Whose Christ?

Critiques of Christianity; Christian Apologetics

Evaluations of Christianity—and I’m sure as well of all other religions or quasi-religions like Buddhism—, the more I read them, the less satisfied I find them. Even Nietzsche’s. Nietzsche probably should have known better. It doesn’t matter whether the critique is ultimately a defense or a condemnation, the problem is always the lack of definition. It always seems to be assumed that we know what we are talking about when we are talking about the faith. The heart, the essence, the thing itself. Critiques of specific doctrines or positions are much more effective than those of the faith itself. Even Nietzsche is best when he restricts himself to this or that aspect of Christianity, though in every case what he ascribes to Christianity may from another point of view not be Christian at all. (Nietzsche is clear that what belongs to Christ rarely belongs to Christianity, though I find his claims on this score to be often questionable, at least in The Will to Power.)
This is all a very rambling way to approach the question: what is Christianity? How do we know it when we see it? No satisfactory answer to this question is possible. Even “family resemblances” only gets us so far. The old “faith v. works” question only begins to crack open the nut of the divide, as though Christianity were the answer to the question, “How do I get to heaven?” You can think of Christianity as that, but there’s nothing that requires you to do so and much that allows you to ignore that question altogether. And even if you want to steep yourself in that question, the further question of what constitutes faith leads you down several rabbit holes. And so does the corollary question of what constitutes works.

Obviously the question of what Christ said has something to do with Christianity is. Obviously the question of what Christ did has something to do with it as well. But what did he actually say? What did he actually do? And what is the something it Christianity has to do with these things? Nietzsche finds it quite easy to separate out Christ from the biblical accounts of Christ—already corrupted, he says before they were written down. The best scholarship also brings out the question of the authenticity of the accounts, not to deny it, but to require us at every moment to consider the question in our reading.

Was he crucified? Some have denied but, but then some have denied he existed. We can only go so far with Humianism. I don’t doubt he lived. I don’t doubt he died, was crucified by Rome, likely for the even in the temple. But I’m already a couple butt positions out on the limb here. And that’s what it gets tricky. Was he resurrected? If so, what does that mean? In a physical body or directly into heaven with the gospel accounts (which Paul does not seem to be familiar with at all, and which differ from each other profoundly) acting as symbolic representations of resurrection. And if he was resurrected in any sense, what does that mean? For him? For us? Was it really a “sacrifice”? Or is that a post-resurrection interpretation of a mourning community—even if Jesus was God incarnate? (Which is a question I’m not even going to broach at this moment.)

The question we have to answer before we ask give a critique of or an apology of Christianity is “What is Christianity?” And there are so many ways to answer that question, we have to confront the question this way, “Does Christianity exist?” If so what is the status of that existence?
Among the earliest things Christianity did was to divide the orthodox from the heterodox. It set up Peter as the arbiter once Christ was gone and could not himself provide this essential service. That was supposed to prevent just such questions as I am asking here. He even got his authority written into one of the gospels quite forcefully. But the move had very limited success. Paul rose up out of nowhere and became such a force in the formulation and spread of the faith that Peter had to accept him into the hierarchy of this new faith—which really must have been strange and rankling. The hint of this we get from the New Testament is telling: all the disciples arguing over who among them is to sit on the right and who on the left hand of the son, and here is an outsider who never met or even witnesses Jesus personally taking a position as an apostle while the apostles themselves are still around? Where the hell did he come from? And what gives him the authority? And why would God have chosen him after the fact if he’d wanted him for an apostle? He was alive during the ministry of Christ.

The road to Damascus story is very good, but a little convenient, a little suspicious.
And yet—he does not formulate Christianity in any way that the apostles could object to. He does risk his life, his health, his wealth and social status to adopt this pretty miserable and tenuous life of the itinerant preacher. If you didn’t have a road to Damascus experience, why would you do that? He does (we think) actually eventually die as a result of this. Why would a person do that? Today quack evangelists are everywhere, seeking money and power and ego gratification. It’s hard to imagine Paul getting enough of any of these to balance against the hardship in those early days.

He got to formulate the faith. But not well enough for the formulae to stick everywhere, to be understood everywhere the same. And he wasn’t Christ. Even if he were always right (which is unlikely, witness that line about God not testing the believer beyond his ability, which is probably impossible to reconcile with experience, and the bit about God being responsible for who gets to be king, which has caused no end of trouble and has led any number of self-professed Christians to assume God voted for Trump (though of course not for Obama))… even if he were always right, he does not say the same thing to everyone who reads him. And he did not prevent the early Christian heresies, and the faith still needed the Council of Nicaea, and it still needed to formulate a scripture, which passed controversially and still isn’t the same for all sects that call themselves Christian. And it still fell apart in 1523 and has been steadily crumbling into any number of other Christianities ever since.

Nietzsche himself could be hailed as the profit of a Christian sect without the need to discard the Christian scriptures.
But that won’t do.

Christianity has always existed as the response to three questions:

Who was Christ?

What is the Christian message?

They are not utterly distinct questions, of course. For much of Protestant Christianity, Christ is the message. John calls him as much when he calls him the “logos.” But the two questions are not hard to distinguish. But it is impossible to say with absolute assurance which of the two takes precedence. If you accept the Christian message but deny the divinity of Christ (a la the Deists of the 18th century, and not just the Deists but any number of their disassociated progeny right up to the present day), can you be saved?
If you accept the Christ but get the message all wrong, (a la the great mass of Christians whichever sect is closest to right, a la any sect of Christianity who thinks Donald Trump is a good idea), can you be saved?

There may be right answers to those questions, but we do not have them with any assurance.
I did not put the question “What is the Bible?” with the two above, though it almost belongs. It is an important question. But salvation—should there be such a thing—does not depend on whether you believe the Bible is the inspired and unerring Word of God or just an anthology of texts written by people for a number of reasons, most of which are concerned in some way with God, and which were collected at various points, most notably at Nicaea, an act that reinterpreted them all into a single narrative with a lot of holes and contradictions but a definite trajectory.
If you can’t get to Heaven without believing in the Bible, then St. Paul didn’t go to Heaven.
Still the Bible is the chief source of information on both the teaching of Christ and the person of Christ. Whatever the best answers to those questions, the material from which those questions are answered is furnished more from the Bible than from elsewhere—though we can’t rule out the other proposed sources of knowledge of God, the Holy Spirit (which will lead you into all knowledge), Reason, and Nature.
All are flawed means for learning about God, the message and person of Christ. (To be clear, the Holy Spirit, if the Holy Spirit exists, being a person of the Trinity, can be definition not be flawed, but, like the Bible, Reason, and Nature, must be interpreted insofar as it/he/she is a source of knowledge. There’s the rub.)

While the person of Christ is a hard theological nut to crack, the essential teachings of Christ do not seem to be so difficult. However flawed the transcription of the New Testament is and whatever competing forces went into its construction, the essential moral teaching does not seem to me to admit of much dispute: Love your enemies; Love God; Love your neighbor; Love yourself.
Rise above your animal instincts for hatred and revenge and self-centeredness. Rise about your instincts for violence. Do not give quarter to the destructive forces of hate that are in you. Because God loves everyone, everyone is valuable. No one is more valuable than you are; no one is less valuable than you are. (This is a far cry from Jeffersonian “equality.” All men are certainly NOT created equal in any other sense than this one.)

Love or its inverse Do Not Hate. This is the heart of the message or nothing is. It’s simple, but it’s so difficult that no one will master it in a lifetime. One minute’s loss of vigilance and the counter forces well up. Hate is there like an addiction we are born with.
Two things: a loss of self-centeredness does not entail the giving up of the self. This is an easy but false conclusion. If everyone’s equally valuable, then you yourself are of infinite value. Your desires, your dreams, your curiosity—whatever the word is that best describes this—has been given you for fulfillment, not for sacrifice. Your desire is holy. Your happiness is what it’s all about. Just not at the expense of others. A million sermons need to be written to clarify this.

Who was Christ? I don’t know. I used to. Should the crucifixion be understood in the terms of sacrifice, like an animal sacrifice, to appease the wrath of God? Perhaps not. I find Girard pretty persuasive on this point, that it is to be understood as the end of sacrifice, as the finally putting to rest of the idea that God is appeased by violence and death like an old mythic, pagan god. The death of Christ is the example of the ultimate expression of love, a love greater than most of us are capable of. I am not. Willingly to suffer and die without defense, without insisting on arms against the state, without spitting in the face of Herod or Pilate, without self-defense. The death of Jesus has to be understood not as a sacrifice for our sins (at least not in the way that phrase is generally understood, as a kind of magical or juridical act) but as an act of love, the highest act of the greatest love.