How did the Cross of Christ shape the Western mind?

 In the Western world today, certain values are dominant, even if largely implicit: human rights, equality, democracy, helping the weak, the rule of law, justice, ..

Where did these values come from? ancient Greek philosophy, the Enlightenment, cultural evolution, Judaism, Christianity? These are the questions that the popular historian Tom Holland grapples with in his recent book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. In the theology reading group we are discussing it over the next three months. In more than five hundred pages he offers a breath-taking and engaging ride through more than two thousand years of history. 

The main argument of the book is that "a cult inspired by the execution of an obscure criminal in a long-vanished empire came to exercise .. a transformational and enduring influence on the world.."

Last night we discussed the first one-third of the book, Antiquity, covering from 497 BC in Athens to 632 AD in Carthage. Here are some of the main ideas that stood out to me.

Image: Issenheim Altarpiece by Gruenwald

1. It all begins with The Cross of Christ. It leads to an intellectual, theological, cultural, social, and political revolution. Victory is found in defeat. God identifies with the weak, marginalised, poor, suffering, ...

2. Equality. All humans are made in the image of God. Hence, they are all of equal value and should be treated with respect and dignity. Followers of Jesus have only one identity: Christian, that transcends gender, nationality, citizenship, ethnicity, wealth, position, social class, ...

3. Followers of Jesus live to embody the Cross. They live sacrificially to serve the poor, share wealth and possessions, heal the sick (including in plagues), comfort the dying, rescue abandoned babies, liberate slaves,...

4. Although, the thinking and actions described above may seem admirable and heroic today, at the time they were completely counter-cultural: it went against Greek philosophy, Roman rule, and how people lived. Crucifixion was a brutal means to exercise political control: it involved not just incredible physical suffering but also public humiliation. The heroes were the strong. The most powerful became gods. Violence was good: a means for social control and stability. There was a "brute truth" that most in Rome "took for granted: the potency of a Roman penis. Sex was nothing if not an exercise in power" (p. 81). 

Holland illustrates how context matters. We need to understand the context in which the New Testament was written and how the development of different church doctrines and institutions, were influenced by their cultural and political context.

5. History shows that the church has an ambivalent relationship with wealth and power. The New Testament and the lives of exemplary Christians are incredibly radical and counter-cultural. Wealth and power are intertwined and have a pernicious ability to corrupt mind and spirit, even among the well-intentioned who seek to use wealth and power for the good of others. Church history is a continual cycle of radical service and renewal, institutionalisation, and corruption.

6. The church seems to have had the greatest influence when it was radical and on the margins and when it had an integrated approach combining head, heart, and hands. Or in different words, study, contemplation, and action.

If you want a brief introduction to the book see

A review in The Guardian by Terry Eagleton, a Marxist and distinguished literary critic.

An interview with Tom Holland at the Centre for Public Christianity and another on ABC Radio.

A related book, with a shorter historical scope, is by the sociologist Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity.

In another post, I will consider some missing dimensions to Holland's perspective on the Cross of Christ.

What is Religion? What is Science? How might they be related?

Peter Harrison has beautifully demonstrated that answers to these questions have changed significantly over the past few hundred years in the Western world, with reference to Christianity and the natural sciences. Harrison’s book, The Territories of Science and Religion, based on his Gifford lectures, has generated considerable interest. 

 

Similar issues of ambiguity and Western bias become even greater in South Asian contexts. This is nicely summarised below by Darren Duerksen and William Dyrness in a recent book, 

Seeking Church: Emerging Witnesses to the Kingdom, which builds on field research by Duerksen, and engages concepts of emergence from the social sciences, that I will also discuss below. The quote is long but I include it because it highlights such a fundamental issue.

 

Defining religion is similar to the proverbial problem of defining time—it seems self-evident until one actually tries to put words to it. But for all the various definitions of religion—and there are many—there are at least two things upon which contemporary scholars agree. The first, as scholars such as Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Clifford Geertz, and J. Z. Smith have suggested, is the idea that religion was, and to some degree continues to be, a concept that comes from outside of religions themselves and does not adequately describe various religious traditions. As Richard King has noted, early Greco-Roman uses of the concept referred to ritual practices and paying homage to the gods. With the rise of Christianity, however, it was redefined as “a matter of adherence to particular doctrines or beliefs rather than allegiance to ancient ritual practices.” This model tends to emphasize a theistic belief and a “fundamental dualism between the human world and the transcendent world.” Such conceptions reflected particular ways of understanding the Christian religion in the West but did not and do not always adequately describe the religions of other contexts.

The second area of agreement is that the idea of “world religions” is also largely a Western concept born out of the Enlightenment and responds to the need to make sense of a changing world. As Tomoko Masuzawa demonstrates in her influential book The Invention of World Religions, until the mid-nineteenth century Europeans and North Americans typically described the world as made up of Christians, Jews, Muhammadans (Muslims), and the rest. Western affinities for taxonomy began to be more specific about “the rest” in subsequent decades, …

What this required, however, was to somehow define and order in Western and Christian terms that which often defied categorization. An important example is the “religion” of Hinduism. As H. L. Richard and others have shown, historically the non-Muslims of the Indian continent did not understand themselves as sharing a common set of beliefs and practices known as Hinduism, much less call themselves Hindus. In the eighteenth century onward, however, and particularly through interaction with British Christian colonialists and missionaries, Britons and then Indians started to categorize the widely ranging traditions of the subcontinent as an identifiable religion.

This signals an important point that we intend to explore in this book— that from a social science perspective the category of religion itself is an elastic concept and is not as self-evident as is often assumed.

An integrated reading of Paul

I have now finished reading Participating in Christ: Explorations in Paul's Theology and Spirituality by Michael J. Gorman

It is certainly one of the best and most influential theology books I have read over the past year. My theology reading group is an eclectic bunch and I think this may be the only book that every person in the group has liked!

A signature of Gorman's approach and thinking is that it is integrated and multi-faceted. He is not reductionist, into either/or categorization, and avoids false dichotomies. For example, the following paragraph may be representative.

For Paul the inseparability of justification and justice is critical,... The community of the justified is the community of the just, which is the community of those being transformed and glorified and recreated all in Christ. 

These are not different, competing soteriologies even quasi-independent slices of one soteriological pie. Rather they are intimately interconnected dimensions of one soteriological reality, such that one aspect to not be fully or adequately articulated without reference to the others. 

A comprehensive term or phrase is needed, or at least helpful, to keep these dimensions integrated... "corporate, cruciform, resurrectional, missional theosis,"... 

(italics are his, page 233-4).

The above occurs at the end of chapter 9, in which Gorman connects three passages from 2 Corinthians, to argue that the concept of theosis is central to Paul's theology and spirituality. Gorman considers the central verses for each of the passages are the following.

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. (3:18) 

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness [justice] of God.(5:21) 

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.(8:9)

The last verse is in the context of Paul's appeal to the Corinthian church to contribute to the financial collection for the poor in the Jerusalem church. 

"5:21 is a bridge from the heavenly glory of 3:18 to its practical, even mundane, embodiment in 8:9.'' It is "Theosis on the Ground: Cruciform Economic Justice."

I think such an integrated perspective is needed to avoid getting trapped in rigid dichotomies such as individual/community, faith/works, life/doctrine, predestination/free will, faith/reason, spirituality/mission, ....

Redemption from words

My wife and I enjoyed watching the movie The Professor and The Madman. It is based on the fascinating story of the origins of the Oxford English Dictionary, focusing on the contributions of and the relationship between the editor James Murray and William Chester Minor. Minor is in a prison for the "criminally insane" as a result of a murder he committed.

I found it quite striking and beautiful is how the issue of forgiveness and redemption thread through the story. How can a murderer find redemption? Can his victim's family forgive him?

How the cross shapes the Christian life

For the next three monthly meetings of the theology reading group we will be discussing Participating in Christ: Explorations in Paul's Theology and Spirituality by Michael J. Gorman

In the first chapter, Gorman introduces the book by making the case for 13 propositions. Here I list the ones that I found particularly interesting and helpful.

        The Cross

3. The cross is not only the definitive revelation of Christ and of God (i.e., it is both Christophany and theophany) but also the definitive revelation of what humans and the church are to be.

         Cruciformity

4. The cross is not only the source but also the shape of our salvation, and cross-shaped living (cruciformity) means that all Christian virtues and practices are cruciform: faith/faithfulness, love, power, hope, justice, and so forth.

6. Cruciformity/Theoformity is a matter not of imitation but of transformative participation: being in the Messiah/Spirit and having the Messiah/Spirit within (mutual indwelling).   

 Dying and rising with Christ  

10. Paradoxically, cruciform (cross-shaped) existence is also resurrectional (resurrection-suffused) cruciform ministry because the death of the messiah means life for all who share in that death.   

Mission  

11. The church is called not merely to believe the gospel but also to become the gospel and thereby to advance the gospel, the church is a living exegesis of the gospel.  

12.  Becoming the gospel means embodying the missional practices of love, peacemaking, reconciliation, restorative justice, forgiveness, non-violence, and so on that correspond to what God has done in the Messiah. 

13.  To be in the Messiah is to be in community, to be in mission, and to be in trouble (persecuted) - simultaneously.

What do we learn from the history of epidemics?

An epidemic provides a mirror on society: its values, its strengths, and its weaknesses. This idea is emphasized by Frank Snowden, a historian at Yale University. Last year he published “Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present,” and there is an insightful interview with him in The New Yorker, ``How Epidemics Change History''.

Epidemics are a category of disease that seem to hold up the mirror to human beings as to who we really are. That is to say, they obviously have everything to do with our relationship to our mortality, to death, to our lives. They also reflect our relationships with the environment—the built environment that we create and the natural environment that responds. They show the moral relationships that we have toward each other as people, and we’re seeing that today.

[an epidemic]  raises really deep philosophical, religious, and moral issues. And I think epidemics have shaped history in part because they’ve led human beings inevitably to think about those big questions. The outbreak of the plague, for example, raised the whole question of man’s relationship to God. How could it be that an event of this kind could occur with a wise, all-knowing and omniscient divinity? Who would allow children to be tortured, in anguish, in vast numbers? It had an enormous effect on the economy. Bubonic plague killed half the population of full continents and, therefore, had a tremendous effect on the coming of the industrial revolution, on slavery and serfdom.

David Brooks in the New York Times also picked up on this idea of the mirror, reflecting on the impact of the 1918 flu epidemic in the USA.

In Philadelphia, the head of emergency aid pleaded for help in taking care of sick children. Nobody answered. The organization’s director turned scornful: “Hundreds of women … had delightful dreams of themselves in the roles of angels of mercy. … Nothing seems to rouse them now. … There are families in which every member is ill, in which the children are actually starving because there is no one to give them food. The death rate is so high, and they still hold back.” 

This explains one of the puzzling features of the 1918 pandemic. When it was over, people didn’t talk about it. There were very few books or plays written about it. Roughly 675,000 Americans lost their lives to the flu, compared with 53,000 in battle in World War I, and yet it left almost no conscious cultural mark. Perhaps it’s because people didn’t like who they had become.

There is a fascinating chapter, ``Epidemics, Networks, and Conversions,'' in The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries, by Rodney Stark.  Pagans fled Rome during epidemics. Christians stayed and cared for the sick, including pagans abandoned by their families.
Here is the Wikipedia summary.

In a time of two epidemics (165 and 251) which killed up to a third of the whole population of the Roman Empire each time, the Christian message of redemption through sacrifice offered a more satisfactory explanation of why bad things happen to innocent people. Further, the tighter social cohesion and mutual help made them able to better cope with the disasters, leaving them with fewer casualties than the general population. This would also be attractive to outsiders, who would want to convert. Lastly, the epidemics left many non-Christians with a reduced number of interpersonal bonds, making the forming of new ones both necessary and easier.

N.T. Wright on the coronavirus

Time magazine published a nice article by N.T. Wright,
Christianity Offers No Answers About the Coronavirus. It's Not Supposed To.

Some of his main points are expanded upon in this video interview.