Parade of Follies -- Dehumanizing Christology

 So... this is now "me" in entire and not Tom at all. His model inspired me and these, while not as immediately problematic as the ones he called out, have their own pernicious side effects. They flatten some things out that should not be flattened (dehumanizing...), they stack other things that should remain relatively flat (hierarchicalizing...) and worst, they adopt what I see as the wrong kind of imperial structure (violence in its consummation vs. royal proclamation) about the wrong aspect of the event (the return, instead of the message) -- but there, I'm getting ahead of myself, but I'm being egged on inside by the overall purpose I have in mind that I even bothered to publish these half-2-pagers at this time in this way.

A lot of the theological fights in the first 300 years of the church were about Jesus’ nature. And I believe that they got it right: fully God, fully man. The Nicene Creed says the divine half of that most bluntly: ὁμοοῦσιον τῷ πατρί, of the same substance as the Father. They felt no need to say it – being 1700 years closer to the facts it might have felt useless – but they could have added, ὁμοοῦσιον τοῖς ἀνθρώποις, of the same substance as humanity. In the first 100 years or so that would have seemed tautological: “Why mention it? We know his siblings’ descendants, we know the grand-kids of the 500 etc. That’s not even a question!” Eventually, at Chalcedon<1>, some of them at least, did, with a pronoun (us): ὁμοούσιον ἡμῖν; but time and again, as I was growing up and things about Jesus were discussed in Sunday School, sermons and Bible studies, Jesus’ humanity was always under-played.

Occasionally the Bible points out that Jesus knew what they were thinking or understood people, but in those days, we often assumed that Jesus ALWAYS knew what EVERYONE was thinking (“he’s, like, God, right?”), and in many other ways, divine (in the sense of “super-human”) attributes were assumed of him even though the New Testament also clearly says he was “in all ways just like us” or “you made him a little lower than the angels”<2> – not to mention that there are moments when it seems like Jesus asked questions from a genuine need to learn something or broke down in very human ways. And even the church fathers knew better: he became what what we are to make us what he is, wrote Athanasius.

So these things, the thought that “of course he knew what they were thinking, he was God”, and “made like his brothers in every way” can be set at loggerheads. And that always bothered me.

The thinner your view of why Jesus entered humanity the hard way, lived to adulthood, died, was buried, rose from the dead, the less you need to notice the problem, the less important it is not to ascribe too many divine-like attributes to him in the gospel stories – which are so terse that they depend on an active imagination to fill in the details and the blanks – and I think it leads to impoverishing the ways we can look to the example of his life in how we conduct our own.

When exercising spiritual gifts, there’s always at least the thought, “am I right? Is this the moment?” And this thought made a conception of his full humanity more visceral, more of a missing-piece found:

When Jesus was wracked with the anticipation of the cross, what was he dreading? Was it separation from his Father? John 16.32 can be read to suggest, strongly: no. If it were so, would he contrast being abandoned by the disciples against togetherness with his Father? Wright does no more than hint at it in Jesus and the Victory of God, but I think he was onto something more profound than he let himself hint at: that, preparing to finish provoking the various power groups in Israel to hate him to the point of killing him; having predicted the temple’s destruction and promising to rebuild it; having preached, healed, raised the dead, etc, still: the shadow of uncertainty, of self-criticism to the point of potential doubt of what he was about to do, the “what if I’m wrong?” that every mature person about to commit to something as irrevocable and final as that would have<3>. That seems to me to be a compellingly credible possibility and forms one more confirmation to me that we just don’t take Jesus’ humanity seriously enough. And remedying that will enrich us all still more.

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<1> sadly, this was one of the earliest points at which eastern and western churches began to split; I'd be curious about the east's view of this application of ὁμοούσιον. Their position about all of Chalcedon have been pretty clear since it happened. From something I read in T. F. Torrance, I am inclined to believe they were right about the filioque clause, for what it's worth. But now we really HAVE left the open market for a very particular ivory tower. Personally I prefer the market...
<2> Psalm 8; it's usually taken to refer to humanity generally, but these things often have multiple referents and if at no other time, Jesus' position was "a little lower than the angels" just like the rest of us. (cue up Joan Osborne's What if God was one of us?)
<3> Dickens, Charles: A Tale of Two Cities. What contemplation would Sydney Carton have had before committing to his final scene? 

Parade of Follies -- Continued!

I’m hardly a fit source of an antiphon to N. T. Wright’s pithiest critiques of western theology, but the more I thought about the damage that moralizing anthropology, paganizing soteriology, and platonizing eschatology have done to how we think about our identity in Christ and what it means in this world, the more I thought to answer those three critiques with three echoes of my own:

• dehumanizing Christology: probably in answer to the modernist/fundamentalist divide of 130 years ago, the more-devout-than-intellectual end of the faith (as of a tug-of-war rope) has clung so tightly to the resurrection and Jesus’ divinity that we’ve held less to his humanity than we ought to have. It has done us no good.
• hierarchicalizing ecclesiology: whether it’s a succession of bishops thing, or operating under a covering of authority, or just being loyal to the Pastor or whatever, we have given more allegiance to Paul’s saying “find trustworthy men to place over each congregation” than to Jesus’ earlier “call no one father”. You don’t even have to be a raging feminist to see what damage that has caused. (I suspect this is what Rev. 13.11's  “beast that looks like a lamb but speaks like a dragon” refers to: hierarchical authority becomes beast-like in the end, inevitably; lamb-like refers to its self-identity, largely accepted of followers of Jesus who was led like a lamb to the slaughter; dragon-like: ultimately the agenda is more congruent with the purposes of hell, with all the subtlety of a Screwtape, than with that of heaven)
• imperializing the parousia: we forget that the purity of the figurative raiment we want to claim comes from being dipped in the blood, not of Jesus’ enemies but of Jesus himself, and we anticipate his return as a moment when he will wreak mayhem on his enemies – as if he would forget his own teaching on how to treat ememies.

So I present here, in what Tom Wright might view as an unwanted tribute (but his three critiques inspired this from me) my quick list of three “other” baleful influences on our theology. I have no credentials that you should pay attention to what I say but if anything catches and holds your attention, take heed, not necessarily to what I write but to whatever truth Papa brings to your mind in interaction with it.

Of the three, I feel I am on shakiest ground around ecclesiology. The other two ring through my heart as truisms that should be obvious to anyone who has given the matters even passing examination, especially in view of the ways I see them playing out in the ways people calling themselves Christian are behaving in North America these days.

Parade of Follies -- Platonizing our Eschatology

"Eschatology" – the study of the last things – typically this branch of Christian thought is dominated by "heaven", "hell", Jesus' return, the "millennium". Plato's philosophy, such as we understand of it, in broad sketches, held that what is unseen about people is better, more lasting, than what can be seen: mind, soul, heart etc. over body. And that a disembodied bliss was the best people could hope for after death. But enough of definitions:

"We believe in … the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting." (Apostles’ Creed)

This is the last of N. T. Wright’s “three great quibbles” with modern western theology and it may be the hardest to really get one’s head around. What we typically say about final destiny is slightly other than what scripture teaches; and things we are not saying that the authors of scripture might deem essential and are embodied in the creed, what Wright is calling us to uphold, are closely tied to a “vocational anthropology” as opposed to a “moral” one: our final state, if is about a vocation to be restored, requires that our standard expectations about a post-death existence be thoroughly re-worked.

“If you believe in Jesus, you’ll go to heaven when you die. If you don’t, you’re going to go to hell.” That’s the simplistic message I heard when I was a child. Let’s leave hell out of this item for the moment – but I’ll refer you to Jersak’s Her Gates Will Never Be Shut for an intro to that spectrum.

And I grew up with a family story about an uncle I never met, suffering about 100 years ago, at age 15 of Hodgkins Lymphoma. He reported seeing Jesus (whom, of course, he had not seen) coming to him with his older brothers and sisters (who all pre-deceased his birth) just before he breathed his last breath.

So, along with traditional Christian belief, I believe that there is some state where the personality is separated from the body during death, but in some form that allows for recognition and relationship. But the teaching of Jesus and the apostles – as well as  at least some Jewish teaching before Jesus – promises a resurrection of the righteous – a resurrection into new bodies that will not be subject to death and decay, that will be similar to, yet different from, the bodies we have now.

This ultimate fate is quite different, I think, from what is in people’s imaginations with the phrase “going to heaven when you die” or “crossing the rainbow bridge” or whatever. This is quite different from the ultimate hope of many eastern religions of all the human selves being absorbed and dissipated into the divine nature (not even really a “self”) in a way even less differentiated than the “founders” within the Star Trek – Deep Space Nine story: these can join together in a vast, near-planet-wide lake called the “great link”, but individuals can emerge from it at will or need.

Some may claim that resurrected bodies within a renewed universe versus disembodied spirits inhabiting some “islands of the blessed” is a distinction without a difference, and it may in fact be so when push comes to shove and you ask individuals what they mean by these terms and you start driving them towards expressing distinct aspects of what they would desire for themselves in such an endpoint if it were a true account of a final post-death destination.

A TV show such as “The Good Place” makes it obvious how hard it is to imagine what a final destiny might actually be like. I am in full agreement with Wright on this quibble. As I stated in describing “moralizing our anthropology”, the stereotypical description of heaven bears little to no attraction for me. In the same way that Eric Liddell said, “When I run, I feel God’s pleasure,” when I write great software, there’s an affirmation from God that I feel in that act: that good code honours him at least as much as a great worship song or inspiring sermon, or other more traditional endeavours. To say our future “hope” is disembodied bliss makes, to my mind, a mockery of the extravagant promise implicit in, for instance (once again), I Corinthians 2.9. And this distinction is important to me.

Parade of Follies -- Paganizing our Soteriology

This title is a bit more "inside baseball" to the Christian world -- and for readers who do not identify that way, I apologize. My writing conceit is to fit things into two pages -- in this series into one page -- and part of the cost for that is resorting to mnemonic terms which will sometimes make the text a trifle opaque. Sorry, not sorry.

But in this essay title, I'm using two highly compressed and technical terms. By Paganizing, Wright and I mean conforming the Christian message to widespread other-religious forms, outlined for instance in Mimetic Theory by René Girard, where "balance" and "order" (and "proper" hierarchy as opposed to equality -- more on that some other time) are restored by choosing a victim and pouring the community's hate out on that one. The story of the crucifixion in its barest formfits very neatly into that framework but proper understanding of the event from the Christian position points elsewhere.

By Soteriology, Wright and I are referring to the branch of Christian Theology that tries to categorize and understand deeply what "salvation" (σωτηρία -- so-tay-'ree-a -- "Saviour" was, incidentally, a standard imperial title: Julius Caesar was said to have saved the empire from the civil war) is, how it works, operates, what God does, what people do, etc. Wright used it in his three-word phrases because it is such a powerful mnemonic.

The "numbered" footnotes come from my off-web composition. I'm going to re-read this and try to identify the tersest, most arcane elements here for similar exposition as above in lettered footnotes.

It is not hard to invite someone into new life in Christ but it can be tricky to bring up the subject at all. It can be complex to give even a minimally coherent whole account of the matter. It can be painful to navigate around the hurts that someone may have received at the hands of authority figures within church groups in their past – without enumerating them here, nor imbibing in the “No True Scotsman” fallacy. But at some point, one who without external duress offers himself to the most brutal death imaginable and forgives his tormentors is a compelling picture.

It’s relatively easy to express analogies for what Jesus’ death was for from things that the New Testament writers said about it. The thing is simple enough that a pre-schooler can fall in love with it (I did) and follow it for the rest of one’s life.

The difficulty comes in when we try to articulate precisely what was going on in technical terms. This is not to say that the exercise is futile and ought not to be attempted, only that it’s difficult, fraught and has divided more friends over more generations than the years many of us will live out.

Was Jesus human? Was he also God? Did he only appear to be God? Did he only appear to be human? Was he only God some of the time? Did God really die?<a> In the first generation, nobody doubted that Jesus had been nailed to a cross and died, nor that he appeared alive afterwards to easily identifiable people who could give an account of having seen him<1>.

The Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds settled these questions after centuries of arguments and pitched battles over the details. Then there was the running “why?” – was it to store up merits for us all? was it to restore God’s honour in the face of our disobedience? was it a gesture to make it plain he was not angry with us?

The most common western answer has typically settled on sin having incurred a blood debt with God that Jesus’ death was sufficient to cover for all mankind – or at least for the Elect<b>.

This picture, still widely preached, has an unfortunate resemblance to a father requiring the death of his own son for some religious purpose. Given how many other possible resonances are available, and how Jesus’ death is an echo of Isaac’s near-sacrifice by Abraham, which seems in one sense to be saying, “nope! I never meant you to actually do that”, due consideration ought to be given to the possibility that something else is going on here.

René Girard talks about Jesus’ death being the death-knell to the perfect-victim pattern in human history. Kruger and Young posit that the Father and Jesus (and the Spirit) were never separate, not even in Jesus’ death – that the cry of Psalm 22.1<c> by Jesus on the cross was not of dereliction, but a reference to the whole Psalm<2>. A particularly well-loved modern Christian worship song makes it sound as though “the wrath of God” something like licked its chops at Jesus’ death<3>

Whatever the cross was, I think it’s as much a mistake to cling to any explanation that makes God sound like an ancient bloodthirsty deity as I think it is to dogmatize any other medieval doctrinal tic.<d>
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<1> I Corinthians 15:3-8 – an interesting run of “Greek-as-a-Second-Language” text within Paul’s acro-verb-ic text. Scholars argue strongly that this text dates back to within 5 years of Jesus’ resurrection.
<2> And they’re not the only scholars to point that out, e.g. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God
<3> In Christ Alone (Keith Getty/Stuart Townend). Some fellowships re-write that line, the original composers object.
<a> The history of this debate over the first 300 years or so of Christianity makes fascinating reading if you're into that sort of thing, but the best summary of the results of that debate are probably to be found in "The Apostles' Creed", "The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed" and "The Chalcedonian Definition" -- all documented reasonably well on Wikipedia.
<b> In some framings, only some people, the chosen ones, are destined to be saved, others to be condemned. Using that term here, is a reference to those frames. The term itself shows up in a verse that confers no advantage on the elect, Matthew 24:24.
<c> "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
<d> if you're familiar with the pools of doctrinal positions either adamantly held to or adamantly opposed to by churches whose stream of thought stretches back to the 16th century or back through the times when Christendom dominated the west, you won't have to think too hard to figure out some of the things I'm pointing at with my elbow here. "iykyk" is a wonderful mnemonic, too!

Parade of Follies – Moralizing our Anthropology

N. T. Wright has laid three critiques against modern evangelical theology. I heard them and pondered them, and I think he’s right. They are “Moralizing our Anthropology”, “Paganizing our Soteriology” and “Platonizing our Eschatology”. I want to talk here about “moralizing our anthropology”, what it means to me, and why and how far I see it to be a valid critique.

Anthropology in its broadest sense is simply our understanding of people, from ἄνθρωπος (man, as in mankind) and λόγος (word, -ology is a common “study-of” suffix in English). The anthropology conceived of here is not one of the branches of anthropology listed in the Wikipedia article but the theological conception of what a human is.

Ever since I was a child I remember hearing sermons that implied, not even subtly, that the most important detail about any human being was whether they were a good person or not (and none of us are good in ourselves). And in the face of universal fallenness, the next important question was whether we were in a “saved” or “damnable” state. From this flowed all kinds of concern over predestination or not, “perseverance” or not (back-sliding? irreversible back-sliding?), “security” or not and how to relate one to another based on that state. Mix into it the importance of doctrinal distinctives and I don’t think it’s hard to see what kind of problems, in simple human relationships, never mind in Christian to Christian fellowship this could lead to.

Add in the rise of not just Christian pluralism but religious (and irreligious) pluralism, getting so caught up in such a Most Important Question Facing Anyone could distort the ability to relate human-to-human in normal, productive ways.

Even more, if what matters most is one’s moral standing in a “salvation sense”, then it’s possible that the subtler “character” issues might go by the board. They shouldn’t but if preaching is so focused on altar calls that it seldom deals with virtue (much less with civic virtue), that’s another problem. (And civic virtue, the softer skills that it takes to perform well at loving and living with those in the closest parts of one’s community is crucial.) Those are the resonances I hear in “moralizing our anthropology.”

Beyond that, and I think this is where Wright’s emphasis lands harder, on the second touch: what has God saved us for? The stereotype of sitting on clouds and playing harps has never appealed to me, falling far below the vision cast in I Corinthians 2.9 – which feels to me like a divine game of “you’ll never guess” or “top that one”. A better answer is right there waiting for us to see in Genesis 1 and 2.

This world, all of it – not just Earth, not just the Solar System, not just the Milky Way, nor the Observable Universe, but all of it – was built to be a temple to God’s glory. We were placed here as images of God’s person and our calling is to reflect God’s wise rule into creation and to reflect creation’s glory back to God. How big a calling that is, what it will take in its entirety to fulfill it, is not yet known but the possibilities extend far, far beyond what “eye has not seen nor has ear heard nor has it entered into the heart of any man” can possibly mean for us yet. Our moral choices, agency, alignment, repentance are important but are ultimately only one sliver (I want to attenuate not nullify its importance) of all that God means us to fulfill. I am daily staggered by these thoughts and how good the news we have to share is in terms of destiny, how far beyond a simplistic “moral standing”.

Some Theological Summaries

From the professional to the personal, and yet this and the pieces that will follow leading into the summer are of significant public import as well. I have been writing some "two-pagers" but I have a small stack of one-pagers that serve as an intro for something that has struck me as of highest current urgency.

The long version of the thoughts that led to this urgence are not easy to fit into this format, nor would the time required to compose them fit very well into the ways my life is organized. But here is an intro to some pieces I have called a parade of follies, as much as anything because I do not measure up to the scholar that the first half is summarizing, yet I deign to put my notions up beside his here, in the imitation that only a devoted but incompetent fan would dare to put out.

Tom Wright Names Our Theological Follies

This series of eight one page (or-less) pieces cover, first, N. T. Wright’s pithiest critiques of western Christian theology.

While there’s nothing here that corresponds exactly, for instance, to C. Baxter Kruger’s and Wm. Paul Young’s thoughts on “union” versus “separation” (which in one point is almost as important, as a single thought, as Tom’s three points are taken together) these are three of the biggest problems, the deepest ways in which the Zeitgeist has infected how we think about God, about Jesus, about our relation to them and how this present period in the story of salvation is likely to come to conclusion.

Briefly:

We have reduced our interest in who or what people are by being so concerned about moral standing and position in light of eternal things as to set the value of most of what any man or woman is or does to approximately nought. (moralized our anthropology)

We have espoused theories of what Jesus’ death meant which when pared down to their logical minimums make Good Friday look like a case of cosmic child abuse (to which Baxter and Paul would say, “Amen!” and “just exactly as we have been telling you”). (paganized our soteriology)

And we have clung to understandings of our destiny beyond the grave that short-change the hope that the Jews had in speaking of resurrection and painted a picture that bears little resemblance to what must be the secret in the Father’s heart when he had one of his prophets say what Paul quotes in I Corinthians 2:9 (eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of any man the things which God has prepared for those who love him), a verse which strikes me as Papa saying to us, “Guess! Whatever you can imagine, it’ll be better – not like ‘vegetables’, but like a holiday at a beach – on the other side of the world!”. Instead, under the weight of a memory of “sacred tradition”, we have been settling for the best that the Greeks could imagine. (platonized our eschatology)

In the following single pages, I first summarize each of these ideas, as I understand them, in one page, in a form that should be easier to consume than a 40 page chapter in a monograph might do, yet more transparently than the summarizing three word phrases can. (like in number alone to the silly phrases a Canadian politician has been using to raise his profile)

I follow up with three items of my own that Tom’s items called forth out of my heart – not that he needed (or wanted) an answer from this quarter, but that’s the way his words worked on me.

So here you go: Wright’s Quick Critiques explained, then Arthur’s Add-Ons (also numbering three) as chasers. Truly, a parade of follies (where the folly is all mine)

And I’m going to follow that with another thought about the intersection of religious convictions and how we western Christians are moving in the world that I consider of paramount and general importance.

Opposing Bill C22 (yet another security-backdoor bill) with Manly Firmness

Dear Ms. Royer,

I can't remember how many times the government of Canada has introduced bills in the last 2 decades asking for law-enforcement back-doors on secure communications. And I can't remember how many of them I missed the opportunity to speak up against them, as much as anything because every time we do this, it makes us look like idiots; if it were ever to pass it would make us all more vulnerable to bad actors; and really, can we just learn from others' mistakes and the words of experts and just drop this?

Earlier this evening I was watching "Vera" (the "Christmas Special" about a student group reunion on an island only accessible by car at low tide), and once again it struck me how Britain's surveillance state has used that show, Morse, Midsomer, all the detective shows to give good press to their pervasive system of CCTV cameras (which a certain band held up to ridicule on their low-budget music video -- paid for by editing and postage stamps on FOIA requests) -- which episodes always strike me as to how lazy CCTV systems made policing there. This highlights the first problem with legislated back doors in encryption: why do the hard work of human intel and gumshoe investigation if you can just unlock the communication. The automatic comparison to the PRC's Public Security Bureau (公安部) are striking to me -- the last work I did at *****, one of the things that drove me out, was realizing that enabling GRE of IPv6 traffic for routers destined for [Chinese companies] was to aid the surveillance state. Or it reminds me of Russia's Interior Ministry. Our law enforcement should be ashamed to come out in support of things that grant them those kinds of powers.

But it gets worse. If every secure channel is available through keys known only to the participants, the chances that a bad actor will get access to everyone's communication (as happened in 2024 with China's Salt Typhoon attack on American targets) is unthinkably impossible. Force access through a law enforcement key or key infrastructure, and the occurrence becomes practically a certainty -- especially over the long haul. You may be being sold on C22 making Canadians safer by helping law enforcement find the bad guys quicker but the bad guys will use illegal encryption anyway -- and our police will be foiled ---- AND bad actors have a FANTASTICALLY valuable target to hit for: get the right key and you can unlock all Canadians' so-called secure messaging -- and we'll all be walking around digitally naked in a hostile world. Your government should be ashamed to consider in any kind of a positive light any measure that has a finite (and significant) chance of leading to that outcome.

Finally, it's not as though this is new news that a back door is a bad idea. Everybody knew it already even before the Clipper chip was put out as a tentative standard for secure telephony. The security boffins knew it was a bad idea and fortunately mobilized the public to oppose it, so it didn't become a widespread, mandatory-because-everyone-uses-it like gmail or Microsoft Office, standard and it just died.

This bill must die, too, and someone needs to drive a stake through its heart so that it never comes back. Please. Oppose it (to borrow a phrase from our neighbours) "with manly firmness" (read that as "with adult firmness" -- their founding Fathers weren't paragons of gender neutrality). Oppose it in caucus. Oppose it in committee. Oppose it on the floor. And sneer confidently that you're siding with the smart and the good people to mock the proposal to scorn on any occasion when it arrives in the future.

I have been having a stressful week because of all the other things your government is doing that I see ending badly for the welfare of all my neighbours here in Canada, too many to enumerate now -- and then along with the suspension of bicycle travel to work because physics overcame physical structure too many times (not to my injury, thankfully! but to my impediment), this (C22) comes along: the bad idea of escrow or secondary key that will just never go away.

I am not a drug dealer but I treasure the freedom to be private.

I have no vile secrets, neither do I write love letters and last-will-and-testament instructions on postcards.

I want our police to catch all the miscreants, but I am UTTERLY and to my last breath opposed to surrendering one ounce of my privacy to make their job easier. They're already doing a pretty good job and they don't need this kind of a short cut -- or if they feel they do need it, it comes at too high a price in the welfare of myself and all my neighbours that we should even DEIGN to consider the request, let alone to grant it.

And so I will always say, Sincerely and with utmost respect -- despite the straits of tension and inner panic its repeated consideration is inducing.

Arthur N. Klassen