Truth
A Religion for Agnostics—N Micklem
Abstract
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.John Rawls
© Dr M D Magee Contents Updated: Thursday, 20 September 2012
Nathaniel Micklem
Dr Nathaniel Micklem was a distinguished Free Churchman, a philosopher, a poet and and eminent member of the UK Liberal Party who wrote a book, A Religion for Agnostics for those of his friends who were not hostile to Jesus but were wary of Christianity as superstition, so could not be sufficiently sure of it to adopt it themselves. As a believer, Micklem thought there was a reality which was not superstition—God and the historicity of Jesus—but there were many aspects of Christian theology of which he declared himself agnostic. As he considered it to be possible to be appreciably agnostic, yet to believe still, he was describing the Christianity in which he believed himself!
His agnostic friends were humane people so he did not expect them to give up their agnosticism, but may have been wanting some logical or scientific demonstration of the spiritual. Micklem simply required tham to accept the practical insights and principles taught as essential by Christ as being good ones to live by. He did not invite them to accept Christianity by assenting to its customs, conventions and dogmas, but asked them to distinguish between Christianity and Christ, accepting Christ's practical morality. In this respect he was a secular Christian.
He argues that we become aware of “the spiritual” through the material world, and by “the spiritual” he means peace, quietness and thankfulness—the contentment and satisfaction that human beings get from seeing goodness being done by others, and especially by doing good for others. The agnostic human being has the same in their heart as any other whole person, by which is meant we all have the same instincts for caring, helping and protecting others that constitute loving them. We can all be Christs as long as we do not ignore and neglect “the sick and the lonely, the prisoners and the refugees, the hungry, the helpless and the oppressed”.
His book is therefore interesting. His is different from more usual apologetic works, though he tips his hat to modernism, science for example, more than most doctrinaire Christians do. He even admits in contradiction to Dr Francis Collins of the NIH, who fell down in God struck awe before a frozen waterfall:
I make no claim that one is compelled in logic to move from a recognition of the rational order of the universe to an attitude of worship. It is one thing to recognize Power, Order, Beauty in the world around us, it is another to cry out in wonder and adoration, “It is thou! It is Thou!”.
Even so, he does argue the old canard that “science no less than religion rests on faith”. The faith of the scientists, he explains, is their assumption of the order underlying the world, so that a rational account is to be had for everything that happens in it.
Humans have indeed noticed that some things in the world are repetitive. No assumption of order precedes the conclusion induced from successive observations of these repetitions that they display order. If the world were entirely capricious, then no such conclusion could be possible. And it was not scientists who made these observations and drew the original conclusion of order, but people who worshipped cattle, crocodiles or cranes—primitive early humans. Their observations were probably the very source of the concept of order! So this “faith” is neither a faith nor is it particularly scientific. It is a hypothesis based on commonplace observations going back to the emergence of consciousness in humans.
Suspect Scriptures
Considering the Christian scriptures, Micklem, the true philosopher, is obliged to find them “suspect”:
- they were written with the aim of stimulating faith, not as a true record of history
- their authors, anyway, had no idea of what constituted valid evidence
- they are far from contemporary with the events they purport to record, so are both hearsay and are distorted by lapses of memory
A biblical generation is 40 years, and the best guess of biblicists is that the earliest gospel, Mark, was written a generation after the death of Jesus. Micklem says:
That leaves plenty of time for the distortion of fact, the growth of legend, and the embellishments of faith… It is substantially never possible for us to say of any recorded event “that is exactly how it happened” or of any recorded saying “that is precisely what he said”.
Most of the Christian scriptures are attributed to Paul, and indeed Paul carries more weight as the founder of Christianity, especially Christian theology, than Christ, the putative Son of God, and is more often cited than him. Micklem admits:
It is unlikely that Paul ever saw Jesus in the flesh. He gives us no stories of the ministry apart from the crucifixion. He hardly ever directly quotes any sayings of Jesus, so far as we can tell. He is thus up to a point a most disappointing and unsatisfactory witness… How little evidence he appears to offer! He represents Christ, it may be said, as the second Adam, the exalted Lord, the pre-existent Son of God—an altogether mythological and non-human, non-historical figure.
Mystical experiences, Micklem agrees, are experiences—as no one doubts—but need not be understood as anything to do with religion, although those who have tried to induce them by various abuses of body and brain curiously think they are.
Because of uncertainties in the accuracy of the gospels, the very sayings of Jesus reported in them are suspect too:
The predictions of the future put into the lips of Jesus by the evangelists have sometimes been coloured by the events that actually occurred, more particularly in the Jewish rebellion and the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.
He means Jesus’s prophecies of the destruction of the temple were probably written after the temple was broken up by the Romans after the Jewish War. Jesus oddly believed that seeds died when they fell to the ground (John 12:24). Only then could they yield a crop. Should one rely on the prophecies of a God who was mistaken about the germination of a seed? The Christian can avoid the embarrassment of God making an elementary mistake about His own Creation if this passage was a later attempt by an evangelist to explain the resurrection and subsequent growth of the Church by analogy, but it means accepting that the bible contains human errors, so is not inerrant.
When it comes to the post mortem appearances of Jesus that Paul considers such conclusive evidence, Micklem says they cannot be decisive for us because what other people are reported to have seen is mistrusted as evidence these days. It is hearsay. Jesus himself said people would not believe “though one rise from the dead” (Luke 16:31) if they already do not believe the law and the prophets.
One early Christian sect, the Quartodecimans, celebrated both Jesus’s death and his resurrection on the Friday. The dead saints had risen from the grave and were walking around Jerusalem on the night of his death (Mt 27:52f). If Jesus were to be the first fruits of the dead, he must already have arisen himself. It is not, of course, in line with the prophecy of Jonah that there would be three days and three nights of death, though this was written belatedly into Matthew after Christians had agreed that Jesus arose on the third day not the first (or second in Jewish days), when the tomb was found already empty. Even then, the prophecy was wrong because Jesus was dead only two nights, not three.
Primitive Features
Micklem goes on to mention an aspect of Christianity that leaves most non Christians, and even some Christians puzzled and offended, and unimpressed by promises of salvation, and that is the emphasis in it of sacrifice, even human sacrifice, and the “blood of Christ”. The idea of redemption by blood sacrifice belongs to the most primitive religions, and is barbaric even symbolically.
Primitive sacrifices probably began as a type of thanksgiving in appreciation of the feast to be had from the killing of a farmed or hunted animal by offering a portion of the dead creature—often its omentum because it is fatty and burns well—to the god. But the priesthood then made the sacrifice the point of the ceremony of burning some fat, supposedly to propitiate the god, while the choice part, often the shoulder, was put aside for the gods and consumed privately by the priests. After butchery, the rest was sold off to the worshippers according to what they could afford, and the money put into the temple treasury.
Today we see no point or sense in sacrifice, so why should an omniscient, benevolent God have chosen a worthless concept to build his universal and eternal religion on. Unless He knew the religion would be rendered worthless itself by its practitioners.
In the same vein, it does not do to follow the ancient people who believed that blood was a magical substance of life. In a scientific sense, it is, as the carrier of oxygen around the body, but the blood of another animal is no use to us sprinkled on us, or on the altar, as the Jewish priest would do. Metaphorically, or symbolically, blood as life makes some sense, but it is a dangerous metaphor when there are large numbers of people, many putatively Christians, willing to take it literally whether out of malice or simple ignorance.
In any case, Jesus always remained a devout Jew and never had any intention of factionalizing Judaism any further, already deeply divided as it was between rival sects. Micklem concurs. Jesus did not invent new jargon but accepted the phrases of the bible and the concepts of the time. It rather shows he was an ordinary man and not God, as he himself implies in the gospels in one significant place. He accepted the idea from Persian religion (Zoroastrianism) of a wicked god who controlled the wicked world. The wicked God was to be displaced by the conquering hosts of heaven at the end of the age, and the wicked world to be replaced by the kingdom of God or heaven on earth. However, he believed this apocalyptic event would be “soon”, albeit at no prescribed date or time. He thought it would be “soon” because he thought his destiny was to initiate it.
If Jesus were God as Christians believe, then he is a perverse God. We saw above that Jesus said on one occasion that, if men could not recognize the spiritual authority of Moses and the prophets, they would not believe though one rise from the dead! Yet Jesus then rose from the dead, and Christians cite it as evidence of his divinity, though others in the bible also rose from the dead before he did. Does it make sense that a God who expressly says raising someone from the dead does not persuade people should then go ahead and do it himself? The ineffectiveness of Moses and the prophets is supposedly why God sent Jesus, knowing all along it would be no more effective than His previous efforts. Christians say, “Ah, but look how effective it was!”—a third of the world professes Christianity. Christians therefore declare God to have been wrong! If God, being God, was necessarily right, it follows that the 2 billion Christians are not the sort of Christians God was counting on! The overwheming majority of them are not Christians except in name, and God knew it beforehand.
Jesus’s aim was to herald a new age of God, a return to the perfection of Eden to replace the age of Satan. It seems God knew he was doomed to fail, but tried it nevertheless, knowing perhaps that eventually his succession of attempts will register with the stiff necked, presumptuous human race. There is no sign of it yet. The throne of Satan is still secure, perhaps most secure in the country that considers itself the most Christian.
Micklem also thought the history of the Church was less the working out of what Jesus meant, as the record of man’s constant failure to understand it. But could that be possible at all, after Christianity became the imperial faith and bishops became state officials? What Jesus meant then did not matter. What mattered was the issue of whether he was God. To be a Christian, by then, was the proper thing to do, and people did it for reasons of career and ambition:
From that time to this, the Church, when armed with political power, has been guilty of atrocities. Many non Christians have been morally far more respectable.
Practical Christianity
Despite these objections, objections he had to admit he could not avoid as a philosopher, Micklem remained a Christian. He believed in the power of prayer, although would doubtless have had to revise his views in the light of several more recent and thorough studies that show it is ineffective.
Micklem’s attitude to traditional Christians, who said that his religion was not Christianity, was that he was not concerned because everything in it rests on the facts of Jesus—his life and teaching. In his defence, Micklem quotes from an address made by Dr Elmslie at Westminster College, Cambridge, in 1959. Taking as his subject the passage John 13:35, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples: if you have love one to another”, Dr Elmslie said:
Throughout the centuries, those men who have so loved Jesus that they loved their brethren have become effective witness to Christ and his faith in God. On the other hand, how vast the tragedy that the organized churches in various ways have insisted that much else is indispensible, and each demanding the totality of its view has cried to the others “Heretic! Heretic!”—with the consequences that Christianity has floundered in miasmic swamps of cruelties and all uncharitableness. I assure you it is unconvincing to stigmatize as heretics those who give cold water to thirsty lips.
So, what he did recognize in the teaching of Christ was the plain message at its core but swallowed up in the miasma of mysticism introduced by Paul and preferred by Christians ever since because they do not want to know what Jesus was really saying. It is the message of love, not meant as a mere token or a nice sentiment, but meant to be practiced. S Augustine made an odd statement which disturbs many Christians as it comes from such an eminent authority:
That very thing which is now called the Christian religion existed in antiquity and was not absent since the beginning of the human race until such time as Christ should come in the flesh, whence true religion, which existed already, began to be called Christianity.Retractationes, 1:13:3
The emphasis of Christ in his teaching was on the love of human beings for each other. That then is all that S Augustine could have meant, for human society could not have begun, and could not endure, if people hated each other, or were even indifferent to each other’s fate. Love of others is necessarily the foundation of human existence, and that is Christ’s entirely worldly message. Emphatically, it was not getting rich. For any one to get rich, the rest must somehow have been deprived of part of their produce, leaving some of them hardly able to live. Christ was in no doubt that those people were saved for being poor and meek, while the rich were damned for their greed and presumption. Christianity is therefore incompatible at its core with our present day economic system.
Micklem wondered what was the cause of the widespread conviction that privilege is wrong and must be swept away:
Every recorded age of human history has hitherto been a system of privilege, whether of birth, power or wealth… communism is in principle warfare against privilege whether of race, birth, property or colour.
His answer is that God is the source, and it unquestionably comes to us through the bible. Intrinsically all people are of equal value in the sight of God, but are judged on their works in their lifetimes. If God values everyone equally, then who are we to value them differently? It is not our role to judge, but God’s. Micklem sees the turmoil that accompanies the warfare against privilege as God “plainly vindicating Jesus”. It is a message American Christians would do well to ponder, impressed as so many of them are by riches and rich people, and contemptuous of the poor.
People are necessarily social. If we do not stand together we fall separately. We all of us therefore rely upon others. We must help others in return for the help of others. Love is an extension of compassion, a basic emotion we have, and most mammals too have compassion. It is an instinctive reaction, therefore, that has a long evolution. As Micklem says:
We are not mere individuals. We are so constituted that we belong to one another, that we do not even exist as persons out of relation to other people.
Christ expressed it as that we must love others as we should love God. God is in every human being we meet, and the reason stems back to when we lived in small groups of one or two hundred people around 100,000 or more years ago. Everyone depended upon the group they were in for every kind of support. The group was eternal for all those primitive humans. It served the functions many people think the supernatural God of today’s belief systems serves, but in reality! The original God was the group.
Jesus Christ said as plain as day that God would judge people at Judgement Day on the basis of how we treated Him when he appeared before us hungry or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick or in prison—in short, in need! If we had treated Him well, then He will treat us well in this judgement. If we treated Him ill, then He too would treat us badly in the judgement (Mt 25:34). Those who demand and pursue vengeance by the callous murder of innocent strangers far away cannot be Christians at all. How many modern Christians who cannot be bothered to read their bibles understand this?
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