The Bible, the Church, and Homosexuality

             

 

I asked a Catholic website for the passages in the Bible on which the Church bases its teaching.

“For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error” (Rom. 1:26–27).

 

“Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor sexual perverts, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:9–10).

 

“Now we know that the law is good, if any one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, immoral persons, sodomites, kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine” (1 Tim. 1:8–10).

 

“Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise acted immorally and indulged in unnatural lust, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire” (Jude 7).

 

All these are from St. Paul except the last one, which is traditionally from Jude, brother to James, perhaps the brother of Jesus. It seems the teachings of the Old Testament have been left intact, both in word and in spirit – the advent of Jesus changed nothing about the way St. Paul and Jude understand homosexuality. So you can read in the Encyclopedia Britannica about the letter of Jude:

 

The letter appeals to Christians to “contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (1:3) and to be on their guard against people “who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (1:4). The author struggles forcefully against heretics who deny God and Christ and attempts to strengthen his readers in their fight against such heresy that leads to wickedness and disorder. Libertinism is a characteristic of such heresy, and he warns that the punishment of the heretics will be similar to that which befell the unfaithful in the Old Testament patriarchal times [emphasis mine].

 

I also think it was not disputed that St. Paul was active in establishing the early Christian church, as his letters are deeply concerned with distinguishing true believers from false, true beliefs from heresies. Who is a Christian? Who is not a Christian? Inevitably in such a project something like ‘the law’ comes into play, though in modified form: for example, Paul did not take over all the rituals and punishments of the Old Testament. But the underlying idea of distinguishing between the righteous whom God loves from the unrighteous who shall be punished – even if now in the afterlife – does come (I think) through St. Paul into Christianity. In any case, I personally feel a change of spirit from the agape love of Jesus to the somewhat pharisaical puritanism of St. Paul. Be that as it may.

 

     In the Old Testament, Leviticus 18:22 we read in the King James translation:

 

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.

 

Other translations replace abomination with ‘disgusting’, ‘repulsive,’ or ‘abhorrent.’ The context is important, which we can gather from the following passage, Leviticus 18:23:

 

Nor shall you mate with any animal, to defile yourself with it. Nor shall any woman stand before an animal to mate with it. It is perversion.

 

Leviticus spells out the consequences as well (20:13):

 

If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.

 

Sins that were punishable by death include homicide, striking one's parents, kidnapping, cursing one's parents, taking God’s name in vein, blasphemy, witchcraft and divination, bestiality, worshiping other gods, violating the Sabbath, child sacrifice, adultery, incest, and male homosexual intercourse (there is comically no biblical legal punishment for lesbians).

      Of course, the first mention of this theme in the Old Testament was in Genesis 19, when the “men of Sodom” demanded that Lot, son of Abraham, deliver the two guests, both men, actually angels who had taken on human male form, to be homosexually raped. Lot offers them his daughters instead.

 

Now the two angels came to Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom. When Lot saw them, he rose to meet them, and he bowed himself with his face toward the ground. And he said, “Here now, my lords, please turn in to your servant’s house and spend the night, and wash your feet; then you may rise early and go on your way.” And they said, “No, but we will spend the night in the open square.” But he insisted strongly; so they turned in to him and entered his house. Then he made them a feast, and baked unleavened bread, and they ate. Now before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both old and young, all the people from every quarter, surrounded the house. And they called to Lot and said to him, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us that we may know them carnally.” So Lot went out to them through the doorway, shut the door behind him, and said, “Please, my brethren, do not do so wickedly! See now, I have two daughters who have not known a man; please, let me bring them out to you, and you may do to them as you wish; only do nothing to these men, since this is the reason they have come under the shadow of my roof.”

Yes, that’s the text. I don’t know what to think of that. There does seem to be a distinction between homosexual and heterosexual rape, with the latter – perhaps being more ‘natural’ – the lesser evil. (Did God destroy Sodom because of homosexuality or rape?)

       Of course, I don’t know and interpretation is involved, but the homosexual acts in play here seem to be pornographic, perverted, and violent acts, explicitly placed in the context of other such acts. Orgies. Swinger clubs. Sado-masochism. That sort of thing comes to mind. Yes, I can see that such things do not exactly express the love of one’s soul, the souls of others, the Creation, or a loving Creator. I can see that such descriptions of a person’s sexual practices as a biographer of the philosopher (or sorts) Michel Foucault

 

Miller is nevertheless gruesomely particular in his descriptions of the sadomasochistic underworld that Foucault frequented, a world that featured, among other attractions, “gagging, piercing, cutting, electric-shocking, stretching on racks, imprisoning, branding. . . .” “Depending on the club,” he dutifully reports, “one could savor the illusion of bondage—or experience the most directly physical sorts of self-chosen ‘torture.’” Foucault threw himself into this scene with an enthusiasm that astonished his friends, quickly acquiring an array of leather clothes and, “for play,” a variety of clamps, handcuffs, hoods, gags, whips, paddles, and other “sex toys.”

 

represent desecrations of nature, the human form, and sexuality from a Christian perspective. I can see why the Church doesn’t want to make a saint of Foucault. Indeed, the Foucault analogues living in the culture of the Old Testament – the men of Sodom – would have been stoned to death on command of the priests speaking for God. And if St. Paul had his way, the Foucaults of the world would all end up in Hell, or rather, if he has understood the mind of God, like the other categories of people who offended God and nature – the witches, the murders, the adulterers. See Dante’s Inferno for a translation of this desire into imaginative literature. The adulterers, perverts, and witches break God’s rules. The desecrate the Creation. The acts they do are inherently “disordered” – not ordered to their true purpose and reality – as the Catechism puts it. In Old Testament terms, God cannot dwell among us unless we purify the community from such pollutants. In Christian terms, Christ cannot dwell in our hearts while we are in the grip of such compulsions.

      You know what does not come into my mind reading these passages? The image of two human beings loving one another and living responsibly according to the vow of marriage. A loving caress for one person to another, yes of the same sex does not come to mind. Nor do the many kindnesses that any married couple do for one another come to mind. Nor does the pain that married people cause each other through their all-too-human failings. Nor do the broken hearts of lovers when they are abandoned – homosexual or not. The grief one feels upon the death of a lover and a friend. I could go on. None of this can I connect with the Sodomites or with Foucault.

        And yet Leviticus 18:22 seems to see all homosexual attraction as by definition something akin to having sex with an animal, as something utterly de-humanized, depraved, perverted. There is no conceptual space for love, commitment, friendship, union inside of a homosexual attraction. I am not sure about this, and I don’t see how anyone else could be either. In any case: either the passages in the Bible see as sinful only certain forms of homosexual sex, as it also does certain forms of heterosexual sex; or all homosexual acts are by definition “disordered” no matter what the subjective attitude of the people involved. And if the latter, then I say: it suffers from an all-too-human failure of moral imagination, a failure still prevalent in our times – the inability even to imagine a loving relationship between two human beings of the same sex. In either case, the Bible passages offer no basis for the Church to find all homosexual love as such “disordered.” [Reading Plato’s Phaedrus might have helped the early Christians.]

 

     Did Jesus not change all this? It is true: Jesus did not make what was evil – murder, adultery – good; he did not make sins like lust or pride into virtues. But recall the woman caught in adultery. She broke the law. The punishment was clear: she was to be stoned to death (Leviticus 20:10-12). The Pharisees about to do this wanted to test Jesus, to see if he was willing to violate the law. Now I’m talking about Jesus Christ, who for Christians shared the consciousness of God the Creator, was one with the Creator. And he did not carry out the law the priests of Leviticus ascribed to God. You know the story from John 8:

 

Then the scribes and Pharisees brought to Him a woman caught in adultery. And when they had set her in the midst, they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses, in the law, commanded us that such should be stoned. But what do You say?” This they said, testing Him, that they might have something of which to accuse Him. But Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground with His finger, as though He did not hear. So when they continued asking Him, He raised Himself up and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.” And again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. Then those who heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning with the oldest even to the last. And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had raised Himself up and saw no one but the woman, He said to her, “Woman, where are those accusers of yours? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said to her, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.”

 

    I promise you I have heard (on YouTube) sermons given by Catholic priests on topics like Wokism and homosexual marriage not physically, but with their minds and words throwing stones, as did St. Paul, who was a Pharisee before his conversion according to tradition: it seems his conversion was not complete, which is only human. Again, throwing stones not only at the men of Sodom, Michel Foucault, the sex addicts visiting your local swinger club or porn website, but at my niece, who has lived lovingly and responsibly in marriage for many years, and who is a loving and responsible, indeed virtuous woman.

       Jesus didn’t even stone the adulteress and presumable would not stone Foucault. Why? Because Jesus knew our hearts. Even I, who don’t know much, know that any soul caught in the grip of perversions is suffering, has been damaged by other people or nature. For Jesus love transcended condemnation. He removed absolutely condemnation from human beings, and put it completely in the hands of God. It is none of our business to condemn another to stoning or Hell. We are only commanded to love and forgive. We know what violates love. It is pretty easy to see that Foucault’s sado-masochistic orgies had little to do with love. But we are only tasked to doing that which Foucault’s good demands – loving him, treating him like a human being even if he didn’t always act like one. Had I been his friend, I would have tried to help him see his sex compulsions in the light of love, though as my light shines rather weakly, this might have been presumption. Be that as it may:  compassion and not condemnation is the right response to the Foucaults of the world, according to Jesus, which is to say, according to God. The will to divide the world into the righteous and the unrighteous has its source in resentment, not love. This will is what God tried to correct. The second any of us cast the first stone, we have violated our reality and cut ourselves off from our roots in God. Or as Wendell Berry put it in a little poem:

 

Dante

 

If you imagine

others are there,

you are there yourself.

    

       My point is that my niece and thousands like her should not be see in the light of the men or Sodom or a Michel Foucault at all. The Bible just sees homosexual acts in this light. Perhaps the people of that time had experienced nothing else. Perhaps they were incapable of imagining nothing else, though Plato certainly was.

  

     The same website that made the passages available also shared this:

 

Yes, interpretation is important. If interpretation were left up to us as individuals, we could make the Bible say whatever we want it to say, and our sinful natures could gravitate toward interpretations that serve our passions. That is why, ultimately, the Church reserves the right to interpret Scripture to herself. “For all of that has been said about the way of interpreting Scripture is subject finally to the judgment of the Church, which carries out the divine commission and ministry of guarding and interpreting the word of God” (Dei Verbum 12).

 

  Well, where does that leave me? Either I must submit to Church authority and equate my niece’s marriage with the men of Sodom wanting to rape two angels, with men having sex with sheep, with an inherently “disordered” – read perverted, unnatural, pornographic – sexual practice, in opposition to my reason, my heart, and my conscience, to all the better angels of my nature; or I am on the Church’s shitlist. Either I can remain attached to the Bible as sacred scripture authoritatively interpreted by the priesthood and understand those passages as distinguishing loving from pathological sex; or if a Church gives me no choice and tells me I have to see all homosexuality in the light of the men of Sodom, then I must reject that as simply an error, one with profoundly negative consequences. No, I don’t enjoy being a damned Luther. I don’t like criticizing the Church. I hate it. I only do it when absolutely forced (which is often). So far I don’t see that I have an option when it comes to homosexual marriage.  No exit. Do I feel that cuts me off from God? No. I don’t even feel it cuts me off from the invisible Church. I know it seems arrogant and I hate that, but I fear this Church teaching cuts the theologians who hold it.    

    You can see how this frankly immoral teaching on homosexuality is undermining the life of the Church. You can see how tying Christianity down to ancient texts and their interpretation – or bowing down to a monopoly on interpretation – is not the right foundation for a Church or a religion.

 

 

 

Moral Judgments on People from Past Epochs and Different Cultures

      I struggle with this one. Condemning Aristotle for his views on slavery and women, Robert E. Lee for his defense of slavery, or Dante and Aquinas for their thinking that those whom they had to understand as ‘heretics’ belong in a lower circle of Hell; or even my grandparents for their uncritical acceptance of a division of family labor between man and woman that most find unacceptable today – I find it easy to condemn the beliefs of Aristotle, Dante, Aquinas, and Lee on these points, but more difficult condemning the people. Perhaps what bothers me most is the man who penned the Declaration of Independence – “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created equal” – was a slaveholder himself (with a bad conscience) and supported a constitution that made slavery quasi-legal and afforded political protections for it. I could today only visit the monument to him in Washington D.C. with very ambivalent feelings – as opposed to the reverence I felt in its presence when there as a school child. 

      Of course, it is a Christian commonplace to condemn the sin, but not the sinner (we are all sinners); that we have our lives in a community of sin; that our culture is meaning-blind to other things we will be condemned for by future generations; that we cannot say how we might have acted had been born into those other worlds, and so on. These valid and familiar arguments do some work but don’t completely remove my discomfort with it. I would like to reflect on this by reflecting on a passage from Gaita’s A Common Humanity:

 

 Cultures are partly defined and distinguished by what is unthinkable in them – unthinkable not in the sense that no one ever thinks them, but in the sense that they are beyond argument; they are ‘indefensible’ because any serious attempt to defend them would show one to lack the judgment necessary for the proper exercise of reason on the matters in question. Or, in the case of moral matters, because it is wicked even to contemplate them. It is, for example, unthinkable that we should eat our dead or can them for pet food in order to reduce the slaughter of animals. Any argument that led to such a conclusion would have found its reductio ad absurdum. It is also in the same sense unthinkable that we should consider murder as a means for political advancement. We have not considered this an option in political life and rejected it on moral grounds. It is not up for serious consideration. That distinguishes us fundamentally from some other cultures, in which political murder is practiced or – more importantly for the point I am making – considered an option amongst others and then rejected for fear of its consequences. What is unthinkable is different for different cultures and changes from time to time (181).

 

I think it is fair to say that for the cultures Aristotle, Jefferson, and Lee inhabited, to see slavery as a moral evil or Africans as fully the equals of the causations was, if not impossible, then possible only after a difficult revolution that would have destroyed their identity as well as their roots in their respective communities. I am sure not even Jefferson could do it, and it polluted him. I am not sure about the culture of antiquity, where slavery (which was not really racially based) might have been so ingrained that to imagine a world without it may have disqualified a person who imagined it as unhinged; if this is so, then however sick I get when I read Aristotle’s view of slavery, it is the views and the cultural views I condemn. He is not without some blame. He was a great intellect. One feels he should have seen through the cultural acceptance of slavery rather than adapting his own philosophy to accommodate it – to the detriment of his philosophy. Indeed, that Plato’s moral thought, while not explicitly defending abolition, plants the seeds for it because it is incompatible with it, is a key to the greater wisdom of Plato over his student – though for Aristotle precisely this feature of Plato meant that for him (and the culture) Plato was a crank ‘trying to defend a thesis at any cost’ – namely, the thesis that the evil-doer is absolutely more to the pitied as wretched than his victims because he, in contrast to them, has poisoned his very soul.

        But in the American south more enlightened and indeed moral views did enter Jefferson’s and Lee’s world, and indeed their own persons. They struggled with their cultures views, the views of their own lived experience, and the moral views that condemned the practice and would not allow them to translate what they knew in their head fully to their heart and into their actions. Lee, in any case, had to deform his Christianity to make it compatible with slavery and racism; he had a slave whipped; he was unrepentant; he had to rationalize his decision to defend the slave power rather than the constitution, to which he had sworn an oath. I think Jefferson would have never sided with the Confederacy and welcomed the emancipation he should have helped bring about. Jefferson did not offer any defense of his actions except the fear that emancipation might result in a bloodbath. Both were aware that slavery was evil, though Lee more superficially.  I am not sure either really believed blacks were morally fully our equals. Still I judge them both less harshly than I would one of my contemporaries (all things being equal) for whom the idea of human dignity is a powerful cultural Ideal if not a reality and who grow up in a society without slavery or even the worst, overt forms of segregation.

     I also struggle with those decision-makers in WWII who authorized the terror bombing of German and Japanese civilians, and dropping the Bomb on two defenseless cities. It is hard to judge people on the one hand when you cannot be in their situation; it is impossible to excuse such actions for fear that the past be glorified in the service of some ideology.

       I know a woman whose lived experience and cultural inputs ingrained in her the belief that her worth as a human being was a function of her power to sexually attract men, which in turn was a function of the degree to which she corresponded to the very physical Ideal or model of a female body – roughly the body of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl, with somewhat bigger breasts. Now she knows this ideal is de-meaning and de-valuing of women as human beings – a form of woman-hating. But the program is just as strong in her as ever. I know that given the climate catastrophe unfolding and the horrific conditions animals suffer under through the power of industrial meat, I should not eat meat. Yet I find it extremely difficult to give up the occasional hamburger. The slaveholders Jefferson and Lee were in a similar condition, but with more on the line.

        I guess what I am saying is that it is more important than ever to condemn slavery and racism; and we are all responsible for our views before our maker, so to speak, though in a human way. We are limited; we are fallible; we are indeed sinners. ‘There for the grace of God go you or I’ – a good cliché. Indeed, to have been born into the Jefferson or Lee families seems more a misfortune than those beggars and homeless people we usually apply the cliché to, if one thinks of one’s immortal soul. Aristotle is further away from us, more like trying to condemn the Chinese emperor for the practice of having concubines. Unthinkable for ‘us,’ not for ‘them’. So much good or bad is simply a gift or a curse of culture. (Of course, our deepest sympathy belongs to the victims of slavery and racism, and not the slave holders and racists. But this has been a reflection on my attitude to the latter.)

     I do know this: though I did not own any slaves, though I am guilty only of the evils I have done, my relationship to the ancestors of those whose ancestors were dehumanized by my ancestors is importantly defined by this history. It would be wrong of me to be indifferent. It would be wrong to imagine I were a little Absolute disconnected from the world and its history. We belong to each other; we cannot be free of one another – and should not strive to be.  History defines our moral starting points, the meaning of our relations with one another. You can’t ignore it or falsify it without blotting out reality in preference to a virtual reality.

      And I know this: my hesitancy to condemn Aristotle or Jefferson or Truman for dropping the Bomb on defenseless cities may in no way serve as a justification or relativization of evil done. Apologies for past sinners may not ever rationalize a fake, imaginary sentimental picture of the past to legitimize current regimes and their agendas. I despise the way history has been misused in my country.

 Grief

                                                                 

                                                                         My father

It is the third anniversary of my father's death. I miss him. I still cry when I see his picture. If there were no love, there would be no grief. In fact, death wouldn't matter at all. It only matters because it takes from us what or whom we love. It is love that makes death sting. 

 Meditation on Easter

    Traditional Christian theology understands God to be both perfectly just and perfectly loving. Human beings, due to our inherent sinfulness (i.e. attachment to the alienated ego and its self-serving fantasies and desires), are separated from God and subject to the consequences of sin, which include spiritual death. To reconcile humanity to himself, God's justice demands a payment for sin, while his love seeks to rescue and redeem humanity. The crucifixion of Jesus Christ is seen as a sacrificial atonement for the sins of humanity. Jesus, being both fully divine and fully human, voluntarily offers himself as a sacrifice to satisfy the demands of divine justice. By undergoing crucifixion, Jesus suffers the punishment that humanity deserves for sin, thus making reconciliation with God possible. Jesus' willingness to endure crucifixion is an act of solidarity with humanity. By taking on human form and experiencing suffering and the worst death, Jesus enters into the human condition fully. Through his sacrifice, Jesus bridges the gap between humanity and God, offering a pathway for reconciliation and salvation.

     The crucifixion is not merely a tragic event but is part of God's redemptive plan. Through his death and resurrection, Jesus triumphs over sin and death, offering humanity the hope of new life and reconciliation with God. The resurrection demonstrates that death is not the final word and that through faith in Christ, humanity can be restored to relationship with God. That is the official version, largely supported in the Gospels themselves (i.e. that is how many or most of the early Christian groupings, especially those with a background of Judaism, understood the crucifixion).

    It’s like God, having made the eternal law that condemns us – not as individuals but as a race (all sinners by nature through Adam) – can’t live with the consequences and out of pity takes the only way allowed by his own eternal law: he allows himself to be sacrificed to the Devil, thus paying the price to get our race out of Hell, or at least such of us that believe in his sacrifice.

   It doesn’t make sense to me that God required his “son” – part of himself translated into flesh and blood – to be tortured to death to build a bridge to us. That the God – who Jesus reveals as Love – would be the source of such a law makes no sense. That the law of God would bind God to make a deal with the Devil to free us makes no sense to me. It doesn’t make sense to see humanity in every case – even children – as damned to hell because of the actions of past generations (Adam) and the unjust, sinful human world that does seem to be endemic to human nature (in its “fallen” state). I don’t deny that something is not right with our race; that we have a propensity to sin. But tracing that back to the sin of our original parents makes sense only if I understand the significance of the apple (the forbidden fruit) as the desire to be “autonomous”: to be the final judge over what is Real, what is Good, what is Beautiful; over how we live, how we “identify”, and how we interpret. That is the fruit of the ego alienated from reality: from other people; from nature (as Creation); from community; from the spiritual life; from God. That is the modern self, pounded into us moderns from birth by our culture. It is born of the twins of the fear of being vulnerable and the desire to protect itself at any cost from pain – at the extreme, by acquiring power over others and the environment, the power to make us invulnerable and the legislators of good and evil.

    But the remedy for this disease is love, wisdom; not God having to give himself over (temporarily) to the Devil (the negative energy that drives the high priests and the damned Romans). At least that makes for sense to me. God freely translating himself into flesh and blood to reveal his true mind to us, insofar as we are capable of understanding it, knowing He would have to suffer for it. That is analogous to a father who leaps into a burning house to save his children. Just leave out the pact with the Devil, the ransom He owed the devil.

 

I think the theology I am criticizing is most intelligible to me as C. S. Lewis depicts it in fantasy, in his novel The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. In the story, the "deep magic" is portrayed as an ancient and unchangeable law that governs the land of Narnia. This "deep magic" represents a form of divine justice and order within the narrative, one that predates the creation of Narnia. Similarly, within Christian theology, there is a concept of divine law and justice that governs the universe, including the consequences of sin. Aslan must sacrifice himself on behalf of Edmund, who has committed treason against the rightful ruler of Narnia. This act of sacrificial atonement echoes the Christian belief in Jesus willingly laying down his life as a sacrifice for humanity's sins. Aslan does not have to power to set aside the “deep magic”, according to which the evil Snow Witch is owed all traitors (sin is conceived as treason against God, the Ruler of the universe). Despite being bound by the "deep magic" to undergo death, Aslan is aware of a deeper magic, a magic of which the servants of evil are blind: that to give your life for love of another brings with it a resurrection after the physical death of the body. Aslan's resurrection embodies the theme of victory over death and the triumph of good over evil. His resurrection brings hope and renewal to Narnia, just as Jesus' resurrection brings hope and new life to humanity in Christian belief. If Aslan is analogous to Jesus, he is one with the Creator of the “deep magic”, the law that requires Hell for traitors (final alienation from God). But as translated in flesh and blood in the physical universe, Aslan/Jesus, though identical to the Creator, did not fully share the mind of the Creator – Jesus because he was human. Thus the metaphor of Father and Son: distinct modes of consciousness. Thus, despite some knowledge of the mind of the Father, faith was required to accept the torture and death as a condition to bring about the forgiveness of the traitor.  

     But the reason the novel was more plausible to me is because Aslan sacrificed himself to save one child, Edmund. The other siblings were not completely innocent but were not “traitors.” But in our current form of human existence, we are all considered sinners (children of Adam, as the creatures of Narnia refer to us) – we are all Edmund. Jesus comes to save our race, which is corrupt. To me that means that we cannot overcome attachment to our alienated egos – egos that define themselves apart from other egos, nature, our own potential souls, and God – even in a difficult rebellion (as, for example, girls who do not conform to the physical standards of capitalist beauty, embodied by the “model”, can sometimes come to find themselves beautiful through a difficult rebellion against the capitalist standards). No, grace is required: the self-sacrifice of Aslan/Jesus/God himself as incarnated in flesh and blood, both embodying the divine mind but as embodied not fully identifying with it. Without that grace / self-sacrifice of God, we would be condemned to inhabit a state of sin (alienation) and no matter how sincere our wish to escape, we would be powerless to overcome it. The most virtuous among us would still be a traitor, a sinner, addicted to the alienated mode of self.

   I can agree with that, understood in a certain way. It’s just the “deep magic” that compels God to be sacrificed, this limit on God’s freedom, that bothers me. He appears primarily to be sacrificed rather than to enlighten (and correct all the false images of Himself as a stern patriarch demanding obedience, punishing disobedience; setting up a system where those who follow the rules (ritual washing, ritual praying, sacrificing, not eating pork, etc.) are righteous (like the elder brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son) are “righteous” and the rest hell-fodder.

    Human beings do on rare occasions sacrifice themselves for someone or someplace even that they love – or even because we see strangers in the same light as we do those we love. Parents sacrifice for their children; a man jumps on the train tracks to save the life of a stranger; soldiers sacrifice for their fellow countrymen, etc. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” To be able to see others as intelligible objects of such sacrifice is also probably a gift of grace: “…he appeared and the soul felt its worth.” People did sacrifice for their own – look at the Spartans. The idea that humanity as such is one metaphorical family – that is a gift of grace. We are programmed by nature and culture to feel normal with our own, with those who are intelligible, familiar to us. We tend to reduce others outside our groups. I find the idea that Jesus in some sense sacrificed himself. But why?

    “Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.” We know from the prophets and from iconic people like Socrates that bearing witness to the truth in a world constructed on lies, fantasies, and ideologies is a dangerous undertaking – constructs upon which power elites rely to justify their power. The God of the high priests and Pharisees was an idol. The true nature of God was unknown. Nature itself partly – millennia of small bands of human beings fighting for survival in environments of scarcity –  and a long history of unjust societies (intensified by the advent of agriculture) formed our unconscious minds. Cultures in which minorities oppress majorities form the egos of people. Cultures in which at a certain time mankind is seen at war with all of nature – bad conditions for knowing God if God is love. And that is what Jesus reveals God to be – contra the entire Old Testament, except for some prophets who picture God as loving his Chosen People but not humanity as such. The priestly construct of “God” has him setting up brutal laws: stoning the adultery to death. Jesus contradicts and asks those who would stone to look into their own hearts. The priestly construct of “God” who commands complete genocide against the peoples living in the lands he promised the Israelites. Jesus contradicts and says love and pray for your enemies. The priestly construct of a “God” who demands sacrifices and obedience. Jesus contradicts and says the Law and the Sabbath are there for people, not people there for the Law and Sabbath (thus undermining the power of the priestly caste). The priestly construct of a “God” who demands group conformity and othering of everyone outside the in-group. Jesus contradicts and tells us the despised Samaritan who helps the injured man is closer to God (again undermining priestly authority).

      However it happened, however you want to interpret it, God (assuming God is real as a personal being who is also absolute – hard to make sense of that) reached out to us through Jesus to correct the idolatrous misconceptions of the pharisees and high priest and reveal whatever of his true nature (his and her perhaps, of their true nature) as we could comprehend. And for that, Jesus took himself into the lion's den, the lions' den being for me a metaphor of the alienated ego and the world constructed by the alienated ego; Satan, at least as metaphor. In that sense, Jesus did have to give himself up to the power of Satan. Overcoming "the world" means overcoming the "fat, relentless ego," it social embodiments, and indeed that part of nature we think of as "dog eat dog" or "eat or be eaten," the part of nature that is probably the source of the alienated ego [reconciling that with the "Creation" is another theological problem.] He had to challenge the powers that be, and they killed him in the worst way.

    In this reading, there is no ransom. God saw a need. God addressed that need at enormous sacrifice. We were elevated by that sacrifice. But there is no need for the “deep magic” here, an eternal justice that demands the ultimate punishment for all humanity. That is a very pharisaic conception of God, one Jesus came to undo. It makes more sense to say that God was moved by compassion alone and not a need to find a way to satisfy his justice. On the gate to Hell in Dante’s Inferno, we can read: “Justice moved my great Creator, Divine power made me.” Sin must be punished – so the Old Testament God.  Jesus says sin must be forgiven, that we may not cast the first stone. God is not a slave to his own commands – which are more like the commands of a Stalin than Jesus. Jesus came to bear witness to the truth, to undo all of that.

    How then did the ransom theory enter into Scripture and Church teaching? Scripture, first, was in the service of church-building. Jesus left no writing. The memory of the Sermon on the Mound, the parables, the story of the adulteress – here we have the pure water of Jesus. But the pure water is muddied by church building, by trying to harmonize Jesus with the Old Testament, to reintroduce the Idol that justified the priestly caste, which then came to justify the Emperor. As Tolstoy put it in his Preface to A Gospel in Brief – I will quote at length:

 

But now to understand the teaching of Jesus it is necessary to know clearly the chief methods used in these false interpretations. The most customary method of false interpretation, and one which we have grown up with, consists of preaching under the name of Christianity not what Christ taught but a church teaching composed of explanations of very contradictory writings into which Christ's teaching enters only to a small degree, and even then distorted and twisted to fit together with other writings. According to this false interpretation Christ s teaching is only one link in a chain of revelations beginning with the commencement of the world and continuing in the Church until now. These false interpreters call Jesus God; but the fact that they recognize him as God does not make them attribute more importance to his words and teaching than to the words of the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, the Apocalypse, or even to the decisions of the Councils and the writings of the Fathers of the Church. These false interpreters do not admit any understanding of the teaching of Jesus which does not conform to the previous and subsequent revelations; so that their aim is not to explain the meaning of Christ's teaching, but as far as possible to harmonize various extremely contradictory writings, such as the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Gospels, the Epistles, and the Acts-that is, all that is supposed to constitute the Holy Scriptures. Such explanations aiming not at truth but at reconciling the irreconcilable, namely, the writings of the Old and the New Testament, can obviously be innumerable, as indeed they are. Among them are the Epistles of Paul and the decisions of the Councils (which begin with the formulary: 'It has pleased Us and the Holy Ghost'), and such enactments as those of the Popes, the Synods, the pseudo-Christs, and all the false interpreters who affirm that the Holy Ghost speaks through their lips. They all employ one and the same gross method of affirming, the truth of their interpretations by the assertion that their interpretations are not human utterances but revelations from the Holy Ghost.

 

The pure water of Jesus teaching does not give us a church with a priestly caste, but as a teaching that gives us the meaning of life.

    Thus though the resurrection is something I would love to believe – it is not the ‘miraculous’ nature of it that bothers me but the idea of the Old Testament God construct behind it that causes me problems – my ‘faith’, such as it is, would not suffer without it. I agree that Jesus was more than just a wise and good man. Beyond that, I cannot say. I respond to the truth of the pure water of his teaching, as expressed in the Sermon on the Mound, the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the saving of the adulteress from stoning, the healing of the sick, the feeding of the hungry. The line “For God is love” gets it right.

   A religion of laws, such that the righteous are separated from the unrighteous according to who follows the rules; a religion that divides humanity into two camps: the righteous and the unrighteous (based on who obeys the rules) – that is not for me: “he who considers himself good (i.e. relative to others) will not be good”; that is one form taken by the “fat, relentless ego.”  That is to neglect the prime directive – to love your neighbor as yourself – in preference to man-made laws (e.g. not eating pork, ritual washing, etc.) made to divide a group of so-called “righteous” from the rest of the “unrighteous” – and prop up a privileged caste of priests. The main principle of the alienated ego is here at work: to de-mean the other as a prologue to doing violence against them, or at least not doing good to them. According to all the laws the priestly caste had set up, Jesus - God - was rightly crucified. He flaunted them. 

  Of course, I am speaking personally, as we all must when it comes to such things. (Tolstoy – and I don’t uncritically take over all his theology – has been an important conversation partner for me.)

 Thoughts on Good Friday

 The Easter time has been a time of longing for me – especially since I have been living in Germany. I have experienced it as a bit magical: the sun, spring flowers, birds, green grass, church bells during the day; the deep black sky and the glowing moon at night. I have my favorite music: Bach’s Matthäus Passion, Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, and other pieces. I can only long for the times when I felt the longing. That is not the same as “the wasteland.” In the wasteland, I would be devoid of longing altogether. If I go to Mass, then on Good Friday. The Easter Mass, or the Midnight Mass on Saturday – too much for me. I can’t feel the joy that is performed. I’m not even sure what I think about the resurrection, great symbol of hope that it is.

   One can only speak personally about the ultimate realities. I am a bad Catholic, a bad Christian. I know that. Grace – divine love – gets through, but it’s like trying to get a radio station far away with a weak and broken antenna. I work on receiving that signal, but often I just have to do my duty, or fail to do my duty.

   I cannot see The Bible as such as sacred scripture, as almost all other Christians do in one form or the other. It is too clearly a work of human minds and editing. Except for the first chapter of Genesis, I can find nothing sacred in the Old Testament. Except that it forms the Matrix in which Jesus’ teaching took place, I would see it as a collection of myths masquerading as. I love myths, but the Old Testament myths are not as pleasurable to read as the stories of Thor and Odin, for example. It kept me far away from Christ’s teachings for many years since I believed that to accept the latter I had to embrace the former as scripture. There are a couple of small diamonds in it. But overall it burdens Christianity for me. Conservative Protestants prefer it, for they can quote to justify all kinds of nasty things that violate the word and spirit of Christ’s teaching. (Trump selling patriotic Bibles for 59 dollars and 99 cents – I want to vomit just thinking of it.)

    The Old Testament – the Torah – is the story of God’s relationship with his Chosen People: not with the rest of us. From the stories of ethnic cleansing to the ritual contempt for those not included in the Chosen People – the Samaritans, for example – the character revealed therein starts good, but then becomes a tyrannical, genocidal, punishing, Patriarch whose commandments are law and by definition “good.” I don’t like him. If he were more than a character in that story, he could destroy me with his power. Perhaps in terror I would submit. But only in fear, not love.

    Even the New Testament is not a sacred text for me. It contains sacred texts – the teachings of Christ, as they come filtered down through the decades after his death. But these are diamonds in the rough. Much of the New Testament consists of attempts by Christians still in the Jewish tradition to understand what of Jesus’ teachings, life, and death had been passed on; other parts of it consist of attempts by people with little or no contact with the religion and culture of old Israel to understand. Some of these attempts to make sense of Jesus are valuable or moving (e.g. the first chapter of John); others alienate me (Jesus as the sacrificial lamb: the so-called “ransom theory”). Jesus, like Socrates, left nothing written behind. Unlike Socrates, he did not have a Plato to pass on to us a living memory of his teachings, life, and death.

   Scripture for me would require culling the diamonds – the authentic teachings of Christ, his own words (and critical scholars agree some of the Gospels stem directly from Jesus, and were not added later). The closest approach to a Scripture for me is Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, a somewhat idiosyncratic translation of the diamonds contained in the New Testament, leaving out the rough. It is this translation that brought me back into contact with Christianity after a long absence in which I couldn’t take it seriously.

 

The meaning of the Cross. if divine love truly reached out to his Creatures ensnared by sin (as though now part of our DNA) through the incarnation, and died on the cross as a consequence, then it would be most ungrateful indeed not to honor that sublime sacrifice. Christians are Christians partly in gratitude for the sacrifice: they are grateful to the man Jesus, to God who sent and inspired him. Trusting that Jesus was a window into divine love, my theological problem ‘was Jesus a unique prophet (similar to how Muslims think of Mohammad) or did God become human in the person of Jesus’ becomes practical when the Christian wishes to express gratitude, love: how to love Jesus? As God’s special prophet and the embodiment of unfallen Man? Or as a person of God the Trinity? To whom are we grateful? How much does it matter? Does everything depend on getting the answer right? As a Christian one must rely on tradition here, on a trust in the Church.

     These are the salient facts.

Jesus prayed in fear to be spared the cross, but submitted to God’s will. If Jesus and God share one mind, then it is not a father willing his son to be crucified, but God willing himself to be crucified – a kind of suicide. Unless, of course, he was as the man Jesus powerless to alter the course of events. To be one of us, God had to submit to our powerless, to torment, fear, and death just like so many others. No Red Seas were parted to save himself from the worst humanity has to offer.

A core of Jesus’ teaching can be found in the Old Testament – Isiah 1:11

“The multitude of your sacrifices— what are they to me?” says the LORD. “I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and the fat of fattened animals; I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats.

Again and again, Jesus by word and example flaunts the older conception of a God who demands sacrifices and blind obedience. After all, it is understandable why the priestly caste found him dangerous, considered him to be a blasphemer: by their light, according to their conception of God, quite rightly. Thus to introduce the “ransom theory” to understand his death seems inconsistent with his own life and teachings, as tempting as the metaphor must have been to Jewish Christians of the time.

     The "ransom theory" dates back to the early Church Fathers and was particularly popularized by theologians like Origen and later by St. Augustine. It has some textual support in the New Testament. The theory suggests that the death of Jesus Christ on the cross was a ransom paid to Satan to liberate humanity from the bondage of sin and death. No human sacrifice could have been enough to pay this debt, so God had to pay it himself.  According to this theory, humanity, represented by Adam and Eve, had fallen into sin and thereby came under the dominion of Satan. Since Satan had a claim over humanity due to sin, Jesus' death was seen as a payment of ransom to Satan in order to free humanity from his power. This payment of ransom is often depicted metaphorically, with Jesus offering his life as a sacrifice to satisfy the demands of justice and redeem humanity. I don’t wish to take this away from anyone who finds it essential, but the idea of God owing the devil a sacrifice to free us from his prison is an idea I can’t reconcile with God as Jesus reveals him, a God of love and Creation.

[C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe gives the most sympathetic understanding of the ransom theory I know of, when Aslan sacrificed himself for Edmund’s betrayal: even Aslan could not per fiat command the debt be paid as that would have violated the old magic, the law made at the founding of the world. Lewis comes as close as anyone can come in this fantasy story of making sense of the ransom theory to me.] 

This is my rather idiosyncratic attempt to understand the insane image of God on the cross. The world is beautiful but way before Adam and Eve animal life was structured by the cruel struggle between predator and prey. (Image a lion devouring a zebra while the poor creature was still alive. Out of this struggle for existence, Adam and Eve emerged, the first self-conscious human beings. (That is not the Garden of Eden, but bear with me.) Nature implants in predators cruelty towards their prey; otherwise, they could not hunt and would die out. The movie Madagascar portrayed this humorously when the friendly zoo lion Alex, starving to death, regresses to his primal nature and while running after his zebra friend Marty no longer sees his friend but a steak. The predator reduces a living creature to food – which is what we do too. And extend this reduction to “enemies” and “others” – to threats to the community. People get reduced to orcs – or Samaritans, or Philistines. The cruelty in nature sprang over to the human world, symbolized for many Jews by the Romans and their crucifixions.

    God as Creator brought this into being. (The attempt to let God off the hook by claiming the all of nature “fell” with original sin – that before original sin the lion lay down by the lamb – is a beautiful myth, but doesn’t make sense of what we know of nature.) And the only picture of God in a monotheistic religion was Jahve, who often seems very much embedded in the cruelty of nature. The very idea of the Chosen People with their Promised Land pit them against enemies, who thus had to be reduced even as the enemies had to reduce the Chosen People. The entire Creation groans, as St. Paul put it.

    Jesus’ entire life and teaching showed God as overcoming these dichotomies: starting with friend and enemy/other: the command to love and pray for your enemies; not to condemn sinners (the adulteress); to overcome the divisions between ruling classes and the poor; to reject the hypocrisy of the righteous and unrighteous, subordinating the Law (and the priests) to love and humanity; to reconcile humanity (not just a Chosen People) to a God who is the source of their being; to die to your selfish ego and discover your soul.

    Imagine now that Jesus was the translation of the mind and spirit of God into flesh; that becoming mortal and living among us was the only way to communicate these truths. Communicating those truths, revealing God’s true being would be the purpose of the “incarnation” – the unity (in some mystical sense) of God and man. Not to ransom us from Satan, but to help us, to save us by giving us a chance to overcome the fearful predator in ourselves and giving us a less anthropomorphic image of God to guide us.

    To do this for us, to give us a chance at “salvation” (i.e. the overcoming of all the dualisms in us) Christ-God was willing to suffer the cross. “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” Well, some people have been trying to comprehend for 2000 years. I am trying, however unsuccessfully. (The truly Good get killed: seems to be a law of society. Socrates met a similar fate, even if the Athenians executed him much more humanely than did the damn Romans Jesus.)

   That, with my bad antenna, is the best I can do.

We can't see light  

I am reading an introduction to cultural anthropology. The following passage about a woman from the Mixtech people (who live in Mexico) struck me as philosophically important:

The Mixtec like other Mesoamerican people believe that living things that come into the world at the same time are fundamentally linked to one another. An animal and a human born at the same moment will thus share life experiences, are often said to have a single soul, and will at times share a consciousness. This latter most often occurs through dreams, which may be interpreted as the world seen through the eyes of one’s co-essential animal (so labeled because the animals and their human counterparts are essentially linked). In Nanuu Maria's case, her kiti nuvi is a small, playful, furry creature called a coati. (This has been determined years beforehand through divination and because, like the cootie, she had a special liking for bananas.) It was on one of its nocturnal journeys that the coati had been hit by lightning.

     The idea of the co-essential animal is something that to us seems a bit far-fetched. But the Mixtec case is far from unique, and ethnographers report many examples of traditions that hold that things not physically attached to the body are an intimate part of the self. For the Mixtec, the concept of the co-essential animal is at least as complex and comprehensive as the Id or super ego and has no less basis in empirical science: it explains good and bad luck, sudden and even deadly illnesses, the nature of dreams, and even why some individuals have more wealth and power than others, since those with big ferocious animals such as jaguars stand higher in the social hierarchy than those with small, innocuous animals such as rabbits.

      Mixtec thus clearly conceived their selves – their essential being in the world – is not being bounded by the body. Maria is linked to her kiti nuvi, not as one discreet hole is linked to another, as one of us feels linked to a lover or a child, but as a fellow creature whose experiences are hers and who shares her experiences in its own dreams, both in a physical as well as a psychic way. In contrast, we in the West tend to view ourselves – and our selves – as consisting at the core of an essentially unitary whole, unique and enduring. Generally, this shows that even so fundamental a facet of our experience of life as our concepts of who and what we are, concepts that seem to constitute a primary basis for common sense are in fact subject to extraordinary variation from culture to culture. This, in turn, has profound consequences for the ways in which societies are constituted socially, economically, and morally. When we in the West see ourselves as persons, we tend to see ourselves as autonomous individuals, each of us master of our own destiny and not part of a wider continuum of entities that might include a coati. Coming out of that kind of conception of ourselves – and our selves – is a sense of limitless possibility. Children in the United States, for example, are often told in elementary school that anyone can grow up to be a president. Historical and political reality to one side, this notion points to a concept of personhood, and here we use the term person to refer to the way ideas about the self articulate a more comprehensive political ideology – which bases personhood on shared capacities and rights. In other words, persons in this context are defined based not on what makes us different, but on what makes us the same. This view of persons is enshrined in the United States Constitution, which endows all citizens with the same social and political rights. In fact, the most recent amendments to the Constitution have all been concerned with denying the relevance of class, ethnic, racial, religious or gender differences in social arrangements, economic decision making and political participation. [emphasis mine]

   John Monaghan and Peter Just, Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2000), p. 131-132.

     

   This interests me because it implies that our conceptions of self – of human nature, of who and what we are – might make sense (or not) of our lives in a particular world-matrix (lifeworld) but have no basis in science. Here mythical thinking and metaphysical thinking merge.

    In it curious that in “philosophy of the mind” as it is taught and practiced in philosophy departments in North America and Europe, there is no theory of “co-essentialism.” You get theories like these:

1.    Physicalism: Also known as materialism, this theory posits that all mental states and processes are ultimately reducible to physical processes in the brain. It suggests that the mind can be fully explained by neuroscience and the laws of physics.

 

2.    Functionalism: According to functionalism, mental states are defined by their causal roles in relation to inputs, outputs, and other mental states. It focuses on the functions and operations of the mind rather than its physical substrate.

 

3.    Dualism: Dualism proposes that the mind and body are distinct substances, with the mind comprising non-physical or spiritual elements that are separate from the physical brain. Variants include substance dualism and property dualism.

 

4.    Identity Theory: Identity theory asserts that mental states are identical to specific brain states. It suggests that each type of mental state corresponds to a particular type of neurological state, offering a type of reductionism while maintaining a monistic perspective.

 

5.    Eliminative Materialism: This theory contends that common-sense understanding of mental states and processes is fundamentally mistaken, and that they will ultimately be eliminated or replaced by a matured neuroscience. It proposes that our current folk psychology is inadequate to explain the mind.

 

6.    Panpsychism: Panpsychism suggests that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe, present in all things to some degree. It proposes that mental properties are inherent in all physical entities, from subatomic particles to complex organisms.

 

7.    Epiphenomenalism: According to epiphenomenalism, mental states are byproducts of physical processes in the brain, but they do not have any causal influence on physical events. Instead, mental events are caused by physical events, but cannot cause physical events themselves.

 

8.    Emergentism: Emergentism posits that complex systems, such as the brain, give rise to novel properties (like consciousness) that cannot be reduced to the properties of their constituent parts. Consciousness emerges from the interactions of simpler elements.

 

I like the last one: it leaves the nature of what emerges completely open – co-essentialism could emerge as well as any other. Panpsychism may also be consistent with the Mixtec beliefs.

    The point: the Mixtec metaphysical understanding of the self is no more or less a possible subject of scientific inquiry as any of the others. None have a purely factual basis. All attempt to make sense of aspects of our self-conscious lives – as embodied in particular cultures. In the end, the only reason the Mixtec belief seems far-fetched to us is that it can play no role in our form of life. But the Western liberal belief in the autonomous individual, the belief in an immaterial soul, or the Catholic belief in the soul as the living form of the body – none of these would make sense of the Mixtec form of life. There is no external reality beyond our conscious experience (always embedded in a form of life) – no fact of the matter – to which to refer these different ways of making sense. Prove the Mixtec woman didn’t have a coati as a co-essential animal! Prove by some scientific text that we are autonomous individuals – or prove that we are purely physical entities ruled by the equations of physics! You can’t. Nobody can. The  belief in an immaterial soul or a self-brain identity or an autonomous self with rights is no more objectively rational than Maria’s belief that she shared consciousness with a coati. All are equally…magical, when seem from a perspective from outside the forms of life where they may make sense.

        As Schopenhauer put it: “That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject.”  Consciousness of always consciousness of something, taken in a certain way: but being conscious of consciousness is impossible. The self – consciousness of oneself as a self – is always a representation, or an interpretation of that which cannot be directly experienced (like a bit of God). We can only make sense of its effects in the world as we experience it. It is the light that opens up the world for our vision – our minds and spirits. But you can’t see the light. You can only interpret it, or speculate about it, on the ground of what it reveals.