Prayer in School

Prometheus: Bad Rep for Zeus (Yea for Humanity, Nay for the Gods)

I just re-read Prometheus Bound – that classic play from the 5th century BC traditionally attributed to the Greek playwright Aeschylus – and I was again struck by just how badly Zeus comes off.

Whoever the real author was, he clearly didn’t think too highly of the father of the gods. In fact, I wonder if he actually believed in Zeus, because the play certainly wouldn’t have put him into very good standing with the divine despot. The author treats Zeus much more like a fictional character whom he feels free to portray in a negative light.

All the sympathies of the audience lie with the tragic hero Prometheus who – unlike Zeus – actually cares for humanity. It’s safe to say that the author of the play also cared much more for humanity than for the gods.

Jesus, Interrupted

Bart Ehrman on his new book Jesus, Interrupted:

Pseudepigraphical Books – The Forgeries of Biblical Times and the Questions They Pose to the Believer

Pseudepigrapha[1]—meaning “false writings”—are books pretending to be written by someone else, such as the Apocalypse of Peter that was clearly not written by Peter. From the second century BC to the second century AD, it was practically the norm for Jewish religious writings to be pseudepigraphical.

To show just how widespread these texts were, the reader may excuse the following incomplete and rather disorderly list of pseudepigrapha on which we have definite information: Book of Noah, First and Second Enoch, Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, A Vision of Jacob, An Apocryphon of Judah, The Words of Levi, The Last Words of Kohath, The Visions of Amram, Reworked Pentateuch, An Annotated Law of Moses, Jubilees, Words of Moses, Three Tongues of Fire, Psalms of Joshua, Prophecy of Joshua, Vision of Samuel, Psalms of Solomon, A Collection of Royal Psalms, Assumption of Moses, Apocalypse of Baruch, 4-6 Ezra, Apocalypse of Zephaniah, Apocalypse of Abraham, Prayer of Joseph, Book of Eldad and Modad, Apocalypse of Elijah, Apocryphon of Elisha, Apocryphon of Malachi, Proto-Esther, Oracles of Hystaspes, Testament of Job, Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, Testament of the Three Patriarchs, Apocalypse of Peter, Testament of Hezekiah, Testament of Abraham, Vision of Isaiah, Christian Sybillines, Apocalypse of Paul, Apocalypse of Thomas, Apocalypse of Stephen, Apocalypse of Esdras, Apocalypse of the Virgin, Apocalypse of Sedrach, Apocalypse of Daniel, Revelation of Bartholomew, and Questions of Bartholomew.

In addition, Daniel of the Old Testament and 2 Peter of the New Testament are generally considered pseudepigraphical, and several scholars classify other books of the Bible as pseudepigrapha as well.

Now it is hard for us in the twenty-first century to understand the mindset that produced such an array of—from our perspective—preposterous writings. If I wrote a book claiming to be a lost work of Shakespeare, I would get into serious trouble. In 1983, one of Germany’s major magazines, the Stern, actually published what it claimed to be Adolf Hitler’s diaries. When they turned out to be forgeries (=“pseudepigrapha”), the man who had produced them had to serve a prison sentence of several years. The chief editors resigned, and the incident remains the biggest scandal in German journalism, aside from it being a source of great embarrassment for the Stern.

Such is our high standard of truth and our ability to self-critically examine our sources.

Not so in Judaism at the time of Christ. Forgeries were the norm. “Diaries” of almost all biblical characters were popping up regularly without creating a scandal.

How come? And who on earth wrote these fictions sold as facts? The question of the hidden authors’ identity is all the more puzzling in that these books clearly preach the fear of God. How could the writers so obviously revere God and want their fellow believers to live righteously, but use forgeries as a medium to preach their message? Forging Hitler’s diaries is one thing; forging the words of the Holy God another thing altogether. Did the writers not feel a pinch of hypocrisy? There they were, elaborating on the fires of hell awaiting the godless, while remaining completely unafraid that their fraud might land them in those same flames.

Well, ultimately we (or at least I) do not know for sure what was going on in their minds, but their way of thinking was clearly quite different from ours. They seemed to have lacked the kind of self-analysis that makes you stop in your tracks and say, “Wait a second. How can I possibly know the things I am writing?” When they penned a supposed revelation of the ancient biblical character Enoch, they might have thought that Enoch really did have such a revelation and that someone should have written it down a long time ago.

They might have also genuinely believed themselves to be inspired by God to “recover” these ancient revelations. A passage in the pseudepigraphical book 4 Ezra illustrates this well. It was written at about the same time as several books of the New Testament, and some churches (such as the Russian Orthodox) actually included it in their Old Testament canon. The book recounts the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 586 BC and claims that the Scriptures were destroyed at that time, too. Ezra then prays for God’s Holy Spirit to inspire him in writing down what had been lost, and in a forty-day period he dictates to scribes ninety-four books—without a break. “And when the forty days were ended,” says 4 Ezra, “the Most High spoke to me, saying, ‘Make public twenty-four books that you wrote first, and let the worthy and the unworthy read them; but keep the seventy that were written last, in order to give them to the wise among your people. For in them is the spring of understanding, the fountain of wisdom, and the river of knowledge.’ And he did so.”[2]

This episode about Ezra is, of course, itself pseudepigraphical and completely fictitious, written in the first century to lend authority to other Jewish writings (the “seventy”) in addition to the generally accepted Scriptures (the “twenty-four”). All the same, it does show that the writer of 4 Ezra might have believed it possible to actually be inspired by God to write down lost Scriptures, and he might have considered his own account of Ezra to be just such a lost story.

Whatever the precise cause of the pseudepigraphical practice, however, they show one thing: The culture in which the New Testament books were written lacked critical self-analysis. Attributing your own words and ideas to another religious figure was not an exception, and certainly nothing outrageous. Pious readers—and maybe even the writers themselves—believed in these forgeries.

This fact puts a serious damper on any argument in defense of the historical reliability of the Gospels. The burden of proof lies with the Christian apologist who says that, in spite of its widespread forgeries and its lack of epistemological self-analysis, the culture of first-century Judaism nevertheless produced religious works of great historical accuracy.

It also confronts the Christian apologist with a question: Why would God choose to reveal His Ultimate Truth to mankind in a culture with so little ability to distinguish truth from falsehood? Is it not rather like singing to a deaf man and expecting him to teach others the song?

Read more about this issue in The C. S. Lewis Book on the Bible.

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[1] For different classifications of pseudepigrapha, see The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls by James Vanderkam and Peter Flint, Ch. 8.

[2] 4 Ezra 14:45-48; NRSV.

Smashing God: A Dream

I dreamed that it was springtime, and while walking in green meadows speckled with flower buds, I came across a path with a sign that said: EXPERIENCING GOD. Intrigued, I followed the path, and soon I marched, I ran, I rejoiced on this Way of knowing God.

But then I halted. The Way ended in front of a big mirror, and in the mirror I saw only myself. And then I looked up, and behold, many other Ways of Experience led to the point where I was standing; their ends formed a large circle. Almost seven Billion Ways of Experience, and at the end of each Way there stood a mirror.

Granted, many people still marched full of joy on their individual Way, still felt secure in their experience. Others, though, stood disappointed in front of their own reflection and stared at what lay within. They had looked for God, but only found themselves.

I clenched my fist and smashed the image in the mirror to pieces.

I raised my voice and screamed, “Not me, Lord, not me! I had been looking for You, God, for You! Where are You?”

Blackness pervaded the space behind the mirror. An empty hole. My cries were swallowed up. Not even an echo returned.

But then, yes, then a sound—a sound divine—reached my ears. Something came, something arose from the blackness.

Yes, something arose. But no, no! It was only the pieces of the broken mirror that began to rejoin. It was my desperation had called up the shattered fragments from the dark. My soul, it seemed, could not bear the blackness. It needed an image, broken now as it was.

I looked at my deformed reflection. Was this perhaps God after all? Divine glory in a mortal frame?

Suddenly I had an idea. It would be easy to find out! Why had I not thought of that before? If every mirror, all seven Billion of them, showed a similar picture, then they had to be divine mirrors—no, not mirrors, but windows, insights into the reality of a divine Being.

I walked over to the other Ways and asked the people to describe what they saw in their mirrors.

My heart sank. My hope was crushed. There were some similarities, but oh so many differences. So many contradictions.

Everyone saw something else. Seven Billion different images.

No God.

Only Man.

I smashed the mirror anew, called one last time into the black nothingness and left the Way of EXPERIENCE.

But then a voice behind me called out: “Job! Job! Where are you going? Do not stop smashing the mirror! Your friends mend it, but you smash it. You must smash it. You are closer to God in smashing it than your friends are in mending it. There is no pretence in His presence.”

I woke up from my dream, my face lying with one half on the Bible and the other half on Immanuel Kant’s On the Failure of All Philosophical Attempts at a Theodicy. I lifted my head and decided to keep reading both.

Priests Obsessed with Sex: The Abuse Scandal in Ireland

You don’t hear much about it in the international news anymore, but the recent disclosure of sexual abuse by Irish churchmen continues to be a topic here in Ireland. I hope I am not making light too much of a very serious issue by posting this cartoon I drew a while back:

What made me draw the cartoon was not any sex scandal, though, but the curious fact that many believers throughout history have almost been obsessed with their sexuality, whereas many (or at least several) forerunners of secularism have been rather indifferent on the topic.

I’m thinking of St. Augustine, for instance. When he became a Christian, he ditched his long-time friend and lover, Floria, with whom he had a son, only thereafter to give into his passions and satisfy his cravings with another woman, exchanging love for mere lust. And throughout his life – even as a bishop – he struggled with his sexuality, as one can read in his Confessions. The Greek philosopher Epicur, on the other hand, taught openly the importance of pleasure, but the greatest pleasure for him lay in the contemplative life. The one man sought contemplation and struggled with pleasure; the other sought pleasure and found contemplation.

The second observation that went into the comic strip is the irony that some of the most famous unbelievers seem uncommonly obsessed with the idea of God and can’t stop talking about him, whereas many believers grow apathetic in their faith and might even feel embarrased to talk about God. A dead God apparently intrigues people more than a live one.

Perhaps it’s all due to law vs. freedom. If you have to think and talk about God, and you have to abstain from sex by all means, the one becomes a burden and the other an obsession. But if you are free, well, then you can find out your true interests.

What Aslan Tells Us About Dualism, Pantheism and the Problem of Evil

This continues my last post.

I raise my hand for the next blow: Aslan is not the good guy in a drama of good and evil fighting one another on equal terms. Such a view is called dualism, to which, in order to refute it, Lewis devoted several pages in his Mere Christianity.

There he mentions that he personally thought dualism to be a very manly and sensible creed, but he realized there was a catch in it. The catch is this. If the universe exists of two independent powers of good and evil, who then is the judge between them that decides which one is good and which one evil? Human beings, perhaps? But we are dependant on them and cannot therefore be their judge. You cannot judge a thing from “below.” If fish could talk, they would judge all fishermen to be evil and all human beings of other professions good, but that would hardly be a judgment with which we agreed. Clearly the Judge of these two forces has to be on a higher plane than either of them, and both have to be accountable to Him.

That, however, would lead us away from dualism and into the world of monotheism. Changing the analogy, we can picture the universe of dualism like two boxers fighting each other—but without a referee. And if there is no referee, each boxer can decide for himself what is and is not fair play. Each one can therefore consider himself being the good guy fighting the bad guy. And then we can just as well drop the whole idea of good and evil, and with it, drop the idea of two truly opposite forces fighting at all.

It follows that Aslan and the evil Witch are not equal opponents. The Witch is nothing more than a pathetic rebel against the sovereign Lion, merely one of his creatures who chose wrong over right.

This is well illustrated by an incident in The Magician’s Nephew. There, the Witch flings an iron bar at Aslan’s head, but it has no effect on him whatsoever. It strikes him between the eyes, glances off and falls with a thud into the grass, and the Lion keeps on walking—“neither faster nor slower than before.”

However, only because Aslan is not a “boxer” in a dualistic universe, it does not follow that he is “everything,” as pantheists would have it. He is not both the cancer and the healer, both life and death, creator and destroyer.

When Digory’s mother lies sick in bed, Aslan has “great shining tears” in his eyes. A pantheist would tell Aslan, “If you could but see it from God’s perspective, you would know that the sickness, too, is God.” But Aslan is God, and yet he cries. That is profound. Apparently he endowed some of his creatures with such a power of choice that their choices can grieve him, and yet he is not angry at God (meaning himself) for having “allowed” such evil to exist.

The Religion of the Force (and of the Great Cosmic Emptiness)

(This is a continuation from my last post.)

The next blow is this: Aslan is not a Great Cosmic Consciousness. What with today’s popularity of Eastern religions, the vague idea of a Great Cosmic Consciousness seems to have found its way into many a person’s head. This makes it important to be aware of C. S. Lewis’ total rejection of any such concept when he became a Christian and certainly when he wrote the Chronicles of Narnia. I say “any such concept” because there are almost innumerable variations of this idea on the market—some of them bordering on the absurd and others more rational. Here are two basic ones.

(1) The Force. This term is not taken from a well-known movie epic by George Lucas, but from Lewis’ novel Perelandra, which he wrote long before Luke Skywalker and Han Solo set out to rescue Princess Leia from the clutches of Darth Vader. There—in Perelandra, that is—the villain Weston tells the hero Ransom that he is on a mission to spread “spirituality” and is working, not for himself or humanity, but for Spirit itself. In the subsequent conversation Ransom tries to press Weston to tell him what exactly he understands this Spirit to be, and Weston always evades him by saying in effect that definitions do not matter.

When asked whether this Spirit was in any sense personal or alive, he does not answer the question but provides the obscure picture of “a great, inscrutable Force, pouring up into us from the dark bases of being” —a Force that is not personal and yet can choose its instruments, that can give people purpose and guidance. It is not really alive but is the driving force behind all life.

Pressed further, Weston says that what Ransom considers to be the devil and God “are both pictures of the same Force.” Heaven is “a picture of the perfect spirituality ahead”; hell “a picture of the urge or nisus which is driving us from behind.” When asked what that implies, Weston finally admits that he would do anything that the “Life-Force” was driving him to do, including murdering and lying, since the traditional concepts of good and evil were mere “conventionalities.”

Such is the logical conclusion of living by an ill-defined Force, though most people apparently do not go that far. They only go as far as they want to, because the religion of the Force is one where you can have your cake and eat it too. The Force is neither good nor evil, nor even personal, and therefore cannot make any uncomfortable demands on its subjects, and yet it is powerful enough to give its believers purpose and guidance. That sounds like just the sort of thing that one would expect a made-up religion to be like. C. S. Lewis felt that it did not have that “edge,” that unexpectedness, which reality usually has.

Thus he rejected this kind of Spirit-Force. Aslan is not a mere Force.

(2) The Great Emptiness. This term I did not take from Lewis but thought fittest for describing the Spirit of Zen-Buddhism and similar worldviews, which I already mentioned in Chapter 3 of Book I. The “Great Emptiness” is in a way the opposite type of Cosmic Consciousness than the Force. It is not the drive behind existence, but the spiritual hole into which one is to fall and “dissolve.” It is a difficult thing to picture because, as a great Zen-Buddhist teacher once said, it is neither non-existent nor does it exist. The very fact that we ask about its existence shows that we have not yet understood it. Trying to understand means not to understand. The quest lies in giving up all reasoning and letting oneself fall into the Great Emptiness: to be “enlightened”: to realize that there is no individual “you” but that you are Buddha, you are God, you are It. There is nothing else.

Lewis did not believe in the Great Emptiness for the simple reason that there is no reason to believe in it. Any worldview that undermines the value of Reason is self-refuting. Lewis believed that Reason is the common ground on which all human beings move, and if anyone tries to convince others that they need to give up Reason, he destroys the very power of convincing them. To use a stock metaphor: He saws off the branch on which he is sitting.

Aslan, therefore, is not an emissary of the Great Emptiness who invites his followers to abandon Reason.

What If Zeus Appeared on Our Doorsteps Today?

In this post, I talked about the overall Christian worldview in the Chronicles of Narnia, with its principles character being of course Aslan, the Story Writer within the story.

This story writer I will now attempt to define more closely. And I think the best way to get to know him is by starting with the negative definition: what Aslan is not like. By so doing, I shall set to work like a sculptor who takes a slab of rock and chips off everything that does not belong to his envisioned piece of art. With each stroke of the hammer, the form of the actual sculpture will become more defined.

The first bold stroke of the hammer, which will drive the chisel deep into the rock and wedge off a considerable part, is the issue of polytheism. C. S. Lewis did not believe in one god among many. Aslan is not the “local deity” of Narnia, because then he could hardly be its creator.

Lewis understood that gods without a capital “G” cannot possibly have created all that exists. Only a self-existing Being is capable of doing so, and a “local deity” is not self-existing. Its existence is always derived from something else. If such a being created the universe, he (or she or it) would himself be living in another universe, and the question would be who (or what) created that universe. And so we could go on indefinitely and never reach an answer. This is a well-known issue in philosophy and has often been called the “infinite regress.”

For this reason the gods do not, in fact, deserve the high name of “God.” They are only “gods” in the sense of “immortals” or “super-humans,” but not in the sense I am trying to define. They are not ultimate existence. They are not the basic Fact from which all other fact-hood is derived. Even supposing there are such gods, they would be mere products of something higher and included within it. If Zeus bodily appeared on our doorsteps today, our search for ultimate reality would still not be over.

More “hammer strokes” in another post.

A Little Aphorism about Religion and Atheism

“If religion is perpetual childhood, then atheism is perpetual puberty.”

(I’m not saying this is true of many or even most  people, religious or otherwise. The aphorism is rather meant to express that if one of these charges is made, the other charge can be equally made. Personally, I’m trying to be cautious with any such charges. And perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that “anti-theism” is perpetual puberty, but that wouldn’t have sounded as well .)