Category: Literature

Myth, Seasons, and the Resurrection of Jesus

Should the claim that Christianity is similar to prior, pagan mythology concern us?

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The god of the sea and oceans Neptune (Poseidon).

Popular trends arise in culturally contingent ways, and those trends often dominate the public mind for a season. Thus, the idea that Christianity borrowed from prior pagan mythology gained notoriety with the rise of New Atheism. The Zeitgeist: The Movie (2007) is a poster child for this popular trend in thinking.

The Zeitgeist movie forces the narrative, ignoring glaring dissimilarities, and manufacturing similarities that don’t really exist. It ignores (or isn’t familiar with) the relevant academic scholarship, but it has been watched well over one million times. We might say that the Zeitgeist movie has become legendary in a truly mythic sense itself.

I will go out on a limb, nevertheless, to say that Christians have shown far too much angst over this trend of claiming that Christianity is similar to prior pagan mythology. There are critical differences, and they are significant, but there are some similarities also. Do the similarities pose a problem for Christianity?

The short answer is, no. In fact, if truth is truth and reality is reality, ancient, pagan attempts at explaining that reality are likely to hit on some metaphysical truth. If they didn’t, I might begin wonder about the nature of reality and our ability to recognize and understand it.

Mythic literature as a genre is an attempt to provide some explanation and understanding of basic realities and the ebb and flow of life. I am reminded of these things as I sit outside on an unseasonably warm day in November with a view of trees bared of their multicolored leaves that have been collected by my earnest neighbors in piles lining the suburban streets for pickup.

Fall is ebbing into the dark night of winter. The subtle coolness in the breeze portends (what seems to me now) a distant spring. I am braced for what comes next as I enjoy what is likely to be the lest vestige of warmer days for longer than I care to think about.

My hope for the spring, however far off it seems in my present mood, is rooted in my experience of the certainty of the seasons. I know my hope is not fanciful, even as I brace (all too knowingly) for the cold, bleak trudge ahead.

It seems completely natural that ancient mythology captures this duality in stories that have religious significance. These experiences are common to man. We remind ourselves of the hope of spring as we gaze in wonderment at fall trees in the throes of seasonal death and the chill onset of winter. It reminds us of our own life and death sagas, even now in all our modern comforts.

Our modern comforts allow us to be a bit more disconnected and circumspect, perhaps, than our ancient forbearers. Those comforts and great advances in scientific knowledge allow us to be intellectual about these things. Ancient pagans lived literally at the mercy of the seasons, and all the things they didn’t know played like gods on the stage of their fraught imagination.

Modern people chalk seasonal changes up to natural cycles that just happen. We believe humans chased all the gods off long ago. The ownership we have asserted in our knowledge of the way the world works gives us an illusion of control that I surmise is not all that much different than the ancients, who sought some ownership and control of this world through the mediators of gods they thought they could appease.

Pagans found solace in the seasons as we do. Myth is rooted in collective experience, and it is driven by an impulse to understand and import control into our experience. We also have a natural inclination to seek meaning. We might call this impulse a “religious” one.

Though we have the chased the gods off, we still have a religious impulse. Though we no longer believe in many gods, and we no longer venerate ancient myths with more than a curious read, the idea of one, Creator God God persists, and it is not explained away by modern science and knowledge. The Bible, though it has ancient origins, stands up to our modern scrutiny in ways that pagan myth does not.

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God Speaks to Each of Us in Our Own Love Language

The poignance of human longing, existential angst, and the intimacy of God with us

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Photo credit to Carolyn Weber: author, speaker and professor

Carolyn Weber has always been an academic, but she is no longer an atheist. She has a B.A. Hon. from Huron College at Western University, Canada and a M.Phil. and D.Phil. from Oxford University, England. She has taught at faculty at Oxford University, Seattle University, University of San Francisco, Westmont College, Brescia University College and Heritage College and Seminary, and she was the first female dean of St. Peter’s College, Oxford.

My inspiration today comes from an interview of Carolyn Weber by Jana Harman on the Side B Stories podcast. You can listen to the hour long interview in episode 4, Finding God at Oxford – Carolyn Weber’s story. She turned her personal story into a book, “Surprised by Oxford”, which is being made into a screenplay staring Phyllis Logan from Downton Abbey and Mark Williams from the Harry Potter movies.

In the interview, Carolyn Weber shared that she was drawn to the romantic writers of the 17th and 18th centuries in her college years because they wrote about infinite longing. Carolyn long recognized a similar longing in her own life, and they romantic writers resonated with that longing in her. 

Carolyn was raised in a non-religious home. She had no experience with religion, and she was not familiar with the detail of Christianity or the Bible.

She recalls that she knew nothing of the Bible until she read the Bible for the first time in a college class. As an undergraduate literature major, her first impressions of the Bible included included recognition of how well the story of the Bible holds together in intricate detail, though it was written over many centuries by almost four dozen different writers.

These elements of Carolyn Weber’s story remind me of my own story. I was raised in a religious home. We were Catholic, and we went to church every Sunday, but I had never read the Bible. I knew next to nothing about the Bible before college, and church seemed to have no relevance for me.

I was also an English Literature major. I also read the Bible for the first time in a college class. I wasn’t particularly drawn to the romantic writers, but I did notice the theme of longing, and it intrigued me. (You can read my story here.) Our first impressions of the Bible were also very similar.

I recognize that my resonance with Carolyn Weber’s story may not translate to every reader (and maybe not to any reader). A statement she made in telling her story, however, may. She said, “God speaks to us in our love languages.”

I can identify with that, perhaps, because my “love language” seems to be so similar to hers. The same things that spoke to her, spoke also to me. I will explain below, but I invite you to consider as you read (or go back to listen to her story) what your love language is and how God has spoken intimately to you in your love language.

Continue reading “God Speaks to Each of Us in Our Own Love Language” →

East and West Meet at the Tower of Babel

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I have been listening to the BEMA podcast. I highly recommend it. As defined on the website, “‘BEMA’ (or bimah) is a Hebrew word that refers to the elevated platform in the center of first-century synagogues where the people of God read the Text.”

The early Christians knew their Scripture. They built their lives around it. They devoted themselves to it, and to prayer, and the apostles reaching, and to fellowship and shared meals. (Acts 2:42) The bema in was where early Christians gathered in first century synagogues before they were persecuted and scattered.

The BEMA podcast attempts to approach Scripture the way easterners would have approached Scripture – the way the early Christians in the Middle East would have approached Scripture. The idea that Hebrew people were more “eastern” in their thinking was first pointed out to m by my Jewish professor in college over 40 years ago, so following up with that concept intrigues me.

Christianity quickly became westernized, but the origins of Christianity are eastern, growing out of the Hebrew culture and scriptures. For that reason, we would do well to gain some new perspective from a more eastern way of thinking. I encourage you to listen to the first couple of episodes of the podcast linked in the opening paragraph if you want an introduction to an “eastern” perspective of the Bible.

Reading the first 11 chapters of Genesis from an eastern, Hebraic perspective, opens up new insights. Not the least of which is the genre of literature these chapters represent. They are poetry. They are written in chiasms with intricate organization and emphasis that is found in the structure of the chiasms.

The Tower of Babel story is one of those chiastic passages in Genesis. The story actually begins in the Hebrew with the last verse of Chapter 10 (as it is organized in English Bibles), and it goes like this (ESV):

These are the clans of Noah’s sons, according to their lines of descent, within their nations. From these the nations spread out over the earth after the flood.

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, ‘Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.’ They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, ‘If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.’

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

Hebrew has no vowels, only consonants. Rather, vowel signs are placed over the consonants to denote where breaths should be taken for anyone reading Hebrew out loud. 

The consonants in this chiasm are repetitive: N, B, L, H; then H, L, B, N in reverse. There is a front half and a back half to the structure. The middle of the chiasm is verse 11:4, which I have emphasized by bolding it.

The verse in the middle of the chiasm is where the emphasis lies: the peoples’ concern about being scattered over the face of the earth. They didn’t want to be scattered.

Why not? That’s the question we should be prompted to ask according to the emphasis we find built into the structure of that story.

I am not sure I can do any justice to the layers of meaning and the questions that arise in these verses in a short blog post. I can only scratch the surface, but here goes….

Continue reading “East and West Meet at the Tower of Babel” →

Clearing the Rubble of Hume in the Making of an “Unapologetic” Argument for God

Hume’s argument against miracles seems to be more of an exercise in satire than a sincere exercise in reasoning.

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I have been trying to clear the way for an “unapologetic” argument for God. I am four articles in, and still making me way to the beginning. Standing in the way as I move forward is Hume’s standard of proof for miracles.

David Hume has had a profound influence on Western thought in the promotion of the Enlightenment view, which values human reason as the supreme measuring stick. Hume’s argument against miracles has been viewed as a gold standard among proofs that Christianity is not credible, especially to the extent that Christianity stands on the foundation of a miraculous event – the resurrection of Jesus.

Hume does not hide his antipathy for Christianity.[1] He calls the “Christian religion” a doctrine “so little worthy of a serious refutation … founded merely in the testimony of the apostles”. He labels belief in Christianity “arrogant bigotry and superstition”.

Hume speaks of the “greediness” with which “miraculous accounts” are received. He characterizes the “religionist” as “an enthusiast who sees no reality”, whose vanity is excited by strong temptations and self-interest to promote narratives he knows to be false for what he deems to be a “holy cause”. Hume accuses religionists of renouncing judgment by principle and losing grip on judgment by “passion and a heated imagination”.

Hume blames the popularity of religion on a “strong propensity of mankind to the extraordinary and the marvellous”. Hume’s disdain carries over from his view of “the generality of mankind” emerging from “ignorant and barbarous nations” who he says are fools … industrious in propagating the imposture” of the “supernatural and marvellous”, the “grossest delusions”, and “delusive prophecies”.

Hume rails on the religions “of ancient Rome, of Turkey, of Siam, and of China” equally. He lumps together the testimony of “a few barbarous Arabians” about Mahomet with “Titus Livius, Plutarch, Tacitus, and… all the authors and witnesses, Grecian, Chinese, and Roman Catholic, who have related any miracle in their particular religion”.

Me thinks he doth protest too much.

The standard Hume created to determine the veracity and credibility of a miraculous account contains the poison of his passionate convictions – a passion that smacks of the same kind of bias he accuses the “religionist” of committing. Yet, that standard has adherents today, perhaps because he reduces it to mathematical proportions that have the appearance of sacred science. Hume says,

“A hundred instances or experiments on one side, and fifty on another, afford a doubtful expectation of any event; though a hundred uniform experiments, with only one that is contradictory, reasonably beget a pretty strong degree of assurance. In all cases, we must balance the opposite experiments, where they are opposite, and deduct the smaller number from the greater, in order to know the exact force of the superior evidence.”

He acknowledges the importance of eyewitness testimony, but he imposes a standard on it that diminishes the value of any eyewitness testimony that contradicts widely established human experience. This seems reasonable on its face. “Marvelous” assertions are suspect; miraculous ones are even more suspect.

I think most of us can “go there” with him. On miracles, Hume says.

“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.”

In one sense, Hume is merely acknowledging the nature of a miracle: it is a miracle that goes against (or seems to go against) the laws of nature that are commonly recognized and the weight of common experience. Nothing would be considered a miracle that was common to the experience of people, even if that experience is relatively uncommon among human experience. He reasonably says,

“There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation.”

Hume, though, is not content to relegate miracles to the rarity they are by definition. He proceeds to define them out of the realm of possibility:  

“And as an uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle; nor can such a proof be destroyed, or the miracle rendered credible, but by an opposite proof, which is superior.”

Perhaps, wanting to appear open-minded, Hume allows for some proof that might establish a miracle. The proof of a miracle, Hume says, must so weighty “that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours [sic] to establish”.

Even then, Hume says, such counter-balancing evidence only levels the scales; it doesn’t make the factual assertion of the miracle more likely than not (and rejection of the assertion of a miracle would be justified either way).

Hume says, the mere testimony that a miracle occurred should be dismissed out of hand unless the falsehood of the assertion would require believing the miraculous, itself.

Hume seems to assume the possibility of such corroborative evidence, but a simple application of math belies the lack of substance he saw in anything miraculous. Nil plus nil equals nil.

As Hume’s approach is a mathematical one, we can see by the application of math and the value Hume has given to the miraculous the impossibility of establishing proof of a miracle on Hume’s position. The likelihood of proof is nil.

Indeed, he sets his bar so high and makes the requisite proof so onerous that a miracle would be required to prove a miracle. Lest there be any doubt about the meaninglessness of Hume’s standard, he admits:

“I beg the limitations here made may be remarked, when I say, that a miracle can never be proved….”

Hume is saying that miracles cannot be proven by any amount or kind of evidence.

For this reason, Hume’s argument against miracles seems (to me) to be more of an exercise in satire than a sincere exercise in reasoning. I am surprised, therefore, that we take him at all seriously. To give further illustration and to remove all doubt about his pretense, Hume seems to beg the question in the following example:

“But suppose, that all the historians who treat of England, should agree, that, on the first of January 1600, Queen Elizabeth died; that both before and after her death she was seen by her physicians and the whole court, as is usual with persons of her rank; that her successor was acknowledged and proclaimed by the parliament; and that, after being interred a month, she again appeared, resumed the throne, and governed England for three years: I must confess that I should be surprized [sic] at the concurrence of so many odd circumstances, but should not have the least inclination to believe so miraculous an event.”

The fact that people still take him seriously, though the blunt force of his conviction seems stronger than his argument, is one reason I address him here.

Continue reading “Clearing the Rubble of Hume in the Making of an “Unapologetic” Argument for God” →

Pulling at the Threads of the Christian Paradigm that Uniquely Influenced the Western World

Down at the bedrock of modern, western values remains a Christian foundation.

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Galleries under the central arena of the Colosseum in Rome, Italy

I read Tom Holland’s new book, Dominion, about a year ago, and I have written about it a few times. Many Christians would not think to read a history about Western Civilization by a self-described secular humanist (once atheist, perhaps now agnostic) historian.

Most non-Christians are likely to be uncomfortable with the chronicle Holland describes of the radically influential role that Christianity played in the development of Western Civilization, providing the foundation, in fact, for secular humanist ideals. When Holland dug down to the bedrock of modern, western values, he was surprised himself to find them anchored on a Christian foundation.

Holland did not set out to write a Christian apologetic, and he seems to remain somewhat uncertain how to process what he “discovered”. What he found, though, changed his mind about Christianity. He gives a brief explanation in the following clip:

Though Holland has had a turnabout on his view of Christianity, he finds himself caught in an odd position wrought by the unexpected discovery that his lifelong, secular humanist values flow from the radical catalyst of Christian influence and remain embedded ubiquitously in its very fabric. The awkwardness of his current position is evident in his interviews and discussions about the book.

Christians and secular thinkers, alike, wrestle with his book. Holland doesn’t hide any warts, and he doesn’t pull any punches. Neither does he obfuscate the thoroughly paradigmatic shift in Western thinking that Christianity worked into a society that once proudly and unashamedly championed strength and privilege over the poor, the weak, and the lowly.

Holland exposes the metanarrative developed during the Enlightenment and thereafter that belies the foundation on which the Enlightenment structure was built. Far from advancing the progression of human values, the Enlightenment threatened to undo the distinctly Christian concern for the poor, weak, and lowly while attempting to wrest western civilization from the hold of the Divine. Humanism saved the Christian ethic, albeit divorced from Christ.

Consider the full title of Darwin’s great tome which staked out the ground of a scientific (and social) revolution free from God’s interference:

“The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”

The title of Darwin’s book championing the evolutionary paradigm, harkens back to the Greco-Roman value system that despised the poor, the weak and the lowly. That value system did not just turn a callous eye at wanton and discriminate cruelty, it cheered on the strong while they snuffed out the weak. It was national sport!

The very reason the full title never “stuck” (I now believe) is due to a fundamental, pervasive, and thoroughly entrenched counter-value of the intrinsic worth of human life that is uniquely Christian in its source.

The intrinsic value of all human life, from the greatest to the least, from the wisest and strongest to the weakest and most imbecilic, from the fittest to the most infirm, is traceable to the Christian belief that all human beings are made in the image of God. That the survival of the fittest did not take hold as a western social or ethical value is attributable to the deeply ingrained Christian ethic that survived yet, despite the efforts to eradicate its God from modern equations.

Modern humanists may attempt to recast Darwin into a humanistic mold, but the idea of “social Darwinism” bears his name through no model of random, unguided selection. According to John G. West, Charles Darwin, himself, set in motion the inertia for eugenics, among other things, that were associated with social Darwinism:

Darwin himself in The Descent of Man provided the rationale for what became the eugenics movement, and how the vast majority of evolutionary biologists early in the twentieth century were right to see negative eugenics as a logical application of Darwin’s theory.

While the defense of Darwin against the charge of social Darwinism has largely succeeded in popular and polite company, the very title of the Origin of Species (by means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life) belies the success of that effort. The fact that the full title is merely a parenthetical today is evidence only of a concerted rescue campaign.

Christian values survived despite the Enlightenment coupe, not because of it. Humanism today assumes the evolutionary paradigm for its science alongside the uniquely Christian paradigm of intrinsic human value. That the two assumptions do not fit well together seems to be lost on modern minds.

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