Searching for God # 116

 The Jewish historian, Yuval Noah Harari, in a work entitled, 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century, reported on an experiment in 1970 on a group of seminarian students who were training to become ministers in the Presbyterian Church. Each student was asked to hurry to a distant lecture hall to give a talk on the Good Samaritan parable, which tells how a Jew traveling from Jerusalem to Jerico was robbed and beaten by criminals, who then left him to die by the side of the road. After some time a priest and a Levite walk by, but both ignore the man. In contrast, a Samaritan-a member of a sect much despised by Jews- stops when he sees the victim, takes care of him, and saves his life. The moral of the parable is that people’s merit should be judged by their actual behavior rather than by their religious affiliation and philosophical views. The eager young seminarians rushed to the lecture hall, contemplating on the way best to explain the moral of the parable. But the experimenters planted in their path a shabbily dressed person who was sitting slumped in a doorway with his head down and his eyes closed. As each unsuspecting seminarian hurried past, the ‘victim’ coughed and groaned pitifully. Most seminarians did not even stop to inquire what was wrong with the man, let alone offer any help. The emotional stress created by the need to hurry to the lecture hall trumped their moral obligation to help strangers in distress. (p. 57-58)

And then he lays out an incisive and somewhat explosive nugget:

Human emotions trump philosophical theories in countless situations. This makes the ethical and philosophical history of the world a rather depressing tale of wonderful ideals and less-than-ideal behavior. How many Christians actually turn the other cheek, how many Buddhists actually rise above egoistic obsessions, and how many Jews actually love their neighbors as themselves? That’s just the way natural selection has shaped homo sapiens. Like all mammals, homo sapiens uses emotions to quickly make life-and-death decisions. We have inherited our anger, our fear and our lust from millions of ancestors, all of whom passed the most rigorous quality control tests of natural selection. (p. 58)

Question: Will the Jesus Seminar’s ‘take’ on the Good Samaritan, that the Jew taken for dead in the ditch is the most appropriate and fitting image of the ‘Christ’ as vulnerable victim, shift the social, cultural, religious and moral convention in the direction of ‘identifying’ with the victim? Perhaps, time will have an answer.

The question of religion’s highly instrumental influence on the identity of humans, however, remains at the forefront of human history and of the mind of historian Harari.

…Marx exaggerated when he dismissed religion as a mere superstructure hiding powerful technological and economic forces. Even if Islam, Hinduism, or Christianity is just a set of colorful decorations over an economic structure, people often identify with the décor, and people’s identities are a crucial historical force. Human power depends on mass cooperation, and mass cooperation depends on manufacturing mass identities---and all mass identities are based on fictional stories, not the scientific facts or even economic necessities. In the twenty-first century, the divisions of humans into Jews and Muslims or into Russians and Poles still depends on religious myths. Attempts by Nazis and communists to scientifically determine human identities based on race and class proved to be dangerous pseudoscience, and since then scientists have been extremely reluctant to help define any ‘natural’ identity for human beings. So in the twenty-first century religions don’t bring rain, they don’t cure illnesses, they don’t build bombs---but they do get to determine who are ‘us’ and who are ‘them,’ whom we should cure and whom we should bomb. (Harari, op cit. p. 134)

Like a social diagnostician, examining significant human issues, from the perspective of a long-reaching ‘scope’ into history, religion and identity, Harari cites a glaring issue of most of the world religions, beyond setting up a model of ‘us’ and ‘them’ as allies and enemies. His criticism rings deeply and resonantly in the twenty-first century:

Many religions praise the value of humility but then imagine themselves to be the most important thing in the universe. They mix calls for personal meekness with blatant collective arrogance. Humans of all creeds would do well to take humility more seriously. (Ibid, p 199)

Moving from personal attitudes to theological precepts, Harari casts deep, lasting and authentic shade on the religious concept of monotheism.

What about monotheism then? Doesn’t Judaism at least deserve special praise for pioneering the belief in a single God, which was unparalleled anywhere else in the world (even if this belief was then spread to the four corners of the earth by Christians and Muslims more than Jews)? We can quibble even about that, since the first clear evidence for monotheism comes from the religious revolution of Pharaoh Akhenaten around 1350 BCE, and documents such as the Mesha Stele (erected by the Moabite king Mesha) indicate that the religion of biblical Israel was not all that different from the religious of neighboring kingdoms such as Moab…But the real problem with the idea that Judaism contributed monotheism to the world is that this is hardly something to be proud of. From an ethical perspective monotheism was arguable one of the worst ideas in human history. Monotheism did little to improve the moral standards of humans—do you really think Muslims are inherently more ethical than Hindus just became Muslims believe in a single god while Hindus believe in many gods? Were Christian conquistadores more ethical than pagan Native American tribes? What monotheism undoubtedly did was to make many people far more intolerant than before, thereby contributing to the spread of religious persecutions and holy wars. Polytheists found it perfectly acceptable that different people worshipped gods and performed diverse rites and rituals. They rarely if ever fought, persecuted, or killed people just because of their religious beliefs. Monotheists, in contrast, believed that their God was the only god, and that He demanded universal obedience. Consequently, as Christianity and Islam spread around the world, so did the incidence of crusades, jihads, inquisitions and religious discriminations. (Harari, ibid, p. 194-5)

In a footnote to this general criticism of monotheism, Harari adds another dimension of evidence, from the retrospective of a long-lens into history, against its adoption:

When we think of human sacrifice we usually have in mind gruesome rituals in Canaanite or Aztec temples, and it is common to argue that monotheism brought an end to this terrible practice. In fact, monotheists practiced human sacrifice on a much larger scale that more polytheistic cults. Christianity and Islam have killed far more people in the name of God than did the followers of Ba’al or Huitzilopochtli. (Supreme Patron god of the Aztecs) (Harari, ibid, p. 293-294)

Reading Harari (published in 2018), along with Robert Funk, in Honest to Jesus, (published in 1996) we can hear echoes of Funk’s Christianity for new age in Harari’s historic assessment of some of the tenets of the faith needing attention, and perhaps even amendment.

With reference to monotheism, we read this in Funk:

Jesus is one of the great sages of history, and his insights should be taken seriously but tested by reference to other sects, ancient and modern, who have had glimpses of the eternal, and by reference to everything we can learn from the sciences, the poets, and the artists. Real knowledge, divine knowledge, is indiscriminate in the vessels it elects to fill. That is another way of saying that the glimpse comes to those who are open to it and does so without reference to social station, education, or political prowess. The glimpse is no respecter of theologies, theological schools, or evangelists. The glimpse blows where it will—every which way. (Funk, p.302-303) Clearly, this perspective relinquishes any exclusive hold on absolute theological truth, and in another passage Funk insists:

There is nothing in the creed, in the gospels, in Christian tradition, and in the historical and scientific methodologies with which we study them that is immune to critical assessment and reformation. We cannot put a protective shield around any part of the Christians heritage if we aspire to set Jesus free. Everything is on the table….In the ‘new age,’ all theology is post-Auschwitz, as a German theologian recently remarked. Theology conducted in the aftermath of Auschwitz means, among other things, that we can no longer trust the authority structure of an ecclesiastical tradition that learned, at several crucial junctures in its history, it was unable to resist the ultimate compromise. We should already have learned from the lessons of the Spanish Inquisition. Or we might have gathered something of the American propensity to read scripture in a self-serving way as an endorsement of black slavery. Now we have the Nazi horror to look back on as well. In view of the compromises ‘Christian’ leaders made in those and similar contexts, it is a wonder that anyone would want to claim the authority of this or that church council for the ultimate truth. (Funk, Honest to Jesus, p. 299)

Acknowledging that the basic notion of religion, and the faith it spawns, have their foundation in mythic stories, Funk comes right out to make a bold and critical statement of biblical scholarship.

The principal deficiency in biblical scholarship currently is its lack of a myth criticism. We have developed historical criticism to a high art, but we have been unable to conceive a critical relation to the stories that undergird our tradition and limit our vision. In the next phase of our work, we must remedy this fundamental deficiency.  (Funk, op. cit. p. 309)

In an attempt to delineate Jesus from the Christ, as a potential first step in ‘myth’ criticism, Funk pushes the envelope even further:

We need to reconsider the vocation of Jesus as the Christ. Jesus’ functions as the Christ were assigned to him by his admirers in the first few centuries. But the real vocation of Jesus was assigned to him by his vision. Jesus told parables as though he were hearing them. He was not so much calling God as God was calling on him. He was not making claims; he was being claimed. We know what it means to .form: voke. It is available in Latin: vocare, to call, which is related to vox, voice. Jesus was ‘voked,’ called. To be ‘voked’ means to receive a vocation, a calling. Vocation is the noun that goes with the verb ‘voke’. (Funk, op cit. p. 309)

Think for a moment about the reversal of perspective on the parables, from the way most of us have been taught, as if there were moral, ethical, religious and spiritual guides or perhaps even imperatives, ordained by the sacred words of Jesus. If Funk and the scholars are even close to a more valid version and interpretation of those highly recognized and venerated words and stories, think how different the Christian churches’ relationship with the Jesus of Nazareth would be, as compared with their relationship with the Christ of the Resurrection. Words like ‘sage’ and ‘ordinary’ and ‘shaman’ and ‘teacher’ and ‘special’ being called to give voice to the vision of God come to mind. Taking the focus off himself, and pointing to God, is one of the conclusions (or notions) that emerges from the work of the Jesus Seminar. Gone is even the possibility of ‘absolute’ . The Latin words, ‘Vera Religio Ac Scientia Vera’ on their coat of arms, reflect the founding principles of Huron College as an Anglican theological college. English translation: “True Religion and sound Learning.” I literally shuddered every time, decades ago, I looked at, or later even thought about or remembered those words.

Is monotheism undergoing some critical and thoughtful and scholarly revision? Is the Christian church beginning to differentiate between the Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of both Crucifixion and Resurrection? Is the Christian church awakening to the self-sabotaging hypocrisy of ‘humility’ as a Christian value and ‘exclusive superiority’ as a practicing psychology? Is the Christian church beginning to open its individual and collective eyes to the discernment between history and myth? And is the Christian church even open to consider the injections of contemporary culture, myth and subjective reporting as well as poetry and fantasy as integral to scripture along with some far less absolute and constricting moral and ethical code?

As Bob Dylan wrote and sang so many decades ago, and his words remain full of meaning today, “the times they are a’changing”!