Previous post, Part 2: Renewal
In those early days, faith was, for me, based mostly on emotion. Even truths such as God’s forgiveness were lodged in my heart more than in my head. The slingshot experience I’d had, going from self-serving despair to a place of hope and joy, meant that my feelings had come alive as never before.
Yet, what had I done? Was faith no more than passion and sentiment? Was it based on reality? Was the gospel of God-in-Christ-come-to-earth, tortured as a slave, risen from the grave . . . actually true in history? Or was it only “true” in my personal experience? This was a troubling quandary. Being a logical thinker, I’d come to realize that just because something felt real to me didn’t mean it was real. Much later in life, I learned of the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach (d. 1872), who held that religious belief was a projection of man’s inward nature. That is, theology – the study of God – was anthropology – the study of man and his needs, of which God was the result. Put more simply, God is no more than man writ large. As a young thinker, I’d never heard of Feuerbach, but it occurred to me as a college student in my twenties that it’s possible I could be embracing God simply because the idea of God met my emotional needs, not because God was actually there.
Besides, what of the hundreds, maybe thousands of other religions out there? What made mine so special? Maybe Christianity was special only because I believed in it. On the other hand, there was no way I could be wrong about this – not with the 180-degree turnabout I’d done the past couple of years. Yet, Dad’s question to me haunted: How had I become so wise?
And so began a 45-year journey for me in philosophy and theology, investigating the truth claims of the Christian faith. Some might object to such a project, insisting that faith, by definition, is a private affair (my fear, mentioned above), not subject to intellectual analysis. Let’s say person A asserts with all his heart that faith is a private affair and person B asserts, just as strongly, the opposite – that faith is, or can be, a public matter. Who’s right? Assertions need backing; they need arguments. My first argument was that Christianity was and is a public religion containing publicly verifiable factual claims about its chief figure, Jesus Christ. Did he come into the world, teach the masses, perform miracles, die, and rise? These supposed truths are subject to public, historical investigation. Similarly, one might ask whether Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March in 44 BC, leading to the downfall of the Roman Republic and the rise of Caesar Augustus. These are also publicly accessible historical “facts” that can, theoretically, be shown true or false.
Now, late in my career as a traveling speaker for a national campus ministry, I’ve worked at nearly a hundred colleges and universities around the country. And I return to a few of the same schools year after year. For example, I’ve visited the University of Michigan many times. Students there are thoughtful and smart, which is how they got into U-Mich in the first place. I remember sitting in East Hall, second floor, one year, a stream of student appointments filling my calendar. A young woman I’ll call Josie came in and told me she was struggling with her faith. So many uncertainties, so many religious options . . . why should she follow Jesus? Was he even real? The church teachings of her childhood seemed distant and doubtful.
I asked Josie if we could look at some historical data that supported the life and times of Jesus Christ. Was this allowable in her thinking? It was, she answered. So we proceeded. I said very carefully, “If Jesus is not real, who made him up?” Now, to this question she hadn’t given any thought, so I suggested that maybe his followers – the first disciples – either made him up completely or exaggerated the parts of his life that are harder to accept, such as the miracles. In other words, perhaps Jesus was a fictional creation (or embellishment) of men such as Peter, James, and John, the famous stalwarts of the early church and heirs of his legacy.
But why create Jesus? These were Jews. There was only one God: Yahweh of the Hebrew scriptures (the Old Testament). What Jew would create what appears to be a second God – Jesus Christ – and suffer the wrath not only of his fellow Jews but of the Roman provincial governors and prefects who enforced worship of the emperor and ritual sacrifice to the approved Roman gods? Creating and promoting a new God who rivaled Caesar came with a death sentence, which is exactly what Peter, James, and John received as they spread the news of Jesus around the Mediterranean world. Why die for a known fiction? And it must be remembered that death in this context involved torture via Roman crosses, the jaws of lions, the points of spears and swords, frenzied wild dogs, and even human skewers doused in oil and lit as torches. It simply doesn’t make sense for first-century Palestinian Jews to create Jesus, at least not this Jesus. Not the Jesus who overturned established tradition by fraternizing with women (forbidden), healing on the sabbath (unlawful), soiling himself by contact with spiritually unclean rabble, and failing as a model Messiah by perishing at the hands of Israel’s sworn enemy, Rome. Maybe they’d create a benign, congenial Jesus. Maybe a humanitarian sage. Maybe a tolerance-preaching guru. Maybe even a miracle-worker – not so strange in the ancient world. But create the Son of God, who’s also a radical nonconformist to Jewish tradition? Then die for this lie? Historically and psychologically, unlikely if not impossible.
What I just summarized in a few paragraphs took a lot longer to discuss with Josie in East Hall at U-Mich. In the end, she couldn’t think of any reasons the disciples of Jesus would have fictionalized his life. Before that, however, she brought up the idea of a power-play by the followers of Jesus to launch a religion, form the institutional church, and control the masses. But this is a popular myth. The first three centuries of the church were often fraught with terror for Christians as maniacal emperors such as Nero, Marcus Aurelius, and Diocletian issued catch-and-kill decrees. In Lyon (France), for example, church members were rounded up in chains and marched into the amphitheater to be gored by bulls or to fight one another to the death. There was little to no civil power for Christians to exercise. Even with the famous conversion of Emperor Constantine in the early 300s – the “Caesar” who made Christianity the official religion of the empire – Christians were but a small minority, perhaps ten percent of the population. Bishops of the early church indeed exercised power in their various districts (called “sees”): mainly, the power to attend ecumenical councils and work on doctrinal issues, teach from the pulpit, and oversee the religious education of parishioners. Not the “power-play” mentioned by Josie and other critics.
That’s not to say power was never misused. One example is in the later medieval period of the tenth through fifteenth centuries (roughly speaking), when the church fell into corruption. This is a shameful period in church history that was addressed, famously, by Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other reformers. Still, it seems a stretch to suggest that the first disciples of Jesus launched a sham religion to gain power over others when the core doctrines of the religion would almost certainly land them inside the mouths of lions or, as in the case of Bishop Polycarp (d. 155 AD), burned alive and stabbed to death. I, for one, am not ready to start a movement based on a known deception that will get me killed. Even if I did, I wouldn’t include in the story a CEO who dies in the shameful manner of a Roman slave.
