The Quarrel With Christianity: An Easter Meditation

I developed my basic critique of Christianity by the time I was 20 years old. I have found no compelling reason to abandon or even modify that critique in the three and a half decades that have since elapsed.

The critique is primarily moral and only secondarily historical.

The moral critique is this: a god worthy of my worship ought to be my moral superior. The Christian god--at least as he appears in his Pauline guise--does not appear to me to be my moral superior. Hence, he is not worthy of my worship.

The god who emerges from Paul's letters as preserved in the New Testament is a god who becomes angry at his creation (humanity) for exercising its god-given free will (or, ethically more problematic, for acting out its divinely pre-determined destiny) in ways that offend him. Rather than attempt to rectify the situation, Paul's god simply retaliates by demanding that he be appeased by blood sacrifice--human blood sacrifice.

Now, Paul was trained as a Pharisee and, as his writings amply attest, he was a creative interpreter of his scriptural inheritance. Nevertheless, the lesson that he might have drawn from the story of Abraham on Mt. Moriah--that god does not really desire human sacrifice--was not one that the Apostle to the Gentiles appears to have entertained. On the contrary, in order to make sense of the death of the man he had become convinced was the Jewish Messiah, Jesus the Nazarene, Paul avidly embraced the notion that would later become known in Christian theology as the doctrine of substitutionary atonement.

That doctrine makes explicit another ethically problematic assumption that is implicit in Paul's embrace of the divine demand for human sacrifice: the assumption that god will allow the innocent to be punished for the sins of the guilty. Wouldn't a "just" god demand that the guilty be punished for their own misdeeds and the innocent be rewarded (or at least permitted to go unpunished) for their righteousness?

The ethical problem here is best illustrated by an analogy. Let us say that a murder is committed, a suspect is arrested, evidence is gathered, a trial held and, as a consequence, the suspect is convicted and sentenced to death. Subsequent to the convict's execution, new evidence comes to light that completely exonerates him or her and points the finger of blame towards another individual. In our own (admittedly fallible human) system of justice, we would have the new suspect arrested and tried on the newly acquired evidence. But according to the (supposedly infallible divine) system of the Pauline god's justice, the execution of the innocent convict atones for the actions of the guilty individual and there the matter ends.

Well, not quite. Paul is adamant about the resurrection of Christ and, I suspect, his insistence upon the historicity of this "event" is due, in part, to his unacknowledged recognition of the moral quandary involved. For it seems that, in Paul's mind, Christ's resurrection somehow rectifies his god's willingness to allow the guilty to go unpunished so long as there is an innocent victim that may be punished in their place.

I fail to see the moral logic. How does a "happy ending" for the innocent victim erase the injustice of that innocent victim's previous suffering? If atonement is the point of this system of justice, who will atone for that? Perhaps it will be argued that god atones for this injustice through his own "suffering." This argument creates far more problems than it solves. For example, how does god suffer? And who, we have to wonder, saddled this (allegedly) omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly just and merciful deity with such a convoluted (not to mention bizarre) system of justice? When working out a scheme of atonement, this is what he came up with? There is plenty of job security in these questions for professional theodicians, but little comfort for those who are honestly vexed by the ethical issues they raise.

Understood most charitably, Christian soteriology represents a lapse in moral judgment--analogous to the one exhibited by those who convince themselves that god's 11th hour substitution of the ram on Mt. Moriah somehow clears the deity (and/or Abraham) of the attempted murder of Abraham's son. The Qur'an, by the way, modifies the tale as it appears in Genesis: Abraham (Ibrahim) fully discloses to his son his plan to offer him as a sacrifice and his son, in turn, fully consents to the plan. This may represent an ethical improvement over the Biblical version, but the question of the god's desire for a human sacrifice remains unresolved.

When Kierkegaard struggled with this problem in the 19th century, he found that the only way to adequately address the moral issue was to theorize what he called the "teleological suspension of the ethical." This phrase, however, is simply a dodge: S.K. recognized that there was no way out of the moral problem that the story presents so he argued that there was a "higher" objective to consider. While we may be willing to accept the possibility of a "higher" objective, it strikes me as singularly dishonest (or impatient or lazy) to suggest that we are somehow entitled to ignore the moral issue since we have failed to resolve it. That is no way to "address" the issue; rather it is a way to avoid addressing it.

At age 20 I concluded that the genuine moral value of this tale (like the moral value of the story of Christ's crucifixion) is that it activates and intensifies our sense of justice (our conscience, if you will) and calls upon us, first, to candidly acknowledge the ethical problems involved and, second, to recognize that Paul's god must answer for them. It was then that I moved beyond Christianity into the vortex of adulthood and the way of the pilgrim and the stranger...

As for Paul himself, he remains, for me, a fascinating figure in his own right. Those who are interested in exploring him further should read Alan Segal's Paul The Convert.

Segal's 1992 book offers a compelling historical reading of Paul as a Pharisee who spent much of his formative years in the Jesus movement among Gentiles and, as a consequence, became convinced that the Christ event ushered in a new "antinomian" dispensation as the end of the world approached. On the surface, there does not appear to be anything new here. However, the book is filled with a wealth of information about the Jewishness of Jesus and his inner circle (including family members) and the contrast with Paul's alternative "Gentile dispensation" is made to stand out in bold relief. Segal tries to explain the Pauline difference by reference to recent theories of religious conversion. Paul was a Pharisee who was "converted" to a Gentile lifestyle (radical in itself) in an effort to create a new kind of community in which there is neither Jew nor Gentile. He latches on to something that was, at best, an exception in the teachings of Jesus (who "was sent for the lost sheep of Israel") and struggled to make it the center of the movement. The book is not just about Paul but about the beginnings of the Jesus movement in its late antique context--i.e., an intramural argument among Second Temple Jewish sectarians that turned into a world religion at the expense of its Jewishness. It is a tour de force.

Jesus and his brother James: