Dale Allison on the limits of the quest for the historical Jesus

Over the holiday I read Dale Allison Jr.’s The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus. Allison is a well-regarded historical Jesus scholar with a number of tomes to his name and a practicing Christian. This book is his attempt to come to terms with how his work as a historian affects his personal faith.

As part of this endeavor, Allison takes a critical look at the various “historical Jesuses” that have been paraded for our acceptance over the last several decades. These are usually reconstructions based, in part, on identifying the supposedly authentic sayings and deeds of Jesus, to the extent that they can be excavated from the overlay of ecclesiastical spin and theological reflection in the New Testament. Taken with various social-scientific theories and an improved knowledge of 1st-century Judaism, scholars have produced a diverse set of “Jesuses”: Jesus the Cynic peasant-philosopher, Jesus the egalitarian social critic, Jesus the mystic wonder-worker, Jesus the apocalyptic prophet, and so on.

Allison, however, is critical of the standard procedure for historical Jesus reconstruction. He argues that trying to isolate particular sayings and deeds as authentic rests on faulty assumptions about the way memory works. Empirical studies suggest that human memory is far better at grasping overall impressions or gestalts of events and much worse at accurately recalling specific details like, say, the precise words spoken by someone or the exact order of a series of events. This casts serious doubt, Allison contends, on the method of trying to identify the “authentic” sayings and deeds of Jesus. Furthermore, the traditional criteria used by scholars to determine the authentic material just aren’t strong enough to render a portrait of Jesus that can resist the theological agenda of the person doing the reconstructive work. It’s no surprise, Allison says, that, a century after years the liberal Protestant scholar Adolf Von Harnack, looking down the well of history, mistook his own liberal Protestant reflection for Jesus, the various historical Jesuses tend to reflect the theological and ideological positions of their proponents.

Moreover, he says, if the primary sources we have for Jesus’s life–the four gospels–are as unreliable in their understanding of who Jesus was as many of the historical Jesus scholars claim, then we are simply reduced to agnosticism. To try and reconstruct an entire personality apart from the impression that person made on other people completely misunderstands the nautre of personhood and memory. Instead, he says, we should focus on the whole rather than the parts: the general impression that Jesus made can be found in the gospels, even if we can’t say with certainty that any particular saying or deed goes back to him:

Given that we typically remember the outlines of an event or the general purport of a conversation rather than the particulars and that we extract patterns and meaning from our memories, it makes little sense to open the quest for Jesus by evaluating individual items with our criteria, in the hope that some bits preserve pristine memory. We should rather be looking for repeating patterns and contemplating the big picture. We should trust first, if we are to trust at all, what is most likely to be trustworthy. (p. 62)

And this implies that the canonical witnesses to Jesus, and the overall picture they paint, is the most reliable source we have. If we were to try and disregard their understanding of what Jesus was like in the attempt to base a reconstruction on some supposedly authentic bits and pieces, we could never produce a reliable picture:

Because the Synoptics [i.e., the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke] supply us with most of our first-century traditions, our reconstructed Jesus will inevitably be Synoptic-like, a sort of commentary on Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Nothing else, however, can carry conviction. If we insist instead on countering in significant ways the general impressions left by our early sources, the pictures we paint in their place will be like sidewalk drawings done in chalk: we may delight in making them, and others may enjoy looking at them, but they will not last very long. (p. 66)

In the following posts I’ll take a look at what kind of Jesus Allison thinks this leaves us with and what he thinks some of the implications are for theology and the life of faith.

Friday Metal: Get well, Ronnie!

Very sad news: metal legend Ronnie James Dio has been diagnosed with stomach cancer. Here’s hoping for a speedy recovery!

Forthrightness needed on climate e-mails

Andrew Leonard at Salon makes a good point about what has come to be called (inevitably) “Climategate.” Yes, the hacking into private e-mails was a criminal act, but the apparently unethical behind-the-scenes behavior of the scientists involved is bound to shake public confidence in climate science, whether or not such a response is reasonable. As Leonard makes clear, the only thing for defenders of the science to do is to publicly explain why this information doesn’t alter the scientific case for human-caused climate change. Anything else will just look like they’re trying to avoid the main issue.

The only meaningful response to this crisis is to get out in front, explain the context of each and every e-mail, and address forthrightly whatever improprieties may or may not exist. Because there may well be more to come.

Nothing I’ve seen indicates that this changes anything as far as the science goes (see here and here for starters), but in a country where one party mostly doesn’t believe climate change is happening and (at least) half of the other party will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing anything about it, you can’t cede the p.r. war to the other side or hope that it will just go away. There are very powerful vested interests dedicated to stopping any serious action on climate change; they’re not just going to drop this.

Buddhist emptiness and Christian salvation

Kristin Johnston Largen, a professor of theology at the Lutheran seminary at Gettysburg, has written a stimulating little book: What Christians Can Learn from Buddhism: Rethinking Salvation. In it she offers a summary of the key points of what Christianity and Buddhism mean by salvation and reflects on how Buddhist notions of salvation can shed light on–and even change–the way Christians think about what it means to be saved.

Recognizing that Buddhism is as multi-faceted a tradition as Christianity, Professor Largen focuses her discussion on the Mahayana school of Buddhism, particularly as represented by the 2nd-century Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna has been described as something of a philosophical skeptic, using the tools of logical analysis to deconstruct some of the elaborate metaphysical claims made by the Vedic and Buddhist philosophers of his day. He is particularly well known for his arguments against the idea that the world is made up of enduring metaphysical substances with fixed essences and for collapsing the distinction between nirvana (the state of being free from suffering) and samsara (the cycle of karmic birth and death which it is Buddhism’s goal to escape from). The upshot is a view of reality as a pulsating, ever-changing, relational nexus, rather than being composed of fixed, externally related entities

For Nagarjuna, salvation is realizing–experientially, not just intellectually–the fundamental “emptiness” of all things. This isn’t nihilism; it’s the view that nothing that is has a fixed essence or has its reason for being in itself. Rather, everything is dependent for its existence on relations with everything else. As human selves, we are constituted by our relations with others, and with the rest of the world. Emptiness just is, according to Largen, the fact of interdependence and impermanence. Which is why the distinction between nirvana and samsara vanishes when one attains englightenment: nirvana is not a realm beyond the empirical world; it’s the realization of the “emptiness,” the impermanence and interrelatedness, of all that is.

So what does this have to do with the Christian idea of salvation? Largen provides a helpful overview of various theories, or motifs, of the Atonement, including the Christus Victor, satisfaction, and exemplarist views. Each of these, she says, preserve important aspects of the truth. She also identifies certain other themes associated with salvation in the Christian tradition, such as the tension between the already/not-yet, individual/communal aspects, as well as between the emphasis on divine initiative and human response.

What Buddhism can do, Largen argues, is provide a new vantage point on some of these tensions. For instance, a Buddhist metaphysics of emptiness (if we can call it a metaphysics) undermines the sharp distinction between the individual and the communal (or social) that much Christian tradition takes for granted. Likewise, Buddhism might help us to learn to see the Kingdom as already present, or at least as closer to the present moment than some Christian eschatologies have portrayed it. These insights can affect our practice in encouraging us to live more compassionately and ecologically.

Largen even offers an, admittedly speculative, argument for universal salvation on the grounds that God, in becoming incarnate, became intimately related to all people, precisely becuase of the irreducible interrelatedness of all things. Christians have often intuited something like this, but they haven’t always had the metaphysics to back it up. The early fathers, with their strong Platonist leanings, could argue that Human Nature itself was transformed when the Word became flesh, but a more individualistic and less participatory metaphysics has trouble making sense of that notion. Thus we end up with a lot of talk about imputation and substitution, replacing ontological language with the language of contracts and debts. A quasi-Buddhist view of reality (which is surprisingly similar in some ways to the view of reality portrayed in contemporary physics) could provide a more hospitable environement for a more participatory understanding of salvation.

Of course, there are a whose of other issus to be considered. For instance, the Buddhist view that Largen describes doesn’t seem to require a creator God who is the unchanging ground of the flux of temporal being. It’s not immediately apparent how compatible Buddhist “emptiness” is with the doctrine of creation as Christians conceive it. On the other hand, creation ex nihilo does seem to have at least some affinities with Nagarjuna’s doctrine of “dependent origination.” According to the Christian view of reality, none of us has our reason for being in ourselves; we are all radically dependent on God at every moment of our existence. Moreover, some contemporary theologians have tried to articulate a “relational” ontology that views relationship as a fundamental consituent of being. Whether this ends up being compatible with what a Buddhist might say about the nature of being is an open question, but it at least indicates that some Christians are pointing in that direction.

Regardless, Largen’s book is a valuable example of genuine inter-religious dialogue where the convictions of the other party are taken seriously–neither rejected out of hand nor assimilated to one’s own. She has also demonstrated that Christians have a lot to learn from Buddhists in particular.

Friday Metal: Paging Donald Blake

It doesn’t really get much more metal than this:

More on assisted migration

Here’s a Wired article from last year on assisted migration (or colonization) for species endangered by climate change, as discussed in the previous post. Apparently this is something that at least some ecologists take quite seriously. Obviously, a huge concern is the havoc that such transplants could wreak on their new ecosystems, as Camassia pointed out in a comment. Yet, others argue that, at least in some cases, the risks might be worth it.

The article has some good discussion of the pros and cons of both positions. Echoing Southgate, though, it makes the point that there is no longer any “pure” nature untouched by human influence. Like it or not, the fate of other species is now contingent on our actions (or inaction).

Noah, climate change, and “assisted migration”

In Celia Deane-Drummond and David Clough’s Creaturely Theology, Christopher Southgate expands on an idea he discussed briefly in his recent book The Groaning of Creation (see my posts here). Southgate points out that, due to human-caused climate change, we’re looking at a massive die off of animal life in the near future (what has been called the sixth great extinction). Naturally, when we debate climate change and what, if anything, we should do about it, we focus primarily on the costs and benefits to us. Occasionally, if we’re feeling expansive, we might briefly consider the effects that rising temperatures and sea levels may have on millions desperately poor people around the world, but it would be a huge stretch to say that those people’s interests are given anything like the appropriate weight in our debates. How much less, then, are we taking into consideration the interests of the billions of non-human animals that will be affected?

Extinction, Southgate says, is a sui generis event. It’s not just a harm inflicted on numerous individual creatures, but the final disappearance of an entire way of being in the world. The seriousness of such an event, much less many such events, and the near-certainty of at least some degree of significant climate change should lead us, he argues, to consider whether we have responsibilities, Noah-like, to ensure the continued existence of threatened species.

Southgate argues that traditional environmentalist and animal-rights philosophies are ill-equipped to deal with this scenario. Environmentalists have tended to urge human beings to leave wild nature be–our responsibilities toward non-human creatures are couched in terms of restricting our impact on them. Meanwhile, animal rights proponents have been concerned primarily with the plight of animals already within the sphere of domestication and, hence, human society to some extent. But what Southgate urges us to recognize is that we’re rapidly approaching–if we haven’t already reached it–the point where human action is inescapably changing the conditions for all life on earth. (What Bill McKibben called “the end of nature.”) We can’t simply abdicate our responsibility for that influence by taking refuge in the comforting illusion that we can shrink our impact to nothing. The damage is done, or is inevitably being done, so we have some responsibility for mitigating it.

Given the limitations of existing environmentalist and animal rights frameworks, Southgate proposes turning to the Bible for some ethical principles. The OT teaches us that God cares for everything she has created, and the NT, while short on pro-ecology passages, upholds a normative ideal of concern for the other and servant-hood. Southgate here echoes Andrew Linzey’s idea that human beings are the “servant species,” the one kind of creature capable of taking an interest in the needs of others, even at great cost to itself. Moreover, Christian theology inculcates a moral preference for the most vulnerable, the voiceless, those who are unable to stand up for their own interests. Finally, Southgate appeals to a Pauline notion of community as mutual giving and receiving, suitably expanded to include non-human creatures. The interdependence of the entire ecosystem drives home the point that not only can non-humans be the beneficiaries of our gifts, but we also constantly receive from them.

With these principles in hand, Southgate proposes that we need to seriously consider costly programs of assisted migration for species threatened by habitat loss due to climate change. This could take two forms: the first would be the creation of “corridors” allowing animals safe passage from their old, increasingly unsuitable habitats to more hospitable ones; the second would be actually physically transplanting a viable population from one habitat to another. (Southgate offers a thought experiment of relocating polar bears to Antarctica.) Such measures would not be easy or cheap, but there may be cases where a daring and sacrificial use of resources would be called for. At a more practical level, merely making people aware of such seemingly far-fetched possibilities might drive home the need to make preventative changes now.

Southgate warns that we’re not in a position to save all the creatures as Noah was, but

the profoundly difficult and risky exercise of moving animals from one locus to another should reinforce the point that the earth is our only ark, and the great preponderance of our current current creativity and ingenuity must be towards prayerfully and humbly ensuring the continued health of the “vessel,” such that it is no longer necessary to keep displacing its inhabitants. (pp. 264-5).

This is a radically different notion of “dominion” or even “stewardship” than the one we’re used to: it calls upon humans to take active steps to foster the continued flourishing of the rest of creation, even if it requires significant sacrifice on our part. Southgate distinguishes between an anthropocentric and an anthropomonist ethic: we must recognize the central place that humans, inescapably, play in caring for creation, but without elevating our own interests to the sole, or even most important, criterion for how we exercise that care.

Intelligent dissent on the food movement

I’m obviously sympathetic to a lot of the proposals of Michael Pollan, et al., but some of what passes for criticism of our system of food production can come across as simplistic, naive, or nostalgic.

That’s why I was happy to discover the blog of historian and author Maureen Ogle who, among other things, subjects “Pollanism” and allied movements to a healthy dose of sympathetically critical scrutiny.

See here and here for two interesting series she’s written.

Ogle is also the author of the book Ambitious Brew, an unabashedly celebratory history of the big American beer makers–the sort of thing that drives beer snobs up a wall.

Friday Metal: The Red Chord, “Fixation on Plastics”

Annals of Lewisania

Saw the movie “An Education” yesterday. A small subplot turns on one of the characters pretending to know C.S. Lewis and forging an autograph on a copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Debate ensues about whether he goes by “Clive” or “C.S.” I know that he went by “Jack” with friends and family, and the letters I’ve seen are usually signed “C.S. Lewis,” “C.S.L.,” or “Jack.” Did he ever go by “Clive”?