Category: Religion

Myth, Seasons, and the Resurrection of Jesus

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

kevingdrendelLeave a comment
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.

Continue reading “Myth, Seasons, and the Resurrection of Jesus” →

Christmas and the Transcendent, Imminence of God

Jesus is called Emmanuel, which means God, with us.

kevingdrendel1 Comment

“If God is real, then He can be known.” This is the assertion made by Dr. Sharon Dirckx, who has a PhD in brain imaging from the University of Cambridge and has held research positions at the University of Oxford and the Medical College of Wisconsin. Dr. Dirckx does not say this lightly.

Dirckx grew up in a secular household, asking questions like “Why can I think? Why do I exist? Why am I a conscious being?” as a child. She was impressed with the “awareness of my own existence, of my own consciousness.” These questions led her on a lifetime quest.

Dirckx knew she wanted to be a scientist as a teenager. Her biology teacher gave her the book, The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. That book set the course of her thinking as a child “that we are just gene machines, that there’s just the material and that’s all that it means to be a human being.” She absorbed a materialistic worldview from Dawkins and the people around her.

“I arrived at university to study biochemistry assuming that we were material beings and that science and God were not compatible.”

Making Sense of Science and Faith – Sharon’s Story, By Sharon Dirckx, Jana Harmon,on September 13, 2024 Sharon Dirckx, eX-skeptic, Side B Stories, CSLI Podcasts, Jana Harmon

Dr. Dirckx achieved her dream of becoming a scientist, but her path deviated from the materialism she assumed and absorbed as a teenager. She is now the author of several books and a frequent speaker on the subject of faith in God. You can listen to her story on the eX-skeptic podcast embedded below.

I want to pick up and run with her statement: If God is real, then He can be known. I agree with her, but I believe many people make the mistake of thinking that God can be known on their terms. We make the mistake to think that if God exists, He exists within our own purview and within the limitations we experience as human beings that we can control on our terms.

He doesn’t. When we are talking about the creator God who made the universe, and all that is in it, including human beings and all of material reality, we are talking about a God who is transcendent. He is the uncaused causer and the uncreated creator. He is not found in his creation as if He was a component of it.

Such a God is said to be “outside” of the space/time continuum. The concept of such a God includes a spaceless, timeless, immaterial reality that is not contained within or limited by the material world.

Some quantum and theoretical physicists speak variously of consciousness that collapses the wave function of particles, Platonic or Mathematical Realism that imagines immaterial mathematical forms underpinning material reality, and Philosophical Idealism that imagines consciousness or mind-like properties out of which the material world emanates. These are non-theistic attempts to get at the idea that the material world is contingent, and immaterial reality is the fundamental building block of and force behind the universe and reality.

The most robust of these conceptions is the theistic one pulled out of the text of the 60 some writings by 40 some authors compiled in the work we call the Bible. If God is real, and He created the universe as these writings claim, with all of it’s immensity, and if He created life, including humans, He is completely different (Other) than us: God is transcendent.

Yet, people have always had some sense of this transcendent reality. Religious expression is among the oldest of the traces of human history we can find in the archaeological and written records we are able to find from our ancestors.

While we may tend to assume that all primitive humans believed in a panoply of Gods animating the material world, evidence exists to suggest that primitive people from diverse corners of the world believed in one, Creator God. This monotheistic conception of God may, in fact, by the oldest form of religious belief.

Perhaps, the pagan gods that inhabit the material world seem more accessible. They might make demands on our behavior, but they have no province over the thoughts in our minds, our wills, and our hearts.

That we would have a hard time finding a transcendent God and making sense of him is understandable. Imagine a living being the size of an electron viewing a human being from an electron’s vantage point: How does an electron-sized being make sense of a human being – or anything above the quantum level, for that matter?

The difference between a human being and a transcendent, creator God is much greater then the difference between an electron-sized being and a human being. For one thing, they are both part and parcel of the same material reality. The biblical conception of God understands that God transcends the material world.

To quantify this difference, we might imagine a human being compared to the infinitely vast space of the universe. Now add in the bit about God being completely “Other”: spaceless, timeless, and immaterial.

I maintain that such a God would need to reveal himself to us. How could we know such a God unless He revealed Himself to us?

I have written about this before. God must “stoop” to us to make himself known. We cannot “ascend” to Him.

Continue reading “Christmas and the Transcendent, Imminence of God” →

Is Your Faith Determined by Where You Live, Your Parents and Your Culture?

People do tend to adopt the faith perspective that is predominant where they live, that their parents had, and in the society in which they were raised, but….

kevingdrendelLeave a comment

Richard Dawkins famously claims that religion and faith are a product of where people live and the influence of their parents and the culture in which they live. A quick look at data on religious faith might suggest Dawkins is right.

On other hand, Richard Dawkins was raised in the Anglican faith and was confirmed at the age of 13. He didn’t remain a Christian, though. In his later teens, he rejected the God and religion he was raised to believe in and the religion he was confirmed in.

Dawkins, himself, proves the falsehood of his own claims – unless, of course, Dawkins is the extremely rare outlier.

Dawkins’ assertion is generally true if we take a quick look at the data, but even the data reveals it isn’t so simple. People who live in areas in which religious belief is enforced by law and social custom tend to remain (at least) nominally loyal to that religious belief, but there are significant outliers in the data.

Iran, for instance, had 100,000-300,000 Christians in 1979, comprised of ethnic Armenians, Assyrians, and Chaldeans who had lived there for centuries. Organizations like ELAM Ministries and Transform Iran reported only 300-500 Muslim converts to Christianity in 1979.

In 1979, revolution dethroned the Shah formed an Islamic state. Since that time, Islam has been enforced by law and strong social mores. Onerous legal and social penalties are imposed on people who convert from Islam to other religions, including physical punishment, social exile, imprisonment, and even death.

For the past 44 years, Iranians who decided to become Christians have been persecuted with religious zeal and governmental force. (The World’s Fastest Growing Church, July, 20, 2023 (International Christian Concern)) “All missionaries were kicked out, evangelism was outlawed, Bibles in the Persian or Farsi language were banned and several pastors killed.” (A spiritual revolution in Iran?, September 16, 2020) Global Christian Relief))

Some people report that the number of Armenian, Assyrian, and Chaldean Christians has slowly dwindled to around 100,000. (See The World’s Fastest Growing Church) This kind of outcome is to be expected in a country like Iran in which one religion is not only predominant; it is enforced by legal decree and social coercion.

Unexpectedly, though, the number of Muslim converts has risen exponentially since 1979 according to faith-based groups that support them. Until recently, the claims of exponential growth in Muslim conversions to Christianity in Iran were largely anecdotal reports from faith-based organization.

Those claims have recently been affirmed by the secular, Netherlands-based research group, GAMAAN. A 2020 poll of 50,000 Iranians aged 20+ Iranians shows that 1.5 percent of then identify as Christian. (Survey supports claims of nearly 1 million Christians in Iran, Aug, 27, 2020, (Article 18)) With a population of 80M+, that works out to 1,200,000 Islamic converts to Christianity in 2020. (See A spiritual revolution in Iran?)

Continue reading “Is Your Faith Determined by Where You Live, Your Parents and Your Culture?” →

The Errors of Our Ways: Science, Religion, and Racism

That Christians should have known better seems self-evident to us today. But, what of science?

kevingdrendel2 Comments

Most people know well the checkered history of Christianity on racism, especially in the United States. Much less is said (and therefore known) on the checkered history of science on racism in the west. One reason for that difference in our collective memories is the Enlightenment narrative: that science rescued the world from Christianity. More on that below.

I am not writing today to criticize Christianity less or science more for the moral failing of the history of racism in America. I am writing to bring some clarity where a popular narrative muddies the waters.

I think most people can agree that American (and British) Christianity has a racist past, but we have short (and biased) memories on this score. History is replete with dominant people groups subjecting other people groups to slavery, genocide, and other atrocities. It wasn’t just Americans, or western civilization, or Christians that perpetuated the evil of slavery.

That we even call those things atrocities today is a credit to Christianity. The story of Jesus voluntarily dying at the hands of the dominant power of his day, urging his followers to live lives of self-sacrifice, and looking after the benefit of others as he did changed everything.

It took three centuries, but the cross eventually became the symbol of this religious movement characterized by self-sacrificial love.

Prior to the death of Jesus, the cross was the ultimate symbol of the exultant might of the dominant state over its subjects. Those in power determined the values of the society they ruled, and those values were imposed with Draconian force on those who lived under that power.  “Might makes right” was just the way the world was for most of history.

Tom Holland, in his seminal book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, found the nexus for a radical change in the west in the crucifixion of Jesus. That event and the movement it inspired changed forever how the west (and now the rest of the world) views power and morality.

Tom Holland was an atheist When he did the research for this book. His area of expertise is Greco-Roman history. He was steeped in the brutish nature of the Roman world that championed power and elite, male dominance over all that was weak.

When he set out to trace his secular humanist values in western civilization, he knew there was some discontinuity between the Greco-Roman values he knew so well and his own, modern notions of basic human rights, so he was curious to locate the origin of that seismic shift.

His book, Dominion, traces our modern values from the roots where he found them in the history of western civilization. He found they go back to Jesus of Nazareth and the people who gave their lives to follow him.

The death of Jesus on the cross radically subverted the assumptions that ruled the world to that point. The Greco-Roman world that valued and honored power above all things gave way over time to the man who is claimed to be the Savior of the world who let himself be led like a lamb to his own slaughter. His life and message of self-sacrificial love became the bedrock for modern civil rights, human dignity, and the assumption that the powerful should shelter and care for the weak.

The criticism of Christians for racism and its worst manifestation – slavery – is deserved. Mostly because Christians “should’ve known better”. Of all people, Christians should have known better!

The water gets murky, though, in our modern memory because it has been influenced by a narrative that obscures the truth. The narrative that exposes the failing of Christianity often does so by directing attention away from the nonreligious world of reason and science, as if there is “nothing to see here.”

This view that rose to prominence during the Enlightenment is prevalent still today. It puts the full weight of condemnation for our failings on religion (and Christianity in particular). This is a false narrative, and, it obscures the truth and warps our perceptions that still persist.

There is nothing inherently wrong with science and reason. It is people who are flawed, and the flaws of people are not confined to science, or religion, or to any particular ideology or worldview. No ideology or worldview is immune.

Continue reading “The Errors of Our Ways: Science, Religion, and Racism” →

Still Influenced by the Flesh? Division in Christ

What is your litmus test for who is in Christ? If you have a litmus test that is different than God’s standard, you need to put yours down!

kevingdrendelLeave a comment

I keep coming back to the theme of unity that Paul addressed in most of his letters. Christ tore down the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles (Ephesians 2:14), and there is no longer any divisions in Christ: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28 (Emphasis added) Elsewhere Paul says,

“[T]here is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.”

Colossians 3:11

We might add the major divisions we have today, like black or white, Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, capitalist or socialist, Palestinian or Israeli, American or Russian….

Did I lose anyone there?

Do you have a hard job believing that certain types of people can be considered Christians?

Are we not “all one in Christ”?

Of course, we need to define what is meant by “in Christ.”

According to John Piper, to be in Christ means to receive and embrace grace (1 Timothy 3:9) to be chosen by God (Ephesians 1:4), to be loved by God’s inseparable love (Romans 8:39), to be redeemed and forgiven (Eph. 1:7), to be justified and considered righteous (2 Corinthians 5:21), and to be a new creation. (2 Cor. 5:17) It means to be in relationship with God in Christ as sons and daughters, marked by God’s Holy Spirit.

“In Christ” means that we have a saving relationship with Christ in union with him:

Being one with Christ, means that those in Christ should be one with each other also. The one thing that binds us together is Christ Jesus. We may be very different from each other in many ways, but we are one if we are, indeed, in Christ.

It doesn’t matter how many differences we have with each other. If we are (indeed) in Christ, we are unified in Christ. Thus, it should not be surprising that Paul urged the Corinthians to be unified:

“I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.”

1 Corinthians 1:10

No divisions among you! Be united in mind and thought.

How do we do that? What keeps us from being united?

Continue reading “Still Influenced by the Flesh? Division in Christ” →