To Be Continued....

/2 It was near Christmastime, and the subject of Christmas cards came up. I happened to mention that I gave Christmas cards to Christian friends, but gave generic Seasons Greetings cards to a few friends who were Jewish or Muslim.

This became a problem.

— AnyAndAllThingsHat (@Popehat) June 27, 2022

/4 My mother brought me to church, but my sensibilities were also governed by my father, an agnostic who modeled tolerance for other beliefs while maintaining his own. On many a vacation he drove us to church and sat happily in the car reading the paper.

— AnyAndAllThingsHat (@Popehat) June 27, 2022

This is as good a place to start as any. Although I won't start there, after all.  Then again, I will.  You'll see.

When I was in seminary, there came a point where our professors (the older ones, who'd served in churches.  The younger ones were by and large academicians; committed to the cause of training us for parish ministry, but not exactly coming from that background themselves.) became very concerned with us maintaining some sense of Jesus as "different."  By that I mean the emphasis of our education was on historical fact (the history of Israel, the fact there is no "Red Sea" in Egypt a la Cecil DeMille's portrayal, or the one in Exodus, for that matter) and putting Jesus of Nazareth in historical and physical (i.e., social, human) context.  We also learned a great deal about sophia, or wisdom; which actually makes a significant appearance in the Hebrew Scriptures, almost a person of the Trinity, so to speak.  Radical monotheism has a hard time staying radically monotheistic.  This puts their concern in context, for the moment.  Did we understand, they wondered, Jesus as a religious figure, not just as a philosopher?

I should point out my NT professor made much of the similiarities between the teachings of Jesus and the Greek Cynics, a comparison I still think is overwrought.  Not because similiarities are not there (Jesus is not sui generis in his teachings, nor are they so radically separate from Greek or Roman thought as to have come from outside human culture.  If they were, how would we understand them?  But that's a epistemological question for another time.), but because I know enough about the Greek Cynics to think the comparisons were superficial, not fundamental. (I haven't encountered much about those comparisons since.  I think it was a "new idea" that never really took root, for what that's worth.)  Still, we focused on the wisdom of the sayings of Jesus, especially the idea that the first of all will be last and servant of all; of the basiliea tou theou as what I came to call "a race to the bottom."

That idea is actually harmonious (at the very least!) with Isaiah's vision of the holy mountain to which all the world would be drawn.  Some Christians later turned that into an apocalyptic vision of a world converted to Christ and God in a religious rapture (not to be confused with the Rapture of millennial apocalyptic readings).  But to the Hebrews it meant simply if they followed the wisdom of Mosaic law (and not for purposes of pleasing God and so getting the winning pull on the cosmic slot machine), their life would be so good other "nations" (not in our post-19th century "nation-state" sense) would be drawn to Israel to learn the secret of their happiness.  Which secret was simply the Mosaic law, summed up by Micah as:  "Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God."  That last one sounds "religious" to our ears, but if you couple it with Matthew's parable of the sheep and the goats ("Lord, when did we see you?"), you don't have to invest it with profoundly religious baggage and requirements like "denying and disrespecting Christ" because you don't give everyone you know a Christmas card.

This is where we start to make the turn from "religion" to "wisdom."

We have to recognize that wisdom is fundamentally a religious concept; but not "religious" in our modern sense of the word (by "modern" I mean basically since the Protestant Reformation.  I'm going to try to develop these points but, if I don't, it's because this is a a blog post, not an essay scrupulously examined for publication in a journal.  I.e., I'm lazy and I'm not getting paid for this, and almost no one reads it, so I'm pleasing myself, primarily.  And don't discount my laziness....).  Socrates was said to be the wisest man in Athens.  But the record we have of that comes from Plato, who tells us it was the statement of the Delphic Oracle; who was a priest of Apollo, and presumed to speak for the god.

So Socrates' wisdom was affirmed by religion.

The Hebrews, quite separately from the Greeks, considered wisdom a helpmate of God, even, eventually, the shaping force of Creation.  John's gospel consciously echoes this in the "Hymn to Creation" that opens that gospel, where the Logos, identified with Jesus, is the shaping factor of Creation, through which everything that was created, was created.  Logos for the Greeks, by that time, was synonymous with "wisdom."  Indeed, in the Greek conception of creation and the nature of reality (the Creation stories in Genesis are also about the nature of reality; that's what creation stories are for), logos is the force that keeps chaos at bay, however temporarily.  For the Hebrews, wisdom is Sophia, a female figure who offers guidance to humanity.  Indeed, Mosaic law is not meant to be a set of decrees, restrictions, and punishments, but a way of implementing wisdom at the basic level, so that wisdom among the people, in their daily activities, can thrive.  It is the answer to Tolstoy's question:  "How should we then live?"  Which is really the first and most important question for any society, for any people.

Isaiah's holy mountain is a vision for how we should all live, without or without fealty to the God of Abraham, with or without the laws of Moses (which were meant for the children of Abraham, the heirs to the covenant; not to all persons on earth).  The basileia tou theou is about the same thing:  how we should live.  It's simplicity and direction don't require religious faith as we understand it today.  It just requires recognizing the wisdom that foregoing judgment takes you out of the circle of judgment (what goes around comes around), and by being servant of all you will be first of all, because the most equitable system of social order is not democracy, but servanthood.  Walking humbly with your God, if you prefer.

So does this mean we toss out 2000 years of Christianity, burn down the mission and the churches, and abandon religion altogether?  Hardly.  It means we reimagne and understand anew that religion actually is, because we've built an edifice and a superstructure we can't maintain anymore, and we need the wisdom of the Hebrews and the Gospels now more than ever.

And any wisdom from the other world religions would be welcome, too.  Not because we should all be religious; but because we can, and should all, be wise.

You know, if I go on with this here, this is going to splinter and crack.  Blog posts really can't carry that much weight.  What I'm proposing, in brief, is a re-definition of religion and what we consider "religious."  I am not criticizing religious practices, especially in Christian churches.  Far from it.  I still prefer the liturgical worship of very traditional Christianity, because for me it emphasizes the very things I'm talking about:  the experience of God and of fellow worshipers working on a common goal (leitourgia, the "work of the people.).  But the fundament of that experience and work, and of our praxis as believers, should be the pursuit of wisdom, not the pursuit of whatever "religion" tells us is important.  Understanding Matthew 25 is a step on the road of wisdom.  Worrying about "denying and disrespecting Christ" in whom you send what kind of Christmas cards to is, in my humble opinion, the work of "religion."  And we really don't need anymore of that.