Part 3: On Being a Postmodern Catholic

After listening to the Phillip Johnston podcast I referred to in my post about Getting Perspective on Iran, I subscribed to the "Speaking of Faith" free podcast service, and it immediately downloads dozens of their shows from the past, and as Sir Francis and forestwalker point out in their comments, many of them look very good.  I listened to two: the 8/17 interview with Karen Armstrong and the 5/18 rebroadcast of a 2002 interview with Jaroslav Pelikan, the great Yale historian of the early development of Christian doctrine.

Both were excellent.  Armstrong's story is a fascinating one, and is a vivid example of a very intelligent, spirited, curious woman who approaches all religions with  the attitude of the warmhearted music critic I talked about in my earlier posts.  And she 'gets' this idea that doctrine and the scriptures have to be approached as one approaches poetry or a Zen koan. Such verbal forms hold but hide truths that cannot be approached with the rational faculties alone.  They have to be cracked open to reveal an expansive interior which they contain, and the faculties that recognize these interior expanses are spiritual or soul faculties which have to be awakened or developed. That's the goal of spiritual practice.

So for those who have developed such faculties, there are cognitions, and then later the figuring out what they mean. Armstrong tells the story of Gregory of Nyssa's approach to the idea of the trinity which illustrates the point. I paraphrase from memory: He wrote:  'I think of the One, then I think of the Three;  I think of theThree, then I think of the One.  My eyes fill with tears.' I don't know the context of Gregory's statement, but when I heard Armstrong's recounting it, it struck me that Gregory was describing what was for him a Christian satori moment. 

The important thing for those who are skeptical about the truth claims of Christianity or any religion to understand is that those claims are experience based.  That's the meaning of revelation--something has been disclosed; a discovery was made.  An intellectual approach can only go so far; the usefulness of the intellect is secondary and works post revelation in order to understand the it, and it is never completely adequate to the task.

The Pelikan interview focused on creeds and the larger question why Christians have such a tendency to create them.  One of the last book projects Pelikan developed toward the end of his life was entitled Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition. The interviewer asks him why Christianity emphasizes creedal formulations so much. After all, the Jews have gotten along fine with the simple, but beautiful schema: Hear O Israel, the Lord God is One!  Why have Christians this need for long lists of things to believe?  Can any modern person believe all these things that were formulated by people almost 1700 years ago? 

These are fair questions, and there are good and bad answers to it, but it would sidetrack us to get into now. But suffice it to say that creeds ought never to be used as an ideological straitjacket or as a mind control tool.  Their use in that way is an abuse of clerical power and always and everywhere should be repudiated. Nevertheless, for anyone to belong to a particular creedal community requires that he respect the discoveries of those who preceded him, even if their discoveries are not ones that he has made yet for himself. If one chooses to undertake the discipline of Zen, for instance, he does so in the hope of making discoveries like the masters who have done so before him. I see no difference when it comes to the deeper and seemingly incomprehensible truth claims of Christian orthodoxy. Because these truth claims are not graspable by ordinary rational consciousness does not mean that they are not graspable.

For me the creedal elements in Christianity are part of a  legacy bequeathed by those who have gone before us who have made discoveries they wished for us who followed them to discover for ourselves.  If thought of in this way, the creeds are not intellectual straitjackets, but signposts or trailmarkers left by those who have already explored the terrain.  Our job is to rediscover what they already discovered, and that's the essence of the postmodern task.  As the Renaissance was a rediscovery and retrieval of the classical heritage lost through most of the medieval period, so now must we rediscover what was lost or forgotten during the modern period. I think that means a rediscovery and retrieval of element from the premodern Christian traditions, which are Catholicism and the Eastern churches, but also the premdoern heritage of non-Christian religions. 

Now here are some of my thoughts about the truth claims of Christian teaching. All the teachings of the great religious traditions are based on the discoveries made by their founders:  Moses, Muhammad, the ancient Rishis of Hinduism, and the Buddha.  I believe Christianity is similar in many ways to these other religions, but different in this critical sense:  Jesus was not the founder of Christianity.  He was not the discoverer, but the discoveree.  Thus his question to Peter is archetypal question posed to all who encounter him on some level: Who do you say that I am? The encounter with the Christ is an experience of insemination in the Matthew 13 sense (parable of sower, mustard seed, etc.).  This seed has a subversive effect within the soul life of those who are inseminated, and they find that if they nurture its germination in the right way, a new regime grows within.  Jesus called this interior regime the kingdom, which was his historical task to bring into the world.  Being a citizen of this kingdom is a precondition for deeper discoveries of the Christian kind.

As the seedlings grew in the early experience of the Christian community, so did its understanding of the answer to the question about Christ's identity. The evolving process is the basis for the various creedal formulations that culminated at Nicaea in 325.  The story of those developments is a fascinating, enormously complex, and deeply human drama, and there is no better source to learn about it than Jaroslav Pelikan.  I'd be happy to debate all the alternative explanations, but that's how I see it.

And so to my way of thinking, the interesting existential question for any serious person is not whether these discoveries are in some way provable, but whether they are worth making the effort to discover for oneself.  For if you have not made the discovery for yourself, you cannot judge their validity; all you can do is believe or disbelieve the testimony of others.  Having some criteria for judging the credibility of such testimony is a serous issue, and that, too, perhaps can be explored in a future post if readers want to.

Ok.  So now to particulars.  Commenter Eusto could perhaps be persuaded that Christianity is a beautiful fiction, but cannot see how any sane person could truly believe what Christians say they believe.  I think to a large extent I've already answered the question, but he's interested to know particulars.  Do I believe in the virgin birth, the miracles, the divinity of Christ, and so on.  I'm not going go into each of these because to do so would require tediously long explanations.  So I will focus here primarily on the Christian belief in Christ's resurrection on the first Easter.  If that's not true, then none of it is.  If it is true, then the plausibility of the rest of it is easier to establish, and if there's interest, we can get into it in future posts. My goal here is not to convince the skeptic but to show how its possible for a sane person to accept what seems to be an impossible idea.

It comes down to believing or not believing the testimony of the early disciples, and that testimony lives both in the memory of the Christian community and also in some of the New Testament texts. I think that it's important to emphasize that in my opinion no sane intelligent Christian looks at the Gospel accounts as journalistically objective accounts.  The gospel accounts were on the one hand indeed a record of specific events that I believe happened in historical time both before and after his Jesus' death.  But they are on the other hand an attempt to represent what different communities of Christians believed to be the significance of those.  They are both exposition (this is what happened) and synthesis (this is what it means).  I don't believe that everything that can be known about the Christian mystery is contained in the scriptures.  They are a good place to start, but not necessarily where one stops. I do believe they are inspired and have enormous authority; I don't believe they are infallible.

And while we're on the subject of infallibility, let me say a few words about the pope's claim to it. It is hard for me to imagine a more colossal and unnecessary blunder than its promulgation in the 19th century.  What problem is this doctrine designed to solve?  That papal authority is not being taken seriously enough?  But is there any doctrine that has done more to undermine papal credibility? Whatever its rarefied theological justification, it's hard to think of a doctrine that has done more to make Catholicism hard to take seriously by anybody who thinks. And it is a scandal for the faithful insofar as it reinforces the stereotype of Catholics as passive sheep led by those who know better. It's another species of this certainty fetishism that I talked about in earlier posts of which fundamentalism and scientism are also examples.  It is an  testament to the astonishing cluelessness and pomposity of the house management.  If those in the church hierarchy think themselves somehow immune from the delusions of power, their thinking so is a symptom of the malady.

I digress.  Back to our reflections on the Easter event. What can we learn from the gospel accounts about the period after Good Friday? I like particularly the accounts given in Luke and John: I’m conflating a little here, but the essential narrative boils down to some women went to the tomb where Jesus’s corpse lay to dress his wounds  to discover that the tomb was empty.   The women are greeted by two men who ask, “Why do you seek the living among the dead. He is not here, but is risen.” The women return to tell the other disciples what they have discovered; the disciples are incredulous, but Peter and John run to the tomb and find that the women’s account was true. The tomb is empty.  There is no Jesus to be found anywhere. There are just the linens in which his body was wrapped. And John's gospel has little details that the other accounts do not.

In Luke the scene shifts to the story of the nameless disciples' encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus which has more of an archetypal symbolic quality than the particularities of the John account. There is the encounter with the risen one who they do not recognize.There are all the explanations to them of the significance that they had not yet grasped. There is the recognition at the moment of the breaking of the bread. There is the awareness of how their hearts burned.

I say archetypal because whatever its basis in historical fact, it points to the elements that characterize any encounter with the risen Christ either then or in the centuries following and because of its eucharistic overtones.  I think lots of people have had Emmaus type experiences. The purpose of the mass and the eucharist is to be a locus for such encounters. This is something that bible-centric Protestants in general don't get, and it's part of the premodern heritage I believe they need to retrieve.

In John's gospel, the scene shifts to the story of Mary Magdalene's encounter with him in the garden near the tomb. And again its the little details that are most striking in the account. This acount is not archetypal but empirical. Mary, like the Emmaus disciples, does not at first recognize him.  She thinks at first that he is the gardener.  I find John's gospel to be the most interesting for the way it combines these very concrete detailed empirical observations with its cosmic Logos Christology, but that, too, is another subject.

So what to make of all this?  I believe that something happened in real historical time, but I am not certain that if there were a video camera recording these encounters it would have recorded the physical presence of the Christ.  It might have; I just don't know.  I am clear, though,  that whatever the nature of Christ's body, it was not the same as the body he had before he died. It didn’t even look like him.  I'm speculating, but I see these encounters are subjective/objective visionary experiences.  Subjective in the sense that there has to be a subjective alteration in subjective consciousness to be able to have the experience, but objective in the sense that it wasn't just a fantasy.  They were not just seeing some projection of their subconscious.

But my Harrisite friends might be asking themselves Why?  Why is all this necessary.  Isn't the resurrection and the whole idea of redemption another example of a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist? How is it all connected to the Christian idea of redemption?  And if there was redemption, it didn't take, did it?   All fair question to which there are good answers, but already I fear I've written more than most Harrisites are willing to work with, but I'd be interested to write in response to any questions Harrisites or others pose if they want to go further.  I address some of these issues in my Sinning Originally posts from over a year ago.

Comments

[Matt Zemek]

Jack,

Another great post. Thanks.

This is just a hunch, but I imagine those of a Harrisite bent might very well raise questions and doubts about the resurrection because of the problem of suffering.

After all, Eusto and many others wary of Christianity rightly and appropriately decry the enormity of suffering caused by Christians on individual and institutional levels throughout the years.

Wrestling with the issue of suffering--its causation, existence and impact--is something to be dealt with here, and it could form the basis for future posts on this or related subjects.

One could deal, for example, with the Franciscan theological worldview that Christmas, not Easter, is the central Christian feast, due to the belief that Jesus' birth and life were "enough," and that the crucifixion and resurrection, while hugely significant, are nevertheless somewhat secondary to the reality of God-become-flesh in the human, created world.

Points to ponder... suffering is a huge key in all of them.

[Jack Whelan]

Matt--

I'm not sure I understand the question. The commenters like Eusto seemed to be making the argument that religion caused more suffering than good, and therefore cannot be taken seriously. The answer to that of course is that people do all kinds of awful things in the name of religion that have nothing to do with religious ideals, just as people do all kinds of nasty things in the name of love that have nothing to do with love.

Are you asking: Why is there suffering? Isn't that the same question as why is there evil? The quick answer is that suffering is the price we pay for freedom. There is no freedom if there is nothing at stake in the choices we make. If our choices don't have significant consequences, there is no real freedom. Human existence isn't a parlor game.

There's obviously a lot more to be said, and I don't mean to be glib, but that's what it boils down to. If you want to get into it a more expanded way, let me know.

jw

[Matt Zemek]

Jack,

What I was trying to say was that there are elements of the resurrection narrative (and the crucifixion story that preceded it) which create the idea that Christianity is a religion of suffering, and that the Paschal Mystery ("suffering is redemptive") turn suffering into grace and new life.

The unsaid but implied thrust of what I began to touch on was that some folks might object to Christianity because of a perception that it welcomes suffering into our lives on an overly frequent basis.

Obviously, no one else has yet commented on this thread, but I can only wonder if there are a fair amount of Harrisites who would view the embrace and/or centrality of suffering (be it real or overstated) as a negative element of Christianity.

Here's a summary statement that puts my previous comment into a fuller and more proper perspective: the same "suffering" that results from the mistakes of people could be excessively allowed or tolerated by Christians because of a theology that embraces it too much, relative to the progression from crucifixion/death to resurrection/life.

In other words, Christian theology could be viewed by some as having a self-fulfilling prophecy that is all too quick to allow suffering and, consequently, not rebel forcefully against the spread of suffering when it emerges in the world.

I dare suggest there might be some skeptics of Christianity who feel that a theological connection with suffering (Paschal Mystery) is somewhat intentionally/purposefully tied to pain-causing actions/behaviors from Christian leaders and practitioners. THAT is what I was trying to get at, and I didn't flesh it out enough.

[Jack Whelan]

Matt--

That's clearer. A couple of thoughts in response: That people suffer and that life is brutal is a given. It's something Americans have done the best job they can to insulate themselves from. But it's a self-evident truth for 99% of human beings who have ever lived.

So it stands to reason that if Christ's mission was to fully submerge himself in the human condition, he would have to experience the whole thing, including the human capacity for brutality.

That to me is the key to the orthodox argument against the Docetists who thought that Christ was just pretending to be human. He just "appeared" to be suffering, but for them it was logically impossible that a divine could suffer. Well suffering is just part of the deal. It's what human beings do, and there's no being human without it. But being Christian means that we help one another through it, that we carry one another's burdens, that we do what we can to alleviate it.

Now I think that there is a kind of perversion of the Christian attitude toward sufferingin in certain imitatio Christi practices in which some Christians think they are being Christlike in identifying with Christ's sufferings with masochistic practices like self-flaggelation, and so on. I think there is a legitimate kind of ascetic practice, but too often it plays into a kind of body hatred that has nothing specifically to do with Christianity.

It has more to do with the human paradox that Ernst Becker explores in his book The Denial of Death, which in shorthand is that humans experience themselves as both angel and beast. It's hard to be both at the same time, to live a life that integrates both, so there's a tendency for people to choose to be one or the other.

There are a lot of religious people, Christian and non Christian alike, who pursue a kind of angelism, and a perverse asceticism is often the result. Nothing could be more non-Christian than body hatred. That's the whole point--the redemption and sanctification of the body, including the earth body (All creation groans and suffers . . . Romans 8:22)

So the pursuit of suffering for its own sake is sickness, but if it is accepted as part of a larger mission of compassion, it is noble. It is only in that sense that an imitatio Christi that embraces suffering is legitimate.

I don't think that should be hard for most Harrisites to understand. It isn't too distant in kind from the kind of noble suffering we soldiers, athletes, and parents willingly embrace on a daily basis. It's not about the suffering, it's about the willingess to pay the price to accomplish the mission.

[Matthew]

"The quick answer is that suffering is the price we pay for freedom."

That is, if we have freedom. If we don't, of if it is constrained to such a point that it's hard to understand its value, that bit of apologetics falls a little flat.

But I guess that wasn't really the point of your initial post.

[freerywrogier]

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