Notes to the Prologue of Aslan's Zealot

Notes to the Prologue:  A Different Sort of Sacrifice

of

Reza Aslan, Zealot

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Co-Pastor

This “Prologue” doesn’t even mention Jesus.  It sets up an account of the assassination of the high priest Jonathan son of Ananus in the year 56 CE.  Just why Aslan thinks that assassination is important to his historical reconstruction of Jesus won’t become clear for quite a while yet, if it ever does.  The Prologue is made up mostly of a description of the layout and functioning of the Jerusalem temple and a description of the function and role of its priests around that year.  That year is something like 26 years after the death of Jesus, but never mind.  Aslan isn’t a fan of the temple or of the priests, but then neither was Jesus—probably for at least some of the same reasons. 

Aslan gives a rather detailed description of the physical layout of the temple.  It was constructed as a series of decreasing tiers, most of them called “Courts.”  The first and largest of them was the Court of the Gentiles.  It was open to anyone, even non-Jews as the name suggests.  It was in many ways a marketplace.  Here merchants sold the animals that were to be sacrificed in a court deeper into the temple.  Here money changers changed people’s unclean Roman money for temple currency that had to be used to pay the temple tax all Jews owed.  Aslan doesn’t like these merchants and money changers.  He refers to merchants and “grubby money changers” who “lie in wait as you make your way up the underground stairs and onto the spacious sunlit plaza.”  I’m not sure why he calls them “grubby” money changers” or refers to them and the merchants as “lying in wait.”  He acknowledges that they played a vital role in the functioning of the temple.  Indeed, the temple couldn’t have functioned as the religion of the day needed it to function without them.  Sacrificial animals had to be bred for that purpose and free of all blemishes, so the people had to buy them at the temple.  Roman money had to be changed for temple money.  Sure, the merchants and the money changers made a profit.  Maybe it was even an exorbitant profit, but they still were necessary to the temple.  They didn’t defile it, they helped it work as it was supposed to work.  Still, Aslan doesn’t like these merchants and “grubby” money changers.

The tiers of the temple proceeded from the Court of the Gentiles, open to everyone, to the smaller Court of Women.  Any Jew who had no physical affliction and who had had a purifying bath could go this far.  It was as far as women were allowed to go.  Beyond the Court of Women was the Court of Israelites (as though the women, who weren’t allowed into the Court of Israelites, weren’t also Israelites, but never mind).  Men brought their sacrificial animals this far.  Aslan says that there the stench from the continuous animal sacrifices was overwhelming.  Perhaps it was; but remember that Aslan as a Muslim and we as Christians have nothing to do with animal sacrifice, and Aslan isn’t about to minimize its negative effects on the atmosphere of the temple.  The priests performed the sacrifices in the next court, the Court of Priests.  Only priests and other temple officials (think of the scribes) could go that far into the temple.

Beyond the Court of Priests lay the Holy of Holies.  The term Holy of Holies is, I think, widely misunderstood in our culture.  I’ve even heard it misused in popular music.  The Holy of Holies doesn’t refer to God, it refers to a place, a room essentially, the innermost room of the Jerusalem temple.  Only the high priest was allowed to enter it; and he did so only once a year, on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur).  Here’s how Aslan describes the Holy of Holies:  “This is where the glory of God physically dwells.  It is the meeting point between the earthly and heavenly realms, the center of all creation.” 

Aslan says, wrongly, that the Ark of the Covenant once stood there.  That’s wrong because the Ark of the Covenant never stood in the Holy of Holies of the temple Aslan is describing.  That temple is the second temple to have stood on Mount Moriah (known as the Temple Mount) in Jerusalem.  The first temple was built by King Solomon in the tenth century BCE.  The Ark of the Covenant was a chest in which, supposedly, the Israelites carried the stone tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai in the wilderness.  The Babylonians destroyed Solomon’s temple in the year 586 BCE.  The Ark of the Covenant was lost at that time and has never been found, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark to the contrary notwithstanding.  The temple Aslan is describing is the second temple on the temple mount and was first built in the late sixth century BCE after the return of the exiles to Jerusalem from Babylon.  Herod the Great (died 4 BCE) greatly expanded it and made it more elaborate and impressive.  That’s the temple Aslan is describing, and the Ark of the Covenant was never in it.

The Holy of Holies was an empty room, but it was seen as serving a divine purpose.  The Holy of Holies served, Aslan says, as “a conduit for the presence of God, channeling his (sic) divine spirit from the heavens….”  That divine spirit flowed out from the Holy of Holies, it was believed, into the entire world.  Aslan says that only the high priest could enter the Holy of Holies because he was set apart from the rest of the people by his office.  Perhaps, but he was the only one who could enter at least for the additional reason that the Holy of Holies was so sacred.  Remember the ancient Israelite belief that no person could come into the immediate presence of God and live.  By the first century CE God perhaps didn’t physically live in the Holy of Holies as the Israelites had come to believe that their God Yahweh physically lived in the Holy of Holies of the first temple, but the Holy of Holies was nonetheless the most sacred place on earth.  To enter it was to come into the presence of God more immediately than one could at any other place.  Allowing no one but the high priest to enter it, and he doing so only once a year, preserved the sacredness of the place.

Aslan says that the it is impossible to overstate the importance of the temple.  I think he’s right about that, which made Jesus’ rejection of the temple so revolutionary.  The temple was the center of the Jews’ religious life.  It was a center for commerce and finances for all of Judea.  It was, Aslan says, the seat of a theocracy.  He cites Josephus (the late first century Rome-leaning Jewish historian) as having coined the word theocracy to apply specifically to Jerusalem and its temple.

The temple produced lavish incomes for the priests and other temple officials; and most Jews viewed “the entire priestly nobility, and the high priest in particular, as nothing but a band of avaricious ‘lovers of luxury’….”  Aslan stresses the opulence surrounding the high priest and the way the people resented it.  He’s probably right about that, but the high priest certainly isn’t the only supreme religious leader ever to be surrounded by opulence.  Consider the Pope.  The current guy rejects some of the papal opulence, but he’s an exception among Popes.

In 56 CE a member of a group of assassins called the Sicarii assassinated the high priest Jonathan.  Aslan calls that a different kind of sacrifice, different of course from the temple’s sacrifice of animals.  With that, the Prologue ends.  Aslan’s description of the temple in this Prologue is vivid and extensive.  I assume that it’s mostly historically correct, except for the part about the Ark of the Covenant.  Whatever you end up thinking about Aslan’s picture of Jesus, this Prologue gives a lot of good information about the temple.

Notes to the Introduction to Aslan's Zealot

Notes to the Introduction of Reza Aslan’s Zealot

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

August, 2013

In his Introduction to his book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, Reza Aslan sets out the task he undertakes in the book, namely, to paint an historically accurate, that is, factual, picture of Jesus of Nazareth.  This book is a quest for the historical Jesus, and I ask you please to read my piece on the quest and this book before you read these notes to the Introduction.  It’s on line at monroeuccadulted.blogspot.com, as these notes will be when I’m done with them.  I have serious reservations about any attempt to identify the historical person Jesus of Nazareth behind the Jesus, or the Jesuses, we have in the Gospels, our only sources of information on him.  I do not reject historical critical studies of the Bible.  I value them very highly.  I think we can say with some reasonable certainty at least some things about what in the Gospels is historical fact and what is not.  Doing so is vitally important in some contexts, as when we attribute the anti-Judaism and the Christian exclusivism of the Gospels to the books’ authors and not to Jesus himself despite the fact that the Gospels put anti-Jewish and exclusivist sayings into Jesus’ mouth.  I have no doubt that the sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John are not authentic sayings of Jesus but are rather faith confessions of the Johanine community many decades after Jesus’ death.  That doesn’t necessarily make them untrue as faith confessions, but if they are true they are not true because Jesus said them.  He didn’t.  Historical criticism is essential, but that doesn’t mean that we have any way of reconstructing a Jesus radically different from the one(s) we find in the Bible.  I’m afraid that’s what Aslan is doing here, and these notes are going to be very critical of his work.  As always, you don’t have to agree with me, although I suspect that most of you will find Aslan’s Jesus disturbing and hard to believe in.  So read Aslan closely.  Read him critically, as you should anything you read.  Aslan isn’t gospel.  The Gospels are gospel.  This book is really interesting and challenging, but it doesn’t necessarily give you a truth you didn’t know before.  With that I’ll move on to comments about specific things Aslan says in his Introduction.

Eschatological holy men were common in Jesus’ day, a time of much apocalyptic expectation.  All kinds of people claimed to be messiahs and foretold the coming of the Kingdom of God.  Among them were the prophet Theudas mentioned in Acts; an figure known only as “the Egyptian,” whose army the Romans massacred; Athronges, a poor shepherd who crowned himself King of the Jews and was killed with his followers by the Romans; “The Samaritan,” whom Pontius Pilate crucified; Hezekiah the bandit chief; Simon of Peraea; Judas the Galilean, and Simon bar Kochba.  They all had messianic ambitions, and Rome killed all of them.  There were other groups as well, the Essenes (of Dead Sea Scrolls fame); the Sicarii (assassins who stabbed Romans and their Jewish collaborators with daggers), and later (at the time of the rebellion of 66CE) an organized party called the Zealots.  Aslan says that first century Palestine was “awash in messianic energy.”  As we go along we will see that Aslan considers Jesus to have been essentially another of these would be messiahs, not all that much different from the others, whom Rome handled the same way they handled all the rest of them.

Then we come to the first thing Aslan gets wrong about Jesus.  He says that Jesus called for violence, and he cites Luke 22:36 for that proposition.  In doing so he gets that passage from Luke all wrong.  He cites verse 36b (calling it only verse 36) but not verses 37 and 38 that immediately follow.  I’ll give you all three verses here:

He said to them, ‘But now, the one who has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag.  And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one.  For I tell you, this scripture must be fulfilled in me, ‘And he was counted among the lawless’; and indeed what is written about me is being fulfilled.’  They said, ‘Lord, look, here are two swords.’  He replied, ‘It is enough.’

Aslan takes “the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one” as a call to violence.  In context we can see that it isn’t.  Jesus says that he’s saying that because “this scripture must be fulfilled in me.”  He doesn’t want his people to use violence, he wants some scripture to be fulfilled.  The scripture in question is Isaiah 53:12, part of one of Second Isaiah’s “suffering servant songs.”  The point is Luke’s, not Jesus’, and it is that Jesus is the suffering servant of whom Isaiah spoke.  Note also that the disciples produce two swords in response to what Jesus said.  Twelve disciples, two swords.  Jesus says it is enough.  Enough for what?  Certainly not to fight the Romans.  Not even enough for all twelve disciples from defend themselves from a robber.  It is, however, enough to fulfill the scripture; or at least Luke thought it was.  This passage quite simply is not the call to violence that Aslan says it is.  He’s just wrong.  He gives us very bad biblical exegesis here.

Aslan then admits that Jesus, historically speaking, is hard to pin down (which doesn’t stop him from pinning Jesus down, but never mind).  That’s because the New Testament, and specifically the first three Gospels, are our only sources that contain any historical information about him.  That’s a problem because the Gospels are not eyewitness documentation of historical events.  They are testimonies of faith written well after the fact.  Aslan says:  “Simply put, the gospels tell us about Jesus the Christ, not Jesus the man.”  (Which doesn’t stop him from using them to tell him about Jesus the man, but never mind.)  I would say that actually the Gospels, or at least the Synoptic Gospels, tell us about both Jesus the Christ and Jesus the man, as Aslan clearly thinks they do despite his statement here.  The problem is trying to figure out what in the Gospels is about Jesus the man and what in them is later faith confession about Jesus the Christ.

Aslan concludes that there are only two historical facts about Jesus “upon which we can confidently rely.”  They are that Jesus was a Jew who led a popular movement in Palestine early in the first century and that the Romans crucified him for doing so.  Aslan says that, but as he writes his book he more or less confidently relies on a whole lot more supposed facts about Jesus and what he said.  His method for moving forward despite the paucity of reliable facts about Jesus is, he says, to combine these two facts with everything else we know about the time and place where Jesus lived.  The history of Palestine from about 4 BCE and 73 CE is really important for Aslan.  It is a tumultuous and violent history, and Aslan claims that that history sheds significant light on Jesus.  He says that using that history together with those two bare bone facts about him “can help paint a picture of Jesus of Nazareth that may be more historically accurate than the one painted by the gospels.”  Note how careful he is here.  “May be” more historically accurate, not is more historically accurate.  It is commendable caution on his part, but of course he goes ahead and gives us his picture of Jesus nonetheless.

Then we come to a pretty good statement of Aslan’s thesis in the book: 

“Indeed, the Jesus that emerges from this historical exercise—a zealous revolutionary swept up, as all Jews of the era were, in the religious and political turmoil of first-century Palestine—bears little resemblance to the image of the gentle shepherd cultivated by the early Christian community.” 

Here Aslan calls Jesus a “zealous revolutionary”.  That’s his primary thesis.  Jesus is a zealous revolutionary.  We’ll get to what he means by “zealous” in due time.  His reference to the context of first century Palestine shows us where Aslan gets much of that image.  There were lots of zealous revolutionaries in first century Palestine.  Just about everyone in first century Palestine was in a revolutionary fervor, he thinks, so for him Jesus was too.

Then there’s the fact that the Romans crucified Jesus.  Crucifixion was the punishment for the crime of sedition.  Sedition is essentially anything that threatens the authority of the state.  The charge against Jesus was that he claimed to be the King of the Jews, Aslan says, taking the Gospels’ statements to that effect as factual history.  The sign on Jesus’ cross said King of the Jews, Aslan says, again taking biblical statements literally.  If I remember right, Crossan, a much better Jesus scholar then Aslan, denies that there would have been any sign on the cross at all.  Still, Aslan accepts the Gospels’ statements that there was, he takes those statements to be factual history, and so he concludes that Jesus claimed to be the King of the Jews. 

Then we come to a key passage of the Introduction that deserves some comment:

The notion that the leader of a popular messianic movement calling for the imposition of the ‘Kingdom of God’—a term that would have been understood by Jew and gentile alike as implying revolt against Rome—could have remained uninvolved in the revolutionary fervor that had gripped nearly every Jew in Judea is simply ridiculous.

There are several things to say about this striking sentence.  First of all, the idea that Jesus called for the “imposition” of the Kingdom of God is just wrong.  He said that the Kingdom of God was already here.  He didn’t call for anyone to impose it on anyone else.  Aslan will later on make much of the fact that Jesus began as a disciple of John the Baptist.  True, but John didn’t call for the imposition of the Kingdom of God either, except perhaps by God.  Jesus changed John’s message.  He didn’t expect God to impose the Kingdom, at least not during Jesus’ lifetime.  Rather, he told people that the Kingdom was already in their midst and called on them to live the life of the Kingdom here and now.  That was a revolutionary message in a way, but it was not a call to revolution in any standard, worldly sense.  It was, and is, a call to us to transform ourselves from the inside.  It is not a call to violent revolution. 

Recall the story of the exorcism of the demon called Legion, usually called the exorcism of the Gerasene Daemoniac, Luke 8:26-33.  In that story Jesus exorcises a bunch of demons out of a man.  The demons identify themselves as “Legion.”  Jesus puts them into a herd of pigs, which all run down the hill into the sea of Galilee and drown.  That’s how Jesus wants to deal with Rome.  The demons are called Legion.  What’s a legion?  It is a basic large unit of the Roman army.  We’ve probably all heard of the Roman legions, that is, the Roman army.  In this story Rome isn’t an external occupying force, or at least that’s not primarily why Rome is such a problem.  Here Rome has occupied a man’s soul.  He has internalized the ways of the Empire.  Jesus symbolically drives the Roman army into the sea in this story, but he does it spiritually to heal a man’s spirit.  That’s how Jesus wanted to deal with Rome.  We need to free ourselves, with the help of the Holy Spirit, from the ways in which empire has occupied our hearts, minds, and souls.  Then we can live the Kingdom life, not the life of worldly empires, whether ancient Roman or modern American. 

Also, it may be true that Jesus could not have been untouched by the “revolutionary fervor” of his people and his homeland.  Galilee had rebelled against Rome in 4 BCE upon the death of Herod the Great.  That’s the year most scholars think Jesus was born.  That rebellion was crushed, and Aslan will have a lot to say about those events shortly.  Jerusalem rebelled in 66 CE and was crushed.  There was indeed a lot of revolutionary fervor in Jesus’ time, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Jesus was a violent revolutionary or called for violent revolution.  I believe that he responded to that revolutionary fervor not by joining it but by giving people a different vision of how to deal with Rome.  Jesus wanted to create the fullness of the Kingdom of God on earth, but he didn’t want to do it by violent revolution.  He wanted to do it by the spiritual transformation of one person at a time.  Living with people who longed for violent revolution doesn’t necessarily make one a violent revolutionary.  Aslan almost seems to think that it does, or at least he thinks that the crucifixion of Jesus in that context means that it did that to Jesus.  I don’t.

Aslan then asks why the early Christian communities would turn this revolutionary who called for violence into a peaceful spiritual shepherd.  First of all, the Jesus of the Gospels isn’t only a peaceful, spiritual shepherd.  He rants and raves, he overturns tables and releases animals in the temple. he calls people hypocrites.  Never mind.  Aslan says that the process of changing Jesus from a zealous revolutionary into a “peaceful spiritual leader with no interest in any earthly matter” began after the Romans crushed the Jewish rebellion in 70 CE.  He’s wrong about that in at least a couple of ways.  It is beyond me how anyone can read the Synoptic Gospels and think that Jesus has no interest in earthly matters.  In those Gospels Jesus deals with economic justice for the poor more than he deals with anything else.  He’s concerned with people’s physical and spiritual health—in this life, not so much in the next.  In the first, second, and third centuries CE Christianity was illegal.  Why?  Not because it had no interest in earthly matters but because it led people to break the law by not worshipping Caesar and the Roman gods and by refusing to serve in the army.  Yes, for much of Christianity Jesus became that spiritual leader with no interest in earthly matters, but that process didn’t begin in 70 CE.  It began only in the fourth century CE with the establishment of Christianity as the religion of empire.  Again, I couldn’t disagree with Aslan more here.

Aslan acknowledges that he really doesn’t have sufficient historical sources to do what he’s trying to do, although of course he doesn’t put it that way.  He says that trying to write a biography of Jesus “is somewhat akin to putting together a massive puzzle with only a few of the pieces in hand; one has no choice but to fill in the rest of the puzzle based on the best, most educated guess of what the completed image should look like.”  Again he’s wrong of course.  One has another choice.  One can recognize the inadequacy of the sources for the project one wants to undertake and give up the project as undoable.  Of course, you don’t end up with a No. 1 New York Times best seller if you do that, but you can do it nonetheless.  As Aslan concedes, if you write the biography despite the inadequacy of the sources you’re left with a “best guess.”  Why anyone should take a guess, best and most educated or not, seriously I frankly don’t quite understand.[1]

In the piece I wrote and put on the blog just before this one I told you about Albert Schweitzer’s critique of the first quest for the historical Jesus.  Aslan never mentions Schweitzer by name, but he does acknowledge the criticism that Schweitzer was the first to make about seeking the historical Jesus behind the Gospels.  He refers not to Schweitzer but to the prominent German theologian Rudolf Bultmann, who said that the quest for the historical Jesus is in the end actually an internal quest.  Aslan paraphrases Bultmann as saying “Scholars tend to see the Jesus they want to see.  Too often they see themselves—their own reflection—in the image of Jesus they have constructed.”  That’s Schweitzer’s objection, and it is my objection too.  Aslan acknowledges that the objection gets made, but he presses on nonetheless.

He says:  “And yet that best, most educated guess may be enough to, at the very least, question our most basic assumptions about Jesus of Nazareth.”  Really?  Why?  If it’s only a guess, why should it lead anyone to question anything?  Maybe the problem here is that he uses the word “guess.”  Perhaps if he’d called it an informed hypothesis rather than I guess I wouldn’t react so negatively.  But guess is his word, so he’ll have to live with it.

Aslan acknowledges the criticisms of the quest for the historical Jesus, but he insists that his undertaking is legitimate nonetheless.  He says:  “If we expose the claims of the gospels to the heat of historical analysis, we can purge the scriptures of their literary and theological flourishes and forge a far more accurate picture of the Jesus of history.”  That of course is the claim of all historical Jesus studies.  Yet that is precisely what Schweitzer and Bultmann said we can not do.  I don’t dismiss critical study of the Bible.  As I’ve said, I cherish it.  I am however very concerned that Aslan has gone far beyond what honest critical study will allow us to do.  O well.  His book is still interesting and popular, so we’ll press on.

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[1] Please understand.  I am among other things a professionally trained historian with a Ph.D. in that discipline.  Aslan has a Ph.D. in sociology, but he isn’t a professionally trained historian.  I and my Ph.D. candidate colleagues all had to write Ph.D. dissertations that met a high scholarly standard.  It was common for us to come up with ideas about an interesting and important subject but give those ideas up because we would never have been able to find sufficient historical sources to complete the work.  Neither Aslan nor anyone else who tries to write a true biography of Jesus has sufficient historical sources to complete the work.  That reality stopped us Ph.D. candidates.  It didn’t stop Aslan, just as it hasn’t stopped many others.

Some Thoughts on Historical Jesus Studies and Reza Aslan's Zealot

Some Thoughts on Historical Jesus Studies

And Reza Aslan’s Zealot

Reza Aslan’s book Zealot:  The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth is an attempt at reconstructing the historical person Jesus of Nazareth.  Some of you are probably familiar with the issue of the historical Jesus, but others of you probably are not; so here’s a brief recap of the issues surrounding our knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth as an historical person.

The only significant sources we have about Jesus are the Gospels in the New Testament.  There are gospels that are not in the New Testament, but for the most part they add nothing to our picture of the historical Jesus.  They are either merely sayings gospels that record sayings of Jesus but say nothing about his life, or they are late, often fantastic gospels that may tell great stories but that pretty clearly contain little or no historical fact.  There are references to Jesus in a few (very few) extra-biblical ancient sources, but all they really do is confirm that by the end of the first century CE Jesus and his movement had become at least somewhat known in the Roman Empire.  So we’re left with the canonical Gospels, that is, the Gospels in the New Testament.

Of those Gospels only three of the four contain anything remotely like accurate, factual information about Jesus.  The Gospel of John really doesn’t.  It differs radically from the other three Gospels in the picture it paints of Jesus.  It is a theological tract by a Christian from the late first or early second century CE for whom Jesus had become the Word of God Incarnate.  The author of John is interested in a mystical, divine Jesus, not in the very earthly person Jesus of Nazareth.  That doesn’t mean that it is necessarily theologically wrong, but it does mean that John is no help in any quest for the historical Jesus.  So all we really have as sources on the historical Jesus are the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke are all we have, but there’s a huge problem with them as historical sources for Jesus.  They may sound to us like historical narratives of the life and teachings of Jesus, but they aren’t.  For centuries Christians took them as historically reliable.  Few if any people doubted that what the Gospels said happened in fact happened.  That’s a comfortable, reassuring approach to the Gospels to be sure.  Many Christians, unfortunately, still adopt it.  With the assumption that the Gospels are historically factual there are no questions about who Jesus was or what he did or said.  If you want to know those things, just read the Gospels.  The problem is that that comfortable, reassuring understanding of the Gospels just couldn’t hold up forever because it simply isn’t true.

Scholars began to realize that the Gospels aren’t simply historical fact in roughly the eighteenth century in western Europe as they applied scholarly, critical study techniques that had developed as part of the European Enlightenment to those Gospels.  It became clear to the scholars, most of them Germans, that the Gospels are actually something quite different from what we would consider to be historical accounts.  They discovered that the Gospels were written between roughly forty and eighty years after Jesus’ death, that they were not written by the people whose names they bear, that their authors were not eyewitnesses to the events they describe, and that they were written for a purpose far different from conveying what we call history, that is, far different from recording facts as they actually happened. 

The Gospels are not historical accounts, they are primarily faith confessions.  Their purpose is to present an orderly account of the life and teachings of Jesus not to tell us what really happened but to convey to the readers who Jesus had become for the Gospels’ authors at the time they wrote their Gospels, decades after Jesus’ death.  The authors of the Gospels order their accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection to make their theological points about him, not to tell us what he really said and did. 

Here’s one quick example.  For the author of Matthew Jesus is the new Moses.  So, among many other things he does to make that point, he took all of the sayings of Jesus that he knew and organized them into five blocks of sayings that he put into his narrative of Jesus’ life.  Why five blocks of sayings?  Because Jesus actually delivered those sayings that way?  No, but because there are five books of the Torah, the so-called books of Moses.  If the original Moses had five books, Jesus had to have five books, or at least five blocks of sayings.  The first and longest of those blocks is the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:1 to 7:27.  (The other, shorter blocks are at Matthew 10:5b to 10:42; Matthew 13:1 to 13:52; Matthew 18:1 to 18:35; and Matthew 23:1 to 25:46.)  Jesus never gave the Sermon on the Mount, the existence of the “Chapel of the Beatitudes” on a hillside in Galilee where the tour guides say that he gave it notwithstanding.  Some of us think that’s a good thing because the Sermon on the Mount, great as it may be as a body of teaching, is a lousy sermon.  It would never pass a seminary preaching class, but that’s not the main point here.  The main point is that we can’t simply assume that things in Jesus life just happened the way the Gospels tell them.  They didn’t.

Yet it seems clear that at least the Synoptic Gospels (although John only to a considerably lesser extent) contain some accurate historical, factual information about the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.  We can be confident that the existence of a person called Jesus of Nazareth is historical fact contained in the Gospels.  We can be certain that the Romans crucified him, a truth which the Gospels contain despite their desperate attempts to shift the blame for his crucifixion onto the Jews and to excuse the Romans.  We can be quite sure that he conducted a public, itinerant ministry of preaching and healing in Galilee and that he then went to Jerusalem, where he was crucified.  We are confident that he had followers, although it is difficult to know just how many followers he had.  The Gospels are primarily theological confession, but they do contain historical facts as well. 

Once scholars had figured out that much about the Gospels the question arose:  How can we tell what in the Gospels is historical fact about Jesus and what isn’t?  With that question began what came to be called the first quest for the historical Jesus.  Throughout the nineteenth century many different authors, mostly but not exclusively Germans, undertook to get behind the theological confession of the Gospels to discover just who Jesus of Nazareth was as an historical person rather than as the Christ of Christian faith.  Scores or even hundreds or more of portraits of the historical Jesus were published, each claiming to have discerned who the man behind the Gospel stories actually was.  There was quite a cottage industry in publishing such books.  So far from them all painting the same portrait of the historical Jesus, they gave us as many historical Jesuses as there were authors writing the books.

Then along came Albert Schweitzer.  You know Albert Schweitzer, one of those people who drive you nuts because it seems there’s nothing he didn’t do masterfully.  He’s the one who took his medical practice to serve the poor in Africa.  He was also one of the world’s greatest organists.  In 1911 he published a book that put an end to the first quest for the historical Jesus.  It’s title is The Quest of The Historical Jesus, and (despite the different preposition) that title is where the phrase we’re using here, the quest for the historical Jesus, comes from.  In that book Schweitzer denied that it is possible to get behind the Gospels to the historical person Jesus of Nazareth.  The Gospels are all we have, so the Jesus (or I would say Jesuses) of the Gospels is (are) the only Jesus(es) we have.  Schweitzer insisted that when all those authors went looking for the historical Jesus they found exactly what they were looking for—not the actual historical person Jesus of Nazareth but the Jesus they wanted to find.  All those historical Jesuses were nothing but projections of the many authors’ personal preferences for who Jesus should have been, not who he actually was.  Schweitzer’s argument was so compelling that the first quest for the historical Jesus dried up.  That little cottage industry of publishing such books went out of business.

It went out of business, but it didn’t stay out of business.  There was a brief revival of the quest for the historical Jesus in the 1950s, sometimes called the second quest for the historical Jesus.  That one didn’t last very long, but there is a third quest for the historical Jesus that is much more significant.  To a considerable extent we’re still in it.  We can examine this latest quest for the historical Jesus by looking briefly at the famous Jesus Seminar, the most prominent and important expression of that quest.

In 1985 a scholar named Robert Funk founded the Jesus Seminar.  It consisted of about 150 scholars and laypeople, and it undertook to find the historical Jesus behind the Gospels.  Its most famous members were John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, or at least they became famous largely as a result of their work on the historical Jesus.  Most famously, the Jesus Seminar undertook to determine which of the sayings that the canonical Gospels (and the Gospel of Thomas, but don’t worry about that too much) attribute to Jesus he is likely actually to have said and which he is likely not to have said.  Their method for doing it became famous, or infamous.  The members of the Seminar would vote on whether Jesus said a certain thing attributed to him in the Gospels using red and black balls.  If the Seminar member was sure Jesus said the thing they were voting on he or she would put a red ball into the pot.  If he or she was sure Jesus did not say the thing, he or she would put in a black ball.  They they’d tally up the balls, with each saying of Jesus being characterized as red, pink, gray, or black.  The Jesus Seminar published the results of this work in a book titled The Five Gospels:  What Did Jesus Really Say?  The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus in 1996.  (Five Gospels because, as I said, they included the Gospel of Thomas, a sayings Gospel that is probably older than the canonical Gospels.)  In that book the Seminar members explain their methodology for their determinations.  That methodology includes things like how many independent sources we have for Jesus having said the thing, is the thing something the later community would have preferred Jesus not have said and would have left out if they could have, and, finally, just how much do we think the saying sounds like Jesus rather than like a later Christian community talking.  It’s an interesting read with the sayings of Jesus not all in red as in so many editions of the Bible but in red, pink, gray, or black depending on how likely the Seminar folks think it is that Jesus said it.

What can we say about the work of the Jesus Seminar?  It’s interesting.  It’s often provocative.  Some of its conclusions seem very likely to be correct.  In The Five Gospels, for example, all the sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of John are in black, meaning the Seminar is sure Jesus didn’t actually say any of them.  Given how different those sayings are from anything Jesus says in the Synoptic Gospels or in the Gospel of Thomas, and given the fact that people would have thought anyone who said those things totally mad, it seems likely that Jesus in fact never said them.  Even more than the other Gospels, John is faith confession not historical fact.  As faith confession it can be true.  As historical narrative it isn’t.  I believe that the Jesus Seminar gets it right about Jesus’ sayings in John.  I’ll give them that much.

There is much of value in the work of the Jesus seminar, but does it escape the criticism that Albert Schweitzer made of the first quest for the historical Jesus?  Not really.  Schweitzer said that the questers of the first quest found who they wanted to find when they went looking for the historical Jesus.  The Jesus Seminar is vulnerable to the same criticism.  The Jesus Seminar gives us a Jesus who is socially and economically progressive, whose main focus is speaking up for the poor and the marginalized, and who preached nonviolence.  I love that image of Jesus, for that is the Jesus I would look for too; but how do we know that the Jesus seminar didn’t just find the Jesus they wanted to find?  We don’t.  They claim objective criteria for their search, but their criteria aren’t really all that objective.  One gets the real sense that the decision mostly came down to the question does this sound like Jesus to us or not.  That’s a purely subjective evaluation, and the Seminar’s claims of objectivity are not very convincing.  I strongly suspect that they too found who they wanted to find in their search for the historical Jesus.  Schweitzer was right, and the failing he found in the first quest is probably unavoidable in any quest for the historical Jesus.

Which brings us to Reza Aslan.  His book Zealot is an exercise in the contemporary quest for the historical Jesus.  Like the Jesus Seminar and so many others before him Aslan seeks to get behind the Gospels to find the real historical person Jesus of Nazareth.  He does it, as indeed it must be done if it is done at all, using the Synoptic Gospels as his sources on Jesus.  He cites passages from them for proof of things Jesus said.  Unfortunately he never address the issue of how to determine which things in the Gospels can be used that way and which can’t, but that’s what he does.  So far I’ve read a bit less than half of the book, so this is subject to change; but it looks to me like the supposedly historical Jesus that Aslan finds is one who knew, expected, and probably hoped that his teaching would lead to a violent rebellion of the Jews against Rome.  Aslan’s Jesus even called for violence on occasion, as when he told his disciples to buy swords.[1]  I am as convinced that that is not who Jesus was as Aslan is convinced that it is who Jesus was. 

Can I prove he’s wrong?  No (and he can’t prove me wrong either), but consider this.  Aslan is Muslim.  Being Muslim doesn’t in any way disqualify him from writing on Jesus.  It doesn’t question his credentials as an author.  He is in fact a very good author.  Zealot is a fairly easy read, and his book No God But God is a wonderful introduction to Islam for non-Islamic audiences.  Yet the fact that Aslan is Muslim seems significant to me in evaluating Zealot.  I have long taught that the major difference between Jesus and Muhammad is that Jesus taught nonviolence while Muhammad was, among many other things, a fighter.  Jesus wouldn’t let his followers us violence to defend him.  Muhammad used violence to defeat the forces of Mecca that came out against him.  Aslan works very hard in Zealot to downplay Jesus’ rejection of violence and to make him one who knew that his teaching would necessarily lead to a great deal of it if people followed that teaching.  I saw a reference recently to one critic of the book who said that Aslan’s Jesus sounds like a failed Muhammad.  That’s probably overstating the matter a bit, but I think there is truth in it.  In any event, like every other author who has searched for the historical Jesus, Aslan seems pretty clearly to have found the historical Jesus he was looking for.  Is that who Jesus really was?  I don’t think so.  You can decide for yourself; but as you read the book keep in mind what Albert Schweitzer said about the quest for the historical Jesus.  Seek and ye shall find—find precisely what you want to find, not what really was.

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[1] See Luke 22:36.  But see also Luke 22:37-38, in which Jesus says having swords is only a matter of prophecy fulfillment and says that only two swords are enough, enough it must be to fulfill the prophecy but hardly enough to fight Rome or much of anyone else.  This passage really isn’t a call for violence.  Aslan just gets it wrong.

Some Preliminary Thoughts on Zealot By Reza Aslan

Some Preliminary Thoughts on Aslan’s Jesus Book

Some of you are beginning to read Reza Aslan’s book Zealot for our Sunday morning adult education sessions.  I too have been reading it, and I gave you some preliminary warnings about it last Sunday morning.  I told you that Aslan makes statements about the facts concerning New Testament figures, especially John the Baptist and Jesus, that I’ve certainly never heard before without giving any citation of authority for those statements.  I said that when you hear him saying something you’ve never heard before, don’t immediately conclude that you’ve learned something new about John or Jesus.  What you’ve learned is only that Aslan makes a certain statement about them.  Examples include his claim that John had the people he baptized cross the Jordan river from east to west, reenacting the action of Joshua, this time as the new Israel and his claim that after his baptism by John Jesus went into the wilderness not to be tempted as the Synoptic Gospels say but to spend time studying with John and his followers.  Those things may be historically plausible, but I know of no original source that establishes that they are historically true.  Please keep all of this in mind as you read the book.

As I have read more of the book I have become more concerned about what Aslan’s doing here.  I am very concerned about his claim that the God Jesus believed in and taught is the particular God that we can find in the Old Testament who orders the Hebrews to kill all of the non-Hebrews living in Canaan.  His only argument for his claim that that was Jesus’ God is that Jesus was a Jew; but of course the Old Testament contains many different views of God, not just that one.  It seems perfectly clear to me that Jesus picked up not that view of God from his scriptures but the view of the eighth century prophets who said that what God demands from us is not extirpation of our enemies but justice for the poor and the vulnerable.  Aslan clearly has not read Walter Wink on the phrase “turn the other cheek,” which Aslan says Jesus intended to apply only to relations between Jews, not between Jews and others.  He mentions the Parable of the Good Samaritan, but then he says that Jesus intended the phrase “love your neighbor” to apply only between Jews.  How he so quickly forgot the Samaritan I do not understand.

I am becoming convinced that the only reason to read this book is because it is so popular and has gotten so much press.  We need to know what it says, but I am becoming more and more convinced that what it says is an accurate representation neither of the Jesus Christ of the Gospels nor of the historical person Jesus of Nazareth.  This may be wrong, but it is starting to sound to me like Aslan, a Muslim, is turning Jesus into an former day Muhammad.  Muhammad was, in addition to being a prophet and the founder of a great religious tradition, a fighter.  Muhammad lead men in battle.  Muhammad used military force to defeat the forces of Mecca.  Islam may place limits on the use of violence, and those limits may have been moral progress in seventh century Arabia; but Muhammad never rejected violence outright.  Jesus did, but Aslan is going way out of his way to deny that truth about Jesus.  He wants to limit Jesus’ sayings on nonviolence only to actions between Jews and wants them not to apply to Jews’ actions toward anyone else.  Yes, the phrase “love your neighbor” comes from Leviticus; and yes, in Leviticus it clearly applies only between Jews.  But in Luke Jesus illustrates the saying by telling a story, the Parable of the Good Samaritan that I’ve already mentioned, in which Jewish leaders are the bad guys and a non-Jew, the Samaritan, is the good guy.  So how does love your neighbor apply only between Jews?  Aslan is simply misreading Jesus here.

Jesus doesn’t parrot the worst passages in the Old Testament, no matter how hard Aslan tries to make out that he does.  He rediscovers and lifts up some of the best insights of the Old Testament, insights about justice and care for those in need.  He adds to those insights a radical teaching of nonviolence.  That’s the Jesus we find in the Gospels.  That is Jesus the Christ.  It is the historical person Jesus of Nazareth.  Aslan has gotten Jesus all wrong, as nearly as I can tell.  So read the book so you will know about what Aslan says and so we can have some good discussions, not so that you will know something you didn’t know about Jesus.  The book will probably tell you some interesting things you may not have known about the history of Jesus’ time, about ancient Rome, and about the functioning of the Jerusalem temple and its authorities.  I don’t think it will give you much accurate, new information about Jesus.

Liberating God--Chapter Two

Chapter Two

The Failure Classical Theism

The God of classical theism is dead.  God is dead!  Long live God!  The God of classical theism is dead, it’s just that a lot of “His” followers don’t know it yet.  Some of us do.  That so many people don’t know it doesn’t change the truth of the contention.  The God of classical theism is dead.  Classical theism has outlived its usefulness.  It already lies in the dustbin of history, or at least it is headed there in a great hurry.  Yet mustn’t we ask:  If classical theism is so dead how did it ever became “classical” in the first place?  I think we must, so before we turn to the multiple and manifest shortcomings of classical theism let’s give it the credit that it is in fact due.

It is easy for us to deny all validity to faith traditions that we reject.  Christians do that to non-Christian faith traditions all the time.  Yet, for example, Islam, which most Christians deny contains any truth at all, would never have spread around the globe and become humanity’s second largest faith tradition if it did not function as religion should function, namely, to connect people with God.  I and many others today reject classical theism and its image of God, yet we must concede that classical theism has in fact connected a great many people with God.  It still does.  It still will for a while.  Eventually its actual death will cause it to disappear, but for now it still ticks at least a bit in our world. 

We should be careful about taking it away from people who find their connection with God through it and only through it.  That’s why I don’t intend people who have no questions about the view of God they have been taught and who find the benefits of faith in that view as part of the audience for this book.  The faith of classical theism is brittle.  Chip out even a small piece of it, and it tends to shatter completely.  I have no desire to take away any faith that gets anyone through the night, that gets anyone through hard times, that helps anyone face death with hope and peace.  Classical theism has done that for many, and for many it still does.  Let us not forget that truth, and let us not forget to be pastoral toward those for whom it does.

The God of classical theism is dead, but He wasn’t always dead.  The God image of classical theism served its purpose for a time.  It never would have become “classical” if it hadn’t.  The God of classical theism can meet some of humanity’s needs with regard to a divinity, and it did so for a long time.  It still does, despite its recent death, for a great many people.  That God is God and not an idol after all.  The classically theistic God is the Creator of the universe.  Belief in Him (always “Him,” and whenever in this work I call God “Him” I am referring only to the God of classical theism) explains why anything at all (except perhaps God Himself) exists.  It teaches that God rules the world, albeit it sometimes remotely and usually judgmentally.  It answers some of humanity’s most profound questions about existence.  We may not now find those answers persuasive, but answers they are nonetheless.

Classical theism says that God sent his Son Jesus Christ to die for our sins and make it possible for us to spend eternity in heaven rather than in hell.  That statement of course raises the issue of the classical theory of atonement.  That theory isn’t the subject of work.  I dealt with it in Chapter 8 of Liberating Christianity, and you can  refer to that earlier work for more information on that theory and its manifold and manifest shortcomings.  Suffice it to say here that the classical theory of atonement is the theology that says that God sent His Son Jesus to earth for the purpose of dying as a sinless sacrifice to pay the price of human sin that God required to be paid, and that no mere human could pay, before God would forgive us and let us into heaven.  It is the theology of Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ and of its marketing slogan “Dying was his reason for living.”  For all of that theory’s theological indefensibility it did provide comfort and hope for a great many people for a very long time.  It assured them of heaven, and many people live with a constant need to be assured of heaven.  Classical atonement theory goes hand in hand with classical theism and is one reason why classical theism became classical.

The God of classical theism is always seen as a “heavenly Father,” and the notion that we have a divine father is very comforting for some people who have not had a loving human father in their lives or whose loving human father has died and is no longer with them.[1]  The God of classical theism isn’t always all that loving, but sometimes He is seen that way.  The image of a loving heavenly Father has had great meaning for a great many people, and it too helps explain the longevity of classical theism.  So let us not go overboard here.  The God of classical theism is dead, but that God and the other theological propositions always associated with Him has indeed served to connect generations of people with God.  Thanks be to God!

All that being said (and being truly meant), it remains true that the God of classical theism is dead.  For many people today that God is utterly unbelievable.  The number of people for whom that God is unbelievable is growing every day.  Why?  What’s wrong with the God image of classical theism?  Why do so many people today reject it?  Why do I say that it is dead?  There are lots of reasons.  Here are some of the more important ones.  We will deal with some of them in more detail later in this work, but what follows here will give you at least some idea of the failings of the God of classical theism.

Let’s start with one of the most basic limitations of classical theism.  As we have seen, in that understanding God is a being.  Classical theism frequently calls God “the Supreme Being,”  and that phrase betrays this basic limitation of the classically theistic view of God.  That God is in some sense “supreme” I do not deny.  That’s not where the problem is, or it is at least where there doesn’t need to be a problem depending on what you mean by supreme.  The more fundamental problem is with the word “Being” used with either an indefinite article—God is a being—or a definite art8ce—God is the Supreme Being.  God is not a being.  God is not even the Supreme Being, for that all too familiar phrase too makes God a being.  I say God is not and cannot be a being, and you’re probably asking how I can say that.

The problem with calling God a being, any kind of being, even the Supreme Being, is that being a being necessarily implies limitation.  The identity of anything that is, that is, of any being, is determined primarily by what it is not.  Let me use myself as an example.  I am a being.  So are you, and what I say here applies at least in general to you as well as to me.  I am who I am, but I am also not who I am not.  I am not you.  I am not my wife.  I am none of the members of my congregation.  I am not any other person at all.  That’s true even though I have an identical twin brother.  I’m not him either.  I have certain characteristics that are part of my being and that set me off from everyone and everything else that is.  I am 5’6” tall, down from 5’7” when I was younger.  I have gray hair and a gray beard.  I have lived a particular set of life experiences and have not lived any other experiences.  I have a certain educational history and a certain work history that are mine but not anyone else’s, and I have not had the educational nor the work history of anyone else.  As the philosophers say, I am what I am not.  Specify everything that I am not, and what you’re left with is me.  It may be impossible as a practical matter to do that, but that’s not the point.  If you could, I would be everything that I am not.  I am not Black.  I am not female.  I am not Chinese.  I am all of the things that I am not.  Because I am a particular human being and not human being in general, I am limited.  I have borders.  I have boundaries.  I occupy a particular space, not space in general.  I live in a particular time, not in time in general.  As a being and not as being itself I necessarily have limits.

The same is true of God when we make God a being—any kind of being.  As a being God has limits.  Even as the Supreme Being God occupies a particular space, not space in general.  Classical theism speaks of God sitting in heaven.  That’s a particular place, it is not creation in general.  When God is in heaven God is there and not here.  Classical theism thinks of God as living through time in the same way we do except that for God time never ends.  That makes God time limited even if immortal.  It gives us a God living only in the present moment and not beyond and across time.  In short, the image of the classically theistic God is an image of limited God.  He (again, this God is always he) may be a Supreme Being.  He may be all those omnis that we talked about above and will address more below.  For all that, this God is still a being.  Therefore, this God has limits.  The classically theistic God is a limited God.

A limited God isn’t truly God.  That’s why the notion of God as any kind of being ultimately fails.  It is of course a thesis of this work that we can never truly and completely define God, but one thing we know for sure.  God isn’t limited.  We can’t define God, but one classical attempt to do just that helps us understand the failure of the notion of God as a being.  Around the turn of the eleventh to the twelfth century CE Anselm of Canterbury, better known as the author of the classical statement of the theory of substitutionary sacrificial atonement, defined God as “that greater than which nothing can be imagined.”  That statement ultimately doesn’t work as a definition of God any better than any other definition does, but it does at least point to one truth about God.  Whatever or Whoever God is, God is greater than anything we can imagine.  It’s not at all hard to imagine something greater than any particular being, even a particular Supreme Being.  As we have seen, even a Supreme Being is limited by its character of being a particular thing.  We can easily imagine a reality that is not a particular thing but that transcends all of the limitations of particular being.  We can imagine ultimate transcendence, transcendence that obviates all of the limitations of particular being; or at least we can come up with concepts that point beyond all of the limitations of particular being to a reality that has none of those limitations.  We imagine something limited, and we can imagine something unlimited.  We imagine something finite, and we can imagine something infinite. 

We imagine beings bound by time, and we can imagine a reality beyond time.  I admit that this is a difficult one for me, but it may be worth paying some more attention to as a good example of how God as a being isn’t truly God.  We human beings exist in a reality in which time is a major element.  We live a life in time.  For us things happen one after another across time.  For us the past is past, and the future hasn’t come yet.  We all experience time as we age.  We begin as newborns and, if we are lucky, end as senior citizens, very different from who we were as newborns.  Most of us probably can’t actually imagine an existence that doesn’t include the element time.  Yet some of us can, and some of us have actually had experiences in which time disappears.  Here’s one of mine. 

Back when I used to be a lawyer I had for a while an office high in a skyscraper in downtown Seattle.  I had a view of the Cascade Mountains and Mount Rainier.  On some winter mornings, early in the morning, the view of the changing colors in the sky as the sun rose from behind the Cascades was simply stunning.  One such morning I got to work early and looked out my windows.  I was awestruck by the beauty of the scene.  I sat down at my desk, thinking that I’d just enjoy the view for a minute or two.  The next thing I knew I looked at my watch, and forty-five minutes had passed.  I couldn’t believe it.  I had no awareness whatsoever of that time passing.  It seemed to me that I had looked at the view for no time at all.  For that brief period, time had simply ceased to exist for me.  The element time had not been part of my reality for those forty-five minutes.  Adept practitioners of the meditation arts report the same thing.  On occasion at least time for them time simply disappears as they meditate.

“On occasion” is of course an expression mired in time.  We humans really can’t escape time for long.  That’s a paradox of human existence.  We can on rare occasions experience the absence of time, but we can never escape it.  We certainly can’t convey much of anything to anyone without expressing the motion of time in what we say.  We are creatures existing in time.  We are limited beings, and time is one of our limitations.  Time is a limitation of any particular being. 

Time is a limitation of God as a particular being, even as the Supreme Being.  Yet even we time-limited creatures can on occasion experience transcending time.  We can experience being free from the limitation of time, albeit it paradoxically only for a limited time.  We can for a time transcend time.  We, however, always come back into the world of time.  God doesn’t.  God doesn’t because if God did, God would be limited.  Of course we are here facing another paradox.  I just said “God doesn’t,” which implies a limitation while the point I’m trying to make is that God isn’t limited.  So be it.  As I will insist again and again in this work, our language is ultimately inadequate for speaking about God, and we just ran into another example of that truth.  It remains also true, however, that making God a being makes God limited, and God isn’t limited.

Another failure of the God of classical theism is necessarily implied by that truth that God isn’t a being, not even a Supreme Being.  I have already said several times in this work that the God of classical theism is always referred to as “He.”  The God of classical theism is male.  “Male” is of course a category of creaturely being.  Some animals are male, and some are female.  The male/female distinction is one of the primary distinctions with which we humans live.  Sometimes it’s a wonderful distinction of unity in difference.  Sometimes it’s a wonderful distinction combined with the ecstasy of sexual union.  The male/female distinction propagates species, including our human species.  Sometimes, much of the time tragically, we humans pervert the male/female distinction into a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority, almost always with the male seen as superior to the female.  We’re getting over that perversion of God’s creation, although of course we still have a long way to go.  Male and female are distinctions between basic types of sexual creatures, and as distinctions male and female necessarily imply limitations.  I am male, which means I am not female.  My wife is female, which means she is not male.  Being one gender limits us from being the other.[2]  Being one gender means we are not the other.  Gender necessarily implies limitation.

Because gender implies limitation, and God is not limited, God does not have gender.  Note again, “God does not,” a statement of limitation; but we’ve already acknowledged that unavoidable paradox.  God does not have gender.  A more sophisticated way of stating that truth is to say that God transcends gender.  It’s not that God is less than gendered.  It is that God is more than gendered.  God subsumes gender (and all other human distinctions) into Godself and is beyond them.  The way Christians always refer to God, and always have referred to God, as “He” ignores and denies that reality about God.  We Christians are so used to calling God “He” that most Christians still have trouble understanding why our doing so is so problematic.  It’s problematic for a whole host of really important reasons having to do with patriarchy, androcentrism, and misogyny.  As important as those reasons for not calling God “He” are, they are not the subject of our present inquiry.  The important point for us is that calling God “He,” as classical theism always does, limits God.  It makes God too much like us limited, gendered creatures.  It applies a biological category from created being to a reality, i.e., God, Who is infinitely beyond created being and all of its distinctions and limitations.  Perhaps some classical theists would reply here that God can be the Supreme Being and not be bound by gender.  Maybe so, but classical theism always calls God He and resists calling God anything else.  Some classical theists have fits whenever anyone calls God She.  The God of classical theism is a gendered being and is therefore a limited being.  That characteristic of its God image is a profound failing of classical theism.

Another profound failing of classical theism has to do with the location of God.  The God of classical theism is always located somewhere particular, and that somewhere particular is always “up.”  There are a couple of problems with this aspect of classical theism.  The first problem is that being in a particular location necessarily implies a limitation.  Right now I am sitting at my desk in my home office typing these words on my computer.  I am here, at my desk.  I am not anywhere else.  You won’t find me anywhere else.  If you wanted to see me in person right now you’d have to come into my home office.  I’m at home, I’m not at my church.  I’m at in Washington state, I’m not in Moscow or Beijing or Berlin or Caracas or Chicago.  I’m not anywhere except where I am.  My physical location is limited.  It is a particular place, and it is not any other place.

Classical theism says that God is “omnipresent,” that is, present everywhere; but classical theism also says that God is in heaven, and that statement about God seems much more central to classical theism’s conception of God than is the abstract notion that God is omnipresent.  Classical theism of course understands heaven as a particular place.  For classical theism, heaven is heaven and is not anyplace else in much the same way that New York City is New York City and not anyplace else.  If God as a particular being is located in a particular place called heaven, then God is not anyplace else but heaven.  The notion of God in heaven, so central to classical theism, falls with the understanding that God is not limited.

The other problem with the idea that God is in heaven is that classical theism always understands heaven as being “up.”  I have already mentioned the story of Jesus’ Ascension in Acts for example.  In that story the risen Christ goes back to heaven, and he does it by going up.  The disciples see him going up.  Many of our traditional Christian hymns, most of which reflect the God of classical theism, refer to heaven as up.  In addition to the fact that God can’t be limited to being in heaven wherever we may think heaven is, heaven can’t be up.  The notion of heaven as up comes from an ancient cosmology, an ancient understanding of the structure of the universe, that we know simply isn’t true. 

I have already given you a couple of examples of the Bible’s notion of heaven as up in the last chapter.  The cosmology of the Bible, and of most of the ancient world, was that the earth existed in a physical space between heaven which was up and hell (or something like hell) that was down.  As I noted in the last chapter, people thought they could build a tower to heaven and that a ladder could stretch between earth and heaven because heaven was up, and not very far up at that.  We know that that simply isn’t true.  When we go up from earth we enter that vastness of space, which in some sense I’ve never really understood the scientists say doesn’t end.  We never come to any physical heaven.  We know that the universe is billions of light years large, which means that we know that heaven isn’t just up above us beyond the clouds.  Yet classical theism continues to speak of God up in heaven and of heaven not very far away.  Those are concepts that we simply can no longer maintain given our scientific knowledge of the nature of the universe, knowledge the ancients simply didn’t have.

Moreover, consider this.  At Christ’s Ascension in Acts the disciples see the risen Christ ascending up, as we have already noted.  They see him, which means that the body of the risen Christ, whatever it may actually have been, consisted at least of photons.  Photons travel at the speed of light.  If the risen Christ had started rising at the speed of light slightly less than two thousand years ago, we know that he would still be in the Milky Way!  He’s still be in our galaxy, billions of light years from the edge of the created universe, if that universe has any edge at all.  He can’t have risen up.  It makes no sense to say that he rose up, if we understand that statement literally.  Heaven isn’t up.  Heaven can’t be up.  We know that as undeniable truth.  So why does classical theism still say God is in heaven and heaven is up?  Beats me, but it does.

Then there’s the question of those “omnis” that characterize the God of classical theism.  In that view God is in particular omnipresent (at least in theory), omniscient, and omnipotent.  God is, in other words, present everywhere, all knowing, and all powerful.  The omnis raise more complex problems than do the other characteristics of the God of classical theism that we have considered so far and rejected.  The problem here isn’t that these statements about God are flat wrong.  They aren’t.  The problem is in how classical theism understands them.  The particular problem with the omnis arises in connection with the third of them, omnipotent or all powerful.  I’ll comment on the other two briefly, then turn to that one.  I’ll have a lot more to say about it in this work when we get to the question of God’s relationship to creation, but I’ll say just a bit about it here.

First omnipresent.  Is God omnipresent?  Yes.  In Chapter One I quoted Psalm 139 on the omnipresence of God.  Psalm 139, except for verses 19 through 22, which I wish weren’t there (you can look them up if you want to know why I say that) is my favorite Psalm.  I carried a copy of it, minus verses 19 through 22, in the front of my class notebook all the way through seminary.  Classical theism isn’t wrong when it says God is omnipresent.  There are major problems concerning the question of how God is in God’s omnipresent, and we’ll discuss that question at length in the course of this study.  For now I’ll just accept classical theism’s contention that God is omnipresent and move on.

Next omniscient.  Is God omniscient?  Does God know everything?  Yes, I guess I believe that God does.  That’s not always a very comforting thought frankly.  I’m sure we all have things about ourselves that we wish God didn’t know.  That’s why confession is such an important part of the life of faith.  I may not always like the idea much, but I find it hard to imagine a true God to whom anything is unknown.  After all, if God is omnipresent as I just conceded God is, God is going to be omniscient.  God could hardly be present and not know what’s going on.  The problem with classical theism here isn’t that it says God is omniscient.  It is rather what classical theism tends to say about what God does with God’s universal knowledge.  The God of classical theism tends to be very judgmental.  We haven’t talked about the issues of judgment and grace yet, but we will.  For now I will just say that while I believe that God judges us, I don’t believe that God’s judgment supersedes God’s grace or leads to any kind of punishment for us.  Omniscient is fine, but we have to be careful about the conclusions we draw from God’s omniscience.

Finally omnipotent.  Is God omnipotent?  Is God all powerful?  Classical theism certainly thinks so.  Recall what I said about the term “the Almighty” in Chapter One.  In classical theism the adjective Almighty operates as a functional noun and becomes the proper name of God.  In classical theism “the Almighty” and “God” are synonyms.  Again I think the problem here isn’t with the idea of God’s omnipotence itself but with classical theism’s usual understanding of the consequences of God’s omnipotence.  The God of classical theism controls events on earth.  Certainly in the Old Testament God controls what happens on earth.  The assumption behind most of the Old Testament’s writings is that whatever happens on earth happens because God caused it to happen.  Yes, the Babylonians conquered and destroyed Judah and its capital city Jerusalem; but the Babylonians did that only because God brought them to do it or at least allowed them to.  Yes, the Persians allowed the Jews to return to Judah and to Jerusalem, but they only did that because they were acting as God’s agents.  Second Isaiah even calls Cyrus the Great of Persia Yahweh’s Messiah even though Cyrus had never heard of Yahweh and certainly never worshipped him.  God was in control of geopolitical events.  About that the ancient Hebrews had no doubt.  They believed that God controlled events in the lives of individual people as well.  For example, the Psalms are full of prayers to Yahweh to do or not to do various things in the life of the one offering the psalm. 

Those beliefs about God being in control are hardly unique to the ancient Hebrews.  They are very much alive in the Christianity of classical theism today.  Pat Robertson says God brings the destructive force of hurricanes upon Florida because the United States tolerates homosexuality, not that most of the United States really does.  For classical theism God controls events in individual lives too.  Once years ago I was interviewing for a job on the east coast, and the prospective employer put a bunch of applicants up for the night in a hotel in Baltimore.[3]  We didn’t get rooms to ourselves, and I had a roommate who was a Mormon.  We were watching the late night local news on a Baltimore TV channel.  Somewhere in the Baltimore area a child had been murdered.  The TV news showed someone in clerical garb proclaiming that the child had died because “God wanted another little angel in heaven.”  My Mormon roommate almost exploded.  He said No!  No!  God didn’t kill that child!  God wants a full and complete life for every one of God’s children!”  All I can say to that is Amen, but notice some of the assumptions here.  Something had happened.  Something horrible and tragic; but, assuming that the clergyman on TV was being authentic and was expressing his sincere beliefs, he assumed that it had happened because God had done it.  For him, God is in control.  Everything that happens on earth, even the unspeakably sad things, happen because God does them, because God wants them to happen.  The God Who this clergyman thought killed this child is the God of classical theism.  That God is The Almighty.  That God is omnipotent, and that God uses His omnipotence to control events on earth.

I will have a lot more to say about the issue of God’s omnipotence and about how God relates to creation later in this work.  For now suffice it to say that making God omnipotent in this way creates unsolvable problems for our understanding of God.  It makes God a monster.  It makes God a child killer.  It convicts God of genocide.  It makes God favor some people over other people.  It leads us to thank God when good things happen and ignore all the people for whom good things don’t happen.  God may in some abstract sense have unlimited power, but concluding that God uses that power directly to control events on earth is theologically untenable.  It is a notion from which God needs to be liberated.

There’s one more issue that I want to address.  It is the issue of God’s “existence.”  Classical theism asserts that God “exists.”  Believers in the God of classical theism ask people if they believe in the existence of God.  They insist that God does exist.  That they do makes perfect sense.  The God of classical theism is a distinct being as we have seen, and distinct beings exist.  They have existence.  I, however, do not believe that God “exists.”  Whenever I say that people are shocked to find a Christian pastor who is an atheist, so let me explain.  I’m not an atheist.  I believe in the reality of God.  I believe that God in some mystic, unknowable sense is.  My quarrel isn’t with the reality of God, it is with the word exist; and that quarrel comes from the greatest theologian of the late, unlamented twentieth century Paul Tillich.  Tillich insisted that God does not “exist.”  God does not exist, Tillich said, because existence is a category of created being not of pure being.  Created things exist.  They exist because God causes them to exist.  God is not created.  Therefore God does not exist.  God is, but God does not exist.

Maybe what I’m saying here sounds to you like a meaningless playing with words, but I don’t think that it is.  When we say that God exists we are putting God on the same level of being as we’re on.  We exist.  When we say that God exists we bring God down to our level of being.  We make God too much like us.  Reserving the term existence for created beings as and refusing to apply that term to God as Tillich does helps to preserve God’s infinite otherness.  It preserves God’s utter transcendence.  God doesn’t exist, but God is not less than existence.  God is more than existence.  That God doesn’t exist doesn’t mean that God is nothingness.  Saying that God doesn’t exist doesn’t make God disappear.  Rather, it helps us to remember that God is God and just another being in some way like us even if vastly bigger and more powerful than we are.  God transcends us utterly.  That that contention doesn’t entirely remove God from our lives we will explore and explain later in this work.  Religions always tend to run to one extreme or another in their conception of God, and for many Christians God is so familiar, so close, so much like a father and a friend, that they forget who they’re really talking about.  They’re talking about God.  They’re talking about God, and God is utterly beyond us.  Utterly different from us.  Understanding that we exist but God is helps to remind us of those undeniable truths.  Its insistence and God “exists” is an obscure but definite failure of classical theism

---

[1] It is also very damaging for some who have had abusive, destructive human fathers in their lives.  For them the image “father” doesn’t convey love and care.  It conveys physical, sexual, and/or emotional abuse.  For some who never had a human father in their lives it conveys not loving presence but indifferent absence.  Those reactions to the image father are part of the reason, although only a part of it, why I almost never call God Father.  For all of the problems with male exclusive language with God see Johnson, She Who Is, op.cit., passim, and the discussion of that issue that follows herein.

[2] I am of course aware that human gender categories are in reality not quite this simple.  Gender does not necessarily determine sexual or affectional orientation.  I have known transgender people, and some people are born with physical characteristics of both genders.  We must acknowledge these truths of human gender as we recognize the primary distinction of male and female.  I intend in no way to disparage or minimize people born with the many variations of human gender by what I say here.

[3] We were told to refer to this prospective employer as “the Department of Defense at Fort Mead.”  Some of you will be able to tell from that information who this prospective employer actually was.  It offered me a job based on my knowledge of Russian.  I turned it down.

Liberating God--Chapter One

Chapter One:  Classical Theism

The concept “God” is in crisis in the context of the dominant culture of North America today.  It is in crisis in many other contexts too, especially in the context of Western Europe.  Indeed, in Western Europe the crisis is considerably more advanced that it is in North America.  Christianity, the primary religious tradition in and through which Western Europe has known God for the last seventeen hundred years or so, is virtually dead in most of that area.  Western Europe still produces great Christian theologians, and throngs of people still crowd into St. Peter’s Square to hang on every word of whoever happens to be Pope at the moment.  Yet very, very few people in Western Europe attend church any more.  Christianity in Western Europe gives us a grim picture of where Christianity in North America is headed.  The numbers of both those who attend church regularly and of those who say they are Christians have been in decline in the US for decades.[1]  Many theologians and sociologists have studied this phenomenon of the decline in American religiosity for a very long time and have posited many different explanations, or elements of the explanation, for it.  Whatever any particular scholar says about the matter, it seems clear that fewer and fewer Americans are finding the concept “God” to be convincing or important in their lives.  Several authors have made quite a name for themselves, and I presume a good deal of money, attacking the very concept of God.  These so-called “new atheists” include Richard Dawkins[2] and Christopher Hitchens.[3]  Dawkins, Hitchens, and others gleefully attack religion as they understand it and ridicule belief in God as nothing but juvenile superstition.  The image of God that is projected by the most vocal of our Christian voices is an image that fewer and fewer people find compelling or even convincing.  Until recently that truth was somewhat masked by the seeming popularity of very conservative Christian churches, but more recently even conservative traditions like the Southern Baptist Convention have experienced a decline in numbers.  The concept of God is indeed in crisis among us.

God has been dead in American academia for a very long time.[4]  When I was studying for my Ph.D. in history in the 1970s my major professor, the late Donald Treadgold, was a great rarity among university faculty and prominent scholars among us.  Don was an actual, practicing Christian.  Many of his colleagues more or less ridiculed him for his belief, although his standing as a scholar was such that they had nonetheless to respect him and his historical work.[5]  That Don was close to unique among his university colleagues as a believing Christian simply highlighted the extent to which faith had nearly disappeared from intellectual America by the 1970s.  That particular decline of faith is particularly important, for the content of cultures is always determined in the long run by the small numbers of scholars, authors, and artists among them whose thinking eventually seeps down into the culture and determines its form and content.

The decline of religion among us raises serious questions.  The basic question is of course why.  Why are so many Americans, especially Americans who belong to the still dominant, white, Europe-based North American culture, rejecting religion?  Why is atheism growing among us?  There is no simple answer to these questions.  Any complete answer must start by going back at least to the rationalism and scientism of the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Or perhaps it has to go back as far as the establishment of Christianity as the official faith of empire in the fourth century.  Mercifully the task of this book doesn't require us to provide a complete answer to our question. Our question is about God, not about the decline of religion as a whole.  To proceed with our inquiry we need look only at the question of how the image of God that has come to dominate in our context has contributed to the decline of religion and specifically of Christianity among us.  For there is a dominant image of God in our context, and that image is simply not believable to a great many people today.  The image of God to which I refer is the image that I call the God of classical theism.

Before we dive into what classical theism is we need to talk a bit about the term itself.  The key word in this two word phrase is of course theism.  Theism is an English word that comes from the Greek word Theos.  Theos is simply the ordinary Greek word for God.  It is the word used to mean God in the Greek originals of the New Testament documents.  We don’t call God Theos, but some of us do “theology,” an English term built from the Greek words Theos, God, and logos, word, theology then being “words (or a word) about God.”  Theism then is simply “God-ism.”  The most basic, foundational meaning of “theism” is “ believing in God.”  Yet some scholars today expressly reject theism but do not deny the reality of something they too call God.  The best example of this phenomenon is the prolific John Shelby Spong.  We will cite more of Spong on what he calls theism and we here call classical theism shortly.  Spong acknowledges on occasion that rejecting theism leaves one, linguistically speaking at least, with “atheism.”  Nonetheless, Spong insists on using only theism for the image of God that he rejects as no longer believable.  He’s right that what he means by theism is unbelievable today, but Spong never adequately deals with the truth that even he admits that rejecting simply theism leaves one with atheism.  Spong is not an atheist.  His language however leaves him open to the charge that he is, so I will not call the image of God that I will here reject simply theism.  I remain a theist and am not an atheist, by which I mean that I accept the reality of something that I and many others call Theos, that is, that we call God.

Yet we must have some term for the image of God that we reject.  How else are we to talk about it?  Theism without more won’t do, Spong to the contrary notwithstanding.  So what are we to use?  As she does with so many theological questions, Elizabeth A. Johnson gives us the answer to that question.  She uses the term “classical theism” for the concept of God that Spong simply calls theism.  I will use that term here, but as I do I must offer some explanation of why I think adding the adjective “classical” to the noun “theism” solves the linguistic problem we face. 

Adjectives of course add meaning to the noun they modify.  In the phrase classical theism the adjective classical adds meaning to the noun theism.  Exactly what meaning it adds shall unfold anon.  Suffice it to say for now that the term classical refers here to a particular type of theism.  Unlike the naked term theism itself it does not refer to all belief in the reality of God.  It refers to something much more limited than that.  The word “classical” in its original meaning refers to the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, i.e., the classical world.  That of course is not its meaning in the term classical theism.  Ancient Greece and Rome certainly had gods who in many ways fit the definition of classical theism that I will develop here, but by classical theism I don’t mean the belief about God or gods of ancient Greece and Rome. 

Classical has come to have other meanings of course.  Classical can refer to something that is supported by a large body of literature.  It can mean something that is considered standard, that is considered to be a norm or a commonly held conception of something.  Even though it doesn’t necessarily point to ancient Greece and Rome, classical does point backwards not forwards.  Something that is classical is something that has been established in the past.  It is something that is at least a bit old.  Innovations are not classical.  Hollywood may occasionally promote some movie as an “instant classic,” but that phrase is an oxymoron.  It contradicts itself.  Something becomes a classic over time, not instantly.  Something that is classical is something that has come to be accepted as a standard, as generally considered valid, as something few if any question. 

It is in this sense that I and others use the phrase classical theism. Classical theism is a theism, that is, a particular view of or a particular belief in God, that has become standard in our time.  It is the view of God that most people hold today.  Classical theism is what most people think of when they hear the word God.  When most people answer the question of whether they believe in God they are really answering the question do you believe in the God of classical theism, for most people in our context today who haven’t made an intentional study of the matter (and some who presumably have, like those new atheists I mentioned above) have no other image of God to which to refer in answering the question.  Classical theism is an image of God that indeed arose in the past.  It isn’t new.  It wouldn’t be classical if it were.  It isn’t rare.  It wouldn’t be classical if it were.  Rather, it is widely held both by people who accept it (or who at least say that they do) and by people who reject it, either replacing it with a better image of God or denying the reality of God altogether and becoming true atheists. 

OK, so classical theism isn’t rare, and it isn’t new; but what is it exactly?  What is its view of God?  Who is the God of classical theism?  To help us answer those questions let’s turn to two authors I have already mentioned, John Shelby Spong and Elizabeth A. Johnson.  In particular, here are some statements from Spong’s book Why Christianity Must Change or Die[6] and Johnson’s book She Who Is, The Mystery of God in Feminine Theological Discourse[7] that tell us pretty clearly what classical theism is.  As I’ve already said, in this work I will reject classical theism.  The next chapter of this book sets out my objections to it, and I’ll mention only a few of them briefly here.  But before we can reject something we must know what it is.  Spong and Johnson will help us with that task.

Spong says that what he calls theism and what I call classical theism is “the idea of God defined as a supernatural person who invades life periodically to accomplish the divine will.”[8]  He quotes the English theologian Richard Swinburne as saying that the God of theism is “‘something like a person without a body, who is eternal, free, able to do anything, knows everything, is perfectly good, is the proper object of human worship and obedience, the creator of the universe.’”[9]  To return to Spong’s own words, he says that theism is the “belief in an external, personal, supernatural, and potentially invasive Being.”[10]  The God of theism is then, for Spong, personal, external, omnipotent, omniscient, and One we should worship.  This God is not only personal, He (the God of theism is always a He) is a person.[11]  A very unusual person to be sure, unlike any other person, but still a person alongside other people.  This God is a being alongside other beings, a “Supreme Being” of course, but still a being.

Johnson’s discussion of classical theism, which she also calls philosophical theism, is much more sophisticated than Spong’s, but then Johnson is a much more sophisticated theologian than Spong is generally.  She begins a discussion of the God of classical theism by saying that classical theism

refers to the concept of God developed by medieval and early modern theology in close contact with classical metaphysics.  It signifies the understanding that there is God (contrary to atheism), that God is one (contrary to polytheism), and that the one God is not to be identified with the world (contrary to pantheism.)[12]

That classical theism does all of those things is certainly true, and those things are fine as far as they go.  There is, however, much more to classical theism than that.  Johnson continues:

Theism [Johnson here, perhaps inadvertently, uses Spong’s term] in this specific sense views God as the Supreme Being who made all things and who rules all things.  Although architect and governor of the world, it is essential that ‘he’ (the theistic God is always referred to in male terms) be essentially unrelated to this world and unaffected by what happens in it so as to remain independent from it.[13]

Johnson remarks that this view of classical theism emphasizes God’s divine transcendence and in the process tends to lose an awareness of God’s immanence in creation.  It stresses God’s perfections, and God becomes “‘infinite, self-existent, incorporeal, immutable, impassible, simple, perfect, omniscient, and omnipotent.’”[14]  The theistic God, Johnson says, is “modeled on the pattern of an earthly absolute monarch….”[15]

Classical theism tends to get caught in contradictions between its words about God and its functional understanding of God.  Johnson points out one of those contradictions.  She notes that classical theism will always say that God is mystery.  In making that statement it agrees with what will become one of the primary elements of the liberated understanding of God that I will develop in this study.  In practice, however, classical theism makes God into a thing.  It is guilty of, in Johnson’s words, “reducing infinite mystery to an independently existing Supreme Being alongside other beings, a solitary, transcendent power who together with the world can be thought to form a larger whole.”[16] 

Johnson then states:  “Classical theism emphasizes in a one-sided way the absolute transcendence of God over the world, God’s untouchability by human history and suffering, the all-pervasiveness of God’s dominating power to which human beings owe submission and awe.”[17]  We need to be a bit cautious here about simply agreeing with Johnson on this point.  Yes, transcendence, power, and awe are certainly aspects of the God of classical theism.  Yet many who hold that view of God also experience God’s presence in their lives.  We must not decline to give credit to the view we will ultimately reject when that credit is due, even if classical theism is easier to attack when we deny it all theological virtue.  Take for example Reza Aslan, the well-known American Muslim author of Iranian origin.  In the introduction to his book Zealot he speaks of having converted (temporarily as it turned out) to evangelical Christianity in his youth.  The God of evangelical Christianity is of course the God of classical theism, yet Aslan says that during his time as an evangelical Christian Jesus Christ was a real and helpful companion in his life.  Perhaps classically theistic Christianity uses Jesus as an offset against an excessively remote, powerful, and judgmental God.  Still, for Christians Jesus is God Incarnate, so the way in which many traditional Christians feel an intimate relationship with Jesus does, to some extent at least, mitigate the remoteness and other aspects of the classically theistic God.

Johnson, a great feminist theologian, then points out that classical theism’s God is “the reflection of patriarchal imagination, which prizes nothing more than unopposed power-over and unquestioned loyalty.”[18]  Classical theism’s God indeed has power that no one can effectively oppose if God decides to use that power, and that God indeed demands unquestioned loyalty.

So what then precisely is the classical theism with which I begin this book?  It is an image of God that is still pervasive among us.  That image is the God of Fundamentalism and of conservative evangelicalism.  It is the God of most of the people in the pews of the once-called mainline Protestant denominations.  It is the God of most Roman Catholics.[19]  Classical theism’s view of God is the first and primary thing from which God needs liberating.  Why that is so will appear in what follows in subsequent chapters. 

The most fundamental thing about the theistic God is that this God is an independently existing being.  God is the Supreme Being.  Perhaps most people who call God the Supreme Being think mostly of the adjective Supreme when they use the phrase, but the phrase nonetheless calls God a being.  Writing Being with a capital B doesn’t change that fact.  In classical theism God is not being.  God is a being, even if we more commonly say the Supreme Being.  The God of classical theism is neither being itself nor the ground of being, to use two of Paul Tillich’s key phrases for God.  This God is imagined as something.  In this view God is radically separate from creation.  In the course of this work we too will say that God is separate and different from creation, but we will at least attempt to avoid classical theism’s one-sidedness in making that assertion by also emphasizing God’s immanence in the world.  In classical theism God as the Supreme Being exists beyond the world and outside of it as an entity existing over and against a very separate created universe. 

The God of classical theism is “up.”  He (again, the God of classical theism is always “He”) is a separate being and as such is located somewhere.  That somewhere is heaven, and heaven is located in a physical place in our sense of physical places.  God’s place is heaven, and heaven is located up.  The ancient world thought that heaven was up too and that it wasn’t very far up.  In that ancient cosmology the sky was a dome over the earth (see Genesis 1:6-8), and it wasn’t very far away.  That’s why, in the story from Genesis, the people of Babel thought they could build a tower to reach it (see Genesis 11:1-9).  That’s why Jacob, in another story from Genesis, has a dream in which a ladder reaches from the earth to heaven (see Genesis 28:10-17).  That’s why the first Christians could imagine Jesus physically ascending to heaven after his resurrection (see Acts 1:6-11).  Few people with a classically theistic image of God think that simplistically about God and God’s heaven anymore.  They have learned more contemporary astronomy than that; but for most of them heaven is still where God lives, and heaven is up. 

There’s more.  Much more.  The God of classical theism is the God of the “omnis.”  This God is imagined as radically other, as vastly beyond and different from creation while at the same time being thought of mostly as some kind of supreme man.  There is truth in that understanding that God is beyond and different, as we shall see in this work; but classical theism lets its belief in the radical otherness of God lead it into seeing God in some problematic ways.  Those ways are expressed with a number of words that begin with the particle “omni,” from the Latin meaning “all.”  In classical theism God is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent, and we need to understand what those terms mean in order to understand the God of classical theism.

The God of classical theism is omnipresent, in theory at least.  Omnipresent means all present, present everywhere.  Again, God as omnipresent is not something with which a liberated view of God has a problem, but classical theism gets into trouble here because of it radical emphasis on God’s separateness from the world over God’s presence in it.  Omnipresence becomes a characteristic of God to which classical theism more or less pays lip service, all the while seeing God as really out there, up in heaven.  God’s omnipresence is useful for the churches of classical theism, for they can use the concept to tell the people that they cannot escape from God, usually for the purpose of inducing a guilt which gives the church great power over the people. 

God is indeed omnipresent.  The Psalmist of Psalm 139 knew that truth a very long time ago.  He wrote:

Where can I go from your spirit?

            O where can I flee from your

                        presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there;

            if I make my bed in Sheol, you are

                        there.

If I take the wings of the morning

            and settle at the farthest limits of

                        the sea,

even there your hand shall lead me,

            and your right hand shall hold me fast.[20]

Many of us with a liberated view of God, myself included, find God’s unfailing presence with us both comforting and challenging.  God as omnipresent isn’t the problem with classical theism.  The problem with classical theism is rather its one-sided emphasis on God’s transcendence, which in practice tends to limit people’s understanding of God’s actual presence in their lives and the nature and purpose of that presence, subjects to which we will turn in the course of this study.

The God of classical theism is “omniscient.”  Omniscient means all knowing.  The God of classical theism knows everything.  Again, the problem isn’t that this contention of classical theism is wrong on its face.  Liberated theology also understands that nothing is beyond God’s knowledge.  The problem is more what classical theistic Christianity has tended to do with the notion of God’s omniscience.  I have a colleague who says that when he was growing up he was afraid to lie on his back in bed because he could see God looking down at him, knowing everything he had done, and judging him accordingly.  The problem with God’s omniscience in classical theism is the way it connects God’s omniscience with the notion of judgment and condemnation, something we will discuss at some length later in this study.

The most significant of the “omnis” of classical theism is “omnipotent.”  Omnipotent means all powerful.  It usually gets rendered in English as “Almighty.”  In classical theism God becomes “the Almighty.”  What began as an adjective gets turned into a noun, a proper noun even, that functions essentially as the name of God, always spelled with a capital A.  The question of God’s power or lack thereof over creation is one of the thorniest problems in contemporary theology.  We will devote a good deal of space to it later in this work.  In classical theism God’s omnipotence means that there is nothing that God can’t do on earth.  God in this view has the power to do absolutely anything.  God could intervene on earth to usher in the Kingdom of God this very instant if God wanted to.  God could end all human suffering.  God could end human death.  God could save the environment from human degradation.  God could end war.  The God of classical theism has the power to do anything.  That God has all the power there is, power beyond our human imagining, power to control the entire universe and everything and everyone in it. 

Ascribing omnipotence to God creates immense problems for theistic theology.  It creates problems especially when it is put together with another theistic aspect of God, namely God’s goodness.  In Archibald MacLeish’s play JB, the character JB says “If God is God he is not good.  If God is good he is not God.”  That statement rather obviously assumes the God of classical theism, especially a God who is omnipotent; and it powerfully points out the ultimate impossibility of holding together both God’s omnipotence and God’s goodness.  We will have a lot more to say about that issue in this work.

Perhaps the most central thing about the God of classical theism is that that God is anthropomorphic.  He (again, always He) is some kind of man.  An immensely wise and powerful man.  An immortal man to be sure, for the God of classical theism after all doesn’t die.  A supreme man.  A radically other man, yet still a man. 

To understand the God of classical theism, think of this picture:

It is of course Michelangelo’s image from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican, usually said to be of God creating Adam even though it doesn’t actually represent anything related in that story from Genesis.  This image give us the God of classical theism.  He is an elderly man, very definitely a man.  He’s up in the sky.  He is coming down to earth to intervene and do something that no ordinary man could do, to create human beings and give them life.  He is the Creator God, and he comes into creation from outside creation.  He looks like an ordinary man, a Caucasian man of course, for classical theism is the creation of European civilization; and he’s a man not a woman because that European civilization was highly androcentric.  Adam is a white man too, but he’s not the focus of our interest here.  Our focus is the anthropomorphic God who breaks into creation from above to do miraculous things to complete His divine purpose. 

That is the God of classical theism.  That is an image from which God very much needs to be liberated.  The God of classical theism may once have had great meaning for people.  Indeed, millions upon millions of people in former times found that image of God convincing and compelling.  For many people today, it no longer is.  The God of classical theism once conveyed God’s spiritual gifts to a great many people.  People found in it meaning, comfort, hope, encouragement, and challenge.  Few people today still do.  So what in any detail is wrong with the God of classical theism?  Why does that God no longer speak to us?  Why do we no longer believe in that God?  To those questions we now turn.

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© Thomas C. Sorenson, 2013.  No portion of this document may be copied without the express written consent of the author.  All rights reserved.

[1] See Bass, Diana Butler, Christianity After Religion, The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, HarperOne, 2012, passim.

[2] See in particular his The God Delusion, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008.

[3] See his God Is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything, Twelve, 2007.

[4] See my Liberating Christianity, op. cit., Chapter One, for a very brief account of the rise of secularism in the West.

[5] Don was the author of what is still a major textbook on the history of Russia in the twentieth century.  It has the somewhat unoriginal title Twentieth Century Russia.  Don died in 1994, but his text book has been re-edited and reissued since his death through the work of his colleague Herb Ellison and others.  Once when I was arriving at Don’s house for a dinner party a young faculty member arrived at the same time.  He looked up at the lovely home Don owned and said “Oh to have published a successful textbook!”  Indeed.

[6] Spong, John Shelby, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile, HarperSanFrancisco, San Francisco, 1998.

[7] Johnson, Elizabeth A., She Who Is, The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, Crossroad, New York, 1997.

[8] Spong, op.cit., p. 46.

[9] Id., quoting Swinburne, Richard, Coherence of Theism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977, p. 1.  I’m not sure Swinburne is right that the God of classical theism is without a body.  See my discussion of Da Vinci’s image of God below.

[10] Spong, op.cit., p. 46.

[11] A quick word about God and gender.  We’ve all heard God called “he” over and over again.  Most of us have rarely heard God called “she.”  Yet even classical theism acknowledges in theory that God transcends gender, gender being a characteristic of created beings not of God.  In this work I will not call God “he” except when referring to the God of classical theism.  I may on occasion call God “she,” because it is so important for us to overcome the tendency of our language to turn God into a man and to open our minds to other images for God.  Mostly, however, I will avoid gender specific pronouns when I refer to God.

[12] Johnson, op.cit., p. 19.

[13] Id.

[14] Id., pp. 19-20, citing Owen, H. P., Concepts of Deity, Herder and Herder, New York, 1971, p. 1.  Again let me say that the image of the theistic God, especially in popular understandings, isn’t necessarily “incorporeal” as Owen says here.

[15] Johnson, op.cit., p. 20.

[16] Id.

[17] Id., p. 21.

[18] Id.

[19] Although as I said in the Introduction, I write from and mostly to a Protestant context, let me hasten to add that the God of classical theism is not the God image of many more enlightened Roman Catholics.  After all, Elizabeth Johnson is not only Roman Catholic, she is actually a nun, albeit one that the Catholic hierarchy is trying in some ways to silence.

[20] Psalm 139:7-10