Truth
The Trouble with Theology 1
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 11 January 2007
Reasoning About God
“What is Theology?” is a question that Maurice Wiles, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, set out to answer in respect of Christianity in a 1976 monograph. After over 100 pages, he had not come up with an answer, so he ventured a “possible answer” in that it must include:
- the account of Christ in the bible and the response to these events
- the continuing history of the church through the ages
- the philosophical assumptions behind Christian belief and practice.
Wiles seems to realize that he has not said much, and certainly nothing to whet the appetite, so ventures further that it is more than this because there are many ways of approaching it, and they are strewn with the anti-personnel bombs of prejudice and tradition, and the smoke bombs of inadequate criteria. It is hard to make anything of such unpromising material, but he assures us it can be done! Wiles is an academic divine, and can hardly saw of the branch of knowledge he depends on for his daily crust and glass of sour milk, but he is honest enough to allow his own doubts to shine through the cracks in his subject that he finds hard to paper over.
On the face of it, theology, as its components in Greek suggest, is reasoning about God, “logos” being “reasoning” and “theos” being “God”. “Logos” is often given as “word” because that is how it is rendered in the New Testament and Christians do not like to think that God reasons at all, but this is a more representative of its meaning.
There is a problem from the outset. Theologians have read in their bibles:
To whom then will ye liken me that I should be like him, says the Holy One.Isaiah 40:25
It makes them feel guilty. Theology is reasoning about something which is supposed to be unknowable, beyond words, beyond reason, ineffable, and even unimaginable. It seems theologians do not have a lot to talk about, but it does not deter them, and it is a perverse tribute to human ingenuity that they have filled innumerable books, and wasted countless lives in their determination to do something that even God Himself expressed skepticism about—the impossible. They declare that reasoned discourse about God is quite possible despite the difficulties, and even if “the elusiveness of the essential subject matter gives theology a highly problematic character”, an “embarrasing fact”, admits Wiles, that theologians do not like to face.
One way out they try is that theology is intelligible to believers, even though others do not get it, though that is not what Isaiah said. The unbelievers, they say, are like the deaf trying to comprehend music, or the blind a painting. They are boasting that believers have a special sense by which they can perceive God, and “see” theology. Those without it cannot. It must be a nonsense, but, if it is right, it makes the forcible teaching of religion to those who do not have this sense a shocking case of child abuse that should be stopped until the children have been shown by some rigorous test to have this sense (or nonsense). The religious professionals will immediately claim that this sense is developed by exposing guileless children to religious propaganda when they are too young to object. It has always worked in the past so who can argue with it? Useful subjects are being chopped out of the modern dumbed down curriculum, so no doubt this nonsense subject will find its way into it, but it would be simply another indication that we are heading back into ignorance.
It is instructive that other theologians think the notion that theology is only meaningful to believers is itself nonsense, because they vouch for the fact that everyone has this organ that can sense God, or apparently not really God but “depth of being”—everyone knows that is God anyway. So argued Paul Tillich. God is depth! Knowest thou depth? Then thou art not Godless! Or, is it depth from God’s position, but from our own vantage point maybe it is height, and that just appears like depth. Wiles reassures us that this is not just an apologetic device, though that seems, to those of us lacking the sense of depth, to be what the whole of theology is, and all that it can be, when unquestioning belief is the starting point of the study of itself.
One can accept without being any sort of believer that reality is not what it seems at first glance, and sometimes one has a sense of it, but this utterly natural, if inchoate sense that anyone intelligent has, can hardly be claimed as God. It is the mystery or complexity of the structure of reality, and is available for us all to ponder, quite unlike God who is a figment of the imagination, and therefore entirely subjective. If anyone is obsessed with any such feeling, the proper study of it is psychology not theology.
The theologians here are trying on the same trick as their colleagues who always claim that Einstein believed in their God, when Einstein simply used God as a convenient shorthand for his own wonder at the harmony of Nature, its orderliness, its knowableness, and the wonder of our existence in it. It is the diametric opposite of the invisible meddler in the world. The order and harmony of nature are among the features of it that make life livable. It is much more the God of the Stoics than the God of the Christians. Regarding this God, it is the Christians who are the atheists, and so too, all of those who think God is a supernatural being in heaven.
Martin Luther tried a similar deceit:
I say, whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God.Large Catechism I, The First Commandment
So, whatever you are enthusiastic about is your God, rather a demeaning and possibly dangerous definition of God, surely. It could justify the most terrible crimes on humanity by people who are on or over the edge of sanity. In that respect, maybe it is an excellent definition, since the Church was full of raging murderers for centuries, and Luther himself was no different, but such frankness cannot be the intention of a Christian theologian. And, if the passion is innocent, like clinging to a love of music or confiding one’s thoughts to science, can it be considered a God, except in a pejorative way. It is nothing but an apologetic trick to make the impossible seem possible.
Even accepted metaphorically as a God, it is no subject for theology, and, if it were, theology would soon merge into the object of the passion, the music, science, lust, ecstatic dancing, or whatever. God descends from on high to be anything and everything that anyone can be passionate about. Monotheism breaks up into polytheism, love of many gods, and that too cannot be the intention of people like Luther, though it is arguably a healthier form of religion to have, given that religion is considerd necessary at all. Sure enough, Wiles rejects any such ideas, noting that Marxists and humanists find deep meaning, awareness and purpose in their own lives from their non-supernatural passions, which fulfil “a role very similar to that played by God in the life of the believer”, something too dangerous to think about. Wiles prefers to accept that theology is an elusive subject rather than create hostages to fortune.
The French sociologist, Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), thought religion offered a common identity to people in a society. It was their culture, and so it was, of course, in ancient times certainly, and still for many believers. Max Weber (1881-1961), the German sociologist, had a similar notion but perhaps more conscious. Religious myths were what gave a society its meaning and mores. Effectively religions, in any sociological thesis, reflect social forces at work. Religions claim to be based on unchanging principle but any serious examination of Christianity’s history shows that it has changed several times. Apart from its broad trappings, its raison d’etre and mores changed from one era to the next. The supposed goodness of Christians did not stop a bulk of German Christians, both Catholic and Protestant for their own reasons from supporting Hitler into power, and continuing to support Him in power when the nature of his regime must have been evident. The unspeakably smug if not wicked G W Bush retained the support of millions of US evangelical Christian. In what way do these people worship the Galilean pacifist, for whom a single sword was too many, according to the Christian New Testament?
So what are the axioms of theology? They are the religious dogmas declared to be true on the basis that they have been validated by an aspect of God, the Holy Spirit. This last is actually one of the dogmas. From these “truths”, the purpose of theology is to elucidate their consequences. The trouble is that there is no proper criterion for judging whether the process has yielded anything that is true. Or rather, the criterion is simply whether the theologians like what emerges or not, whether they seem to fit their own conceptions of what Christianity should be. The Holy Ghost tells them what. So they say theology is corrigible, but it is only in an arbitrary way based on their own judgements and expediency. Neither the dogmata nor the conclusions can be tested other than subjectively.
Theologians try to relieve the problem of dogma by accepting that some dogmas might not be true, per se, but are an attempt to formulate an essential truth in words inadequate to express it. It is an essence of something too profound. In short, what they really mean is a mystery of God, but, as we are no nearer to understanding them, they have to suffice as they are. Justifying it is all too hard, so most believers and some theologians just forget it, content that God or His Holy Ghost is looking after them, and will make it all right.
Essentially such mysteries are part of God’s revelation. For most Christians, it does not have to be rational or logical. So, we have to believe that God gave us those organs for thinking to lead us up blind alleys, without warning us to “hang on, it might be dangerous in there”. How is it possible for the Christian to imagine that God made us in His own image, then treats our use of the gifts he gave us, like that of thought, as some sort of satanic temptation. To believe that God does this is to believe that God is Satan. Or, it leads you to believe that God has lost control of Christianity to satanic people. It seems far more likely than that a God of love wants us to be irrational even though He has given us brains.
Wiles asks whether it is possible for a religious man to live his faith while being willing to submit it to rigorous and critical examination. After a few pages uncertainly batting it around, we being to realize that the answer must be “no”, because the exercise is leading nowhere. He eventually concludes:
There is the possibility of an intelligent method of discourse… no comparable branch of study can ask or lay claim to more than that.Maurice Wiles, What is Theology?
So, the faithful person can talk as much as they like about their faith but they cannot expect to reach a conclusion. And what are the comparable branches of study? One can lay down any set of axioms and rules of debate that you like and see where they lead you. It is a sort of game like setting the rules of automata like Conway’s Game of Life. Some of the rules lead to interesting behaviour, and no doubt some of the arbitrary axioms and rules of discussion might do the same. The criterion of success is whether they help us to understand the world we experience. Some sets, like those of science do, some like philosophy may do, some like theology scarcely do, and some, most in fact, lead nowhere, or, at least, nowhere enlightening. Theology does not deserve to go into the last and most useless group because religion has been shown to have some psychological benefits in some cases, and it certainly has adverse psychological consequences in others, and terrible social consequences that can effect us all. It has effects that cannot be written off as inconsequential, but they are not good.
An Historical Religion
Perhaps the etymology of the word “theology” is too restrictive. The subject, for Christians, is not confined to thinking rationally about God. After all, that is a bit of an oxymoron, is it not? Christianity claims to be an historically based religion. Its myths are claimed to be literally true history, and history is a valid study. The trouble is it faces the theologian with more problems—historical ones. History is a critical study. It is, in short, scientific in the sense that it is based on skepticism, and a proper use, and particularly critical appraisal of evidence. Yet religions like Christianity like to offer their acolytes the absolute “truth”. History cannot be absolute, especially when the evidence is so poor, when examined, that only believers can contrive to make it stand up. The myths of the gospel Christ have to be simply believed because there is no corroborating evidence for them, and otherwise they are incredible.
Religious stories are usually called myths, except when they are Christian myths. Then they are history. Myths encapsulate in metaphorical form some moral or truth that ancient people wanted to put over to their children to make them upright citizens. The acceptance of them helped to bind the tribe or ethnos together. Rarely, therefore did they have to be literally true, but Christian myths are different because they are literally true, the pastors say. The way that ancient people understood their myths depended upon their overall conception of the world and what comprised it. That understanding is so utterly different from our own it is unlikely that anyone today can comprehend an ancient myth the way it was understood originally. Yet, Christians all think they can understand precisely what God means in His Word. It is much more certain that none of them do. They project into what is essentially meaningless to them, whatever they want it to mean.
The resurrection of the gospel hero from being dead is the biggest element of the Christian fantasy. How can that be substantiated historically? “The resurrection was a miracle”, the Christians chorus, but the real miracle is that they will believe such an incredible story. Christians claim it was unique and for that reason must be taken on faith. Resurrection is not unique in the real world, it is impossible. That is supposed to be why it is such a remarkable miracle, and the foundation of faith. But, in what way is it unique in mythology, including previous biblical myths? Even in the New Testament Jair’s daughter and Lazarus were both raised from the dead before Jesus. Wiles tells us that the difference is that these two were raised into ordinary life “to die again in due time”. How does he know this? As far as we know, they were resurrected, so, it is not the resurrection of Jesus that is the proof of Christianity.
In fact, the raising of Lazarus was more remarkable than the raising of Jesus. Do Christians ever wonder what the significance of three days in the tomb was? Of course, they do not. It is part of the common understanding of the times, but that is now forgotten by all but a few divines and mythologists. The belief was that the soul remained with the body for three full days after death, then departed. The soul could rejoin the body within the three days, and the person could return to life. That is what Jesus did himself. It was not particularly miraculous! What of Lazarus? He had been dead for four days (Jn 11:17, 39)! The soul had already departed from his body and he had started to decompose! The raising of Lazarus is therefore a much greater miracle than the raising of Jesus. Nevertheless, Christians might say that Jesus did the raising. But Jesus himself admitted that it was God who did the miracles, not him. God reviving a stinking corpse is more remarkable than raising a man who might not have been dead.
So, for Jesus, it must then be his ascension into heaven that was remarkable. Do Christians realize this? The ascension is recorded only in the books written by Luke, making the case thinner than ever. Furthermore ascension into heaven was de rigeur for Pagan gods like Quirinus and Hercules, so again there is nothing unique even in this part of the myth of Jesus.
Christian faith just cannot be justified by history, as Lessing pointed out 200 years ago. The fact is that, if God has chosen to make His salvific revelation through an historical event, why could He not make it all together more persuasive? Some Christians like to think that it is because God wanted everyone to have faith in Him, but, as usual, it means ignoring the brain God supposedly gave us, and it is simply not possible to believe that God gave us it not to be used! If He meant us to use our brains, He did so knowing they would be useful for us to question bogus and sham schemes of imitating Him for someone’s benefit, whether wicked men or the Devil.
The myth of Jesus adapts to fit the concerns of each age, as A Schweitzer showed in 1906:
Each successive epoch of theology found its own theory in Jesus… each individual created him in accordance with his own character.
Jesus is the archetypal Proteus who fits himself to any desired shape. It has been a useful characteristic for theologians glad to be able to cast aside any serious attempts at discovering the true history of the man behind the myth. The literary character of Jesus is protean but his life, assuming that he lived at all, must be fixed, and that history cannot be divorced from the situation at the time or the evidence we have. Admittedly, the gospels were not meant to be history, but they were set in an historical period, and record clues that can be read appropriately. All that is necessary is to set aside the fantasy to yield a plausible, reasonable and convincing account of the events. It requires the supernatural interventions by God to be set aside, as the spin put upon quite natural events, for the real story to be seen. That is what Christians cannot do.
The historian treats the New Testament sources as a record of something that happened in a certain context, and from them judges what it could have been in reality not in fantasy. Faith then is the personal decision to abandon reason and and believe the fantasy instead. History is ultimately irrelevant to the believer, so the idea that Christianity is a religion based on history is itself a deceit. Moreover, Jesus is set in a particular time in history but his supernatural actions could be set at anytime, so Christianity is not an historical belief. Of course, if Jesus with his supernatural powers were the detective hero, Philip Marlowe, no one would believe the story any more than they believe Superman, whose exploits were more amazing, because no one is fooled by supernatural events set in modern times. For Jesus to be treated properly as a historical person, he has to be a man of his time, not a superman.
The radical difference between the accounts put forward by responsible scholars with good evidence to support them in each case, suggests that evidence is not such as to bring us anywhere near the level of moral certainty.Maurice Wiles, What is Theology?
Certainty, however qualified, is more than any historical study can provide. Nor is it what belief provides, although believers delude themselves otherwise, and it seems to be what Wiles is implying. And who are these responsible scholars? What or whom are they responsible to? And how comprehensive is the evidence they adduce? The historian does not decide what is certain but which hypothesis best fits the evidence available—all the evidence, not selected bits of it to suit some thesis. The evidence has to be as much of it as can be encompassed. Not all of it can be encompassed at such a long distance because additions and alterations have been made later, but nothing significant should be excluded and all external evidence that is relevant should be included. And “responsible” should mean responsible to scholarly standards not to religious dogma and personal belief. These responsible scholars are largely irresponsible ones determined to find a “historical kernel” to the gospel stories sufficiently like them to promote belief among the marginally skeptical. In short, they are a type of Christian apologist, picking and chosing the evidence to suit themselves, and ignoraing what is unsettling to them and the Jesus myth. What he cannot be is what he was hung as—a rival to Caesar, a bandit and insurrectionist! Yet, that is where all the evidence, honestly considered points.
The Bible in Theology
So, perhaps Christian theology is accounting rationally for the bible. Unfortunately, this will not do for the fundamentalist in most Christians. To think rationally about the bible, has to begin with testing it against extra-biblical criteria to make sure that God’s word is true, and modern theologians know full well that is another hostage to fortune. Even if extra-biblical criteria are eschewed and scholars try only to use standards internal to the bible, they face terrible obstacles to sustaining belief, at least for those willing to think. The most obvious one is that the God of the Old Testament is quite different from the one of the New Testament, but the different books of the New Testament are no less incoherent examined with a critical eye. So, it is hard for the theologian to do it. It does not matter to the average uncritical Christian lamb—they believe whatever they are told—but the scholar cannot reveal the incoherent truth to them, and, if the scholar is truly critical themselves, they must conclude God or the Holy Ghost is a dunce. Even many of the lambs must find it hard in the light of modern knowledge to believe in demonic possession, or the imminent apocalypse of god that Jesus believed in all those years ago, unless, of course, they have been brought up in the redneck school of fundamentalism.
And these are just the obvious cultural assumptions underlying these ancient works that simply do not pertain, for anyone intelligent, in the modern world. Fundamentalists might think otherwise, but they are manifest hypocrities because their fundamentalism always manages to find ways out of the wishes of their incarnated God that do not suit them, such as his high regard for the spiritual value of poverty. And this is, Christians think, God speaking directly to them through His Holy Word, not a self confessed rogue, and merely a man, called Paul. “Blessed are the poor” is not simply to say “bless you” to the poor, as you do to people who sneeze. People who were blessed were holy. They were saints. They would enter God’s kingdom. Those who were not blessed would not. One way God, in his manifestation as Jesus, said you could get into heaven was by being poor, not by having an empty faith. What fundamentalist TV evangelist has given away all he has to the poor to secure salvation the way that Jesus recommended? They prefer power and influence to poverty and salvation.
Christians freely pick and choose their beliefs from the expressed wishes uttered by God Himself when He appeared on earth as a man, feeling no danger and regret about what they leave out. However “inerrant” they declare the bible to be, they feel free to interpret it in any way they like, or simply to ignore what they do not like. Interpreting things to mean just what is wanted was called by the Greeks sophistry. Do they think an almighty God is too stupid to notice? They make good into bad and heaven into hell and the abject believers in God’s Word think their God is too distracted to care. Why do they bother at all, and why don’t the theologians spend more time pointing out that Christians are ignoring God’s Word, not following it perfectly as they are evidently deluded enough to imagine?
Or is all this chicanery just what theology is? Plainly, fundamentalist pastors amd TV evangelists think it is, even if people like Wiles disagree, but they all unite against freethinkers and atheists, even though disbelief must be better than wrong belief. But these people are interested in their incomes more than correct belief, and are happy to pander to the crowds when it optimizes their financial turnover. They are hypocrites and cynics, and doubtless people like Wiles are embarrased by it, but these days one Christian will rarely criticize another, even when they think the error is so severe as to be satanic.
They do admit that Christian theology is not merely describing Christian belief but trying to assess the truth of its interpretation, and that requires investigation and probing, not sophistry. Can God really approve of the convoluted interpretations of millionaire evangelists determined to prove black is white, and therefore that riches prove God’s blessing, and not the opposite, as God clearly said Himself in person, according to a simple, straightforward and obvious reading of the bible. The Christian who believes the likes of Jimmy Swaggart makes God into a shyster. If God is good, it is plain who the real shysters are, but the evangelical flocks cannot see it, so is God really good? It is hard not to see the whole kaboodle as a scam. If it began as God’s Word, the Devil must have got hold of it somewhere along the line, and the believers just continue to follow the demons who have taken over from the saints and jump incomprehendingly headlong into the fires of hell. That is the logic of them doing the opposite of God’s wishes.
The fact remains that there are over 30,000 Christian sects, and each has one or more issues they consider important enough to divide them from the Christian “koinonia”. All take the bible as their starting point and all agree among their own sectarians what it means, but disagree vehemently with others. They cannot all be saved, now, can they? So there must be more to theology than just squabbling over the meaning of an ancient text, that, despite the claim that it is no less than the Word of God, is anything but God-like in its uncertainty and confusion of meaning. If theologians are really concerned with the salvation of simple folk, theology must have something to do with whether the whole enterprise is true.
