Customized Christianity: The Resurrection vs. Things That Actually Matter

The following is one of a multi-part response to an article by Jim Burklo entitled "How To Live As a Christian Without Having to Believe the Unbelievable." For an introduction to these thoughts, see Burklo's Bible.
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It is important to remember that faith and practice, theology and ethics, compliment one another. It is equally important to realize that not all theology is created equal. There are certain of the "fantastic stories" Burklo alludes to that should not and were probably never intended to be taken literally (if by literally we mean historically, factually, or scientifically). There are certain dogma which arose late in the life of the church which can be accepted or rejected liberally (and frankly, until the Reformation and Trent, the church universal understood this). Unfortunately, Burklo makes no distinction between different types of biblical data, those whose historicity or factuality are essential to the faith and those whose historicity is an unnecessary hindrance.

No one takes the entire Bible literally, not in the sense we've defined the term. Everyone knows that the Psalms are poetic and that parables are moral fictions. From there a tremendous debate arises. Did a winged creature really destroy Sennacherib's army or is "angel" an all-inclusive way of speaking of a providential act or was the supernatural explanation a pre-modern attempt to understand something like a plague? Who knows? And Burklo rightly points out that it doesn't really matter, because the point of that story is not the mechanism by which Israel was delivered by the causal relationship between Hezekiah's faith and Jerusalem's deliverance, a theme which carries over into the New Testament very well. Whether you think the inability of the Assyrians to take Jerusalem was the result of a supernatural slaughter, natural devastation, or simply economic inability to maintain the siege is irrelevant so long as we all affirm the active God who listens and responds to human need.

The problem is not with admitting that certain stories or certain details can be questioned historically without invalidating the faith. There are whole books of the Bible that I would argue need to be read etiologically (e.g. Genesis) or allegorically (e.g. Jonah) and have no basis in historical or scientific fact. Burklo's problem is his inability to distinguish between the seven days of creation and the resurrection of Jesus.

Instead of caring whether the story of Jesus’ resurrection was a fact or a myth, let’s concern ourselves with things that matter.

That's dumbfounding, at least to anyone who has made it far enough out of the Gospels to find 1 Corinthians 15. Burklo apparently has not, suggesting that:

The key to Christianity is the Sermon on the Mount in the gospel of Matthew, chapters 5-7.

Curiously, Burklo doesn't seem to realize that the Sermon on the Mount is offered only in Matthew, while all four Gospels have an account of the resurrection. In fact, it is the resurrection that is the defining event of the Gospels. And why not, since according to Paul, it is the Gospel (unlike Burklo who asserts, without explanation or justification, that the Gospel is "the good news that Love is all that matters"). "If Christ has not been raised," and Paul specifies a bodily resurrection, "then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain."

Paul isn't exaggerating. The resurrection is the central event is Christian thought. It is the purpose of the Incarnation, it is the victory of good over evil, it is the means by which humanity is redeemed, it is the core of the message Christians proclaim to the nations, and it is the future hope for all the redeemed in Christ. There is a reason the creeds include an affirmation of the resurrection of the dead. It is core to everything we do. It defines our anthropology which, in turn, defines how we treat not only ourselves but others. It shapes a theologically valid relationship with the material world. It is our promise of participation in the eternality of God and the sustaining hope of millions who suffer. Without the resurrection, Christ's and ours, there is no Christian faith.

It is interesting from a historical standpoint, that all manner of beliefs seeped into the mainstream of Christian thought at one time or another. The belief that the Son was a creature and that the Spirit was a creature. The belief that Jesus was a human-deity hybrid. The belief that, after a period of pedagogical suffering, even the devil would be saved. Curiously, however, the mainstream of Christianity never entertained a belief that the resurrection did not literally happen. Certain gnostic sects certainly, as part of a broader complicated cosmology in which the Christ was never really here to begin with and therefore never really died and never needed to be really raised. For Christianity, this has been a modern pretension.

I can swallow a lot of skepticism. They could discover today that the whole Old Testament was written by a council of rabbis in the 200 BC, and I would trudge merrily on. You could tell me you don't believe Jesus walked on water or changed water to win or even drew water from a well if you're so inclined, and I can still extend you a sincere, if shaky, hand of fellowship. But a graduate student at a seminary in the Midwest once told a friend of mine, "If they found the bones of Jesus today, it wouldn't affect my faith at all." I'm not there. I'm with Paul; if Christ has not been raised, my faith has been in vain. Burklo needs to understand that. To suggest that the historicity or factuality (or however you want to phrase it) of the resurrection is a matter of no consequence is to misunderstand everything: the structure of ancient narrative, the historical witness of the church, the soteriological and eschatological promises of Christianity, in short, the faith in its entirety.

The church can and should scrub away the accretions of overactive imaginations and the layers of obscurants created by ancient idiom and metaphor. The church also can and must distinguish between those things which can be scrutinized safely and those which, if undone, will mean the end of the faith as we know it. Some of those essentials, particularly the resurrection, may unfortunately fall into Burklo's unbelievable category. This, of course, cuts to the heart of Burklo's problem. A faith which can only believe that which it already considers believable is no faith at all, and a God who can only do that which His creations can reproduce in a laboratory is no God at all.

Customized Christianity: Choosing Between Faith and Practice

The following is one of a multi-part response to an article by Jim Burklo entitled "How To Live As a Christian Without Having to Believe the Unbelievable." For an introduction to these thoughts, see Burklo's Bible.
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In reading Burklo's article, one of the first things that became immediately apparent, is that Burklo sees believing creeds, dogmas, and fantastic stories as somehow and to some degree opposed to living like Christ.

Christianity asks you to do very hard things that are supremely worth the effort. Loving your enemies – that often seems impossible. Willingly giving up your power and money and time and influence in order to serve the poor and the sick and the oppressed – that can be downright scary. Having a heart full of pure love in all circumstances – how can we do it? But if we do it, we build heaven on earth. These are things that matter, things Jesus asks us to do. It takes a lifetime of serious spiritual and physical and emotional work to come even close to rising to these challenges.

Compared to them, believing in the factuality of the fantastic stories in the Bible is trivial. And that is exactly why it makes no sense to let such questions matter very much in living a faithful Christian life...Don’t let dogma and doctrine get in the way of practicing Love, who is God. Doctrines can be interesting. They help us understand the origins and background of our religion. But repeating creeds is not the price of admission into Christianity.

Burklo is right to say that repeating creeds isn't the price of admission into Christianity, but there are at least two reasons why, pragmatically, that assertion is meaningless. First, the majority of churches do not use creeds as the terms of admission. The majority of Christians still belong to churches where admission to the faith is managed through baptism, at various ages. A creed may be read during the process, but it is not the central feature of admission into the faith. What's more, they aren't even necessary for continuance in the faith in most denominations. Anyone can walk into the high holy service at an Episcopal church and refuse to say all or part of the creed during the service (and I always refuse to say at least part during my frequent visits) without being asked to leave or denied the Eucharist. In fact, barely over a week ago I was at an Episcopal wedding and the priest made a point of reading what has been in every bulletin at every Episcopal service I've attended: anyone who is baptized is welcome to partake of the Lord's Supper. That has been my experience at a variety of denominations. Some require baptism in their particular sect, but I have never once been asked to recite a creed to determine my status as a Christian. If you walked into a Methodist Church today and they happened to be reciting a creed, you could repeat "watermelon" over and over like a kid who doesn't know the words to a song and not receive so much as a sidelong glance from an usher.

Even if none of that were true, however, the greater pragmatic truth is that the overwhelming majority of Christians accept the overwhelming majority of the creeds, even churches that are non-creedal, even churches that are anti-creedal. The Apostle's Creed does little more than copy and paste statements from the Gospels and Paul. If you can't affirm those truths, with whatever interpretation you want to wash them over with, then you find yourselves on the most extreme margins of what might be considered Christianity.

And having wasted too much time on those considerations, the true flaw in the argument is to suggest that believing a central Christian doctrine or a biblical story might ever impede "practicing Love." Just the opposite, every word of Scripture was canonized precisely because the teachings and stories therein were shown to be conducive to living the Christian life. The church historical has always understood there to be a harmonious relationship between faith and practice, between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. It is a fallacy of modernity, and particularly in our day of emerging Christians, that believing in the Trinity might somehow be contrary to turning the other cheek. The Trinity was not a doctrine arrived at in a void of philosophical speculation. If Burklo would turn to the history he encourages others to study, he would find Trinitarian dogma the result of centuries of struggle against beliefs that were set to gut Christianity, soteriologically, theologically, and, yes, even ethically. Fashionable as Arianism has become once again, the ancients saw in it the potential to utterly distort everything that Jesus had come to offer the world (a trap which I intend to demonstrate later this week Burklo has fallen into). The same, of course, is true of the other dogma which have formed the core of Christianity for lo these many centuries since Chalcedon.

Dogma, particularly those enshrined in the central creeds, was not established to force conformity of belief on "trivial" matters. They were established precisely because the early church realized how far-reaching the effects of wrong belief can be. That is not to say there isn't some validity in moving toward a greater balance. Certainly the doctrines and stories of Scripture exist almost exclusively to shape behavior, but that they exist should be a reminder to us of just how much our behavior needs shaping. Ideological purity, as Orwellian as that term sounds, serves a legitimate ethical and existential function. Who God is, who Christ is, should have a profound effect on what it means to seek God and to be Christlike. If it doesn't, then our faith has become unthinking, non-specific, and worthless. Burklo encourages spiritual disciplines like prayer, but in a doctrinal void, does he know who he is praying to?

Jesus did not come to reveal to us and reconcile us to the idea of a deity but to a particular, engaged, personal God with particular attributes and about whom particular statements are either relatively true or relatively false. Who that God is and how He has chosen to reveal Himself is the content of doctrine. How He has intervened in human history and the human condition is the fantastic biblical narrative. When who God is and what God has done are set in opposition to how God wants us to live, Christianity implodes.

Customized Christianity: Burklo's Bible

While browsing another blog, I came across an article by Jim Burklo entitled "How To Live As a Christian Without Having to Believe the Unbelievable." Within, Rev. Burklo--the Associate Dean of Religious Life at the University of Southern California, an ordained United Church of Christ pastor, and the author of books on progressive Christianity--lays out his vision of a Christianity which allows the adherent to pick and choose buffet style which beliefs to accept provided a set of core ethical values is maintained.

There is a great deal of commendable observation in Burklo's article, provided of course it is read in isolation of his broader argument. In particular, his assertion that the Bible is not self-aware is a sermon that I never tire of preaching. His recognition that the full scope of Christianity with its manifold traditions, doctrines, and mythology is a hard pill to swallow for many modern seekers is perhaps the defining problem for Western evangelism in today's world. The reminder that Christianity is neither an ancient legal code nor a modern political ideology is among the most necessary messages for American Christians.

Nevertheless and unsurprisingly, I find most of Burklo's points as well as his overarching message to be severely flawed, both by his own internal logic and by legitimate external standards. I am certainly not one to suggest that the Bible should be confused with a history book or, worse still, a science book. Just the opposite. Moreover, I have never been one to use the forms of creeds as tests of fellowship. Barton Stone would turn over in his grave. I admit a great deal of latitude in recognizing and drawing conclusions from the human components of Scripture, at least by majority Christianity standards. With all that said, however, I have the following objections to Burklo's vision of Christianity.

1. Burklo mistakenly implies an oppositional relationship between believing creeds, doctrines, and "fantastic stories" on the one hand and living like Christ on the other.
2. Burklo fails to make any meaningful distinction between essential and non-essential data in Scripture when suggesting what might be disregarded as non-factual.
3. Equating the "divine spark" in Christ with the divine spark in all is idolatrous, anachronistic, unbiblical, and reenforces the need for the Christological dogma found in the creeds.
4. The desire to focus only one what Jesus said and not what he did is self-defeating.
5. Burklo confuses ethics with religion, and thereby fails to grasp the comprehensiveness of Jesus' mission.

I will treat each of these more fully over the next few days, hopefully with uncharacteristic brevity, with the intent of moving toward a Christianity that can be forward thinking without divorcing itself from its past and, equally importantly, away from a Christianity which is comfortable with sentiments such as, "If [doctrines] don’t make sense to you, don’t worry about them."

Holy Uncircumcised Penises, Batman!

Germany has become the first country (to my knowledge) to outlaw religious circumcision. While many countries have made cosmetic circumcision of children illegal, a court in Germany now says that religion is no longer a valid excuse:

Circumcising young boys on religious grounds amounts to grievous bodily harm, a German court ruled Tuesday in a landmark decision that the Jewish community said trampled on parents' religious rights.

The regional court in Cologne, western Germany, ruled that the "fundamental right of the child to bodily integrity outweighed the fundamental rights of the parents", a judgement that is expected to set a legal precedent.

"The religious freedom of the parents and their right to educate their child would not be unacceptably compromised, if they were obliged to wait until the child could himself decide to be circumcised," the court added.

The fact that roughly one in every three males born into the world is circumcised in a practice which has been carried out continuously since the dawn of recorded history didn't seem to bother the German judiciary. After all, we are entering a brave new world, one that can put behind it the ways of life in the backwoods parts of the world where circumcision is still prevalent: Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Israel, Canada, the United States, and Australia. Thankfully, we have Germany to lead the way, standing on the cutting edge of oppressing Jews for nearly a century now. (I'm sorry. It was just too easy.)

This, it would appear, is what societies get when law and ethics become reducible to questions of conflicting theoretical rights. Being neither a Muslim nor a Jew and living in a country which permits circumcision with broad latitude, I don't really have a dog in this fight, except for my ideological consternation when I see courts ruling in favor of self-determination for infants. Because a baby has a right to a foreskin, a right which supersedes a mandate from G-d or Allah. That works if you're a secular court in Germany because you can touch a foreskin and you can't touch God, but that logic won't fly with the billions of unenlightened people in the world who think that the commands of their respective deities hold real weight.

The idea of self-determination for infants is, pragmatically, nonsensical. We recognize that infants require guidance and support in every area of life but at the same time pretend that parents ought to be raising them in a political, ideological, and religious void. Says the court: "The body of the child is irreparably and permanently changed by a circumcision. This change contravenes the interests of the child to decide later on his religious beliefs." Ignore for a moment the fact that the absence of a foreskin does not actually prevent little Fritz von Spielberg from growing up to be good secular humanist like every other European millennial and imagine what this self-deluded ideology of neutral child-rearing and apotheosis of choice looks like in practice. In the words of Stephen Prothero, "This is foolhardy, not unlike saying that you will not read anything to your daughter because you don’t want to enslave her to any one language."

It is the right, or more precisely the duty, of every parent to raise each child in the way the parent believes is best for its health and safety temporal and eternal. Democrats can raise little Democrats. Republicans can raise little Republicans. Sooner fans can raise little Sooner fans, and the children of Longhorn fans will continue to thumb their noses at them every fall at the state fair. More importantly, Christians can raise little Christians and would be rather perturbed to find a court somewhere ruling that baptism prior to eighteen "contravenes the interests of the child to decide later on his religious beliefs."

And Jews and Muslims ought to be able to raise their children up in the way they should go. That includes performing the defining and foundational right, at least in Judaism, on their children. Unfortunately, the Germans don't seem to agree, and who better than the German courts to decide for Jews and Muslims what unacceptably compromises their religious beliefs.

Children's Bible Commentary

Here's an amusing anecdote relayed by Theodore Roosevelt in a letter to Emily Carow in 1900. It's an adorable look into the mind of a child, perhaps the most astute and convicting hermeneutical tool available in Christianity--adorable, that is, if you can overlook references to the racist archetype:

The other day I listened to a most amusing dialogue at the Bible lesson between Kermit and Ethel. The subject was Joseph, and just before reading it they had been reading Quentin's book containing the adventures of the Gollywogs. Joseph's conduct in repeating his dream to his brothers, whom it was certain to irritate, had struck both of the children unfavorably, as conflicting both with the laws of common-sense and with the advice given them by their parents as to the proper method of dealing with their own brothers and sisters. Kermit said: "Well, I think that was very foolish of Joseph." Ethel chimed in with "So do I, very foolish, and I do not understand how he could have done it." Then, after a pause, Kermit added thoughtfully by way of explanation: "Well, I guess he was simple, like Jane in the Gollywogs": and Ethel nodded gravely in confirmation.

Meanwhile, in Africa

There have been plenty of well-documented reasons to temper global enthusiasm about the Arab Spring, and the precarious state of the Egyptian church is high among them. Now, with a recently resigned member of the Muslim Brotherhood as Egypt's first freely elected president in modern history, Coptic Christians react:

"Between ourselves (as Christians) we say we are for (Morsi's opponent Ahmed) Shafiq, but we cannot mention this publicly," said Father Yu'annis, a priest of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Upper Egypt. "But as a church we say — and believe — that we will accept who God gives us and work for the good of Egypt. Many people are afraid now and are thinking of emigrating. But Egypt is a country of rumors, and if not for these we would all be fine."

Meanwhile, the religious strife in Nigeria only seems to be getting worse, with whole states going into lockdown and Christians staying locked safely in their homes on Sunday mornings.

Worried by the threat by Boko Haram to make June the bloodiest in the history of its attacks, most Christians Sunday stayed away from churches in the Northern parts of the country, especially in Kaduna, Kano, Jos and many other cities.

In recent weeks, Christians have been serially attacked in their churches during worship services by the Islamic insurgents, Boko Haram. In Kaduna State, for instance, three churches-two in Kaduna and one in Zaria - were bombed penultimate Sunday, resulting in the death of 92 people in the tit-for-tat reprisals between Muslims and Christians, a situation that has resulted in a lockdown in the state. Prior to the Kaduna suicide bombings, churches in Bauchi and Jos were attacked for two consecutive Sundays in a row.

In several churches in Abuja yesterday, worshippers were few and visibly jittery owing to the threat by Boko Haram to start a religious conflagration.

Anthonia Eke, who spoke to Reuters, said she is trusting God to end an Islamist insurgency in Northern Nigeria but won't be praying in church any more, after a string of bombs at Sunday services. "We are still traumatised over the attacks and have no intention to attend church service until total peace and normalcy are restored," Eke said in Kano. "God understands our situation here so we have decided to pray at home. Only he can end this pain."

Genovese on the Difference Between North and South

Here are an interesting pair of quotes from Eugene Genovese on the historic and enduring differences between the culture of the American North and the American South. They probably each warrant entries of their own with attendant commentary, but--as is the case with other great thinkers, like David Bentley Hart--I find that Genovese's thought is often more compelling when allowed to simply speak in an annotative void:

There nonetheless remains a fundamental difference between northern and southern versions of religious tolerance. In the North people are wont to say, “You worship God in your way, and we’ll worship him in ours.” This delightful formulation says, in effect, that since religion is of little consequence anyway, why argue? In contrast, the southern version, well expressed in an old joke, says: “You worship God in your way, and we’ll worship him in His.” From the early days of the Republic, when the Baptists led the fight for religious freedom and the separation of church and state, white southerners have done rather well in living together with mutual respect and tolerance for each other’s religious views. Always reminding themselves of human frailty, they are perfectly tolerant of some damned fool’s right to choose eternal damnation. But they are not about to pretend that they regard another’s religion as intrinsically equal to their own.

“Prejudice,” like “discrimination” and “tradition,” is a positive word in the southern lexicon, much as it is a dirty word in the liberal lexicon that prevails in academia…It rests upon a belief in an omnipotent God who necessarily can only be approached through a faith that requires community-grounded prejudices and apparently nonscientific modes of discrimination. This viewpoint warns against the unforeseen and often destructive results of social experiments that derive from an appeal to abstract reason—in effect, to ideological constructs. We might recall, for example, that “reason” in the guise of the most advanced scientific thought contributed to the pernicious triumph of racist thought in the nineteenth century. The religiously orthodox Old South, in contradistinction to the religiously liberal Northeast, stood on its prejudice in favor of a literal reading of the Bible’s account of the monogenesis of the human race and rejected scientific racism. Generally, this view of prejudice says that a community’s historically developed sense of right and wrong should be permitted to defy the latest fashions in reasoned speculation until they are empirically established.