A New Heaven

Back by popular demand (I know, I don't believe it either): blogging about religion! Last week I posted some thoughts on the Lord's Prayer, and was very encouraged by the response. Several people inquired about other thoughts I might have on religion, and so I caved to what was actually a shockingly small amount of pressure. But here goes.

I've said for many moons that I don't buy Christianity as a metaphysical thesis, but until now I haven't written anything public on the topic. For those who know only little (or nothing) about Christianity, here's a brief recap of what you've missed in the Bible. First, it comes in two Testaments, the New and the Old. That's 1.0 and 2.0 for those keeping score at home. The Old Testament is where one finds most of the biblical stories that we might encounter growing up: e.g. the Garden of Eden, Noah's ark, Moses parting the Red Sea, God passing down the 10 Commandments to Charlton Heston, God testing the faith of Job, etc. The Old Testament is actually a chunk of Jewish religious text (that Christians also adopt) composed of several books, though there are disputes about the order in which the books go. The New Testament, by contrast, is the most significant point of departure where Christianity diverges from Judaism. That section of the Bible is about Jesus of Nazareth, also known in swearing man's terms as "Jesus Christ" (and sometimes even as "Jesus H. Christ," though the origins and meaning of the H. are completely unknown, and the topic of much speculation).

Here I think it propitious to drum up an old line: a little education is a dangerous thing. There are many who learn about the Bible and adopt it as completely unquestionable, on account of the fact that it's the word of God. However, when one learns a little bit more, one realizes that in fact there are more biblical-type books, candidates for the canon if you will, and it was in fact groups of men who chose what to include and what not to, and what order they should go in. So, some critical reflection is needed here. First, how did they (and how should we) decide what to consider canonical text and what to omit? Second, and more importantly, what does it mean for the status of these texts that they are chosen and bound in leather and red letter by mortals?

Anyway, back to the Bible. The Old Testament contains a series of covenants between God and men. (Note here that I use "men" and not "people," not because I'm oblivious to the gender issue, but because God didn't make any covenants specifically with a woman, so far as I know.) Some examples of God's covenants: he made one with Adam and Eve that they could live in the paradise of Eden forever so long as they did not eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil or of the Tree of Life. Sadly, that didn't pan out. God later made a covenant with Abraham that if he would follow God's commands, then God would make Abraham the father of a nation. In fact, Abraham became the father of two nations: the Israelite people and the people who would later become the Muslims. The Ten Commandments were another covenant, this time between Himself and the Israelites.

The Ten Commandments are something we should talk about a little more. (Again, for the popularity of their story we are indebted to Charlton Heston, that gun-toting nut from whose cold dead hands the Ten Commandments were taken when he died before reaching the Promised Land.) The Ten Commandments are a set of rules that the Israelites were supposed to follow in order to remain holy in the eyes of the Lord, and to hold up their end of the bargain. In that respect, this covenant is entirely non-unique in the Old Testament. There are thousands of rules laid out in these pages; open to any page of Leviticus for examples. These rules are often quite explicit, and even more frequently seem to us quite strange. For all those who use Leviticus 18:22 as proof beyond any doubt that homosexuality is unholy, there are relatively few who follow the decree in Leviticus 19:19 that we are not to wear any clothing of blended cloth. That's right: y'all are a bunch of poly–cotton blend-wearing sinners.

My main point here is not to harp on those who would apply religious texts unevenly and uncritically, though that is also a really important topic that I should perhaps one day treat. No, the main point here is that there's a trend that emerges in the Old Testament that I don't find in the New. The Old Testament lays out a multiplicity of detailed laws, which are meant to serve as guides for our behaviour. In the New Testament, by contrast, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of God (to be fair, he said he was the son of God, but what I have written I have written) takes human form and begins to teach the Israelites. Now this Jesus character is a real rebellious cat: he doesn't work his way up the professional ladder through a series of peer-reviewed articles in respectable journals. No no, he just starts his own school. The Sadducees and the Pharisees, who are the leading religious scholars and teachers at the time, don't appreciate Jesus' teaching the folk, and when he starts to get a significant following, they have him hauled off, put on trial by Pontius Pilate and crucified. That was on a Friday, and by Sunday he's already resurrected and back up to his old tricks. That was the first Easter, by the way. And the statutory holiday on "Easter Monday" is just superfluous.

The interesting thing about Jesus' teachings is that he only gives his disciples one real commandment: to love one another as he loved them. This is where I see a real break between Old and New Testament methodology. Whereas the Old Testament gives really detailed and numerous instructions, the New Testament gives one simple instruction that entails the kind of detailed stuff one finds earlier in the Bible. For the math people out there, rather than giving us all the points that constitute a relation, and giving them to us piecemeal, Jesus gives us the function that we can use to calculate the points ourselves.

An important consequence of the position that I'm advocating here is that Christianity thus conceived can be a partner of culture rather than its enemy. (Not everyone agrees that this is a virtue, but I certainly see it as such.) Of course, what it is to love and respect the people around you is a culturally-determined factor, and so the decree to love one's neighbours is culturally variable. As the culture changes, so too do the concrete actions of the Christian follower. Conceived as a set of explicit rules, where the set of concrete actions deemed holy is static, cultural change is antithetical to Christian values. If there were indeed a time when wearing blended cloth was not a very nice thing to do to one's neighbour (and honestly I have trouble imagining such a time and place), that's certainly not the case now. Blended fibres are everywhere, they're ubiquitous. But I don't believe that to wear them is a sin.

Defined statically, Christianity becomes either an impediment to the evolution of cultures, or the culture just goes right along evolving and Christianity wags its finger at the sinful folks all around it. That depends on whether the culture tries to stick to the statically defined practices, or whether it just goes on its own merry way, Christianity be damned. Defined dynamically, I see Christianity as being able to demand the best out of any culture that it adopts. What could be more idyllic than loving and respecting everyone around us?

Proposed next topic: the resurrection. Thoughts?