsequent persecution of those who not only stayed with a belief in the Jesus they had known but so many who never saw him in life. The emergence of Christainty in the context it started and emerged in is remarkable in a way that is even more unexplanable if the Resurrection of Jesus was meant as a mere metaphor for the very phenomenon it inspired. The only thing I can believe is that not only did those who heard Paul and the others talk about what they'd experience believe that Jesus had risen from the dead, but that those who report their experience of the risen Jesus were reporting their own experience, not indulging, as a group, in a literary device.
I have decided to go farther into this chapter of Hans Kungs On Being A Christian and so will pick up the posting of these sections as I get a chance to do so.
The Stumbling Block As The Center Of Faith and The Myth Of The Objective Observer
Part 1:
Footnote
The new atheism fad of the 00s and lingering on even as its fashion has faded was good for religion, I think, in that it led many of us who weren't that well versed in theology to look again at the literature of intellectual engagement over God and the many lines of divergence within theology and religion. In many cases, especially in both poplar writing and rigid ideological and sectarian writing, the kind that gets the most attention from low and middle brow browsers and scribblers, that literature isn't very good and is quit unworthy of the topic. But at the high end, it is some of the most impressive intellectual engagement there is in Western or, in fact, any culture. A Reinhold Niebuhr, a Hans Kung from the first pages of reading them will instantly throw you in a deeper end than your typical modern, Western university level education will have made you comfortable in. Typically a fine theologian will make full use of an enormous range of research and analysis and documentation in a vast range of topics and will have read more books than just about any other professional in any other branch of scholarship. Even fine historians or philosophers will seldom make references, almost always with full citations and attributions, as wide as a good theologian will.
Back in the 00s, even before I'd started reading more theology than I had in my misspent youth and earlier adulthood, I was generally struck at the extremely low level of engagement with intellectual culture that was on display among the new atheists and even the older generation of ideological evangelical atheists, the CSICOP generation and its predecessors. In the course of my review of that literature, it was interesting to contrast the writing of some of the bright lights and even the legitimate intellectuals among them, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, adding to my youthful reading and early rejection of the existentialists and Marxists. I have noted here before that not only did the prominent theologians of those generations address and at times very skillfully and honestly eviscerate the arguments of a Dewey or a Russell, that it was far more often that the theologians would deal directly with the opposition in direct confrontation and on the same footing and very often they had the better arguments.
The same can't be said of their intellectual grand-kids, as it were, the generation of Dawkins and Dennett and, in turn, their spawn, the generation of Harris, Carroll, Coyne. None of them are intellectually prepared to directly confront the best of theology, which is probably why they try to remake the rules so they won't have to. You see, they have "science" on their side, they don't have to address their intellectual opponents pretending that when they are addressing theology they don't do so on the grounds of science which is entirely removed from the areas that theology covers by the conventional agreement of those who do legitimate science. Even a Daniel Dennett who, as a man who made his living doing philosophy, should know that distinction but Dennett was never that much of a philosopher, choosing to be a groupie of scientism when any philosopher worthy of drawing a paycheck as such should have the chops to know that scientism is an absurd and self-contradicting position which is, itself, not a scientifically testable idea and so self-refuting.
The new atheism was, I concluded, a symptom of the general decay of intellectual culture under the influences of modernist nihilism and, more importantly, the damage done by bringing the worst forms of mass media in to dominate the time and so lives of the general population. It was an appeal made by the intellectual lightweight to those who were unprepared for anything better, that so many of the ones who took to it had university credentials shows how bad that intellectual decay is - I know, I have struggled with it my entire adulthood, many others never thought to struggle. I was never so far gone that I didn't realize that atheism is an intellectually vapid position but I did take the cowards way out in agnosticism, an eternal refusal to make a choice, the intellectual equivalent of a non-voter who refuses to take responsibility to try to do something to make life better.
As the passage I started giving you yesterday continues, Hans Kung addresses some of the general attacks by enlightenment era anti-Christian criticism, going back to a time when the critics of Christianity did so from an intellectual foundation instead of with the tactics of public relations and advertising.
Psychology can explain a great deal in the world, but not everything. Nor do the prevailing conditions explain everything. In any case, if we want to interpret psychologically the initial stages of Christianity, we may not merely presume, postulate, work out ingenious hypotheses, [a fault of the historical-critical way of using the Bible, in far too many cases] but we must consult without prejudice those who initiated the movement and whose most important testimonies have been preserved for us. Fro the latter it becomes clear that this Passion story with its disastrous outcome - why should it ever have entered into the memory of mankind? - was transmitted only because there was also an Easter story which made the Passion story (and the story of the action lying behind it) appear in a completely different light.
But, far from ceasing, the difficulties only really begin at this point. For if someone wants to accept what are known as the resurrection or Easter stories literally with simple faith, instead of trying to find a psychological explanation, that will not be the end of it. A little reflection, any kind of reasoning, will bring him up against almost unsurmountable obstacles. Historical-critical exegesis only increases the embarrassment, as it has done ever since the most acute polemicist of classical German literature - Gotthold Ephraim Lessing - two hundred years ago brought to the notice of a bewildered public those "Fragments by an Anonymous Person (the Hamburg rationalist H. S. Riemarus, died 1768) among which were "The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples" and "Concerning the Story of the Resurrection." If, as men of the twentieth century, we want to believe in some sort of resurrection not only halfheartedly, with a bad conscience, but honestly and with conviction, the difficulties must be faced squarely and without prejudices of faith or unbelief. But it is just at this point that the reverse side of the difficulty is revealed. There are surmountable difficulties.
First difficulty, What is true of the Gospels as a whole is particularly true of the Easter stories; they are not unbiased reports by disinterested observers but depositions in favor of Jesus submitted in faith by supremely interested and committed persons. They are therefore not so much historical as theological documents; not records of proceedings or chronicles, but testimonies of faith. The Easter faith, which characterized the whole Jesus tradition from the very beginning, obviously determined also the Easter accounts themselves, thus creating extraordinary difficulties from the star for a historical scrutiny. It is in the Easter stories that we must ask about the Easter message.
The reverse side of this difficulty is that this is the very way in which the central importance of the Easter faith to primitive Christendom becomes clear. At least for primitive Christendom, Christian faith stands or falls iwth the evidence of Jesus' resurrection, without which there is no content to Christian preaching or even faith. Thus Easter appears - opportunely or inopportunely - not only as the basic unit, but also as the permanent, constitutive core of the Christian creed. Even the earliest brief Christological formulas in Paul's letters, if they amount to more than a title, are concentrated on Jesus' death and resurrection.
It was certainly not something which the earliest Christians were unaware of that their claim that Jesus, a disgraced, executed criminal (the disdainful description of him that the arrogant, elite Roman intellectual Tacitus left as independent evidence of the reality of Jesus*) was raised from the dead by God, that he, in a new body recognizable by the wounds of crucifixion but also different enough so that his closest followers sometimes didn't know it was him until he let them know it, the very people who gave the account of the crucifixion and Resurrection knew that other people would find these very stories unbelievable or at least very hard to believe.
The difficulty raised, that it was interested parties who told the stories is certainly not considered an impediment in most other areas of discourse. History is always told in documents left by the parties involved or who, if an observer and not an actor, almost always have a partial point of view.
The ideal of the "objective observer" who is not only gifted with having no predisposition or prejudice BUT IS ALSO GIFTED WITH AN ENHANCED OBSERVATIONAL, ANALYTICAL AND REPORTORIAL ACCRUACY SUPERIOR TO OTHERS is a myth. Such "objective" observation doesn't exist. That is something which Lessing or Reimarus may not have known in the 18th century, it is certainly something which we not only know today but which the hardest science made into one of the most astute and important of discoveries in the 20th century. Not that the culture of science or the general culture of modern scientism has caught up to it.
I doubt there is a more credible example to turn to in this than Paul who, by his own confession was a zealous opponent of the earliest followers of Jesus after the Resurrection and whose intellect and astute analytical powers are documented in Romans and his other authentic letters. And, as Kung notes, the very story marked as not-credible by those who scoff and deny, something which, no doubt Paul not only encountered after his conversion but was probably one of before his conversion, was given by him as the central belief which distinguishes a follower of Jesus from a non-follower.
For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
1 Corinthians 1: 19-31
I think the method of Biblical criticism that looks for things you would never expect an avid promoter of faith to have put in their scriptures is one of the more convincing methods. I find the Hebrew-Christian habit of putting some of the most shameful parts of their history and claims into their scriptures to be some of the most convincing aspects of it, they certainly knew their enemies would use their own confessions against them. The Bible is not a royal road to faith, it is hard and difficult and, when read honestly, the very kind of stumbling block that Paul talked about.
If Paul, who, after all, for subsequent Christians is the one who defines what the basic definition of a Christian is, wanted to make it easier to believe, he would certainly have either emphasized other aspects of the teaching and life of Jesus than the hardest to believe or would have left that out altogether. But he didn't. He gave the very thing that was most scandalous about Jesus, his conviction and execution as a criminal, a story which shows his foremost followers - apart from the women - in the worst light, the most incredible of all, his Resurrection, as the defining belief that a Christian had to hold to be a Christian. The very things that Tacitus gave to sneeringly disdain the Christians.
Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.
I will note that even though there have been a few scholars who claim that this passage in Tacitus is a later Christian interpolation, a claim which is weakened by the tone against Jesus and Christianity contained in it, modern scholars, even those who are ready to find whatever they can to dismiss or debunk Christianity today take it as an authentic text from Tacitus. As I probably should have continued above, the game of dismissing what gets said based on the ideological interests of those saying it is most stringently played against those who are well disposed toward religion, most stringently against Christians but also against Jewish scholars, Islamic scholars, etc. It is a standard which those with a predisposition against religion are seldom held up against. But theologians, certainly the best of them and many of those who are average to good constantly present and address the arguments of their opponents in a way that the would-be debunkers seldom address, in my experience. The new atheists, unable to deal with that level of intellectual engagement never have in my experience of engaging with even some of the more famous of them online, Carroll and Coyne, not to mention the likes of PZ Myers.
I will continue with the difficulties that Hans Kung addressed later.
Update: Hate Mail
Oh, that old saw about Paul not being literate and dictating his letters. First, I tend to doubt it. I would expect that as a self-professed Pharisee, Paul would have stood a better than average chance of being literate.
But even if he were illiterate or not a writer the letters bearing his name, especially the ones that modern scholars agree are authentic would prove that as a non-reader-writer, Paul must have had an even more impressive mind. To be able to compose something like 1 Corinthians or Romans without recourse of a number of rough drafts doesn't constitute a lesser intellectual achievement but a far greater one. I can't even write these little posts without going through drafts.
The criticisms of Paul that are legitimate, SOME of what he said about slavery, SOME of what he said about women is due to him dealing with the practical, day-to-day problems within the communities he had helped get established among former-pagans who, certainly, were not uniformly able to give up even some of the most morally abominable practices common to Mediterranean pagan cultures - especially things like the temple prostituting of children and the ubiquitous practice of slavery - but also dealing with the patriarchal, sexist social norms that were certainly ingrained in even many of those who had been converted. His advice to the slave to return to his master was in the context of the master treating him as an equal, as a brother as opposed to as a slave would be treated in Roman dominated societies. His advice to how women should act - the response which by the women in those cities we don't know, as Elizabeth A. Johnson has pointed out - is matched by his totally atypical presentation of women as his equals in discipleship and authority, something which was probably unheard of in Rome and Corinth and elsewhere. Paul is one of the most interestingly complex figures in the classical period, a person of contradictions whose complications can't be understood except within the context in which he operated. As the great scholar Susannah Heschel noted, a huge part of understanding Paul is taking his own personality as it comes through in his writing into account. He certainly couldn't have been an easy person to live with, he was certainly headstrong - as Heschel says, it's no wonder he wasn't married - but he was certainly sincere in his conversion after his experience of the Crucified one as a living being.
Footnote
The new atheism fad of the 00s and lingering on even as its fashion has faded was good for religion, I think, in that it led many of us who weren't that well versed in theology to look again at the literature of intellectual engagement over God and the many lines of divergence within theology and religion. In many cases, especially in both poplar writing and rigid ideological and sectarian writing, the kind that gets the most attention from low and middle brow browsers and scribblers, that literature isn't very good and is quit unworthy of the topic. But at the high end, it is some of the most impressive intellectual engagement there is in Western or, in fact, any culture. A Reinhold Niebuhr, a Hans Kung from the first pages of reading them will instantly throw you in a deeper end than your typical modern, Western university level education will have made you comfortable in. Typically a fine theologian will make full use of an enormous range of research and analysis and documentation in a vast range of topics and will have read more books than just about any other professional in any other branch of scholarship. Even fine historians or philosophers will seldom make references, almost always with full citations and attributions, as wide as a good theologian will.
Back in the 00s, even before I'd started reading more theology than I had in my misspent youth and earlier adulthood, I was generally struck at the extremely low level of engagement with intellectual culture that was on display among the new atheists and even the older generation of ideological evangelical atheists, the CSICOP generation and its predecessors. In the course of my review of that literature, it was interesting to contrast the writing of some of the bright lights and even the legitimate intellectuals among them, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, adding to my youthful reading and early rejection of the existentialists and Marxists. I have noted here before that not only did the prominent theologians of those generations address and at times very skillfully and honestly eviscerate the arguments of a Dewey or a Russell, that it was far more often that the theologians would deal directly with the opposition in direct confrontation and on the same footing and very often they had the better arguments.
The same can't be said of their intellectual grand-kids, as it were, the generation of Dawkins and Dennett and, in turn, their spawn, the generation of Harris, Carroll, Coyne. None of them are intellectually prepared to directly confront the best of theology, which is probably why they try to remake the rules so they won't have to. You see, they have "science" on their side, they don't have to address their intellectual opponents pretending that when they are addressing theology they don't do so on the grounds of science which is entirely removed from the areas that theology covers by the conventional agreement of those who do legitimate science. Even a Daniel Dennett who, as a man who made his living doing philosophy, should know that distinction but Dennett was never that much of a philosopher, choosing to be a groupie of scientism when any philosopher worthy of drawing a paycheck as such should have the chops to know that scientism is an absurd and self-contradicting position which is, itself, not a scientifically testable idea and so self-refuting.
The new atheism was, I concluded, a symptom of the general decay of intellectual culture under the influences of modernist nihilism and, more importantly, the damage done by bringing the worst forms of mass media in to dominate the time and so lives of the general population. It was an appeal made by the intellectual lightweight to those who were unprepared for anything better, that so many of the ones who took to it had university credentials shows how bad that intellectual decay is - I know, I have struggled with it my entire adulthood, many others never thought to struggle. I was never so far gone that I didn't realize that atheism is an intellectually vapid position but I did take the cowards way out in agnosticism, an eternal refusal to make a choice, the intellectual equivalent of a non-voter who refuses to take responsibility to try to do something to make life better.
As the passage I started giving you yesterday continues, Hans Kung addresses some of the general attacks by enlightenment era anti-Christian criticism, going back to a time when the critics of Christianity did so from an intellectual foundation instead of with the tactics of public relations and advertising.
Psychology can explain a great deal in the world, but not everything. Nor do the prevailing conditions explain everything. In any case, if we want to interpret psychologically the initial stages of Christianity, we may not merely presume, postulate, work out ingenious hypotheses, [a fault of the historical-critical way of using the Bible, in far too many cases] but we must consult without prejudice those who initiated the movement and whose most important testimonies have been preserved for us. Fro the latter it becomes clear that this Passion story with its disastrous outcome - why should it ever have entered into the memory of mankind? - was transmitted only because there was also an Easter story which made the Passion story (and the story of the action lying behind it) appear in a completely different light.
But, far from ceasing, the difficulties only really begin at this point. For if someone wants to accept what are known as the resurrection or Easter stories literally with simple faith, instead of trying to find a psychological explanation, that will not be the end of it. A little reflection, any kind of reasoning, will bring him up against almost unsurmountable obstacles. Historical-critical exegesis only increases the embarrassment, as it has done ever since the most acute polemicist of classical German literature - Gotthold Ephraim Lessing - two hundred years ago brought to the notice of a bewildered public those "Fragments by an Anonymous Person (the Hamburg rationalist H. S. Riemarus, died 1768) among which were "The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples" and "Concerning the Story of the Resurrection." If, as men of the twentieth century, we want to believe in some sort of resurrection not only halfheartedly, with a bad conscience, but honestly and with conviction, the difficulties must be faced squarely and without prejudices of faith or unbelief. But it is just at this point that the reverse side of the difficulty is revealed. There are surmountable difficulties.
First difficulty, What is true of the Gospels as a whole is particularly true of the Easter stories; they are not unbiased reports by disinterested observers but depositions in favor of Jesus submitted in faith by supremely interested and committed persons. They are therefore not so much historical as theological documents; not records of proceedings or chronicles, but testimonies of faith. The Easter faith, which characterized the whole Jesus tradition from the very beginning, obviously determined also the Easter accounts themselves, thus creating extraordinary difficulties from the star for a historical scrutiny. It is in the Easter stories that we must ask about the Easter message.
The reverse side of this difficulty is that this is the very way in which the central importance of the Easter faith to primitive Christendom becomes clear. At least for primitive Christendom, Christian faith stands or falls iwth the evidence of Jesus' resurrection, without which there is no content to Christian preaching or even faith. Thus Easter appears - opportunely or inopportunely - not only as the basic unit, but also as the permanent, constitutive core of the Christian creed. Even the earliest brief Christological formulas in Paul's letters, if they amount to more than a title, are concentrated on Jesus' death and resurrection.
It was certainly not something which the earliest Christians were unaware of that their claim that Jesus, a disgraced, executed criminal (the disdainful description of him that the arrogant, elite Roman intellectual Tacitus left as independent evidence of the reality of Jesus*) was raised from the dead by God, that he, in a new body recognizable by the wounds of crucifixion but also different enough so that his closest followers sometimes didn't know it was him until he let them know it, the very people who gave the account of the crucifixion and Resurrection knew that other people would find these very stories unbelievable or at least very hard to believe.
The difficulty raised, that it was interested parties who told the stories is certainly not considered an impediment in most other areas of discourse. History is always told in documents left by the parties involved or who, if an observer and not an actor, almost always have a partial point of view.
The ideal of the "objective observer" who is not only gifted with having no predisposition or prejudice BUT IS ALSO GIFTED WITH AN ENHANCED OBSERVATIONAL, ANALYTICAL AND REPORTORIAL ACCRUACY SUPERIOR TO OTHERS is a myth. Such "objective" observation doesn't exist. That is something which Lessing or Reimarus may not have known in the 18th century, it is certainly something which we not only know today but which the hardest science made into one of the most astute and important of discoveries in the 20th century. Not that the culture of science or the general culture of modern scientism has caught up to it.
I doubt there is a more credible example to turn to in this than Paul who, by his own confession was a zealous opponent of the earliest followers of Jesus after the Resurrection and whose intellect and astute analytical powers are documented in Romans and his other authentic letters. And, as Kung notes, the very story marked as not-credible by those who scoff and deny, something which, no doubt Paul not only encountered after his conversion but was probably one of before his conversion, was given by him as the central belief which distinguishes a follower of Jesus from a non-follower.
For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
1 Corinthians 1: 19-31
I think the method of Biblical criticism that looks for things you would never expect an avid promoter of faith to have put in their scriptures is one of the more convincing methods. I find the Hebrew-Christian habit of putting some of the most shameful parts of their history and claims into their scriptures to be some of the most convincing aspects of it, they certainly knew their enemies would use their own confessions against them. The Bible is not a royal road to faith, it is hard and difficult and, when read honestly, the very kind of stumbling block that Paul talked about.
If Paul, who, after all, for subsequent Christians is the one who defines what the basic definition of a Christian is, wanted to make it easier to believe, he would certainly have either emphasized other aspects of the teaching and life of Jesus than the hardest to believe or would have left that out altogether. But he didn't. He gave the very thing that was most scandalous about Jesus, his conviction and execution as a criminal, a story which shows his foremost followers - apart from the women - in the worst light, the most incredible of all, his Resurrection, as the defining belief that a Christian had to hold to be a Christian. The very things that Tacitus gave to sneeringly disdain the Christians.
Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.
I will note that even though there have been a few scholars who claim that this passage in Tacitus is a later Christian interpolation, a claim which is weakened by the tone against Jesus and Christianity contained in it, modern scholars, even those who are ready to find whatever they can to dismiss or debunk Christianity today take it as an authentic text from Tacitus. As I probably should have continued above, the game of dismissing what gets said based on the ideological interests of those saying it is most stringently played against those who are well disposed toward religion, most stringently against Christians but also against Jewish scholars, Islamic scholars, etc. It is a standard which those with a predisposition against religion are seldom held up against. But theologians, certainly the best of them and many of those who are average to good constantly present and address the arguments of their opponents in a way that the would-be debunkers seldom address, in my experience. The new atheists, unable to deal with that level of intellectual engagement never have in my experience of engaging with even some of the more famous of them online, Carroll and Coyne, not to mention the likes of PZ Myers.
I will continue with the difficulties that Hans Kung addressed later.
Update: Hate Mail
Oh, that old saw about Paul not being literate and dictating his letters. First, I tend to doubt it. I would expect that as a self-professed Pharisee, Paul would have stood a better than average chance of being literate.
But even if he were illiterate or not a writer the letters bearing his name, especially the ones that modern scholars agree are authentic would prove that as a non-reader-writer, Paul must have had an even more impressive mind. To be able to compose something like 1 Corinthians or Romans without recourse of a number of rough drafts doesn't constitute a lesser intellectual achievement but a far greater one. I can't even write these little posts without going through drafts.
The criticisms of Paul that are legitimate, SOME of what he said about slavery, SOME of what he said about women is due to him dealing with the practical, day-to-day problems within the communities he had helped get established among former-pagans who, certainly, were not uniformly able to give up even some of the most morally abominable practices common to Mediterranean pagan cultures - especially things like the temple prostituting of children and the ubiquitous practice of slavery - but also dealing with the patriarchal, sexist social norms that were certainly ingrained in even many of those who had been converted. His advice to the slave to return to his master was in the context of the master treating him as an equal, as a brother as opposed to as a slave would be treated in Roman dominated societies. His advice to how women should act - the response which by the women in those cities we don't know, as Elizabeth A. Johnson has pointed out - is matched by his totally atypical presentation of women as his equals in discipleship and authority, something which was probably unheard of in Rome and Corinth and elsewhere. Paul is one of the most interestingly complex figures in the classical period, a person of contradictions whose complications can't be understood except within the context in which he operated. As the great scholar Susannah Heschel noted, a huge part of understanding Paul is taking his own personality as it comes through in his writing into account. He certainly couldn't have been an easy person to live with, he was certainly headstrong - as Heschel says, it's no wonder he wasn't married - but he was certainly sincere in his conversion after his experience of the Crucified one as a living being.
Sunday, April 12, 2020
It's Good To Have Heroes
This movie came up in the sidebar Youtube and I watched it, it made me feel better than just about anything I've seen lately so I thought you'd like to see it. This guy and his parents are great.
Footnote On The Morning Post
Part 1
Earlier today I noted the difference in the levels of integrity between today's orthodox scientistic-atheisic- materialism and the levels of integrity of the earliest followers of Jesus as a means of evaluating whether or not they really believed what they claimed to. The quality of the integrity of believing in the risen Jesus and the quality of believing in such necessities of scientistic-atheistic-materialism (for convenience maybe I should just call it SAM) is can be determined and one of the most obvious distinctions should concern the desire for them to convince other people of their beliefs.
A believer in the risen Jesus should be expected to devote themselves to trying to convince others of their belief even at great risk to their lives. As it is documented that James and Peter and Paul, Stephen, etc. did. The old tradition is that all of the named Apostles except Judas Iscariot, died a martyr. The universalism of the Gospel of Jesus and, especially, as articulated in the rest of the New Testament holds that God desires all to be saved - the radical meaning of which extends to the entirety of creation in some of the theological articulations of it. I will come clean and say that I am of that belief, that the salvation that Jesus taught extends to all of Creation. I am a radical universalist.
People, peoples' minds, hearts, souls, are considered to be of the highest possible significance and importance to the original Jesus movement and Christianity so the continued attempt to convince people of that makes complete sense.
The desire to save peoples' entire being is entirely consonant with a belief in Christianity, a Christian who does that clearly is acting with complete integrity.
The opposite view of people, of human minds is held by contemporary scientistic-atheistic-materialism. There has been a constant project of demotion of, first some people then gradually expanding to the entirety of humanity under that intellectual regime. As I have noted, under such atheist ideology as academic study permeates the social sciences and materialist philosophy. In their desire to make everything conform to their rigid monism there is the ultimate discounting of human minds as either being a delusional by-product of material causation without any semiotic significance or actual meaning - hold that and you can get a full professorship in a philosophy department or one in the social or even real sciences.
You would not think that a motivation to propagate such a belief would be strong in such believers. According to the belief, itself, it must be delusional as all consciousness is held to be delusional - among other insignificant organisms as human beings are held to be, such a desire would not often be exhibited by people who really believe in that stuff. Yet such an urge to evangelize for SAM is ubiquitous among those who claim to really believe that.
If they really believed it, they would not care what their fellow insignificant beings thought because all of their thoughts mean nothing. Their minds are nothing, their lives mean nothing, they have no significance and no value. The nihilism that is forced by a rigorous adoption of materialism, atheism, scientism, really does have that end, it is an eschaton of emptiness, any attempt to promote itself would have to be sound and (as is so often on display among atheists) fury that, if they had any integrity, IF THEY REALLY BELIEVED IT, they would have to hold that their very claims signify nothing.
Earlier today I noted the difference in the levels of integrity between today's orthodox scientistic-atheisic- materialism and the levels of integrity of the earliest followers of Jesus as a means of evaluating whether or not they really believed what they claimed to. The quality of the integrity of believing in the risen Jesus and the quality of believing in such necessities of scientistic-atheistic-materialism (for convenience maybe I should just call it SAM) is can be determined and one of the most obvious distinctions should concern the desire for them to convince other people of their beliefs.
A believer in the risen Jesus should be expected to devote themselves to trying to convince others of their belief even at great risk to their lives. As it is documented that James and Peter and Paul, Stephen, etc. did. The old tradition is that all of the named Apostles except Judas Iscariot, died a martyr. The universalism of the Gospel of Jesus and, especially, as articulated in the rest of the New Testament holds that God desires all to be saved - the radical meaning of which extends to the entirety of creation in some of the theological articulations of it. I will come clean and say that I am of that belief, that the salvation that Jesus taught extends to all of Creation. I am a radical universalist.
People, peoples' minds, hearts, souls, are considered to be of the highest possible significance and importance to the original Jesus movement and Christianity so the continued attempt to convince people of that makes complete sense.
The desire to save peoples' entire being is entirely consonant with a belief in Christianity, a Christian who does that clearly is acting with complete integrity.
The opposite view of people, of human minds is held by contemporary scientistic-atheistic-materialism. There has been a constant project of demotion of, first some people then gradually expanding to the entirety of humanity under that intellectual regime. As I have noted, under such atheist ideology as academic study permeates the social sciences and materialist philosophy. In their desire to make everything conform to their rigid monism there is the ultimate discounting of human minds as either being a delusional by-product of material causation without any semiotic significance or actual meaning - hold that and you can get a full professorship in a philosophy department or one in the social or even real sciences.
You would not think that a motivation to propagate such a belief would be strong in such believers. According to the belief, itself, it must be delusional as all consciousness is held to be delusional - among other insignificant organisms as human beings are held to be, such a desire would not often be exhibited by people who really believe in that stuff. Yet such an urge to evangelize for SAM is ubiquitous among those who claim to really believe that.
If they really believed it, they would not care what their fellow insignificant beings thought because all of their thoughts mean nothing. Their minds are nothing, their lives mean nothing, they have no significance and no value. The nihilism that is forced by a rigorous adoption of materialism, atheism, scientism, really does have that end, it is an eschaton of emptiness, any attempt to promote itself would have to be sound and (as is so often on display among atheists) fury that, if they had any integrity, IF THEY REALLY BELIEVED IT, they would have to hold that their very claims signify nothing.
Last Dead Letter
What is said at Eschaton stays at Eschaton and doesn't travel far beyond that. And it's not even important even there. It's a cul-de-sac where codgers talk smack. Only it doesn't work on anyone who doesn't care and once you realize it doesn't matter outside of that small club you don't care. I don't get the feeling that the former regulars there who found my reactions to it amusing in the past are really interested in it. So I'm dropping it.
After leaving this man to die in complete isolation, how did it come about that his followers not only clung to his message under the impact of his "personality," . . . but immediately made this person himself the essential content of the message?
It is one of the most telling and conclusive deficiencies of the materialist-atheist-scientistic view of reality that it quickly is obvious what it's useful for and what it's not any good for, at all.
It is good for mentally, at best, destroying anything you want to deny, God, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc. As the early-modern materialists and scientistic atheists proved, one of the things they most wanted to be rid of were the moral teachings of the monotheistic religions that had come to such enormous influence in the world, probably the foremost of those the requirement of providing for the least among you but also just about anything in that monotheistic tradition that impinged on their own desires and benefits. That led to the libertines of the late renaissance and baroque periods through the attempts to come up with a rational framework replacing morality with formulations of self-interest and utilitarianism and as the obvious absurdities of those became more apparent and - as atheist-materialists will - into the inversion of morality and even intellectualism under Nietzsche and those like him and following him.
It is good for denying the validity of anything you don't want to have to consider is possibly true, that, in the late 20th and 21st centuries is all the phenomenon of organized "skepticism" is good for. In the case of the absurdly successful debunking started by Paul Kurtz, CSICOP, the decadence of their ideology became clear in the one and only and totally disastrousscientific investigation it undertook, the sTARBABY scandal (I wrote about it here at length with links and citations, see my archive) in which not only the scientific and mathematical incompetence of even such "skeptics" as taught the relevant topics at world-renowned universities but the main figures, within CSICOP. It also revealed the complete acceptance of the exposed incompetence and Nixonian dishonesty of the scientists prominent in the leadership of that major organ of "skeptical" - for which you can with complete safety substitute materialist-atheist-scientism - orthodoxy. As the soon to be former ex-leader of CSICOP, Dennis Rawlins quickly discovered, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation . . . was primarily a public relations gimmick that had no interest in scientific integrity or investigation, it was an exercise in vulgar debunkery that demonstrated that the scientists and philosophy teachers were ready to abandon science for the most vulgar levels of show-biz as practiced by its most famous member, James Randi.
As the atheists' progress continues into the decadence it reaches what is, perhaps, its ultimate decadence in the late 20th century in which the imperatives of intellectual materialist atheism-scientism have led to the denial of the significance and even existence of the consciousness which articulates the logical conclusions of materialism which forces what I have to hold is that ultimate decadence in eliminative materialism as will get you a faculty position at philosophy departments universities as eminent as Tufts, Yale, and the University of California system. From which you can debunk the significance or even existence of the minds which you are supposed to be improving, filling those loci of insignificance with the fully thought out ideas, the significance of which you hold as an intellectual and logical conclusion you must, of necessity by your own holdings, must hold are totally meaningless.
And as you are cheered on by your fellow atheist-materialists within the science departments of your and other universities from which they make a good living dispensing science, the significance of which, not to mention a category properly called "truth," thing even more remote from the realm of possibility in their ideology, no doubt, protecting and defending all of the privileges, honors and esteem of ones so intellectually accomplished. As is the way with university faculties. All proving that none of them believes a word of what they hold are truths which are to be insisted on.
Not to mention their demand for the acquiescent belief of those uninitiated into the complexities of their philosophical-scientific tergiversations. And that is the right word for what they are paid to come up with. They are oddly insistent on being believed for people who would seem to have no logical claim to want something they had so little regard for as the minds and hearts of anyone.
---------------
The central role that our conscious experience plays in whatever we can possibly have of what we call truth is remarkably demoted in the modern materialist-scientistic- atheist culture. Given the central role that experience, observation, plays in modern science, the engine that was linked to materialist-atheism, and the fact that modern physics has directly confronted the vicissitudes, nay, the very centrality that our conscious experience plays in that most reputable of all the sciences, the very thing which all materialists hold that everything is reducible to, the demotion of our experience, individually and collectively as the human species is dispensed with amazing ease as what is allowed to be taken as true. The psychologists of "skepticism" (conventional materialist-atheism) are specialists in coming up with all kinds of seemingly plausible schemes for pooh-poohing the experiences of people whose experience is not to their liking - many of those schemes totally unevidenced in either individual cases or even as existing as a real thing. The decadence of psychology and the credulous faith in it which arose in the 20th century has played an outsized role in the decadence that has come with the rise of such pseudo-science.
But this is an Easter post, the first in a series I am hoping to write during Holy Week and maybe beyond, current events, the pandemic, the attempt to save American democracy and, more important than even that, egalitarian democracy and equal justice, will certainty intervene.
Since he is the theologian I'm reading the most of right now is Hans Kung* and because he seems to have thoroughly thought through just about everything well before I even had a glimmer of it, I will be relying heavily on him. In speaking about the evidence of the Resurrection of Jesus he deals with the enormous improbability of the Jesus movement surviving and the quick development of Christianity by not only the very first preacher of the risen Jesus - Mary Magdalene but the male followers of Jesus who all fled in terror as the women of the movement stood by him as he was tortured and crucified and buried who very quickly turned and found a courage to not only continue his teachings but who began to make the most incredible claims for him after he died. Kung begins with a long passage of questions that force you to consider how improbable that was and to provoke you to consider what a profound experience must have led to that. I, alas, cannot present his full, magnificent and rigorous argument which begins with a description of just how ignominious the crucifixion of Jesus was, indeed the ignominy of it was enough that even his most ardent male followers fled in a clear lapse of belief, in the Gospels, that is most ignominious in the one who put himself in the role of the greatest believer, Peter. I cannot believe that the account of his denial and abandonment of Jesus would have come down to us except through the confession of Peter, himself.
Here is the start of Kung's questioning.
How did a new beginning come about after such a disastrous end? How did the Jesus movement come into existence after Jesus' death, with such important consequences for the further destiny of the world? How did a community emerge in the name of a crucified man, how did that community take shape as a Christian "Church"?
To be more precise:
How did this condemned heretical teacher become Israel's Messiah the Christ? How did this disowned prophet become "Lord," how did the unmasked seducer of the people become "Saviour," this rejected blasphemer "God's Son"?
[Here it's important to note that all of the earliest members of the Jesus movement which incubated Christainity were all Jews, in the case of the most stunningly surprising and effective of them, Paul, even after his conversion and during his evangilization, he described himself as not only a Jew but a religious fanatic among Jews, one of the champions of The Law, a Pharisee. So Kung's characterizations would have been entirely relevant for those earliest followers for whom Jesus, the Crucified, became known as all of those things.]
After leaving this man to die in complete isolation, how did it come about that his followers not only clung to his message under the impact of his "personality," his words and deeds, not only summoned up their courage come time after the catastrophe to continue to proclaim his message of the kingdom and the will of God - for instance, the "Sermon on the Mount" - but immediately made this person himself the essential content of the message?
How did they come to proclaim, therefore, not only the Gospel of Jesus, but Jesus himself as the Gospel, unintentionally turning the proclaimer himself into the content of the proclamation, the message of the kingdom of God into the message of Jesus as the Christ of God?
What is the explanation of the fact that this Jesus, the man who was hanged, not despite his death but precisely because of if, become himself the main content of their proclamation? Was not this whole claim hopelessly compromised by his death? Did he not want the greatest things and yet hopelessly failed to get what he wanted? And, in the religio-political situation of the time, could a greater psychological and social impediment to the continuance of his cause have been devised than this disastrous end in public shame and infamy?
Why was it possible then to link any sort of hope with such a hopeless end, to proclaim as God's Messiah the one judged by God, to explain the shameful gallows as a sign of salvation and to turn the obvious bankruptcy of the movement into its phenomenal new emergence? Had they not given up his cause as lost, since his cause was bound up in his person?
Where did they get their strength from; these men who came forward as the apostles so soon after such a breakdown, the complete failure of his plans; who spared no efforts, feared neither adversity nor death, in order to spread this "good" news among men, even to the outposts of the Empire?
Why did there arise that bond to the Master which is so different from the bonds of other movements to the personalities of their founders, as for instance of Marxists to Marx or enthusiastic Freudians to Freud? Why is Jesus not merely venerated, studied and followed as the founder and teacher who lived years ago, but- especially in the worshiping congregation - proclaimed as alive and known as the one who is active at the present time? How did the extraordinary idea arise that he himself leads his followers, his community through his Spirit?
In a word, then we are faces with the historical enigma of the emergence, the beginning, the origin, of Christianity. How different this was from the gradual, peaceful propagation of the teachings of the successful sages, Buddha and Confucius; how different fro the largely violent propagation of the teachings of the victorious Muhammad. And all this was within the lifetime of the founders. How different, after a complete failure and shameful death, were the spontaneous emergence and almost explosive propagation of this message and community in the very name of the defeated leader. After th disastrous outcome of this life, what gave the initial impetus to the unique world-historical development; a truly world transforming religion emerging from the gallows where a man was hanged in shame?
I will issue a spoiler and say that one good reason for that is because the earliest followers of Jesus who knew him, Mary Magdalene, first preacher of his Resurrection, but also those men who had fled in terror as they saw their leader tortured and crucified by the Roman Empire and the puppet king and the religious authorities in Jerusalem in the most ignominious and shameful way, are presented accurately as having seen and experienced Jesus not only as the reanimated corpse imagined by anti-Christian, especially atheist mockery but as far, far more than his body come back to life.
It is one of the most astounding lapses of Christian teaching that they don't present the Resurrection in the terms the last parts of the Gospels and the letters of Paul present the resurrected Jesus as being. More than a reanimated corpse, more than a ghost, more than a metaphorical experience, a feeling, as in the most un-Biblical, anti-textual presentation of modern historical-critical New Testament study does. I doubt anyone would have had the career of James or Peter or the other named followers of Jesus based on a nostalgic feeling for the definitively fallen, crucified Jesus. I certainly think that that oppressor and would be destroyer of the earliest Jesus movement, the Pharisee, Paul, would have never done what he did unless he really, truly experienced what he claims to have experienced in his encounter with the risen Jesus who he doesn't seem to have claimed to have ever seen before he was crucified.
Certainly, for us, this isn't' a phenomenon like a mass delusion - the letters of James and Paul certainly aren't the products of people with severe mental illness or who are prone to delusions. The Letter to the Romans is the product of such a well ordered mind that it even has the respect of some otherwise derisive atheists.
I'll continue with this tomorrow. It's already a long post. But it's a big topic.
*I think going through Kung's trilogy about the exitence of God, about Jesus and Christainity and about the continuance of life after death could be an excellent introduction to not only Christianity but modern thought and culture, in general.
It is good for mentally, at best, destroying anything you want to deny, God, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc. As the early-modern materialists and scientistic atheists proved, one of the things they most wanted to be rid of were the moral teachings of the monotheistic religions that had come to such enormous influence in the world, probably the foremost of those the requirement of providing for the least among you but also just about anything in that monotheistic tradition that impinged on their own desires and benefits. That led to the libertines of the late renaissance and baroque periods through the attempts to come up with a rational framework replacing morality with formulations of self-interest and utilitarianism and as the obvious absurdities of those became more apparent and - as atheist-materialists will - into the inversion of morality and even intellectualism under Nietzsche and those like him and following him.
It is good for denying the validity of anything you don't want to have to consider is possibly true, that, in the late 20th and 21st centuries is all the phenomenon of organized "skepticism" is good for. In the case of the absurdly successful debunking started by Paul Kurtz, CSICOP, the decadence of their ideology became clear in the one and only and totally disastrousscientific investigation it undertook, the sTARBABY scandal (I wrote about it here at length with links and citations, see my archive) in which not only the scientific and mathematical incompetence of even such "skeptics" as taught the relevant topics at world-renowned universities but the main figures, within CSICOP. It also revealed the complete acceptance of the exposed incompetence and Nixonian dishonesty of the scientists prominent in the leadership of that major organ of "skeptical" - for which you can with complete safety substitute materialist-atheist-scientism - orthodoxy. As the soon to be former ex-leader of CSICOP, Dennis Rawlins quickly discovered, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation . . . was primarily a public relations gimmick that had no interest in scientific integrity or investigation, it was an exercise in vulgar debunkery that demonstrated that the scientists and philosophy teachers were ready to abandon science for the most vulgar levels of show-biz as practiced by its most famous member, James Randi.
As the atheists' progress continues into the decadence it reaches what is, perhaps, its ultimate decadence in the late 20th century in which the imperatives of intellectual materialist atheism-scientism have led to the denial of the significance and even existence of the consciousness which articulates the logical conclusions of materialism which forces what I have to hold is that ultimate decadence in eliminative materialism as will get you a faculty position at philosophy departments universities as eminent as Tufts, Yale, and the University of California system. From which you can debunk the significance or even existence of the minds which you are supposed to be improving, filling those loci of insignificance with the fully thought out ideas, the significance of which you hold as an intellectual and logical conclusion you must, of necessity by your own holdings, must hold are totally meaningless.
And as you are cheered on by your fellow atheist-materialists within the science departments of your and other universities from which they make a good living dispensing science, the significance of which, not to mention a category properly called "truth," thing even more remote from the realm of possibility in their ideology, no doubt, protecting and defending all of the privileges, honors and esteem of ones so intellectually accomplished. As is the way with university faculties. All proving that none of them believes a word of what they hold are truths which are to be insisted on.
Not to mention their demand for the acquiescent belief of those uninitiated into the complexities of their philosophical-scientific tergiversations. And that is the right word for what they are paid to come up with. They are oddly insistent on being believed for people who would seem to have no logical claim to want something they had so little regard for as the minds and hearts of anyone.
---------------
The central role that our conscious experience plays in whatever we can possibly have of what we call truth is remarkably demoted in the modern materialist-scientistic- atheist culture. Given the central role that experience, observation, plays in modern science, the engine that was linked to materialist-atheism, and the fact that modern physics has directly confronted the vicissitudes, nay, the very centrality that our conscious experience plays in that most reputable of all the sciences, the very thing which all materialists hold that everything is reducible to, the demotion of our experience, individually and collectively as the human species is dispensed with amazing ease as what is allowed to be taken as true. The psychologists of "skepticism" (conventional materialist-atheism) are specialists in coming up with all kinds of seemingly plausible schemes for pooh-poohing the experiences of people whose experience is not to their liking - many of those schemes totally unevidenced in either individual cases or even as existing as a real thing. The decadence of psychology and the credulous faith in it which arose in the 20th century has played an outsized role in the decadence that has come with the rise of such pseudo-science.
But this is an Easter post, the first in a series I am hoping to write during Holy Week and maybe beyond, current events, the pandemic, the attempt to save American democracy and, more important than even that, egalitarian democracy and equal justice, will certainty intervene.
Since he is the theologian I'm reading the most of right now is Hans Kung* and because he seems to have thoroughly thought through just about everything well before I even had a glimmer of it, I will be relying heavily on him. In speaking about the evidence of the Resurrection of Jesus he deals with the enormous improbability of the Jesus movement surviving and the quick development of Christianity by not only the very first preacher of the risen Jesus - Mary Magdalene but the male followers of Jesus who all fled in terror as the women of the movement stood by him as he was tortured and crucified and buried who very quickly turned and found a courage to not only continue his teachings but who began to make the most incredible claims for him after he died. Kung begins with a long passage of questions that force you to consider how improbable that was and to provoke you to consider what a profound experience must have led to that. I, alas, cannot present his full, magnificent and rigorous argument which begins with a description of just how ignominious the crucifixion of Jesus was, indeed the ignominy of it was enough that even his most ardent male followers fled in a clear lapse of belief, in the Gospels, that is most ignominious in the one who put himself in the role of the greatest believer, Peter. I cannot believe that the account of his denial and abandonment of Jesus would have come down to us except through the confession of Peter, himself.
Here is the start of Kung's questioning.
How did a new beginning come about after such a disastrous end? How did the Jesus movement come into existence after Jesus' death, with such important consequences for the further destiny of the world? How did a community emerge in the name of a crucified man, how did that community take shape as a Christian "Church"?
To be more precise:
How did this condemned heretical teacher become Israel's Messiah the Christ? How did this disowned prophet become "Lord," how did the unmasked seducer of the people become "Saviour," this rejected blasphemer "God's Son"?
[Here it's important to note that all of the earliest members of the Jesus movement which incubated Christainity were all Jews, in the case of the most stunningly surprising and effective of them, Paul, even after his conversion and during his evangilization, he described himself as not only a Jew but a religious fanatic among Jews, one of the champions of The Law, a Pharisee. So Kung's characterizations would have been entirely relevant for those earliest followers for whom Jesus, the Crucified, became known as all of those things.]
After leaving this man to die in complete isolation, how did it come about that his followers not only clung to his message under the impact of his "personality," his words and deeds, not only summoned up their courage come time after the catastrophe to continue to proclaim his message of the kingdom and the will of God - for instance, the "Sermon on the Mount" - but immediately made this person himself the essential content of the message?
How did they come to proclaim, therefore, not only the Gospel of Jesus, but Jesus himself as the Gospel, unintentionally turning the proclaimer himself into the content of the proclamation, the message of the kingdom of God into the message of Jesus as the Christ of God?
What is the explanation of the fact that this Jesus, the man who was hanged, not despite his death but precisely because of if, become himself the main content of their proclamation? Was not this whole claim hopelessly compromised by his death? Did he not want the greatest things and yet hopelessly failed to get what he wanted? And, in the religio-political situation of the time, could a greater psychological and social impediment to the continuance of his cause have been devised than this disastrous end in public shame and infamy?
Why was it possible then to link any sort of hope with such a hopeless end, to proclaim as God's Messiah the one judged by God, to explain the shameful gallows as a sign of salvation and to turn the obvious bankruptcy of the movement into its phenomenal new emergence? Had they not given up his cause as lost, since his cause was bound up in his person?
Where did they get their strength from; these men who came forward as the apostles so soon after such a breakdown, the complete failure of his plans; who spared no efforts, feared neither adversity nor death, in order to spread this "good" news among men, even to the outposts of the Empire?
Why did there arise that bond to the Master which is so different from the bonds of other movements to the personalities of their founders, as for instance of Marxists to Marx or enthusiastic Freudians to Freud? Why is Jesus not merely venerated, studied and followed as the founder and teacher who lived years ago, but- especially in the worshiping congregation - proclaimed as alive and known as the one who is active at the present time? How did the extraordinary idea arise that he himself leads his followers, his community through his Spirit?
In a word, then we are faces with the historical enigma of the emergence, the beginning, the origin, of Christianity. How different this was from the gradual, peaceful propagation of the teachings of the successful sages, Buddha and Confucius; how different fro the largely violent propagation of the teachings of the victorious Muhammad. And all this was within the lifetime of the founders. How different, after a complete failure and shameful death, were the spontaneous emergence and almost explosive propagation of this message and community in the very name of the defeated leader. After th disastrous outcome of this life, what gave the initial impetus to the unique world-historical development; a truly world transforming religion emerging from the gallows where a man was hanged in shame?
I will issue a spoiler and say that one good reason for that is because the earliest followers of Jesus who knew him, Mary Magdalene, first preacher of his Resurrection, but also those men who had fled in terror as they saw their leader tortured and crucified by the Roman Empire and the puppet king and the religious authorities in Jerusalem in the most ignominious and shameful way, are presented accurately as having seen and experienced Jesus not only as the reanimated corpse imagined by anti-Christian, especially atheist mockery but as far, far more than his body come back to life.
It is one of the most astounding lapses of Christian teaching that they don't present the Resurrection in the terms the last parts of the Gospels and the letters of Paul present the resurrected Jesus as being. More than a reanimated corpse, more than a ghost, more than a metaphorical experience, a feeling, as in the most un-Biblical, anti-textual presentation of modern historical-critical New Testament study does. I doubt anyone would have had the career of James or Peter or the other named followers of Jesus based on a nostalgic feeling for the definitively fallen, crucified Jesus. I certainly think that that oppressor and would be destroyer of the earliest Jesus movement, the Pharisee, Paul, would have never done what he did unless he really, truly experienced what he claims to have experienced in his encounter with the risen Jesus who he doesn't seem to have claimed to have ever seen before he was crucified.
Certainly, for us, this isn't' a phenomenon like a mass delusion - the letters of James and Paul certainly aren't the products of people with severe mental illness or who are prone to delusions. The Letter to the Romans is the product of such a well ordered mind that it even has the respect of some otherwise derisive atheists.
I'll continue with this tomorrow. It's already a long post. But it's a big topic.
*I think going through Kung's trilogy about the exitence of God, about Jesus and Christainity and about the continuance of life after death could be an excellent introduction to not only Christianity but modern thought and culture, in general.
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