easter, part 1: this whole business about dying for your sins

So it's Lent, which means Easter is coming up, and with that in mind, there's a few Easter-centric things to talk about. NUMBER ONE:

If anyone has tried to sell you on the benefits of Christianity -- whether trying to convert you or explaining their own love of it -- one of the strategies they are likely to have used is to tell you that "Jesus died for your sins."

Whether you're a Christian or not, and whatever you think of the sales pitch, it's worth talking about the fact that this is actually a relatively recent Christian teaching. It's not as recent a development as fundamentalism or anything (the full-fledged form of it was articulated by Aquinas in the 13th century and became the main Catholic view of atonement over the next century or two: that may sound like a long time ago, but relative to the scale of Christian history it's as though we're talking about the 1940s vis-a-vis American history), but it doesn't come from the New Testament, from the first Christians or the Church Fathers. It's called a substitutionary theory of atonement, and variants are found in both Catholic and Protestant theologies.

This whole thing is part of the same narrative I'm always laying out for you: the way that in the first millennium of Christian history, the emphasis of the religion shifted from Jesus (teacher, role model, miracle worker) to Christ (deity, supernatural intercessor).

If you believe Jesus died for your sins -- if you're a Christian and this is the version of atonement you subscribe to -- I'm not going to tell you you're wrong. I don't believe there's only one valid theology. I do want you to consider several crucial points:

1: This isn't the only or original theory of atonement. You don't have to think this way to be a Christian. It's very likely that you think that you do, since this phrase has become synonymous with Christianity in many peoples' minds.

2: Even if this theory of atonement is true, when you embrace it as the core of Christianity, it casts the actual teachings of Jesus into such shadow as to subvert his message. Jesus's teachings were grounded in love for one's neighbor, open commensality, and an absolute rejection of societal shaming. A sin-centric Christianity is a shame-based religion. Beyond that, it is one that focuses more on Jesus's magical power to get you into Heaven, rather than anything he said about what you should actually, you know, do with your fucking life.

When I say this school of thought is "relatively recent," that isn't to condemn the teaching, as such. It's partly to point out that although religious conservatives condemn liberal "innovation" in Christianity, their own beliefs are dependent on such innovations and many liberal beliefs -- such as a non-substitutionary theory of atonement I will also talk about -- are simply older beliefs that have fallen out of favor. It's also to point out that there are other ways of seeing Jesus, other ways of seeing the appeal of Christianity.

When I talk about the Church Fathers below, I'm referring to a large group of key theologians, bishops, and other church leaders, who guided (and argued about) Christian doctrine in both the West and the East in the 4th through 7th centuries, after the church became organized. When I talk about "early Christians" I am generally talking about the Christians of the generations preceding the Church Fathers. I'm not really going to get into specific enough detail that the distinction is important, but just FYI. And as always, "orthodox" with a "little o" doesn't mean the Orthodox Church but rather an idea, school of thought, or group associated with mainstream Christianity -- meaning the Eastern (that is, Orthodox) and Western (Catholic) Churches in the early days, and Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and mainline Protestantism later. It's a habit because I'm so often talking about Christian ideas before there really was a Catholic Church.

As I've said before, I think it's ridiculous and harmful that Christianity regularly frames itself in sin-obsessed terms -- and while that sin obsession clearly plays an enormous role in the history of Christianity, its primary sources and core teachings do not make that obsession inevitable. That is, removing the obsession with sin from Christianity is not like removing an obsession with dharma from Buddhism. It's a grit that's been accumulated after leaving the factory.

Really, "Jesus died for your sins" contains several claims:

1: A claim about the meaning and purpose of Jesus's death: that it is the vehicle for atonement.

2: A claim about how atonement is achieved.

3: A claim about sin. The idea that Jesus died for humanity's collective sins is often coupled with ideas about original sin.

Atonement refers to the reconciliation of God and humanity, which requires believing that there is a breach. Believing that humans are not perfect does not necessitate believing that there is such a breach between God and humanity -- like I keep saying, theories of atonement have tended to rise in importance in Christianity as the ideas of original sin and shame have become important.

One thing to keep in mind about early Christian thought is this: after the first generation of Christians, Christianity seems to have rapidly become predominantly gentile (that is, non-Jewish), and certainly this is the case by the second century. Christianity's relationship with Jewish scripture and Jewish thought was a subject of considerable discussion, but: because the Jewish canon itself was not yet assembled, and because rabbinical Judaism developed alongside Christianity and therefore its commentaries on Jewish scripture were written outside of even the earliest Christians' sight, all that Christians took with them from Jewish writing was the "Old Testament" itself.

If this does not seem immediately significant, it's because you were raised in a predominantly Christian culture.

Pound for pound, the Hebrew Bible is easily outweighed by the Talmud -- the central text of rabbinical Judaism, consisting of commentaries on the Bible from antiquity which serving as clarifications, expansions, etc. Think of it as having a similar relationship to the Bible that the body of case law has to the Constitution. The Constitution alone provides a foundation, but once put into play, it immediately raises questions which are resolved in the courts and recorded in judicial decisions.

The Church Fathers not only lacked the Talmud -- which the Jews who preceded them had lacked as well, since as I say, rabbinical Judaism and Christianity developed in tandem -- they lacked the oral tradition of Biblical interpretation to fall back on. Which is not to say that no one brought knowledge of Jewish Biblical interpretation into the mix, but when it came time to interpret the Jewish scriptures in a Christian context, more often than not contemporary perspectives were dominant -- that is, Hellenistic perspectives, the perspectives of philosophers and theologians versed in Greek philosophy and Roman mystery religions -- rather than older Jewish modes of thought.

This is an important frame for understanding Christian thought, really: the reinterpretation of the Old Testament from a new cultural context, one lacking its ancestral Jewish contexts, with Greco-Roman thought and christology rushing in to fill the gaps. That's not so much "another story for another time" as it is something that will keep coming up.

Like I've talked about before, early theological discussion in Christianity -- the first eight or nine centuries, really -- is largely focused on christology, i.e. figuring out the nature of Jesus Christ. That tunnel vision (which, don't get me wrong, was not complete tunnel vision by any means, but still shouldn't be understated) is pretty important to the history of theology for a number of reasons -- not only because it meant that the Medieval theologians generated a flurry of work to address all these previously poorly explored areas of theology, but because the fact that the most mature area of theology (and the area with the most well-developed consensus) dealt with the nature of Christ shaped everyone's thinking in other areas of theology. It sort of guided everyone's arguments.

So that's the main reason that the atonement theories you associate with Christianity have such a late birthday; and that early christological obsession contributes to why later atonement theories are so deeply invested in the supernatural powers of Christ.

But what did early Christians think? What were the early theories of atonement that were displaced by the more supernatural ones?

Honestly, it's pretty fucking simple.

Early Christians, when they talked about atonement at all, from the early generations up through the Church Fathers, subscribed to what historians call the moral influence theory of atonement or the educational view: Jesus didn't die for your sins, and Jesus doesn't reconcile you with God through his death. Jesus brings you back to God through his teachings, which is why he spent all that time in the Gospels being a fucking teacher, before that bit at the very end where he died.

I mean, it's weird that this needs to be pointed out these days.

Really, this is only barely a theory of atonement, because it doesn't necessarily assume a deep breach between God and humanity; the terminology here is ours, the moderns', and we refer to it as the moral influence theory "of atonement" to contrast it with later theories of atonement that displaced it.

For centuries, this was considered obvious: Jesus was the perfect moral teacher. That's why there was a Christianity in the first place; everything else came later. You can certainly bring supernaturalism into this. You don't need to deny him being the Son of God. This is not about reducing Jesus's importance or denying his divinity. But Jesus's divinity should never be more important than his teachings, or you've missed the whole fucking point.

Reconciliation with God is found by following Jesus's teachings, as revealed through both his words and his example. This is far from an easy thing, of course. That's a whole nother matter. Figuring out what exactly Jesus meant half the time is ... well, good luck with those bracelets.

Have you ever fucked up really badly, and gone to someone for forgiveness, and heard, "I don't want to hear another 'I'm sorry,' I just want you to stop doing this?" That's the point of the educational view: not that Jesus's crucifixion wounds open up portals to infinite Golden Tickets of I-forgive-you, but that he taught you to stop fucking up in the first place.

The educational view is found as early as the Didache and the Epistle of Barnabas in the early second century. The New Testament itself doesn't really address atonement as such; obviously there are Biblical verses used in support of later theories of atonement, but some of them come from the Old Testament and require the assumption that they were prophetic writings written with the intention of being read in reference to Jesus (and being a Christian does not obligate you to rewrite the Old Testament as a prequel to Jesus), while others are taken out of context or written in the apocalyptic fervor of the first generation of Christians, some of whom expected the Second Coming to occur in their lifetime. The very existence of the Gospels can, in one sense, be read as support for the educational view.

As the idea of the afterlife became more common and more integral, in part as a response to the fact that the world did not end in those early Christians' lifetimes -- and I'll talk another time about the fact that Heaven as the afterlife (rather than God's home) is not an inherent, inevitable belief within Christianity, but one that developed over time, post-Jesus -- Jesus's role was solidified as the one who ensures passage to that afterlife. Specifics vary. The paradigm you're familiar with now -- die and immediately go somewhere, whether Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory, depending on your denomination and status of sinfulness -- took a long time to develop and be accepted, which is why some early Christians talk about their own afterlife as a sort of echo of Christ's own resurrection: they envisioned not the transfer of their soul from their dead body to some far off plane of Heaven at the moment of their death, but rather the resurrection and continued inhabitation of their dead bodies at some point in the future, with a period of nonexistence (well, non-consciousness, let's say) in between. The idea that death causes the soul to depart from the body and enter the afterlife trickles into Christianity (and occasionally Hellenistic Jewish thought) via Greek and Roman mythology and especially the popularity of Homer's Odyssey, which provided vivid descriptions of a Greek view of the afterlife that permeated the popular imagination in the same way Dante's descriptions of a late Medieval Christian view of the afterlife have done. (Even those early Christians who write about the soul departing in this way from the body don't write about Heaven in the sense that we depict it now; while it's notable that their Heaven isn't a below-ground underworld, it's basically a waiting room near God where the souls of the dead wait for the time of their bodily resurrection, which is still the endgame.)

I don't really want to get into the way that Heaven was itself increasingly supernaturalized and paradis...ized..?, except insofar as to say that it was part of the same trend in changing thinking which altered Jesus's role. The afterlife became a complicated place, with all those circles of Hell and seven heavens and all of Aquinas's granularities of sin frittering away the hit points of your soul.

The "physical theory" of atonement, of Church Father Athanasius, comes in quite early, in the 4th century, and is certainly more mystical than the educational view that otherwise prevailed both then and for several centuries afterward. "Jesus became human that we might become divine," Athanasius said, which sums it up best -- but while this sounds a little like "Jesus died for your sins," there are some key differences from what became orthodox (little-o) Christian thought. First, Athanasius's emphasis is on the incarnation, not the crucifixion -- that is, not just Jesus's death but the fact that he became human at all and had to suffer any mortal indignities, since Athie is writing early enough that he's still arguing with people who believe that Christ was fully divine and never experienced mortality. Second, he had a very extreme view of humanity's fall from grace, one that doesn't comport either with orthodox Christian thought or most Jewish thought -- for him, Adam himself was a divine being before the fall, an idea with no real Biblical support apart from the notion that, because he was made by God rather than being born, Adam is, like Jesus, the "son of God."

For the physical theory, then, the mechanism is not so much Jesus's death-event wiping out the stain of sin but Jesus's mortality -- which includes the inevitability of death -- restoring a divine birthright to the descendants of Adam as a sort of equilibrium. Different and more involved than the educational view, absolutely! Christ-obsessed, yes. But not as shaming and sin-centric as "Jesus died for your sins."

Substitution theories of atonement develop around the idea that humanity deserves to die for its sins, but Jesus's death on the cross transpires instead. We still die individual deaths, of course, but we have the opportunity to be resurrected in Heaven. See what I mean about how all these strains of thought need to develop alongside each other -- this model of atonement kind of needs a well-developed reward-based Heaven in place. Anyway: there are various forms of the substitution theory. One of the early ones is the ransom theory, which says that Satan has dominion over humankind because they're sinful, but Jesus's death pays the ransom price. This was displaced by the satisfaction theory, which is basically the dominant substitution theory today, and which says that wait no, the price isn't owed to Satan, but to God, and that Christ's death is the sacrifice offered by God to God to pay humanity's debt to Himself. Basically. It's the satisfaction theory (of Anselm) that Aquinas modifies and codifies in his Summa Theologiae, a mammoth work of Catholic theology that comes to dominate Catholic thought, especially in the Thomist revival of the 16th and 17th centuries, when everyone was sort of newly able to appreciate his intellectual rigor.

If you've ever read a web page proving the Hollow Earth theory, you know that impressively detailed arguments don't actually make you right.

There are a lot of reasons the substitution theory succeeded in becoming dominant. Many of them have to do with the scaffolding surrounding it -- that is, it's consistent with all the other developments in theology that were going on. The moral influence model just looks dowdy and ordinary compared to the glittery supernaturalism of Medieval theology, with all its different kinds of angels and all that shit.

But part of it has to do with one of the central facts of earliest Christianity:

Jesus died on the cross.

I mean, that's obvious, you know that. But one reason that even the historians who want to whittle the "definite facts" about Jesus down to the barest minimum keep that one in the mix is because there is no way you would tell people your religious leader had been crucified unless you knew that everybody knew about it already and there was nothing you could do except to get ahead of the story. The earliest form of that is just the Eminem 8 Mile version: yeah he was crucified, tell these people something they don't know about me. You just own the thing and act like it doesn't embarrass you so your enemies can't use it against you. A later version, a much later version? Make it the source of your guy's superpowers. Oh that? That's not kryptonite, that's a fucking ray gun.

The Fall and Original Sin

The Old Testament, the New Testament (mainly Paul), and the Church Fathers all talk about the Fall of Man, that is, Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden. Quotes referring to the Fall are often used in later writings talking about the doctrine of original sin.

Here's the problem (or rather, the good news). These two concepts are not the same. In contemporary Christian discourse, "original sin" refers specifically to the idea of ancestral or inherited sin. This too is a sneaky conflation: the term "original sin" in the sense of "the first sin committed" sometimes appears in Jewish literature, but mainstream Jewish teaching does not include the idea of inherited sin.

Which means the Christians who developed the doctrine of original sin were not simply carrying over the Jewish interpretation of the Fall -- although often the way the Bible is taught by Christians today, this is implied -- but were once again introducing innovation to their interpretation of the Jewish scripture, by marrying classical Greco-Roman ideas like ancestral fault, Biblical tropes like collective retribution, and orthodox Christianity's growing emphasis on shame.

The idea of inherited sin is very different from the idea -- common to most religions or, really, most systems of belief, period -- that most people, even well-meaning good-natured people, will fuck up from time to time. Even the idea of "sin" in the sense of a weight on your soul impacting your post-death fate as the result of your adhering to received moral rules, well, that's different too, but you can buy into the idea of individual sin without buying the idea of inherited sin that exists independently of the individual's actions.

In the early Christian writings on the Fall, the consequences of the Fall are not a permanent taint of inherited sin that is borne by every future human, but rather the consequences actually described and detailed in Genesis: mortality and the need to labor for one's daily survival. In ancient Jewish thought, Genesis 3 is not even the enormous trauma that Christians turn it into.

Once you starting leaning on this original sin business, this idea that everybody is born with two strikes, the educational view of atonement doesn't seem to cut it anymore. What good is Jesus if all he does is teach us how to be awesome people? Being awesome people isn't going to wipe this magical sin taint off of us! We need to fight this magic with other magic. Give us some Jesus magic. Thus, Jesus dying for your sins.

Of course, the development of the doctrine of original sin (which begins with the Church Fathers -- Augustine, bless his fucked up little heart -- but wasn't fully developed until quite a bit later) and its use to subsequently justify and develop substitutionary theories of atonement resulted in a framework in which it was difficult for Christians to imagine salvation for non-Christians (or unbaptized dead babies, etc). Fast-forward that a couple centuries and subtract a lot of religious literacy and you wind up with a lot of sort-of Christians or half-atheists figuring every other religion is just so-and-so's map to atonement, which isn't true either.

Next up on Easter talk, probably some stuff about how being obsessed with the end of the world and your entrance into a Heavenly paradise leads to a life of being an irresponsible dick who doesn't care about the future or the planet.

Have a Creme egg.

recent reading: theology in the context of world christianity

I think this is the last of these for now, though of course if I don't blog about something else before the next relevant book I finish reading, that will prove wrong.

Theology in the Context of World Christianity:

This is a book for theology students, and Tennent is not only an orthodox Christian -- which I am not, at least in some respects that orthodox Christians would find important -- he is a relatively conservative one, and his skepticism where progressive Christianity is concerned is frequently clear. Nevertheless, that doesn't take anything away from the many valid points he has to make about the growth of Christianity in what this book calls the "Majority World," which you may more familiarly know as the Third World and which in my encyclopedia work is often called the Global South.

I've blogged about this book before, last week. Moving on from there:

"These new Christians believe the Bible [which is to say, incline more toward literalism and authoritarianism], are Christ-centered, and are supernaturalistic ... in contrast to their Western counterparts, they have 'a much greater respect for the authority of scripture' and 'a special interest in supernatural elements of scripture, such as miracles, visions, and healings.' They also believe in the 'continuing power of prophecy.'"

While on the one hand this rise sounds similar to the religious revivalism that punctuated American religious history until culminating in the takeover of American Protestantism by charismatic, Pentecostal, evangelical, and fundamentalist elements, the important context here is that these are "revived" Christians, these are converted Christians, Christians living in cultures much more religiously pluralistic than the United States, Christians who have chosen this flavor of Christianity over other religions, rather than simply over other flavors of Christianity. The religious history of the United States is so incredibly and improbably diverse within the bounds of Judeo-Christianity that it is easy for Americans to lose sight of how different Christian life is when you have, instead, many religions and fewer variations within Christianity.

"Five trends in the theology of Majority World Christians:

"1: These believers accept the authority of Scripture and, by Western standards, hold a theology considered conservative, orthodox, and traditionalist;

"2: Majority World Christians are more likely to be morally and ethically conservative;"

And yet ...

"3: These new, younger churches are more likely to be sensitive to the Christian responsibility to address issues related to poverty and social justice;

"4: These younger churches are experienced at articulating the uniqueness of the gospel in the midst of religious pluralism;

"5: Majority World Christians are more likely to grasp the corporate (not just individualistic) dimensions of the teachings of the New Testament."

"These younger churches are experienced at articulating the gospel in the midst of religious pluralism. Many of the younger churches are springing up within the larger context of the sometimes dominating presence of some non-Christian religion, such as Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. ... They often approach the continuities with less defensiveness while, at the same time, are surprisingly frank and candid about the glaring discontinuities that inevitably arise when other religions fail to recognize the true dignity of Jesus Christ."

"Many of these new Christians cannot be easily categorized under any of the traditional and familiar headings of Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant. These Christians had no part in the European 'protest,' so it is difficult to call them Protestant. They are not related to the pope or the magisterium in Rome, so it is difficult to call them Roman Catholic. They are not submitted to the authority of any of the Eastern patriarchs, so it is difficult to call them Eastern Orthodox."

To be fair, this is true for many, many Christian movements in the United States from the 19th century onward, with the Latter Day Saints, 7th Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Scientists, and aforementioned fundamentalists and evangelical movements as the obvious examples. Nevertheless there is a good point to be made here, it has just been worded poorly: these younger "Majority World" churches are in many cases independent or have only tenuous formal connections to western ecclesiastical organizations.

"The delegates to the Council of Nicea and the Council of Chalcedon were seeking to be faithful to the hundreds of Christological 'pieces' found in the texts of Scriptures. It was their unenviable task to put the whole 'picture' of Christ together for the very first time in such a way as to find a perfect match for every piece. ... The proceedings of these councils did more to declare which pieces were not true pieces of the puzzle and should be discarded, then to provide a final, definitive statement of Christology that would silence all future discussions."

First of all, see what I mean about orthodox Christianities defining themselves by opposition, vis-a-vis what I mentioned in passing in my Qur'an in Conversation post? Second, this is mainly a reminder to myself to expand my reading to include more in-depth reading about the Council of Chalcedon, which lies just outside the time period I have usually focused on.

"Another example is reflected in the insightful question about Chalcedon raised by Millard Erickson: 'How do we integrate and understand a Christology 'from above' with a Christology 'from below'? In other words, the Council of Chalcedon was looking at the Christological puzzle from the upper side, that is, from the divine perspective of God's initiative in becoming a man. They did not deliberate or discuss how the incarnation is understood from the perspective of, for example, fifth-century Persian Christians who, at the time of this council, were being persecuted for their faith in Christ.

"Even these few examples reveal two important insights about Chalcedonian Christology. First, even if we accept, as the sensus communis has, that every single piece Chalcedon placed into the Christological puzzle was a perfect fit and every single piece they rejected was truly worth rejecting, we must still recognize that the puzzle is much bigger than Chalcedon or any other council could fully tackle. Second, as it turns out, the puzzle is more complex than an ordinary one because each piece of the puzzle seems to have two sides: an 'upper side' revealing God's perspective on Christ (eternality, Trinity, Son of God, etc) and an 'under side' revealing the human perspective on Christ (teacher, healer, friend of sinners, etc)."

"African Christology tends to be more holistic in the way it integrates the person and work of Christ. Its view of the person of Christ is constantly informed by what Christ has accomplished in history and what he continues to do in the world. There is a deep concern in African Christology to demonstrate that Christ is no stranger to the practical realities of poverty, illiteracy, ethnic tensions, colonialism, dictatorship, illness, disenfranchisement, and suffering, all of which Pobee and Akinade have aptly called Africa's 'multiheaded hydra.'"

"The second implication of Africans' starting their Christology 'from below' is that its overall approach is more holistic and integrative in explaining how the person and work of Christ apply to the whole of African life. ... The early preaching [by European missionaries] did not, for example, point out that Jesus was Lord of the crops or the one who provided protection during dangerous journeys or who assisted in the safe birth of a new baby. The nineteenth-century missionaries did not generally come from Christian traditions that practiced casting out demons or were accustomed to praying for God to bring in the crops, except perhaps during times of extreme drought. In short, the Jesus Christ who was preached was often a truncated Christ, not measuring up fully to the biblical picture of Jesus's life, work, and ministry."

"The second distinctive feature of African Christology is its conscious awareness of traditional Christological formulations from the West. Unlike Western theologians who often write in isolation from the wider global context, African theologians are keenly aware of the historic Western Christological focus on precise philosophical and metaphysical questions concerning the person of Christ. It is true that some African theologians are critical of the way the councils produced 'metaphysical rather than biblically functional images of Jesus,' or complain that the historic formulations are 'static,' and fail to 'touch the souls' of Africans or relate to the 'concrete lives of people.' But the overall tenor of African Christology is marked by a profound respect for historic Christian confessions.

"In fact, John Pobee encourages emerging African theologians to listen carefully to those who have gone before us so that we 'do not go hopelessly wrong.' He reminds Africans that they are not 'starting from scratch,' but that they must write in the context of the depositum fidei that should inform all African Christology. John Onai-yekan calls the classical formulations 'valid reference points' and argues that every African Christian should 'consider this classical Christology part of the common theological patrimony of the Church, of which we are full-fledged members.'"

Some of this can sound a little paternalistic, like the concern here is to make sure that new Christians don't "accidentally" stray from orthodoxy and wind up with a Christianity that's too far removed from western Christianity, but to be fair, it is true that in two thousand years of Christian history, chances are pretty good that past theologians have addressed -- and disputed -- and countered -- and doubled down on -- just about every question you can think of, and that there is little point in reinventing the wheel without at least consulting everybody else's wheel blueprints first. Even so, after reading a chapter on African Christology by a non-African, I sort of feel obligated to read some African theology by an actual African theologian.

Moving on from Africa:

"... two important branches of Vaishnava Hinduism are the Vadagalais and the Tengalais. The Tengalais teach that salvation comes through a total surrender to the sovereignty of Lord Vishnu and a full and complete trust in his bestowal of unmerited grace. Being saved and surrendering to God is like a young kitten totally dependent on its mother. We have all observed how a mother cat will pick up her kitten with her mouth ... as it hangs helplessly and in complete trust. The Tengalais say that the baby kitten is the perfect picture of grace ... so the devotee must totally surrender to the will of Lord Vishnu.

"In contrast, the Vadagalais teach that salvation depends on some exercise of our human will and our participation with God in his sovereign act of grace. Rather than a kitten, they use the analogy of the baby monkey. A baby monkey must actively cling to its mother as the mother moves around for food or shelter or seeks safety. The baby monkey is, for the Vadagalais, the picture of our participation with God in his sovereign work."

And some points about the Holy Spirit, in a chapter about the rapid growth of Pentecostalism in historically Catholic Latin America:

"This ambiguity [of the Holy Spirit] and neutrality is reflected in the Apostles' Creed (which is probably based on the earlier second-century Roman Creed) and the original Nicene Creed of AD 325, which simply states, 'We believe in the Holy Spirit,' without further commentary. In 381, a second ecumenical council met in Constantinople. The further deliberations on the Holy Spirit led the council to amplify and clarify the faith of the Nicene Creed so that it unequivocally declared the deity of the Holy Spirit. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed declares,

"'We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets.'"

"Because the ecumenical discussions about the Holy Spirit were focused primarily on its deity and relationship within the Trinity, there was a serious neglect of a full development of its work. Indeed, William Menzies points out that 'the ancient church from the second century through the ninth century was almost totally preoccupied with questions pertaining to the identity of Jesus Christ, so that what was said of the Holy Spirit was largely an appendage to theology, and was limited largely to ontology, the Being of God within his inter-trinitarian relationships.' That remained largely unchanged during medieval scholarship."

For context, the Holy Spirit is the source of "gifts of the spirit," i.e. speaking in tongues, prophecy, the casting out of demons, "faith healing," and the other distinctive features of Pentecostalism. There is a sense -- and this is me saying this, not Tennent -- in which what happened here is that Trinitarianism was established but the role of the Holy Spirit was so ill-defined (especially in Protestantism, which largely lacks a distinctive vigorous theology of the Trinity but usually preserves the concept of the Trinity) that the Pentecostal movement was able to find this conceptual gap in received Christian thought and wiggle into it, providing Biblical and theological justification for religious activities that are in other respects very foreign to the Christian experience of worship.

"The bhakti movement allows for Hindus to focus their worship on a particular god ... these Jesu bhakta [Jesus-worshiping bhakta] follow an ishta devata theology within Hinduism. The practice of ishta devata allows a person to worship a particular, chosen deity without necessarily denying that other gods exist."

INTERRUPTING BILL SEZ: This is similar, it sounds to me, to the term "monolatry," originally used in reference to classical Greek religious practice but also used in discussions of ancient Jewish religion, specifically the theory that the ancient Jewish religion shifted from the monolatrist worship of El (Yahweh) while acknowledging the existence of gods such as Baal, to a strict monotheism that denies not only the validity of worshiping other gods but the existence of those gods. The textual evidence for this is rampant, and it feeds into an alternate origin story for Israel: because there is no archaeological evidence for an Exodus (and because this lack of evidence is not easy to explain), a popular theory is that Canaan became Israel not through the invasion of Hebrews who had escaped bondage in Egypt, but through internal revolt as Yahwists overthrew non-Yahwists, whether by force or cultural shift.

So that was a total tangent.

"They are, therefore, allowed to focus their worship exclusively on Jesus and yet maintain their cultural and social particularities as Hindus. If asked, they continue to call themselves Hindus. They will not identify themselves as Christian, and many do not attend any church. This unwillingness to identify with the church or with baptism is not due to any shame about following Christ, but to strong cultural associations surrounding the terms ... many Hindus think that to become a Christian means using Western style eating utensils, eating beef, and drinking alcohol ... they do not understand why Christian women no longer wear bangles or participate in popular cultural festivals. In short, even if a Hindu is drawn to Christ, they may find membership in the church or the term Christian repugnant."

There's a longer and more complicated section on people in the Muslim world who, while worshiping Jesus, continue to identify as Muslim, with the note that there is not nearly enough research in this area.

So. Overall a very good overview with lots of things to explore more in the future.

religious literacy

I know I said I'm on hiatus, but let me finish this one post, at least, on some fundamentals of religious literacy that a staggering number of people get wrong.

Listen, I have one mission here: Stop making assertions about religion unless you have good reason to believe you know what you're talking about.

These two things do not count as good reasons:

1: I don't believe any of it so the specifics don't matter.

2: I am a member of Religion X, and that alone qualifies me to make assertions about Religion X.

Everyone is an expert on what they personally believe, although in my experience they have not spent much time thinking about it; no one is an expert on theology or religious teachings if they have not specifically devoted time to becoming one. In between ignorance and expertise is a vast middle that should, in a sensible world, be well-populated, but as religious literacy has dimmed, this has ceased to be true.

There are so many fucking areas I could cover here, but let's scratch the surface and see what gets under our skin.

"All Religions Basically Teach The Same Thing"

This is one of the dumbest things people say about religion. There's often a Christian variant of it -- at least I have personally heard it from Christians the most often -- whereby when looking at or asking about another religion, they ask about the analogues to aspects of their Christian faith: how do you get into your Heaven, and who forgives your sins?

The problems here should be obvious, but for starters not every religion believes in an afterlife, and "sin" is at best a problematic term to use outside of the Abrahamic religions (it means more than "wrong thing to do"). Not every religion that has an afterlife has a gated afterlife, and not every religion proffers a relationship between sin and the afterlife.

Going further than that, there are religions that teach that the world is fundamentally evil, corrupt, suspect, or unreal, and that proper behavior requires removal from it, and religions that teach that the world is fundamentally good and sacred, and that proper behavior requires engaging with that sacredness. These are not basically the same thing, except insofar as a square and a circle are both basically not a triangle.

All religions do not teach the same thing. There are some benign factors in recent intellectual history that account for this fallacy -- nineteenth century scholars and the 20th century field of comparative religion were very interested in identifying the common ground shared by many religions, and these findings were often overstated or misunderstood to amount to something like "all religions are basically the same," when it would be more accurate and helpful to say that "most religions deal with similar material, even when they have not had contact with each other." That latter bit was the actual point: the discovery in anthropology and other social sciences that it was not necessary to posit one original prehistoric religion from which other early religions had descended, but that religions would independently develop in communities that had no contact with one another, and that despite this lack of contact, these religions could have many things in common. However, it's not necessary for the religions to agree for this to be interesting. And we see these similarities in language, economic systems, political systems, and family units, without also saying "all governments basically do the same thing."

Social sciences have also muddied the waters, though.

For example, we have one word for "soul" in English, and in discussing the beliefs of various systems, this can make it seem like we're talking about a disagreement over what "the soul" is. It's more accurate and helpful to realize that we're using one word to refer to many very different and distinct concepts. There is no single soul-concept that is present in all religions, or even in all religions that have some kind of soul-concept.

The soul may or may not be located in the body and have a physical presence.

The soul may or may not be the part of an individual that persists after death, either in the afterlife or through rebirth.

The soul may or may not exist before the individual's body is formed.

There may be one soul or several (I think one constant we can point to is that while an individual may have multiple souls, any given soul belongs to only one individual at any given time -- but I could be wrong about this).

The soul may or may not be related to the phenomena of consciousness, emotion, and personality.

When a Christian asks about another religion, "what do they teach about the soul?", the conversation is already at the point where it needs to be backed up in order to explain that it's misleading to think that all religions basically agree on what we mean by "the soul." Some religions have little to no official teachings about the soul, in fact, because across time and cultures, "the soul" is not always within the purview of religion. Our modern separation between science and the supernatural, and classifying the soul in the latter camp, is a recent thing.

There have been attempts to distill the world's religious teachings into a proto- or world religion, but these attempts belong in the crank file alongside schematics for perpetual motion machines and proofs of the Hollow Earth. When serious scholarship, they are not successful. When seemingly successful, they are not true.

"All religions teach basically the same thing" is often the mantra of someone who is trying to make the case for religious tolerance -- or, especially some decades ago, the case that non-Christian religions are not "primitive religions." In this form it's a variant of "people are the same beneath their skin," which is a statement that tends to normalize the experience of the dominant culture and minimize the importance of the experiences of the marginalized and minorities. It's counterproductive to emphasize that people are "the same beneath the skin" when it glosses over the very different experiences resulting from the skin, and it's equally damaging to teach that all religions are "basically the same."

Even when the "basically the same" argument is whittled down to "every religion teaches the same fundamental ethics" -- which is the Dalai Lama's argument, for instance -- it's both incorrect and damaging.

"Basically the same" is what encourages conversion, for instance. It trades gods and spirits for saints, renames religious celebrations, burns old idols. "Basically the same" usually secretly or not-so-secretly means "basically the same as Christianity, you know, the normal one." Positing a "normal" religion is counter to the ideal of religious freedom, because if we undervalue our religious differences, we turn them into something no longer worth protecting. Why not leave "In God we trust" on the money, why not put the Ten Commandments up at the town hall, if "all religions are basically the same." after all? Where's the harm -- if they're all basically the same, then any Christian utterance, any endorsement of Christianity, is basically fine, right? Let me give you a spoiler: this has already fucking happened. This is already how people are thinking.

"All religions teach basically the same thing" normalizes the Christian experience, and the secular experience of those raised in a predominantly Christian culture, in the same way so much of the rest of American culture normalizes whiteness, and should be opposed for the same reasons. This normalization affects the way we view and are able to understand other religions -- Buddhism is misrepresented in numerous ways because it's so unlike Judeo-Christianity, and the lower the levels of religious literacy become, the more the general public's understanding of religion becomes coequal with its understanding of the dominant religious culture. This leads to attempts to map Buddhism (a religion founded by someone who said that the creator deity and the idea of a divine creation are either untrue or completely irrelevant) to an Abrahamic framework (in which the divine creation and a covenant between the creator deity and the followers of the religion are among the most defining elements of the faith), or even to reject its religiousness altogether and call it "a philosophy."

On top of all these problems, the very impulse to say "all religions teach basically the same thing" should be questioned. Why is "we're all basically the same" the argument in favor of tolerance or compassion? This implicitly condemns difference -- there is no way to say "we should be kind to each other because we're the same" without saying "let's be less kind to those who are not the same" -- and differences among people are never going to go away.

What's crazy to me is that most people know there are significant differences between, for instance, Protestants and Catholics, or Jews and Christians, and yet they can't take an extra ten seconds to recognize that such profound differences among cousins must surely imply even greater differences between family trees.

The myth of "scripture alone"

I got into an argument not long ago with someone who thought the best way for them to learn about religions -- not as a religious party themselves (I have no idea what his religious views were) but just out of interest -- was to read the sacred texts of every religion he could think of, and nothing else about the religion. He wanted to "come to his own conclusions," see, rather than read "what other people think." This is one of the worst possible ways to learn about religion. More than that, I think I can fairly say that it is not actually possible to learn about religion this way.

Let's confine our remaining discussion to Religions of Sufficient Age and Population, with the understanding that a religious group founded thirty years ago, or practiced only by a small group with little geographic distribution, may be an exception. I'm specifically going to talk about the Bible, and mainly from a Christian perspective, but it's important to understand that similar things could be said about any other religious scripture -- I promise, every religion with a scriptural tradition has a theological one -- and further, that not every religion has a text that is as central to that religion as the Bible is to Judaism or Christianity.

The Bible tells you next to nothing about Christianity or Judaism, and again, since everyone knows there are fundamental differences between Jews and Christians, how could anyone think that reading "The Old Testament" would be sufficient to understand Judaism, and that by simply adding the New Testament to your reading list, you'd arrive at an understanding of Christianity? The Jewish Scriptures aren't even arranged in the same order by Christians, nor are they read or understood in the same way. The fact that I even have to point this out is making me grit my fucking teeth.

Which part of the Bible tells you what a Presbyterian believes that a Catholic doesn't?

Which part of the Bible tells you about the Rapture? Abortion? Christians have historically vilified premartial sex -- where's that in the Bible?

Do you have any idea how little about the afterlife is in the Bible, compared to the detailed beliefs Christians have about it? Even most non-Christians can tell you more about the Christian view of the afterlife than the Bible can.

Jews and Christians alike have experienced two thousand years of history since the Bible was assembled, and before Christians even had a chance to assemble their New Testament, there was as great a diversity of belief among different Christian groups as you find today, if not greater. Multiple councils and other orthodox (little-o) efforts were required to create what we now call the Catholic Church, and to define mainstream Christian belief -- a process of centuries, and arguably a process that never ended.

Religion is not scripture.

Religion is, among other things, scripture as interpreted by tradition, amplified by both doctrinal and folk belief and practices, informed by theology, philosophy, and other elements of culture.

Maybe to those with a low level of religious literacy, they don't understand the importance of that interpretation because they're thinking of English class. In a serious literature class, you don't just read Huck Finn, you read Huck Finn and what people have said about Huck Finn. You talk about Huck Finn in its historical context, in terms of language, in terms of race. But the purest experience of Huck Finn, at least until our language changes enough to push it into the Shakespearean past, will always be to simply read Huck Finn.

The Bible isn't Huck Finn. Religious texts don't occupy the same space, aren't written for the same end, aren't used in the same way. By itself, the Bible is meaningless -- though read by itself, most contemporary Americans would bring to it an unconscious model of Christian belief that they've absorbed through osmosis, reading into the text things that are not actually on the page, things they've absorbed from political arguments and 7th Heaven and whatever.

Every religion has some tradition of theology, interpretation, and supplementary text; every religion, furthermore, has sects, denominations, or other groups that are defined in part by their disagreements over interpreting their shared texts (written or oral). On top of that, every religion has changed over time. You are not practicing the religion of your great-great-grandparents. It's often very important to people to claim that they are, but these claims are incredibly flimsy. Consider the fact that the most backward-looking, modernity-rejecting form of Christianity -- fundamentalism, Biblical literalism -- is younger than the automobile.

To understand Christianity, in addition to reading the Bible you would need to define some goals -- what exactly is it you're trying to understand? Current practices? The history and origins of those practices? The origins of the religion? I would argue that there is an important sense in which what we now mean by "Christianity" didn't exist until the fourth century, and was preceded by a wide variety of religious groups descended from the movements founded by John the Baptist, Jesus, Paul, and a handful of Jesus's disciples. The Bible won't tell you anything about that because all of its texts were written in the second century or earlier, but it's the formative period of Christian history, and leads into the period in which Christian belief began to incorporate elements from classical philosophy to fill in gaps left by the Bible or to help interpret it.

Reading the Bible alone will leave out many of the key elements of Catholic faith, including the existence, nature, and function of the saints, the immaculate conception and most other beliefs about Mary, the role of the Church, or the sacraments.

Reading the Bible alone will not tell you why there are so many different Protestant denominations or why they differ, or how the evangelicals who arose in the early 20th century differ from the mainline Protestants they have gradually overtaken.

Reading the Bible alone will not tell you what to do with the book of Revelation, nor what the Old Testament is supposed to mean to Christians.

One incredibly important thing that varies is how much leeway is left to the individual practitioner. Most Christian denominations, for instance, do not have an official stance on evolution beyond declaring that they are not opposed to it -- in other words, members are free to believe in it but it's no more a specific tenet of belief than is gravity or arithmetic. (Obviously there are cultural reasons why nonopposition to evolution plays out differently than nonopposition to arithmetic.) One reason this is important is because the fundamentalist takeover of the discussion of religion in this country has promulgated the myth that the Bible requires a very extensive set of beliefs, and Christians are helpless to do anything about it. The New Atheists have co-signed this myth, further weakening liberal or moderate Christianity's influence in the culture.

Requirements of belief and practice come almost entirely from traditions of interpretation, as codified in official doctrine or as passed down through the theological traditions of a given denomination. "Interpretation" is not the same as "taking liberties with." The Bible simply doesn't cover everything, and is often unclear, and consists of numerous parts with undefined relationships to each other, and interpretation is a necessary part of using the Bible as the basis for a moral and ethical code, and for deriving from it a view of the world and of human nature.

The New Testament in particular is not a manual of religious belief and practice. It consists of a series of stories that contradict each other in ways both minor and significant, a series of letters addressed to specific early churches, and a prophetic text in the form of Revelation. Despite the tighter focus, ostensibly on Jesus, it is a less complete text than the Old Testament -- which itself can only be understood in a Jewish context when amplified by the midrash and the Talmud, and which is extremely difficult to approach from a Christian standpoint without a lot of theological supplement.

I sometimes use the comparison of trying to apprehend American law by only reading the Constitution and somehow extrapolating everything else from that, but American law is only 200-something years old and doesn't exist in the form of dozens of related but distinct systems. Christianity is 2000 years old and shares a heritage with a religion even older than that. To expect to come to terms with it by reading an ancient text and nothing that has come since is ridiculous, and yet this keeps coming up.

As I said, I'm using the Bible, and mainly Christianity, as my examples here, but similar things are true for all religions. No church just passes out a book and says "okay everybody, just do what it says," and even those that would attempt to do so wind up with theology anyway if they survive long enough for people to ask questions or forget the cultural context of the original text.