Abraham

Morality, a harsh taskmaster, is the key to religion.

I have had an understanding of Abraham, the father of modern religion, that seems both clear and obvious and hardly worth noting except that Christians, in  particular, might find my view strange and querulous, and for reasons I will explain. My basic premise is that Abraham fashioned God to be invisible and omnipresent because he had identified God with morality, which is also invisible and omnipresent, and so distinctly different from pagan religion, where there were spirits in trees and rocks and mountains and in idols and where the gods might or might not be moral, more akin to human beings than to the supernal, to the otherness of God, just a more or less powerful god.God always had to be moral even if people could not always see that He was such because being moral was an essential characteristic rather than just a quality of some god character, like Odesseus sly and Achilles brave, when people and gods did not have to be that but God did.

There are a number of advantages to thinking of God this way. It means that God speaks and is a matter of words in that moral rules, which bind the past to the future, something else a  supernal god can do, are set out in words, in pronouncements, and so they are portable, con vegetable in a holy ark, written down in words, and also enunciated through the words imagined by great men like Noah and Moses, for whom words come to them about what should be done. That is different from the God who prefers the offerings of Abel to Cain and with such terrible consequences. An earlier god could make a choice out of pique or favoritism and never have a moral explanation as to why. So morality is not just an acquisition by religion so as to manage the ordinary lives of stable  congregations, which is what Weber thought. It is a revolution in what it is to be religious, their religious yearning for the all powerful. To be accomplished through being moral, an internal state of being rather than mere compliance.as indicated in rituals and prayers and adoration.

It is no wonder, then, that the story of Abraham and Isaac is problematic for Jews because God seems to be planning to kill Isaac. Put aside the platitudes that God was just testing him and  didn’t really mean to carry it out. That would have been cruel and it seems clear that Abraham was willing to go through with it. Abraham had made no objection though Abraham did intervene with God to lessen the judgment on Sodom, compelling God to meet his own moral standards. Couldn’t he have weeded about his own son? Maybe what was being tested was Abrahan’s loyalty to God, as when Job is loyal to God but still wonders about the ways of the world. But the Abraham Isaac situation begs the question about whether God can be immoral rather than inexplicable.

 And put aside the anthropological question that the story is a benchmark for religion moving away from child sacrifice. That would just rob the story of moral significance, just a moment of cultural evolution, in which things move on and nothing has permanent significance. But in morality it is not so easy to change as when it is clear that some people still think homosexuality an abomination. All moral religion thinks there is an old time religion by which people should take their stand and including those humanist religions who think that the respect of personhood is bedrock and so means accepting what were recently taboo as part of the holiness of all humankind.”Who am I to judge?” says Pope Francis.

A Christian, especially if influenced by Kierkegaard, would have a very different reading of the Abraham and Isaac story. It is about faith rather than loyalty. A true believing Christian has faith that however contrary the story presents itself may be, the believer is convinced, has faith, that there is reason for what Abraham was required to do, that shrouded by the mysterious ways of God. There may have been a reason to sacrifice Issac or God to spare him, even if He will not say what it was. The story is less a test of Abraham rather than of the ordinary believer that all is right in God’s world, while the Jewish believer is apt to question God’s wisdom, however less he may be than God.

I think that Kierkegaard and many Christians confuse faith by compounding two very different things. There is faith in the sense of beliefs or a credo, like the Virgin Birth or the Nicene Creed, which means it is a set of propositions about supernatural and also moral themes, such as when a fetus becomes human or whether homosexuality is an abomination, and then there's faith in the sense of the basis for believing in that creed or proposition, Catholics having largely lost the proofs of God’s existence, the reasons Anselm and Aquinas founded or justified their creeds, and relying rather on faith as an emotional confidence in those truths, a deep sense that they must be true because they believed so since childhood and are unwilling to be disabused by their disloyalty, that most primitive of attributes that are already present in the Old Testament. 

Christian believers rely on their faith  and confuse that with what they believe. The problem with that is that faith as a creed can cover a lot of supernatural things that can't be tested, such as the Virgin Birth and can, in their heart of hearts, just regard such beliefs as a formula to assert whatever their misgivings while avoiding reducing the belief into merely a symbolic one, for then one might ask why such a belief was today so reactionary in that women who have human procreation are not to be thought therefore impure. And moral standards are then regarded as also formulas to which a person assents for the sake of loyalty even of disregarding it as a practical activity in that Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi regard themselves as good Catholics even though both of them support abortion. Faith as a feeling becomes narrow when it can exclude beliefs that are not compatible.Faith as confidence is far from Kierkegaard because it can exclude whatever it cares to and is left with supernatural matters that are outrageous but non contestable while aligning with an overall sense of confidence or faith that people are always getting better or using Jesus as a benchmark for how humane people should be. But politicians like FDR were embarrassed at discussions of religion. That was to go into deep waters and most American politicians do not want to step into that ocean,largely unequipped to do so, concerned as they are with local district chairmen and matters of social policy, there being few exceptions, like Bill Clinton, who could explain his view on abortion rather than just weigh it as a campaign  point.

Pre-Protestant Christianity became so encrusted with so many beliefs, articles of faith, that it rivaled paganism with alluring stories and certainties that defied the imagination that had created it. You can know about the gods without ever going around to rationalize them as spirits or forces to be reckoned with, such as wisdom  or bravery. Similarly, pre-Protestantism had invented doctrines that it was difficult to be certain about, such as whether the Holy Ghost was coterminous with God or in some sense was a product of God. You can argue about such matters by arguing philosophically about what was metaphysically necessary or, in a more literary way, playing on what it meant for God to somehow begat Jesus when that is a metaphor for something deep because God cannot literally begat a son, even if pagan gods could. Either way, this reasoning is a stretch and it is reasonable for Bart Ehrman to regard theologians as presumptuous and arbitrary, himself retreating to being a mere historian who chronicled and compared what people in  texts say. Theologians can get out whatever they want to, a harmless pastime in that the laity doesn’t care about that but the base meanings to which they do subscribe.

Protestantism, for its part, went back to basics by dealing with the moral engagement of God to every single person in  his own soul and consciousness, elaborating on  the Abrahamic relationship between God and Abraham, the two sparring with one another about what morality requires, by adding the idea that the human soul has to open up his consciousness, like a witness swearing to tell the truth, so that he or she is pure enough, sincere enough, to engager such a tussle, purified so as to see the morality of things. Very daunting indeed in that it means a faith without the adornment of bells and smells. I am not at all sure this is not so high a standard to place on congregants so that the can apply moral reasoning, but I am not at all sure that it is better to think that following Talmudic law, whether by those of the Orthodox or Reform, and so sufficient to make you morally engageable. Can’t anyone engage with morality? If morality is invisible and everywhere evident, as is the original idea of Abraham, then there is no need for a set of gatekeepers into morality. But that may be my democratic and idealistic way of approaching matters. Christians are more aware than I am of how awful human souls can be and so there are those bereft of moral reasoning while I think that people try to be good, most of them, even if there are monsters among them.

Not that Protestantism does not get encrusted or diminished over its centuries, far from the standards of moral righteousness which is its bedrock. First of all, in America at least it became political, Evangenicals supporting Trump because he was a means to the end, which was accomplished, which was to reverse Roe v. Wade, but at what cost? You have bartered away your soul to someone reckless and a miscreant even if you have preserved millions of souls from murder, Is that a God would think a moral tradeoff? Why should God have to endorse such a deal as a legitimately moral one? Only the devil requires you to make Sophie's choice. They knew he was a bad man even if they did not expect he would try to overturn the Constitution out of p;ique and greed. A Protestant would think that character really counts.

And second of all, Protestants can debase their own gold by trivializing what they claim so that Christianity is reduced to what is allowed for children to understand, when Children catch on to what goes on in life. Protestants are less willing to understand than Catholics do just how lurid can be representations of the crucifixion. That is real suffering however much I think it trivial to suffer a bit before freeing people from their Original Sin. Cheap swap. Abraham would have agonized more about Isaac than God the Father over the fact that Jesus will be restored to the throne next to Him. This is just pagan imagery of slaughter and revenge.

And the Protestant impulse is also diminished by repeating the mantra that “Jesus is your friend” because you can rely on his advice and appeal to your better nature, like a doll cradled in your arms or vice versa. However cuddly the image, Jesus is not your friend. He is much too alien from you, more than the difference between lord and peasant. Jesus is bringing to Earth a new moral dispensation of love over law and you should be properly scared if you are not up to that new standard. Jesus is up to bigger things than comforting you. He is not just agreeing with moral standards but making new ones, just like the judges in Oresteia. The universe shakes, but that is a meager metaphor, and that is why, despite myself, I have to admit that Kierkegaard captures a lot of the enormity and anguish of morality.

Re-release: Peter Brown's Christianity

I had the temerity of challenging the great historian Peter Brown on his own turf, which is late antiquity. Readers of the 2017 post, however, do seem interested in what I have to say and so I am re-releasing the post.

That extraordinary scholar Peter Brown’s latest book “Through the Eye of a Needle” is a magisterial account of the social, economic and theological structure of the late Roman Empire. His guiding thesis as he states it in his introduction is that as a result of that great outpouring of theological genius in the later part of the Fourth Century, the Church came from regarding wealth as a sin, which it was in the Gospels, to regarding contributions to the Church as justifying great wealth. Wealth was good when it went to the Church, and that explains the prevalence of the Church in the Middle Ages. I think this thesis basically wrong, first of all, because, as Brown himself shows in an early chapter, contributions of mosaics and other church naming occasions were already part of Church life right after Constantine converted to Christianity and, indeed, I might add, are part of every religion known to mankind, whether that means putting up a cathedral or getting a seat in a synagogue named after a deceased family member.

More important, the thesis is wrong because Brown imposes his thesis upon a description of social life where economic motivation is taken for granted as the reason for doing things, while the idea that people can earn favor with God by making contributions provides a motivation of the sort envisioned by Max Weber when he spoke of the decisive importance of the Protestant Ethic in liberating Europe to become capitalist, while Brown imagines that religious motivation for the accumulation of wealth results in the economic stagnation of medieval times, when it ought, by his logic, have led to capitalism in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries.

Most of all, why is it necessary to reconcile the remark about the camel and the needle with the practices of rich members of the Church? People join and support churches for a variety of reasons. They like the liturgy or they like feeling part of the community of respectable people. They can take theology or leave it. The New Testament has a great many passages that are in spirit contradictory. You are supposed to welcome the prodigal son, which is supposedly a tribute to the idea and feelings of family as well as an allegory for dealing with believers who stray, and yet Jesus also came to separate sisters from brothers. Which is it? A believer can live with the admonition about rich people because what he likes about Christianity is that it offers salvation to everyone, even including rich people, and maybe in a particular believer’s case, a depth of conviction must surely make up for the fact that the person is rich. Moreover, maybe the remark about rich people came from the looney or radical fringe of the movement-- though that is an insight that would come to a modern mind, one less trusting to texts than the great Fathers of the Church. At any rate, there is no need to pose this as a crucial matter, as Brown does, unless there is reason to think a doctrinal point is not only central but fraught with consequences, which is what Weber did when he said that a belief in good works was key to Protestant Christianity even if predestination ruled out those good works being the cause of salvation. Practice rather than meaning has consequences.

Seventh Century capitalism did not happen. What did happen, according to Brown’s brilliant interpretation, was that the Church had accumulated wealth and that made it powerful with a soft power that could counter the power of the state, which was the power of the various kingdoms that had arisen after the fall of Rome. It invoked this power in the name of the poor, which is to be taken to mean not only those in poverty but all those well into the middle class who were not part of the aristocracy or the wealthy. So the Church had a constituency to be looked after and its wealth made that possible, and that is what made it the dominant institution of the Middle Ages. That is very different from saying that the Church was the progenitor of a kind of capitalism, though this claim could indeed be made in that monasticism, which depended on generous contributions from the wealthy, did see the origins of a countryside based capitalism that did not survive for more than a few centuries before efficient economic activity was eventually moved from the countryside to the city in part due to the efforts of Pope Innocent III in the early Thirteenth Century.

There are structural consequences when the clergy become the repositories of wealth. They have to become part of what Brown calls “the otherness” of the clergy, as was symbolized by their adoption of the tonsure and of celibacy, something Brown thinks was something desired by the laity and only then enforced by the clergy. Celibacy was necessary because the priests were the people who handled the Holy Eucharist, and so had to remain pure. (Brown does not deal with the prior question of why sexual chastity is more pure than an occasional romp in the hay.) In these and in other ways, Christianity was transformed less by its organizational skills and its growing monopoly of learning than by the responsibilities imposed on it by its wealth. Other religions also create liturgy and a heightened sense of the holiness of their clergy, but the Catholic Church did all of this so well that it dominated Europe until the Reformation.  Brown offers up a panorama of Late Antiquity, something about which he seems to know everything. The reader is rewarded with a rich feel for the Late Roman Church. Brown explains how St. Augustine went down to meet the crowds that attended his sermons; he explains how barbarian armies were merely mercenaries recruited to deal with civil wars breaking out within the empire and these armies set up courts which local aristocrats found they could deal with as well as when Rome was in charge. 

The original thesis about religious ideology changing the Church so that it is in favor of wealth is, therefore, not Brown’s true thesis. The true thesis is one that he never overtly identifies, perhaps because he thinks that it is too obvious. That thesis, which makes much more sense and is far more significant, is that structural considerations are enough to explain the evolution of spiritual experience of the Church, an experience which would stretch to the end of the Middle Ages. This is a profound insight into the way Christianity and all other religions operate: that they are subject to the give and take of economic and political forces  but it takes no ghost come from the grave   to tell  me that Religion operates as do all other institutions.

As a sociologist, I have certain quibbles with Brown about his use of historical evidence. Early on, in his presentation of the economic and social situation in the early Fourth Century Roman Empire, he uses a farmer who eventually earned himself a position on the city council as illustrating the fact that power explained wealth rather than the other way around, though that is not what the instance he cites would support. You can’t be that loose. Moreover, as with most historians, Brown engages in anecdotal proof, however wide ranging and how many histories of particular communities he may draw upon. What is the basis for his generalizations other than that there are some places, even a great many, where what he says holds true? Now that may be the best evidence available, but it is not conclusive. But be that as it may, there is no gainsaying Brown’s mastery of and his deep insight into his material. This book stands as a worthy rejoinder to those, like me, who take the role of ideas as very important in expressing, creating and propagating new versions of old or eternal religious emotions, and who also think that the Protestant Ethic had always been there, latent in Christianity, and waiting upon events to bring it forward.