A LATERAL LOOK AT POPULIST CHRISTIANITY

Published in LADY GODIVA ... December 1991

The word 'lateral' is used in the phrase 'lateral thinking' - which is the practice of considering familiar facts and ideas in unfamiliar ways and so perhaps suggesting unfamiliar conclusions. These conclusions are not necessarily of superior truth to those arrived at conventionally but the practice of lateral thought may be refreshing and sometimes fruitful. It is, for example, the very stuff of a good detective novel.

A simple example of non-lateral thought is provided by the well known fact that seed formation is the way in which many plant species reproduce. Laterally, one might truly say that the plant is the means whereby the seed reproduces itself. Both ways of looking at the endless cycle - seed: plant: seed: plant etc etc - are equally 'true' even though it is customary to see the seed as the means and the plant as the end rather than vice versa. Even this use of 'customary' is a little arbitrary; if the plant happens to be, say, wheat then the seed is our 'end' because we eat it and we cultivate the plant mainly for that reason.

'Christianity' means, for our present purposes, not some belief system expounded by some sophisticated believer who supposes that 'his' version is 'true' Christianity; it means 'that which passes for Christianity in the everyday discourse of people who describe themselves as Christians - no matter what sophisticated theological eyebrows they may raise by their undisciplined utterances'. In short, we are simply talking about populist Christianity.

Theism is assumed; it is the day-to-day Christian version of theism that is being considered laterally - as it might be so considered by liberal minded Jews or Muslims or other informed monotheists and perhaps some academic Christians too.

The main special tenet of Christianity is that, in fulfilment of an ancient prophesy, a Saviour has been born (of a virgin), that this Saviour is truly identifiable as Jesus who is/was God Incarnate and whose ministry, miracles, crucifixion and subsequent bodily resurrection are taken to be historical facts and that the whole sequence from prophesy to resurrection carries the 'Good News' that we can be saved eternally if we accept the message - and cannot be other than damned eternally if we do not. Again, it must be emphasised that this is the actual Christian view that we usually meet in conversation, sermon and popular lore; it is 'populist Christianity' - which may or may not be considered acceptable by some sophisticated, but largely unheeded, theological experts.

The occasion for questioning this belief system - even within a strictly theist frame - is that the main feature of the prophetic vision has simply not happened. There is no need to labour the point; the gospels refer repeatedly and unambiguously to the imminent Second Coming of Christ within a few years of his crucifixion and claim that this event would be unmistakable in its authenticity and patently revolutionary in its effect upon human life and prospects.

Apart from some brief furtive and soon ceasing post-crucifixion appearances reported in the Gospels, Jesus simply has not turned up and, after nearly two millennia, this continuing non-event must rank as one of the greatest anti-climaxes ever to be observed. Therefore, anyone is entitled to say of populist Christianity, and not disrespectfully at that, "I'll believe it when I see it".

It is at least arguable that the main consequences of the life of Jesus have been far short of what the gospel authors evidently envisaged. These consequences include -

1) the establishment of a fractious priestly bureaucracy capable of brutal persecution, corrupt worldliness, unsinkable complacency, scholarly enlightenment, flashes of selfless heroism;

2) a remarkable promotion of the arts;

3) that this bureaucracy has secured the nominal support of only about one-fifth of humanity - the other four fifths adhering, equally nominally to pre- or post- Christian religions or to no recognisable religion at all.

4) the immediate pre-Jesus world and the immediate post-Jesus world seem to be remarkably similar - peopled by the wise and the stupid, the better and the worse, the effective and the futile, the hopeful and the desperate. From 1000 BC to 1000 AD .... nothing fundamental seems to have changed .... which is as much as to say that the life of a famous man (Jesus) half way through that period seems not to have made much difference. Empires came and went, new religions appeared and metamorphosed (as they do) from heady enthusiasm to entrenched bureaucracy. If the Apostles could see what we can see, they would be surprised and disappointed at the transforming second coming that never comes.

The only ways in which the post-Jesus world is markedly different from the pre-Jesus world is the explosion of 'progress' that has given us the 'modern world'; this explosion began more than a thousand years after Jesus and its detonation has coincided with the general decline of Christianity from its local European peak in the Middle Ages. The ubiquitous post-Jesus anti-climax means that the whole Christian scenario needs to be looked at very hard and very critically - perhaps laterally.

First the matter of 'born of a virgin'. This is now believed by many scholars to rest simply upon a faulty translation of the source documents. The relevant word, it is claimed, should be translated as 'a young (married?) woman' with no implication of virginity. It is also likely, on biological grounds (and populist Christianity is held to be factual and historical and not just a mental construction or 'model') that virgin conception would result in a female baby. What a female Jesus might mean for male ordination need not be pursued here!

Then, there is this matter of prophesy in general. It is a difficult area and it is easy to make logical oversights in it. Two 'thought experiments' might help matters.

First, let me foretell an earthquake in Italy in the year 2040 or thereabouts and that many people will be killed by it. Let us suppose that, in 2043, such an earthquake does actually occur and that many victims do die. Let us also suppose that the people of 2043 know about my 1991 prophesy. What will they make of it?

Some people (in 2043) would say that the prophet ('tis I) knew truly how to foretell the future; others would say that if enough people make enough predictions then some of them are bound to work out right sometimes and that it was a matter of luck to get it right - a pure fluke!. The earthquake itself would be factual; it could neither be invented if it did not happen nor denied if it did happen.

Secondly, I hereby predict that around 2070 a woman will appear in the public arena claiming to be Joan of Arc Reincarnate. Let us suppose that in 2067 such a woman indeed comes to public notice and is believed by some people to be genuine. What about that? Would the same two reactions be possible - the True Prophet or the lucky guesser?

The two possibilities do indeed arise but there is also a third - that someone who knew about this prophesy 'put her up to it' and she was flattered to be so chosen and she accepted the story, rehearsed for years and then acted the part and came truly to believe in it herself - and perhaps even to suffer for that belief.

This third type of possibility arises in this case, but not in the earthquake case, because the earthquake is simply a matter of fact - or absence of fact - whereas the status of the woman would be more a matter of belief, or the lack of it, in a purported fact.

If we are questioning the Christian scenario in a lateral manner, we must look for a reported opportunity whereby Jesus could have been 'put up to' believing himself to have the special status Christians attribute to him.

We do not have to look very far. Early in Luke's gospel we read of the boy Jesus escaping from his parents' care and discussing serious matters with learned men in Jerusalem for several days. It is not reported what was said during those three days. Can it be that the learned men, who must surely have known of the ancient prophesy, 'put him up to it' perhaps hoping that he would liberate the Jews from Roman rule and further their own political careers? If that had happened, and had the boy believed the scholars, then we might expect him to have been brashly dismissive of his parents' anxieties when he was reunited with them. He 'knew a thing or two' that they did not! Luke tells us that the boy Jesus was indeed dismissive of his parents in very much the way the 'put him up to it' hypothesis might suggest. Subsequent scriptural reports of Jesus's dismissal of family ties (the instant recruiting of the 'fishers of men' without any regard to the legitimate interest of those who were left to crew the boats as best they could, and the appalling remarks reported of Jesus in Luke 14:26) seem to bear this out).

Nothing much is reported of Jesus's late youth and early adulthood. Was he rehearsing the role for which he had been, perhaps all too easily, interviewed and recruited.?

It is notable that Jesus, a man portrayed as very much given to teaching others what he saw as truth, is not known to have written anything for posterity to read. This is consistent with his assertion that his own triumphant second coming would follow in the lifetime of some of his hearers. In the circumstances, written testimony would have been pointless, the truth would soon be manifest. Who needs the book if we are all soon to be performers in the real life drama?

The earliest Christian writer about Jesus (Paul) seems not to have met him and to be commenting upon a reputed teacher rather than a personally known, or properly documented, one and the gospels follow even later than Paul (who died A.D. circa 65).

The gospel writers seem to have depended on hearsay and folk report and Luke, in his preamble, suggests that already, (circa 75) the record is muddled and he needs to tidy it up for the benefit of future people. One of the most striking of Luke's revisions is that of Jesus's reputed last words. He changes "My God why hast thou forsaken me?" into "Father forgive them, they know not what they do."

Is it mere coincidence that Matthew's version suggests an all too human pretender, perhaps habitual self-deceiver, facing the awful truth that the game is up while Luke's version is more suggestive of a truly holy being - the words attributed to him by Luke are surely one of the noblest statements ever said to have been uttered.

Be that as it may, the one version of the last words is consistent with 'the game is up' having dawned on their speaker while the other version is consistent with an almost superhuman nobility of thought.

Is Luke revising Matthew for purely propaganda purposes? It is, after all, Luke who gives the genealogy of Jesus as going back to Adam and to God himself while Matthew attributes to Jesus a different and merely human ancestry going back only to David. Luke seems to be very keen to promote a more-than-merely-human Jesus, long enough after the real Jesus's death and so to make such propaganda difficult to expose for what it may well be - propaganda.

Christians readily accept that very little hard fact is available about the life of Jesus and that much of what is believed is habitual, traditional, satisfying and faith-based.

It may be salutary to wonder whether a less than flattering lateral construction based upon the same meagre data may be, at least, worth considering. To do so does not undermine the value of Christianity as a contrived conceptual model that can accommodate a great deal of anyone's experience of life in a way that some people, legitimately, find satisfying and inspiring. But the lateral view hinted at above does undermine the pseudo-historical basis for such satisfaction and, very practically, it thereby undermines the credibility of Christianity as an instrument of tyranny.

To confront people with 'fact' is more manipulative than to invite them to consider the attractions of a conceptual model.

Undermining THAT classic function of religion - power over people - is surely the business of liberal sceptics and of liberal believers alike. Perhaps (some of) our Jewish neighbours are right to think that Jesus was a false prophet and that Christianity is a Judaic heresy that has got out of hand. If the scholars who 'put him up to it', when he was twelve years old, saw their terrible error and took their terrible, but guilt-laden, revenge twenty years later - it figures. And perhaps subsequent centuries of Christian anti-semitism is but guilt-ridden vengeance upon the guilty avengers. It figures too.

Meanwhile, 'old Adam' runs and runs and the tired old Church runs and runs .... it's business as usual - with a pension at the end of it.

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