The Religious Paradox

The Maverick Philosopher has an interesting post on the "religious paradox", which is how one might recognize the true revelation.

Mere Christianity

I’m not a fan of C.S. Lewis’s notion of “mere Christianity.”

I’ve read a lot of Lewis and learned a great deal from him. For my money, his greatest book is the prophetic The Abolition of Man, a work that becomes more important as we are increasingly tempted to genetically engineer human beings. His concept of “mere Christianity”, unfortunately, is not one of his better contributions.

For those who don’t know, Lewis gave a series of radio addresses during WWII that were later collected and published under the title “Mere Christianity.” The book has become a classic of Christian apologetics, especially evangelical Protestant apologetics. Central to Lewis’s case is his concept of “mere Christianity,” which he defines as the “common doctrines of Christianity.” The common doctrines are all those beliefs that orthodox Christian believers of all stripes, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, etc. have in common. Through the notion of “mere Christianity”, Lewis hoped to avoid entanglement in intra-Christian squabbling (“ecclesiastical disputes”) while making a case for Christianity to non-believers. Lewis was careful to make clear that “mere Christianity” is not a substitute for commitment to a particular denomination once one had become a Christian (Lewis was an Anglican). He used the image of a hall off of which doors opened to many rooms. The hall is only a place to decide which door to enter, not a place of permanent residence.

In light of my previous posts (here, for example) the reader may be able to guess some of my problems with “mere Christianity.” It takes for granted that the proper approach to Christianity is through a rational analysis of doctrine conducted independently of any authority. Once the basic doctrines of Christianity are established (this is Lewis’s “hall”), then the believer can address the (for Lewis) secondary historical questions of ecclesiology (the “doors off of the hall.”) This inverts the relationship between the Church and doctrine. It makes the authority of the Church subsequent to our knowledge of doctrine, when really our knowledge of doctrine follows on the authority of the Church. It is through the living witness of the Church that we know the truth of the Incarnation and Resurrection (the basic elements of “mere Christianity.”) Instead, for Lewis, it is in light of our prior and independently arrived at knowledge of the Incarnation and Resurrection that we decide which denomination to join.

If not by the witness of the Church, how does Lewis suppose one comes to know the truth of “mere Christianity?” The only way is, of course, through the reconstruction of remote events through scientific history. I’ve already written enough regarding Kierkegaard’s point that this can provide, at most, a probable case for Christianity. Here I would like to address Lewis’s apparent short-cut to the historical truth of Christianity, the famous “Lord, Liar or Lunatic” trilemma he deploys in “Mere Christianity.” The trilemma has a logical form and therefore seems to offer more than the merely probabilistic conclusion Kierkegaard identified. There is nothing probabilistic about logic, after all. But as skeptics have long and routinely pointed out, the trilemma only works if you accept Lewis’s assumption that his three alternatives are exhaustive.

The argument works this way: The New Testament is filled with statements of Jesus Christ claiming divinity and various divine powers; the right to forgive sins, for example. Now someone who says these things is either a lunatic (e.g. David Koresh or Jim Jones) or a liar. There is a third possibility, the thrilling possibility that He might actually be Who He says He is. Lewis dismisses the possibilities that Jesus was a lunatic or a liar, leaving him with (apparently) no logical alternative but to submit to the truth that Jesus Christ is Lord. But of course there are other possibilities, among them the possibilities that Jesus never really existed at all or that, if he did, he never actually said many of the words attributed to him in the New Testament. The New Testament is a compilation of two-thousand year old documents, written twenty or more years after the facts they relate, and of which we have lost the originals and possess only copies (or, more likely, copies of copies of copies…) Taking the documents simply as data for historical reconstruction, it is not out of the bounds of reason to suppose that things didn’t happen exactly as they say they did, particularly when it comes to details of place and speech.

Lewis wanted to avoid getting involved in the intricacies of ecclesiastical history because he thought “the questions which divide Christians from one another often involve points of high Theology or even of ecclesiastical history which ought never to be treated except by real experts.” In this he jumps from the frying pan into the fire. Lewis’s trilemma doesn’t work as a way to avoid getting deep into the mud of New Testament history, and ecclesiastical history is relatively well-documented and straightforward compared to early Christian history. In a nutshell, the ecclesiastical history is this: Since at least the fourth century, the Church of Rome has perpetually and consistently proclaimed the same Gospel, summarized in the Nicene Creed, from which various splinter groups have broken off, generally under the justification that they have a better grasp on early (“true”) Christianity than does the Church. Lewis’s metaphor of the hall and the doors really does get it wrong. The Catholic Church is not one of the doors; it’s not even the hall. It’s the house in which one finds both the hall and the doors. To repeat myself from earlier posts, this is not a rhetorical point but a matter of accepted history. G.K. Chesterton put it this way: One can say that a Europe composed of nation states is better than one united under the Roman Empire, but it is simply a mistake to think of the Holy Roman Empire as just another nation state. It was what was left of the old Empire when all the other nations broke away from it; just as the contemporary Catholic Church is what is left when all the “denominations” broke away from a united Christendom. That fragmentation may have been good or bad depending on your perspective, but whatever that perspective, the Church is not just another fragment of Christianity.

Religion and the test of Life

I have been arguing that, if we desire miracles, we need look no further than the eternal miracles that are the Jews and the Church. Besides the fact that these miracles have the peculiar feature that they are not merely historical (and therefore at most probable) but are ever-present and therefore as susceptible to certainty as anything, they have another remarkable feature. God himself has defined the parameters of fulfillment for these miracles. These are not miracles that come as complete surprises, but are predicted by Him in the form of a promise. Consider the following passage from Deuteronomy, where Moses speaks in the Name of the Lord to the Hebrews as they are about to enter the land of Israel:

See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you this day, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statues and his ordinances, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land which you are entering to take possession of it. But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you this day, that you shall perish... (Deut. 30: 15-18)

Skeptics like to make a big point concerning the apparent irrationality of all the minutiae of Old Testament Law. What's with all the petty details about oxen and sheep, the slaughtering of animals, circumcision and the rest of it? How is that conducive to human flourishing? This misses the point. If you told me that if I and my family all got mohawks and dyed our hair red, and did that for generation unto generation, then God would bless my family with enduring life till the end of history, I would be skeptical. But if you showed me an ancient book where God commanded a people to do that very thing, and that people had been getting red mohawks for twenty-five hundred years and remained intact as a culture and a people, outlasting by far any other people, then I would be tempted to head for the barber myself. So what if it doesn't make sense to me? There are stranger things in the world than are dreamt of in my philosophy.

God does not offer the Law to the Hebrews as something reasonable. He does not even offer it to them as something true. God is "realistic" in the most basic sense, for he offers the Covenant in terms of the most basic realities, life and death. And it makes it clear to us, today, the terms in which it is appropriate to judge the Old Testament: Did it and does it give life? Is it alive today?

Jesus Christ casts the New Covenant in similar terms in the New Testament (John 3:16). Jesus does proclaim himself to be the Truth, but his constant refrain is that his Gospel is a gospel of life. And so we may judge the New Covenant in the same terms as the Old. Did it and does it give life? Is it alive today? Yes, in the Body of Christ in the Roman Catholic Church.

Miracles and history

Brian Holtz makes this point:

Why such ambiguous and picayune miracles? Why not raise a new mountain in the desert, or install a new star in the heavens?

One of the typical assumptions of atheism is that the nature of "miracle" is clear and easily stated, and that it is easy to propose indubitable miracles. I wonder if getting a grip on miracles is so easy.

Let's consider Holtz's request (demand?) that God raise a new mountain in the desert. Suppose God were to perform such a feat. As soon as the mountain is raised, it becomes just another feature of the landscape and its origin a matter of history. That is, how the mountain got there is a matter of the reconstruction of the past from present facts. A point that Kierkegaard hammers home is that the category of history is probability. There is no reconstruction of the past that is absolutely certain, only reconstructions that are more or less probable. Therefore as soon as a miracle becomes history - i.e. as soon as it is over - Humean arguments against its occurrence immediately become available. It is always possible to ask: Is it more likely that an honest-to-God miracle occurred, or that some natural explanation is behind it? Maybe the raising of the mountain was a freak natural occurrence. Maybe the mountain was there all the time and we simply couldn't see it because of some bizarre natural circumstance. The longer time goes on, and the more the miracle recedes into the past, the easier it becomes to argue that the mountain was really there all the time, and its absence a mere concoction of Christian apologists.

The Old Testament records the story of the voice of God speaking to Moses from a bush that burned yet was not consumed. An impressive physical miracle. Yet who is to say what really happened once the burning ceased? Presumably, once the burning ceased, the bush looked like any other bush untouched by flames. At that point, it is easy to suppose that Moses imagined the whole thing. And once Holtz's mountain is raised it will look like any other mountain. Who is to say how it originally got there? And even if we admit that its origin was sudden and spectacular, how can we claim with certainty that God was the cause? Maybe intelligent aliens with far superior technology are playing tricks on us. Not probable, for sure, but less probable than the occurrence of an authentic miracle?

The only way for a miracle to overcome the necessarily uncertain and probabilistic nature of history is for it be, in some manner, an eternal miracle; a miracle that does merely happen at a brief moment in time but that happens continually across time; a miracle that is ever-present. What would such a miracle look like?

One such miracle would be the ongoing life of something that should, by all reasonable expectation, have already died many times. I have pointed to the Jews, an ancient Middle Eastern tribe that still worships the same God it did three thousand years ago, as one such miracle. The Roman Catholic Church is another living miracle, a Roman Empire-era institution that continues to survive and proclaim the same message it did two thousand years ago. The Church is sometimes criticized for not being "relevant", but it has proven itself relevant in a far deeper sense than the many secular institutions that have come and gone in its long history. It is not merely relevant at some point in time, according to passing taste, but in a way that transcends time. This is not just apologist rhetoric but a matter of historical fact.

The miracles of the Jews and the Church are easy to overlook because they are mundane. We see Jews and Catholics every day; we assume that what we see every day has an every day explanation. We therefore filter out the mundane in our perception of miracles. But our thirst for the bizarre reflects our prejudices concerning the nature of miracles, not a reasonable theory about what they must look like. I suppose if we saw every day people walking around wearing ancient Egyptian headdress, worshiping Isis, and building pyramids and sphinxes, we would not find it remarkable. We might not pause to wonder how amazing it is that a three thousand year old civilization and its cult have persisted to this day. But someone who was not jaded by Egyptians would be startled by them; he would demand an answer to the question of just what these people are still doing here... What is the secret to their survival?

More on early Christianity

In my answer to Brian Holtz’s challenge, I make the following statement:

Or is it more likely that the first 20% of Christian history was pretty much like the other 80%, with the faith defined by a stable creed authorized by the Church and persisting in the face of heresies that swirled around it?

I would like to expand on this statement a bit.

It is natural, when looking at the condition of the Church and Christianity today, to look for a “golden age” in the past when Christians were united in doctrine and in praising the Lord, and Christianity existed in its “perfect” or at least “best” condition. It is also natural to suppose that this golden age existed early on and that Christian history has consisted largely of various fallings away from that golden moment. This seems to me to be something like the view of a lot of evangelical Protestants, who seem to operate under the assumption that the best way to arrive at the true Faith is to attempt a reconstruction of Christianity as it existed in the first century; that is, they try to overleap two-thousand years of Christian tradition into a supposed early, golden age of Christianity. But is there any reason to suppose that there ever was such a golden moment? Maybe the state of Christianity today, with many different sects voicing competing claims to possession of the true form of the Faith, is the natural state of Christianity. Maybe a cacophony of competing voices is the way Christianity has always been.

The Gospel of Luke begins in the following manner:

Since many have undertaken to set in order a narrative concerning those matters which have been fulfilled among us, even as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having traced the course of all things accurately from the first, to write to you in order, most excellent Theophilus; that you might know the certainty concerning the things in which you were instructed.

We see that, even as the Gospel of Luke was being written, there were already many competing narratives concerning Jesus Christ. What does Luke tell us will distinguish his account from the others? Luke’s account is not merely an historical reconstruction of the life of Christ, but is based on the testimony of “eyewitnesses” and “ministers of the word” who “delivered them to us.” In other words, Luke’s account is distinguished from others because it is written with authority. Luke writes as the voice of an already existing sacred tradition, and it is his grounding in the tradition that distinguishes his account from others. The pattern for Christian history is set: The faith is defined by authorized witnesses speaking in the context of a sacred tradition, who periodically publish documents for the edification of the faithful, so that they “might know the certainty concerning the things in which you were instructed.”

Notice that Luke does not appear scandalized by the fact that there exist competing versions of the Faith. He seems to take it as a natural fact; he does not pine for an earlier Christianity in which his voice was the only one. In fact, Luke teaches us that even during the active ministry of Christ Himself there were different Christianities [Luke 9:49-50]:

John answered, "Master, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we forbade him, because he doesn't follow with us." Jesus said to him, "Don't forbid him, for he who is not against us is for us."

Apparently Luke was not worried that there are competing Christian voices because neither is Jesus Christ worried. That has been the natural state of affairs in Christianity from the beginning. But neither do Luke and Christ doubt that there is an authoritative voice in the cacophony, and that such a voice is readily distinguished. It is distinguished as the voice of authoritative tradition [Luke 24:45-49]:

Then he opened their minds, that they might understand the Scriptures. He said to them, "Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. Behold, I send forth the promise of my Father on you. But wait in the city of Jerusalem until you are clothed with power from on high."

The situation is continued in the Pauline epistles. A regular concern in the epistles is Paul’s struggles to keep the churches he founded from straying from the true Faith. Time and again he admonishes his flock not to be tempted to follow other voices. He gives reasons and defenses of the Faith for sure, but the fundamental reason he gives that his Gospel should be followed is the authority with which he taught it.

What we know of early Christianity indicates that it was a lot like late-Roman Christianity, medieval Christianity, early-modern Christianity, and contemporary Christianity. A lot of people running around claiming to have the true interpretation of the faith, with one steady, authoritative voice consistently proclaiming the same Gospel across time. This is why I don't get worked up when the newspapers breathlessly announce the discovery of a new Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Judas or the remains of some bizarre quasi-Christian first century sect, or when scholars announce a radical new interpretation of the Bible that puts paid to orthodox faith. Of course there were all varieties of heresies proclaimed right from the beginning; and of course the New Testament documents can be forced into supporting non-Christian doctrines. It was ever thus. And it gives no reason for supposing that the Church's witness to the truth has not been consistent from the beginning.

Atheist Challenge

The Secular Web has a link to an atheist challenge by Brian Holtz. His actual arguments are here.
My answer to the challenge is here.

Marriage and Love

There is an interesting My Turn column in the latest issue of Newsweek. The title is Yes to Love, No to Marriage. The column is the self-defense of a woman who “doesn’t need a piece of paper” to prove that she is committed to her lover Jeff for life. As is typical today, the outstanding feature of the column is its egocentrism. Marriage must justify itself before the court of the Almighty, Autonomous “I”, and if it cannot, then it must be summarily dismissed.

Of course marriage will never survive such a trial, for its very essence is the submission of the autonomous self to something greater than itself. That is why marriage has always been a public institution and, in the Church, a public sacrament. The public vows of the husband and wife are an acknowledgment that, in marriage, what happens is greater than either of them individually or even the both of them put together. Marriage is, in a very real sense, the death of the self; for true marriage involves the death of the purely autonomous, egocentric self that measures everything from the perspective of its own needs and desires. But in that death, the self may find itself reborn into a new life in union with the spouse and the community. Instead of “I”, there is “We”; the “We” that in its most fundamental nature consists of husband and wife, but one that naturally extends itself into the life of the community through children. Marriage is an institution authorized and witnessed by the public because, in forming the union of marriage, the couple creates the foundation for public life itself.

The author writes that “Meeting Jeff – an intelligent, creative, thoughtful man – became the icing on the rich cake of a life not wasted cruising singles bars and pining over lost loves.” What a metaphor for the egocentric life! Lovers once waxed eloquent about how their spouses completed them, how they were half a person without them, how they would die without them. But a cake – especially a “rich” one – is complete in itself without icing. Icing is nice to have but a cake can get along quite nicely without it. I wonder if Jeff was inspired by the news that he is the icing on the author’s cake. Maybe he is as egocentric as her and assumed that he was the cake and she was the icing. If we must use baking metaphors, then spouses in true marriage are like yeast and dough; they can do nothing apart from each other. But when they come together in something larger than themselves (say, an oven), they create something greater and more substantial than either of them; something that is not just good for themselves, but good for others as well.

Despite herself, the truth about marriage seems not to have entirely escaped the author. She laments the fact that if a couple does not perform a publicly recognized marriage ceremony, “some people just don’t give any weight to your commitment.” Of course not; a publicly recognized marriage ceremony just is the way the public gives weight to commitments. Her disappointment is like the disappointment of a witness who discovers that people won’t believe her if she refuses to swear an oath before testifying. And what does she care if anyone “gives weight” to her commitment? What happened to the glorious independence that sneers at “pieces of paper” and “pretty white dresses?”

The author has “lived life mostly on her own terms.” One can appreciate the strength of will in such a statement. Unfortunately, both the world and human nature is created on its own terms, not terms of our choosing. The best things in life, like marriage, can only really be experienced if we submit ourselves to their terms rather than our own.