Truth
The Trouble with Theology 3
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 11 January 2007
Infallible?
The entire problem of the Christian fundamentalist approach comes from their belief that the bible is the unique authoritative word of God. It is a revelation! Because God is perfect, they believe the bible is uniqely perfect. They seem unable to understand that the world is imperfect and so too is everything in it. Even Jesus showed unworthy emotions and a disregard for his mother—faults taken to prove that he was indeed human—and the bible can hardly be expected to be more perfect tham God Himself when He appeared on earth. Supposing for the sake of argument that the bible was perfect, we humans are manifestly imperfect, and Christians tell us we are all sinners to prove it, so inevitably we must perceive the perfect bible imperfectly. It is like the world’s most perfect diamond dug from the earth. It looks like a lump of rock, or, at best, like a rough piece of glass. Fresh out of the earth, it cannot be seen as a clear jewel, free of all imperfection, as it can when it is cut and polished to remove its earthly tarnish.
But evangelical and fundamentalist Christians must think they are as perfect as they suppose the bible is, because they can read it right, and only they can. Evangelicals and fundies, in claiming the perfection of the bible, are claiming perfection for themselves. They are the only ones who can see the jewel properly. To imagine that anybody can see the bible clearly without even inspecting it properly, sounds much like a satanic delusion of grandeur, and not a bit like the humility God told Christians they needed to be Christians.
We really have to ask also why almighty God has to work in this perverse way. Believers excuse God as working in mysterious ways, but why should He? And, if He has to, how does He expect us to work it out? Let us repeat what is unquestionably true, and that is that every human being has a brain, and Christians believe that God Himself gave us it. God allegedly made us in His image so that we are models of Himself. We have a nature that is not only God-given, but it is god-like, albeit imperfectly so. Are we really to believe that God does not expect us to use our brains over these important matters? Despite the pastors and priests telling us that we must not enquire, that it is satanic in some way to do so, God has given us the ability to do it, and must expect us to. So, the clergy are the agents of Satan not our brains. They are the ones who will not be questioned or tested because they have spent lifetimes telling lies.
Why should an almighty and perfectly good God be cantankerous about His creatures using the abilities that He gave them in His own likeness? If God is able to create and destroy the world, He could have sent unquestionable accounts of His wishes in fluorescent lettering in every language of the world on sheets of platinum had He thought it necessary. Instead, we have to believe that God put utterly inadequate accounts into the hands of incompetent apostles, as God’s Word itself admits, with the instruction to tell everyone, “You had better believe it, or else!” It is more intelligent to believe that this is the work of rogues than that it is the work of a good God.
As Origen said 18 centuries ago, the message is perfect, but it was delivered in earthen vessels! If it has to be believed that God can write only with the aid of human amenuenses, then the imperfections of the human scribes must emerge in their work, despite God’s inspiration of it. They might be God’s instrument, but no instrument on earth is perfectly tuned, so even God cannot play all the right notes through earthly instruments. But why should He have to? He has hosts of angels that could do the job better than badly picked human beings. Or an Almighty could do it better Himself!
The unquestioning believer simply will not consider these questions because they have been taught not to question God. But why do they think they are questioning God? How do they know that God is not aghast that they will not use the organ of intelligence he gave them, as a precaution against their being duped, to question the instruments of Satan who took over the message as soon as it had left His lips. Believers give themselves no option but to believe, even if the message is false. They simply will not look, and that cannot be God’s doing. God is all powerful, and can do just as He choses, the Christian thinks, but the omnipotence of God tells against the method He chose to give the vital message of salvation. If the message is vital, then God could have done better. Perhaps, the message is that God expects humans to do better in appreciating His power. Instead they sell themselves to rogues who promise something they can know nothing about, and protect themselves by telling the sheep not to question God!
These Essenes were not illiterate. They spent a lot of time writing, or at least copying. The fact is that, if God wanted His message written by poor men, then He had a body of Poor Men at hand to do the writing for Him. They might not have been so great at writing in Greek because they normally wrote in Hebrew or Aramaic, and so the poor Greek of the gospels might be excused on these grounds, but there were these poor men who could write, and they are in line with the historical evidence of the times. An almighty being able to do amazing miracles, could have conveyed His message in perfect Greek. He did not, but the way, the “message” emerged fits in with known historical facts. If God is to pick human beings to do His work, He might want to pick poor ones, but it seems perverse to pick ignorant ones. The Essenes were not ignorant.
The Bible Savage and False
Do Christians want to be associated with a religion that maintains that God wants a man and His family stoned to death for stealing already stolen goods (Achan, Joshua 7:10-26), or wants a man to be cut to pieces in front of Him (Agag, 1 Sam 15:33)? Are these revelations or post hoc justifications of barbarous behaviour? They might be intended to be warnings to the people, but they are not a good God’s warnings. They are typical warnings and the harsh punishments of pitiless and cold-hearted men acting characteristically of their time—plain old human folly. They are an absolute monarch’s threats, not a good God’s.
Yet to preserve their supposition that the whole of the bible is perfect revelation, believers feel obliged to accept them as God’s own work. It means that a proper question for theology is why people could possibly hold the view that a wholly good God would want to reveal Himself in such a way, and inevitably that has to descend into pathetic apologetic. The sensible and coherent view held by many Christians who are not fundamentalist is that the bible is not a perfect one-off revelation but is more in tune with the proper understanding of the word—revealing is a process not a single event. It is an argument that scotches any idea that the bible is true. Much of it is not, but can still be considered as pointing them in the direction that God wanted them to go, given a modicum of thought to accompany it!
So it is that thoughtful types of Christian call the bible the book of the acts of God. In this view, or at least one variety of it, God has revealed himself, through acts appropriate to the age in which they were recorded, and the impressionability and maturity of the people who recorded them, with all the faults of perception that could be expected. The bible keeps emphasizing the great acts of liberating God’s people, especially the liberation from bondage in Egypt. The fact that any such bondage was in Canaan and not in Egypt at all, is a matter for historians and archaeologists, for there is one thing that is treated ultimately phenomenologically—the sacred history of the bible. It cannot be shown to be true at all in reality, but, though false, for theologians, it is a sacred truth—God’s Truth!
The medium is most definitely not the message, but it suffices for the revelation, and, if the sacred history is the medium of revelation, but is false, where does it leave the message? Are famous miracles like the crossing of the Red Sea by the escaping Israelites just stories? How can they be believed if the historical context is quite different or never existed? They are why simple Christians want to believe an inerrant bible, even if it is equivalent to believing Mother Goose or Jack and the Beanstalk. No one can have any sympathy for the ogre, even if he is one of God’s creatures. Likewise, the Egyptians, the Canaanites, the Assyrians, and so on. God decided they should die, and that seems just to the simple of the world, but so, much for “Thou shalt not kill”. The bible is manifestly clear that “Thou shalt kill” when God does not want someone to live, and who is to decide that but the devout believer through whom God speaks! The theologian has to wriggle out of this by saying these acts of God are not to be taken as separate examples but as a pattern of events culminating in the main message, that of Christ.
Here too however are equivalent problems. What in the bible read as a fallible human record of Christ is true and what is false? What is an actual act or word of Christ, and what is what the early Christians thought he ought to have said? The New Testament records what the earliest Christians remembered about Christ when they were writing it down in quite different circumstances many decades later. When did God stop revealing Himself in this phase of revelation? How can the believer be sure that the right books were bound together in the New Testament canon? Many books, some of which are mentioned in the bible itself, were left out. Should they have been? How did God signify his intention to leave them out? Would they have altered the slant of God’s word if they had been included? Were the best books left out?
The canon is, in fact, an arbitrary selection of all the books that could have been included. Theologians have given their own reasons for the inclusion of some books and the exclusion of others, but were these reasons the right ones? The reasons for selection themselves were arbitrary. Thus, works purporting to be by Peter, the right hand man and minder of God incarnate, were left out, but many letters by a man who never knew Jesus when he was alive were included. That sounds pretty arbitrary, all right. Then again, the Catholic Church considers that revelation ceased with the apostles, just as the Jews considered that prophecy ended with the last of the Old Testament prophets, but other worthy Christians and Jews think that God never stops revealing Himself, and did it throughout the early church. Wiles is among those who see God as working continuously, sees revelation in church history. What He was revealing about Himself in the inquisition has to be addressed by Christians, but it is something they prefer to ignore, and excuse.
Historical Sources
For Wiles, an important aspect of theology is as a dialogue with the past, an “attempt to gain an accurate and sympathetic understanding of the Christian past”. By introducing the word sympathetic in this definition, all claim of objectivity is abandoned. It means that we must not dwell on the horrible bits of Christian history, and instead think of all the good it has done. In fact, no one at all sympathetic in their feelings towards others—the basis of Christianity according to the incarnate word—could possibly give Christian history a sympathetic hearing. The screams of the tortured and the smell of their burning flesh stops us.
Nevertheless, Wiles sounds proper notes of caution to his fellow believers in that the historian has to be suspicious of his sources. He has to treat them critically, noting that, in ancient times whatever was written was to make a case. It was not objective history. It is true and should be applied to all ancient documents, including the bible, something that fundamentalists will not do. Like alcoholics and drug addicts, they prefer to remain in denial. Among the suspicions that historians must have is whether a work is authentic. The works of Dionysius the Areopagite, mentioned in Acts 17:34, expound a well developed trinitarian theology, an apparently contemporary boost to believers in the Trinity… except that they were forged about half a millennium after Dionysius was dead.
They are pseudepigraphs—later writings under the false name of a much earlier authority. Pseudepigraphs are a well known genre of ancient literature, a plain attempt to add antiquity and authority to lesser and later works by pretending they were by a famous old author. Daniel in the Old Testament is a blatant pseudepigraph, though those whose idol is tha bible will not admit it. If the truth be told, the Jewish scriptures are all pseudepigraphs, and honest scholars, if not most of them, admit it, though few parsons will tell it to their congregations. There are enough people alive today who think that arcane and esoteric writings must be full of hidden truth, but, even in ancient times, antiquity was considered a virtue, and ancient tradition a central criterion of truth. So writers were often keen to publish their work pseudonymously to get it read and respected. Today we should know better, so…
…to accept them as very early works is not merely to see them in a false context, it leads to a totally distorted picture…Maurice Wiles, What is Theology?
Wiles here means these writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite. How much more, then, is it true of the Jewish scriptures in their entirety, the scriptures quoted by Christ himself. His picture, like that of every Jew of his time, and every Jew and Christian since, was “totally distorted”. Wiles sums up:
Unless such pseudonyms are recognized and the writings ascribed to their real situation, no authentic understanding of the Church’s history is possible.Maurice Wiles, What is Theology?
And so too of the whole of the Jewish scriptures.
Of course, documents can also be deliberately changed, and it is ridiculous to assume that those in charge of them were so saintly they could not have done it. It can be proved that they did. Eusebius, the original chronicler of church history and a chum of the emperor Constantine, mentions seven letters of bishop Ignatius of Antioch, a Christian martyr. A millennium later thirteen letters were attributed to the good bishop. Archbishop James Ussher—that same man who worked out the creation of the earth to have been 4004 BC—in rather more serious scholarship showed that seven of the thirteen were genuine, and the others were later forgeries. Ussher was vindicated in 1646 when an ancient Greek manuscript was found bearing the seven genuine epistles, just the ones Ussher had worked out to be genuine.
Furthermore, Christians were demonstrably less than fair in their treatment of rival ideas. They were anything but scrupulously saintly in the way they treated heresies. Remember, the modern meaning of heresy as a dissident view was not the original meaning. Originally a heresy was simply an alternative, or a differing view with no pejorative sense. It was because the church insisted on there not being any alternative views, because everyone had to accept Christian dogma, that those who adhered to a different view were tainted as outcasts and heresy took on its modern meaning. The intolerance of early Christians to alterrnative viewpoints is shown in the many works they wrote putting down the heretics. They did not give any balanced presentation of the heresies because they believed everyone should think like them, and so they happily used misrepresentation, just as they do still.
Paul of Samosata, who is a candidate as the founder of the sect of Paulicians, was condemned as a heretic in 268 AD. His heresy was that he was a unitarian who refused to accept that Jesus was God. God was God, so he objected to hymns being sung in church to Christ, a man! For taking this view, his character was blackened and he was depicted as a megalomaniac, yet he was the bishop of Antioch, chosen for his Christian qualities. If the character typology of his accusers is correct, then he was of the type of Peregrinus, whose flock were too gullible even for Christians to admire. Otherwise the picture of him is false.
No scholars think 2 Peter was written by Peter, the apostle in the gospels who was the rock of Jesus. It is concerned with matters that arose much later in church history, and could not have been known by Peter himself. The honest historian cannot take documents on their face value, yet that is exactly what all Christians do in regard to the biblical books. They are so extreme that they object to honest scholars dissenting from their dogmata. The Apostle’s Creed is not the work of the apostles but was written five centuries after they had died. Nor was the Nicene Creed agreed at the Nicene Council in 325 AD, but at the later Constantinople Council. The Athanasian Creed is from fifth century France, so that too has nothing to do with the wishes of the earliest Christians, and especially Jesus. Most Christians are too ignorant to know any of this, though they have in the past been no less willing than modern Moslems to trash buildings in their supposedly righteous anger in protest against those who spoke truly and honestly, but not the words Christians liked to hear. Ignorance can be forgiven, especially when people have been misled, but the trouble with the flock is that they are just too ovine to question the lies they have been fed.
No one, until recently, asked questions about the truth of the bible. They knew it was true! Its claims to factual truth were not to be tested. It purported to be history, but it was not treated as history. It was sacred history. What then when the sacred history did not match the history we knew? Known history was declared wrong! Sacred history could never be wrong, and sometimes the sacred history matched real history, proving that sacred history was right! It was right when it was right and it was right when it was wrong. So it is that whole swaths of the Old Testament simply do not exist in real history, but they have to be fitted in, and it is the real history that has no move out of the way. Moses and the exodus, the conquest of Canaan, the Judges and Saul, David and Solomon just never existed, but they are fitted in to history and spoken of, even by historians, as if they were real and not mythical.
It is true that the Acts of the Apostles says one Gallio (Acts 18:12-15) was made proconsul of Achaia, and that an inscription at Delphi confirms it happened in July, 51 AD. What a great historian the apostle, Luke, was, the Christians say, but remarkable things are recorded in the bible, as if true, that are not recorded anywhere else. When Jesus died on the cross, a whole series of amazing events happened. There was darkness at noon. A large tapestry veiling the entrance of the temple Holy of Holies was mysteriously ripped. A host of graves split open, dead men climbed out, and walked into the streets of Jerusalem. Only the bible records any of these happenings. The Romans had wealthy scholars and administrators who, rather like Charles Fort, collected strange reports, but none of them ever heard of these biblical ones. The elder Pliny, who died in the eruption of Vesuvius, in 79 AD, was one such man. The Christian will wriggle out of this on the grounds that Pliny or anyone else just would not accept such marvels, or never heard of them. All right, that is a sensible suggestion, except that the author of them in the bible is Almighty God, and His purpose was to advertise that He had died to save humanity! An all powerful being could have ensured that the message He inspired Matthew to write could have got further afield in view of its importance. How many souls have burned in hell because they never heard of God’s Good News?
In a similar fashion God gave us free will, but the pastors and priests tell us that, if we were to use it, we will be forcibly roasted forever in the eternal fires of hell—if we used free will to do something that the pastors tell us is a sin, that is. The theologians create a lying God, who pretends to give us free will, but it is not free over anything that is proclaimed a sin to do, and they create a God cruel enough to torture us forever, if we actually use our free will in any of those respects. What is free about free will? It is not free. Elsewhere, God tells us that we have to do His will. Is this the good God that theologians say we must be worshipping, or is it an all together less worthy god? How do they know which God it is? Why are we not allowed to inspect the evidence to make sure we are not being tricked, either by the Devil, or by his evil lackies pretending to be good themselves.
The only way to make sense of Matthew’s miracles is to realize that they were not historically true at all. They were metaphors for what was happening or about to happen in the world, according to the beliefs of the people writing then. The tearing of the curtain in the Jewish temple signified the end of temple Judaism. Matthew could write it down knowing that it had happened because he was writing after the temple had been closed by the Romans in 70 AD. The dead men walking was Matthew’s way of signifying that the miracle was not that Jesus alone had been resurrected, but that all of the holy saints would be resurrected too, as Hosea prophesied. All holy people would be resurrected to live in God’s holy kingdom. Unholy people would be refused admission and would die permanently.
The whole story was set at a particular time in history because those people believed that the apocalypse would be soon. That was then, 2000 years ago. Now a substantial majority of American Christians still think the apocalypse is coming soon, and they are apparently praying for an atomic war. They seem to think that God could not have destroyed the world until human beings invented the H-bomb, but now that they have, the apocalypse is on the cards. An apocalyptic end to the human race might be on the cards all right, but it will be because some madman who thinks like them decides to launch the war. They will be stumbling around in agony, burnt and poisoned by radiation, praying for God to take them up in the rapture that they all expect, but they will just die in agony. Too bad. They turned out to be the ones who were second guessing God.
Any theologically inclined Christian has to ask why God wants to fool them. Why has God wanted to fool people that a fake history is real history. They will never consider that maybe God did not, but, if there is a God, then there is also a Devil, and they really have no proof that the Devil did not fool them right from the start. The reason is that Christians refused, and still refuse, to use their brains. Modern pastors are unhesitatingly and openly satanic, but they have such confidence in the dunces that follow them that they no longer care. These issues have to be honestly faced by theologians, not dishonestly explained away. Any ancient test should be scrutinized, perhaps especially one that someone proclaims is the work of God, and it might be the work of the Devil or devilish people pretending it is what it manifestly is not, once it is honestly examined.
Mystical Belief
Perhaps the basis of belief is a new awareness, a heightened experience, a type of mystical experience, in fact. It can be argued, of course, but it is simply expressing a new dogma. How do we know that the supposed cause of the new awareness is God? How do we know where it points? Who can say authoritatively it is not an illusion or a delusion? The answer to these questions will be answered by science not by belief, but whatever the cause, the Moslem, kabbalist, sorcerer or fascist might see it quite differently from the Christian. Where then does any such experience get you? Is it the best God can do?
Perhaps belief is the accumulation of several or many different experiences, none of which is persuasive in itself. Theologians seem to like this approach. It is like saying that this approach does not persuade you, and nor does that, or that, or that… but all together they add up to a powerful argument. Really, it is an argument by analogy. No bedsheet is long enough to save you from the burning house, but all tied together they will—as long as they are sound ones! The proper equivalent is that this bedsheet is inadequate because it has been burned by the fire, and so is that, and so on… so, even when tied together, they are all damaged still and not up to the task. The fact is that a concatenation of bad arguments cannot give you a good argument. Should a good God, keen on preserving a harmonious world, make it so? The theologians must think so.
This mysticism argument seems to reduce to a sense of wonder at the natural world, that it exists and that we are in it. It is a wonderful world, but, if it is an argument for God, it is far from self-evident. Nature undoubtedly exists and is wonderful, so what purpose is served by assuming another hidden wonder that is responsible for the one we can see? Even so, the wonder of our lives and experiences within them are sufficient for Wiles to believe in God. Giving proper attention to how amazing the world is does not persuade him that it is amazing, but that God is. In other words, it makes the one who already believes in a separate God certain of their belief, that it depends on God and that it has His purpose in it. But we still do not know why the believer already believed in god, do we? If we must postulate a wonder, why cannot we postulate that the one we can see is it? If Nature is to be thought of as God then many arguments make more sense, but Christians believe Pantheism is a type of Satanism, it seems. The wonder of it is plain to them, but even clever ones like Wiles cannot overcome the prejudices against it that their pastors and priests have already given them.
