Why every theology faculty deserves an atheist

Every theology faculty deserves its own atheist. Ours is called Kevin.* As he tells it, Kevin grew up in a Christian family, and as a teenager considered becoming a priest. Now, in his 70s, he calls himself an atheist. Or an agnostic. It depends. Kevin drifted into theology after taking a few subjects in philosophy as a way to keep himself off the streets in semi-retirement. He stuck with it and is close to completing a degree.

The Empty Tomb, by Dr. He Qi, China.

Kevin’s no fool – he’s had a long and varied career in the law – but he is the only person I’ve ever met to get 5% for an essay. It was in Old Testament. Kevin gave us a precis. It began with “The Old Testament is a load of rubbish” and pretty much ended there too. The lecturer refused to let Kevin sit the exam, which I think was extremely unfair, and showed an astonishing lack of curiosity.

Kevin and I did a subject together last semester. Having an atheist in a theology class had its challenges. He was so determined that Jesus isn’t the answer that it was hard to get him to actually listen to the question. It also had its advantages: Kevin’s curveballs frequently stopped students assuming that everyone in the room thought the same way (like, Christians think the same way?) on topics like pacificism, for example. But what I found most helpful were his frequent requests to explain it “without the Christian jargon” and his insistence on bringing up questions we thought we were well past, the kind of questions you were supposed to have answered in Sunday School, not theology college. Ones like:

“The Resurrection: what’s it all about?”

We were having end-of-semester drinks in the University Club (Kevin’s shout – another good reason to have your own atheist) when Kevin asked this one. He looked around the small group of theology students, a couple of actual ministers, the rest graduates or post-graduates. Most people suddenly found something interesting floating in their wine glasses. One guy responded with: “I’m not sure yet: I used to be a Presbyterian.” After I scraped myself off the floor, I realised it was over to me.

My slightly improved-upon and expanded response to Kevin’s big question – without using jargon.

If you mean, “What happened at Jesus’ resurrection?” I have no idea. There were no witnesses. It’s not a scientifically repeatable experiment. All we’ve got are the Gospels (aka Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) and they’re not giving much away.

For me, what the Resurrection is about is not so much what happened then, but what it means now for Jesus to be resurrect-ed. I think there are four significant implications:

Firstly, a resurrected Jesus is still involved in human history. A living Jesus is one still passionately engaged in the story of humanity, still crying over Jerusalem, still devastated by the betrayal of friends, still weighing-in on the side of the outcast, the exploited and the powerless.  He just can’t keep out of it! A living Jesus calls people who would follow him to a similarly passionate involvement in life, inspired by his commitment to justice, compassion and love.

Secondly, a resurrected Jesus is someone humanity can relate to. There’s a lot of cant talked in Christian circles about “Having a personal relationship with Jesus”. Much of it’s about appropriating Jesus to our own ends. But unlike a dead Marx or Gandhi, a living Jesus cannot be domesticated quite so easily. A living Jesus is the only kind of Jesus that it makes sense to literally follow (not much sense in following a dead person, they’re not going anywhere), to argue with, to recognise in the street, to try to avoid. A resurrected Jesus is a force to be reckoned with.

Thirdly, as well as being active in the present, a resurrected Jesus has a future. Just like any living person, he is someone we can expect more from – and not in some pie-in-the-the-sky afterlife, but within human history. His story hasn’t finished. What the next chapter looks like we can only speculate, but we can be sure it’s consistent with his character of wisdom, justice and love.

Fourthly, a resurrected Jesus has implications for humanity. When his contemporaries “got” Jesus, when they grasped – if fleetingly – what he was about, they said things like,  “This is God’s son”. In other words, This is what being truly human looks like. The resurrection is never presented as a one-off special something for the good guy only – but as the future of all of God’s people. This has immense implications for what it means to be human. People are not disposable products with a limited shelf-life; God loves us so much God cannot imagine a future without us. Maybe we should love each other, too.

So, the Resurrection in four easy parts, and without jargon. Did I satisfy Kevin? I’m not sure. But thanks for asking, anyway.

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*Name changed for privacy purposes.

Holy smoke?

Brisbane lawyer Alex Stewart recently got in all sorts of trouble for videoing himself using pages of the Qur’an and the Bible as cigraette papers and posting it on the Net. I tend to think it was a bad idea, but not for the usual reasons.

A burning religious text.

In his  since-removed video, Mr Stewart reportedly stated:

It’s just a f—ing book. Who cares? It’s your beliefs that matter. Quite frankly, if you are going to get upset about a book, you’re taking life way too seriously.

Why wristband ethics aren’t enough

In a comment on a recent post, I was taken to task, in the nicest possible way, for dissing the 1990s phenomenon of wearing WWJD bracelets as a reminder to ask “What Would Jesus Do?” when faced with ethical conundrums.

WWJD actually dates back to 1896, when Charles Monroe Sheldon wrote the Christian novel In His Steps. Subtitled What Would Jesus Do?, the book tells the story of a small-town minister who encourages his flock to move beyond singing hymns on Sunday about following Jesus, to actually doing so in their daily lives, with radical results.

In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?

By getting his co-religionists to go back to the roots of their faith, the life of Christ as presented in the Gospels, Sheldon did Christianity a great service. As Wikipedia helpfully points out, In His Steps “ranks as the 39th best-selling book of all time, along with Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls.”

But Sheldon’s aim was not to provide a simplistic moral compass:  what the Evangelical WWJD wristband movement turned it into – a moralistic “Beam me up, Scotty” for Christian teenagers whose mates are “tempting” them with booze or porn – wouldn’t have been further from his mind, I’m sure.

Sheldon was a Christian socialist as well as a Congregational minister, and when he asked the WWJD question, he was looking squarely at what’s often called social sin. As Paul Raushenbush wrote in The Huffington Post, In His Steps was addressed to:

…an American society rife with social inequalities and ills due in part to the rise of industrialization and the capitalist exploitation of the poor by the wealthy. While the book has undeniably patronizing tones, it compellingly tells the story of a prosperous church whose members respond to the challenge of living their life by the question: What Would Jesus Do? The characters in the book include a business man who decides to make his factory a cooperative, a tenement owner who repents of his policy of neglect towards his tenants, and an heiress who gives up her fortune to give housing and religious instruction to the poor women of the slums.

My first criticism of WWJD, then, is that we’re doing it wrong. Instead of trying to invoke Jesus to come done on one side or another of our personal moral quandaries, we should be seeing how we live up to what Jesus had to say about life’s big questions. And the biggest question – which Sheldon saw clearly – is what we do about wealth, poverty and injustice, whether in our own neighbourhoods or globally. If you’re going to wear a WWJD wristband, I suggest you wear a  Make Poverty History one along with it.

Secondly, when I called WWJD not “a particularly Christian question”, I should really have said New Testament. Surprising Bible fact #1: only once in the New Testament does anyone explicitly mention imitating Jesus as a basis for Christian ethics.

It’s St Paul in 1 Cor 11:1, and his comment comes at the end of a section justifying his own behaviour: some may call him wishy-washy, but he tries not to pointlessly upset people of different religious sensibilities for the greater good of helping people know God. How this relates to something Jesus did in life, at least as recorded in the Gospels, is beyond many. Jesus upset everyone!

So if a literal imitatio dei is not a foolproof method of discernment, where do Christian ethics come from? What does following Jesus look like? And can we ever move from text to praxis? In first semester this year I took a fascinating subject at theology college called “Ethics in the New Testament”. The central thing I’ve taken from that class is this, and it’s a significant one: a popular way of using the New Testament in ethics is to look at the ethical outcomes – the whats – we find in the text, to try to synthesise them (or not) and then to attempt to apply them to the contemporary situation. A more fruitful way is to see the New Testament as series of snapshots of communities captured in the process of trying to do ethics themselves and to take their methods as our models – the hows - rather than their outcomes.

So rather than saying, ” the Bible says this about this, so we should too”, a better approach is to consider how the communities whose records come down to us in the New Testament are portrayed as coming to grips with ethical issues themselves. Do they appeal to their own scriptures (the Old Testament)? Do they model themselves on paradigmatic situations or people, or invoke rules or commandments? How do they harmonise with or differentiate themselves from the other religious and ethical perspectives in their societies? Do they seek to create situational heuristics or rules for all time? More fruitful, but a lot harder to do.

The course also emphasised the fact that the construction of Christian ethics in the New Testament is inseparable from the establishment of (early) Christian community. The questions they asked tended to concern “What does it mean to be the people of God in this new, radical situation” (i.e. post the resurrection of Jesus). The questions we ask concern “What should I (the individual, which is largely a post-enlightment construction) do in situation x”.

Unfortunately, you’d have to have a pretty thick wrist to manage What Kind of Community Are We Creating In The Light of The Jesus Event? But, when you think about it, this was really the question the original WWJD phenomenon was prompting us to ask.