Religion really like an Elephant?

I was reading Timothy Keller's 'Preaching and Pluralism', and came accross an interesting point. There is a popular analogy of 'the elephant' that I have always had a logical problem with. Keller put a voice to my thoughts.

The analogy is of the blind men trying to describe an elephant. One feels the tail and reports that an elephant is thin and flexible. Another feels a leg and claims the animal is thick as a tree. Another touches its side and reports that the elephant is like a wall. This, to the pluralist notion, represents how the various religions only understand part of God while no one can truly see the whole picture. To claim full knowledge of God is arrogance.

HOWEVER, the only way this parable makes any sense is if you've seen the whole elephant. Therefore, the minute you say, 'All religions only see part of the truth,' you are claiming the very knowledge you say no one else has. And you are demonstrating the same spiritual arrogance you accuse Christians of.

Interesting fodder for discussion, and maybe a sermon.

Jesus is Big Business!!

Jesus is big business. Peruse the shelves of any ‘religion’ section in your local Coles or Chapters and you’ll see what I mean. North America is knee deep in ‘pop’ hysteria around the historical Jesus, and your section of tabloid-style scholarship testifies to the money there is to be made. The good news, however, is that there is a standard pattern to poor Jesus-scholarship. So, if you are thinking there's something wrong with the book you are reading, and want to discern if your impression is correct... from the pages of Luke Timothy Johnson’s The Real Jesus, here are the 5 top clues to discern if you are reading a book of junk-Jesus-scholarship…

Your first clue, the author uses the standard marketing ploy to gain respectability, contrasting him or herself overtly against the traditional church. By setting themselves against the institution, many authors have made up for their complete lack of education or substance. Those without credible degrees offer themselves as a breath of fresh air from the stuffy and suppressed work of church-washed scholars. Those defrocked as priests or let go by a credible Universities market themselves as 'classic examples' of the church’s inability to handle real truth. By far, the most popular posture is that if the whistle-blowing insider. That is, the heroic insider, bishop or otherwise, who is letting us see behind the curtain at what is really going on. Unfortunately for serious readers, in today’s media these are real qualifications.

Your second clue, the author exploits a small, popularly unknown tidbit or angle on the study of Jesus abandoned by serious scholars. Most argue that the ‘truth’ about Jesus can only be found in a historical reading of the gospels using their tidbit. A simple reading of any scholarly work from the last 100 years can supply anyone with enough obscure points, long since abandoned by real scholars, for a lifetime of popular books. My favourite is various treatments of ‘midrash’, a style of reading that can’t be proved ever existed. Other examples are hidden biblical codes or mythical imagery linked to other ancient religions.

Your third clue; the author employs ancient outside sources hand picked to best fit their argument. Cast off texts and teachings waiting for exploitation as outside sources abound. The materials of Nag Hammundi and the Dead Sea Scrolls are the most popularly exploited writings, and are implicitly accepted thanks to years of conspiracy weaving by the media. Does the book you are reading have its own conspiracy around Nag Hammundi or the Dead Sea Scrolls? What other obscure ancient texts are used?

Your fourth clue, the book is as provocative as possible. For a book to become a best seller, the new ‘true’ reading of the gospels must deny all surface meanings. Making a splash in the media is very important in marketing to our culture. The headline “New scholar asserts traditional reading of the gospels” hardly inspires a popular frenzy. Barbara Thiering became a best-selling author by asserting that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. Even though she gave no evidence to support this, and asserted that is wasn’t the crux of her argument, it sure made for great press and higher sales.

Your fifth clue, the book implies heavily, and as much as possible, how disastrous this new finding is for the church. The final point in uncovering poor scholarship is when a book asserts how Christianity to completely abandon its traditional teaching for authors own new religious belief. The most popular trend is for authors to supplant the teaching of Jesus with a Unitarian gospel created from some handpicked teachings from Eastern spirituality.

If your book fits this pattern, keep in mind that what you are reading is, in fact, another form of literalism based on the author’s best guess. Think on the fact that most conclusions in these books are at obvious odds with other books of the same type, although it is funny that the only thing they all agree on is that the church is wrong. The historical-critical method, as it is called, does give us new insight into the person of Jesus. However, it does not give us license to create new pictures of Jesus that are, in fact, a reflection of our own socio-political preconceptions. This is the worst aspect of any literalism. To keep via media we all cherish, it is important for Anglican’s to balance the low-level scholarship offered by Coles and Chapters, with faith-building authors like Johnson or N.T. Wright. If you are interested on more information with regards to the misguided quest for the historical Jesus and the truth of the Gospels, see Luke Timothy Johnson’s renowned work The Real Jesus or his follow-up Living Jesus, both from Harper Collins.

Sharing The Faith by discussing Tom Harpur's "The Pagan Christ"

Recently I have been accosted at several functions such as the remembrance-day services, senior’s dinners and receptions by some very eager people. Armed with what they felt were iron-clad arguments from recent books such as The Pagan Christ or The DaVinci Code, they want to know why the church has not radically changed it’s beliefs in the light of such compelling scholarship. One would think that in a church where most priests and church leaders are well educated, they would be open to, and changed by, fact and reason. Personally, I have found these to be great opportunities to debunk common misconceptions about the church and to share the message of Jesus with these curious and conscientious seekers. To explain why such books have failed to compel the church, and to start a discussion about Jesus, I share something like the following.

When I recently borrowed The Pagan Christ I expected it to be a stimulating read. However, as many others have discovered, it turned out to be what has, sadly, become the standard assertion of shaky speculations sensationalized and sold as undisputable reality. Harper makes a great many leaps such as that Jesus never existed, and that his story is nothing more than a ‘myth’ brought in from Egyptian pagan belief. How do we recognize this as 'shaky'? Basically, Harper makes the same mistakes that have earned many a university student a ‘D’ on term papers. That is, glossing over of facts and the use of simply outdated sources.

First, and foremost, Harper does nothing to address the fact that if Egyptian myth had such a heavy impact on Israel in the first century, there would be evidence on burial sites. In other words, if the people of that time took their belief in life-after-death from the Egyptians, there would be a great many graves containing Egyptian symbols or hieroglyphs. As scholar N.T. Wright points out, there are no such graves in existence.

In addition, the logic of Harpur’s major assertions is both full of holes and extremely outdated. As W. Ward Gasque, the co-founder of Regent College and a historian of early Christianity, comments (www.canadianchristianity.com), other than quotes from books published in the 17 and 1800’s, and heavy doses of a sensationalist American journalist, Harpur leans on the work of Alvin Boyd Kuhn another author from the 1800’s. Harpur says of Kuhn that he was “A religious scholar and thinker”, who was a “towering polymath whom history has yet to recognize fully in all his brilliance.” Why hasn’t he been noticed? Harpur goes on, “He is simply stepped too often and much too hard on too many powerful toes, particularly those of the vested religious institutions”. However, his assertion notwithstanding, Egyptology is a secular subject; the ‘evil religious institution’ has about as much power over it as it does the outcome of the World Series. Simply put, Harpur ‘blows smoke’ because he is unable to find any immanent works that take Kuhn seriously other then a few unexceptional writers from the 1800’s.

The truth about Kuhn? A high school teacher from the 1800’s who earned a PhD from Columbia University by writing a dissertation on Theosophy (not Egyptology), he had difficulty finding a publisher for his works and most of them were self-published. His only link with an institution of higher learning was a short stint as the secretary to the president of a small college. In fact, in a recent poll by Gasque of 20 leading world Egyptologists, only one of the ten experts who responded ever heard of Kuhn, or of the other two of Harpur’s main sources Higgins or Massey. All the responding scholars were unanimous in dismissing the suggested Egyptian etymologies (were the words came from) for ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’. As well the main arguments for Iusa, the virgin birth of Horus, or that he was a fisher of men, the dating of the religion of Osirus, the dating of the earliest writings from Egypt, and the redefinition of ‘incarnation’ are all rejected by the contemporary Egyptologists.

To say the least, it takes much more than a book of this pedigree to take the Church into radical heresy. The Pagan Christ along with most of the other “Christian” books published and mass-marketed through Chapters and Idigo are simply peddling pop-culture syncretism; the kind that makes for a great Hollywood-type conspiracy, but a very poor foundation for Christian faith. This is why the church is neither impressed, nor intimidated by them. They do serve, however, as very good starting points to a deep discussion about our Lord a Saviour Jesus Christ with those curious enough pay for and read a book about Him. An opportunity every believer should relish and prepare for! For further reading on dealing with these and similar questions regarding contemporary pop-scholarship, I highly recommend Luke Timothy Johnson’s The Real Jesus, or anything by NT Wright, the Bishop of Durham. The better educated we become, the better prepared we will be to meet seeking people where they are with the message of salvation.