So Diarmid McCullough (I have his book around here somewhere; now I have to read it) followed up his book on Christian church history with a six-part BBC series (this may be old news, it was new to me on Easter Sunday) where he explores all that history in an entertaining and very BBC style. In the last episode he reaches the 20th and 21st centuries, and despite the Crusades and the Inquisition and the absolute acceptance and approval of poverty that marked the Church in the Middle Ages (except for the priesthood, which is why Francis was so dangerous and almost a minor figure in that history), despite even the record of the Church in World War II (both the Pope and the church in Germany, which was covered without one mention of Dietrich Bonhoeffer; then again, he covered the Enlightenment without one reference to Jonathan Swift, but a lot of attention to Voltaire. Much as I love Candide, Voltaire is not fit to untie Swift's shoe laces), what most disturbed McCullough were the questions of Spinoza (who was Jewish, for what that's worth; I note it because there was no mention of the other great Jewish thinker in matters religious in the 20th century, Martin Buber). If you're only vaguely familiar with Spinoza, don't feel left out. I encountered him gaining my minor in philosophy almost 50 years ago, and have barely heard anything about him since; nor was I taught he was a seminal thinker in European thought. Interesting, but more of a Berkely than a Locke or a Hume. McCullough, on the other hand, thought him more important than Descartes, despite the fact Descartes cemented the idea of soul v. body into modern thought (nothing but an echo of Plato, actually; still, Hellenistic thought is still alive and well. That will be an issue for us before long.)
Spinoza troubled McCullough's quasi-Christian soul (he is the son of five generations of Anglican priests; it rubbed off, but not enough to make him faithful. That's okay; I know that feeling well.), and by World War I and World War II. Like Voltaire over the Lisbon earthquake, McCullough identifies with the Lost Generation (he never mentioned a one of them, though) and the failure of faith of people like Elie Wiesel. Let's not be rude and point out they had reasons for despair that McCullough, only slightly older than yours truly, has never known.
That rankled me, a bit; not because I would have McCullough a true son of the church (as if there is such a thing), but because the intellectual dishonesty is a burr under my epistemological saddle, a pea under my intellectual mattress. It bugs me, and prompts me to consider why McCullough is so sure a God who doesn't intervene as he sees fit (even to stop the Holocaust) is not a God worthy of our attention today, much less our devotion.
Consider the history. The Greeks gave up on their pantheon at some point. There are whole genres of fiction based on the idea that gods need worshippers in order to remain god-like. Neal Gaiman got a novel and a TV series out of the concept, which he basically cribbed from ST:OS ("Who Mourns for Adonais?"). It pops up all over the place in popular culture, as if we were all anthropological dilettantes and knew this is how "primitive cultures" created "gods". They gave up becasue they gods they worshipped stopped doing anything for them. But to look at the literature, it's hard to see what they ever did for the Greeks.
"Oedipus Rex" is my favorite touchstone/punching bag for this idea. Consider Oedipus: damned by the gods because he doesn't know who he is; but how is he to know? Hearing a passing party guest say he's going to kill his father and sleep with his mother, he flees his home and parents and goes out into the great world. Beware the Jabberwock, my son! But rather than find a beast with eyes of flame burbling in the woods, he encounters an imperious stranger in a chariot who tells the wanderer to get out of the way! Oedipus, full of the piss and vinegar of youth, refuses, and ends up killing the man and his servants. He also answers the Sphinx's riddle (childishly easy, when you know the answer, like all riddles are) and is given the kingdom as his reward.
But then the gods punish the kingdom, without telling them why. Creon goes to Delphi to get the word from the oracle, and the word from Apollo's priest is that Thebes harbor's the murderer of Laius, the former king who went out one day and never came back. So punishment first, verdict and reason whenever. It's up to Thebes to know, or to figure it out. By the time they do, of course, it turns out Oedipus is the son of Laius, not the mother and father who raised him, and the former wife of Laius, now Oedipus' wife and mother of their four children, is his mother, too. (Which makes the kids his children and step-siblings, all at once). Oedipus is punished for his sins, which the Greeks consider justice; even if it is cruel and implacable and Oedipus sinned without knowledge of his transgressions. When he does find out he gouges out his own eyes and goes in to exile; but all too late. Then the brothers grow up, fight over the throne, and end up dead on the battle field, leaving Uncle Creon as king. But he angers the gods by refusing the burial of the brother who attacked Thebes for the throne, and walls up his neice and daughter-in-law Antigone in a tomb for defying his no-burial order. Seems the gods jealously seek possession of the dead as their right, and don't appreciate the living being in places meant for the dead. Thebes is not punished this time, but Creon is; and maybe Thebes, too, because at the end of the play Creon is not fit to rule a group of toddlers at play.
And this the Greeks consider justice; justice dealt out justly by the gods. It's not even inscrutable justice. It's just....just.
Now consider the situation of Job, a man blameless and upright, yet he loses everything but his life and his wife, and he silences her with a rebuke that keeps her quiet for the rest of his story. Why is Job suffering? We know it's because of a bet between God and Satan (no, not really that one; that's Christianity, this is Hebraism). Job doesn't know that, and neither do his friends. They all try to make sense of it, trying to comfort Job but also telling him God is just and Job deserved it. Job refuses to accept that argument, and in fine Hebraic form the argument goes round and round (I'm not being racist or vindictive there. Midrash is centuries of argument between scholars across time about almost every word in their holy scriptures. It's good for you, to argue rather than just accept what it said.) Job insists God will show up and vindicate Job.
And then God does show up, and tells everyone they're full of blue mud, because God is creator (the imagery here provoked some of the finest illustrations William Blake ever turned out) and God is speaking only to creatures. None of them can defend themselves before God (the idea of God in a court of law defending God's actions is one that shows up again and again in the preaching of the prophets, who alone in Scripture claim to speak for God. Let that one sink in for a bit.), and when God is through pointing out how thoroughly they are NOT God, God restores Job's fortunes more than he had before, including more children.
And where is the justice in that?
Honestly, to set Job against Oedipus Rex or Antigone is to make Sophocles slink away and find a shadow to pull over himself. The Greeks were pikers on this and so many other subjects (morality, community, social structure) that the Hebrews had an absolute genius for. And yet, Christianity was born in a Greek speaking world, midwifed by people trained in Greek philosophy as much as Hebraic traditions, and we've been thinking like Greeks ever since. So where the Hebrews never thought God owed them a damned thing except guidance in how to live this crazy thing called life (and not the guidance of how to be healthy, wealthy, and wise; just how to be a just and fair society), we think the gods owe us an explanation and a reason to worship them (as if worship was for the gods; well, it was for the Greek gods, petty egotists that they all were) and should pay off when we pour them out a libation or invoke their name or build them a fine temple. That's the Greek idea, and it's the basis for our idea that God hasn't done anything for us lately, or didn't do anything for Lisbon in the 18th century, or hasn't stopped us from turning the 20th century into a horror show of violence even though we took all the credit just before that for being "civilized."
As if.
But where is God to protect us from ourselves? We aren't Oedipus, born cursed and unable to find it out until far too late. But neither are we Job, accepting good from God and so open to recognizing we must accept bad, too. We aren't nearly that mature. We've made life easy and we want it to stay that way. When it doesn't we do what Donald Trump does, and we look for somebody to blame. God is the easiest respository of our anger, and so we create clay idols and smash them and say "There! We're done with God!" As if God were the idol of our affections and product of our hands, and now just as appropriately the object of our ire and anger. It's a short step from there to "God was never a good idea, anyway!" Which sounds really petulant, when you think about it for a minute.
"God? Never knew him. Never knew him at all."
Sound familiar? But now I sound like a Baptist preacher from my youth, thinking he has been clever in coming up with a trap we can't escape from, and now we have to admit God is real (and maybe good, but that's not as important) and get back in line with the rest of East Texas religious society. No, that argument won't do, either. This is not an argument for proving God is irrefutable. This is an argument for being intellectually consistent and honest in your faith; or lack thereof. If God is a complete failure, the question must be asked: "whose God?" The God of Mike Pompeo, the God who "saves" those who believe as Pompeo does? That's a concept of the God of Abraham, but is it the concept of Christianity, as McCullough addresses it? Is there a singular concept of the Christian God? Is it essential to that concept that God be concerned with "eternal salvation," with whether the immortal soul rises to heaven or descends into hell? Is it essential to that concept that the followers of Christ concern themselves first and foremost with the last and least among us, with making themselves last of all and servant of all? Is it essential to that concept that God wants us to live in this world, and benefit from it and care for each other? Or is it essential to that concept that we chase power and temporal reward (the prosperity gospel, which McCullough does touch on)? Is it essential to that concept that we understand the wisdom of the power of powerlessness (is the cross a triumph of will? or of sacrifice?)? Or is it essential to the Christian concept of God that the church be a power in the world, and when it isn't, the world has no need of Christianity?
McCullough is wise enough to point out that Christianity is only 2000 years old; against the backdrop of some 150,000 years of human civilization, that isn't a lot of time yet. Christianity is not old; it is an infant. But must Christianity be tied to all the ancient concepts in order to remain Christianity? Lose too many of them and we're left only with the "prosperity gospel," which is as temporal and anti-Christian a "gospel" as I can imagine. Retain too many of them, and Christianity becomes a museum of dead things, a mausoleum preserving a defunct past. We have two holdovers Christianity has to get beyond, at least in the West (the church in Africa, from what McCullough presents, doesn't have these problems, at least; or not as much as the West does): one is the Constantinian model of the church which has been with us since the 4th century. The other is the Greek idea (even theology is a practice rooted in Hellenistic thinking; Judaism has no theologians) of gods as benefactors and punishers on a scale we find inscrutable but ultimately understandable. Thebes did house the murderer of Laius, Creon did offend the gods by his decree that Polynices be left on the battlefield for the animals to pick at. But the punishment of the gods is capricious and all out of order to the offense (why was Thebes responsible for what Oedipus had done, when no one in Thebes knew of the crime?). At least when Israel strays, it strays as a nation, and God gives them plenty of information about what's wrong before, in the magnificent vision of Ezekiel, he leaves the Temple in Jerusalem and mounts his throne-chariot as a symbol of his status as Creator, not regional deity bound to a building. There is a great deal more authority, moral and temporal, in the vision of the Hebrew Scriptures than is allowed in the concept of the God of Abraham as an almagation of the Greek pantheon. The first thing Christianity could do, would be to recover a bit more of that, and to reconsider how much of Greek rationalism we still need in the world; and certainly consider, from the Hellenistic as well as the purely Jesus of Nazareth point of view, how much more humility we need in the world.
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