Reflections on the Christian faith and Dostoevsky

 

     The cultural matrix to the gospels is so different, and in the clear light of day from within my culture it is not easy to just accept the gospel story in every detail. Thus I have been at times in my life drawn to the demythologizing approach, tempted to see much of it as a myth that pictures or symbolizes the Divine, which is transcendent, and revealing existential truths about humanity and the human condition. The historical Jesus, which I wanted to see contained in the Sermon on the Mount, the one commandment to love God and neighbor (neighbor being defined by “The Good Samaritan”), the adulteress story, and a few parables. Like Tolstoy I wanted to see esus as correcting the misleading images of God the Father in the Old Testament (and still do). I wanted to see Christ’s spirit reflected, for example, in Dostoevsky characters like Alyosha and Zosima. I am aware of what is at stake. The Gospels cannot be reduced to myth or symbol without raising the question of the source of the myth or symbol, which is likely going to be located in the human psyche rather than Being itself. I think this is perhaps Ivan's dilemma expressed with the thought that if there is no immortality, anything goes.

     This is a very old struggle. Many have stood exactly where I am: sensing something morally and spiritually luminous in the figure of Jesus, yet hesitating before the miraculous claims that the Church insists are not merely symbolic but literally true. I want to try to sort some of this out.

       First, there is the problem of myth and demythologization. The theologian who made this famous was Rudolf Bultmann. He argued that the New Testament expresses its message in the mythological language of the ancient world (angels, demons, cosmic battles, heaven above, hell below). Modern people, living after the scientific revolution, cannot literally inhabit that worldview. Bultmann therefore tried to “demythologize” the New Testament: not to discard it, but to interpret its myths as symbolic expressions of existential truths about the human condition: guilt, judgment, grace, authentic existence. For Bultmann, the resurrection is not primarily a biological event but the proclamation that the crucified one confronts us with the call to authentic faith. The myth points to an existential reality.

     But if everything becomes symbolic, the question immediately arises: what anchors the symbol in reality? This is the point where classical Christianity differs from the demythologizing approach. For the Church Fathers and for medieval thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas, the central claim of Christianity is not primarily a set of symbols but a historical event: that in Jesus Christ God actually entered history. The Incarnation is not a poetic way of speaking about divine presence; it is the claim that the divine Logos truly assumed human nature. In other words, the metaphysical-theological doctrines, that is, the Incarnation, Trinity, resurrection, are meant to secure the objectivity of salvation. They say that redemption is not merely an idea about God but something that has happened in the world.

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       Now to the deeper philosophical issue connected in my mind with Ivan Karamazov. Ivan’s reasoning is simple: if there is no immortality and no ultimate judgment, then moral obligation has no final ground. Everything becomes permissible. Morality becomes fragile if the universe is morally indifferent. Grounding “the way” in the Sermon on the Mount and in figures like Alyosha is Dostoevsky’s response to Ivan, and I embrace it. Those characters show that goodness can appear in human life with a kind of radiance that feels almost sacramental. But Alyosha’s goodness does not just represent an ethical ideal. Rather, it flows from his trust in the resurrection of Christ and in the reality of eternal life. Without that background, Alyosha would simply be a kind moralist. In other words, Dostoevsky suggests that the moral beauty I respond to depends on the metaphysical truth behind it. This is why for the Church (for Dostoevsky, Orthodox) doctrines like resurrection and Trinity are meant to safeguard the reality of the good that shines through figures like Alyosha.

      People like myself often approach faith through the radiance of Christ before they accept the metaphysical-theological claims. The path often goes like this: first one sees the beauty of Christ’s teaching and character; then one begins to suspect that such a life reveals something about the structure of reality. Only later does one consider whether the metaphysical claims might actually be true. My situation (i.e., hope centered on the Sermon on the Mount, the parables, and certain luminous human figures) is therefore not outside the Christian tradition.

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     The real philosophical question underlying these reflections may be this: Is the moral beauty revealed in Christ simply a human ideal, or is it a disclosure of the deepest structure of reality itself? If it is merely an ideal, then the demythologizing approach makes sense. If it reveals the structure of reality, then the metaphysical claims begin to look less like mythology and more like attempts, perhaps imperfect, to articulate what that revelation means. And here Dostoevsky enters. For him, the decisive argument for Christianity is not a philosophical proof but the experience of a certain kind of goodness, a goodness that seems too deep to belong merely to the human world. That goodness appears in Alyosha, in Zosima, and occasionally in ordinary acts of compassion. The question then becomes: Does such goodness point beyond the world, or is it simply an accident within it? It is  the question that Dostoevsky placed at the center of The Brothers Karamazov.

    I actually have fewer problems with the theo-metaphysics, derived from being moved by goodness, than the actual gospel narrative, including (under the influence of historical Bible scholarship) some of Jesus' own self-interpretation. That is what I tend to want to hollow out to get to the metaphysical truths, e.g., the Incarnation explained as a mystery, but that somehow Christ shared God's mind, or God translated his mind into human consciousness through Christ (in place of the literal Christmas story). What the Grand Inquisitor says about miracles seems right to me: Jesus would not have wanted faith based on miracles. I acknowledge Lewis' point that if God is, he can intervene in nature. But that picture of God – which I associate with the Old rather than the New Testament – does not inspire love.

       This too a common position. It is the attempt to preserve what feels metaphysically true about Christianity while loosening the grip of the historical narrative form in which it comes to us. Many thoughtful readers of the Gospels experience the tension: not so much in the metaphysical claims themselves, but in the concrete narrative details surrounding them. The metaphysics can seem intelligible: if there is a divine ground of being, it is not absurd that this ground could become uniquely present in a human life. But the particular narrative frame – the Bethlehem story, angels, miracles, resurrection appearances – feels culturally distant, even mythic. So one tries to preserve the truth while hollowing out the narrative.

       This instinct has appeared frequently in modern thought. Leo Tolstoy did something very similar: he tried to strip the Gospels down to what he believed were the authentic teachings of Jesus Christ, especially the Sermon on the Mount, while rejecting miracles, the resurrection, and the divinity of Christ in the traditional sense. But there is a problem with this. The metaphysical insight (i.e., goodness revealing reality) comes to us through the narrative and the person of Jesus. If the narrative is hollowed out too much, the authority of the metaphysical insight begins to weaken as well. This is something C. S. Lewis emphasized. He argued that the Gospels do not read like myth in the ordinary sense. They read like eyewitness testimony shaped by a religious community. His point was that the central claims are presented as historical events. If those events are removed, the entire thing becomes unstable.

     But my problem with miracles, especially the one expressed by the Grand Inquisitor, won’t go away. The Grand Inquisitor (in The Brothers Karamazov) argues that miracles undermine freedom because they compel belief, which of course he Satanically affirmed. If people see undeniable supernatural power, faith becomes submission to overwhelming evidence rather than free trust. That is a serious objection. Yet the Gospels themselves seem aware of this problem. In fact, they repeatedly show Jesus refusing to perform miracles as proof. When people demand signs, he refuses. When he heals people, he often tells them not to speak about it. At the crucifixion the mockers challenge him to come down from the cross to prove his power, and he does not. This implies that miracles in the Gospel are not intended as coercive demonstrations but as signs or events that can be interpreted in more than one way. In other words, New Testament miracles do not force belief. One person sees divine action, another sees coincidence, another sees exaggeration. Even in the Gospels themselves, many witnesses to miracles still do not believe. So the narrative seems deliberately structured so that faith cannot rest on overwhelming proof.

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  My formulating the Incarnation as God translating divine mind into human consciousness through Christ is not far from some classical theological ideas. Medieval theologians like Thomas Aquinas wrote something similar: that in Christ the divine intellect is uniquely present in a human mind and will. The essential thing is that this is not merely a metaphor but an ontological reality: the divine Logos truly assumes human nature. Even within traditional theology the Incarnation remains a mystery, meaning not something irrational but something whose depth cannot be fully grasped by human reason. An understanding of the Incarnation becomes problematic only if it dissolves the historical particularity of Christ.

      Christianity does not say merely that divine truth appeared somewhere in humanity. It says that it appeared in this specific person, in this particular place and time. For many modern minds this feels arbitrary. Why that person? Why that moment in history? Yet the tradition insists on this particularity because otherwise the Incarnation dissolves into a general philosophical idea: that God can be present in humanity. Christianity claims something stronger: that God has actually acted within history. This tension between the universal metaphysical truth and the stubborn particularity of the Gospel story has troubled thinkers for centuries. Dostoevsky embraces the particularity. For him, the decisive question is not abstract metaphysics but the concrete person of Christ. His famous line expresses it starkly: if someone proved that truth lay outside Christ, he would still choose Christ. That statement does not resolve the philosophical tension but it shows where Dostoevsky thought the center of the mystery lies, i.e., not in doctrine alone, and not in ethics alone, but in the person. And as I am drawn to his characters, he “proves” it to me in a way.

      The deeper philosophical question then becomes: Does that luminosity merely express a human possibility, or does it reveal something about reality itself? Christian faith answers that question by saying that the goodness you see in Christ is not merely human; it is the very life of God appearing within human history. Whether one can fully accept that claim is another matter. Of course, I think it can and in hope does reflect reality. If just worldly, psychological, then it would mean nothing, not to me anyway. But do I believe God impregnated Mary? Do I have to? This points to a difference between believing that the goodness revealed in Christ reflects ultimate reality and accepting the specific miraculous narratives through which the Church says that reality entered the world. Many serious believers, including theologians and philosophers, have stood exactly where I am standing. If the goodness revealed in Christ is merely psychological or cultural, it ultimately means nothing. It must correspond to reality. Yet the concrete miraculous form of the Gospel story – especially the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection – feels difficult to accept literally.

      Within Christian thought itself there has been a hierarchy of central claims, even if the Church formally affirms all of them. At the absolute center stands the claim that God was uniquely present in the life of Jesus, that the divine life somehow entered human history in him. Around that center gather various narratives meant to express or safeguard that claim: the virgin birth, the miracles, the resurrection appearances, and the theological formulations like the Trinity. The virgin birth is one of the places where modern readers most often stumble (I can never forget how as a young man I laughed at the Monty Python film, The Life of Brian). Even within early Christianity it appears only in two Gospels. The earliest Gospel, Mark, does not mention it, and neither do the earliest Christian letters of St. Paul. This does not mean the tradition invented it arbitrarily, but it does suggest that the earliest Christian proclamation focused primarily on something else: the life, teaching, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The virgin birth functions theologically as a symbol of radical divine initiative, that Christ’s life originates from God rather than from human history alone. Its purpose is not biological curiosity. Its purpose is to say something about who Christ is.

     I need to believe that Christ uniquely shared in the divine mind; that God somehow expressed himself through Christ’s consciousness. In philosophical terms, that is already very close to the classical idea of the Incarnation. What troubles me is the narrative mechanism through which the tradition explains this. The Gospel narratives were written within an ancient symbolic world where divine births were a recognized way of expressing the appearance of a world-changing figure. The real philosophical question is therefore not the biological mechanism but whether something occurred in the life of Jesus that revealed the divine nature in a uniquely decisive way? If the answer is yes, then the symbolic language surrounding that event may be secondary attempts to articulate its meaning. C. S. Lewis rightly insisted that Christianity cannot dissolve entirely into symbolism. If everything becomes metaphor, the claim that God acted in history disappears. So there is a tension between two dangers. One danger is reducing Christianity to myth or moral philosophy. The other danger is insisting on literal interpretations in ways that make faith intellectually impossible for post-Enlightenment people.

      The goodness of Christ reflecting reality is actually the decisive point. If the goodness revealed in Christ truly corresponds to the deepest structure of reality, then the metaphysical heart of Christianity remains intact even while one struggles with certain narrative forms. In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky dramatizes this tension through Ivan and Alyosha. Ivan cannot accept the world as it is; he cannot reconcile suffering with divine justice. Alyosha, by contrast, does not resolve the philosophical problem but trusts the goodness revealed in Christ. Dostoevsky’s insight is that faith often begins not with doctrinal certainty but with confidence that the goodness revealed in Christ is ultimately real. That confidence may precede full belief in every doctrinal articulation. Hope comes first. And what I wrote earlier – that the goodness revealed in Christ must reflect reality or it would mean nothing – already means hope.

      The philosophical question then becomes less about whether one can assent immediately to every miraculous element and more about whether  the goodness revealed in Christ truly reflects ultimate reality, and then what kind of universe would have to exist for that to be true? Christian theology is one historical attempt to answer that question. But the struggle to make sense of it is something that many believers have experienced. Perhaps that struggle closer to faith than it sometimes feels. It would be nice to think so but that could be merely consoling. 

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   I don't question miracles (in that special sense) as logically impossible. If God exists, miracles are possible – parting the Red Sea, Killing the first born of Egypt, etc. The issue for me is one of making sense given the hinge belief in the love of God as shown in and through Christ. My question lies at a deeper level. I am asking whether this particular picture of divine action fits with the hinge belief that the ultimate nature of reality is love, revealed in Jesus Christ. Interestingly, it is very close to the way Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) frames things in his early work, Introduction to Christianity. Ratzinger argues that Christian belief ultimately rests on a single interpretive key: that the ground of reality is personal and loving, and that this is disclosed in the person of Christ. Once that hinge belief is in place, the rest of Christian doctrine becomes an attempt to articulate its implications.

     My problem (not only mine of course) arises because some of the Gospel narratives, especially certain miracles or birth stories, do not immediately appear to express that same character of divine love. I am essentially asking whether this narrative reveals the same God revealed in the cross and the Sermon on the Mount?

     The Christian tradition itself has always interpreted the Gospel narratives through the central revelation of God in Christ’s self-giving love. The cross is the key. Everything else is understood in its light. So if one were to approach the miracles from within that hinge belief, the question becomes different from the one modern skepticism usually asks. Instead of asking “Did this violate natural law?” one asks “What would divine love look like if it entered the creation?”

      Jesus’ miracles are different in kind that Yahweh’s. They have also a different symbolism – Lewis said they were sublime myth that became history, acknowledging they have meaning on the symbolic level, too. The miracles in the Gospels have a pattern; they are almost always acts of restoration. Blind people see. The sick are healed. Storms are calmed. The hungry are fed. The dead are restored to life. They are not displays of power in the abstract. They are small anticipations of what the world would look like if it were fully healed. In other words, they are signs of the kingdom, glimpses of a creation restored to its intended goodness. From that perspective, they are dramatic expressions of the same love revealed on the cross. Even the resurrection, in this view, is not simply a proof of divine power but the affirmation that love is stronger than death.

    Now the virgin birth belongs to a somewhat different category. It is not a healing miracle but a narrative about origins. That is where many readers have problems because it does not obviously express the same pattern of restorative love. But the deeper hinge belief remains the important thing: that the goodness revealed in Christ corresponds to the structure of reality itself. That belief already places one within what the Christian tradition is trying to articulate.

     The real task is interpretive. Does the Gospel narrative, taken as a whole, reveal the same reality as the goodness that first drew you to Christ? That is the question Fyodor Dostoevsky places before the reader in The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan judges the world by the suffering of innocent children. Alyosha judges it by the love revealed in Christ. Neither position is intellectually trivial. And the novel leaves the reader standing precisely between those two interpretive possibilities.

     There is also a very interesting passage in Ratzinger where he says something striking about miracles that might resonate with the hinge-belief approach. He argues that the real miracle of Christianity is not the suspension of nature but the transformation of the human heart through love. This recalls Simone Weil’s thought:

 “The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say, ‘What are you going through?’ It is the recognition that the afflicted man exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen of the social category labelled ‘unfortunate,’ but as a man exactly like us.”

 “The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.”

 “The supernatural virtue of justice is rarer than genius and more difficult than heroism. It is a miracle; it is greater than the miracle of the Red Sea.”