← Almost
essays of a post-Christian

Poor King Agrippa

24 August 2017 · By Manny Glover

I started NT Wright’s “Evil and the Justice of God” again from the beginning, at the behest of my “Progressive Evangelical” friend Robert Lee White, and this is my summary so far:

🇺🇸 #NTWright2020 🇺🇸

But seriously, I wish someone as sophisticated as he and with such a strong moral compass and a compassionate heart would rule our nation. He spends a fair amount of the first part of the book critiquing naïve responses to social evils. He seems so spot on to me. I wholeheartedly agree with his thesis that the lack of nuance in political/sociological/psychological thinking is truly damaging. He writes:

The immature reactions to evil can perhaps be seen close up if we ask ourselves how we react to evil in our own lives or immediate circumstances. What are you angry about right now? Who has done something which you feel is unjust or unfair? How do you cope with it? How do you come to terms with it? We react so often in one of two ways. We can project evil out onto others, generating a culture of blame: it’s always everyone else’s fault, it’s society’s fault, it’s the government’s fault, and I am an innocent victim. Claiming the status of victim has become the new multicultural sport, as people scramble for the moral high ground in which they can emerge as pure and clean, and everyone else is to blame.

Alternatively, we can project evil onto ourselves and imagine we are to blame for it all. This is one of the normal causes of depression; but the issue is wider than just psychological states. Politically we oscillate between those who tell us that all the ills we face are the fault of someone else – terrorists, asylum-seekers, drug dealers, criminals – and those who tell us, in the classic pop psychology of the 1960s and 1970s, that we are all guilty, that the terrorists are terrorists because of what we’ve allowed to happen in their countries, that the asylum-seekers are fleeing the effects of my previous foreign policies, that the drug dealers dealing drugs because we destroyed their other indigenous livelihoods, and that the criminals are the victims of the affluent society. The fact that there is more than a grain of truth in both caricatured sides of this equation doesn’t help. The culture of blaming everyone else (resulting in lawsuits, victim exaltation and self-righteousness) and the culture of blaming oneself (resulting in depression and moral and social paralysis) are likewise immature and inadequate responses to the problem of evil as it presents itself, not so much in our metaphysical discussions as on our streets and television screens.

Four more years! Four more years!

But let us leave earthly matters and enter into spiritual matters.

The NT Wright book came up in conversation with my Christian friend Robert because he was wondering how many Christian books I had read, since I am a “post-Christian”. I’ll list them here, in case you are curious:

Y’all might be surprised to know how much I enjoy reading most of the books I listed above, even though I read most of those books as I was losing my faith or after I already had. I typically find the authors to be sophisticated, insightful, and compassionate, and their views on ethics and even God, believe it or not, resonate with me deeply. I want to be a Christian in the sense that I want to help bring in Christ’s Kingdom to earth. The Kingdom predicted in the Sermon of the Mount, for instance. I want to be a Christian in the sense that I want to prostrate myself before a holy God and ask for forgiveness of my sins. I want to be a Christian in the sense that I want to meditate upon the meaning of the Incarnation and the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. I want to be a Christian in the sense that I want to sing praises with God’s people thanking him for His wonderful creation and for His self-sacrifice on the Cross.

But I can’t be a Christian, because I think that Christ is perfect, but Jesus–at the risk of levity–“close but no cigar”. I don’t want to defend doctrines which my conscience, my portion of the Holy Spirit (in my view), condemns. For instance:

And He said unto them, In what place soever ye enter into an house, there abide till ye depart from that place. And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them. Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city.

I’m just imagining some meek young Jewish maiden, taught from her youngest days to be a good Jew and to honor the one God in heaven, reacting like, “Who are these cooky uneducated vagabonds? My mama and papa think they are radicals… misguided.” And then, for this “great sin”, Jesus declares them worthy of destruction more violent than one of the most horrific smitings in the Bible? No, sir. “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

Moreover, though I feel edified by and embrace the implications of such central events to the Christian faith as I mentioned above, I don’t think of them in the way that y’all do. I think of them in the way David Friedrich Strauss, a brilliant 19th-century German critical scholar of the Gospels, who argued that the Gospels contained myths, thought of these events:

The author is aware that the essence of the Christian faith is perfectly independent of his criticism. The supernatural birth of Christ, his miracles, his resurrection and ascension, remain eternal truths, whatever doubts may be cast on their reality as historical facts. The certainty of this can alone give calmness and dignity to our criticism, and distinguish it from the naturalistic criticism of the last century, the design of which was, with the historical fact, to subvert also the religious truth, and which thus necessarily became frivolous. A dissertation at the close of the work will show that the dogmatic significance of the life of Jesus remains inviolate: in the meantime let the calmness and insensibility with which, in the course of it, criticism undertakes apparently dangerous operations, be explained solely by the security of the author’s conviction that no injury is threatened to the Christian faith.

Isn’t that interesting? C.S. Lewis became convinced that the stories of the God-Man represented “true myth”, and Strauss likewise believed in this “true myth”–yet his embracing of these stories did not extend to the historical fact, but to the spiritual fact. Do any of my Christian friends think such a thinker as Strauss can be saved? Some of his more conservative Christian contemporaries were certainly not so gracious. One reviewer:

…the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell.

Oh well… any publicity is good publicity?

In conclusion, I like Christian books. They edify me. They inspire me to serve God. They stimulate my intellect and excite my sense of spiritual awe and kinship with my Creator and His people. But the crux of the matter, the idea that Jesus was perfect and the incarnation of God, and this God is Yahweh too, and this Jesus rose again on the third day… my skepticism leaves me outside of the fold of Christendom, according to what I read in the Bible itself.

Alas, I am poor King Agrippa:

“Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.”