The end of faith?

In his 2004 book "The End of Faith", neurologist Sam Harris, one of the self-styled "Four Horsemen" of the new atheism, asserts that "religion and science are in a zero-sum conflict with respect to facts". Interviewed in New Stateman (April 18th 2011), he is equally emphatic: "Look at the New Testament. It makes a variety of claims that are by definition at odds with what we know to be scientifically plausible." In Harris's view, believers seem to come in two varieties: fundamentalists, who subscribe unconditionally to such claims, and what he calls "weak tea" Christians, who water them down in various ways while still not managing to summon up enough "intellectual honesty" to reject them altogether.

Well, sort of. If we interpret Harris's "facts" in the narrow sense of what can be empirically investigated with current scientific methods, then I am in fair agreement with his position as stated above. As a scientist myself, I cannot stomach the poison brew of fundamentalism, but as someone who knows the reality of God as revealed in Christ, I have never been a fan of weak tea either; if I can't have it good and strong I'd rather join Harris and his friends in drinking the plain water of atheism.

But fortunately, those are not the only drinks available at the bar of religion. We are not stuck with a choice between the miracle-working fantasy Jesus implied by a literal interpretation of the four Gospels and the purely human "Jesus lite" philosopher, moralist, prophet and/or reformer of the tea drinkers. There is a third option, the original one, who appears in all of the parts of the New Testament that predate or are uninfluenced by Mark's invention of the "Jesus of Nazareth" figure: that is, pretty much all of it other than the Gospels and Acts. In terms of beverages, that Jesus could be described, without too much irreverence I hope, as "wholly Spirit". I am currently reading Earl Doherty's "Jesus: neither God nor Man", which does a wonderful job of how this figure was understood by Paul and the other epistle writers to have come down from the highest heaven and been crucified and resurrected in a "sub-lunar" demon-infested spiritual realm whose existence only makes sense within the (to us) peculiar Middle Platonist world view that was prevalent at the time.

The discomfort that many Christians feel on first hearing of a purely spiritual Jesus is understandable. If there was no incarnation, no crucifixion at Calvary, no resurrection of a physical body from a tomb just outside Jerusalem, then we feel somehow let down and cheated.  Is this not "Jesus lite" in another sense, the ultimate retreat of the God of the gaps before the onward march of materialism, the final defeat in Harris's zero-sum game, resulting only in an ignominious Dunkirk-like evacuation of our faith from the entire material realm?

Such worries highlight an important issue about our real beliefs.  The prevalent world view of our time is what Ken Wilber calls Flatland: the complete denial of the dimension of height and depth, of anything beyond what he calls the "monological gaze" which can only see the surfaces of things. A materialism that totally rejects the reality of spirit, that says that only what we can see, touch and scientifically measure is truly real.

Despite protestations to the contrary, many Christians have in practice been hoodwinked by this absurdity as thoroughly as any atheist. Fundamentalism therefore promulgates a Jesus with a firm foothold in the material world and asserts that whatever scientific orthodoxy might have to say about him is just wrong, while liberalism takes the other tack and discards the miraculous elements to arrive at a Jesus acceptable to the scientific mind. Both are equally materialistic, both are equally wrong, and the contempt that Harris and his friends feel for both camps is hard to argue with.

What it comes down to is this. Do we, or do we not, believe what the early New Testament writers took for granted, that spirit is just as real as matter, if not more so?

I don't think we all have to become Middle Platonists to accept this formulation of Christianity. Scientific developments from the time of Copernicus onwards have made that impossible anyway. At the time the New Testament was written, the classical world was undergoing a shift away from an ancient form of religion in which spiritual realities, packaged, as they perhaps always must be, as myth, were located "back then", in the distant past. The ancient gods were losing their power; that's why Socrates was accused of atheism. The new, Platonic world view located spiritual things "up there", in heavenly realms above the earth, and sometimes "down there" in hellish ones below it. For whatever reason, that made much more sense to people at the time.

A similar shift is taking place today, and has been for several centuries. "Back then" is no longer available to us, because of Darwin as well as Plato, and now neither is "up there" because of Copernicus. Guided by Jung among others, many people now locate spirit "in here", within, or through, the human unconscious. Maybe they're right; maybe in another few centuries another metaphor will be in use; maybe we will outgrow such metaphors altogether. I don't think it matters that much. The important thing is that spirit should be known and experienced, not just believed, to be real. Then we can appreciate and celebrate what science shows us within the material domain, while being aware of its limitations. Science, after all, is a matter of exercising our rational faculties, and there is no reason at all to assume that rationality is capable of grasping the whole of reality. That's why myth and mysticism are essential aspects of who we are.

If you really know that spirit is real and God is real, then there is no reason whatsoever to feel uncomfortable at the idea that Jesus of Nazareth (the conventional "historical Jesus") never existed, if that is where the evidence points, which it seems to me that it conclusively does. Rather, we can welcome what Harris, Doherty and other atheists are showing us, and use it as a means to reshaping and liberating our faith, even if they would curse us for doing so.  "The end of faith" indeed, but in a teleological rather than a terminal sense.

Two lives

From an evolutionary perspective, what are we to make of the "first Adam" who became a living soul, and the "last Adam" (1 Cor 15:45) who became a life-giving spirit?

Humanity as currently constituted, like all other forms of life on the earth, has been shaped by the forces of evolution by natural selection.  Those who survive long enough to pass on their genes and raise the next generation will pass on their characteristics. Those who don't, won't.

From a certain point of view, then, we are survival machines. We are finely tuned to survive. This is not the same as being tuned to appreciate truth. Think of a compass needle: it points to magnetic north -- the pole of survival -- which is close to, but not the same as, true north, or the pole of truth. Or again: Garrison Keillor writes somewhere that his parents told him that north was west, which was extremely confusing, because if they'd told him north was south, he could have simply reversed everything they said and believed the opposite. For parents, read "the forces of evolution". Where truth and survival don't coincide, our tendency is to love the darkness, to not want to see the truth. In certain circumstances, an attachment to the truth can seriously impair our chances of survival and reproduction.

Perhaps the choice that Adam and Eve made in the garden was exactly this: to pursue the knowledge of good and evil. Knowledge is power, after all, and it can be the power to survive. But as Paul acerbically comments in Romans, "They exchanged the truth about God for a lie".

Choosing the other tree -- the Tree of Life, or Christ -- would have meant a life of dependence on God, not self-directed autonomy; of following the truth, not doing whatever they could to pass on their genes. Was it ever really possible to make that choice?

I'm not sure it ever was, back in prehistory, but the revelation of the last Adam that gave rise to Christianity can be seen as the arrival of that possibility in the form of a new kind of life: evolutionary in the broad sense, certainly, but moving beyond the separate self and therefore beyond the drive to survive. It is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me. Christ was the one who gave his life for others.

So when Paul writes about living according to the flesh, or the old man, or the first Adam, we can understand this simply as following the dictates of our naturally-selected isolated egos. But when our spirits are made alive and Christ lives in us, another life becomes possible -- one that will always have to fight against the force of our evolved natures, but which is, ultimately, strong enough to overcome. Our task is not to reform or improve our old way of being but to consign it to death and allow a completely new one to grow in its place. And the paradox is that the grain of wheat that falls into the ground and dies -- becomes an evolutionary failure -- can "bear much fruit" after all.

The only and the first of many

I am a big fan of the Christian writer Watchman Nee, who elucidates better than anyone else I've come across what for me is the heart of the teaching of the New Testament. His best known book is "The Normal Christian Life", which you can read online in its entirety here. In the chapter "The Eternal Purpose", focusing largely on Romans 8, he writes about how God's only begotten Son becomes his first begotten.

The method is explained in John 12:24: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit.” Who was that grain? It was the Lord Jesus. In the whole universe God had only one ‘grain of wheat’; He had no second grain. God put His one grain of wheat into the ground and it died, and in resurrection the only begotten grain became the first begotten grain, and from the one grain there have sprung many grains.

Another place we read about earth is in Genesis 2, where Adam (man) is made from the adamah (dust) of the earth when God breathes spirit or breath into his nostrils. Incarnation is when spirit combines with matter and produces the soul or the individual life, distinct from other individual lives just as our bodies are distinct. In the case of the first man, Adam this led to generations of fallen people, separated from God; in the case of the last Adam or second man, Christ, it leads to "many brethren" united to God through him.

The deeper one goes, the more the sense of separateness -- from each other and from God -- becomes blurred, and the more oneness comes into focus. Thomas Keating says somewhere that "the true self of every person is Christ". I'm not sure I'd state it quite as baldly, but there is a refrain running through John's gospel and Paul's writings in particular: we are in Christ, Christ is in us, and Jesus prays we may be one just as he and the Father are one. Perhaps it is legitimate to see this oneness as not so much a change of state as a realisation of the oneness that is already there.

Both extremes at once

"The truth is not in the middle, and not in one extreme; but in both extremes."

So wrote the evangelical preacher and leader Charles Simeon getting on for two hundred years ago. He was right, and this blog is the diary of an attempt to pursue the truth that lies in one particular pair of extremes.

Which ones? Simply stated:

(1) Jesus Christ is the primary underlying reality of our universe. As it says in Colossians, "he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation".

(2) The "Jesus of Nazareth" portrayed in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is, as a historical character, completely fictional.

I came to hold the first of these convictions over thirty years ago. It began as a smattering of "peak" experiences held together by a logical framework that I now largely reject. Over the years it has deepened into a something more like a constant background awareness. The primary underlying reality of my life, as of the universe itself.

The second conviction I arrived at more recently, by a more prosaic process of examining the evidence, reading the arguments of both sides, and gradually coming to accept what seemed like the only way to make sense of the data -- primarily, the text of the New Testament. I read George Wells, then Earl Doherty, then Alvar Ellegard, then Robert M Price. While these writers do not all agree with each other on how Christianity did start, what they do have in common is a quite devastating critique of the mainstream view that it originated with the Jesus of the four gospels.

So there I was, lining up enthusiastically with the Christians on point (1), and somewhat sheepishly with the (by and large) atheists on point (2). Not an easy place to be in, and not a very common one. But you don't unite your head and your heart by rejecting the very strong promptings of either one.

Paul -- who, judging by his writing, knew nothing of the Jesus of the gospels -- talks in several places about Jesus being revealed to him and to the other apostles. Hence the title of this blog, the Revealed Jesus. Note, in passing, that a judicious choice of half the letters in "Revealed" gives you "Real". That is what Paul found him to be, and so do I.

Here's a claim. It is possible to hold convictions (1) and (2) at the same time by following the religion preached by Paul and the other writers of the New Testament epistles. I find that works, with the (rather large) qualification that one can accept the revelation that was fundamental to Paul's message without buying into his whole world view. The latter would be silly; things have moved on in two thousand years. But a world view is just a view, a map, a structure, and it's what's in the view that's the important thing.

I welcome comments on this blog, and will delighted to engage in dialogue with anyone who is willing to entertain (not necessary accept) both of convictions (1) and (2) and explore their implications. If, on the other hand, you are a more conventional Christian who holds only (1) to be true and are anxious to disabuse me of (2), then I will simply refer you to the authors I mentioned above; they have set out the arguments much better than I ever could. If you are at the other extreme, are quite willing to accept (2) but regard any claim such as (1) as necessarily delusional, well...then I would suggest there is something waiting to be born in the depths of your own heart, and can only invite you to be open to that possibility. Beyond that point, words cannot reach; or at least, I don't think mine can. The wind, as someone once said, blows where it will.