Undeception

It’s common to come across the well-founded observation that Luke’s Gospel is particularly interested in highlighting the universality of the Kingdom of God. References to the outcast of society abound, including Gentiles, women, the poor, and the sick. So when I heard someone casually mention that in one of the Gospel accounts Jesus’ given rationale for the temple cleansing was, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations,” I assumed with great confidence that it must have been Luke’s version.

I was very wrong! The quotation from Isaiah 56.7 occurs in all three of the Synoptics, and the only one in which Isaiah’s phrase “for all the nations” is included is the one that seemed to me the least likely.

Matthew 21.13: He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of robbers.”

Luke 19.46: and he said, “It is written,
‘My house shall be a house of prayer’; but you have made it a den of robbers.”

Mark 11.17: He was teaching and saying, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.”

It certainly would have made sense with Matthew’s replacement-theology-esque emphasis to include the phrase from Isaiah; ditto with Luke, for reasons cited above. Why is it, then, that both Matthew and Luke omitted this statement of high significance from Jesus’ words in this act of seminal importance, diverging from their (widely assumed) source in Mark?

Turns out, the universality of the gospel is not as rare in Mark as I had thought. Via Google Books, I found R.T. France commenting on 13.10, “And the good news must first be proclaimed to all nations”:

Jesus’ excursions into Gentile territory (5:1-20; 7:24-8:10) and his Gentile following in 3:8 have begun to prepare us for this vision, and we have seen in 7:24-8:10 a deliberate extension of the blessings of Israel’s Messiah to the surrounding peoples. It is possible that the specific inclusion of πάντα τὰ ἔθνη in the Isaiah quotation in 11:17 is a further pointer in this direction, even if that is not the main thrust in context. Later the confession of Jesus as Son of God by a Gentile officer will be a foretaste of the universal church (15:39). But this verse (and by implication 14:9) is the most explicit indication in Mark’s gospel of the universal scope of the good news and therefore of the Christian mission, as it will be spelled out in Matthew’s final commission (28:19-20) and in the whole narrative of Luke’s second volume.[1. R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: a commentary on the Greek text (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 516]

So the universality of the gospel of the Kingdom seems like an obvious recurring theme in Mark that Matthew and Luke expand upon in different ways. Mark’s interest in that idea is coincident with and even necessary for his vision of the Kingdom of God as rival to the power of Rome (as Joel discusses here et passim), for how could the kingdom over which Jesus is ruler be of smaller geographic scope than that of Rome? France goes on to argue that the eschatological gathering “from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven” in 13.27 is reflective of this universal vision of God’s dominion, which also makes sense and could only be made to refer to Diaspora Jews if 1) Mark was written later than 70 or 2) the phrase or passage is a post-Diaspora interpolation.

This doesn’t answer why this key phrase was omitted in Matthew and especially Luke, where much theological hay could have been made from it. Any guesses?
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Keying off a comment from Marc on my last post, I looked at Peter’s response and Jesus’ response to him in the immediately following verses in a slightly different light.

Here are the verses immediately following those I quoted in my other post.

Peter began to say to him, “Look, we have left everything and followed you.” Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”

Mark 10.28-31 NRSV

One interesting thing I missed in my original post was that before the scenario in question in this same chapter Jesus affirmed the Kingdom of God as belonging to “such as these” children, and then here he uncharacteristically and therefore pointedly calls his disciples “children” so as to assure them that they were not subject to his remarks. This makes it even more unlikely that the disciples were afraid of not getting in on the kingdom — only that, as Marc suggested, the kingdom wasn’t looking like such a sunny prospect as they imagined. If their worry was over their own reward, it would make sense that Jesus would reassure Peter that no one who sacrificed now would lose their reward in the future.

Another interesting thing I’ve just noticed is that Jesus is careful throughout this passage not to exclude the rich. Indeed, compared to Matthew and Luke he seems amazingly even-handed:

1) He was interested in (indeed, “loved”, v. 21) the rich young man despite his wealth.

2) He denies that it is impossible for the rich to be a part of the kingdom, because “for God all things are possible.”

3) He says that “many who are first will be last,” but that the last will more generally be first. Note also that Mark shows the wealthy Joseph of Arimathea faithfully “waiting for the Kingdom of God” [Mk 15.43].

The author of Mark was apparently careful to articulate that Jesus did not bifurcate the “greatest” and “least” down strictly socio-economic lines. Here Jesus seems to be stressing that although there is a strong correlation between the “great” in social status and “great” in pride, the kingdom order is not strictly an inversion of social status, but of attitude. The recurring emphasis almost strikes me as a corrective to what may have been a class warfare trend among the lower classes; it seems not unlikely that Mark was trying to widen the appeal of Christianity beyond the lower classes in which it originated.

Some will no doubt find it tempting  to write off Mark’s nuanced teaching as a wholly innovative accommodation to an affluent audience. Before doing that, we’d need to fully motivate this accommodation. Even the possibility of an appeal for patronage or respite from political or social pressures must be balanced against the central teachings of Jesus, and I don’t find it particularly likely that someone taken with Jesus enough to perpetuate his movement would compromise such a fundamental teaching in order to secure favor for a watered down message. Besides, if campaigning for the support of the elite was the author’s raison d’écrire, it seems he really blew it in key areas, especially when it came to the “little apocalypse” (provided it is original to Mark), which if Allison, Stark, and others are correct was a promise to defeat Rome would have been a preposterous inclusion. Moreover, that this leveling irrespective of social status was a somewhat core teaching of the Jesus Movement is affirmed by other New Testament writers who also believed that Jesus taught that God exalts the proud and gives grace to the humble but who cannot be described as hostile to the wealthy.

There seems to be an adequate reason to think that the author of Mark shows Jesus teaching such an egalitarian socio-economic order: he believed that Jesus taught it. In fact, starting with Jesus’ announcement in Mark 9.35, it seems that Mark is seeking to view all angles of Jesus’ teaching. Neither the rich nor the poor are demonized, because the author understood a focus on class or status to be missing Jesus’ point.

This does not mean that the kingdom come that Jesus proclaimed was not envisaged as having concrete social/economical/political dimensions; indeed, Jesus is reassuring Peter and the others that there would be tangible, social/economical/political rewards for the faithful, and by implication the opposite for the unfaithful. What it does mean is that faithfulness would not be evaluated by social, economical, or political dimensions, but by humility before God.

Chalk this one up to staring too closely at the text. It’s not a felicitous scenario when the material you’re analyzing for your dissertation keeps distracting you from the actual subject.

Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, ‘How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!’ And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, ‘Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’ They were greatly astounded and said to one another, ‘Then who can be saved?’ Jesus looked at them and said, ‘For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.’

Mark 10.23-27 NRSV

I’ve been trying to figure out why Mark shows the disciples finding this teaching so hard to believe, first to be “perplexed” and then still more “astounded” after Jesus was obliged to restate it more explicitly. It’s hard for me to find a compelling narrative or rhetorical purpose behind the disciples’ astonishment.

They had just witnessed the rich young man’s reaction, so a clear illustration of the subject of Jesus’ statement had just been demonstrated before their eyes. The real question is why Mark portrays them as taking the news so personally. They seem almost horrified. Peter goes on to remind Jesus that they should hardly be in danger of exclusion from the Kingdom for wealth’s sake, because they had left all theirs behind to follow him.

Luke appears to pick up on this and redirects the “How hard it is…” statement to the rich man directly and then has a more vague audience (“those who heard him”) react in amazement, letting the disciples off the hook a bit, as Luke is wont to do, by allowing Peter to state more confidently, “Look, we have left our homes and followed you.”

If not a narrative purpose, it seems there would at least be an intended dramatic or rhetorical purpose. But what effect did the writer expect this to have?

Maybe Mark as a famed drama queen simply used Jesus’ disciples as props to set up this implausible scenario of despair to give Jesus a chance to still the storm with his reassurance that “…for God all things are possible.” But why use the disciples and not, as did Luke, a more general audience? Perhaps he was writing with an affluent audience in mind and chose to voice their anticipated incredulity at this hard saying by placing it in the mouths of such generally creditable characters as the disciples of Jesus. Jesus does let the rich off the hook pretty quickly. I can think of no other reason why we should draw such a conclusion about Mark’s audience, however.

There’s a good chance the author wanted to portray Jesus’ teaching as shockingly innovative in its inversion of social status in the Kingdom of God. Yet because the principle of inversion was not an out-of-the-blue doctrine in Judea, this would make it seem that the author was either out of touch with Judean apocalyptic or that he was banking on the possibility that his audience was.

One of the factors that might come into play is Mark’s oft noted pattern of showing the disciples as not quite “getting it”. It is fairly clear however that in this case it was not a lack of understanding but a clear realization of what he said that caused their reaction; this is consternation, not confusion. Why are they painted as feeling threatened by this teaching even though they clearly, even within the narrative, are exempt?

Perhaps it is an awkward attempt to kill two birds with one stone in presenting Jesus’ explosive teaching about the danger of riches while also incidentally intimating that the disciples were not at all on the same page as Jesus, even when they actually knew what he was talking about.

It’s probably multiple of these. But even stirring them in together I don’t come up with anything that can make this passage make sense. So either 1) I’m missing something or 2) the author wouldn’t win many modern writing awards for this passage. Any other ideas?

I thought I was done posting about this subject for a while, but apparently I’m not the only one thinking about this! The following comes from Roger Olson, someone whose views I often find quite compelling. What does he think about the atonement?

…I do think denial of any objective-transactional aspect of the atonement is dangerous to the gospel.  Purely subjective theories fall short; they cannot account for how the atonement takes care of the guilt problem.  They are inextricably tied to an optimistic, perhaps even Pelagian, view of humanity when taken alone.

To me, anyway, the gospel IS that Christ died for our sins in the sense that his death made it possible for God to forgive sinners righteously.  Take that away and the preaching of the cross gradually (or suddenly) fades away.  So does the gospel.

via About the atonement | Roger E Olson

Olson seems to be working from popular but deficient definitions of two words.

The first problematic understanding is of the nature of sin: he still views sin primarily in terms of “guilt”. Then again, maybe it’s his definition of guilt that’s the problem. I believe that sin is real, and that it is the common enemy of God and man. But that’s just it: sin is the enemy, not the sinner. The idea that “the guilt problem” means that mankind with its sinful behavior is a fire that God needs to put out, that is, until Christ died, is the fuzzy logic behind the “objective-transactional” views of governmental and penal substitution theories of the atonement. But it’s not a logic that holds up very well if we take at all seriously the way that Jesus taught us to talk about God, namely as a Father. Any interest I might have in “tak[ing] care of the guilt problem” whenever my young son commits a sin (such as lying) would be nothing less than a perversity on my part. I do care about his guilt, but only insofar as it stems from my real parental concern for his well-being and moral development. He may be an offender, but a good parent first wants to address the fact that his child is a victim of his/her own acts. If my daughter stepped in to offer herself to receive my son’s punishment, and I took her up on her offer, either to demonstrate my sense of “justice” (which sounds disturbingly like the lex talionis superseded by Jesus himself) as in the governmental theory or, admittedly much worse, because I had an otherwise insatiable need to punish someone, anyone, for my son’s misdeeds, I would not be a good parent, much less the wise father of consummate love taught in the New Testament. No, sin is a sickness that must be removed from our souls, not “cancelled” or “paid for” through some clever “transaction”. The sinner must be cured, not left to decay as punishment for being sick. Olson and Piper, as rarely on the same page as they are, unite to disagree with this assessment just as emphatically as I reject theirs. [Note: the preceding paragraph has been edited slightly since publication for clarity.]

The other misunderstanding (puzzling to me in the extreme) that Olson and Piper agree upon is what the gospel is: “…the gospel IS that Christ died for our sins…” Please tell me, then, how Jesus could have been preaching the gospel from the very outset of his ministry! When did he once proclaim his death as the good news? This is massively, bewilderingly wrong, attributable only to the common tendency to allow Pauline theology (esp. from Romans) to trump that of the Gospel writers and their Jesus traditions (in point of fact, I don’t think Paul was so mistaken on that either, but that’s another discussion). The good news of the gospel is of the coming of the Kingdom of God, which was always that God’s heart would soon rule the day: the mighty would be brought low and the lowly exalted. Jesus’ gospel was extremely social; from what we can tell, it was conceived of as a political gospel as well (the return of Israel’s national status), so perhaps it’s best just to say that it was conceived of as a holistic new world order. It didn’t happen quite like they (even Jesus, apparently) thought it would. But in any event, in the Gospels we are never given any indication that Jesus proclaimed that his death was to bring about the Kingdom of God by taking the punishment for our sins. How else could Jesus tell people who called him “Lord” that he never knew them? It was those who “do the will of [the] father,” those who learn to obey their father who take part in the order of the Kingdom. What was Jesus’ solution to the sin problem? In the earliest Gospel’s first statement of Jesus’ ministry in Mark 1.14-15, it was “Repent and believe in the good news!” And notice that “good news” there couldn’t mean “trust in my work upon the cross.”

Olson’s quoted remarks are based on a presupposition: Jesus’ atonement must have been objective, or else Jesus’ death didn’t take care of our guilt. This implies that he is uncomfortable with admitting that perhaps Jesus’ death did not take care of our guilt in a substitutionary fashion, making it possible “for God to forgive sinners righteously.” A righteous father will always forgive his wayward children, will he not? He will punish or love (depending on the circumstance) his children’s misbehavior right out of them; what he will not do is make excuses for it.

Ok, I pledge it: I’m laying off of this subject for the foreseeable future.

Recently I was listening to a pastor describing the gospel in the predominant Reformed fashion as the message that sinners are absolved of guilt because Christ died in order to allow God to punish sin without condemning vile, sinful humanity (at least those of us who are fortunate enough to be among the elect). Under this rubric, “the cross” becomes shorthand for “the way in which Christ received our justly deserved penalty and condemnation”, the so-called penal substitution theory of the atonement. At one point this pastor used Paul’s insistence that he preached nothing but “Christ crucified” as evidence that Paul preached the gospel as defined above.

Have you ever heard that? Someone claiming that the gospel is all Christians need to focus on, all that’s necessary, the only thing we have any business preaching (I do not intend to challenge these assertions here), and in the same breath asserting that “the gospel” means “God punished Jesus in our stead”? Downplaying our utter wickedness and the fact that we deserve to rot in hell for eternity (or even just be consumed) and a primary focus on the ethics of Christianity are seen as tantamount to rejecting the gospel of Christ.

The question that sprang to my mind as I heard the aforementioned pastor, eventually prompting this post, was whether Paul’s phrase “Christ crucified” in 1 Corinthians 1-2 in any way depends upon or implies penal substitution. I believe the answer is a resounding no, so resounding that answering either yes or the more modest yes and no present the danger of propping up a massive distraction from the important message Paul was trying to convey.

The contextual thrust of the passage in which “Christ crucified” is found is unequivocal: Paul is attempting to correct a fundamentally incorrect attitude in the church, an attitude that was hardly unique to Corinth or the first century. He is displeased to have learned that factions have sprung up in the church at Corinth, a faction of Apollos, a faction of Paul, and – with no exemption from criticism – a faction of Christ. Appealing first to those who set themselves up as his followers, he calls attention to the basis of his own leadership, which was not power or eloquence, but humility.

“For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.” (1.17)

Building cliques around leadership meant calling attention away from the very power source of the “cross of Christ”, namely, submission. That was counter-intuitive to be sure, but…

“…it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’” (1.19)

It is this immediate context in which the assertion that “we proclaim Christ crucified” is first made:

“‘…but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (1.23-25)

Nowhere present here or within this entire passage is so much as a passing mention of the wrath of God justly levied against our utterly depraved state. The focus is somewhere else entirely: for Paul, this principle of inversion, the reversal of strong/weak, wise/foolish is a thoroughgoing program, the hallmark and curriculum of the Kingdom.

“Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.” (1.26-29; cf. Philippians 2)

Paul appeals to his own example of self-abasement in the interests of others as the only possible basis for his credibility, which basis simultaneously disqualifies him from exaltation:

“…I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling.” (2.1-3)

“For when one says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ and another, ‘I belong to Apollos,’ are you not merely human? What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each.” (3.4-5)

“So let no one boast about human leaders. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future–all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God. Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries.” (3.21-4.1)

Both to those who uphold and who question his authority, Paul repeats his insistence throughout chapters 1 through 3 (as indeed in various places throughout both letters to the Corinthians) that he wielded a leadership exercised only through and valid only because of his submission, sacrifice, and willingness to be persecuted. It’s a sustained, focused argument: Paul’s focus on the message of a crucified Messiah was intended to show his own Christ-like, “cruciform” bona fides.

When we hear “Christ crucified”, we should avoid losing the focus and intent of that phrase in Paul’s argument. For Paul, Christ’s crucifixion was the exemplar of submission and self-sacrifice, paradigmatic of the whole new world order over which Christ has been made king (again cf. Philippians 2, and also see here). If one insists that “Christ crucified” is the gospel, then at very least the gospel must be defined not as “God punished Jesus in our stead” ¹ but as “the Messiah has through self-abasement become Lord of all.”

However, even framing it that way is anachronistic, for the same reason that it should be manifestly clear that the message of the gospel could not be “that Christ received our justly deserved punishment and condemnation”: the gospel long predates Jesus’ crucifixion. Jesus preached the good news of the Kingdom of God from the very beginning of his ministry, and we have absolutely no reason to believe that his own future death was the subject of his main message. The good news, the gospel, was of the coming of the Kingdom of God, an original conception of which was anticipated by other sects of Judaism before him and found its roots in the canonical Old Testament (e.g. Isaiah 40.4-5). Jesus took up the mantle to fulfill those hopes: the oppressed would be vindicated and the oppressors laid low. Originally, and even in the first century, this eschatological corrective was envisaged as taking place by the restoration of national Israel’s political fortunes. However, it seems that the earliest Christians saw in Jesus a Messiah, a divine restorative agent, who did not overcome might with might, but with self-sacrifice.

No one searching for Paul’s unity with the teachings of Jesus should miss this unifying, early Christian motivating vision of the reign of God: mutual submission and voluntary servanthood is at the heart of the Kingdom of which Christ is king. Interestingly, here we find one of the least disputable indications of the content of the historical Jesus’ teachings, since this principle of inversion not only dominates the first few chapters of 1 Corinthians, the earliest known Christian writing, but also features prominently in the Synoptics (and, for what it’s worth, the Gospel of Thomas as well).

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¹ Despite my oft stated misgivings with the doctrine, I do not mean to claim that there is no trace of the idea of penal substitution intimated or implied within Paul’s writings. However, the frequent use of the expression “Christ crucified” as a proof that Paul thought the core of Christian soteriology to be God’s wrath against sin appeased through punishing Jesus is surely wrong-headed. For if Jesus was exalted to lordship for accepting the cup, what part would that person play who demands satisfaction for wrongs done him –even if that person was God Himself? Would he not be the last, the lowest, the least Christ-like? Jesus would not in that case be exemplifying the Father to humanity, but showing Him up.

Except for the loving help they gave the distressed, revealing him to their hearts as the Redeemer from evil, I doubt if [Jesus] would have wrought a single miracle. I do not think he cared much about them. Certainly, as regarded the onlookers, he did not expect much to result from those mighty deeds. A mere marvel is practically soon forgotten, and long before it is forgotten, many minds have begun to doubt the senses, their own even, which communicated it. Inward sight alone can convince of truth; signs and wonders never. No number of signs can do more than convey a probability that he who shews them knows that of which he speaks. They cannot convey the truth. But the vision of the truth itself, in the knowledge of itself, a something altogether beyond the region of signs and wonders, is the power of God, is salvation. This vision was in the Lord’s face and form to the pure in heart who were able to see God; but not in his signs and wonders to those who sought after such…The truth must show itself in God’s time, in and by the labour. The kingdom must come in God’s holy human way. Not by a stroke of grandeur, but by years of love, yea, by centuries of seeming bafflement, by aeons of labour, must he grow into the hearts of the sons and daughters of his Father in heaven.

George MacDonald

from Unspoken Sermons, vol. 1, “The Temptation in the Wilderness”

Conversations with some of my closest fellow sojourners (such as Mike, Cliff, and Matthew) have often included a discussion of the following question: given our radical departure from many tenets of evangelical orthodoxy such as our rejection of inerrancy and acceptance of critical scholarship of the Bible, the theory of evolution, etc., why does our faith remain strong despite the many (if not the majority) who go along similar paths and end up losing their faith? What makes the difference?

There’s no easy answer, of course. Performing an autopsy of another person’s faith is tricky business, and will certainly require more “inside” details than our armchair analysis will be able to provide. So we usually pursue the least assuming and more promising line of inquiry, which is to examine the commonality of the experiences of those of us who hang on to faith despite its dramatically changing shape under serious scrutiny.

This is more of a “journal”, “web log” kind of post than an exposition. The following will in no way give you a complete picture: chances are that if you’re expecting this post to be an apologetic, you will be significantly underwhelmed. Nevertheless, while I was thinking about it I decided to jot down some of the factors that have contributed to my faith’s thriving (and I think many of these go for the friends I mentioned above as well, but you’ll have to ask them).  I focus here not on what makes me a theist, but what makes me persist as a Christian specifically.

Enduring interest
Obviously, an important component is that I am comfortable with (enthralled by, even) many of the teachings of Christianity, although I have since discarded so many of what more orthodox believers consider essential that they would roll their eyes to hear me say that. I have come to understand God primarily in terms of the message of Jesus, rather than Jesus’ purported actions (miracles, etc., even the Resurrection) or even in specific formulations of his message in the Gospels. In fact, I have accepted the revelation of modern scholarship that the Gospels actually represent the message of Jesus as interpreted by different and varied first century “Jesus communities”; especially considering their relatively late date (30+ years after Jesus), we have precious little reason to expect that they directly present Jesus’ message, but are, rather, later interpretations of his message.

Yet I’ve still not encountered anything that convinces me that the Gospel writers’ presentations of the man’s central message were really far afield. Indeed, despite the many differences between the Gospels, the distinctives of Jesus’ message are actually unmistakably close to one another: the first Gospel to be written already has Jesus framing his mission as the proclamation of the Kingdom of God, and as MacDonald points out, what that kingdom looks like is remarkably consistent over all four Gospels (italics original, bold and bracketed remarks all mine):

What is the kingdom of Christ? A rule of love, of truth—a rule of service. The king is the chief servant in it. “The kings of the earth have dominion: it shall not be so among you.” “The Son of Man came to minister.” [both from Mark] “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” [in John, of Jesus' healing of the sick] The great Workman is the great King, labouring for his own…The lesson added by St Luke to the presentation of the child is: “For he that is least among you all, the same shall be great.” And St Matthew says: “Whosoever shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Hence the sign that passes between king and subject. The subject kneels in homage to the kings of the earth: the heavenly king takes his subject in his arms. This is the sign of the kingdom between them. This is the all-pervading relation of the kingdom.

Many now say that the Jesus of the Gospels was effectively created out of whole cloth by writers well removed from him. But this begs the very serious question never answered: why then did they all create specifically the Jesus of the Gospels? Oh sure there are differences, sometimes dramatic differences, in the Gospels’ portrayals of Jesus, but that makes similarities such as Jesus’ preoccupation with and characterization of the Kingdom of God all the more significant. One must posit a source for these traditions, and we’ve certainly no better hypothesis than that this source was someone actually teaching these things — at very least planting the seeds among his followers. Jesus’ message of the Kingdom of God, which is at bottom of willful servanthood, stands as what I consider the greatest and most important philosophy in history, inspiring me and countless others to be his disciple. As I have said before, even if I found out by proof positive that Jesus never rose from the dead in any sense, I would likely still consider myself “Christian”, at least in a philosophical sense (like a “Kantian”).

Decisive experience
Ok, so I like Jesus’ teachings — so do many people of other faiths and of no faith whatsoever. Still, I consider myself a “Christian” in a more spiritual sense than that.

My childhood faith, bolstered by a community of faithful believers (and particularly my parents), was delightfully rich. Although I’ve never been one to feel or talk as though “me and God hung out today,” I have always felt “connected” with Him in a mystical sense. Somehow, He’s a person I feel I’ve met and come to know better and better, and in actuality I always feel like I’m delusional for trying to deny this even in my thought experiments, like trying to convince yourself you’re not married when you have clear memories of your wedding and subsequent marriage relationship. My experiences with God, which comprise not only emotions but also consistent and lifelong observations of positive effects of belief in myself and others I know well, have been persistently profound even though somewhat intangible. I have seen no reason not to continue using them as something of an anchor.

Intellectual disposition
One more I’m going to mention here is the influence of certain personality characteristics which may help explain my upbeat attitude toward an ever evolving faith.

An extremely important factor for me was that my experience with faith and Christian belief was always one of discovery. So when the data started coming in that convinced me of evangelical Christianity’s flaws and errors, apart from a feeling of growing isolation from my community I was more than happy to glom onto that data not so much as a challenge to but as an expression of my faith in God.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that the following never applies in the lives of the de-converted, but I know for a fact that it has influenced my lack of de-conversion. It is this: I never trusted easy answers to begin with, and so it wasn’t such a shock to have my evangelical faith overhauled by my close scrutiny. An unshakable uneasiness with simply accepting whatever was handed to me and the above mentioned thrill for the truth hunt have been prominent ever since my discovery as a seven-year-old of the discrepancy between what Genesis 1-2 says and what my book about prehistoric science said.

As Cliff is keen to point out, certainty in either direction is simply not in the cards. The dichotomy is not between doubt and faith — doubt is the qualifier that distinguishes a reasonable faith from an altogether blind faith — but between acknowledged and unacknowledged uncertainty. Christians and avowed atheists alike are simply going about their delusions of certainty in a different way. Christians who refuse to peek under the cover are not exercising faith but fear: fear of having to deal with uncertainty.  When former believers who embrace a thorough atheism as though it were the only option other than fundamentalist/evangelical Christianity, they are not exercising healthy skepticism but cynicism, or laziness at best.

In any event, when I reached the fork in the road at the end of the evangelical path I had been led down, I had two choices: I could take the path of hopeful uncertainty or continue on another (very different) path of imagined certainty. The sign over the first path said, “I’m not certain it’s true, but I love it,” and the other said, “I don’t love it because I’m not certain it’s true.” For reasons such as those described above, I chose the former, “and that has made all the difference.”

As I said, this is not meant to be persuasive but as a window into some of my musings of late. Take from it what you will.