This is part of a series I was doing (until interrupted) on Jesus Searching. It was a precursor for my reviews of N.T. Wright and E.P. Sanders, who I think seek to answer some of my objections here.
Can a biography of Jesus be written? Certainly it has been tried, but to no one's real satisfaction. Every Jesus scholar I've encountered tweaks his predecessor's view. I suppose in that regard scholarship is hardly different from the rest of us. 80% of Americans have their own personal Jesus, or so Gallup tells us. Even atheists are all nuanced in their acknowledgment of Jesus, who he was, what he meant. Jesus literature is as diverse as we are, and in the end I am convinced that Jesus is a concave mirror reflecting the light we would see in or out of ourselves.
In that regard, I suspect we may not be all that different from Jesus' contemporaries who themselves reflected tremendous diversity once the significance of Jesus was explained to them. I say "explained to them" because we possess no document that was actually written by a contemporary comrade of Jesus. We do have the writings of the converted Apostle Paul, and the liar Josephus who assured himself Roman salvation by proclaiming Vespasian the Messiah. Neither are quite contemporary.
I am forever grateful to David Hume and his argument against miracles, pointing to what should be self evident: super-natural phenomenon cannot interpret its own significance, much less its own theology. Somebody has to narrate it, and explain it. A miracle is at the mercy of the interpreter. One can say "Jesus rose from the dead." That could be a natural fact, let science and history work it out. But the moment you argue for its significance we are no longer in the realm of the occurrence, but of an interpretation of which there are so very many. How much human genius and effort has been put into this endeavor of interpretation over the centuries? It is a staggering thought.
Most Christians will disagree with me when I suggest that even the New Testament itself is too interpretively diverse to be contained by anything but a fiercely motivated literary hegemony; the kind of force that arose in Constantine and the council of Nicaea, that evolved into the historical truth of Christian power for over one thousand years, which began to subside during the reformation when it could be questioned. Thus today we witness a nearly total meltdown of orthodoxy as tradition lapses in our Democracies, and post modern relativism's reveal a Bible unable to consistently stand for anything other than the subjective view of the reader.
What distinguishes miracles from natural phenomenon? Could it be our sanction? Gravity exists whether I acknowledge it or not, but does Jesus? Christian miracles are hyper-sensitive to human approval, so unlike the natural awe inspiring power of Yahweh in the earliest writings (The book of J) of the Old testament who will be where he will be, and will not be where he won't. In a sense, early Hebrew writing is more scientific, and closer to the spirit of Hume, then is the Gospel of John for instance, recounting not only a (supposed) fact of Jesus' Resurrection, but a decree for others to believe in it. The New Testament as I read it is generally very anxious for a sanction from others. It is not self contained, but focused completely on the endorsement of otherness. In truth it tells others sometimes to take or leave it, but then I suspect there would be no miracle if all of us left it.
"Blessed are those who have not seen and believe..." John tells an anxious audience not too unlike Doubting Thomas, confronted with the delay of the "Parousia" the second coming of Jesus. I am speculating here, as elsewhere, since I am not a Bible Scholar. Even so this late verse, added (some scholars tell us) by some other redactor, seeks to calm an anxiety I often sense in the New Testament's total commitment to the immediate second coming.
2000 years later I can only ponder the peculiar power of interpretation and how necessary it has become, in order to justify an endless array of human disappointment over Jesus' failure to arrive. "Failure" is strong, but what else can it be without a strong theology that could turn it into victory? Nietzsche is the best I've read because he sensed the dangerous power of interpretation, as systems of cruelties, upon which we all suffered--indeed they could create memory but at a price. The memory I am left with is 2000 years of Christian rule and now decline. His cure, he acknowledged through a brutal self honesty was interpretive, leaving him in a hall of mirrors he never fully could manage.
The Miracle of Jesus' resurrecting is another kind of hall of mirrors that is easily managed it seems. Only the resurrected Jesus could in fact distinguish the object from the numerous reflections, and he is not here. I suspect that is why 80% of us have our own Jesus. We can approach Nietzsche but we shy away from his madness. We cannot approach Jesus, yet he is ours and can belong to any of us. This is its own kind of madness perhaps, but there are worse things.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Blue Like Jazz: Donald Miller
As a Jazz Musician, I found it disappointing to find Miller's book had little or nothing to do with Jazz. I've read too much Christian literature lately, and Miller's book is another in a long line of tired attempts to modernize American Christianity beyond its "conservative traditional" mystique. I have commented elsewhere in this blog on Emergent Christianity, and how impressive it is that given its assumptions each of us could in fact become our own Church, with our own sense of Church authority, whatever that might mean for any particular individual, I'm not sure.
I have often observed that both Right and Left winged American Evangelical Christianity are children of Emerson with different emphasis. The choruses they sing are Walt Whitman's Song of Myself where "Jesus" is a metaphor of "myself." The preaching is Emerson's monumental Self Reliance: the principle essay that still moves American politics both Right and Left, despite the fact that fewer and fewer of us have read it.
Miller is just another in a long line of American self invented Christians. One must admire his poetry, and good humor and his writing style. He has his own "particularism" reminiscent of Anne Lamott, or even Victor Hugo, but with a Christian twist. Miller is thoughtful, modern, and "real." I mean "real" in the sense of how any self invented twenty or thirty something wants to think of themselves as "real" these days. Which probably means half-digested truths applied to a bumper sticker that seeks to be more profound than that. I suppose one could call it "post-modern" as numerous reviews I read of it did. But post-modern is a much brandied about term in Christian circles, and I seriously doubt any of them have ever read Lyotard.
What would Emerson have made of Miller and his fellow emergents? I think perhaps he would approve of the contradictions inherent in Miller's framework as much as he would like the over-all freedom of it. If Christianity is "blue like Jazz," than it also necessarily is as individual, personal, and free to be whatever it happens to be. "Everybody sings their song the way they feel it. Everybody lifts up their hands."
In the end its not a question of intellect but one's own personal experience. It is always about the self, yet Miller in Anne Lamott fashion, with good humor, dismisses his self's ability to make a clear judgement. Only an American Christian can be so self driven while insisting the self is no longer relevant. Miller writes "The most difficult lie I ever contended with is this: life is a story about me." Yet Walt Whitman has his revenge after-all as Miller's profound journey is in the nether regions of his self awareness. The problems of the world are not out there, but inside Miller himself "The needy thing in his chest." What can set it free other than a new self alignment? That in the end is his prescription and I can only shake my head in awe of the audacity of it all.
American Christians like Miller are selfish selves, who humble themselves, give of themselves to God, who also lives in them and contends with themselves. God gets all the glory but he lives with-in them. Does the self reap the glory in the end? I suspect that it does.
Miller recounts humorous experiences of Individuals undergoing a "God thing." Can they ever separate the self from the God? Such a question is necessarily alien to them, as the nuances of their language allow a strange "knowing" distinction. Such a knowing is the "spark" or the "gnostic" urge so celebrated by Walt Whitman and Emerson, which can also be found in Kabbalah.
The God with-in apprehends the God with-out, or so Emerson thought. I love the poetry, though I fear the social/political consequences are something else. The nuances of doctrine are no longer necessary in Miller, only the particulars of situation. One of my favorite Emerson quotes is: "Our prayers are the disease of the will, and our creeds the disease of the intellect." Would Miller go that far? I suspect he would. Only an Emersonian Christian could somehow appropriate at least the last half of this formulation, the way Miller does. My hat is off to him and his audacious quest. Is it freedom he gains? I often wonder, is it freedom for the self? Or from other selves? I suspect the later, despite emergent Christian protestations to the contrary.
This book will last a short period in American consciousness as the Christian Church undergoes another metamorphosis, with an increasing hunger for the "fresh" perspectives. The sentiments of Miller, which belong to Emerson and Walt Whitman are timeless and have so infected Leftward Evangelical Christianity that I can scarcely distinguish them.
I have often observed that both Right and Left winged American Evangelical Christianity are children of Emerson with different emphasis. The choruses they sing are Walt Whitman's Song of Myself where "Jesus" is a metaphor of "myself." The preaching is Emerson's monumental Self Reliance: the principle essay that still moves American politics both Right and Left, despite the fact that fewer and fewer of us have read it.
Miller is just another in a long line of American self invented Christians. One must admire his poetry, and good humor and his writing style. He has his own "particularism" reminiscent of Anne Lamott, or even Victor Hugo, but with a Christian twist. Miller is thoughtful, modern, and "real." I mean "real" in the sense of how any self invented twenty or thirty something wants to think of themselves as "real" these days. Which probably means half-digested truths applied to a bumper sticker that seeks to be more profound than that. I suppose one could call it "post-modern" as numerous reviews I read of it did. But post-modern is a much brandied about term in Christian circles, and I seriously doubt any of them have ever read Lyotard.
What would Emerson have made of Miller and his fellow emergents? I think perhaps he would approve of the contradictions inherent in Miller's framework as much as he would like the over-all freedom of it. If Christianity is "blue like Jazz," than it also necessarily is as individual, personal, and free to be whatever it happens to be. "Everybody sings their song the way they feel it. Everybody lifts up their hands."
In the end its not a question of intellect but one's own personal experience. It is always about the self, yet Miller in Anne Lamott fashion, with good humor, dismisses his self's ability to make a clear judgement. Only an American Christian can be so self driven while insisting the self is no longer relevant. Miller writes "The most difficult lie I ever contended with is this: life is a story about me." Yet Walt Whitman has his revenge after-all as Miller's profound journey is in the nether regions of his self awareness. The problems of the world are not out there, but inside Miller himself "The needy thing in his chest." What can set it free other than a new self alignment? That in the end is his prescription and I can only shake my head in awe of the audacity of it all.
American Christians like Miller are selfish selves, who humble themselves, give of themselves to God, who also lives in them and contends with themselves. God gets all the glory but he lives with-in them. Does the self reap the glory in the end? I suspect that it does.
Miller recounts humorous experiences of Individuals undergoing a "God thing." Can they ever separate the self from the God? Such a question is necessarily alien to them, as the nuances of their language allow a strange "knowing" distinction. Such a knowing is the "spark" or the "gnostic" urge so celebrated by Walt Whitman and Emerson, which can also be found in Kabbalah.
The God with-in apprehends the God with-out, or so Emerson thought. I love the poetry, though I fear the social/political consequences are something else. The nuances of doctrine are no longer necessary in Miller, only the particulars of situation. One of my favorite Emerson quotes is: "Our prayers are the disease of the will, and our creeds the disease of the intellect." Would Miller go that far? I suspect he would. Only an Emersonian Christian could somehow appropriate at least the last half of this formulation, the way Miller does. My hat is off to him and his audacious quest. Is it freedom he gains? I often wonder, is it freedom for the self? Or from other selves? I suspect the later, despite emergent Christian protestations to the contrary.
This book will last a short period in American consciousness as the Christian Church undergoes another metamorphosis, with an increasing hunger for the "fresh" perspectives. The sentiments of Miller, which belong to Emerson and Walt Whitman are timeless and have so infected Leftward Evangelical Christianity that I can scarcely distinguish them.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
The Quest of The Historical Jesus: Albert Schweitzer
I have been away from this blog for a while, due mostly to difficult life circumstances, but now I return to it. I have received some emails regarding previous posts; I try to respond as quickly as I can.
Of all the questers I've read, Schweitzer stands as the most poignant. This book in particular is probably essential reading for theologians, pastors, serious Christians, and skeptics. Since it was published in 1911, it has stood as a landmark book. In the study of Jesus, no scholar can completely ignore Schweitzer. He writes:
“The critical study of the life of Jesus has been for theology a school of honesty. The world had never seen before, and will never see again, a struggle for truth so full of pain and renunciation as that of which the lives of Jesus of the last hundred years contain the cryptic record…
Schweitzer begins his critique with an astounding survey of all of the German scholarship on Jesus, taking us through the Eschatology focus of Reimarus, the early rationalists, the fictitious lives, Paulus, Strauss, Bauer, Renan, and finally Wrede.
N.T. Wright, and other so-called “third questers” are often credited for comprehending Jesus in his Jewish context. Yet many of them owe their views to Schweitzer who was among the first to try to place Jesus in his Jewish surroundings.
Schweitzer, more than anyone else at the time, summed up the basic point of German scholarship, and concluded that the Jesus of history was quite alien to the Jesus of faith. Like almost all scholars, he wrestles with the enigma of Jesus as presented in the book of Mark, and concludes that Jesus—and thus Christianity was shaped more by the failure of the Parousia (the second coming) to take place. Jesus in his own lifetime expected a dramatic eschatological occurrence of redemption and salvation for Israel, which failed to come. His disciples chose to see the redemption in his death, and later his resurrection.
The whole history of “Christianity” down to the present day, that is to say, the real inner history of it, is based on the delay of the Parousia, the non-occurrence of the Parousia, the abandonment of eschatology, the progress and completion of the ‘de-eschatological’ of religion, which has been connected therewith. (p.358)
Schweitzer was among the first to recognize and historically trace a dramatic disappointment in Christianity, underneath its message of universal triumph.
There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus….the historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma. The study of the Life of Jesus…set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him, it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Saviour. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own. What surprised and dismayed the theology of the last forty years was that despite, all forced and arbitrary interpretations, it could not keep Him in our time, but had to let him go.
Schweitzer the historian realizes that it is not the study of History that can discover Jesus, he writes:
“History can destroy the present; it can reconcile the present with the past; can even to a certain extent transport the present into the past; but to contribute to the making of the present is not given unto it.”
Schweitzer at spiritual odds with his historical conclusions recognizes a kind of sincerity, which feels to him like truth.
Jesus means something to our world because a mighty spiritual force streams forth from Him and flows through our time also. This fact can neither be shaken nor confirmed by any historical discovery. It is the solid foundation of Christianity.
With a kind of anguish, Schweitzer recognizes the temptation for the reader to read himself into Jesus’ life.
It is nothing less than a misfortune for modern theology that it mixes history with everything and ends by being proud of the skill with which it finds its own thoughts.
Many of Schweitzer’s views have been disproved, by modern scholarship. He did not have access to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and one wonders what he would make of their cryptic resemblances to the New Testament. Yet, he stands as the most important Jesus scholar of the 20th century. Schweitzer was a great man, a wonderful musician, a missionary, and a winner of the Nobel Prize. It was as if he thought of St. Paul in First Corinthians 13, and the moving poem he quotes of love, hope, and faith, but the greatest of these is love. After an incredibly vigorous and poignant historical survey, Schweitzer had no faith, no hope. But he retained love.
Of all the questers I've read, Schweitzer stands as the most poignant. This book in particular is probably essential reading for theologians, pastors, serious Christians, and skeptics. Since it was published in 1911, it has stood as a landmark book. In the study of Jesus, no scholar can completely ignore Schweitzer. He writes:
“The critical study of the life of Jesus has been for theology a school of honesty. The world had never seen before, and will never see again, a struggle for truth so full of pain and renunciation as that of which the lives of Jesus of the last hundred years contain the cryptic record…
Schweitzer begins his critique with an astounding survey of all of the German scholarship on Jesus, taking us through the Eschatology focus of Reimarus, the early rationalists, the fictitious lives, Paulus, Strauss, Bauer, Renan, and finally Wrede.
N.T. Wright, and other so-called “third questers” are often credited for comprehending Jesus in his Jewish context. Yet many of them owe their views to Schweitzer who was among the first to try to place Jesus in his Jewish surroundings.
Schweitzer, more than anyone else at the time, summed up the basic point of German scholarship, and concluded that the Jesus of history was quite alien to the Jesus of faith. Like almost all scholars, he wrestles with the enigma of Jesus as presented in the book of Mark, and concludes that Jesus—and thus Christianity was shaped more by the failure of the Parousia (the second coming) to take place. Jesus in his own lifetime expected a dramatic eschatological occurrence of redemption and salvation for Israel, which failed to come. His disciples chose to see the redemption in his death, and later his resurrection.
The whole history of “Christianity” down to the present day, that is to say, the real inner history of it, is based on the delay of the Parousia, the non-occurrence of the Parousia, the abandonment of eschatology, the progress and completion of the ‘de-eschatological’ of religion, which has been connected therewith. (p.358)
Schweitzer was among the first to recognize and historically trace a dramatic disappointment in Christianity, underneath its message of universal triumph.
There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus….the historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma. The study of the Life of Jesus…set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him, it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Saviour. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own. What surprised and dismayed the theology of the last forty years was that despite, all forced and arbitrary interpretations, it could not keep Him in our time, but had to let him go.
Schweitzer the historian realizes that it is not the study of History that can discover Jesus, he writes:
“History can destroy the present; it can reconcile the present with the past; can even to a certain extent transport the present into the past; but to contribute to the making of the present is not given unto it.”
Schweitzer at spiritual odds with his historical conclusions recognizes a kind of sincerity, which feels to him like truth.
Jesus means something to our world because a mighty spiritual force streams forth from Him and flows through our time also. This fact can neither be shaken nor confirmed by any historical discovery. It is the solid foundation of Christianity.
With a kind of anguish, Schweitzer recognizes the temptation for the reader to read himself into Jesus’ life.
It is nothing less than a misfortune for modern theology that it mixes history with everything and ends by being proud of the skill with which it finds its own thoughts.
Many of Schweitzer’s views have been disproved, by modern scholarship. He did not have access to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and one wonders what he would make of their cryptic resemblances to the New Testament. Yet, he stands as the most important Jesus scholar of the 20th century. Schweitzer was a great man, a wonderful musician, a missionary, and a winner of the Nobel Prize. It was as if he thought of St. Paul in First Corinthians 13, and the moving poem he quotes of love, hope, and faith, but the greatest of these is love. After an incredibly vigorous and poignant historical survey, Schweitzer had no faith, no hope. But he retained love.
Monday, December 10, 2007
The Book of Mark
It is fitting to begin the Jesus Quest with a review of this most surprising Gospel, which can be read in one sitting.
Imagine yourself with Mark in your hands, and it is now the only Gospel you possess, and you know of no other Luke, or John or Matthew. Then remember that most scholars—almost all of them—believe that Mark was the very first Gospel written, and that Matthew, Luke, and perhaps even John had at least parts of this Gospel open in front of them when they wrote.
Even some Christians I’ve read are shocked by the ferocity of Jesus when they encounter him here, particularly without the softening of the other evangelists. It is somehow significant that the demons understand who Jesus is, while his disciples and family generally do not. Stranger still is how Jesus talks in parables with the intent to confuse. After Jesus gives the parable of the sower, Mark quotes Isaiah 6. Here in Mark 4…
Then Jesus said, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear." When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. He told them, "The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you.
But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!”
The parable of the sower represents the attempt by Jesus to sow the Word of God, and in Mark the disciples hopelessly fail to understand, although in Matthew (13) they do. Birds devouring the Savior’s seeds belong to, indeed are, Satan. Does Mark understand either the parable or Jesus’ interpretation? Mark doesn’t say so; we have to assume that he knew that his Jesus was alluding to Isaiah’s bitter irony, in which Yahweh sends forth a willing prophet while remarking that he will not be understood. Matthew, softening Mark’s harshness overtly quotes Isaiah, thus giving us a rather more conventional Jesus, who can shrug off any slowness of understanding, whether among the people or his own disciples. But what happens to Mark’s utterly characteristic sense of how mysterious Jesus is, if we accept Matthew’s revision?
Robert Frost captures the fierceness of Jesus as an enigma brilliantly in his poem “Directive:”
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.
Frank Kermode is my guide here in his most fascinating book A Genesis of Secrecy. I highly recommend it. He points out that the ending of Mark raises even more questions. The book ends with:
So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
The women are running away from what is no longer the tomb of Jesus. Do they yet see and perceive, hear and understand? Running away afraid is hardly a tonality of good news. Chapter 16:9-20 is an editorial after-thought attempting to remedy this striking abruptness. Some scholars believe that Mark originally had a different ending that was edited out. But this is conjecture, since we really don't know.
Greek scholars tell me that Mark was written in a hurried form of Greek. The favorite word of the Gospel is “immediately;” used some forty times. The ending, like the rest of the Gospel is either clumsy or powerfully subtle. Harold Bloom in his book Jesus and Yahweh helpfully suggests that Mark is both clumsy and subtle, reminding us of the enigma of the literature of Edgar Allen Poe.
The upshot is that the secretive Jesus in Mark is woefully enigmatic and difficult to grasp. We the readers see without perceiving and hear without understanding, and like the three women, we run away from the tomb afraid. In Mark, Jesus is talking to insiders, but even the assumed insiders fail to understand. The literary result is an open-ended tonality that rules very few possibilities out. Thus Jesus questers must begin with a hypothesis of a narrative sort that can explain the enigma of Jesus’ behavior here.
No scholar who takes Jesus seriously can quite shake the potent mystery of Jesus’ secret ministry. Schweitzer, Wrede, Remius, and many other scholars since were all powerfully moved by the ferocious puzzle of Jesus in this Gospel. For this reason alone, I believe it contains all the other Gospels, and subsequent gnosticisms, and theological possibilities, which sought to answer the riddle.
Imagine yourself with Mark in your hands, and it is now the only Gospel you possess, and you know of no other Luke, or John or Matthew. Then remember that most scholars—almost all of them—believe that Mark was the very first Gospel written, and that Matthew, Luke, and perhaps even John had at least parts of this Gospel open in front of them when they wrote.
Even some Christians I’ve read are shocked by the ferocity of Jesus when they encounter him here, particularly without the softening of the other evangelists. It is somehow significant that the demons understand who Jesus is, while his disciples and family generally do not. Stranger still is how Jesus talks in parables with the intent to confuse. After Jesus gives the parable of the sower, Mark quotes Isaiah 6. Here in Mark 4…
Then Jesus said, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear." When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. He told them, "The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you.
But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!”
The parable of the sower represents the attempt by Jesus to sow the Word of God, and in Mark the disciples hopelessly fail to understand, although in Matthew (13) they do. Birds devouring the Savior’s seeds belong to, indeed are, Satan. Does Mark understand either the parable or Jesus’ interpretation? Mark doesn’t say so; we have to assume that he knew that his Jesus was alluding to Isaiah’s bitter irony, in which Yahweh sends forth a willing prophet while remarking that he will not be understood. Matthew, softening Mark’s harshness overtly quotes Isaiah, thus giving us a rather more conventional Jesus, who can shrug off any slowness of understanding, whether among the people or his own disciples. But what happens to Mark’s utterly characteristic sense of how mysterious Jesus is, if we accept Matthew’s revision?
Robert Frost captures the fierceness of Jesus as an enigma brilliantly in his poem “Directive:”
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.
Frank Kermode is my guide here in his most fascinating book A Genesis of Secrecy. I highly recommend it. He points out that the ending of Mark raises even more questions. The book ends with:
So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
The women are running away from what is no longer the tomb of Jesus. Do they yet see and perceive, hear and understand? Running away afraid is hardly a tonality of good news. Chapter 16:9-20 is an editorial after-thought attempting to remedy this striking abruptness. Some scholars believe that Mark originally had a different ending that was edited out. But this is conjecture, since we really don't know.
Greek scholars tell me that Mark was written in a hurried form of Greek. The favorite word of the Gospel is “immediately;” used some forty times. The ending, like the rest of the Gospel is either clumsy or powerfully subtle. Harold Bloom in his book Jesus and Yahweh helpfully suggests that Mark is both clumsy and subtle, reminding us of the enigma of the literature of Edgar Allen Poe.
The upshot is that the secretive Jesus in Mark is woefully enigmatic and difficult to grasp. We the readers see without perceiving and hear without understanding, and like the three women, we run away from the tomb afraid. In Mark, Jesus is talking to insiders, but even the assumed insiders fail to understand. The literary result is an open-ended tonality that rules very few possibilities out. Thus Jesus questers must begin with a hypothesis of a narrative sort that can explain the enigma of Jesus’ behavior here.
No scholar who takes Jesus seriously can quite shake the potent mystery of Jesus’ secret ministry. Schweitzer, Wrede, Remius, and many other scholars since were all powerfully moved by the ferocious puzzle of Jesus in this Gospel. For this reason alone, I believe it contains all the other Gospels, and subsequent gnosticisms, and theological possibilities, which sought to answer the riddle.
I will be Reviewing Several Jesus Quests in the Near Future....
Over the past few months I have found that I receive more email feedback on my religious book reviews than anything else, most of it has been very stimulating and interesting. In keeping with that I shall be reviewing a number of Jesus Quests. Before I begin my reviews I want to make a couple of observations.
(1)
Yeshua contains us. All western irony begins with the first becoming last. Turning the other cheek, and suffering for a cause are concepts that are derived from Jesus’ paradox and dark speakings. Refusing him as a savior does not diminish his importance in our consciousness—indeed it can magnify it. The quest for his historical personage must continually bring us face to face with our own assumptions, and presumptions.
For starters, I recommend Charlotte Allen’s book “The Human Christ.” Allen, a Catholic gives a very fair and balanced account of the human comedy of Jesus searching, from the very beginnings of Christianity all the way to the insane present. After reading Allen it occurred to me that the greatest irony of Jesus’ contribution to us is the searchers tendency to uncover himself. Jesus is a concave mirror, reflecting back what we wish to see. The real “historical” Yeshua of Nazareth most likely is alien to us.
(2)
Medicine bottles and Soup recipes don’t lend themselves to postmodern literary criticism, but the Bible certainly does. Enigmatic texts like Jewish literature with their many plausible interpretations are prone to simplifying narrative explanations, which continually mislead us. It is human nature to want an answer, preferably one we like. Do we find meaning first and then search the facts? It seems that we do.
‘Incredulity toward meta-narrative’ is a relatively safe conjecture when dealing with the Bible, since historically, virtually every “narrative” has been shown to be historically flawed in one-way or another. I observe that no questing scholar is fully content with his precursor’s view. Each narrative seems to require “tweaking” when we deal with Jesus, particularly when we talk about his self-consciousness, and his own sense of meaning with words like “Kingdom” or “son of man.” His sense of meaning must always look like our own, or one we can reasonably find.
(3)
Does an interpreter illumine a text, or does the text illumine an interpreter? One could say that it depends upon the text, and our distance to it. The more we focus on a text, the more its meaning can be called into question, particularly as it is bestowed political or religious importance. The search for Jesus is the quest for present social, political, and religious vindication (both by Christians and secularists). It is in every sense a human “will to power,” as Nietzsche superbly termed it, the human desire to inflict us with an interpretation that will compel us. Goethe’s Faust who re-interprets John 1 with “In the beginning was the deed” persistently moves me.
The free thinker should be on guard, and the sympathetic scholar should be generous.
(4)
The Quest for the historical Yeshua is a magnificent quest. I predict that many quests will become great literature in future generations, despite their flawed histories. Narrative history, like Narrative religion falls into literature given enough time. It is no accident that Edward Gibbon is considered to be more literature now than history, just as Greek mythology, once a vibrant religion is now all literature. Perhaps our assumptions about history, religion and literature need to be re-examined, and more philosophical inquiry should begin here.
(5)
A quest can be evaluated by its own sense of honesty, and good will, towards its subject. Some questers sought to do damage to Jesus and movingly found him whole and complete. Others sought to find him and poignantly lost him. In each case the quester uncovered something new about Jesus. Historically real, or literarily imagined, he cannot be ignored.
(1)
Yeshua contains us. All western irony begins with the first becoming last. Turning the other cheek, and suffering for a cause are concepts that are derived from Jesus’ paradox and dark speakings. Refusing him as a savior does not diminish his importance in our consciousness—indeed it can magnify it. The quest for his historical personage must continually bring us face to face with our own assumptions, and presumptions.
For starters, I recommend Charlotte Allen’s book “The Human Christ.” Allen, a Catholic gives a very fair and balanced account of the human comedy of Jesus searching, from the very beginnings of Christianity all the way to the insane present. After reading Allen it occurred to me that the greatest irony of Jesus’ contribution to us is the searchers tendency to uncover himself. Jesus is a concave mirror, reflecting back what we wish to see. The real “historical” Yeshua of Nazareth most likely is alien to us.
(2)
Medicine bottles and Soup recipes don’t lend themselves to postmodern literary criticism, but the Bible certainly does. Enigmatic texts like Jewish literature with their many plausible interpretations are prone to simplifying narrative explanations, which continually mislead us. It is human nature to want an answer, preferably one we like. Do we find meaning first and then search the facts? It seems that we do.
‘Incredulity toward meta-narrative’ is a relatively safe conjecture when dealing with the Bible, since historically, virtually every “narrative” has been shown to be historically flawed in one-way or another. I observe that no questing scholar is fully content with his precursor’s view. Each narrative seems to require “tweaking” when we deal with Jesus, particularly when we talk about his self-consciousness, and his own sense of meaning with words like “Kingdom” or “son of man.” His sense of meaning must always look like our own, or one we can reasonably find.
(3)
Does an interpreter illumine a text, or does the text illumine an interpreter? One could say that it depends upon the text, and our distance to it. The more we focus on a text, the more its meaning can be called into question, particularly as it is bestowed political or religious importance. The search for Jesus is the quest for present social, political, and religious vindication (both by Christians and secularists). It is in every sense a human “will to power,” as Nietzsche superbly termed it, the human desire to inflict us with an interpretation that will compel us. Goethe’s Faust who re-interprets John 1 with “In the beginning was the deed” persistently moves me.
The free thinker should be on guard, and the sympathetic scholar should be generous.
(4)
The Quest for the historical Yeshua is a magnificent quest. I predict that many quests will become great literature in future generations, despite their flawed histories. Narrative history, like Narrative religion falls into literature given enough time. It is no accident that Edward Gibbon is considered to be more literature now than history, just as Greek mythology, once a vibrant religion is now all literature. Perhaps our assumptions about history, religion and literature need to be re-examined, and more philosophical inquiry should begin here.
(5)
A quest can be evaluated by its own sense of honesty, and good will, towards its subject. Some questers sought to do damage to Jesus and movingly found him whole and complete. Others sought to find him and poignantly lost him. In each case the quester uncovered something new about Jesus. Historically real, or literarily imagined, he cannot be ignored.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of ReligionR.A. Knox
Every so often I find a book that reminds me what it is I love about reading, and why I go to all this trouble! Knox is brilliant, articulate, knowledgeable, and penetrating, he is a pleasure to read. I have spent many long hours trying to understand the enthusiastic religious temperament, and Knox, a reasonable Catholic offers a most welcome perspective.
Knox compellingly shows us the two different kinds of religious enthusiasm, which he would like to define as "ultrasupernaturalism."
I would suggest a distinction between "mystical" and "evangelical" enthusiasm. One, taking its point of departure from the Incarnation rather than atonement, by-passes the theology of grace and concentrates on the God within...The other, more acutely conscious of man's fallen state, thinks always in terms of redemption; to know, somehow, that your sins are forgiven, that you are a new creature in God's sight, is all that matters...either tendency can be a signpost to the morass. Your Anabaptist or Ranter may consult the light within him..The mystic's claim is that he adheres to the 'base' or 'apex' of his soul--call it which you will; an inner sanctum, beyond the reach of sense, but apt for communion with the divine...cuts himself in two; half of him is in the clouds, the other half remains on earth, mysteriously divorced from its spiritual partner...on the opposite slope lies the peril of pure antinomianism (Not being subject to morals or a divine law) St. Paul with his Omnia mihi licent (All things are lawful) St. Augustine, with his Ama, et fac quod vis (Love and then what you will, do) Luther with his Pecca Fortiter (Sin without fear)..is it certain that any natural law of morals is binding on a soul which has emancipated itself from the natural, and lives now by a law of grace? (Parenthetical translations are mine--Enthusiasm: 581-582)
This is a pleasure to read. Knox has just described the two sides of Protestantism taken to doctrinal extremes, one illumined by an "inner light" that finds God with-in, and the other illumined by an "inner-light" that can interpret the Bible. Knox takes us through the vexed history of Enthusiasm from Paul's opponents in First Corinthians through John Wesley and modern revivalists. He concludes that all kinds of enthusiasm have their point of departure in a rejection of Authority. I couldn't help but detect a veiled criticism of Protestantism itself, though he also is quick to recognize periods of enthusiasm within Catholicism. Indeed, his primary thesis is that Enthusiasm is "ultra-supernaturalism" on a recurrent theme. Knox rightly calls America the last vestige of Enthusiasm, taking note how similar we are to the Donatists, Montanists, Anabaptists, and so on.
There are so many wonderful quotes in this book, although as a reader I was bogged down in some places dealing with obscure Enthusiasts. Even so, Knox's wisdom and great writing has won me over. I highly recommend this book.
Knox compellingly shows us the two different kinds of religious enthusiasm, which he would like to define as "ultrasupernaturalism."
I would suggest a distinction between "mystical" and "evangelical" enthusiasm. One, taking its point of departure from the Incarnation rather than atonement, by-passes the theology of grace and concentrates on the God within...The other, more acutely conscious of man's fallen state, thinks always in terms of redemption; to know, somehow, that your sins are forgiven, that you are a new creature in God's sight, is all that matters...either tendency can be a signpost to the morass. Your Anabaptist or Ranter may consult the light within him..The mystic's claim is that he adheres to the 'base' or 'apex' of his soul--call it which you will; an inner sanctum, beyond the reach of sense, but apt for communion with the divine...cuts himself in two; half of him is in the clouds, the other half remains on earth, mysteriously divorced from its spiritual partner...on the opposite slope lies the peril of pure antinomianism (Not being subject to morals or a divine law) St. Paul with his Omnia mihi licent (All things are lawful) St. Augustine, with his Ama, et fac quod vis (Love and then what you will, do) Luther with his Pecca Fortiter (Sin without fear)..is it certain that any natural law of morals is binding on a soul which has emancipated itself from the natural, and lives now by a law of grace? (Parenthetical translations are mine--Enthusiasm: 581-582)
This is a pleasure to read. Knox has just described the two sides of Protestantism taken to doctrinal extremes, one illumined by an "inner light" that finds God with-in, and the other illumined by an "inner-light" that can interpret the Bible. Knox takes us through the vexed history of Enthusiasm from Paul's opponents in First Corinthians through John Wesley and modern revivalists. He concludes that all kinds of enthusiasm have their point of departure in a rejection of Authority. I couldn't help but detect a veiled criticism of Protestantism itself, though he also is quick to recognize periods of enthusiasm within Catholicism. Indeed, his primary thesis is that Enthusiasm is "ultra-supernaturalism" on a recurrent theme. Knox rightly calls America the last vestige of Enthusiasm, taking note how similar we are to the Donatists, Montanists, Anabaptists, and so on.
There are so many wonderful quotes in this book, although as a reader I was bogged down in some places dealing with obscure Enthusiasts. Even so, Knox's wisdom and great writing has won me over. I highly recommend this book.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Deep River: Reflections on the Religious Insight of Certain Negro Spirituals
Five or Six decades after its origin, the Negro spiritual was observed by Maurice Ravel to be America’s greatest musical contribution because it was an authentic human outcry of suffering in the worshipful presence of God. After listening to (and attempting to transcribe) some of Ravel's music, I decided to read this tough little book, written by Howard Thurman and Orton Jones.
There is a sublime severity to the Negro folk song, which was born out of the African slaves intrinsic sense of him or herself as a child of God. Thurman and Jones conclude that the materials of the Negro Spiritual were derived from the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, along with a sophisticated conception of nature, and the personal experiences of the common lot of the people. One can go further. The Negro spiritual is the charged inward manifestation for the African slave of the Jewish burden and concept of life, nature, and personal experience, as it is presented in the Old Testament. This profound appropriation is easily identified in the lyrics of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, or Wade in the water. But the sound of the music has a curious people-forming mystique to it as well. Wynton Marsalis and others easily persuade me that this music belongs to African Americans and should be sung and performed by their authentic voice. Jazz too can be continually formed out of this charged African American atmosphere of hope in the daily grind of suffering, and it holds to this mythos even today.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves music, and wishes to understand the roots of the sounds we all groove to.
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