I’ve been trying to understand “sophisticated Christians” like your friend Professor Dale Martin — genuine New Testament scholars who fully accept that core tenets of the religion are historically false (the end did not arrive when predicted), internally contradictory, shaped by later church fathers, and unlikely to reflect what Jesus himself held — yet who still sincerely identify as Christians.
As I understand it, drawing on George Lindbeck’s regulative theology, the move is to concede Christianity may be factually false while relocating its “truth” to the good it does for the community that practices it. But many false beliefs produce good outcomes. Someone might give generously only because they believe God rewards it — the giving is real, the belief simply mistaken.
Two objections. First, the ordinary believer isn’t an intellectual operating with a redefined “truth.” Paul believed Christ physically rose; it wasn’t a metaphor to him, nor is it to most Christians today. There’s something paternalistic, even deceptive, in preserving the masses’ literal belief because you like its outcomes — while you hold a rarefied version they’d likely reject as no longer their faith. Second, this conflates social function with truth. That a belief yields good behavior says nothing about whether it’s true, and surely some of the merit of doing good is diminished when done for the wrong reasons.
Why am I wrong to find something deeply disingenuous in this brand of Christianity?
Eric, you are asking the right question. I do not think the answer should begin by telling you that you have misunderstood Lindbeck or Martin. You have seen something real. Religious language can become empty. It can survive every serious challenge by quietly changing its meaning. The old words may then keep their power, even though the new meaning could not carry that power by itself. Someone who says “Christ is risen,” but means only that the disciples found new courage, is borrowing weight from people who meant that something really happened. You are also right that usefulness is not truth. A false belief can make someone generous or brave. That does not make the belief true. So the answer cannot be that Christianity is true because it works. Nor can someone keep every traditional Christian sentence while quietly removing every claim it once made about reality.
But I would place one alternative beside your conclusion. A Christianity shaped by historical criticism is not dishonest simply because it revises what earlier Christians believed. It becomes dishonest when it hides what it has revised. The question is whether it says clearly what it still affirms, what it denies, and what it will not give up. The last of these matters most. A position that rules nothing out can adjust itself to every possible result, and your criticism lands against such a position. But a position that names a real limit is different.
Here is that limit as I understand it: “Christ is risen” must still mean that God really did something with the dead Jesus. If someone says that God did nothing with Jesus, and that the resurrection exists only in the language, hope, and practices of the Christian community, then the word “resurrection” has lost what Paul meant by it. That is the point of 1 Corinthians 15:14. Paul says that if Christ was not raised, the preaching and the faith are empty. He does not say that the story remains true because it produces a loving community. He believes that something must actually be the case, whether people believe it or not.
This does not mean that historical research can prove that God raised Jesus. A historian can study the early reports, the experiences of the disciples, the empty tomb, and the growth of the belief. But historical research cannot by itself identify something as an act of God. The limit is therefore not a historical proof. It is a statement of what the faith actually claims. Its failure condition is clear, even if historical research cannot establish that this condition has been met: if God did nothing with the dead Jesus, then the Christian claim about the resurrection is false. Changing the meaning of “resurrection” so that it no longer refers to anything God did with Jesus does not save that claim. It replaces it with a different one. Many questions can still remain open: the empty tomb, the nature of the risen body, visions and appearances, and what historians can responsibly conclude. But not everything remains open. That is the third possibility between accepting every traditional statement without question and treating Christianity as a useful fiction.
Two corrections may still be worth making, but they come second. Lindbeck did not simply argue that Christianity is true because it works. He believed Christian language still refers to reality, although he understood the relation between language, life, and truth differently. And Dale Martin may not be the best example of the position you criticize. He stated his method openly and defended a real but transformed, spiritual body, not merely the continuing influence of Jesus’ ideals. He may therefore meet the limit described above. I mention this not to defend him, but because the strongest form of your objection needs a clearer target.
2380, I think there is a name for the difficulty you describe. The historical evidence does not by itself settle the final question. It leaves room for more than one serious conclusion. This is sometimes called underdetermination. It is not simply an error or a compromise. It is a feature of the evidence. But it does create a responsibility. When history does not force the conclusion, we must say what carries the weight of our belief and what would cause it to fail. A faith that can say what it affirms, what it cannot prove, and what would make it false is not a compromise. It is a position.
I don’t want to speak for Dale Martin or George Lindbeck, but I think generally grasping the internal logic of Liberal Christianity requires reorienting away from dogma and toward the existential.
If we look outside of Christianity, many religions are more about communal identity and practice than they are about doctrine.
Contemporary Judaism is instructive. You can find Jews who think Abraham and Moses are mythological but who practice circumcision and keep the Passover. You can find Jews who don’t believe in a personal God but fast on Yom Kippur.
You see the same thing in Hinduism (or ancient Greek paganism): The mythology and practices are set, but how devotees understand and interpret them is open to the individual to work out.
I think that is what is motivating Liberal Christianities–you have people who grew up Christian, who drank the Christian stories and music and art and liturgy and ethical examples with their mothers’ milk, but they no longer accept many of the claims. But all those things remain deeply resonant and meaningful to them, even if they understand them differently.
Porphyry, I think you are right about this, and I think it goes deeper than sociology. We are shaped by a tradition before we ever begin to examine it. The stories, the music, the liturgy, the habits, the people we admired, all of that enters us long before we ask whether Abraham existed, whether Moses wrote anything, or what exactly happened at Easter. It becomes part of how we see. So when someone later changes his mind about the history, the rest does not simply fall away. He may no longer believe what he once believed and still find that the tradition speaks to him more deeply than anything else does. Your comparison with Judaism helps me understand that. People can remain within the same practices while holding very different views about where those practices came from.
I still do not think that quite answers Eric, though. It explains why someone stays. It explains why the words, music, and rituals still matter. And that attachment may be completely sincere. I do not want to question that. But when someone says, “Christ is risen,” another question arises. What is he actually saying? Does he mean that God did something with the dead Jesus? Or does he mean that Jesus’ followers found new hope and a new way of understanding his death? Both may be meaningful, but they are not the same claim. That is the point where belonging does not settle the matter. It explains why the words remain precious. It does not yet tell us what they mean in the speaker’s mouth.
I say this as an outsider to Judaism, and I may be drawing the line in the wrong place. But it seems to me that fasting or celebrating Passover can carry convictions without stating exactly what the participant believes about God or about the events being remembered. The practice can remain even when the person’s understanding of its history changes. “Christ is risen” is also part of worship, of course. But it does not only carry a conviction. It states one. It says something about Jesus, a particular man who had died. In Paul’s argument, something happened to Jesus himself. The sentence became part of Christian worship because of that claim. Its use in worship did not make the claim unnecessary. Passover may therefore show that a practice can continue after the practice and its traditional historical account have come apart. But with “Christ is risen,” the historical reference is not merely the background of the sentence. It is part of what the sentence says.
This is why I tried in my earlier post to name a limit rather than offer a proof. Historical research cannot prove that God raised Jesus. But the claim can still be false. If God did nothing with the dead Jesus, then God did not raise him, however much the tradition may continue to nourish the people who inherited it.
So I think your point stands, and Eric’s question also stands. You have made the liberal Christian much easier to understand. He need not be playing an intellectual game. He may love the tradition honestly and may have been formed by it too deeply simply to leave it behind. Eric is asking what comes next. When he keeps the words, what does he still mean by them? I do not think everyone has to give exactly the same account. But I do think we owe each other enough clarity to say what we believe, what we no longer believe, and what would make what we are saying untrue.
I would suggest that liturgical, and other formulaic utterances, become as much performative as they are plain assertions.
Imagine an atheist saying “God bless you,” when you sneeze; the theist might still mean it quite literally, but he also tolerates the fact that other people use it in a different sense. So too a Jew who doesn’t believe in the Exodus narrative reciting the Haggadah–“if the Holy One had not brought our ancestors out of Egypt, we and our children would still be slaves in Egypt”–or a Liberal Christian reciting the Nicaean Creed. That is not to say there is no semantic content in the utterance, but it may need to be interpreted in a different, perhaps less literalistic, frame.
If we admit that there is meaning and sincerity in such utterances, that seems to avoid the charge of paternalism or disingeuousness.
I think it is important to note that we see reinterpretation and renegotiation of literal meanings in the tradition itself. Look at how Is 7:14 was reinterpreted by Christians in a way no Jew would accept. Similarly the way Hebrew Scripture itself reinterpreted the plain command in Ex 22:29 to sacrifice your firstborn son on the eighth day. Keeping the formula and changing the meaning–even radically changing the meaning–has a long history in the very tradition we are discussing.
Porphyry, you have corrected me here. I drew the line too sharply between a practice and a sentence. A liturgical sentence is not just a statement that happens to be spoken in church; saying it can be an act of remembrance, of loyalty, of worship, of placing yourself inside a story that is older than you are. Your Haggadah example shows that far better than fasting did, because there a man really does say something about what God did in Egypt, and he may say it while no longer holding that the history went as the words seem to describe. So my earlier line “it is still a sentence about Jesus” was too quick, and I withdraw it.
What I do not yet see is why words that do something should stop saying something. Both seem possible at once. This is where 1 Corinthians 15 keeps troubling me. Paul is not only interested in what the confession does for the community. He writes that if Christ was not raised, then the preaching is empty and so is the faith. The words may well form the church, but in his argument they lean on something having happened to Jesus, and he does not appear to leave that part open.
Your wider point about reinterpretation I accept. Traditions do not keep their words by keeping the meanings still. They read them again, sometimes in ways the first speaker could hardly have imagined. But Matthew and Isaiah still seem to me a slightly different case from the one Eric is worried about. Matthew does not keep the old words while quietly stepping back from any claim about how things are; he gives the text a new reference and says out loud what he takes it to mean now. The reading may be good or bad, that is another discussion, but it is not concealed. About Exodus I do not know enough to say who is right, and I will leave it there. Your general point does not depend on it.
“God bless you” helps me in a different way than you perhaps intended. It works because we all know the phrase is often said without any confession behind it. Speaker and hearer share the convention. The atheist is not counting on being taken for a believer. And that does take much of the force out of any general accusation that liberal Christians are pretending. They may be speaking sincerely, participating in a tradition that formed them long before they could examine it, with words that carry more than one kind of weight.
Only I am not sure it settles everything Eric asked. There seem to me two questions lying on top of each other. The first is whether the man is speaking honestly, and here, Porphyry, I think you have shown well enough that the answer can be yes: where the changed meaning is known and available and not kept back, the charge of deception becomes hard to make stick. The second question is what the words still claim, and that one is not touched by the first.
Suppose a church where everyone says plainly that God did nothing with the dead Jesus, and that “resurrection” means the hope and the language and the shared life that came up after he died. Nobody is deceived there. No paternalism, no teaching for the educated behind the teaching for the rest. I would still want to ask whether that is what Paul meant when he said Christ was raised. A man can be entirely sincere, everyone around him can understand him exactly, and he can still be using an old sentence for a new claim.
I do not say this against anyone in this thread. It is only why I tried earlier to name a boundary instead of offering a proof. History cannot show that God raised Jesus. But if God did nothing with the dead Jesus, then I do not see how it can still be true that God raised him, however honest the speaker, and however much the words go on meaning something to those who say them.
I appreciate your engagement; and I don’t mean to present this as more cut-and-dry than it is; I’ve spent years struggling through this, and I don’t mean to give the impression I’ve got it figured out.
On the issue of Paul, I think you raise a live question. I have two considerations:
First, there is good reason to question whether Paul himself understood resurrection as physical resuscitation. Note for example, that his own experience of the risen Christ seems to have been what we would call an encounter not with a material body, but an apparition or, better, a vision had in a trance; and he equates his experience of the risen Christ with the experience of others (including Peter and James). He does not seem to have any awareness of an empty tomb, of probing Christ’s wounds, or of the risen Christ eating fish to prove his material reality. If that is right, and Paul understood resurrection differently from even the evangelists, it lends further credibility to the view of Christianity as a living tradition and open to reinterpretation and revision.
Second, a liberal would not accept the inerrancy of Scripture. The liberal does not view Paul’s theology as settling all theological questions once and for all and binding all subsequent Christians. The liberal sees Paul as an important voice in the tradition, a voice that deserves to be engaged but that needn’t settle all questions or be followed slavishly in each of his particular conclusions and convictions. Many Christians are perfectly happy to revise Paul’s treatment of women, and no Christian accepts the most natural reading of 1 Thess. on the timing of the eschaton (including even the author of 2 Thess). The liberal sees himself as simply accepting this state of affairs honestly and the orthodox as trying to cover Paul’s nakedness with a fig leaf.
Porphyry, I appreciate the way you say this, and especially your opening. I can well believe that you have struggled with it for years, and I do not read you as a man who thinks he has it solved.
On your first point, “physical resuscitation” is indeed too crude a description of Paul. He is not thinking of Lazarus coming back into ordinary mortal life. He speaks of change, of incorruptibility, of a sōma pneumatikon. And my boundary never required Paul’s encounter to be an ordinary meeting with a physically present Jesus. It required only that Paul took God to have done something with Jesus himself, rather than that the resurrection consisted in the experiences and the new understanding of his followers. Read that way, I do not yet see that your account of his vision puts him on the far side of that line. It may only show that the line lies lower than either of us was assuming.
I also agree that a liberal Christian need not treat Paul as inerrant, or as settling every later question. Your examples are useful to me here. When Christians revise Paul on women, or on how near the end was, they do it by saying more or less openly that he was wrong, or bound by his time and culture, or not to be followed at that point. That seems to me an honest way for a living tradition to change. And the same road is open with the resurrection. A man may say plainly that Paul believed God raised Jesus and that he himself no longer believes it. Or he may go on saying “Christ is risen” and make clear what he now takes it to mean. Both are honest. The trouble starts only on a third road, where the old sentence stays, the reference to something God did with Jesus quietly goes, and the change is not made clear.
Your image of the orthodox covering Paul’s nakedness with a fig leaf is sharp, and sometimes it is deserved. There are readings that work very hard to keep Paul from ever having been mistaken about anything. The liberal may well be the more honest reader when he simply admits the mistake. I would only ask that the same honesty be used when the revision touches the resurrection. If Paul’s claim is being rejected rather than interpreted, there is nothing wrong with saying so out loud. It is clearer than making his words carry a conclusion he did not hold.
Which brings me back to Eric. I think your answer does weaken any general charge that liberal Christians are insincere or quietly pretending. But his narrower worry can still stand. The question was never whether Christians may revise Paul; plainly they do, and always have. It is whether the revision is made visible, so that the man next to you can tell whether “Christ is risen” still means that God did something with the dead Jesus, or whether it has come to mean something else.
You are pressing points that I feel.
Let me just add one final thought.
I find myself sometimes torn between a view roughly equivalent Stephen’s: ‘agnostic’ is an intellectually wimpy label to adopt–it amounts to what atheists mean in calling themselves atheists, so the honest thing is for the agnostic to just call himself what he is; other times I feel compelled by Robert’s reading of the Christian apophatic tradition: sure I believe in God but you can’t say anything about him, not even that he exists.
The difference between offering a (re-)interpretation of Christianity from within the context of Christianity and simply rejecting Christianity as wrong is often a matter of choice.
Propositions and formulae require interpretation. Look at how Catholics have addressed the doctrine of virginitas in partu: Some hold to the old patristic view (inherited, ultimately, from the Protoevangelium of James) that Mary’s hymen remained intact even as she (miraculously) delivered the Christ child, others decided to reinterpret what virginity meant: she continued not to have had sexual relations with a man. The latter see themselves as saving the formula from silly superstition and giving it a respectable meaning, the former think the second group is stultifying a dogma and giving it a meaning that is totally foreign to the tradition. Both have a point.
So is it more honest to reject outright a dogma you can’t accept as literally true in its plain meaning, to reinterpret it (perhaps in a way that seems entirely foreign to its historical context and at odds with the naive reading of the words), or to go on holding the dogma understood in a way that, though most natural and historically authentic, you find incredible.
So I suppose, I’m willing to give leniency to the people who confess that Christ is risen, but understand that profession of faith in such a way that (somehow) finding his bones wouldn’t actually change the formula they confess.
The orthodox are happy to do violence to the text of scripture to harmonize apparently conflicting passages, so why should I give less interpretative wiggle room to a liberal Christian when he finds a somewhat contorted way to reconcile his convictions to the articles of faith?
I think looking at membership in philosophical schools could be illustrative. If someone is trained in a school, knows its language and arguments inside and out, thinks in its terms, and contests or radically reinterprets its own central theses, is that person a member of the school or not? If you think of a philosophical school as a discussion, an ongoing and unfolding argument, he could certainly be an important contributor to that developing argument. There may not be a clean and objective answer to the group membership question, but there is at least a plausible argument that he deserves to be included in that philosophical school.
Banez has become synonymous with Thomism, though he verbally contradicts Aquinas on central points (he would insist the contradiction is merely verbal). Molina, viewed by most Thomists as the principal opponent of Thomism, viewed himself as developing Thomas’s project and filling in holes in Aquinas’s account. So who is the true Thomist?
Porphyry, I think I would not quite identify Stephen’s agnosticism with Robert’s apophaticism. The apophatic tradition begins in worship, not in suspended judgment. It does not say that there may be nobody there. It says that the one being addressed cannot be contained by the words used of him. That may not resolve the tension you feel, but the two positions are less alike than they may first appear.
Your example of finding Jesus’ bones brings us directly to the difficult point, although I think one distinction matters.
Finding Jesus’ bones would not necessarily be the same as showing that God did nothing with Jesus. Someone might believe that God raised Jesus into a heavenly or pneumatic life without the earthly remains disappearing. I might find that interpretation unconvincing, but it would still make a claim about something God did with Jesus.
This is not a retreat from the limit I named earlier. I said then that historical research cannot establish that God acted. The limit was never that one particular historical finding would settle the question.
The decisive question is therefore why the bones would make no difference.
If they would make no difference because “resurrection” means only that the disciples found new hope, or that the Church continued Jesus’ cause, then I cannot follow. Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 15 runs the other way: if Christ was not raised, the preaching and the faith are empty. The question is not simply whether earthly remains could exist. It is whether anything happened to Jesus himself, rather than only to his followers.
Your example of virginitas in partu helps to clarify the distinction.
The second group may have moved a very long way from the patristic meaning. They may even have replaced a claim about Mary’s body during childbirth with a different claim about sexual relations. The first group therefore has a real argument against them.
But the second group has not stopped making a claim about reality. It still says that Mary had not had sexual relations with a man. The dispute is between two accounts of what the formula asserts, not yet between an account and no account at all.
That does not prove that the reinterpretation is faithful. It does show what an honest reinterpretation must do: state what the formula now asserts and acknowledge how far that may be from its earlier meaning.
Your three options are the sharpest formulation of the problem in this thread. I would answer them symmetrically.
Rejecting a dogma can be honest.
Reinterpreting it can be honest, even when the reinterpretation is strained, provided the strain and the change are admitted.
Continuing to confess the older meaning can also be honest if a person truly assents to it, even while finding it difficult or improbable.
The dishonesty begins when public words suggest an assent that private conviction no longer contains. That standard applies in both directions. It catches the liberal who quietly empties a formula, but also the conservative who hides his actual position behind forced harmonisation.
I should say that this question is not academic for me. I once left a congregation over it. That is not an argument, and I do not offer it as one. But it is why I want the standard to cut in both directions, and not only against the people I happen to disagree with.
On Báñez and Molina, I accept that there may be no clean and neutral answer to the question of who is the true Thomist. But their disagreement was explicit. Their claims were stated, published, and contested. The question “Who truly belongs to this school?” may remain open. The question “What does Molina actually claim?” need not.
That is the distinction I would make here as well.
ERIC,
this is where I think your objection lands and where I think it reaches too far. It does not land against every revision of a traditional claim. It lands wherever the revision is not stated, where the words go on doing their old work while the assent behind them has changed. That is a narrower charge than the one you began with. But it can be tested, case by case, and it is not reserved for liberals.
I am not trying to decide who may call himself a Christian. I am asking the smaller question of whether those who hear a confession can discover what the speaker is affirming, what he is denying, and what would make his claim false.
Robert, you are right. Porphyry did not identify your position with Stephen’s. He said that he feels the pull of both, and I answered as though he had run the two together.
I also described your apophaticism too much in terms of the classical tradition, instead of listening carefully enough to your own description of it as an apophatic agnosticism that brackets metaphysical and religious beliefs as metaphor and personal mythology. I withdraw that paragraph.
Your clarification does help me with Eric’s question, because his concern, as I understand it, is not simply that Christian language gets reinterpreted. It is that familiar words may continue to carry their old meaning for ordinary believers while the revised meaning remains largely unstated. That is where his concern about paternalism and concealment enters.
That is not what you are doing. You have said plainly what you bracket and what the language still means for you. Someone may still think the position mistaken, or ask whether metaphor and personal mythology can carry the Christian formulas. But the change of meaning is not hidden.
I withdrew my earlier paragraph, but I should say that one part of it still seems to me to hold, though not as a correction of your use of apophatic. The older apophatic writers I had in mind did not bracket whether God was real. They addressed God as real while denying that their words could contain him. Your own description has helped me see more clearly that your apophatic agnosticism makes a different move.
So Eric’s two concerns may need to be separated. A position may be openly stated and still be false. But when someone has made clear what he affirms, what he brackets, and how he uses the language, the charge of hidden revision no longer lands in the same way.
Porphyry, you said that was your final thought. If so, thank you for the exchange, it has been a good one. I think it is wise to leave the thread with Eric’s question.
Eric, I would be interested to know whether you recognise your objection in this form, or whether I have narrowed it too much.
On the limit–that to say “God raised Jesus,” you must believe that God did something to Jesus–what would you make of someone who, for example, holds pantheism, and thus understands every historical event as, in some sense, a divine act. And on that understanding, he takes “God raised Jesus” to mean that the universe caused Jesus to be honored as Lord by half the world’s population two millennia after he died? Would you accept that as falling within the limit, or does that transgress it?
Also–and I am genuinely curious–when does a persons’ difficulty offering full, unqualified internal assent to some doctrine as it has been traditionally understood in his community become a matter of public interest, something he has a duty to disclose or explain, or something that would compel him to leave the community if he wished to keep it private?
That isn’t meant as a gotcha; I find it a genuinely interesting question, one that, as far as I can see, resists simple answers.
On the pantheist, I do not think pantheism itself decides the matter. A pantheist could fall within the limit, but only if he meant that the divine brought the dead Jesus himself into a new mode of life or existence, so that death was not his final condition. That is not what happens in your example. There, half the world comes to honour Jesus long after his death. Something has happened to his reputation, to his followers, and to history. But nothing has happened to the dead Jesus himself.
So the limit is not a test of someone’s doctrine of God. It is a question about the object of the verb. “God raised Jesus” says that Jesus is the one acted upon. When an interpretation keeps the sentence but moves the event from Jesus to the community that remembers him, it has changed what the sentence asserts, however elevated the new meaning may be. Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 15 turns precisely on this. He does not say that the faith is vindicated by its later success.
Your second question I find genuinely difficult. I don’t think there is one rule that will decide every case. I would begin by separating two things that easily become confused. One is the difficulty a person has with a doctrine. The other is the responsibility he has undertaken within the community.
Difficulty by itself is not a matter of public interest. Anyone who has thought seriously about these things probably has some doctrine he cannot affirm easily or without qualification. A community that demanded full inward assent from every member would end by demanding either silence or pretence. A person is not obliged to publish his inner life. Doubt that is still moving is not yet a settled position. It is thought in progress.
What changes the situation is representative responsibility. Someone who has accepted the task of speaking in the community’s name, and who has publicly placed himself within its confession, has done more than hold a private opinion. Others rely on him. When they bring him their grief, entrust their children to his teaching, or receive the faith via him, they rely in part on what they have been given reason to think he believes.
If his settled convictions have moved materially away from what his public role gives others reason to think he affirms, that trust remains while its basis has disappeared. That, I think, is where a duty of disclosure begins, not with difficulty, but with a settled position that remains materially at odds with what the public role continues to give others reason to assume. It is a duty owed first to those who entrusted him with the office, not an announcement to everyone.
But I should add something that I ought to have made explicit earlier, because it changes the form of the question. The question is not necessarily whether such a person must leave the church. I do not think it is. The question is whether he can continue in the particular office, or in a role such as catechist or youth leader, in which he speaks with the authority of the community. Those are different questions, and treating them as one makes the whole matter sound like an ultimatum.
Someone may conclude that he can no longer say what the office asks him to say, relinquish that office, and remain exactly where he is: a member, in the pew, at the table. Nothing I have argued requires him to leave. It requires only that he not continue to speak on behalf of what he no longer affirms. That is a considerably smaller demand than departure. I would not want my earlier answer to have suggested otherwise.
What follows is also not for the individual alone to decide. How much difference an office can contain is a question for the community whose office it is.
I should say that I have a personal history with this second question. It makes me want to draw the line narrowly rather than broadly. So let me state the limit of my answer clearly: it concerns those who speak with the authority of the community, not ordinary members, and it is triggered by a settled conviction, not by unresolved difficulty. A person may struggle for years without owing an account of that struggle to anyone.
Eric, this is where I think your question and Porphyry’s meet. Your objection concerned concealment. I would say that it applies with its greatest force to office and to public teaching within the Church, the pulpit, catechesis, and youth formation, not to an ordinary believer trying to work something out, possibly a lifetime long.
My concern here about concealment is with speaking in the name of a community, not with what a scholar publishes openly in his own name.
On the first question: Let me push back gently. I think you may be using grammar to smuggle in metaphysics. If I understand you, the problem you have with my hypothetical pantheist asserting that “God raised Jesus” is that Jesus is the grammatical object, and if Jesus remained dead, then he isn’t the one that God (whatever God names) is acting on.
But surely you would allow that one can say quite truly that “Mark Anthony honored Caesar at his funeral” even if no one involved means to assert a full-blown metaphysical continuity after death. You can believe that Caesar ceased to exist as a unique individual at his death, and the sentence can remain perfectly meaningful even though, grammatically, it speaks of something done posthumously to him.
My point is that it seems too clever by half to say that if Jesus is the object of the verb, it means that Jesus is no longer dead. Theological issues aside, I think it is perfectly good use of language to believe Jesus remained physically and metaphysically dead and in the tomb and still say “God exulted Jesus and gave him a name above every other name.”
On the second point: Those are helpful clarifications. But I would put this to you. Is it betraying the community if he continues to fulfill his function as demanded–that is, if he is careful to maintain the orthodox position–while harboring his own skepticism about that orthodox line? It seems to me that if that harms anyone, he would be harming himself and his own authenticity (expositing positions he cannot fully endorse), not the community who continue to get exactly what they expect from him, namely the party line.
Indeed it seems that what could be a betrayal of the community would be for him to claim to hand on the church’s pure teaching while publicly rejecting it–if he has taken some vow, as part of his office, to uphold certain teachings, and he then comes out and says, I don’t actually believe them any more, or I believe them, but qualified in a way that you all would regard as a rejection of them. In other words, it seems, from one perspective, that it would be disclosure itself that would betray his commitment to the community.
It seems to me that the teeth of your objection come from his acting in the name of the community. And yet, insofar as he is acting in the name of the community, it seems that naturally distinguishes his personal views from the community’s views; When he leads the Nicaean creed, does he literally speak for himself or does he speak those words in the name of the institution?
Consider an ambassador who doesn’t speak in his own name offering his own opinions but he speaks in the name of the government he represents and he conveys the views he has been instructed to convey? Or take a court bailiff: he may be required by his office to carry out orders he disagrees with; we don’t hire bailiffs to write orders according to their judgement, we hire them to enforce the orders issued by the judge. If he objects so strongly to some order that he cannot in conscience carry it out, we generally expect him to resign. But that is a limit that he sets for himself. As long as he carries out the duties of his office faithfully, no one is asking about his personal opinions.
I see how that could look like paternalism, but I can also see it as him simply making good on his commitment to the community as well as he can.
I think there may be competing ecclesiologies. Are ministers, we might say, custodial or testimonial?
If the role is custodial–speaking for the institution and handing on its teaching–personal conviction seems to be entirely secondary; it is possible to teach something you don’t fully endorse (and any limit to that tension would be set by the minister’s own sense of authenticity and conscience). In other words any discrepancy between the institution’s faith and his own would be solely his problem to sort out.
If ministry is fundamentally testimonial, if his authority in the community derives from his personal conviction, then disclosure becomes part of the job, but why should a change in a minister’s personal convictions, and so also in his personal testimony, disqualify him from continuing as a minister; if his role is to say what he personally believes, why would a change in belief disqualify him from continuing to give testimony to what he believes?
In reality, I suspect for many congregations, those two functions get fused in an awkward, and not necessarily coherent way: You have to offer personal testimony, but your personal testimony can only be so personal, it had better be aligned with institutional doctrine.
Wow I step away for a long weekend and suddenly another interesting conversation starts. I’ll try not to take it personally. Ha!
Pardon me If I’m playing catchup.
We are shaped by a tradition before we ever begin to examine it.
As I’ve mentioned before I was raised in a hardcore fundamentalist community for whom it was doctrine doctrine doctrine… You had to get it exactly right or you were completely out. There was a terror of compromise and “worldliness”. I think if you are raised like that it’s very hard to adjust to a faith that is more of an ongoing negotiation than it is an unassailable screed. I’ve often wondered if I wound up where I have because I implicitly accept the binary of my community. All the way in or all the way out. Where would I be if I’d been raised in a more “mainstream” community?
…I think generally grasping the internal logic of Liberal Christianity requires reorienting away from dogma and toward the existential.
Is there an implicit and perhaps often unquestioned assumption that dogmatic Christianity is the baseline and any form of “liberal” impulse is interpreted as some kind of “falling away” from some pure ideal? If historical-critical analysis has shown us anything it’s that right from the start Christianity was a negotiation. One version became dominant but only after centuries of argument and only after that version achieved coercive political power. Aren’t so-called “liberals” simply doing what believers have always done, negotiate, when they were free to do so?
I would suggest that liturgical, and other formulaic utterances, become as much performative as they are plain assertions.
Let me provide an example from Sharada, my Hindu friend, child of a Brahmin priest, perhaps the most pious person I know. When her sister got married part of the preparation was to consult the astrologers to find the most auspicious time for the wedding ceremony. Now if you get a glass of wine into Sharada she’ll tell you she thinks that astrology is a bunch of crap but was there any thought of not participating? Of course not! Because it doesn’t matter what you think about it, that’s just what you do. Sharada’s piety consists of engaging with and enjoying her culture. Ceremonies and feasts. The Temple is a place of communion with her family and friends and with the divine. The gods are masks for that which has no face – or shares all faces I suppose. I’ll confess I am jealous of a tradition and a community that I can never truly enter into. I will always be a guest.
What I do not yet see is why words that do something should stop saying something. Both seem possible at once. This is where 1 Corinthians 15 keeps troubling me. Paul is not only interested in what the confession does for the community. He writes that if Christ was not raised, then the preaching is empty and so is the faith. The words may well form the church, but in his argument they lean on something having happened to Jesus, and he does not appear to leave that part open.
That is why I am not a Christian. I take Paul seriously. I do not believe Jesus rose from the dead. How the “liberal” (can’t we find a better word?) negotiates this I am simply not the one to ask. I could not.
So who is the true Thomist?
Indeed. I am also reminded of Aquinas’ own testimony about his own ineffable mystical vision in December of 1273, while celebrating Mass. Overwhelmed by divine glory, he stopped writing and left his Summa Theologiae unfinished, stating his words were “like straw” compared to what he had experienced. This doesn’t stop Thomists from spending whole careers parsing his words. So in the end, was Thomas himself a true Thomist?
Stephen is an agnostic epistemologically and an atheist with respect to metaphysical belief…
That’s fair. The problem with describing oneself as an “atheist” is that it is impossible to use the word free from a whole host of accompanying assumptions and characterizations. I gauge my audience I guess. It rarely comes up in a conversation actually but I will usually say I am not a believer or not religious. Nowadays there’s enough of that going around that’s usually the end of it but if I’m asked I will be totally honest. Then I’ll parse it the way Robert has.
On the limit–that to say “God raised Jesus,” you must believe that God did something to Jesus–what would you make of someone who, for example, holds pantheism, and thus understands every historical event as, in some sense, a divine act. And on that understanding, he takes “God raised Jesus” to mean that the universe caused Jesus to be honored as Lord by half the world’s population two millennia after he died? Would you accept that as falling within the limit, or does that transgress it?
Or how about my pastor friend who will privately admit he has no idea what “really” happened in the Garden on Easter morning but who says he feels the palpable living presence of a Person in his life, so much so that it enables him to crawl out of bed at 2am to go hold the hand of a woman who just lost her daughter to an abusive, drunken boyfriend?
Also–and I am genuinely curious–when does a persons’ difficulty offering full, unqualified internal assent to some doctrine as it has been traditionally understood in his community become a matter of public interest, something he has a duty to disclose or explain, or something that would compel him to leave the community if he wished to keep it private?
That’s a good question. I was out before I truly realized it so I didn’t have the experience of consciously deciding to walk out the door. I couldn’t have gone back even if I’d wanted to. I would just say that a healthy community must have room for questioning and self-critique. I can testify to how pathological the “my way or the highway” approach is.
Porphyry, on the grammar you are right, and I withdraw that step. A dead man can be honoured, vindicated, remembered, or exalted without ceasing to be dead. The object of the verb settles nothing by itself.
Let us stay with the letter you chose. If the hymn in Philippians 2 can be read as posthumous exaltation, the rest of the letter should be able to bear that reading too. I do not think it can.Paul expects to be with Christ. Earlier in the same letter he writes that he desires to depart and be with Christ, which is far better. That is not a doctrinal formula but his expectation for after his own death, and one cannot be with a memory.He expects a body. Later he tells them that our citizenship is in heaven, from which we await a Saviour who will transform our humble bodies to be like his glorious body. A man honoured after death does not have a body that serves as the pattern for ours.And these are not isolated. The letter speaks throughout of the coming day of Christ, of knowing him and the power of his resurrection, of the Lord being near. Within a few pages Christ acts, strengthens, is near, and is awaited.
So the hymn is not a free-standing sentence. It sits inside a letter whose author expects to be with this person, to be changed by him, and to see him arrive. Mark Antony did not expect Caesar to arrive.
He also generalises the case. In 1 Corinthians 15 Christ is the firstfruits, the first instance of something that will happen to others. Posthumous honour was available to any dead man in antiquity. It was not a firstfruits event. And if what happened to Christ was honour, the argument collapses, because honour does not prevent those who have fallen asleep from having perished, or Christian hope from being confined to this life. Paul also makes the claim answerable to what God actually did. If the dead are not raised, he says, then he and the other apostles are false witnesses about God, because they testified that God raised Christ when he did not. This is not only a claim about what the language means. It is a claim about what is the case.
None of this tells us what precise mode of existence Paul had in mind, or what a historian could establish. That is where the real disagreement remains. My narrower claim is only that, whatever Paul meant by “raised,” he did not mean that the living later gave a dead man supreme honour.
On your second question, you are right that my earlier answer assumed an account of the office without defending it. So let me say which one I hold. The tradition in which I was formed did not treat custody and testimony as alternatives, at least in its official forms, and not simply from muddle. The content is custodial. A minister does not invent his gospel but receives something entrusted to the Church, and he may not present each change in his own thinking as new doctrine. The manner is testimonial. He is not a bailiff executing another man’s order, but proclaims, prays, comforts, and confesses as one who stands within what he says. Nor is witness confined to the first eyewitnesses. The Church as a whole is called to declare God’s mighty acts, and Paul can say that the word of the Lord sounded out from the congregation at Thessalonica.
That does not require anyone to publish every movement of doubt. Testimony is not a report on one’s present state of mind. But it is also not vague, and this is where I think both of your models understate what is being said. The confessions make claims. Christ is risen. He ascended. He is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come to judge. These are not simply honorific formulas about a man who died. They speak of someone who lives, acts, and will act. A minister affirms them publicly, in the first person, before the congregation. That makes the question simple rather than intrusive: not whether his inner life is in good order, but whether he still accepts what he has undertaken to confess. The community cannot compel him to go on believing it. But where personal assent belongs to the office, it may reasonably ask whether someone who now holds otherwise can continue to speak under that office’s authority.
There is also one situation in which the prior question you raise cannot be left open, because someone else has already asked it. Suppose a dying man asks the minister, “Do you believe this yourself?” He is not asking what the institution teaches. He is asking exactly your question: in what capacity are you speaking? He wants to know whether the person praying beside him can bear witness to what he is saying. That is not normally what we ask of an ambassador or a bailiff. In pastoral care it is not an eccentric question at all. Can you say this with conviction? Will you pray with me and mean it? If I die tonight, is there hope, or is this only language?
An institution may define the minister’s public role as custodial. It cannot make an answer in the institutional voice an answer to that personal question. He may explain the limits of his role or speak honestly about his uncertainty. What troubles me is allowing the institutional formula to be received as personal testimony when he knows that this is what is being asked for and knows that it is not what he is giving.
Eric, this returns to where you began, and I think it is nearer your objection than the general question of liberal theology. You asked whether it is disingenuous to retain the words while meaning something that many believers would not recognise in them. Those formulas may do more than state propositions, but they do not therefore cease to say something about Jesus. Someone speaking them in the community’s name should be able to say what he takes them to affirm.
What you called paternalism may not lie in holding a revised view at all. It may lie in a role that draws on personal witness when trust is wanted, but retreats into institutional custody when conviction is questioned. The person in the pew, or at the bedside, then cannot tell which of the two he is being given.
Stephen, this is unusually helpful, partly because you and I read Paul in much the same way and end in different places. You leave the claim standing and then decline it. That is rarer than either softening the claim or accepting it, and it is not what I have been arguing against.
Your question about whether your fundamentalist upbringing left you with an all-in or all-out map is one I cannot answer for you, but it does caution me. I do not want the line I am drawing to turn every unresolved difficulty into departure. That would reproduce the very pathology you describe. A person can question, reinterpret, and remain uncertain without being dishonest.
Your example of Sharada also helps. Participation can be sincere even when literal assent is absent. A ritual or formula can bind someone to family, memory, culture, and the divine. But, as you also say, words that do something do not therefore stop saying something. That is where Paul remains difficult for both of us.
On your pastor friend, I would not want to place him on either side of the limit from what you have written. Not knowing what happened in the garden is not the same as believing that nothing happened to Jesus. The limit I have been trying to describe leaves the historical mechanism open: how, when, in what manner, and whether a historian could reach it at all.
What it does not leave open is whether the whole of the resurrection took place among the disciples rather than to Jesus himself. Where your friend stands on that, I cannot tell. It would be his to say, not mine.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
1 Guest(s)