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In my last couple of posts I’ve raised some problems with the idea of demythologizing an ancient set of ethical views, such as those of Jesus. The gist of the problem that I’ve raised is that every ethical injunction – just as every teaching, doctrine, piece of advice, sentence, word, communication of any kind – is not just *framed* within a linguistic, cultural, social, historical context: the context is actually determinative of the meaning of a word, sentence, etc. And if that’s true, then ripping a communication out of its context means necessarily to alter – once could say to destroy – its meaning. That at least has been my objection.
And now I have a response to that objection from the other side. It is a two-pronged response.
Prong One: I don’t think that it’s fair to say that context is absolutely *everything*. Context is a *lot*, but a communication consists of a sequence of sensible utterances (or written symbols) that occur *within* a context. As such, they not only participate in that context, they also establish that context (for example, for other communications). And that means that to some extent the communication has some kind of independent status. The communication may make no sense outside of its context, but that does not mean that the communication does not exist. It simply exists within its context.
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Because Jesus gets paid the most lip service as moral teachers go in your context (that is, by those around you and in power.)
I certainly think ancient voices can speak to us in a meaningful way, in a modern context. But I think that we would have to agree on a process and structure for analyzing ancient wisdom or ethical teaching. On one extreme we would have a literal-factual interpretation; on the other, a purely symbolic interpretation. In either extreme case, there would be a real danger in coming to an understanding outside of any “timeless truth” the original may have contained.
Returning to the C. S. Lewis quotation, without repeating it completely, he ends with this , “But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Well, I disagree. Jesus was a great human teacher, and much more. If we do NOT believe he was the Son of God, or God Himself, or if we DO believe he was, he still was a great human teacher….perhaps not the greatest, but a great human teacher. nonetheless.
Jesus could be a great human teacher and the Son of God, or he could be a great human teacher and not be the Son of God. His teachings stand on their own merits.
His teachings about caring for humanity are universal, regardless of who teaches such.
His teachings are as relevant today as they were in his day, regardless of who Jesus was. He did not have to be God to be a great human teacher.
His teaching motivate me and they motivate others (regardless of faith) and they do not need to be demythologized.
This is my opinion on this issue.
Very fine series of essays. Thank you for presenting them to us.
I think by having some sort of tie with Jesus as a humanist you are not returning to the religion of your youth by default. You understand him in a different way. You don’t have to agree with someone 100% (or be able to understand fully!) to appreciate something of what they say. No human has a perfect understanding of the world. I have my own experiences and opinions which have been influenced in many ways because I’ve chosen to interact with people (past and present) with different views. I’ve drawn things from Jesus and Buddha and many different people, even though I don’t hold the same worldviews as them. I also draw from my friends and family to better understand the world. If I don’t turn to other people to challenge me, to teach me something, etc. I will never grow. By engaging with people (past and present) with different worldviews, opinions, etc. I learn and grow and become a better person.
Yes. I was going to recommend that you re-read Gadamer, figuring that someone like you must have read him once. Funny, but I ALSO have a wife in academics who told me a year ago I had to read Gadamer to continue in my religious studies.
I’d also ask if you’ve ever read Krister Stendahl’s work on Biblical Theology and Systematic Theology. Stendahl is one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever encountered (no, I never met him). Stendahl’s Biblical Theology is what you described, a thorough-going deep dive into what a text MEANT when it was written. Sure, Stendahl had doubts about Biblical Theology — he’d read Gadamer too — but he felt that the doing of Biblical Theology is absolutely necessary.
For Stendahl, Systematic Theology is what the text MEANS. Stendahl said that what a text meant is not what it means (i.e., fundamentalists are wrong), and what a text means is not what it meant (i.e., Barth and Bultmann are wrong). Stendahl saw Systematic Theology as essentially a creative effort, the creative part being bringing the meaning of a text across time and context. This is what got Stendahl in trouble with Kasemann — Kasemann wanted the NT to absolutely MEAN something, as a bulwark to what he experienced in the Lutheran Church of Nazi Germany. Stendahl’s response was, in briefest terms, that the “biblical imperialism” of people like Kasemann was what led to the attitudes towards Jews that made Nazi Germany possible. Fascinating stuff IMHO.
So, Stendahl could read Paul to have MEANT that women should not speak in church, and to MEAN that women should be ordained. If you’ve read Stendahl’s “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West”, you have a good flavor for Stendahl’s thinking.
For me, all this means that we can bring Jesus’ teaching into the 21st century, but not with whatever authority Jesus may have possessed 2,000 years ago. There is necessarily a creative effort in interpreting ancient texts (Gadamer would say the same thing about modern texts), and as we humans provide the creative effort, the authority of Systematic Theology is human authority even if we regard the texts themselves as of divine origin.
As for who you choose as a teacher — that’s up to you! But in the end analysis, I don’t think you can escape Stendahl. You have to make a creative effort to learn from a teacher, and the effort is bigger the further removed you are from your teacher. You might consider Jesus, if only because you know him well enough to do the “what it meant” analysis pretty damn well!
Yes, I met Krister Stendahl — he was a very famous scholar in my field — and as a graduate student we abolutely had to know and master the “Introspective Conscience of the West” article. His distinction between what a text “meant” and what it “means” has had a lot of followers, but also a lot of detractors, especially among those who do not thing that a distinterested determination of past meaning is possible. But I myself think it has a lot going for it.
I SO wish I could have met Stendahl. As a Jew interested in Jewish-Christian dialog, I cannot think of a single person who did more to make it possible. AFAIK, no one has written his biography, and someone should.
To answer the last question: I don’t think you should. Readjusting Jesus to suit our own purposes is what the church has done to him for centuries, and I think it’s about time we let the poor guy rest in peace. We’ve already got a lot of non-religious moral philosophers who, I think, are more realistic about the problems people face on this planet, and don’t tell people to “behold the lillies of the field” and wait on a god to come and rescue them from an indifferent world.
“Suppose it is indeed possible to have that kind of close interaction with the words of Jesus on ethics from the past. Why should I want to? That is, if I’m a secular humanist (I am), why should I care what a first-century thoroughly religious apocalyptic Jew had to say about how his hearers should live their lives?”
The choice is entirely up to the modern-day individual: whether to choose to read and try to understand and thereby draw inspiration from ancient writers. Secular humanists deploy methods and principles of secular ethics when it comes to evaluating how one ought to live. They are confident of humanity’s ability to reach the right conclusions about ethical behaviour and what makes for human flourishing. Nonetheless, we also need guidance, wisdom and inspiration from other people, and to learn from tried and tested ways of living. Secular humanists should read religious texts critically and with an open-mind, to appropriate the good teachings from the outdated ones. To reject wholesale religious writings solely on the basis of their religious character is to make the same istake of dogmatism as religious fundamentalists who accept uncritically everything from their sacred texts solely on the basis of them being sacred texts.
There are few moral teachers who have as thorough impact on Western civilisation as Jesus – for a start, the notions of the “good samaritan”, “prodigal son”, “turning the other cheek” for example are entrenched into the English language. His aphorisms and parables have remarkable depth despite their apparent simplicity, are memorable, capable of being appreciated by kids and adults.
“Why not go to Socrates, or Epictetus, or Marcus Aurelius, or Seneca (OK, I’m picking the voices I like, which tend to be Platonic and Stoic), or – just to break the mold – Lucretius, or Thoreau, or Emerson, or … or someone else? By picking Jesus, aren’t I simply relapsing to the religion of my youth by default? Why would I want to do that?”
It is not only Christians who attempt to follow Jesus’ teachings and ethics. Other non-Christian religious leaders in modern times, like Gandhi, the current Dalai Lama, also find Jesus a morally uplifting teacher. Muslims recognise Jesus as a prophet of God, though are suspicious of the historical accuracy of the gospels. Muslims revere Jesus as they do with all the Abrahamic prophets. When the ethical teachings of Socrates, Plato, Marcus Aurelius and others are critically evaluated with sensitivity to the historical contexts they live under and the specific societal problems facing them, they are entirely compatible with a de-apocalytised reading of Jesus’ ethical teachings. In following Jesus’ ethics, one is not doing so to the exclusion of other moral teachers. Those who are concerned with social inequality and social injustice, and those who work for the welfare of the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick are following Jesus’ ethics even if they have never read the gospels.
Good points!!
While a great deal of my moral fiber continues to be based upon the religion of my youth, I have been looking more and more, in recent years, at the Poetic Eddas of the pre-Christian Norse peoples for some interesting principles. For example, the Havamal is a book of sayings attributed to Odin which is somewhat akin to Proverbs or the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. I’ve found a great deal of wisdom in that text, of late, despite the fact that it was composed for a very different people living in a very different time.
I’ve been anticipating those last two paragraphs since the start of this series and am eagerly awaiting your thoughts on it. For me (also a former Christian, current agnostic), I consciously seek out other viewpoints rather than rehashing Jesus in a demythologized context precisely because I already spent a large part of my life on the latter. I don’t see anything wrong with the practice necessarily, but I think too often such aims serve to perpetuate the mythic belief rather than displacing it. That is, the approach doesn’t filter down to the general believing population, but operates as a way to keep budding independent thinkers in the religion by providing sophisticated justifications for beliefs adopted for unsophisticated reasons.
Why pick the ethics of Jesus over the ethics of other teachers? Does it have to be either one way or the other? Why not learn from all using as much reason and historical evidence as possible? Even if the story of Jesus is clouded in legend, who were these guys who made up this extraordinary legend and from where did this stuff come?
Two related observations from my recent Durham newspaper:
1. Evidently, there is some dispute about the meaning of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “content of character” statement. Evidently, the same quote is used to support opposing views of the affirmative action debate. So, what did the “content of character” statement actually mean? Does the statement need to be demythologized? What was the context of the statement? If we have this much trouble interpreting something that is fairly recent, shouldn’t we have even more trouble interpreting something that is over 2,000 years old?
2. A recent study has shown that once Sarah Palin’s myth about “death panels” in the Affordable Health Care Plan has been entrenched into someone’s mind, it cannot be changed by reasonable evidence. The power of myths is quite remarkable.
I am just going to persist in my own line of thinking and add a post that I found on the Internet today. How does a moral code from the time of Jesus help with the issues we face today. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2265402/Adventurous-human-woman-wanted-birth-Neanderthal-man-Harvard-professor.html
Wow…
Short answer = IT DOESN’T!!! If anything, it can make things worse.
Assuming articificial insemmination (a given, I gather), this could technically be a virgin birth. Messi-Ugg?
You might enjoy Decoding Neanderthals, a program recently aired on PBS’s NOVA series. It can be seen here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/decoding-neanderthals.html
The film features John Hawks, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, whose blog I occasionally check in on because of how fascinating this subject is! Haven’t you noticed how smarter Neanderthals are now that it is known that modern humans carry Neanderthal DNA?
And one could not argue that we should look to Jesus for our moral understanding since it originated with him. Do unto others can be found in the Analects of Confucius which predates the New Testament.