My previous post at Strange Notions underscored the often-unacknowledged philosophical premises at work when believers and non-believers sit down to debate about things biblical. In the course of my argument, I pointed to a possible area of common ground for Catholics and agnostics/atheists. A survey of statements by thinkers as different as Benedict XVI and Bart Ehrman reveals an important agreement upon the reality that everyone carries their own philosophical presuppositions and that a purely objective consideration of Jesus’ miracles is therefore impossible. Today I would like to carry forward this discussion. By way of doing this, I will first briefly summarize Bart Ehrman’s position on Jesus’ divinity and resurrection. Then I will critique what I consider to be an insufficient (but very common) Christian response to the skeptic’s position. Finally, I will dwell upon a couple keys given by C.S. Lewis and Pope Benedict XVI which point out from a Christian perspective the direction a philosophical dialogue about miracles needs to head.

Ehrman on Jesus’ Divinity and the Failure of the “Trilemma” Argument

Ehrman’s position concerning the divinity of Christ can be quickly grasped from his evaluation of C.S. Lewis’ famous “trilemma” argument. According to Lewis, Jesus’ lordship can be shown by reducing to the absurd the possibility that he was either a liar or a lunatic. But in Jesus Interrupted, Ehrman reveals a problem with Lewis’ logic:

"I had come to see that the very premise of Lewis’s argument was flawed. The argument based on Jesus as liar, lunatic, or Lord was predicated on the assumption that Jesus had called himself God…I had come to realize that none of our earliest traditions indicates that Jesus said any such thing about himself…not three options but four: liar, lunatic, Lord, or legend."

At the risk of oversimplifying Ehrman’s more lengthy narrative, his position is that Jesus’ disciples began to profess his divinity only after they experienced him as risen from the dead. According to Ehrman’s analysis of the data in How Jesus Became God, the earliest Christian sources (Paul and Mark) do not portray Jesus as divine but rather as an exalted human or an angel. While Jesus certainly existed as a historical person, for Ehrman he is nevertheless a “legend” in that he was not divine as Christians subsequently came to believe.

Ehrman on Jesus’ Resurrection

One of the interesting features of Ehrman’s work is that he affirms at least some direct followers of Jesus sincerely believed their master had been raised from the dead. He suggests that “three or four people—though possibly more—had visions of Jesus sometime after he died.” Ehrman states that the question of whether these putative experiences were veridical (i.e. whether Jesus was really there or whether they were hallucinatory bereavement visions) is beside his point. Rather, the claim he puts forth is the following:

"[A]nyone who was an apocalyptic Jew like Jesus’s closest follower Peter, or Jesus’s own brother James, or his later apostle Paul, who thought that Jesus had come back to life, would naturally interpret it in light of his particular apocalyptic worldview— a worldview that informed everything that he thought about God, humans, the world, the future, and the afterlife. In that view, a person who was alive after having died would have been bodily raised from the dead, by God himself, so as to enter into the coming kingdom."

In Ehrman’s view, then, it was the disciples’ own apocalyptic worldview (informed by Jesus’ teachings while he was alive) that led them to think of their visions of the crucified Jesus in terms of resurrection.

An Insufficient Christian Response

While the constraints of this post do not permit me to elaborate further on Ehrman’s arguments, it should be noted that they are formidable and cannot simply be written off without a robust response. For instance, I do not find satisfactory the response to this “quadrilemma” (Jesus is either a liar, lunatic, lord, or legend) in Kreeft and Tacelli’s Handbook of Christian Apologetics. With due respect to these thinkers whom I deeply admire (and who have likely provided more solid arguments in other texts outside of the present one), I think their response to the “legend” issue unfortunately evinces a rather common but simplistic understanding of the biblical evidence. The authors state that our extant biblical manuscripts contain “very few discrepancies and no really important ones,” but I think Ehrman’s books Misquoting Jesus, How Jesus Became God, and Jesus, Interrupted sufficiently disabuse one of the notion that the Gospels only differ in accidentals such as order and number. And Ehrman is by no means the only author who writes about this sort of thing; he is popularizing information that biblical scholars already know.

Moreover,Kreeft and Tacelli argue, “If a mythic ‘layer’ had been added later to an originally merely human Jesus, we should find some evidence, at least indirectly and secondhand, of this earlier layer.” Here I think the authors have an unduly narrow view of “myth,” and moreover I think they fail to anticipate the obvious response of a bible scholar like Ehrman. What might he say? The evidence for this earlier, non-mythical layer is right there in front of us: it is the Gospel of Mark, whom scholars by and large recognize to be the first gospel composed.

Finally, the authors of the Handbook ask who possibly could have invented such a myth about Jesus. I think they are on to something in remarking, “No one invents an elaborate practical joke in order to be crucified, stoned, or beheaded.” Ehrman agrees to some extent with this insofar as he does not seem to think that the disciples maliciously invented the myth of a divine Jesus. (Remember, in Ehrman’s view at least some of the disciples really thought they saw Jesus alive after his death, and it is this that eventually led them to conclude he was divine). The authors fail to envision this sort of counter-argument when they claim, “Whether it was his first disciples or some later generation, no possible motive can account for this invention.” It is indeed difficult for a Christian to imagine someone inventing the notion that Jesus was divine, but is it fair to say that “no possible motive” could account for this? Couldn’t the disciples themselves have been delusional, as Ehrman seems to suggest? Or couldn’t they have been using the “risen” Jesus as a power play for their own (ultimately unsuccessful) personal ambitions? Now as a believer I am certainly not saying that this is what actually happened, but one cannot properly call it an impossible scenario.

Where the Discussion Ought to Head: C.S. Lewis on Miracles

While C.S. Lewis may not have hit a home run with his “trilemma” argument in defense of Christ’s divinity, I think that his book Miracles is invaluable for those who wish to profess the divinity of Jesus in the face of modern biblical criticism. Lewis begins by arguing along the same lines of Benedict XVI and Ehrman as discussed in my previous post. He correctly observes that the real issue at hand is a philosophical one: “The difficulties of the unbeliever do not begin with questions about this or that particular miracle; they begin much further back.” For Lewis the miracles question boils down to whether or not the natural world we know is the only reality that exists. Looked at from another angle, this is the same as asking whether or not the supernatural or divine exists. A negative answer to the question of the divine’s existence necessarily entails the conclusion that purported miracles such as Christ’s resurrection cannot be true.

A positive answer, on the other hand, means the following for Lewis: “If we decide that Nature is not the only thing that is, then we cannot say in advance whether she is safe from miracles or not.” In other words, if there exists a Being which/who is not limited by the confines of the natural world but is rather the very ground of this world, then we can never conclusively deny that this Being sometimes acts in a way other than that which we tend to expect based on our observations of nature. Lewis thus proposes that within the universe “there are rules behind the rules, and a unity which is deeper than uniformity.” While Christians often speak of miracles as divine “interventions,” this unfortunately appears to presuppose that God is somehow “absent” from his creation and then “intrudes” upon it to perform a miracle. But in truth, if God exists he is always present to his creation. For Lewis, then, the miracles we take to be “interruptions” of nature’s history are in reality “expressions of the truest and deepest unity in [God’s] total work.”

Even if we personally are not conscious of having experienced the miraculous, Lewis reminds us not to discount the fact that our world is full of stories of people who claim to have experienced miracles. Moreover, even if we were to live an entire millennium our experience would not necessarily inform us whether a given miracle happened. Indeed, Lewis and Ehrman both acknowledge that miracles are by definition improbable. It is always more likely that the witnesses to the alleged miracle are lying or deluded than that the miracle actually occurred. And yet, even as we know fraudulent cases exist, these by no means discredit all such claims regarding the miraculous. On this score I myself tend to be very skeptical when people talk of miraculous healings on the one hand or demonic possessions on the other. But then every once in a while I hear an account of some such phenomenon directly experienced by someone I trust and know not to be psychologically imbalanced. These are the moments that make me reconsider the possibility that maybe such things happen after all even if I (thankfully, in the case of possessions) have never directly experienced them.

At the end of the day, Lewis is right: I would be arguing in a circle if I were to conclude that miracles have not occurred merely because I have not experienced them. The bottom line for Lewis is that our experience cannot prove nature is closed, i.e. that it never admits of what from our point of view might look like “interruptions.” To be sure, living sanely in the world requires that we assume the laws of nature continue operating as we have always experienced them (We should not jump out of a boat expecting the gravity to be suspended before we sink into the sea). In fact, Lewis argues that the existence of miracles presupposes that nature is governed by laws. But this does not mean that walking on water is per se impossible. The impossibility of miracles is not something that can be proved, only assumed.

Benedict XVI and the Question of an “Open Philosophy”

I would like to conclude this post by returning to my point of departure in the previous one. In his 1988 Erasmus Lecture, the future Pope Benedict XVI poignantly wrote that “the debate about modern exegesis is not a dispute among historians: it is rather a philosophical debate.” In the course of his lecture, Benedict called for a “criticism of the criticism,” a self-critique of the modern, historical-critical method of biblical interpretation. In the course of these two posts I have attempted to carry forward this critique in one small way, identifying the presence of philosophical presuppositions we bring to our reading of the biblical text and underscoring that believing miracles to be impossible is something people can only assume, not prove.

As one who daily engages in the craft of historical-critical exegesis, I find Benedict’s comments on this subject refreshing and liberating. In contrast with a naturalist, “ready-made philosophy” that precludes the possibility of miracles, the Christian approaches the Bible with an “open philosophy” that refuses to exclude the possibility that God himself “could enter into and work in human history, however improbable such a thing might at first appear.” This posture, deeply rooted in the Catholic tradition with its conviction that the boundary of time and eternity is permeable, allows for the Bible to be what the Church has always claimed it to be: the word of God in human words.

And yet when all is said and done, Christians should beware of thinking we have definitively proven that which we hold by faith. On the basis of reason alone we cannot conclude whether the Bible is the word of God, whether a given miracle has occurred, or whether Jesus rose from the dead. The real question undergirding all these has been given to us by Lewis. It is the question of whether or not God exists, whether we have independent reasons to believe that there exists a supernatural Being beyond the natural order, a Being to whom nature owes its existence and who may act within that order in ways we do not typically expect.

Read Lewis’ Miracles attentively, and there you will find well-argued reasons to believe that the answer to the above questions is “yes.” Moreover, even if you do not agree with him, I think you will find that he provides serious arguments which call into question whether a non-theistic worldview offers an intelligible account of the world in which we live. But this post’s aim remains much more modest in focusing on just one key thought from Lewis’ book: If we admit that nature is not the only thing that is—if we come to the conclusion that theism is true—then we are not “safe” from miracles. This by no means disproves atheism or agnosticism, but at least it points out one direction our dialogue needs to go.
 
 
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“At its core, the debate about modern exegesis is not a dispute among historians: it is rather a philosophical debate.” - Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)

My reflection today revolves around this poignant line from Joseph Ratzinger’s 1988 Erasmus Lecture in which he famously called for a “criticism of criticism.” In penning these words, the German cardinal was looking for a self-criticism of the modern, historical-critical method of biblical interpretation. On the part of those involved in the craft of exegesis today, this would entail the effort to identify the philosophical presuppositions we bring to our reading of the biblical text and to consider honestly the degree of certainty warranted for the conclusions we draw when it comes to things biblical.

Joseph Ratzinger: Pure Objectivity Does Not Exist

Ratzinger’s comments a generation ago remain as relevant as ever for the sort of discussions we have here at Strange Notions. Whether we are aware of it or not, both Christians and atheists bring different philosophical presuppositions to the table when we sit down to debate about the Bible. These first principles are ‘spectacles’ we wear which color our entire view of reality, including what we think is going on within Scripture. Ratzinger for his part argues that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle applies here: “pure objectivity is an absurd abstraction,” for “the observer’s perspective is an essential determinant of the outcome of an experiment.”

What this means in terms of present purposes is that the answers to particular questions we ask of Scripture are in large part determined before we ever open up the text in the first place. What are we to make of Jesus’ miracles and of his resurrection in particular? If one is an atheist, then a natural explanation will be adduced for these phenomena. Such an explanation could take many forms: for example, a putative healing miracle could be explicable in light of modern medicine, or perhaps it was invented by the Gospel authors decades after Jesus’ life in order to convince others of his divinity.

On the other hand, a person who approaches the text assuming theism to be true will likely take the healing story at face value and attribute it to Jesus’ divine mastery over the natural order. Or perhaps the believer might take a position similar to that of the atheist but with the understanding that God in his providence shows us the face of Jesus by working through natural causes, whether that be medicine or human authors with their own agendas.

My point here is not to adjudicate which if any of these explanations best explains a given miracle story in the Gospels. Rather, I simply wish to underscore the reality that our conclusions about a given text are in large part governed by principles and commitments we had before opening up the Bible.

Throughout his career, Ratzinger has shown himself to be at once a great admirer and practitioner of modern exegesis as well as one of its most incisive critics. Far from rejecting a modern approach to Scripture, Ratzinger nevertheless admits that it “has brought forth great errors” caused in no small part by an unquestioning allegiance to certain “academic dogmas.”

A key mainstream assumption he finds particularly problematic is the belief (and I use that word here deliberately, to mean something one cannot prove) that God cannot enter in and work in human history. However improbable divine intervention in our world might appear, Ratzinger argues that this cannot be excluded a priori unless one has definitive proof that God does not exist. The miraculous is by its very nature, if you will, something unexpected and improbable. The jump from calling it improbable to impossible is what Ratzinger finds problematic, and he thinks that many people today read the Bible in this way without reflecting upon whether assuming such a conclusion is warranted or not.

Bart Ehrman: Everyone Has Presuppositions

Since this site is dedicated to fostering dialogue between believers and nonbelievers, I think it is only fair that we attempt to glimpse the same phenomena described by Ratzinger through a competing lens. One of my favorite authors in this regard is Bart Ehrman. The bestselling author, who describes himself as an agnostic, has written several books popularizing modern exegesis and challenging believers to consider more thoughtfully the origins of the Bible and Christianity. The reason I like reading Ehrman, as opposed to many other agnostic or atheist authors, lies not only in his accessible style but above all in his intellectual humility often lacking in believers and nonbelievers alike.

For this post, I simply wish to share some of his thoughts on doing historical biblical study as articulated in three of his recent books. I think there are many points of convergence with what Benedict is saying, even as the two authors ultimately come to quite different conclusions about the Christian faith.

Misquoting Jesus

In this book Ehrman rightly takes issue with those who dismiss modern scholarship out of hand as if it were only practiced by the godless. I suspect that the author is right in remarking that his own books are sometimes written off by those who—whether consciously or unconsciously—perceive his arguments as threatening to their faith. In response Ehrman remarks, “These scholars are not just a group of odd, elderly, basically irrelevant academics holed up in a few libraries around the world.”

In a real sense Christians owe our modern, translated Bibles to such people—some of whom are not believers. These academics have dedicated their careers to producing Bible editions that present us, as closely as possible, with the “original” texts of Scripture.

Most people fail to realize just how complicated was the origin of the biblical texts we now take for granted as “the Bible.” For one thing, we do not possess the original letters of the New Testament fresh from their authors’ pens. Moreover, the (many and much later) copies of texts we do possess contain important variants and points of seeming contradiction among themselves.

As if that were not enough, we then still have to consider the question of how to interpret what we do have. Which manuscripts ought to be considered authoritative? Which, if any, is the one Christians are supposed to consider inspired? As Ehrman says, “If texts could speak for themselves, then everyone honestly and openly reading a text would agree on what the text says.” For better or worse, that is clearly not the case.

Jesus, Interrupted

Ehrman here again goes to great length to make clear his conviction that modern biblical exegesis is not exclusively the domain of agnostic or atheist thinkers:

"My personal view is that a historical-critical approach to the Bible does not necessarily lead to agnosticism or atheism. It can in fact lead to a more intelligent and thoughtful faith— certainly more intelligent and thoughtful than an approach to the Bible that overlooks all of the problems that historical critics have discovered over the years."

The author mentions more than once that his closest friends are both scholars and believers. According to Ehrman, “[I]t was the problem of suffering, not a historical approach to the Bible, that led me to agnosticism.” He discusses the reasons for his conviction elsewhere in his book God’s Problem.

While I do not share his convictions regarding the problem of evil as an insurmountable obstacle to belief in God, that is the topic for another thread which receives frequent attention on this site. For our purposes, let us simply recall that Ehrman’s basis for professing agnosticism has primarily to do with the problem of evil, not the problems unearthed by modern biblical scholarship.

In my estimation, Ehrman does both sides of our debate a great service in debunking the notion that we hold our respective convictions on the basis of certain proofs. For example, he writes that we can neither prove nor disprove the resurrection:

"I am decidedly not saying that Jesus was not raised from the dead. I’m not saying the tomb was not empty. I’m not saying that he did not appear to his disciples and ascend into heaven. Believers believe that all these things are true. But they do not believe them because of historical evidence. They take the Christian claims on faith, not on the basis of proof. There can be no proof."

These words may alarm some Christians who think that we can “prove” the resurrection with the internal evidence of the New Testament or any other evidence for that matter. To be sure, we Christians can and must adduce reasons for our belief and be prepared to defend our faith against objections. But Ehrman is perfectly right to push us on the reality that these reasons do not amount to a definitive proof. That, indeed, is why we call it faith, not science.

Again, the Catholic position is by no means saying that faith is “unscientific” or at odds with science. Rather, the point here is that the Christian and the atheist may look at the same evidence and draw different conclusions because of our prior commitments which involve a decision to view the Bible through the lens of faith or not.

How Jesus Became God

Ehrman probes the issue of belief in the resurrection at greater length in his most recent work. Here he rightly criticizes an all-too common response of Christians when they are faced with the findings of modern biblical scholarship:

"The reason historians cannot prove or disprove whether God has performed a miracle in the past—such as raising Jesus from the dead—is not that historians are required to be secular humanists with an anti-supernaturalist bias. I want to stress this point because conservative Christian apologists, in order to score debating points, often claim that this is the case. In their view, if historians did not have anti-supernaturalist biases or assumptions, they would be able to affirm the historical 'evidence' that Jesus was raised from the dead."

Unfortunately, I have seen plenty in my years of teaching a mostly-Catholic audience to confirm Ehrman’s observations. Sometimes Catholic writers and speakers write off modern scholarship tout court with the use of scare quotes, calling modern thinkers “scholars” as if they were not actually scholars because they lack or at least seem to lack the faith that the Christian thinks is required for them to have any competence at all in their field.

Regarding evangelical Christians—Ehrman’s former self which I take to be his principal audience—the author adds a fascinating point to his criticism above:

"I should point out that these Christian apologists almost never consider the 'evidence' for other miracles from the past that have comparable— or even better—evidence to support them: for example, dozens of Roman senators claimed that King Romulus was snatched up into heaven from their midst; and many thousands of committed Roman Catholics can attest that the Blessed Virgin Mary has appeared to them, alive—a claim that fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Christians roundly discount, even though the 'evidence' for it is very extensive…Protestant apologists interested in 'proving' that Jesus was raised from the dead rarely show any interest in applying their finely honed historical talents to the exalted Blessed Virgin Mary."

This point of criticism is difficult for any Christian to address, and a robust response is needed. While it is not my point here to take on this problem, I would simply note that for the Catholic tradition God’s grace (including the possibility of miracles) is not constrained within the visible confines of the Catholic Church. Unlike some Christians, Catholics are not intrinsically opposed to the possibility of a non-Christian performing or experiencing a miracle.

In a later section of this book, Ehrman turns aside from the above considerations to consider in more detail the fundamentals of how to do history properly. At a pivotal point he says something which I could have mistaken as coming from the pen of Pope Benedict had I not known otherwise:

"The first thing to stress is that everyone has presuppositions, and it is impossible to live life, think deep thoughts , have religious experiences, or engage in historical inquiry without having presuppositions. The life of the mind cannot proceed without presuppositions. The question, though, is always this: What are the appropriate presuppositions for the task at hand?"

This is one of the questions that interests me most and which I think lies at the heart of Pope Benedict’s statement that the debate in exegesis is at bottom a philosophical one. We can never completely suspend our biases, but we can at least do our best to remain conscious of their presence and engage in a self-critique that helps to purify our thought and attune it with the breadth of knowledge we can gain from the sources available to us.

In this critique, a few pivotal questions emerge: Whose philosophical presuppositions best position us for an accurate understanding of the nature of things? Which ones best enable us to live well? And what would the process for making such a determination look like? These are issues I hope to take up in my next post at Strange Notions, but here my concern remains much more basic in showing that there is a problem recognized by good thinkers on both sides of the religious/non-religious aisle.

I would like to draw these remarks to a close with a word on complete objectivity which Ehrman, like Benedict, rejects as a possibility in our effort to interpret the Scriptures. As Ehrman states, “This is one of the great ironies of modern religion: more than almost any other religious group on the planet, conservative evangelicals, and most especially fundamentalist Christians, are children of the Enlightenment.”

Both modern Christians and modern skeptics yearn for a level of certitude that simply does not exist or exists for only a very limited range of truth claims. In Ehrman’s words, “[F]aith in a miracle is a matter of faith, not of objectively established knowledge.” For instance, if Jesus really did perform the miracles the gospels claim he did, then this would help explain how Jesus’ opponents could deny these actions in the face of evidence that God was working through him.

It is the same dynamic that we find in Jesus’ parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. The rich man suffering in Hades begs Father Abraham to send someone to his living relatives and warn them about the place of torment, to which Abraham replies, “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead” (Luke 16:31). Here again, people could look at the same evidence and draw different conclusions, a process largely determined by their prior convictions.

So did Jesus really come back from the dead as the above parable intimates? And was this parable even uttered by the historical Jesus in the first place? These are important questions which—for both believers and nonbelievers alike—are often answered even before they are asked. In the following post we will continue the conversation in more detail, but for now this is a good place to begin our discussion.
 
 
(Image credit: Marc Cz

The theory of evolution proposes an explanation for how life in general and mankind in particular arose. It holds that that there was a long period in which natural processes gave rise to life and to the different life forms on earth.

This in no way conflicts with the idea of God. As the omnipotent Creator, he is free to create either quickly or slowly and either directly or through intermediate processes that he sets up.

He can even do a mixture of these things, such as creating the universe in an instant (as apparently happened at the Big Bang) and then having it experience a long, slow process of development giving rise to stars and planets and eventually life forms including human beings.

He can even intervene periodically in these processes going on in the universe, such as when he creates a soul for each human being or when he performs a miracle.

From its perspective, science can learn certain things about the laws governing the universe and the processes occurring in it. But that does nothing to eliminate the idea of God, for the question remains: Why is there a universe with these laws and these processes in the first place?

Consider an analogy: Suppose that after a thorough and lengthy scientific investigation of the Mona Lisa, I concluded that it was the result of innumerable collisions of paint and canvas which gradually went from indecipherable shapes and colors to a beautiful and intriguing picture of a woman.

My analysis of the painting may be correct. That is, in fact, what the Mona Lisa is and how it developed. But it by no means disproves nor makes unnecessary Leonardo Da Vinci as the painter behind the painting.

Furthermore, if we were the product of a purely random processes then we have good reason to doubt our mental faculties when it comes to knowing the truth. Why? Because our mental faculties would be the result of a random evolutionary process which is aimed, not at producing true beliefs, but at mere survival. But if that were the case then why should we trust the idea that we are the product of purely random factors? The mental processes leading to this conclusion would not be aimed at producing true beliefs.

Charles Darwin seems to have understood this when he wrote:

“With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”

This worry disappears if God was guiding whatever process led to us and if he shaped the development of the human mind so that it was aimed at knowing him, and thus knowing the truth.

"But," you might be thinking, "surely evolution contradicts the creation account in Genesis."

No, it doesn't.

The Bible contains many different styles of writing. History, poetry, prophecy, parables, and a variety of other literary genres are found in its pages. This is not surprising since it is not so much a book as it is a library – a collection of 73 books written at different times by different people.

As such it is important that we distinguish between types of literature within the Bible and what they are trying to tell us. It would be a mistake, for example, to take a work as rich as the Bible in symbolism and literary figures as if it were always relating history in the manner that we in our culture are accustomed to.

Much less should we expect it to offer a scientific account of things. If one is hoping to find a scientific account of creation then he will not find it in these texts, for the Bible was never intended to be a scientific textbook on cosmology.

Saint Augustine put it this way: “We do not read in the Gospel that the Lord said, ‘I am sending you the Holy Spirit, that he may teach you about the course of the sun and the moon’. He wished to make people Christians not astronomers.”

The Catholic Church is open to the ideas of an old universe and that God used evolution as part of his plan. According to Catechism of the Catholic Church, “The question about the origins of the world and of man has been the object of many scientific studies which have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man. These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers” (CCC 283).

When it comes to relating these findings to the Bible, the Catechism explains: “God himself created the visible world in all its richness, diversity and order. Scripture presents the work of the Creator symbolically as a succession of six days of divine ‘work,’ concluded by the ‘rest’ of the seventh day” (CCC 337).

Explaining further, it says:

“Among all the Scriptural texts about creation, the first three chapters of Genesis occupy a unique place. From a literary standpoint these texts may have had diverse sources. The inspired authors have placed them at the beginning of Scripture to express in their solemn language the truths of creation–its origin and its end in God, its order and goodness, the vocation of man, and finally the drama of sin and the hope of salvation. Read in the light of Christ, within the unity of Sacred Scripture and in the living Tradition of the Church, these texts remain the principal source for catechesis on the mysteries of the ‘beginning’: creation, fall, and promise of salvation.” (CCC 289)

In other words, the early chapters of Genesis, “relate in simple and figurative language, adapted to the understanding of mankind at a lower stage of development, fundamental truths underlying the divine scheme of salvation.” (Pontifical Biblical Commission, January 16, 1948).

Or, as Pope John Paul II put it:

“The Bible itself speaks to us of the origin of the universe and its makeup, not in order to provide us with a scientific treatise but in order to state the correct relationship of humanity with God and the universe. Sacred Scripture wishes simply to declare that the world was created by God” (Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, October 3, 1981).

As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) explained:

“The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God...does not in fact explain how human persons come to be but rather what they are. It explains their inmost origin and casts light on the project that they are. And, vice versa, the theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological developments. But in so doing it cannot explain where the ‘project’ of human persons comes from, nor their inner origin, nor their particular nature. To that extent we are faced here with two complementary–rather than mutually exclusive—realities.”

The recognition that the creation accounts must be understood with some nuance is not new, nor is it a forced retreat in the face of modern science. Various Christian writers form the early centuries of Church history, as much as 1,500 years or more before Darwin, saw the six days of creation as something other than literal, twenty-four hour periods.

For example, in the A.D. 200s, Origen of Alexandria noted that in the six days of creation day and night are made on the first day but the sun is not created until the fourth. The ancients knew as well as we do that the presence or absence of the sun is what makes it day or night, and so he took this as an indicators that the text was using a literary device and not presenting a literal chronology. He wrote:

“Now who is there, pray, possessed of understanding, that will regard the statement as appropriate, that the first day, and the second, and the third, in which also both evening and morning are mentioned, existed without sun, and moon, and stars—the first day even without a sky? . . . I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance, and not literally.” (De Principiis, 4:16)

What Origen was onto was a structure embedded in the six days of creation whereby in the first three days God prepares several regions to be populated by separating the day from the night, the sky from the sea, and finally the seas from each other so that the dry land appears. Then, on the second three days, he populates these, filling the day and night with the sun, the moon, and the stars, filling the sky and sea with birds and fish, and filling the dry land with animals and man.

The first three days are historically referred to as the days of distinction because God separates and thus distinguishes one region from another. The second three days are referred to as the days of adornment, in which God populates or adorns the regions he has distinguished.

This literary structure was obvious to people before the development of modern science, and the fact that the sun is not created until day was recognized by some as a sign that the text is presenting the work of God, as the Catechism says, “symbolically as a succession of six days of divine ‘work’” (CCC 337).

Origen was not the only one to recognize the literary nature of the six days. Similarly, St. Augustine, writing in the A.D. 400s, noted: “What kind of days these were is extremely difficult or perhaps impossible for us to conceive, and how much more to say!” (The City of God, 11:6).

The ancients thus recognized, long before modern science, that the Bible did not require us to think that the world was made in six twenty-four hour days.
 
 

 
 
(Image credit: For Wallpaper)

“What great nation is there that has a god so near to it as the LORD our God is to us, whenever we call upon him?”  This passage from the Book of Deuteronomy was recently proclaimed in the Catholic Church’s Lenten liturgy, and it touched right at the heart of something I have been pondering for some time: evidence of polytheism in the Bible and the relationship between ancient Israelite and Canaanite religious traditions.

Popular critics of the Judeo-Christian God frequently focus on the apparent incompatibility of the biblical portrait of God with what we insist must be essential moral attributes of the divine nature should it even exist.  Both critics and believers, however, are often unaware of another crucial problem that would seem to contradict traditional Christian doctrine concerning the nature of God.  In a nutshell, the tension lies not only in the relation of the biblical God to violence and evil, but also on the arguably more fundamental level of whether the Bible reflects belief in only one divine being in the first place.

I have devoted a chapter to this very theme in my book Dark Passages of the Bible, and even there I barely scratch the surface of this issue.  Nevertheless, I have continued to ponder this issue over the past couple years and believe something meaningful can be said within the constraints of a blog post.

Biblical Henotheism and Canaanite Religion

 
First we have to acquaint ourselves with a sampling of concrete biblical texts which illustrate the particular problem.   Here I will focus on just a few examples from the Book of Psalms:
 

"God has taken his place in the divine council;
in the midst of the gods he holds judgment." (Ps 82:1)
 
 
"For who in the skies can be compared to the LORD?
Who among the heavenly beings is like the LORD,
a God feared in the council of the holy ones,
great and terrible above all that are round about him?
O LORD God of hosts,
who is mighty as thou art, O LORD,
with thy faithfulness round about thee?" (Ps 89:6-8)
 
 
"For the LORD is a great God,
and a great King above all gods." (Ps 95:3).

 
Christians typically do not read the above texts with the assumption that multiple divine beings exist.  We know that there is only one God—so the argument goes—therefore the “gods” of which the Psalmist speaks clearly must not refer to other divinities.  This view runs throughout the Church Fathers and is illustrated in St. Augustine’s exegesis of Ps 82:1 cited above: “[The psalm] begins,” he says, “God stood in the synagogue of gods.  Far be it from us, however, to understand by these gods the gods of the Gentiles, or idols, or any creature in heaven or earth except men.”  In line with a venerable Jewish tradition (one invoked by Jesus on a similar text and an issue I simply cannot take up within the constraints of this post), here “the gods” or “holy ones” refer to the saints, that is to say the human faithful who have been made like God through entry into covenant with him.

For thoughtful believers and unbelievers alike, however, the question remains: Does the above explanation truly do justice to what the human author(s) of the Book of Psalms intended to say? In other words, did these authors really have humans in mind when speaking of “heavenly beings” who dwell “in the skies”?  Philosophically speaking, it is impossible to prove that the psalmist couldn’t have meant humans here.  But the question is whether this is the most reasonable and likely reading of his words.  When one achieves an acquaintance with the whole array of biblical evidence to the contrary—evidence, again, of which even my book only touches the surface—it becomes increasingly difficult to side with Augustine on this particular point without a further word of explanation.  Now a staunch Christian might disagree, insisting he can offer a satisfactory explanation to individual problematic texts on a case by case basis.  However, after a certain amount of study and by what Newman calls a “cumulation of probabilities,” the evidence amasses and the scale tips. Conventional pre-critical explanations alone no longer suffice to account for the data.  As a colleague of mine once said, “You may be able to dodge snowflakes, but you can’t dodge a snowstorm that has come right upon you.”

So what is really going on in texts like the psalms sampled above?  A Catholic ecclesiastic and biblical scholar of no less stature than Pope Benedict XVI himself recognized that we are witnessing here traces of polytheism, or, more precisely, henotheism in the Bible.  Even the official religion of Israel, Benedict tells us, did not at first deny the existence of other gods than Yahweh.  Henotheism, also sometimes called monolatry, refers to religious worldviews in which the existence of more than one divinity is taken for granted, while worship is rendered only to the being considered highest among them.

If it is not apparent to the reader simply from a survey of the Scriptures themselves, I find the case for henotheism in certain parts of the Old Testament to be undeniable when reading it against its broader Ancient Near Eastern background.  A number of erudite studies explore the evidence for this claim, for example John Day’s Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan, William Dever’s Did God Have a Wife?, and Mark Smith’s works The Origins of Biblical Monotheism and The Early History of God.  Beginning with Frank Cross’s 1973 work Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic and continuing in more contemporary works such as those mentioned above, scholars have argued that the earliest literary strata of the Israelite tradition from the 1^st millennium B.C. reflect a dependence upon much older Canaanite religious traditions.  Remember, Canaan is the Promised Land conquered by the Israelites, and this land had its own robust culture which naturally exerted significant influence upon the people of Israel.

The religion of Canaan during the 2^nd millennium B.C. is well depicted in the hundreds of cuneiform tablets excavated at the ancient sea port of Ugarit (located in modern Syria) during the last century.  Thanks to these archaeological discoveries, we are now aware of some 150 Canaanite deities, including many who make an appearance in the Old Testament: El, Baal, Yam, Mot, and Asherah, to name a few.  It is noteworthy that Yahweh does not appear in the genealogies at Ugarit.  It seems that Yahweh came into Canaan from the outside.  Where precisely scholars do not agree upon, but the narrative of Moses at the burning bush offers us the Israelite view: Only with the revelation to Moses is the God of Israel revealed as Yahweh.  As God tells Moses, “I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty, but by my name the LORD [Yahweh] I did not make myself known to them” (Exodus 6:3).

The high god of the ancient Canaanite pantheon was named El.  Fascinatingly, El also appears as one of the principal designations for God throughout the entire Old Testament.  The form can occur in the singular (El), in the plural (Elohim), or in what is known as construct form.  For instance, El-Bethel identifies him with a physical place, while the personal name “Elijah” means “My God (literally, my El) is Yahweh.”  Depending on the translation one is using, typically El is translated generically as “god,” a move that makes sense seeing as the Hebrew tradition eventually lost consciousness of El as a divine being distinct from Yahweh.  Elohim (literally, “the gods”) thus can be used to characterize a group of false gods, but it is also used for Israel’s one God despite the thought-provoking fact that the word is grammatically plural. Often one finds Elohim alongside Yahweh (itself often rendered “LORD”).  Thus in translating Yahweh Elohim in Psalm 89:8, the RSV gives us “LORD God.”  In the Psalmist’s view, these two words clearly refer to the same divine being.  An abundance of evidence, however, suggests that an earlier stage within the Israelite tradition saw the two as distinct gods.

Of all the biblical texts that could be cited to this effect, perhaps the most poignant is Deuteronomy 32:8-9, which casts Yahweh as one of the “sons of El”:
 

"When the Most High [Elyon] gave to the nations their inheritance,
when he separated the sons of men,
he fixed the bounds of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God.
For the LORD's [Yahweh’s] portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage."

 
For me it is always illuminating to read various Bible translations against the ancient manuscript traditions they are trying to render in our modern languages.  In the case of Deuteronomy 32:8 above, the RSV does not reproduce the Hebrew Elyon (which, likely referring to a particular manifestation of El, has no equivalent in English).  Rather, it follows the Greek Septuagint’s hypsistos in giving us “the Most High.” According to its standard practice, the RSV likewise follows the Greek kyrios giving us “LORD” rather than reproducing the Hebrew Yahweh.  But for me the most interesting choice concerns the expression “of the sons of God.”  Here the standard Hebrew Masoretic Text reads bene Israel (the sons of Israel).  The Septuagint reads angelon tou theou (the angels of God), reflecting a later understanding that beings once identified as gods would better be characterized as angels.

Why, then, does the RSV say “sons of God”?  In reading the footnotes to the critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, one discovers that this is the suggested emendation which is “probably right” based on comparisons with other extant manuscript evidence (Qumran, Symmachus, Old Latin, etc.).  Essentially, the editors of the Bible are arguing that either bene el (“sons of God”) or bene elim (“sons of the gods”) represents the most ancient tradition of the text from Deuteronomy even though this is not the expression found in the manuscripts upon which we typically base our translations.

The reason why the editors consider this to be the original text lies precisely in the awareness of the Hebrew Bible’s dependence upon earlier Canaanite traditions.  A key concept in the Canaanite religion was that of the “divine council,” a royal court of divinities collectively known as “the sons of El.”  As we know from the archaeological evidence, El was the high god of this heavenly court, while the other gods ministered to him.  In its own turn, Deuteronomy 32:8-9 appears to reflect the Canaanite belief that El had assigned each nation its own guardian god.  Thus Deuteronomy may well be offering us a privileged glimpse of a stage in the Israelite tradition wherein El and Yahweh were still considered distinct deities.

If the above supposition is true, then one may ask why the Septuagint and Masoretic Text changed the original text to “angels of God” and “sons of Israel,” respectively.  As Benedict XVI always taught us in his biblical exegesis, one ought not to exaggerate claims to certainty on such questions, yet, in light of the preponderance of evidence, scholars can still offer the following reasonable explanation: The Bible is best thought of not as a monolithic monotheistic tome but a rich and complex body of “monotheizing” literature.  Later strata of the Israelite tradition built upon what came earlier, in the process developing this thought while at the same time polishing it.  In contrast with the more ancient version of the text which still harbored traces of Canaanite lore, later biblical versions were produced with an emphasis on showing that the “the sons of the gods” did not actually exist.  Eliminating any polytheistic or henotheistic overtones in the earlier tradition, these later editions intended to proclaim that there exists only one El, and his name is Yahweh.

Christians and Atheists: Looking at the Same Evidence, Drawing Different Conclusions

 
At least for some believers and non-believers, what I have said above may represent common ground in terms of evidence we can agree upon.  My summary might even square perfectly with other observations the non-believer has previously made concerning the Bible, seeing in it a frail work made by human hands and subject to countless alterations over the centuries.  Again, all of this might simply confirm the skeptic’s conviction that the Bible is nothing more than a human work replete with discrepancies, errors, and cover-ups.  What I wish to say in this post—and what I want you believers out there to take home—is that the Christian can look boldly and critically at the same evidence the atheist perceives to be deeply problematic, and in doing so actually grow deeper in your faith.

As Joseph Ratzinger famously taught in his 1988 Erasmus Lecture in New York, the real debate in exegesis is at bottom a philosophical one.  Every one of us begins our reading of the Bible already with a particular interpretative lens, with a conscious or unconscious set of presuppositions which in turn color the conclusions we draw from an examination of the biblical data.  In our case as Christians, we admittedly read the Bible with the eyes of faith.  As I hope you can tell from reading this post, this need not and should not mean that we neglect modern scholarship, but it does mean that we operate with the conviction that the Bible’s idiosyncrasies are reflective of a greater plan God has for mankind.

As I have mentioned in earlier posts, the Catholic Church looks at the developments we find in the Old Testament as expressions of the divine pedagogy, the teaching method by which God gradually revealed himself to his people over the centuries. As part of this process, he accommodated himself to our human weaknesses, working from within the context of the Ancient Near East and purifying its religion from within.  Naturally, the Old Testament faithful were not going to arrive at Trinitarian monotheism overnight.  Like any good teacher, God in his divine pedagogy had to work the Israelite and Canaanite pupils he had, not the 4.0-GPA honors students he wished he had.  As Ratzinger put it in a homily on Genesis’ creation narrative:
 

"The Bible is thus the story of God’s struggle with human beings to make himself understandable to them over the course of time; but it is also the story of their struggle to seize hold of God over the course of time…The whole Old Testament is a journeying with the Word of God.  Only in the process of this journeying was the Bible’s real way of declaring itself formed, step by step…For the Christian the Old Testament represents, in its totality, an advance toward Christ; only when it attains to him does its real meaning, which was gradually hinted at, become clear."

 
The traces of polytheism and henotheism we see in the Old Testament are therefore not a scar of which Christians should be ashamed, but rather evidence of the plan by which God patiently worked with a human people to lead them—in a gradual way befitting human nature—along a path which would eventually enable them to welcome the coming of Christ.

So, at the end of the day, can the believer admit that El and Yahweh were originally viewed as distinct deities in Israel?  If a person looks at the Bible as a catalog of divine propositions dropped down from Heaven, then probably no.  But for the Catholic who sees the Bible as God’s word in truly human words, then it only redounds to the beauty of God’s plan to glimpse in the above texts evidence of his ancient dealings with the people of Israel, our ancestors in faith.  Confronting the presence of multiple deities in the Bible only makes me more appreciative of just how far we have come thanks to God’s gracious plan for our salvation.  It makes me profoundly thankful to know that divine providence has led us from worshiping a pantheon of warring deities to worshiping the one true God who became incarnate for our salvation in the person of Jesus Christ.

Now I don’t expect the atheist to agree with anything I have said in these final few paragraphs, but I do hope it conveys in a charitable manner how thoughtful Christians might approach the problem of polytheistic overtones in the Bible.  And for you believers out there, I pray that your engagement with these difficulties will give you both a sense that the Bible’s difficulties really can be faced with confidence, as well as a sense of wonder at how much we Christians still stand to learn about our Israelite family history.
 
 
(Image credit: Conservapedia)

This is the second in a series of posts on the “dark passages” of the Bible. These are texts which understandably raise the eyebrows of both nonbelievers and believers who encounter them and say, “How can that be in the Bible if it is God’s own word?” In my previous post I took up the problem of violent Old Testament passages in light of Pope Benedict XVI’s claim that violence is contrary to God’s nature. My book Dark Passages of the Bible likewise deals with this and various other areas of the Bible that seem to contradict what Christians believe today. Today I’d like to comment on Psalm 137, a short text which is at once one of the most profound as well as troubling imprecatory texts in the Bible.

In Psalm 137 we have before us a hymn whose context is clearly exilic, meaning that it was written after the Jewish people had been carted off into Babylon in 586 B.C. Before discussing, we should read the poem in its entirety:

"By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors
required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How shall we sing the LORD's song
in a foreign land?
 
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy!
 
Remember, O LORD, against the E'domites
the day of Jerusalem,
how they said, “Rase it, rase it!
Down to its foundations!”
 
O daughter of Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall he be who requites you
with what you have done to us!
Happy shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!"

The plain sense of the last pair of verses is a proclamation of blessing—in particular that a man will be blessed by God because he has killed his captors’ little children. This is a point at which atheists understandably say to believers, “Really, your God would bless that type of person? What a hateful, pathetic, bloodthirsty god—a god made in man’s image indeed! This doesn’t sound like a very ‘pro-life’ God.” Even C.S. Lewis, in his Reflections on the Psalms, describes Psalm 137’s concluding outburst as “devilish.” According to Lewis, the harboring of animosity is at once “profoundly natural” but also “profoundly wrong.” Does this mean it shouldn’t be in the Bible or that it constitutes an error on God’s part?

Though Psalm 137 does not have God directly making this troublesome curse, the problem cannot be skirted merely by pointing out that the human author is the one saying these hateful things rather than God. Why does this not help? For traditional orthodox Christianity, which includes Catholicism, the Bible is God’s word in human words, and we believe that lying, falsehood, and hatred are incompatible with the nature of God. As the Second Vatican Council authoritatively put it, whatever Scripture’s human authors assert is also asserted by the Holy Spirit. Therefore, if the human author of Psalm 137 asserts an error, we are saying that the Holy Spirit is also asserting an error.

For a Catholic, the question ultimately then revolves around the following question: what precisely was the human author of Psalm 137 asserting? In Catholic biblical exegesis, this assertion refers to the primary message an author wishes to teach or communicate. For a Catholic, the doctrines of biblical inspiration and inerrancy do not mean that every sentence in the Bible is a reflection of God’s mind on a given matter. Rather, the Bible is God’s word in human words. To use an expression from the Church Fathers, it was part of his divine pedagogy or teaching method to gradually reveal himself to his people. As part of this process, he accommodated himself to our human weaknesses and ennobled feeble humans in such a way that they have become bearers of his word. Naturally, these humans were not going to perceive God’s will perfectly from day one of his divine revelation but rather grow in this perception over time. This is why Pope Benedict states that Catholics should not simplistically treat any given Old Testament text as a definitive illustration of how we ought to act or believe without seeing it as part of a plan that is fully revealed only in the person of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, when Christians are challenged by non-believers to defend a particular Old Testament passage, they end up trying to defend the indefensible and, to borrow an expression from Thomas Aquinas, thereby make the faith look ridiculous.

What, then, is the assertion of Psalm 137? The Catholic must first be clear that it is not to teach that celebration is in order when the children of our enemies are killed. Now if you are an atheist, you are probably (and understandably) going to respond: “You’re pre-determining that this biblical text can’t be saying the crazy thing it seems to say since you’ve already begun with the assumption that it can’t be wrong.” Believe it or not, the Catholic would actually agree with the atheist here. Yes, our prior commitment to Jesus Christ and the truth of the Bible does a priori preclude the possibility that God’s revealed word asserts error.

But does this mean that the Catholic position is irrational and indefensible? As I said in my previous post, Catholics can’t expect a nonbeliever to accept our particular interpretation of a text like Psalm 137 if said person hasn’t first accepted the existence of God, the incarnation of Christ, and the Bible as his revealed word expressed in human words. What we can do is offer a reasoned explanation for the presence of thorny texts in such a way that one could see how it would be illuminating if faith in Christ is granted.

Up to this point I have merely been discussing what Psalm 137 does not intend to teach, but we also have to offer a positive statement of what the author intended to assert. In the present psalm as in any biblical text, an author might wish to make multiple points. In this case, there are two related purposes of the psalm when read in light of the whole. On the one hand, it is a hymn of hope for liberation and confidence in God’s covenant faithfulness. Thus the beautiful words in which the psalmist reminds the people of God’s promise: “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!” God has bound himself to Israel in covenant. He cannot go back on his promise to remember his people.

Though expressive of hope, Psalm 137 is at the same time a national hymn of sorrow. As the text relates, Israelites cast into Babylonian captivity wept bitterly as they were mocked by their captors who asked them to sing songs of their native land which had just been destroyed. The psalm is thus an occasion for the nation to pour out its anguish to God over the loss of land, family, and cult. Its aim is not to assert a universal truth claim about children in relation to evil and revenge. One cannot simply isolate the last pair of verses from the context and message of the whole. Rather, the central thrust of Psalm 137 is its cry of longing for God and for God’s good gifts to be restored.

To be sure, the frightful side of human nature shines through in this psalm, but for the Christian this makes the text all the more real, more meaningful. In this way it becomes a prayer which we today (with proper caution and making due distinctions) can each take up in our own lives. Catholics call this the moral sense of the text, an application to our own life’s circumstances of what we have learned from the experience of God’s people in ages past. We today find in our own heart the same emotions of despair and hope, hatred and love, that God’s people of old experienced. The psalm teaches us that we should not try to hide our deepest and darkest thoughts from God. Rather the psalms teach us to get these out in the open so that God can help us live our sorrows in him and eventually heal our brokenness.

A final dimension of Psalm 137’s moral sense is something picked up on by Christianity already in its first centuries of reflection upon the text. I refer here to the beautiful and practical exegesis of Origen in his important treatise Against Celsus. Following the familiar lines of patristic-medieval thought, he comments:

"The just give up to destruction all their enemies, that is to say their vices, so that they do not spare even the children, that is, the early beginnings and promptings of evil. In this sense also we understand the language of Psalm 137...For, “the little ones of Babylon” (which signifies confusion) are those troublesome sinful thoughts that arise in the soul, and one who subdues them by striking, as it were, their heads against the firm and solid strength of reason and truth, is the person who “dashes the little ones against the stones”; and he is therefore truly blessed."

For Origen, there is no question as to the psalm’s meaning: the “little ones” who are to be slain are not human children but rather “the early beginnings and promptings of evil.” He justifies the psalmist’s words by appealing to the etymology of the word Babylon, which is related to the word “confusion.” According to Origen, these nascent vices are called “the little ones of Babylon” because they arise in the form of troubling thoughts that confuse one’s soul. The message of the psalm is that we should put an end to our evil behavior at its outset—when it is still in its infancy, so to speak—lest it eventually develop into an unbreakable vice.

In line with centuries of Catholic thought, I believe that Origen’s interpretation is spot on. However, I would also caution believers that it is not sufficient on its own. Catholics out there who think that jumping to this moral sense of Psalm 137 does justice to its violent outburst of vengeance need to ask themselves: Does Origen’s exegesis respect the text of Psalm 137? Yes, the Catholic should happily recognize the spiritual sense of the text, but was the psalmist really thinking about crushing his vices when he composed this psalm? While some Catholics refuse to admit that the psalmist actually entertained the hateful thoughts he appears to entertain, the principles I have offered above are an attempt to seek truth in the text while admitting the presence of troubling statements which atheists (rightly, I believe) take to be obviously at odds with the nature of God if such a being exists.

In any event, I think any Christian—and indeed any person who reflects upon his vices—can find great wisdom for life in Origen’s approach to Psalm 137. Regardless of whether my above attempt to determine the text’s literal sense is sound, I hope we would all be able to learn from Origen’s exhortation to blot out nascent defects in our lives before they grow up and develop into full-fledged vices. This is precisely the sort of exegesis that makes a difference in our lives, and for the Catholic it represents the most important purpose of the Bible. But he who wishes to truly appreciate Scripture must pay attention to both its spiritual and literal senses. As I put it in a recent interview with Brandon Vogt, Catholics must beware of whitewashing difficult biblical texts by jumping to their spiritual sense without seriously taking into account the challenges these texts present on the literal level.

To conclude, I’d like to acknowledge and reiterate that ascertaining a biblical text’s intention is not always an easy task. Catholics must respectfully disagree with some of our Protestant brethren who believe that the Bible’s meaning is perspicuous. Exegesis often requires a lot more patience and skill than many Christians possess. Above all, it requires us to recognize that the many troublesome passages of the Old Testament ultimately only make sense insofar as they are seen as part of a progressive revelation by which God gradually prepared his people for the coming of Christ. In the words of Pope Benedict, which I cited in my previous post, “It follows straightaway that neither the criterion of inspiration nor that of infallibility can be applied mechanically. It is quite impossible to pick out one single sentence [of the Bible] and say, right, you find this sentence in God’s great book, so it must simply be true in itself.” According to Pope Benedict, problematic passages in the Old Testament are “valid insofar as they are part of the history leading up to Christ.”

On the same token, biblical exegesis also requires a degree of intellectual humility that I find atheists and believers alike sometimes lack. Especially in today’s world where we get much of our information in short bursts of data via social media outlets, it is very common to find folks assuming that if they don’t understand a claim at first glance or if its meaning is not readily apparent to them, then it’s not true. When the Catholic asks for the chance to clarify or make further distinctions, atheists often accuse him of backpedaling, covering his tracks, or obfuscating the ostensible meaning of the text he is trying to defend.

When I engage in discussions like the present one—especially in an online context—I am always reminded of C.S. Lewis’ words in his book Miracles. Explaining Christianity to someone who thinks it is easy and simple is a lot like trying to explain quantum physics to someone who conceives of atoms as tiny little balls which comprise everything in the material universe. At every turn we have to multiply distinctions and rule out false analogies proffered by our interlocutors. It sounds a lot like backtracking, and sometimes it is in fact backtracking. But sometimes this is what it takes in order to make a reasonably adequate explanation for something immense and beautiful. If Christianity is true, then it is with good reason that Catholicism has long regarded theology as “queen of the sciences,” the study of that being who is most immense and beautiful.
 
 
(Image credit: Flavor Yellow)

Today I’d like to consider an issue on which many atheists and Catholics may—perhaps to their surprise—find a point of common ground. “Violence is incompatible with the nature of God.” This line is not from an atheist but rather from Pope Benedict XVI. The context in which he penned it was his famous (in some circles infamous) Regensburg Address from 2006. In this particular case, he was endeavoring to foster a dialogue with Islam over a theology which “might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness.”

As good Muslims and atheists whom I’ve known in the past have indicated, this warning applies to Christian theology and Scripture as well. Namely, what do we make of the many Old Testament texts in which God commands seemingly evil deeds such as the slaughter of men, women, and children? For just one example, read 1 Samuel 15. Within this chapter, God commands the extermination of an entire people and then proceeds to remove King Saul for office for not having fully carried it out!

Before I proceed any further, I want to make something clear. Within the constraints of a short blog post, I have no pretense of offering an exhaustive defense of the many passages in the Bible which seem to fly in the face of the words just cited from our previous pope. In fact, I have recently authored a 300-page book entitled Dark Passages of the Bible that itself only scratches the surface of this issue. What I hope to achieve here is simply to make an observation which I hope will better frame debate over the Bible’s so-called dark passages, as well as to offer a key principle for explaining their presence from a Catholic perspective—a perspective which, unfortunately, not many Catholics themselves grasp and hence are unable to convey to non-Christians.

To begin, the very notion of violence being contrary to God’s nature is something we Catholics debate amongst ourselves. Thomas Aquinas, for example, seeks to justify violent divine actions in the Old Testament on the basis of the fact that all people are sinners and in fact deserve the punishment of death on account of original sin. Hence Aquinas states, “[B]y the command of God, death can be inflicted on any man, guilty or innocent, without any injustice whatever.” For Augustine as for Aquinas, the problem of thinking God is being cruel when killing people is that we just don’t realize the gravity and pervasiveness of sin and thus the punishment it deserves. Now I love both of these Doctors of the Church, and this is a very brief paraphrase of their arguments, but here I have to join my atheist friends in saying that I simply don’t fully buy the explanation. To be sure, it’s not the only possible Christian answer, but other ones I have come across usually leave me just as unsatisfied. So my observation is this: if even I—a Catholic theologian who buys fully into the Catholic worldview and tradition—don’t find this approach satisfying, then I don’t think we are going to make progress in our dialogue with atheists by taking an approach wherein we seem to have no problem in saying that God directly wills the killing of men, women, and children. Perhaps God does do this. I am open to being convinced otherwise, but again I just don’t buy it.

That said, I am fairly certain that my response is not going to satisfy atheists, either. Yet I do think it makes a step in the right direction by at least admitting that they have a point in seeing the Old Testament’s dark passages as problematic from a certain point of view. So what does the Catholic have to offer the atheist by way of explanation, then?

First, for Pope Benedict with whom I agree, we have first have to admit that the Bible really says what it seems to be saying. It says God did some violent things.

Second, we may admit that what the Bible says does indeed seem to conflict with the nature of God such as we understand it through reason.

Third—and here is the key according to Pope Benedict—the Catholic has to interpret the entire Old Testament as a gradual progression towards Jesus Christ: “Anyone who wishes to understand the biblical belief in God must follow its historical development from its origins with the patriarchs of Israel right up to the last books of the New Testament.” Christians believe the fullness of truth is revealed in the person, teaching, and ministry of Jesus. We look at the entirety of Scripture in light of him. Indeed, according to Pope Benedict, problematic passages in the Old Testament are “valid insofar as they are part of the history leading up to Christ.” Now if he had commanded violence, then we’d be in trouble. (Perhaps you have an objection here, but that’s a topic for another post).

Benedict’s 2010 exhortation Verbum Domini is particularly significant because it has a section entitled “Dark Passages of the Bible” in which he states that instances of violence and immorality in the Bible can be adequately addressed only if Catholics take seriously the fact that “God’s plan is manifested progressively and it is accomplished slowly, in successive stages and despite human resistance.” Benedict admits that “revelation is suited to the cultural and moral level of distant times,” and for this reason the Bible narrates certain things without denouncing their immorality in the way that we would rightly do today. In an interview Benedict stated in the same vein: “It follows straightaway that neither the criterion of inspiration nor that of infallibility can be applied mechanically. It is quite impossible to pick out one single sentence [of the Bible] and say, right, you find this sentence in God’s great book, so it must simply be true in itself.”

Bottom line: the Old Testament does not give us a video-camera account or transcript of what God said and did in times of old. It is God’s word; it is inspired; it is inerrant (Due to space constraints I’m not addressing that issue here, although it definitely needs addressed). Neither I nor Pope Benedict nor anyone who takes such a position need deny these Catholic doctrines. But interpreting passages which seem to contradict the nature of God requires us to recognize that the people who penned the Old Testament were not privy to the fullness of divine revelation and the Catholic tradition whereby we now distinguish, for example, between God’s active will and his permissive will (whereby he allows evil to be done by humans).

Did the authors of the Old Testament think that God wanted them to execute entire peoples? To me it seems disingenuous to reply in the negative. Yet notwithstanding that these authors thought, for Catholicism and its doctrine of biblical inerrancy the question revolves around what they intended to assert or teach, as stated in Vatican II’s constitution Dei Verbum. But I digress. The simplest way to say it is that the Old Testament’s conception of God and God’s deeds was imperfect because God was working with an imperfect people to gradually lead them to Christ. Like any good teacher, God in his divine pedagogy had to work the pupils he had, not the 4.0-GPA honors students he wished he had! The imperfections we see in the Old Testament are therefore not God’s, but rather due to the fact that he deigned to “condescend” (to use a term from the Church Fathers) and patiently work with a truly human people to lead them into communion with himself. I suppose God could have “zapped” people’s minds and taught them the Trinity ten thousand years ago, but in the Catholic worldview this is not the way we understand God typically acts. He creates a human nature and works with it. As the scholastics aptly said, grace builds on nature. Problematic passages within Scripture are among the clearest of evidence that grace does not eliminate human nature.

Like I said above, I don’t expect an atheist to be convinced by this. First of all, it’s an incredibly abbreviated summary covering only one of several key distinctions needed to account for the Bible’s dark passages. Second, to accept the divine pedagogy is already to have accepted something prior to it: namely, the existence of God and faith in Jesus Christ. Seeing Old Testament passages in light of their progression towards Jesus is only going to satisfy someone who already believes that Jesus is God in the flesh. But it’s not my job in this post to prove that Jesus is God or even that God exists. What I’ve tried to do is the only thing a Christian can do in this situation, according to Thomas Aquinas. That job is to provide answers to objections from unbelievers so that they might see what a reasonable way to deal with dark biblical passages might look like if faith in Christ and his revealed word is granted.
 
 
(Image credit: Aleteia)

January 11, 49 B.C. is one of the most famous dates in the history of ancient Rome, even of the ancient world. On that date Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River, committing himself and his followers to civil war. Few, if any, historians doubt that the event happened. On the other hand, numerous skeptics claim that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are myth and have no basis in historical fact. Yet, as historian Paul Merkley pointed out two decades ago in his article, "The Gospels as Historical Testimony," far less historical evidence exists for the crossing of the Rubicon than does for the events depicted in the Gospels:
 

"There are no firsthand testimonies to Caesar’s having crossed the Rubicon (wherever it was). Caesar himself makes no mention in his memoirs of crossing any river. Four historians belonging to the next two or three generations do mention a Rubicon River, and claim that Caesar crossed it. They are: Velleius Paterculus (c.19 B.C.–c.A.D. 30); Plutarch (c.A.D. 46–120); Suetonius (75–160); and Appian (second century). All of these evidently depended on the one published eyewitness account, that of Asinius Pollio (76 B.C.–c. A.D. 4)—which account has disappeared without a trace. No manuscript copies for any of these secondary sources is to be found earlier than several hundred years after their composition." (The Evangelical Quarterly 58, 319-336)

 
Merkley observed that those skeptics who either scoff at the historical reliability of the Gospels or reject them outright as "myth" do so without much, if any, regard for the nature of history in general and the contents of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in particular.

The Distinctive Sign

 
So, are the four Gospels "myth"? Can they be trusted as historical records? If Christianity is about "having faith," do such questions really matter? The latter question is, I hope, easy to answer: Yes, it obviously matters very much if the narratives and discourses recorded by the four evangelists are about real people and historical events. Pope Benedict XVI, in his book Jesus of Nazareth, offers this succinct explanation:
 

"For it is of the very essence of biblical faith to be about real historical events. It does not tell stories symbolizing suprahistorical truths, but is based on history, history that took place here on this earth. The factum historum (historical fact) is not an interchangeable symbolic cipher for biblical faith, but the foundation on which it stands: Et incarnates est —when we say these words, we acknowledge God’s actual entry into real history." (Jesus of Nazareth, xv)

 
Christianity, more than any other religion, is rooted in history and makes strong—even shocking—claims about historical events, most notably that God became man and dwelt among us. Of course, some Christians of a less-than-orthodox persuasion are content to discard large chunks of the Gospels as unnecessary (or even "offensive") or to interpret as "mythological" or "metaphorical" nearly each and every event and belief described therein. But such is not the belief of the Catholic Church (or of the Eastern Orthodox churches and most conservative Protestants). As the Catechism of the Catholic Church flatly states: "Belief in the true Incarnation of the Son of God is the distinctive sign of Christian faith" (CCC 463).

It is, ultimately, this distinctive sign—the conviction that Jesus of Nazareth was and is truly God and man—that is the focal point of attacks on the historical credibility of the Gospels and the New Testament. Over the past few centuries many historians and theologians have sought to uncover the "historical Jesus" and to peel away the many layers of what they believed were legend and theological accretion. Many abandoned hope that any historical (never mind theological) fact could be extracted from the Gospels.

A Work of Fiction

 
There were many complex reasons for this state of affairs, one of them being the Enlightenment-era doctrine that purely scientific, objective history could not only be found, but was necessary. Empirical data became for many scholars—men such as Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and René Descartes—the key to all scholarship, including the study of history. It became the accepted wisdom that supernatural or miraculous elements could not be considered scientific and truly historical and that they had to be rejected. Anything outside the realm of empirical data was liable to be labeled "myth" and "legend."

Fast-forward to our day. The results of this approach are all around us, both in the scholarly and popular realm. Not long ago, a young filmmaker named Brian Flemming produced a documentary titled "The God Who Wasn’t There". Its purpose, he explained in an interview, is to demonstrate that the "biblical Jesus" is a myth. Asked to summarize the evidence for this stance, Flemming explained:
 

"It’s more a matter of demonstrating a positive than a negative, and the positive is that early Christians appeared not to have believed in a historical Jesus. If the very first Christians appear to believe in a mythical Christ, and only later did "historical" details get added bit by bit, that is not consistent with the real man actually existing...I would say that he is a myth in the same way that many other characters people believed actually existed. Like William Tell is most likely a myth, according to many folklorists and many historians. Of course, [Jesus] is a very important myth. I think that he was invented a long time ago, and those stories have been passed on as if they are true." (David Ian Miller, "Finding My Religion," www.sfgate.com)

 
Here "myth" is synonymous with "fiction" or even "falsehood," reflecting the Enlightenment-era bias against anything bearing even trace amounts of the supernatural. "All I’m saying," remarked Flemming, "is that [Jesus] doesn’t exist, and it would be a healthy thing for Christians to look at the Bible as a work of fiction from which they can take inspiration rather than, you know, the authoritative word of God."

"Serious Unicorns"

 
Thus the Gospels, according to skeptics such as Flemming, are compilations of "nice stories" or "silly tales," just like stories about unicorns and the Easter Bunny. Some skeptics mock Christians for holding fearfully onto childish tales while the truly mature people go about the business of making the world a better place. "Meanwhile, we should devote as much time to studying serious theology," stated well-known atheist Richard Dawkins in column in The Independent (Dec. 23, 1998), "as we devote to studying serious fairies and serious unicorns." Fellow atheist Daniel Dennett, in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, wrote:
 

"The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight—that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything [that] a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. That God must either be turned into a symbol for something less concrete or abandoned altogether." (18)

Smarter than Thou

 
Such rhetoric rests both on the assumption that the Gospels are fanciful myth and that the authors of the New Testament (and their readers) were clueless about the difference between historical events and fictional stories. There seems to be an overbearing sense of chronological snobbery at work: We are smarter than people who lived 2,000 years ago. Yet the Second Epistle of Peter demonstrates a clear understanding of the difference between myth and verified historical events: "For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty" (2 Pet. 1:16). The opening verses of Luke’s Gospel indicate that the author undertook the task of writing about real people and events:
 

"Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed." (Luke 1:1-4)

 
And the fourth Gospel concludes with similar remarks:
 

"This is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things, and who has written these things; and we know that his testimony is true. But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written." (John 21:24-25)

 
These quotations do not, of course, prove the historicity of the New Testament. Rather, they suggest that the authors, far from being knuckle-dragging simpletons, set about to write works depicting real people and events—especially since they believed the narratives they recounted had meaning only if they really did occur. As such, their historical content should be judged not against tales of unicorns and Easter bunnies, but against other first-century works of history and historical narrative.

What Is a Gospel?

 
The word gospel comes from the Greek word euangelion, meaning "good news" and refers to the message of Christian belief in the person of Jesus Christ. There has been much scholarly debate about the genre of "gospel" and how it might relate to other forms of writings found in first-century Palestine and the larger ancient world. Obviously, they do contain biographical details, and some scholars have argued in recent years that the gospels are as biographical in nature as anything in the ancient Greco-Roman world.

"The majority of recent specialized studies," writes Evangelical biblical scholar Craig L. Blomberg in Making Sense of the New Testament, "has recognized that the closest parallels are found among the comparatively trustworthy histories and biographies of writers like the Jewish historian Josephus, and the Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides" (28). In his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Catholic theologian and biblical scholar Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis writes:
 

"We must conclude, then, that the genre of the Gospel is not that of pure "history"; but neither is it that of myth, fairy tale, or legend. In fact, euangelion constitutes a genre all its own, a surprising novelty in the literature of the ancient world. Matthew does not seek to be "objective" in a scientific or legal sense. He is writing as one whose life has been drastically changed by the encounter with Jesus of Nazareth. Hence, he is proposing to his listeners an objective reality of history, but offered as kerygma, that is, as a proclamation that bears personal witness to the radical difference that reality has already made in his life." (Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. II: Meditations on the Gospel According to St. Matthew, 44)

 
Many early Christian authors, such as Justin Martyr, referred to the Gospels as memoirs of the apostles. Blomberg has used the descriptive "theological biographies," which captures well the supernatural and human elements found within them.

The Historical Evidence

 
Those supernatural elements—especially the miracles of Jesus and his claims to divinity—are, as we’ve noted, why skeptics call the Gospels "myth" while remaining unruffled about anything written about Julius Caesar and the Rubicon by Velleius Paterculus, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Appian. Yes, Suetonius did write in his account (Lives of the Twelve Caesars) about "an apparition of superhuman size and beauty...sitting on the river bank, playing a reed pipe" who persuaded Caesar to cross the river, but it has not seemed to undermine the belief that Caesar did indeed cross the Rubicon on January 11, 49 B.C. But, for the sake of argument, let’s set aside the theological claims found in the New Testament and take a brief look at the sort of data a historian might examine in gauging the reliability and accuracy of an ancient manuscript.

First, there is the sheer number of ancient copies of the New Testament. There are close to 5,700 full or partial Greek New Testament manuscripts in existence. Most of these date from between the second to 16th century, with the oldest, known as Papyrus 52 (which contains John 18), dating from around A.D. 100–150. By comparison, the average work by a classical author—such as Tacitus (c. A.D. 56–c. 120), Pliny the Younger (A.D. 61–113), Livy (59 B.C.–A.D. 17), and Thucydides (460–395 B.C.)—has about 20 extant manuscripts, the earliest copy usually several centuries later than the original. For example, the earliest copy of works by the prominent Roman historian Suetonius (A.D. 75–130) date to A.D. 950—over 800 years after the original manuscripts had been written.

In addition to the thousands of Greek manuscripts, there are an additional 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and thousands of additional manuscripts in Syriac, Aramaic, and Coptic, for a total of about 24,000 full or partial manuscripts of the New Testament. And then there are the estimated one million quotes from the New Testament in the writings of the Church Fathers (A.D. 150–1300). Obviously, the more manuscripts that are available, the better scholars are able to assess accurately what the original manuscripts contained and to correct errors that may exist in various copies.

When Were They Written?

 
Closely related is the matter of dating. While debate continues as to the exact dating of the Gospels, few biblical scholars believe that any of the four works were written after the end of the first century. "Liberal New Testament scholars today," writes Blomberg, "tend to put Mark a few years one side or the other of A.D. 70, Matthew and Luke–Acts sometime in the 80s, and John in the 90s" (Making Sense of the New Testament, 25). Meanwhile, many conservative scholars date the synoptic Gospels (and Acts) in the 60s and John in the 90s. That means, simply, that there exist four accounts of key events in Jesus’ life written within 30 to 60 years after his Crucifixion—and this within a culture that placed a strong emphasis on the role and place of an accurate oral tradition. Anyone who denies that Jesus existed or who claims that the Gospels are filled with historical errors or fabrications will, in good conscience, have to explain why they don’t make the same assessment about the historical works of Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, Julius Caesar, Livy, Josephus, Tacitus, and other classical authors.

Secondly, historical details are found in the Gospels and the other books of the New Testament. These include numerous mentions of secular rulers and leaders (Caesar Augustus, Pontius Pilate, Herod, Felix, Archelaus, Agrippa, Gallio), as well as Jewish leaders (Caiaphas, Ananias)—the sort of names unlikely to be used inaccurately or even to show up in a "myth." Anglican scholar Paul Barnett, in Is the New Testament Reliable?, provides several pages’ worth of intersections between biblical and non-biblical sources regarding historical events and persons. "Christian sources contribute, on an equal footing with non-Christian sources," he observes, "pieces of information that form part of the fabric of known history. In matters of historical detail, the Christian writers are as valuable to the historian as the non-Christian" (167).

Then there are the specifically Jewish details, including references to and descriptions of festivals, religious traditions, farming and fishing equipment, buildings, trades, social structures, and religious hierarchies. As numerous books and articles have shown in recent decades, the beliefs and ideas found in the Gospels accurately reflect a first-century Jewish context. All of this is important in responding to the claim that the Gospels were written by authors who used Greek and Egyptian myths to create a supernatural man-god out of the faint outline of a lowly Jewish carpenter.

Pay Dirt

 
Various modern archaeological discoveries have validated specific details found in the Gospels:

• In 1961 a mosaic from the third century was found in Caesarea Maritima that had the name "Nazareth" in it. This is the first known ancient non-biblical reference to Nazareth.
• Coins with the names of the Herod family have been discovered, including the names of Herod the king, Herod the tetrarch of Galilee (who killed John the Baptist), Herod Agrippa I (who killed James Zebedee), and Herod Agrippa II (before whom Paul testified).
• In 1990 an ossuary was found inscribed with the Aramaic words, "Joseph son of Caiaphas," believed to be a reference to the high priest Caiaphas.
• In June 1961 Italian archaeologists excavating an ancient Roman amphitheatre near Caesarea-on-the-Sea (Maritima) uncovered a limestone block. On its face is an inscription (part of a larger dedication to Tiberius Caesar) that reads: "Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judaea."

Numerous other finds continue to demolish the notion that the Gospels are mythologies filled with fictional names and events.

The External Evidence

 
Third, there are extra-biblical, ancient references to Jesus and early Christianity. Although the number of non-Christian Roman writings from the first half of the first century is quite small (just a few volumes), there are a couple of significant references.

Writing to the Emperor Trajan around A.D. 112, Pliny the Younger reported on the trials of certain Christians arrested by the Romans. He noted that those who are "really Christians" would never curse Christ:
 

"They asserted, however, that the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so." (Letters, Book 10, Letter 96)

 
The historian Tacitus, in his Annals —considered by historians to be one the finest works of ancient Roman history—mentioned how the Emperor Nero, following the fire in Rome in A.D. 64, persecuted Christians in order to draw attention away from himself. The passage is noteworthy as an unfriendly source because although Tacitus thought Nero was appalling, he also despised the foreign and, to him, superstitious religion of Christianity:
 

"Hence to suppress the rumor, he falsely charged with the guilt, and punished Christians, who were hated for their enormities. Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberius: but the pernicious superstition, repressed for a time broke out again, not only through Judea, where the mischief originated, but through the city of Rome also, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular." (Annals, 15:44)

 
Robert E. Van Voorst, author of Jesus Outside the New Testament, offers a detailed analysis of scholarly controversies about this passage, and then states, "Of all the Roman authors, Tacitus gives us the most precise information about Christ" (45). This includes Tacitus’s understanding that "Christus"—not Paul or someone else—was the founder of the Christian movement. He notes that Christ was executed under Pilate during the reign of Tiberius, and that Judea was the source of the Christian movement. All of which further confirms the historical reliability of the Gospels.

Conclusion

 
As Pope Benedict XVI noted in his book on Jesus, there is much that is good about historical-critical and other scientific methods of studying Scripture. But these approaches have limits. "Neither the individual books of Holy Scripture nor the Scripture as a whole are simply a piece of literature" (Jesus of Nazareth, xx).

The Gospels are not myths or lies, but truthful accounts of the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Answers. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Cross Examined)

The Protestant theologian Paul Tillich once commented that “faith” is the most misunderstood word in the religious vocabulary. I’m increasingly convinced that he was right about this. The ground for my conviction is the absolutely steady reiteration on my Internet forums of gross caricatures of what serious believers mean by faith.

Again and again, my agnostic, atheist, and secularist interlocutors tell me that faith is credulity, naïvete, superstition, assent to irrational nonsense, acceptance of claims for which there is no evidence, etc., etc. And they gladly draw a sharp distinction between faith, so construed, and modern science, which, they argue, is marked by healthy skepticism, empirical verification, a reliable and repeatable method, and the capacity for self-correction. How fortunate, they conclude, that the Western mind was able finally to wriggle free from the constraints of faith and move into the open and well-lighted space of scientific reason. And how sad that, like a ghost from another time and place, faith continues, even in the early twenty-first century to haunt the modern mind and to hinder its progress.

This wave of contention comes at a time when the Catholic Church is winding down its own "Year of Faith.” Which makes it a good time, it seems to me, to clarify what Catholics do and don’t mean by that obviously controversial word.

I will begin with an analogy. If you are coming to know a person, and you are a relatively alert type, your reason will be fully engaged in the process. You will look that person over, see how she dresses and comports herself, assess how she relates to others, You'll Google her and find out where she went to school and how she is employed, ask mutual friends about her, etc. All of this objective investigation could take place even before you had the opportunity to meet her. When you finally make her acquaintance, you will bring to the encounter all that you have learned about her and will undoubtedly attempt to verify at close quarters what you have already discovered on your own.

But then something extraordinary will happen, something over which you have no real control, something that will, inevitably, reveal to you things that you otherwise would never know: she will speak. In doing so, she will, on her own initiative, disclose her mind, her heart, her feelings to you. Some of what she says will be in concord with what you have already found out, but much of it—especially if your relationship has deepened and your conversations are profound and intimate—will be new, wonderful, beyond anything you might have discovered on your own.

But as she speaks and as you listen, you will be faced with a choice: do you believe her or not? Again, some of what she says you might be able to verify through your own previous investigation, but as she speaks of her feelings, her intentions, her aspirations, her most abiding fears, you know that you have entered a territory beyond your capacity to control. And you have to decide: do you trust her or not? So it goes, whether we like it or not, anytime we deal with a person who speaks to us. We don’t surrender our reason as we get to know another person, but we must be willing to go beyond our reason; we must be willing to believe, to trust, to have faith.

This is, I think, an extremely illuminating analogy for faith in the theological sense. For Catholics (and I would invite my Internet friends to pay very close attention here), authentic faith never involves a sacrificium intellectus (a "sacrifice of the intellect"). God wants us to understand all we can about him through reason. By analyzing the order, beauty, and contingency of the world, there is an enormous amount of “information” we can gather concerning God: his existence, his perfection, the fact that he is endowed with intellect and will, his governance of the universe, etc. If you doubt me on this, I would invite you to take a good long look at the first part of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.

Now one of the truths that reason can discover is that God is a person, and the central claim of the Bible is that this Person has not remained utterly hidden but has, indeed, spoken. As is the case with any listener to a person who speaks, the listener to the divine speech has to make a choice: do I believe him or not? The decision to accept in trust what God has spoken about himself is what the Church means by “faith.”

This decision is not irrational, for it rests upon and is conditioned by reason, but it presses beyond reason, for it represents the opening of one heart to another. In the presence of another human being, you could remain stubbornly in an attitude of mistrust, choosing to accept as legitimate only those data that you can garner through rational analysis; but in so doing, you would close yourself to the incomparable riches that that person might disclose to you. The strict rationalist, the unwavering advocate of the scientific method as the only path to truth, will know certain things about the world, but he will never come to know a person.

The same dynamic obtains in regard to God, the supreme Person. The Catholic Church wants people to use reason as vigorously and energetically as possible—and this very much includes scientific reason. But then it invites them, at the limits of their striving, to listen, to trust, to have faith.
 
 
Originally posted at Word on Fire. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Fine Art America)

When asked to prove atheism is true, many atheists say that they don’t have to prove anything. They say atheism is not “belief there is no God” but merely “no belief in a God.” Atheism is defined in this context as a “lack of belief” in God, and if Catholics can’t prove God exists, then a person is justified in being an atheist. But the problem with defining atheism as simply “the lack of belief in God” is that there are already another group of people who fall under that definition: agnostics.

The "I Don't Know's"

 
Agnosticism (from the Greek word for knowledge, gnosis) is the position that a person cannot know if God exists. A strong agnostic is someone like skeptic Michael Shermer, who claims that no one is able to know if God exists. He writes, “I once saw a bumper sticker that read “Militant agnostic: I don’t know and you don’t either.” This is my position on God’s existence: I don’t know and you don’t either.”¹

A weak agnostic merely claims that while he doesn’t know if God exists, it is possible that someone else may know. Agnosticism and weak atheism are very similar in that both groups claim to be “without belief in God.”²

Pope Benedict XVI spoke sympathetically of such people in a 2011 address:
 

"In addition to the two phenomena of religion and anti-religion, a further basic orientation is found in the growing world of agnosticism: people to whom the gift of faith has not been given, but who are nevertheless on the lookout for truth, searching for God. Such people do not simply assert: ‘There is no God.’ They suffer from his absence and yet are inwardly making their way towards him, inasmuch as they seek truth and goodness. They are ‘pilgrims of truth, pilgrims of peace.’"

A Difference Without a Distinction

 
Because agnosticism seems more open-minded than atheism, many atheists are more apt to describe themselves like agnostics, who likewise have “no belief in a God,” even though they call themselves “atheist.” They say that an atheist is just a person who lacks a belief in God but is open to being proven wrong. But saying you lack a belief in God no more answers the question, “Does God exist?” than saying you lack a belief in aliens answers the question, “Do aliens exist?”

This is just agnosticism under a different name.

For example, can we say agnosticism is true? We can’t, because agnostics make no claims about the world; they just describe how they feel about a fact in the world (the existence of God). Likewise, if atheists want us to believe that atheism is true, then they must make a claim about the world and show that what they lack a belief in—God—does not exist.

Belief on Trial

 
An illustration might help explain the burden of proof both sides share. In a murder trial the prosecution must show beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the murder. But if the prosecution isn’t able to make its case, then the defendant is found “not guilty.” Notice the defendant isn’t found “innocent.”

For all we know, he could have committed the crime, but we just can’t prove it. Certain kinds of evidence, like an air-tight alibi, can show the defendant is innocent. But it is the responsibility of the defense to present that evidence.

Likewise, even if the theist isn’t able to make his case that God exists that doesn’t show God does not exist and therefore that atheism is true. As atheists Austin Dacey and Lewis Vaughn write:
 

“What if these arguments purporting to establish that God exists are failures? That is, what if they offer no justification for theistic belief? Must we then conclude that God does not exist? No. Lack of supporting reasons or evidence for a proposition does not show that the proposition is false.”³

 
If he wants to demonstrate that atheism is true, an atheist would have to provide additional evidence that there is no God just as a defense attorney would have to provide further evidence to show his client is innocent as opposed to being just “not guilty.” He can’t simply say the arguments for the existence of God are failures and then rest his case.
 
 
(This blog post is an excerpt from my newly released book, Answering Atheism: How to Make the Case for God with Logic and Charity.)
 
 

A while back I mentioned to an atheist acquaintance that I'd cried at Mass that morning. I explained that it was one of those times when I felt overwhelmed with the presence of God; I was so perfectly at peace, so surrounded by love, that I couldn't help but be moved to tears.

"Maybe it was the music," he responded. He went on to offer an erudite analysis of how music is known to produce certain positive sensations in the brain, noting that religious leaders from time immemorial have used the evolved human response to the stimulus of music to delude the faithful into believing that they've experience the divine.

I had to smile at his suggestion, because I actually agreed with part of his argument.

I never had a "religious experience" before my conversion from atheism to Christianity, and couldn't even imagine what that might be like. Would harp-playing angels appear in front of you? Would you hear a booming voice fill the room? I had no idea.

There had been a handful of moments in my life, however, when I experienced something that was unlike anything else I'd ever felt. On a few rare occasions I felt overcome with an odd sensation, an ecstatic elation on top of inner stillness that was so powerful that it made me feel as if I'd slipped into some other dimension. It was a moment of feeling compelled to relax, to let go, to just trust (trust in what or whom I didn't know, but that was definitely an overriding feeling when I had those experiences). Those moments were...well, if I hadn't been so certain that nothing existed beyond the material world, I might have said "spiritual." And they always occurred when I was listening to music.

It seemed illogical, really, that a mere arrangement of certain sounds in a certain order could transport me, for however brief a moment, into such a sublime state. I was aware of all the natural explanations for music's impact on the human brain; yet when I'd read about how the cochlea transmits information along the auditory nerve as neural discharges into the auditory cortex in the temporal lobe, I'd think, "Uhh, yeah, that's true…but I feel like there's something more going on as well."

One of the many things that rang true when I began studying Catholic theology was the emphasis on art—music, in particular—as a reflection of God. I came to see art as a sort of "secret handshake" of beings with souls: We share 96% of our DNA with chimps, but chimps don't write symphonies. Dogs don't rap. Dolphins can be trained to reproduce musical rhythms, but they don't sing songs. Only the creature made in the image and likeness of God can speak the secret language of music.

In other words, I realized that all those experiences I'd had while listening to music were so tremendous because they were experiences of my soul having a brush with its Creator. Or, in Pope Benedict's words:

"The encounter with the beautiful can become the wound of the arrow that strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes, so that later, from this experience, we take the criteria for judgment and can correctly evaluate the arguments. For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter. I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said:
 
"Anyone who has heard this, knows that the faith is true."
 
The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the power of the Truth that became real in the composer's inspiration."

Christianity doesn't deny that beautiful music can move us to feel something; in fact, it acknowledges it, and then takes it a step farther by articulating exactly what it is we're feeling. And that's why I smiled when I heard my atheist friend's comment. It is actually because I am a Christian that I take that moment at Mass when I became filled with so much love and hope that I felt like I could explode with joy, and I say: Yes, maybe it was the music.
 
 
Originally posted at the National Catholic Register. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: VK.com)