The Dish

In an interview about her new book, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi, Amy-Jill Levine emphasizes Jesus’ Jewish identity as a key to understanding what he taught:

Jesus is the first person in literature called “rabbi,” which at the time–the late first century–meant “teacher.” The term “rabbi,” today thoroughly associated with Judaism, signals for Jesus his own particular Jewish identity.

For Christians, Jesus should be more than a Jewish teacher. But he must be that Jewish teacher as well. If his teachings were not of import to the Church, the Gospels would have skipped right from the Nativity stories to the Passion–right from Advent to Lent. To see Jesus as a rabbi, a Jewish teacher, is to take seriously what he had to say: his parables, interpretation of the Scriptures of Israel, apocalyptic pronouncements, ethical guides–and all of these teachings can only be fully appreciated if we see how they fit into their own historical context.

She goes on to claim the parable of the Good Samaritan is perhaps the most misunderstood:

Today, we hear that the “Good Samaritan” is about accepting the marginalized. Samaritans were not “marginalized” by Jews; to the contrary, they were the enemy. This fact also shows why the modern tendency to identify with the Samaritan is, although affirming for the Christian today, not what a first-century Jewish audience would do.

Or, we hear that priest and Levite ignore the injured fellow because they were following Jewish law concerning ritual impurity. The parable has nothing to do with purity laws; to the contrary, burying a corpse is one of the highest commandments in Judaism, a point made in sources ranging from the Deuterocanonical Book of Tobit to the writings of the first-century historian Josephus to the Mishnah and Talmud. Unless we know what the terms “priest,” “Levite,” and “Samaritan” suggested to that original audience, we’ll not only miss the parable’s profundity, we’ll promote negative stereotype of Jewish practice and ethics.

Recent Dish on the Jewishness of Jesus here.

(“The Parable of the Good Samaritan” by Jan Wijnants, 1670, via Wikimedia Commons)

That’s what Damon Linker calls Eric Metaxas’ claim (behind a WSJ paywall, alas) that science increasingly makes the case for God. His summary of Metaxas’ argument:

Metaxas’ argument is quite simple. As recently as a few decades ago, physicists presumed that life had most likely emerged and evolved spontaneously on planets throughout the galaxy and universe, producing a cosmos veritably teeming with intelligent beings. But in more recent years, scientists have become far more circumspect, noting the enormous number of factors that must be present — on specific planets, in particular star systems, and in the universe as a whole — for life to emerge and evolve. These factors — sometimes called “anthropic coincidences” — are so numerous and involve such stupefyingly improbable outcomes that they point toward the existence of a cosmic designer who established the precise conditions for the emergence and evolution of life on Earth. And perhaps only on Earth.

The problem with such arguments? Linker holds that all Metaxas has done is update natural theology, which stretches back to Plato and Aristotle, and “doesn’t demonstrate the existence of the God of the Bible”:

The biblical God actively creates the universe and each specific form of life, with human beings created in his own image. He is a jealous, and sometimes angry, God.

He regularly intervenes in human lives and history, even selecting the Jews to be his chosen people. He promises rewards and punishments (while often leaving the criterion of judgment mysterious). In two New Testament passages (Matthew 10:30; Luke 12:7), Jesus Christ claims that God cares about every hair on every single human head. The Christian theological tradition even goes so far as to propose that the creator of the universe became incarnate in human form, living and dying an excruciating death in a gratuitous act of love that makes possible the redemption of humanity.

What Metaxas is really showing in his column is a simplified form of natural theology, and not at all an example of theological reflection based on divine revelation. That isn’t a criticism. It’s a statement of fact — a fact that severely complicates any attempt to treat his scientifically based speculations as providing evidence for the God that most Americans profess to believe in.

The Roman Catholic philosophy Francis J. Beckwith likewise urges believers to resist the temptation to latch onto scientific evidence that seems – for the moment, at least – to support God’s existence:

God – as understood by the Catholic Church and by most other theistic traditions – is not a being in the universe, a superior agent whose existence we postulate in order to explain some natural phenomenon, but rather, Being Itself, that which all contingent reality depends for its existence.

In order to appreciate how this understanding differs from Metaxas’ Watchmaker God, suppose in a few years scientists tell us, after further research, new discoveries, and confirmed theories, that the arising of life in the universe is not that improbable after all. What then happens to Metaxas’ God? He is now superfluous, and Metaxas would have to concede that theists are once again irrational, as they apparently were when the (temporarily obsolete) God hypothesis was down for the count the last time science threw its best punch.

Given the arguments Metaxas summarizes in his essay, it is tempting for the theist to confidently tout such evidence. When faced with a cadre of globally accessible, and endlessly annoying, village atheists who posit the findings of science as defeaters to belief in God, there is nothing quite like the Schadenfreude of pointing out to the self-appointed guardians of reason that they have been hoisted upon their own petard. But you should not acquiesce to this temptation. For in doing so, you concede to the atheist his mistaken assumption that the rationality of belief in God depends on the absence of a scientific account of whatever phenomenon is in question.

Dreher nods, adding that “order in creation does not prove God, but it is a sign pointing to God”:

Even if God’s existence could be proved, it changes nothing; even the devil believes in God, but rejects Him. God desires to live in communion with us. Recognizing His existence with the intellect is only a start. He wants not our minds, but our hearts. In Kierkegaardian terms, God is a subjective truth — a truth that can only be known by appropriating it with the most passionate inwardness. We don’t know God like we know the Second Law of Thermodynamics; we know God like we know the love of our father.

(Julius Schnorr’s sketch of God the Father, circa 1860, via Wikimedia Commons)

In a personal essay, Laura Turner reveals the way her “anxiety frequently blossoms at the intersection of uncertainty and powerlessness,” resulting in the fear that she “can never feel at home.” How that connects to her religious faith:

The common misperception of religion as a crutch would have us believe that people are faithful because they want to escape the problems of the world and the realities of everyday life. But my faith tells me the importance of staying put. In one way it asks me to grow roots, but in another it is nothing deeper than what the words say: Stay put. Sit with the worries and fears and discomfort. Recognize it as a part of you and of the world. Recognize you can’t run from it, as much as you want to.

When I am anxious, I am filled with a powerful wanderlust that makes leaving home so tempting and makes it seem like travel will allow me to escape my churning mind. I hold the lesson of my faith in one hand and my desire to bolt in the other. I try to make sense of them. My discomfort surfaces when I have to navigate the world of adulthood for too long. Maybe I should go somewhere so utterly familiar that it does not challenge me, or else somewhere so new that it jolts me out of myself.

There’s an old hymn, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, with these lyrics: “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.” When I get tired and the inspiration to travel—to plan another trip, to look impatiently forward to what is next on the calendar, to move out of the present moment—strikes up (and partly I blame that on God for making the world such a very interesting place to explore) that lyric “prone to wander” hits me hard. I find myself thinking that maybe running away is like leaving God. Sometimes I want to run backward, back to a deeper set of roots I did not put down myself, back to my parents’ house where everything is easy and safe. And this, I think, is maybe like leaving God too.

(Video: Sufjan Stevens sings “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”)

We recently noted that the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo coincided with the publication of Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, Submission, which had been featured on the satirical weekly’s cover. In a recent interview with The Paris Review, Houellebecq spoke about why he believes the novel’s premise – a Muslim candidate is elected President after defeating the the far right candidate Marine Le Pen – is a thought experiment worth conducting:

Well, Marine Le Pen strikes me as a realistic candidate for 2022—even for 2017 … The Muslim party is more … That’s the heart of the matter, really. I tried to put myself in the place of a Muslim, and I realized that, in reality, they are in a totally schizophrenic situation. Because overall Muslims aren’t interested in economic issues, their big issues are what we nowadays call societal issues. On these issues, obviously, they are very far from the left and even further from the Green Party. Just think of gay marriage and you’ll see what I mean, but the same is true across the board. And one doesn’t really see why they’d vote for the right, much less for the extreme right, which utterly rejects them. So if a Muslim wants to vote, what’s he supposed to do? The truth is, he’s in an impossible situation. He has no representation whatsoever. It would be wrong to say that this religion has no political consequences—it does. So does Catholicism, for that matter, even if the Catholics have been more or less marginalized. For those reasons, it seems to me, a Muslim party makes a lot of sense.

In a helpful review of the novel, Steven Poole asserts that its real aim is not to offer “a splenetic vision of the Muslim threat to Europe or a spineless ‘submission’ to gradual Islamic takeover”:

Some in France have already complained that the novel fans right-wing fears of the Muslim population, but that is to miss Houellebecq’s deeply mischievous point. Islamists and anti-immigration demagogues, the novel gleefully points out, really ought to be on the same side, because they share a suspicion of pluralist liberalism and a desire to return to “traditional” or pre-feminist values, where a woman submits to her husband – just as “Islam” means that a Muslim submits to God.

But Soumission is, arguably, not primarily about politics at all. The real target of Houellebecq’s satire – as in his previous novels – is the predictably manipulable venality and lustfulness of the modern metropolitan man, intellectual or otherwise. François himself happily submits to the new order, not for any grand philosophical or religious reasons, but because the new Saudi owners of the Sorbonne pay much better – and, more importantly, he can be polygamous. As he notes, in envious fantasy, of his charismatic new boss, who has adroitly converted already: “One 40-year-old wife for cooking, one 15-year-old wife for other things … no doubt he had one or two others of intermediate ages.”