Jesus, humanity, and doubt - an interesting exchange between scholars

Faith & Science Conversation
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Perhaps I’m misreading you, but I think you think I meant something different from what I was trying to convey. “Let me 'splain.”

I think church communities (like other human communities) did a pretty good job of maintaining a fairly sealed bubble for a long time. So Christians grew up thinking scientific evidence for YEC is rock solid, and that evolution is some vapor-based theory in crisis. And that the Bible was dictated, line by line, to people who more-or-less just wrote down what they were told for our benefit, and that these writings were always perfectly preserved and translated, and that everything makes complete sense, is totally consistent, and there’s nothing to see here, it’s all figured out, you don’t need to see his identification, you can go about your business. I don’t think I’m quite as cynical as you in thinking that churches were jsut trying to get good people to do evil things for the power rush… Some were; but I think the simplest explanation is that our primate brains like to avoid complexity as much as possible and by default will take any out that requires less thinking. The internet changed all that by making it impossible for communities to maintain their bubbles, and suddenly people were being exposed to all kinds of facts and complexities and realities that the community guardians were powerless to block. I welcome this development.

Unfortunately, churches have produced a bunch of folks whose faith comes completely unglued in the face of reality, because their faith is misplaced. “Seriously? You can no longer believe that the Son of God rose from the dead because somebody proved to you that the earth is 4.5 billion years old?” Every day you hear some former Christian Come Out as Deconstructed™ because the earth is old, or because the Bible doesn’t work like they thought it did, or because they have gay friends who are nice people, or because some church leader was really abusive to someone, or because dating before marriage doesn’t ruin everything after all… But Christian discipleship isn’t about any of those things – it’s about trusting the risen Christ, not the consistency of your particular theological house of cards. Church teachers have failed these people by teaching them to prioritize and depend on a whole mess of other things that simply aren’t Jesus.

The “cottage industry” I referred to is just all the hay being made off this. When you Deconstruct™, you can get fame and popularity (and patreons! and ad clicks!) by making your blog or youtubes about your story. If you’re really good you can land sweet book deals. And if you go into apologetics, you can rake it in by using the Deconstruct™ stats to freak out Christian parents and pastors and youth leaders into buying your materials or hosting your seminars (and patreons! and ad clicks!). Some of these people mean well, but many are still laboring under the illusion that if you can just resolve peoples’ intellectual “doubts”, you can keep them on the team. But… that ain’t gonna work. Or, rather, you might keep them on “the team”, but that’s not the same thing as them being disciples of Jesus.

Every time I hear yet another Deconstructee spouting off about how Christianity just couldn’t survive their razor-sharp intellect, I want to grab 'em by the hair and say “Did you really ever believe a crucified man came back from the dead? 'Cuz if you believed that, why are old rocks or gay friends or perv youth ministers such a crisis for you?! GROW THE HELL UP AND DO YOUR HOMEWORK!”

But Jesus probably wouldn’t approve, so I don’t.

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Except that many have countered this by simply refusing to listen or acknowledge anything which doesn’t fit their alternate version of reality. They stick to the sources of propaganda which tells them what they want to hear.

Agreed.

I guess I misunderstood your meaning. It sounded like you were saying that Christian discipleship should simply silence your doubts by believing what you are told. I stand corrected.

I have no idea what you are talking about here… very confusing …

The deconstruction videos I have been seeing are people overcoming the train wreck that highly legalistic extreme versions of Christianity have made of their life. They have my congratulations for overcoming these problems - I never have and never would buy into that sort of Christianity. It is perhaps understandable that their understanding of Christianity as a whole has become a little bit skewed as a result of their experience.

Yes they really believed – that I do not doubt, because I do not buy into that absurd piece of true Scotsman rhetoric. But what they likely did not do is construct their faith and reasoning from a wide foundation of experience and knowledge for themselves, because what they have was probably simply handed to them as if it were the panacea for all human problems – such foolishness!

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I’m not talking about people who renounce the fundamentalism of their youth for more stable (and dare I say healthier) approaches to Christianity. I’m talking about the people who deconstruct their Christianity and leave it altogether. The people who say (in essence): “I was a sincere Christian who really loved God. But one day I realized that YECism is crazy, that God couldn’t have ordered the slaughter of Canaanites, and that the New Testament advocates for slavery and oppression. A veil was lifted from my eyes and I now see that Christianity is just a lie. Please embrace me for my bravery and vulnerability! Oh, and be sure to subscribe to my channel…”

That’s not what I was meaning. I’m not saying “You had these doubts, therefore you must not have truly believed.” I’m saying “If the idea of a man coming back from the dead was something you could believe to be true, why is your faith strained to the breaking point by much less absurd things? You swallowed the camel, so why are you gagging on the gnat?” There are all kinds of explanations for all the things that cause them problems. There are no new objections to Christianity, and literally hordes of extremely intelligent people have written mountains of pages on all of them. If you choose to follow the risen Christ, you’ve done the hard part.

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  :grin:   Not to mention intellect and rationality.

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Yeah, well, I’ll actually give them bravery and vulnerability. No sarcasm: it really is a hard thing to stand up in front of your people and tell them that, after all, they really are all wrong about everything. But “intellect and rationality”? As the German logicians say, “Bullgeschichte.” If you’re not willing to engage the best arguments by the greatest minds on the issues that perplex you, then you have no business taking a position on them as if you had.

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But there is no one way that temptation works and no one way that people experience temptation so I think this argument is nonsensical.

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And this is the sort of thing which caused me to react as I did to Ron_anon. Because I will not have anything to do with a Christianity like that.

These are NOT the essence of sin but things which all mature responsible people SHOULD DO!

  1. We absolutely SHOULD question the rightness of commands.
  2. We definitely SHOULD question the motives of a lawgiver.
  3. And we SHOULD have courage and willingness to sacrifice our lives to defy the commands of gunmen, terrorists, mobsters, criminals, and dictators no matter what consequences they threaten.

I reject utterly this understanding of Genesis 1-3 so convenient for using religion as a tool of power. Sin has NOTHING to do with disobedience and everything to do with self-destructive habits and in the case of Adam and Eve it was the habit of blaming their own mistakes on everything but themselves. You cannot learn from your mistakes if you will not even acknowledge your responsibility. And this is why God cast them from the garden to live by the sweat of their own brow because they had to learn that blaming others for their mistakes simply will not work. It is not very surprising that such a beginning so quickly led to fratricide and constant murder – because that is precisely the way such criminals think – “he made me do it.”

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Amen to that. No doubt temptation comes in a great variety of packages and means. I only proposed one particular way that temptation doesn’t work (at least - I suppose - in the vast majority of human experience) … and that is as a discussion with a literal figure presenting you with conveniently pre-labeled evil options. “Come to the dark side, Luke … we all wear bad-guy helmets, and always shoot at (but never seem to hit) the good guys”. Okay - yeah - that’s a caricature; I’m just having fun. But hopefully you see the point. Nobody I know has ever experienced or participated in evil that looked so pre-packaged like that. But maybe that’s just me. I’ll modify my opinion if they start coming out of the woodwork.

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I’m liking you @Ron_anon, because of and despite this. I think they would say Bockmist. I do like the Latin Stercus Tauri and the Makaton is hilarious if you do it in a meeting. The despite is despite the claim of ‘the best arguments by the greatest minds on the issues that perplex you’. I’m not familiar with any that don’t fully acknowledge Kierkegaard’s sense of the absurd and his subsequent fideism: hallelujah anyway.

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Of course. I didn’t intend to imply that those “best arguments” resolved all the issues. But if a person shows no evidence of having tried very hard to find out what others have thought about the subjects that trouble them, then I have difficulty accepting that it was “intellect” and “reason” that led them away from Christianity. Deconstructee narratives are full of this sort of thing: “…and when I realized that the earth really wasn’t 6,000 years old, I saw that clearly the Bible couldn’t be the Word of God and Christianity is all a delusion.”

A sufficiently motivated individual can eventually rationalize anything. If a person chooses not to follow Christ, it’s either because he doesn’t want to, or because deep down he values something else more. The real deluded individual is the one (on either side) who’s convinced that he just “followed where the evidence led”.

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Indeed Ron. That kind of flip based on a failure of phenomenology in the first place is no less ignorant. I can’t thank why anyone would not want to follow Christ in any meaningful way once they’ve properly encountered Him. I follow where the evidence of science and rationality beyond it leads and where the evidence of my heart leads which supervenes in the opposite direction.

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Oh, hordes of people encountered him when he walked the earth. The same way, even. When the man born blind was healed, he saw the power of God. The Pharisees saw the power of Beelzebul. Some folks simply won’t acknowledge a will superior to their own. Some folks claim knowledge of good and evil on their terms. This is the essence of sin. People just gotta learn that you can’t deny Reality. Some kids are easier to raise than others. A “proper encounter” doesn’t always cut it. You’d think it would, but… no. Anyone who doesn’t understand that needs to spend some time explaining to a three-year-old why he should do something he really doesn’t want to do. After a while, your definition of “proper encounter” starts drifting in strange directions…

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Whaaaaat? @marvin bull history? Thanks for the smile

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In my usage, don’t read too much into the linguistic roots. I know nothing of German. It’s mostly an amusing way of bypassing any language filters (software or wetware), and I’m not technically using the term according to how it was coined. I think it was invented by Robert Price for a different purpose, but I choose to use it otherwise. I’m just all Nietzschean that way.

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I personally would distinguish between the emptied, incarnated version and the transforming and risen Jesus.

If you take the Gospels at their word, it seems even the apostles he personally chose had no clue what was going on at times during his life.

It’s easy to reject a fellow man. The true face of God himself? Shouldn’t that love ultimately consume all?

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Jesus was more than just a fellow man, but still many had no problem rejecting him.

Interesting choice of words. Being consumed could be either a thing to be desired or despised, depending on one’s perspective. In the Christian story, beings with a more full experience of God than we have still rejected him, such as the rebellious members of the Divine Council or Adam and Eve. There is a case to be made that all are ultimately reconciled, but the text is inconclusive. I’m not convinced enough to assert that anyone who chooses not to follow Christ does so simply because he hasn’t “properly” encountered him. I’ve known thoughtful, informed unbelievers for whom I don’t think that’s an adequate explanation.

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A proper encounter can only happen in the resurrection. Until then we have the Gaussian distribution of natural responses to God the bloke at the time. And the story of Him since. I don’t see what will has to do with it or how we justify ourselves. The essence of sin is abuse of power in weakness and ignorance. One day we will all stand before Him and He’ll beckon us to walk with Him in paradise and the encounter will complete our metamorphosis.

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That’s not how I read it. Perhaps you should disassemble what you mean by “abuse of power”.

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. The Father wills into being all that is, and we as his image-bearers are subcreators. In this respect we are most like him and least like the other animals. Sin is when we exercise this divine will in discordance with the Divine Order. In the Story, Adam and Eve want to be like God (which is good – they already are)… but will other than what God has already willed (which is an impossible contradiction, and thus chaos). Their first act as Usurpers is to “hack” creation: to proclaim their nakedness (which God had called “good”) to be bad, and to will into existence a covering. “Power” is nothing but the capacity to manifest your Will. If you keep digging, you always end up at Will… at least, I always do and can’t ever get beyond that. Like it’s foundational or something…

In other words, Will has everything to do with it.

That sounds good, and I hope it’s true. However, I think the Scriptures – and the Story the Church has told over time – do not support that prediction sufficiently for me to assert it with confidence.

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This question of Jesus freedom of will we addressed by church fathers such as St Maximos the Confessor. It was parti of a great theological debate in the ended in the Sixth Ecumenical Council.

Third Council of Constantinople , (680–681), the sixth ecumenical council of the Christian church, summoned by the emperor Constantine IV and meeting at Constantinople . … The council condemned the monothelites, among them Pope Honorius I, and asserted two wills and two operations of Christ.

It has further been often discussed under the term “Kenosis” (the Self emptying of Christ as the Word made flesh in Philippians 2). It means that in order to live among us the Word was limited in Jesus to real human conditions of life, that He could be like we are and have fears and doubts etc be tested as we are but without sin. He could really suffer and could die despite the divine in Him.

it just goes to show every generation keeps wrestling with the same Christiological questions!

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