This is a rant.
This is a personal reaction that need not apply to you. The mainstream Western Christian celebration of Resurrection Sunday has worn thin on me, and even the corrective blog posts and articles have gotten trite. Over the years it has gotten so annoying that I took a New Testament option of not celebrating the holiday at all, but celebrating His Resurrection every day (Romans 14:5). But I wanted to wait until it was all past to write about it.
When I was a kid, I knew it was Easter because it was after Christmas and we would all go and buy new dress clothes. Mom and my aunts would buy extra eggs and talk about dying them. Parents would sneak around getting cheap baskets, fake grass and chocolate bunnies.
Do me a favor, would you? If you want to celebrate Easter (the holy day of Oester), go ahead. But don’t squish into it some passing ritual mention of Christ’s Resurrection, okay? Don’t do Easter stuff at church unless you plan to hold a separate ritual event for the Resurrection. That’s pretty much the minimum if you want me involved.
Sometimes Scripture discusses things directly, usually in its own historical context. Sometimes we have to search for clues with fear and trembling that we don’t blaspheme in the process. The Apostles saw nothing wrong with scholarship and expertise in pagan mythology. The knowledge was not a threat; it was a necessity for dealing with the pagans. Not all pagan religion is a threat to faith. Sometimes there are parallels and insights that actually accord with the Bible. A solid majority of the Covenant of Moses reflects common custom and belief among pagans in that part of the world. God chose to use such things where they were consistent with His revelation. If you don’t know that, then be very careful what you advocate as a believer, because you’ll likely come up wrong on a lot of things.
On the other hand, the Apostles flatly warn us against idolatry. They didn’t word it with quite the severity of Moses because Moses is more about symbolism and national identity, while the New Testament presumes no national identity on the same level. It’s more cosmopolitan about things because our identity is rooted consciously above this realm of existence. We understand the symbolism but we strive to see through it to something difficult to put into words. So Paul lays out a basic guideline that you avoid celebrating a pagan deity. Don’t let your pagan friends think you are worshiping their deities. Find some place in your behavior where you draw a line that they will see and recognize. Don’t be a grouch, but don’t be herded into a festival that is blatantly idolatrous. The whole point is distinguish Christ from the rest.
Obviously I reject the legalism you can find on any number of websites about how “evil” it is to celebrate common cultural holidays in any way. Culture is culture and a lot of our pagan Anglo-Saxon legacy is buried under secularism. You can decide for yourself where to draw the line, but in the back of my mind I never forget that decorating Christmas trees is a pagan religious ritual, as is dying eggs and making chocolate hearts. We aren’t the First Century church, but we do well to realize they celebrated Christ’s Resurrection as a fulfillment of Old Testament celebrations, Passover in particular. That Old Testament stuff is not our heritage of culture, but it is our heritage of faith and revelation. It would be far better to create entirely new rituals for our own context.
Take a moment to consider what an awful thing it was that Constantine managed to seduce the Christian leaders of his day. He offered protection from persecution and favorable imperial policy, and even money, to capture them in his very intelligent scheme of making Christianity more like his favored religion of sun worship. He was a Solarian and he paganized the church to some degree. A great deal of Roman Catholic ritual descends from his influence. We struggle today to unravel the garbage he inserted into the Christian religion of his day, and there is room for debate on a lot of specifics.
On the one hand, I am very conscious of the rhythm of life on this planet. We are obliged as humans to recognize the hand of God in that continuing cycle and celebrate the rich provision for life. On the other hand, I tend to flatline the highs and lows of sentiment that other people seem to want for themselves. In my soul, that roller-coaster stuff is a serious problem, so I try to avoid it. That means I am pretty giddy and nutty every day, but I downplay the holiday celebrations. I might use any contextual factor as leverage to prod people into a stronger awareness of God, but I don’t care for Christmas trees, colored eggs and chocolate hearts. Meanwhile, I love coniferous trees in nature, I eat eggs every day, and I love dark chocolate. I am deeply cynical about flag-waving and other kinds of herding activities, but I am a disabled veteran. I am fiercely nonconformist under whatever you see on my exterior. I won’t piss on your parade without very good reason, but if you begin to sound idolatrous, that might provoke me — especially if you try to rope me into your celebration as if it were a moral obligation.
This is why I didn’t post anything specific about Resurrection Sunday.
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Off topic, but I have a few random questions just in case you have time:
— How come everybody has such different opinions regarding Christianity? Is it just a matter of perspective or is faith just really high level stuff and “implementation” can differ?
— How much guidance can you expect? Or trust in one’s own understanding?
— How much updating should we do to Christian ethics based on science, current material reality etc.? How about different ethical systems or social psychology (Jonathan Haidt’s ideas)?
It often seems as if Christian ideas are left fairly compartmentalized — and 10 different thinkers would give you 10 different answers.
Good questions, Mr. T. While I believe I’ve answered them in previous writings, perhaps not all in one place. Let me attempt a summary.
I believe the word “faith” has been abused. It refers to a faculty above the level of intellect and thought. It’s a word for trust and commitment of a depth that the brain cannot make on its own. Faith is reflected in the presence of convictions. The job of the mind is to clarify what those convictions — what a commitment to God — require. The brain organizes the flesh and implements the demands of faith. But the brain is still afflicted by the Curse of the Fall. Thus, variations in human thinking about responding to faith are natural, even necessary.
The problem comes when you take your mind too seriously, or should I say, the mind takes itself too seriously. The nature of the Fall is the brain asserting itself as master of the soul and refusing to kneel before the heart. The intellect does not admit to being fallen. And then, we have scads of people who believe and theorize without actually having faith. A mind without a living spirit above it is unlikely to know what it’s missing. Way too much of our past expressions of religion come from folks whose spirits were actually dead. And then there’s the additional problem that many with awakened spirits have a very poor connection to their minds. Faith doesn’t actually rule that much in their souls. I suppose if I were to attempt a discussion of how the intellect is not the whole of our conscious awareness, that your brain is not exactly you, we could bog things down very quickly. It’s very hard to put into words something that requires stepping outside the territory where words are anchored.
That’s the whole point I often make: We should not expect to come up with the same answers in the sense of what we can tell each other in words. This is also why I make so much of parables and symbolic logic. I contend that Jesus told His disciples that pulling random listeners back into the proper frame of reference to hear from God requires using a boundary that already exists. It exists in the human wiring and it was fundamental to Hebrew language itself. It’s also why I make clear statements about accepting all comers to this parish. The only requirement for membership is that you tolerate me, not that you agree with me. If you can work with me, there is no reason I can’t include you. I believe that is the proper example of how we do religion together. No human rules the outcome of this.
I’ve not actually read Jonathan Haidt, so I can’t comment directly. After taking a quick survey of summaries and comments from search engine results, I suppose he and I have some ideas in common about the larger questions of morality. However, your question of updating goes back to the observation that we can learn from the ancients, but we can’t replicate their context. I would reject the notion that we could come up with one right answer because there is no such thing. My only consideration is pleasing my God. I try to teach ways you can move closer to the place where you can commune with Him best, to find your place in His intentions. My answer is that you have to find your own path in deciding what to use and what to reject, and why, as well as under what conditions you might change your mind. The mind can be changed, as does the context, but convictions participate in Eternity. Moral convictions are virtually impossible to describe. It won’t hurt to try describing them as long you don’t take the results too seriously, as if your formulations could settle any questions for all contexts.
So it should not surprise you that everyone has their own answers. The better question is working out how you will decide with whom you can work and how closely. The biggest problem is that people imagine their answers are somehow universal. On the other hand, you have to start somewhere. “Walk in the light you have” is a good expression. Obey your conscience with the expectation it should learn things, too. It’s merely the mind’s interface with conviction, a part of the mind in that sense. Don’t develop the expectation that your mind will ever really grasp things completely. Know that your heart is superior in wisdom, and we will spend the rest of our lives trying to clarify what the mind can get from the heart.
Keep asking questions.
Thanks for the answers!
I’m just trying — for my own purposes — to put together the connections between . . .
faith/spirit religion (and other religions) morality ethical systems individual/cultural differences nature biology
… and actually doing things in the world in a spiritually acceptable way.
Not easy!
I have a lot of (in some sense stupid) questions. 🙂
Some characters got stripped, these should have been separated like this:
faith/spirit — religion (and other religions) — morality — ethical systems — individual/cultural differences — nature — biology
Do you have any opinions on “natural theology”?
I’m just starting to read the book “The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology” by Alister E. McGrath.
Seems like a breath of fresh air in a sense because there’s (probably) only so much you can do based on (just) scripture in isolation. The “real world” exits as well: supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit, living morally and hear-led etc.
Also I’m reading Bruce Charlton’s blog who has good ideas and postings despite some Mormon sympathies: http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/
Just because the Mormon religion was founded on a swindler’s bet doesn’t mean Mormons can’t figure things out from inside their odd worldview. There has to be something compelling in Joseph Smith’s teaching or nobody would buy it. That he seems to have stolen his text from a real writer only changes who can claim to have published something that seems to resonate. I’m not hostile to Mormons but I could never take seriously the foundation of their religion. Some of their teachings are actually useful.
Part of the problem with “natural theology” is that it’s a label for two things. One is the classical body of stuff from a particular school of thought; the other is a process of arriving at answers. As with most processes, it has to start somewhere and that’s where we get into so much debate. For the most part, natural theology has a bad name in mainstream Christian religion. But of course, the mainstream pays only lip service to the idea of letting the heart lead.
I don’t object to the basic idea behind the term itself. Paul didn’t either, in the sense that he wrote in Romans that if it’s all you had, it would likely start you in the right direction. Seems to me Paul had confidence in the mechanism of natural revelation, provided you were attuned to your heart. In his world, I believe the imposition of intellect over the heart was unnatural, and relatively new in human awareness as a conscious philosophical orientation. Job’s problem with his three pals suggests that cutting off from that heart-led awareness is an ancient problem — it’s the essence of the Fall — but that Hellenism was the first effort to make it a conscious assumption for seeking truth.
I’d be more interested in reading what you might have to say about it, though. If you have to the inclination to read this stuff, you should share your impressions with us.
I’m in the middle of the book of Job (Job 12) in my current Bible reading so that was a handy reference. (“Then Job replied: Doubtless you are the only people who matter, and wisdom will die with you! But I have a mind as well as you; I am not inferior to you. Who does not know all these things?”)
The problem certainly is that you have to model things somehow intellectually as well in order to understand and connect things. Concepts, categories, etc. And apparently describing spiritual things is not straight forward. It’s still very new territory for me even if everything Works(TM)(R) and it matters.
I’ll try to keep you posted about natural theology (on page 19 in McGrath’s book).
Yeah, the big problem is in that word “describing.” The Bible uses indicative language as opposed to descriptive. It’s a conscious effort to avoid description and prefer indication — AKA characterization, depiction, dramatization, etc. We humbly decline to imagine that we could describe spiritual things. We insist the Bible was written by folks who were like that. Being true to the Bible means avoiding any of that “propositional truth” nonsense. I’m looking forward to your discussion of McGrath.
And I’ve been lately reading your commentary on Romans and listening to some audio programs regarding it as well. So well synchronized (Jung’s term).
In another tab just in case someone is interested, Orgone Energy: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_reich06.htm . Reich got a bit obsessed (hammer, nail), and he had a peculiar take on Christ.
Reich, the infamous psychiatrist. He’s one of those minor characters in my education and I never felt he was worth more attention. All I can say at this point is when you deal with a wacko society while believing it’s fairly normal, you tend to come up with wacko theories about human nature and wacko answers to their problems. That doesn’t mean he knew nothing useful, but that the net result of his work requires careful consideration because it was shot through with major moral errors.
Mr. T – thanks for posting that link to Chilton’s blog, it’s quite interesting reading.
Ed – “when you deal with a wacko society while believing it’s fairly normal, you tend to come up with wacko theories about human nature and wacko answers to their problems.”
Hilarious.
I read somewhere recently that the parameters for ‘normal’ human psychology are based on tests on American college students! If that is the bar for normal I would *hope* to be considered deviant.
My comment arises from something more erudite about Freud’s theories; Reich was a student of Freud. The original goes something like this: If all you deal with are sick people, it’s hard to come up with a valid norm. Freud’s ideas arose from a very high exposure to a very sick bunch of people, but my comment takes note that the society itself is the real reason for the sickness.
What constitutes “normal” cannot be answered by science; it can only be revealed by the God who made us.