Until Further Titling – Week Four: Proofs of God
Warning: This is LONG…. It will probably take a long time to read, so perhaps do it in a few sittings or just give a continuous bit of your time to read and think about what today really is about. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…
It is pretty fractured. I am having horrible writers block and can’t really say what I wish to…
[Skip this section if you don’t care about why I am writing…
I have never been one to discuss Jesus much. If you have ever had a discussion with me about what my religion means to me, the earthly connection to the heavens, Jesus of Nazareth, hardly ever comes up, even though He is my most powerful connection to the numinal. There are a few reasons for that. First, I think it turns people off. I don’t care about anyone’s personal relationship with Jesus, so why should anyone care about mine? Evangelical Christians have ruined this a bit for me, and I am sure many others too. Sure, the Christ can be personal, but He is not exclusive to me or you – and even if He is, it is not something to brag about or shove in anyone else’s face. Sometimes, when watching the news, when I hear just the name ‘Jesus,’ I cringe because of the swagger of the speaking commentator and the extension of Jesus into a place where no reasonable inference of His biblical behavior would lead. So when I speak of Jesus, I am very careful not to take a tone of self-righteousness.
The second reason that I usually avoid Jesus in conversation is precisely because of a relationship that exists. Unless you are a devout Christian or Catholic, He won’t come up because there is something powerful and yet very personal to me about who Christ was that cannot be understood readily by those outside the faith. Further, I would even suggest that a great majority of Christians, those who study the bible, those who go to church on Sundays, those who do much more than I to imbue themselves with religion have a lesser understanding of Christ than I. It’s not that I have a monopoly on knowledge or some quality that makes me better at it than them, it is just that their exploration (or lack thereof) encompasses a stoic and one-sided flat interpretation of the Christ. The fear and hopes and desires that most Christians live in shape their Christ into who they want Him to be. They do not look at Him for what He did or continues to do with the poor in spirit; they look at Him for how they wish a savior would be, much as the Jews that struggled with Jesus’ apparent humanity when he was alive. The Christ they profess to me seems like a Christ of the Old Testament. The Christ many see is a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, genocidal, capriciously malevolent bully that exists simply to damn those who don’t explicitly follow the rules of being a Christian (For a caricature, wiki Westboro Baptist Church or ask any average Christian about his views on being gay). This is not the Christ I see. Their view is as a stalk of grass in its size and upward path’s scope, while exploration by definition and in this case, should be as a tree, with many branches, great scope, and perpendicular avenues of geometric design. But this exploration rarely takes place and I have little patience for bible-quoting stagnancy when it comes to the person of Christ and what He would have wanted in today’s world.
A third and final reason why I avoid Christ in day-to-day conversation is because I am still developing who I thought the man was. This answer will probably take my whole life, but I do not know everything I wish to about Jesus and sometimes I think it prudent to keep my mouth shut (believe it or not)…
So I don’t bring Him up much. But He is much more important to me than I let on, which is what this post is about…]
If it were not for the Christ, as I know Him to be, I would not be religious. Jesus of Nazareth is a concept that I think is beyond any of us as human beings. I am sure you have heard the term secular humanism, and I would say I am exactly the opposite – a religious misanthropist. Religion is our only hope in this world, for humanity itself has failed and continues to fail with every choice it is given. But it is not a limited hope, as many Christians profess with their talk of the fires of hell. It is a great personal hope, and one that encompasses the world in all its depth. It is beyond any religious or secular belief in existence. I could not be a Jew, waiting on a Messiah with no word from God for the past few thousand years. I could not be a Muslim, with a leader who is neither divine nor different than so many of history’s figures. I could not be a Hindu on an eternal journey of repetition and tireless phases of existence and nonexistence with no rest for a weary soul. I could not be a Buddhist with no understanding of a personal yet powerful God and a Force that has intentions and love for each and every person. I could not be an atheist without hope in the eternal or a thought beyond the here and now. Christianity is beyond all of these things. Christ gives access to religion and hopes for those who have none, beyond any religion on this earth. Christ is rest for the weary, strength for the weak, hope for the hopeless, and has something to offer literally everyone.
I have often tried to imagine how, if I were God, I would design a universe in which I wanted to create a race of beings for which I could care and they could reciprocate a measure of love toward me. A silly exercise, clearly, since I am only human and not a very creative one at that, but an interesting one nonetheless. I think about what exactly would make sense for a god to do in order to maximize a phenomenal experience that would culminate in the beings coming home to me in some fashion, during or after their lives. And it may be my lack of creativity, my love of my religion, or my inability as a human being to posit anything greater, but there is nothing better to me than what God has given us, which to the modern Christian is this: We live in a world in which there is no explicit indication of God in day to day life. But thousands of years of thought evolution, experience of the universe, expression of personal impressions of something greater than ourselves, have led us to belief in an Individual who came to earth years ago, claimed He was the Son of the one true God, proclaimed an opposing view of the harsh world in stating that God loves us, suffered, died, and reignited His life to show that God cares enough to give us a new life in which we will not know pain or want. God did not give us any clues but this Man, who proclaimed things that make sense for the good of man’s soul but not really for living in a purely material world. In other words, this Guy that came down doesn’t exactly make sense unless there is something more that exists. And so many choose to invest in His words, which grant us access to the highest Being in existence (if that word applies in our world). Through Him, and only through Him, we understand that we exist for this God’s love and we can choose to take a risk and believe His words or we can really not care about the bigger picture and let the world in front of us be our final cause. (These things are all besides the aspects of God we can see in each other, in nature, in our own creation, and so on, which I do not believe to be nearly as powerful as the human Jesus Christ.)
This, if you ask me, is the perfect way to have the existence of human beings with free will, who can choose to love their creator without being just a machination of a hollow and loveless existence of some kind of biological robot (which even us lowly humans can create with a computer program or a machine class erector set and motherboard). But if the God were me, it would be a hard choice to breathe this love into the universe by offering a piece of yourself, a metaphorical ‘Son,’ in order to ensure that the world knows you can exist and be chosen…
…which is where the power of the message comes in…
The Guy that came down didn’t just come down because God wished to show us He loved us. We were also messing up big time. Jesus’ era was one of slaughter, immorality, and utter disregard of anything but expanding the empire of Rome. This was the final and masterful stroke that God would make, not only to create a new covenant with man that was to supercede those of Adam, Abraham, & Moses, but to fulfill prophecies, redefine morality & virtue, and offer us an unending life where we could forget the woes and worries of earthly existence and move beyond the fear and pain of death…
[I will not be discussing here the fulfillment of covenants or prophecies. Any historical or spiritual examination of the bible will do for this. I am not interested in this when discussing the tangible and applicable power of who Christ was for each person in this life. I see that discussion as more of a proof that Jesus was who He claimed to be and the requirements therein of that qualification. I also won’t discuss the ramifications or dynamics of an extra-temporal, matter-less existence. That is for Sunday, when we can hope for the new day…
No, rather the discussion here is one having to do with the redefinition of morality and virtue. This is where His power lies for me. Why? Because His humanity was His strength. The humanity of the Divine Man on this Good Friday…]
Christ didn’t just redefine the definition of who the Jews were looking for as their savior and messiah. He redefined what virtue and power was and is today for a Christian…
I have a cousin who I don’t typically think of as overtly religious, who was asked why he was Christian. I remember him saying that his attraction to the Christian faith was the fact that the Christian message included forgiveness as a virtue, a sentiment unparalleled by any other religion in its depth and width for each human person. I think my cousin was on the right track, but I think he understated what Christ did for the world, benefits in the western world that we hardly apply any more. I would argue that Jesus did not just add forgiveness to the list of virtues that were in existence after Aristotle, Plato, and the lesser Greek philosophers’ theses, rather he redefined all of them to something much more incredible than before.
Explicitly, Christ would only have problems with three of Aristotle’s virtues and vices. The first is that Aristotle believed compassion to be a weakness that could be exploited. Clearly, Jesus disagreed, in his interactions with the prostitutes, tax collectors, and lepers. Modern Christianity is pretty good at employing this virtue in some ways, but bad in others. (Good in that Christianity decisively gives the most foreign aid in disasters and famines and the like. Bad in that compassion is not offered to the victims of AIDS by many Christians who claim it is a scourge of God for sexual misconduct.) The second explicit difference between Aristotle’s virtue and Jesus’ is forgiveness. Aristotle’s forgiveness should be given only when prudent, while the Nazarene’s was unconditional. This is a huge difference in my opinion, which I get into a bit later. The final difference in Aristotle vs. Jesus concerning virtues is Aristotle’s magnanimity, which was the idea that one should be wealthy to enhance one’s greatness. In doing so, one should also give to the poor, not foremost to help the poor but to show one’s own greatness. Jesus would have fervently disagreed with this, seeing the not only the poor, but each and every person as an end and not a means for the self. These are the only three virtues which Aristotle and Plato professed, that Jesus would likely have a problem with on their face. The virtues’ transformation, however, was not by Christ the person disagreeing with them, but the whole concept of His passion and death.
The difference in Christ’s virtues are how they were established in personal encounters with others and the self. It takes more strength to exercise the virtues as Jesus wished or showed by His example than the virtues that are classically coined. He was human. The first thing I think of when I hear human is frailty and weakness. The phrase ‘all too human’ comes to mind. But Christ’s humanity was his strength. The whole idea of Jesus is powerful because of his human nature. I do not think Christ had an incredible I.Q., high tolerance for pain, good looks, aura-like charisma, ability to predict the future, or any of those things. Though I do think that He had the ability to command these things from heaven if He wished them. But He did not. And therein is the power. What credit would be due to a savior with no senses or emotions that did not feel the pain of the scourge and nails? If God sent His Son with no sensory neurons and complete emotional stability, what would be the gift in Him dying for us? The key is the humanity and free will entailed in it. In the weakness He outwardly showed, Christ showed that his mind and soul were stronger than the flesh, in every way. Power was shown to be not the ability to kill a man with the swipe of a hand, but the ability to stay one’s hand. Christ was surely tempted to call upon the angels when He was being tormented by Satan in the desert. But He stayed His hand, alone in weakness and without the protection of the heavenly rank. He must have been tempted to use some heavenly means to free Himself from the cross, or at least to flee the night before he was taken by those guards. But He did not, and the self-restraint he showed is worthy of awe by any human being. God killed His Son, an entirely human being. Not His Son the painless, emotionless robot.
The most powerful example of this to me is the Anointed One’s Passion. I cannot imagine the fear He must have felt. Crucifixion, scourging, betrayal & abandonment, and death are all dirty business, each warranting indescribable fear in their own right. Crucifixion and scourging need no analysis. The thought of us having to go through one of those two (much less both) makes a strong man shudder. And death the same. Death is the secret fear. The one everyone has, but none talk about, because we don’t know much about it and we don’t want the world to know we live in fear as well. We Christians believe Jesus freed us from the shackles of death. But we can’t be certain, even though the person of Christ is staring at us through historical evidence and the faith we hold. If we think we have little to rely on when the fear of death or torture sets in, think of what Christ must have gone through. He chose to face His death with only the inkling that He was the Savior of the world and could beat it. I would imagine that He must have thought to Himself a million, a hundred million, a billion times, ‘am I crazy?‘ ‘what if I am wrong?’ ‘if this is a mistake, then I have not only failed myself by dying, but the thousands of people that believe in me.’ and so many other things about the safety of Himself, his family, and his followers. He could not have been certain, in fact maybe even less so than we are today that there is something worth dying for. It was that weakness, that humanity, that speaks to me of immense strength. He thought all of those things, feared and worried just like you and I, and followed through with the plan anyway. I don’t think very many people who have ever lived would have been able to do this, and that is not all…
As far as betrayal is concerned, I think it just as harmful to a human being’s mental state as a scourge or nails through the hand and feet. Judas has always been interesting to me in this respect. Judas is reputed in many places to have been Jesus’ best friend, a zealot who wished to throw off the yoke of Roman rule and create a new nation for the Jews, as had once been before the Diaspora. It has also been said that his motivation for betraying Jesus was truly because he believed in Jesus. After the betrayal, he watched and wished Jesus would throw off the shackles, destroy the Romans, and establish a new land for the Jews to live in, as was said that the Jews’ savior would do. What he failed to understand was that Christ was doing just that, it was just with a redefinition of the kingdom and what it meant to fight true evil in the world & still be virtuous. When Judas did not see this, he hung himself. That final choice was the one that damned Judas, not the handing over of Christ. After all, it was not just Judas that betrayed and abandoned Jesus, even though Judas may have been the most damaging. None of Jesus’ followers were at the foot of the cross, save his mother, maybe Mary Magdalene, and John. But the others came back to Jesus in some way after Jesus’ death. Judas did not think that was a choice he had, and that was his main failure…
I wonder how Christ must have felt when Judas turned Him over to the guards. He surely had to know that Judas would try something like this eventually if Judas realized Jesus was the Messiah, Judas being a zealot and expressing distaste for the Romans at every turn. But the betrayal must have hurt worse than any of those nails. I can’t imagine how I would feel if my best friend turned me in if the friend knew the accusations he was turning me in for were false. Especially if I knew I was to be killed for these things. And this friend professed that he would not betray me, multiple times, not to mention the night before. What about everyone else, though? Where I was famous the week before and people were laying down palms for me to walk on, I now had no one to attest to the fact that I had done some good in the world and should not be sentenced to death. If the self-doubt were not too much of a burden with the physical suffering Christ was surely to go through because of His beliefs, the abandonment He must have felt would have overwhelmed anyone into apostasy. However, He refused to give up and His refusal to act in the way that would have been most prudent to save His own life saved the entire world. Weakness transformed to strength, imprudence to eternal prudence, fear to final courage.
As God, the only problem with His plan is how frail humans are. How was He to know that Jesus would follow through? What if He hadn’t? It sounds like a huge risk, but it is clear that God chose the right man for the job. Thank heavens he didn’t chose me, or this world might look like a second kingdom of hell, after a falling to the temptation in the desert…
(As I say that, I realize that the traditional views of power and strength are inherent in us and it takes much thought to be able to reject them. I think it is clear when pondered that meekness, weakness, self-control, piety, and others are virtue, while will-to-power is not. But viscerally, they feel right, which I think is why so many seek for their own and not others…)
The whole plan of the death and passion of Christ most importantly speaks to me of a gift to us beyond what we ever could deserve or conceive. We are entirely undeserving and wholly unthankful for it. But that is not the end of the gifts for us from our Creator. He also wishes us to take part in salvation. And though the two are linked, I think it incredible that there is more than just the Paschal Sacrifice. If I were God, my Son’s death at the hands of the people would have righted some heavenly scale for the sins of the world. Fine, I will sacrifice that which is most precious to me in exchange for you to be off the hook. Nothing more would be required or expected of humanity and that would be the end of it (Let’s be thankful none of us are God). Instead, God extends Himself to us even further, by offering us everlasting glory and pleasure. To which I have no reply except that this world is surely a dream world, in which we have a God that loves us beyond where most of us believe love ends. Love is giving your only Son, an extension of yourself, to a sinful world to pay for that world’s sin. There is no word that describes doing that and then offering the same humans that killed Him a place beside you in heavenly dwelling. It is an aspect of love beyond what we are capable of understanding. And it is a topic of Easter Sunday.
I don’t pity those without Christ in their life, but I do think they are less whole as individuals for it. I think the way He restructured virtue, weakness, and power benefits the individual more than any other philosophy could. I would be a lesser man without it, as would all Christians. I finish with a few [LOT!!!] quotes I thought apply to my thoughts…
But God is up in heaven
And He doesn’t do a thing,
With a million angels watching,
And they never move a wing…
It’s God they ought to crucify
Instead of you and me,
I said to this Carpenter
A-hanging on the tree.
– Unknown
The other gods were strong; but Thou wast weak;
They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;
But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak;
And not a god has wounds but Thou alone.
– Unknown
The cross is the utterly incommensurable factor in the revelation of God. We have become far too used to it. We have surrounded the scandal of cross with roses. We have made a theory of salvation out of it. But that is not the cross…on the cross, God is non-God. Here is the triumph of death, the enemy, the non-church, the lawless state, the blasphemer, the soldiers. Here Satan triumphs over God. Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose that it must be at an end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation, and doubt about everything that exists! Our faith must be born where it is abandoned by all tangible reality; it must be born of nothingness, it must taste this nothingness and be given to taste in a way that no philosophy of nihilism can imagine.
It is one of the hundred answers to the fugitive perversion of modern “force” that the promptest and boldest agencies are also the most fragile or full of sensibility. The swiftest things are the softest things. A bird is active, because a bird is soft. A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard. The stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness. The bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force. In perfect force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can maintain itself in the air. Modern investigators of miraculous history have solemnly admitted that a characteristic of the great saints is their power of “levitation.” They might go further; a characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has been always the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art…In the old Christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens. The tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the rayed plumes of the angels. But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One “settles down” into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man “falls” into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one’s self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy; hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity….
– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“…My son, I ask you to go down into the lost places. Go without fear…But I have no strength Lord; I have not the power to save them!…No man can save another. Only I can save. Yet My strength is within you. My strength works most effectively in your weakness. When will you trust Me?…Have no fear. Walk into the darkness and bring back souls from it. I am with you always…But what can I do? Where should I go?…You are to do only this: you are to look neither to your left nor to your right. You are to go neither ahead of Me nor behind Me. Wait for Me and I will act…”
-Fr. Elijiah
…I don’t think it is a conscious refusal to accept truth. Disbelief is rooted in an inability to trust. It takes an effort of the will to have confidence in the ultimate goodness of life, and the experiences that mankind has been enduring for more than a century do anything but trust. Above all, this is the age of fear…
-Unknown
“…Stripped before his eyes was the fundamental problem of his soul: he had been given everything and it did not suffice. He had been graced to see the actions of God as few men had seen them. The consolations poured out upon him and within him were extraordinary, and not the least of them was today’s miracle. And yet…and yet the ancient scar of Adam within his nature dragged him inexorably back, again and again, to this desire for certainty. Not that he wished to force the Creator of the universe into a position of justifying His will, but he hungered for a trace of explanation…He knew full well that if it were given he would soon need a larger one, and a still larger one after that, until in the end no explanation would fill the yawning abyss of his doubt. The illusion of understanding would breed only deeper confusion, more binding forms of inner protest against the violation of all that was beautiful. Not-knowing was the way to ultimate union with the Love whose embrace was the filling of every doubt, the binding up of all wounds. As a Carmelite, he knew the theology and spirituality of the mountain of faith, the way of nothingness, the path that led by the straight route up the mountain of God. Why this relentless pull to the lift and the right, as if a path zigzagging through perilous ravines and precipitous heights were a better way. It was not a better way. He knew it, and yet the tug remained…The question returned again and again, nagging, biting, seizing his attention whenever he sought to fix his mind on the Presence. Why did God permit it? Why? Were the little arrangements of man destined to fall ever short of the Heavenly Jerusalem, endlessly repeating themselves until there came about some radical and comprehensive fall, some awful and majestic collapse into an ultimate evil, wiping away all delusions about the perfectibility of man?…Was this long lesson strung out the course of all of history not a form of cruelty? Oh yes, he knew all the replies, back and forth, up and down, inside out. Freedom. Human will. Man could not love if he were unable to choose love, and with this choice came the ability to choose love’s opposite. [He] could argue an atheist into silence, if one would listen, and he could go farther to implant the questions that could lead a soul in darkness to fairest hope. But beyond that there would still loom the wider and more perilous questions still. His convert would have to face it eventually for he was still facing it after all these years…Why do You permit evil to go so far? Would you let it devour everything?…Not everything, said the quiet voice. Not everything. And from a single seed comes forth entire forests, waiting to unseal their code, to cover the earth with life…”
– Fr. Elijiah
All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that?–that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking. The aeons are easy enough to think about, anyone can think about them. The instant is really awful: and it is because our religion has intensely felt the instant, that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in theology dealt much with hell. It is full of danger, like a boy’s book: it is at an immortal crisis…Also, with a noble vulgarity, life imitates the serial and leaves off at the exciting moment. For death is distinctly an exciting moment…
– G.K. Chesterton
The formatting is driving me nuts….
Hey Kev,
I am half way through it and it is scary how much it has been echoing my exact thoughts on this topic…I will write more after I have finished the entire blog entry on Good Friday and write more tomorrow…