Saving Jesus (Episode 1): Less Filling, Tastes Great?

My church has begun a series of classes using the Saving Jesus program, a DVD-based small-group curriculum that aims to free Christianity from the prison of conservative doctrinal rigidity. Tonight’s class took a few pokes at traditional understandings of original sin and salvation, and suggested that the “faith” that saves us is relational trust, not possession of correct belief. That reminded me of my initial aversion to the doctrine of justification by faith, when I learned about it in a high school history class. It seemed to be God rewarding the toady; it takes far less effort to mouth the approved ideology than to live a good life. Faith as offering of one’s self, as trusting God’s unseen powers and intentions more than my own visible ones — now that’s a real challenge.

All of this reaffirms, for me, how fruitless it is to oppose faith and works. One of the points made on tonight’s DVD was that Jesus doesn’t force healing on us. We have to step forth and be willing to admit that we need it. This is an action, maybe the most dramatic and wrenching action we’ll ever perform. It’s much riskier than mere agreement with doctrine. Yet paradoxically, we are not allowed to say that we saved ourselves through action. The work of faith does not belong to us because there is no separation between us and it. To say my faith, my talent, means that there are two: the ego and the object it possesses. I have not wholly given myself over to the work, but stand apart from it so that I can use it to reinforce my pride. To the extent that I overcome this separation, I am acting (writing, praying, repenting) in and through faith.

It would be a shame, though, if we closed the faith-works gap only to open up another one between theory and practice. If the anti-intellectualism of the Right is refusing to admit that Biblical interpretation must be informed by personal experience and discoveries in secular fields of knowledge (stay tuned for a post on how the distinction between Biblical and secular knowledge is itself anti-Incarnational), the anti-intellectualism of the Left is bashing creeds in order to exalt “practice”. (Whereas I am clearly an intellectual because I write sentences with more than 50 words.)

My minister tonight went so far as to say that we are saved/healed by the act of trusting, regardless of what we call the object of our trust — Jesus, God or the Life Force. That’s just willpower, not Christianity. Jesus didn’t die to teach us the power of positive thinking.

Faith without works is dead (James 2:20), but we are justified by faith alone (Romans 3:28). One of the many things this means to me is that doctrine is worse than useless unless it leads to a wiser, more fruitful spiritual practice. However, it’s also not enough to say “trust God” while discouraging examination of our beliefs about who God is. I’m not saved by belief in the Creed, but my experience of salvation is inseparable from the concept of God contained in the Creed — a God who doesn’t expect me to become perfect on my own, who loved me enough to die for me. Where my efforts come in, and it’s a task I fail at every day, is to appropriate that gift of grace so that I can actually live as if “the kingdom of God is at hand.” Such salvation isn’t conditioned on what I believe, but if I don’t believe in it — if my doctrinal posture precludes it or makes it irrelevant — how can I receive it?

Christians Writing and Reading the Forbidden

As a writer, my obligation is to tell the truth as I see it. As a Christian, my obligation is to honor God. You wouldn’t think those two would conflict. The problem may lie in those words “as I see it”. As a fallen human being, I can’t be entirely sure that what I see is the truth. (Nor, for that matter, that my actions really honor God.) Is honest intention enough?

I’m working on a novel that is taking me to some pretty strange places. Places in my head, for now, but no less dangerous for all that. These people are doing things that I’ve generally been too sensible, uninterested or afraid to do. At the moment, they’re having a lot of non-marital sex, and describing it in words that the New York Times is still quaint enough to refer to as “obscene gerunds”. The central love story in the book, the one that’s most likely to end happily (if they cooperate), is between two gay men. While I’m not shielding my imaginary friends from all the consequences of their poor impulse control, I’m also letting them enjoy themselves in the short term, rather than imposing immediate punishment from above.

Am I, as a Christian, allowed to write a book like this? Are other Christians allowed to read it?

My characters drink, swear, commit adultery, have one-night stands, choose rock ‘n roll over doing their homework, and otherwise follow what they think is their bliss because the gospel is not just for people like me who don’t find any of those things appealing (except swearing — I am from Manhattan). I see the beauty and joy that they are seeking, the genuineness of their quest for a life beyond rational self-interest, as well as the insufficiency of their answers. Just because you could read my life story without blushing doesn’t make me less sinful than they are. They did, after all, come from my subconscious.

Perhaps I’m rationalizing my inappropriate fantasies, like a porn addict who argues that otherwise he would have to rape women in real life. All I know is that as I write, I’m constantly praying that God will reveal the truth through my work. I could assume I already know God’s truth, and impose it on the narrative like a Procrustean bed. That’s how I’ve always worked before, and my work became more lifeless the more I strained to make it “Christian”. It’s far scarier and more delightful to step out into the abyss, hoping that if my writing rings true to my experience of the world and human psychology, it will also end up at God’s doorstep. If Christianity is true, it has to work in the real world, not a world between Thomas Kinkade pastel book covers where moral judgment is always swift and visible.

No one says this better than W.B. Yeats, in his famous poem “Crazy Jane Talks With the Bishop”:

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
‘Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.’

‘Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,’ I cried.
‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart’s pride.

‘A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’

Then again, he managed to say it without any obscene gerunds….

Ain’t That Good News? (Da Vinci Code 2)

Having finished this rather dopey book, I have only one question: Why would so many people want to believe it? I admit, I’ve sometimes felt it was unfair for Jesus to be given a human body but never have a girlfriend. And millions of men probably jumped for joy when they read that we were meant to access God through sex rather than church attendance. But, because Dan Brown taps into popular anxieties about the hierarchy, authority and secrecy of the Catholic Church, it’s easy to miss how elitist and exclusionary his vision is, compared to orthodox Christianity.

“I don’t need the church to mediate my encounter with God.” Whether you’re a Protestant clinging to sola scriptura or an ordinary American individualist who resents having your spirituality crammed into pre-set rituals and doctrines, this sentiment should be very familiar. It sounds so democratic, right? But the church and the sacraments are open to all comers. What does Dan Brown put in its place? Heterosexual intercourse. Bad news if you’re gay, underage, physically incapacitated, or the pimply kid standing by the punchbowl all night at the senior prom. We want so much to believe in transcendence through pleasure, to skip the disciplines that help us endure pleasure’s fading.

Another conceit of the book is that Christ was not divine, just a human prophet who had a real wife and a royal bloodline that continues to this day. That’s an interesting story, but as irrelevant to my life as Zeus and Hera. The Bible says Christ’s bride is the Church, that is, all of us. Through him, our souls can be as intimate with God as Dan Brown’s Jesus was with Mary Magdalene. Why would anyone prefer a story about a royal family that we worship from afar? If Jesus wasn’t divine, what makes his kids better than the rest of us? (Does God drive a SmartCar with a bumper sticker saying “My son is an honor student at Galilee Elementary School”?)

Finally, I don’t get why so many people find relativism more comforting than sincere belief. Brown’s fictional hero, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (another reason I never give to the Harvard College Fund), explains thus his decision not to publicize evidence that the gospels are a fraud:


“Sophie, every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith — acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove….The Bible represents a fundamental guidepost for millions of people on the planet, in much the same way the Koran, Torah, and Pali Canon offer guidance to people of other religions. If you and I could dig up documentation that contradicted the holy stories of Islamic belief, Judaic belief, Buddhist belief, pagan belief, should we do that? Should we wave a flag and tell the Buddhists that we have proof that Buddha did not come from a lotus blossom? Or that Jesus was not born of a literal virgin birth? Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.” (pp.369-70, paperback edition)


My husband’s a Buddhist, and I don’t think the lotus blossom legend plays a big role in their activities over at the sangha. On the other hand, if there were proof that no one had ever achieved enlightenment by meditating, and the stories to the contrary were a plot to get Tibetans to sit still while the Chinese took over their country, I’m sure he would want to know.

Again, what seems like liberal openness is the worst kind of elitism. The world is divided into “those people” who need their illusions, and “our kind of people” who know better. Because “we” don’t believe that religious ideas have real-world consequences, we don’t mind that billions of people are misled about the nature of ultimate reality. (This is what my minister believes, BTW, which is why I’m blogging this morning instead of going to church. “Resistance is futile!”)

Someone, please explain to me the appeal of this kind of thinking. Is it that you want the warm feeling and pageantry of church membership but can’t manage to agree with the doctrines? Are you afraid of dividing the human race between true and false believers (a line that relativism merely redraws, not eliminates)? Do you actively disagree with Christianity and want to appropriate its cultural capital for other ends? As for me, I’d rather live in a world that God loved enough to die for, instead of a world where most people have to swallow comforting lies in order to avoid eating a bullet.

That’s MISTER Jesus to You

From the Christian parody website LarkNews:


PASTOR TRIES INAUTHENTICITY

For years pastor Terry Bradley of New Life Community tried to be entirely real with everyone.
That experiment is now over.

“Authenticity is bogus,” he says. “It’s never real. Nobody knows himself well enough to be fully authentic, and trying to self-divulge all the time breeds shallow relationships because it denies the complexity and mystery of human personalities.”…

“I don’t see much benefit in everybody knowing everything about me,” says Bradley. “Jesus’ example is to be guarded and realistic about human nature….”

Read more….
   
Or, as contemporary philosopher Roger Scruton once said, “If sincerity means showing what you really are, it’s good to be sincere only if it’s good to show what you are.”

Whip It Good (Da Vinci Code 1)

The day after Christmas seems like a good time to defend corporal mortification. (Memo to world: stop giving me cake unless you’re going to reinforce my office chair.) Anyhow, with the shining obliviousness to social trends that has always been my hallmark, I am just now getting round to reading The Da Vinci Code, and finding it both as exciting and as annoying as I expected.

I mean, poor Silas. In case you don’t know, he’s the tormented albino monk who likes to whip himself when he’s not assassinating people. The book makes a little effort to arouse our sympathies about his abusive childhood, but the overall tone is voyeuristic and superior. Just as in Chocolat, a film that made fun of the Lenten fast, we’re supposed to apply our little pop-Freudian insight that anyone who would deny himself bodily pleasure (or worse, deliberately undergo suffering) for the sake of spiritual formation must be repressed and neurotic at best, a lustful hypocrite at worst. By implication, nothing that this character believes should be taken seriously.

I’m not a big fan of extreme ascetic practices, as they can feed un-Christian ambitions to bring about perfection by our own efforts. Meditation, therapy and a sense of humor about one’s inevitable weaknesses are a healthier path for most everyday struggles with temptation. BUT — a little respect, please, for anyone who loves righteousness so much that he’s willing to tear his own flesh to conquer the devil within.

Ask yourself: would Dan Brown mock a vegan? a bodybuilder? an anorexic? a U.S. Marine? a Buddhist monk who set himself on fire to protest the Vietnam War? Like Silas, and unlike me most of the time, these folks have made some extreme physical sacrifices, sometimes for a noble goal, other times for a questionable one (you do the match-up yourselves, kids). I’m with Simone Weil, who saw something godly in every effort to transcend one’s self through discipline, even a mundane one like doing your math homework when you hate math. Christianity needs its freaks.

The Gospel of Johnny

Chris Tessone at Even the Devils Believe has an excellent series of posts up about the theology of the late, great singer Johnny Cash (starts here).  Chris says:



There is no doubt that Johnny Cash believes the Law must be taken seriously. Many of his songs about prisoners and the condemned are conspicuous in the fact that their narrators or main characters take full responsibility for their crimes; some of them even die for those crimes. Sam Hall does so defiantly, while the narrator of “I Hung My Head” is stunned and terrified by the consequences of his actions, but both go to the gallows without protest all the same.


But Cash also espouses what might be called a liberal position on sin as social failure, too, without sensing any contradiction with his more “conservative” ideas about personal responsibility. In “Man in Black”, he expresses sympathy for and solidarity with “the prisoner who has long paid for his crimes, but is there because he’s a victim of the times.” The song that haunts me more than any other in his corpus is “Drive On”, which discusses the social alienation felt by Vietnam veterans returning to the United States — there’s little question that in singing this song, Cash is blaming American society for the reception those men received.


These two themes are woven throughout Cash’s performances. The interplay between these two sources of human evil permit him to feel solidarity not only with the wrongly-imprisoned, but with the voice of his famous “Folsom Prison Blues”, a convict who “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Cash reports in his autobiography that this struck him as one of the most depraved things one human being could do to another. It’s clear he holds this fictional presence responsible to the fullness of the Law and yet still regards him as a human being deserving the care and concern of other people.


As for me, if it were my last day on earth, Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” is the album I’d be playing over and over again.

Book Notes: Jonathan Edwards, America’s Evangelical

I’m currently reading Philip F. Gura’s brief, lively biography Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical, which holds special interest for me because the great 18th-century theologian and preacher spent the first two decades of his career in my adopted hometown of Northampton, Mass. The issues of church discipline and unity that Edwards confronted seem uncomfortably familiar, 250 years on.

Casual students of church history know Edwards only as the author of the infamous “spider” sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” where he thunders that God’s unmerited mercy is the only thing keeping Him from dropping your loathsome soul into the pit of hell. This leads modern readers to picture Edwards as a dour, witch-burning sort of fellow, because we’re no longer comfortable with the theology of damnation that was pretty standard in his day. According to Gura’s very sympathetic portrait of the Puritan minister, Edwards’ true passion was not fire-and-brimstone but awakening sincere “religious affections” in a church that had become hidebound and hypocritical. He preached and wrote copiously on the beauty of God’s holiness and the love and joy that arise in a heart transformed by grace.

Because he was a Calvinist, however, he insisted that spiritual transformation happened solely on God’s initiative. He fought all his life against Arminian tendencies in the New England churches, as Enlightenment philosophy and the colonists’ increasing economic security made people more inclined to trust their own efforts to attain salvation. Ironically, the spiritual revival known as the Great Awakening, which Edwards helped spark, also released a spirit of resistance to church authority that made the absolutely sovereign God of Calvinism seem less appealing.

Gura reveals the power struggles behind Edwards’ ouster from his Northampton pulpit, which is sometimes misperceived as a triumph of liberalism over repression. Two teenage sons of prominent families were getting their kicks from a forbidden textbook on female anatomy, and the congregation was not happy with Edwards’ attempts to discipline them. It’s easy to side against Edwards as Puritan censor, when the material in question seems laughably tame by our standards. When Gura points out that the boys were using the book to sexually harass young women, and that the underlying issue was the minister’s moral authority over wealthy and powerful laymen, one feels more sympathy for the beleaguered cleric. Edwards reportedly had a happy marriage (with 13 children, surely no prude), and respected his wife’s piety so much that he made her born-again experience a central feature of one of his narratives of the revival.

Despite the very different cultural context, Edwards’ story closely mirrors some important tensions that persist in the churches today. One such is the role of communion (a/k/a the Mass or the Eucharist). Is it a privilege reserved for those with certain beliefs or religious experiences, or is it more like an altar call? In the 17th century, the Puritan churches had required testimony of a born-again experience before one could be admitted as a full member with communion privileges – a status that had social and political implications as well as spiritual ones. Edwards’ grandfather and predecessor in the Northampton pulpit, Solomon Stoddard, had eliminated this requirement as not based in Scripture, arguing also that it inappropriately set men up as judges of one another’s spiritual state. Stoddard opined that the experience of taking communion might trigger a spiritual transformation in itself. Edwards continued this policy until late in his Northampton career, when he was deeply disappointed to see that many who had been caught up in the revival enthusiasms quickly backslid into immoral behavior. Requiring born-again testimony was his way of distinguishing the victims of temporary hysteria from those whose hearts had really been changed by God. Unfortunately, it also cost him his job.

Nowadays, we see the same tension between two visions of the Lord’s Supper, and by extension the church. One impulse leads us to form a community of the pure; the other stresses radical openness. So, on the one hand, you have the Catholic Church, which restricts communion not only to Christians, but to Catholics, and within that sect, to those who do not openly defy church teaching in selected areas (particularly abortion). On the other hand, you have my Episcopal parish, which extends communion to “all who are worshipping with us,” baptized or not. The looming schism in the Anglican Communion over homosexuality similarly forces us to ask how much doctrinal variation and error we can tolerate and still remain one body. (FYI, I am in favor of full acceptance of gays and lesbians; that and the 1982 Hymnal are the only things keeping me away from Mother Rome’s embrace.)

Picking heroes and villains in this debate misses the point. The church needs both impulses in order to fulfill its mission. Communion and membership rules should always be informed by Jesus’ willingness to mingle with sinners before they became cleansed. (Having briefly attended a church where you were expected to be “slain in the spirit” every week, I’m suspicious of demands for Christians to work up a particular emotion on cue.) On the other hand, if one can fully participate in church life without having made a commitment to Christ, the church edges toward irrelevance; it becomes hard to answer the aging boomer who asks “Can’t I worship God just as well looking at the sunrise from my hot tub?”  

How should that “commitment to Christ” be manifested, then? Baptism has the virtue of being an objective, bright-line rule, compared to the fuzziness and potential emotional dishonesty of experiential signs. Again, Edwards’ trajectory is instructive. His efforts on behalf of the religious revival stemmed from his perception that many people’s faith had become empty formalism. However, once the Holy Spirit is on the loose, it’s hard to put Him back in the bottle again. Edwards found himself struggling to reassert his moral authority as a clergyman after God had seemed to speak directly through low-status laypeople such as women and children. The balancing act between openness and leadership never ends.

I wasn’t expecting to find this much common ground with Edwards, since I instinctively recoil from the Calvinist doctrine of predestination (all people deserve hell but God arbitrarily saves a few). Gura’s book summarizes Edwards’ creative attempt to reconcile this doctrine with free will and moral responsibility. According to the Puritan preacher, we are all free to do whatever we want to do, and therefore morally accountable for doing it. But what we want to do is determined by the good or evil disposition that God predestined us to have. Thus Jesus, for instance, was simultaneously free to sin but incapable of sinning.

This analysis made me realize that the problem I have with Calvinism is not that it’s unfair, but that it’s unkind. The whole idea of calculating our moral deserts is sort of beside the point if you believe in salvation by grace. Let’s even assume Edwards is right that we all deserve damnation. However, if God has decided to save some people anyhow, out of the goodness of His love, why wouldn’t he choose to save everyone, if it were totally up to Him? Isn’t His love infinite?

Edwards’ psychology also makes me uneasy. At least by Gura’s description, he believed our dispositions were fixed, unless changed instantaneously by God’s
grace. This all-or-nothing mentality stands in stark contrast to contemplative traditions like Buddhism or medieval Catholicism that heavily emphasized spiritual practice; through cultivating good spiritual habits, they say, one can gradually change one’s character and reorient one’s affections. This seems healthier to me than the bipolar cycle of revivalism. Evangelical Protestantism’s move away from “slow and steady” spiritual disciplines, in favor of emotional moments of decision, may be both a symptom of its co-optation by anti-intellectual and subjectivist tendencies in American culture, and a reason why its critique of this culture is less effective than it might be.

George Herbert: “The Dawning”

Awake, sad heart, whom sorrow ever drowns ;
Take up thine eyes, which feed on earth ;
Unfold thy forehead, gathered into frowns ;
    Thy Saviour comes, and with Him mirth :
                                            Awake, awake,
And with a thankful heart His comforts take.
    But thou dost still lament, and pine, and cry,
    And feel His death, but not His victory.

Arise, sad heart ; if thou dost not withstand,
    Christ’s resurrection thine may be ;
Do not by hanging down break from the hand
    Which, as it riseth, raiseth thee :
                                            Arise, Arise;
    And with His burial linen drie thine eyes.
Christ left His grave-clothes, that we might, when grief
Draws tears or blood, not want a handkerchief.


(Read more about George Herbert here.)

What Has Athens to Do With Jerusalem?

My parents are Reform Jews, nonpracticing for most of my life, who are rediscovering their heritage through some Chabad Lubavitcher friends in our town. My husband, raised in the Reform tradition, is now a Buddhist, and I was baptized into the Episcopal Church in June 2001 after many years of feeling that Christianity was like a thrilling ex-boyfriend I could neither live with nor forget about. Needless to say, this makes the Christmabuddhakwanzukkah season somewhat complicated, though not as bad as you might think. It’s one of God’s little jokes on me that the doctrinal relativism I routinely complain about in my liberal church is what keeps us from coming to blows over the Christmas turkey.

This past Friday we celebrated the first night of Chanukah with some Orthodox friends and their five wonderful children, aged 8 months to 7 years, with whom I played a game involving a war between miniature Barbie dolls and a Playmobil pirate driving a giant wrecking truck. (I was the U.N. negotiator, the kickboxing pizza delivery girl and the one-legged princess.)

The one disturbing note was a picture book that I tried reading to the kids (I say “tried” because they got distracted after about three minutes) about the story of Chanukah. I always thought of Chanukah as a holiday about faith in God and freedom of religion. God miraculously gave the Jews enough oil to purify their temple, after the Maccabee warriors defeated the Syrian king who had banned their religious observances and made them worship the Greek gods.

This little book really played up the culture clash between Jews and Greeks. The Greeks start out being persuasive, even seductive: why don’t you folks take off those long robes, compete in our sports events, and enjoy the nice statues? The Jews respond that they’re too pure for that sort of thing. They only care for inner beauty.  The Torah is all they need. One of the illustrations even shows a Jewish mother blushing and covering her child’s eyes so she won’t see the Greek statue. At that point the king blows his stack and tells them he’s going to ban Shabbat and force them to worship a pig. The rest is history.

This kind of thing makes me glad I forgot to put the little menorahs on the Christmas tree this year. Perhaps the best way for me to respect my ancestors’ traditions is to recognize that they’re no longer mine, rather than combining them with my current beliefs in a syncretistic stew. For me, religion is not like ethnic food day at kindergarten. It’s about finding the best possible description of how the universe works, and I don’t mean whether the world was created in six days. I mean issues like the balance between the individual and the community; what do I do about my own sinfulness and that of others; how do I cope with the impermanence of the material world; are evil and impurity localized in some group, trait or condition that we can improve or eliminate, or are they a universal phenomenon that binds us together in a radically equal brotherhood of sinners?

It’s this last point that sums up the difference between Judaism and Christianity for me, and is one reason I was so upset by this dumb little book. Asceticism and self-righteous withdrawal are certainly not unknown among Christian sects, but that path seems to me to go against the audacious intermingling of pure and impure known as the Incarnation. Whereas in hardcore Judaism, separatism is central.

Yes, earthly beauty can be a snare. Yes, some statues should wear pants. But a worldview based on fear of temptation can be a bigger, badder idol than a golden calf the size of Madison Square Garden. It means you’re obsessed with your own righteousness when you should be thinking about God and trying to see God in your neighbor, even if she’s a Satanist in a miniskirt.

Nathaniel Hawthorne got it right, I believe, in the story “Earth’s Holocaust,” a dark fable that shows preachers, social reformers and well-meaning citizens consigning one after another field of human endeavor, from pipe-smoking to Bibles, to a vast bonfire, in hopes of purifying the world for all time. As their hysterical enthusiasm mounts, a laughing bystander (whose aspect has become increasingly demonic) observes:


“Be not so cast down, my dear friends; you shall see good days yet. There is one thing that these wiseacres have forgotten to throw into the fire, and without which all the rest of the conflagration is just nothing at all; yes- though they had burnt the earth itself to a cinder.”

“And what may that be?” eagerly demanded the last murderer.

“What but the human heart itself!” said the dark-visaged stranger, with a portentous grin. “And unless they hit upon some method of purifying that foul cavern, forth from it will reissue all the shapes of wrong and misery- the same old shapes, or worse ones- which they have taken such a vast deal of trouble to consume to ashes. I have stood by, this live-long night, and laughed in my sleeve at the whole business. Oh, take my word for it, it will be the old world yet!”

This brief conversation supplied me with a theme for lengthened thought. How sad a truth- if true it were- that Man’s age-long endeavor for perfection had served only to render him the mockery of the Evil Principle, from the fatal circumstance of an error at the very root of the matter! The heart- the heart- there was the little yet boundless sphere, wherein existed the original wrong, of which the crime and misery of this outward world were merely types. Purify that inward sphere; and the many shapes of evil that haunt the outward, and which now seem almost our only realities, will turn to shadowy phantoms, and vanish of their own accord. But if we go no deeper than the Intellect, and strive, with merely that feeble instrument, to discern and rectify what is wrong, our whole accomplishment will be a dream; so unsubstantial, that it matters little whether the bonfire, which I have so faithfully described, were what we choose to call a real event, and a flame that would scorch the finger- or only a phosphoric radiance, and a parable of my own brain!

Religious suspicion of the arts (again, not unique to Judaism) is a subject for a whole ‘nother post, but let me briefly say that another way the kids’ book got my goat was its insistence that God can only work through certain approved forms of expression – specifically, verbal and intellectual versus sensory, visual and emotional perceptions of divine beauty.

I could say more, but I have to go bake peanut butter cookies for the winter solstice party at the sangha.

Evolution versus Darwinism

Books & Culture: A Christian Review has just posted a thorough and compelling article by Edward T. Oakes tracing the intellectual legacy of social Darwinism – the belief that societies have the right and obligation to weed out their weakest members in order to advance human evolution. Oakes points out that the premises of ethical naturalism are bound to conflict with the Christian belief that every life is equally sacred because made in God’s image:

[S]ome of the most vicious Darwinian apologists [of the Victorian era] were quite willing to declare war on Christianity precisely because of its total incompatibility with Darwinism.

Among the most egregious of these anti-Christians was Alexander Tille, who taught German language and literature at the University of Glasgow until 1900 but regarded his work on evolutionary ethics as his real calling. One must at least credit Tille for seeing the real issue in all its starkness: “From the doctrine that all men are children of God and equal before him,” he said, “the ideal of humanitarianism and socialism has grown, that all humans have the same right to exist, the same value, and this ideal has greatly influenced behavior in the last two centuries. This ideal is irreconcilable with the theory of evolution … [, which] recognizes only fit and unfit, healthy and sick, genius and atavist” (emphasis in the original).


Where Christian critics of Darwinism go astray, I think, is in opposing evolution as a scientific theory, instead of questioning the project of drawing our ethical lessons from biology. According to the Bible, the natural world has been tainted by original sin, so why should we be surprised that the lessons of nature are contrary to the lessons of grace? What Darwinism tells us about physical power is no different from what the stories of ancient Israel tell us about political power. We want to put our trust in obvious displays of material strength instead of trusting the one whose “strength is made perfect in weakness”.