Can you just picture that?!
Many moons ago (like, a few weeks, actually), The Rambling Taoist threw down a gauntlet, of sorts: Christianity is bunk.
So I threw my gauntlet down too: prove it!
There was a bit of a haggle back and forth, but eventually, RT provided me with a few posts containing his objections to Christianity.
In one post (link above), he took issue with Christ’s nature in Christianity and the concept of “mere” mortal humans knowing God.
To be fair, this isn’t the only objection he has; I assume he has many objections (I’ll contribute posts to a few more in the near future). Nor is this post even the best objection, perhaps. Nevertheless, in the first part of the post he brings up a doctrine that is one of the most mysterious and paradoxical in the Christian faith.
Anytime one tries to plumb God’s identity and nature, we run aground a very stubborn wall after a short while. We can only grasp a smidgeon of who God is. That we can grasp Him at all is only because God, in His infinite grace, has stooped down and made that possible. We are rebels against God, so this is precisely what we don’t deserve.
He writes,
One of my biggest points of internal struggle was the concept of Jesus as part-man, part-God.
For me, the part-God portion mucks everything up. It negates the message Jesus’ life was supposed to typify. If he was truly endowed with the omniscient self, then all the supposed trials, tribulations and suffering he went through are, in my view, severely downgraded. How can one truly suffer from human misery and terror if part of that self knows everything is going to work out a-ok in the end?
I must stop at this point to offer a correction: actually, the Christian concept of Jesus in the Bible is not “part-man, part-God,” but fully man, fully God. Two natures in one person. Yes, definitely seems odd, for no one else has two natures in one person…but then again, Jesus is unique, just as you’d expect if God put on flesh, so noting that no one else in our experience is like that doesn’t carry much weight. These two natures are not mixed together or combined to form a new nature. They are separate but act in one accord; the attributes of both natures are held by the person of Christ.
You might think I’m splitting hairs here, but follow me on this. This is why Jesus can grow in wisdom and stature (Luke 2:52), yet know all things. One of the huge pits that many non-Christian cults get into doctrine-wise is to de-emphasize or deny one of the natures. The bottom line is that Jesus has a fully human body, emotions, mind, and will (minus the sin nature, of course), and in no way does this cast a shadow over his deity. The reason why this is so important is that it relates to the scope of his redemptive work. As Gregory of Nazianzus said (church leader/writer in the early days), “That which he has not assumed he has not healed.” In other words, He was fully God in order for Him to secure salvation for “whosoever” wants to come to Him, and He was fully human in order to fully redeem humanity. That’s what being a “mediator” between God and man entails.
Some think that having a human nature contradicts having a divine nature, but I see no contradiction. It’s not like the claim that Jesus is divine and not divine at the same time. THAT would be a contradiction, but I don’t see why God couldn’t join himself with a human nature. He’s God, afterall, and that strikes me as perfectly within His omnipresence.
I hope now you can see that Christ, since He had a fully human nature, as opposed to half, He can suffer fully, just like us. He suffered fully in His human nature. The writer of Hebrews touches upon this:
14Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— 15and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. 16For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham’s descendants. 17For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for[f]the sins of the people. 18Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted. (2: 14-18)
The prophet Isaiah called Christ “Immanuel,” or “God with us.” Christ was 100% God, yet shockingly, He was “with us” in every sense of the phrase, being 100% one of us. Beautiful.
As I alluded to earlier, this it is difficult for us to wrap our minds around this 100%, but then again, that’s what we should expect when we’re dealing with the Infinite. At the very least, Christians throughout the ages have come back to this doctrine again and again as the one that best sums up the teaching of the Bible about who Christ is.
The main beef RT has, though, is that Christ’s omniscience somehow downgrades His suffering. I simply reject that notion. Just because I know what’s coming up doesn’t mean my suffering is somehow diminished.
I hate shots…hate ‘em. When getting a shot, I know full well it’s only temporary, but this doesn’t help much. I simply can’t stand them, period. That’s a fairly trivial instance; you can think of many other more substantial examples.
We see this with Jesus, too. He knew full well He was going to raise Lazarus from the dead, but this didn’t stop Him from weeping for His friend and His friend’s family. What’s more, when He was on the cross, the physical pain of crucifixion alone was unbearable. I mean, geez, have *you* ever had dull, rusty nails jammed through your wrists, then hoisted upon those nails and left to suffocate for hours (that’s what crucifixion does…it suffocates the victim, in a slow, excruciating fashion.)? When you add into that the abandonement of His friends, a severe beating with a whip, multiple long charade-filled trials, and, to top it all off, experiencing the separation from His Heavenly Father, you’ve got an unspeakable amount of suffering, and it’s just cold to assume that Christ’s knowledge diminishes that.
Sure, the unknown may make suffering more intense, but I see no reason to infer from that that someone who knows what’s around the bend is undergoing second class suffering. In fact, sometimes knowing what is coming up makes the suffering more intense. This was exactly the source of anguish for Christ in the garden of Gethsemane.
Moving on:
In my view, the Jewish carpenter would be worthy of all this adulation IF believers accepted the fact that he was entirely human just like the rest of us. As a mere mortal, his suffering on the cross takes on a entirely different dimension. It would show that he died for what he believed in, not knowing if what he believed was right.
Again, Jesus is fully human. That last sentence is strange, though. If I die for a principle, and I know that principle is right, my death is not worthy of as much adulation? I don’t buy that. In fact, we admire some of our greatest heroes simply because they went to their death boldly, with no hesitation.
He continues,
More importantly, if Jesus was just some guy from Nazareth, then it means that each of us could tread a similar path. It means that we could lead a life based on the very principles he espoused.
I refer to the verses from Hebrews above.
Unfortunately, in my opinion, the institutionalized Christian Church is absolutely terrified of this view. If people believed in this way, there would be no need for churches, ministers, and all the trappings that go with it. No more offerings, TV evangelists or massive property holdings. No more Focus on the Family, Moral Majority or Promise Keepers.
I’ve got two names for you: Oprah and Joel Osteen.
Believe me: organizations, churches, and people don’t need Jesus’ divinity in order to snooker the masses. Witness the myriad of cults and pulpit pimps that trample all over Christ’s divinity for profit. They downplay it, de-emphasize it, or reject it outright and it doesn’t hurt their pocket books in the least. These folks have little if anything to do with Immanuel, yet they rake in the dough. If you want to make a bunch of money or start a religion, you don’t need to turn a peasant sage into God incarnate.
In fact, the God-man can hinder profit in a lot of cases. Face it: self-help sells. Your Best Life Now is sexy. People want to pursue what they want with abandon, and they want to be patted on the back for it. The God of the Universe visiting us gets in the way of that. If Christ is fully God, He has a claim on everyone’s life, and that is mighty inconvenient for those who want to live life on their own terms.
He ends,
So, this conflict started me down the road to Taoism. What pushed me over the edge, however, was the Christian belief in knowing God. The very idea that a mere mortal could understand the breadth of the complex universe is not a sign of devotion but complete egocentrism!
Whatever it is out there — being, process, law, principle or something else — is so vast that what our feeble minds can comprehend is tantamount to a few pixels of a trillion upon trillion gigabyte picture. It’s like holding a handful of sand and then pompously thinking we can each accurately describe a 1 million mile long beach!
First, he sets fire to a straw man: The Bible, nor any creed, nor any Christian worth his or her salt says we can know God fully. That is foolish. Rather, God in His undeserved mercy and grace met us where we are. He broke through and communicated with us in Christ, and because of that, we can know God personally. Fully? Not by a long shot. But we can know Him. When you take into account that we did nothing to deserve this, that it’s an act of sheer grace, it is not egocentric at all.
In fact, RT betrays his cards in that very paragraph. He assumes he can know some things about God or the ultimate. He thinks he knows that He/it is so vast that all other humans can’t grasp Him/it. That just goes to show that the claim that a human can know God partially is not very controversial, and it’s hard to deny.
Two natures in one person is a very easy concept to understand. I know a few. but not many, Christains who are fairly intelligent in everyday survival skills, are good parents, good neighbors, good drivers, decent golfers, cut their grass on a regular basis and would probably be considered OK people. Yet this same person is totally without reason and common sense when it comes to believing the BS that passes as organized religions.
Two natures in one person. Yes, definitely seems odd, for no one else has two natures in one person…
Thespians!
An actor typifies this very well. They portray the nature of one person, while retaining their own nature.
For example, let’s say an actor portrays a character who undergoes an agonizing death. To really make the role believable, the actor must necessarily tap into all the physical and emotional torment the character must go through. In a manner of speaking, the actor must die as the character does.
Yet, while the actor is going through the death throes, he/she knows that when the director yells, “Cut!” he/she gets to go home to have dinner.
Same thing with this Jesus cat, if you believe he is fully man and fully God. While suffering as a human on the cross, part of him already knows that, in a short time, he’ll be sitting at the right hand of God. So, while the agony itself is real, it’s mitigated somewhat by the fact that he would know he “lives on” in the end.
As I stated in the post on my blog, it makes for a far more powerful story if he DIDN’T know the outcome. In that case, he would be undergoing the torment based SOLELY on faith.
RT,
I see absolutely no reason to accept your “suffering calculus.” I detailed the reasons in my post, and you just dismiss them.
Here’s a challenge, RT: go through just a smidgeon of the *physical* part of Jesus’ suffering. I’ll throw in knowledge that you won’t die….then let’s see if you maintain your stance that his suffering is “mitigated.”
To a certain extent, it’s pretty high minded of you to make pronouncements like that about another man’s suffering.
I didn’t “dismiss” anything you wrote. I simply responded by using the analogy of an actor. Maybe you don’t like this analogy, but saying I didn’t respond to your points is a bit disingenuous, if you ask me.
Secondly, Jesus is not the ONLY person in human history to die under horrible circumstances. Each person placed in a Nazi gas chamber went through an excruciating death. Each woman who is raped repeatedly, then murdered, goes through her own agony. And people with horrid diseases and NO health care must endure an elongated period of massive suffering.
Their deaths are tragic and horrific because none of them knew (though I’m sure many believed) whether or not their souls will triumph in the end. Jesus, on the other hand (if a person believes as you do), KNEW BEYOND ANY DOUBT that he would live again.
Compare this kind of knowledge to the struggles we human beings go through. For example, cancer treatment can be frightening and exceedingly painful. My mother suffered through it for 4 years before finally succumbing to the disease.
She hated the agony of her daily treatments, but she was able to get through it because she knew, at the end of the day, she would get to go back home.
You hate needles (I have a terrible needle phobia myself), but my guess is that we’re both able to get through the shot process because we know, that once the injection’s been given, then we get to return to our everyday lives.
It would be altogether different if we were unsure if we would live beyond the shot. If you or I thought we might die the second the injection was completed and yet we still went ahead with the procedure, now that would be courageous!
I’ve responded to your post with a post of my own on my blog.
RT,
You included an analogy in your response that merely repeated your previous claim: knowledge diminishes suffering. Repeating a claim with an analogy is not a substantive response (analogies are not arguments). That’s why I called it a dismissal.
In regards to the analogy, I don’t see the connection b.w an actor and the belief that Jesus is two natures in one person. An actor puts on a mask–this is most definitely NOT a nature! He *acts* like he’s suffering. Jesus’ suffering was real. An actor who gets executed in a movie doesn’t *really* get executed…the nails don’t really go through his wrists…he doesn’t really die of suffocation and heart attack. He doesn’t really spiritually bear all the world’s sin, etc, etc. All that to say: I think you’ve misunderstood what is really meant by saying Jesus is fully man, fully God.
A point of response that I forgot to include last time is this: note what your objection is not. It is not a historical argument that the resurrection didn’t happen in history. It is not an attack on the veracity/reliability of the Bible. It is not an argument that the concept of God in the Bible is incoherent or contradictory. It is not an argument that Christianity can’t square with some well known fact of science or some other fact of the world we know (like evil). Your point, I take it, was that you can improve upon Jesus’ suffering, and you can improve the compelling nature of the story. So the way I read it, you aren’t arguing that a certain core feature of Christianity isn’t true; you are merely saying that you don’t prefer the Christian story.
If you are trying to suggest that Christianity isn’t true, your point, even if I grant it, doesn’t do that: just because you can make the “Jesus story” more heroic or inspiring doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. That is a non sequitur.
Now, back on topic:
“Secondly, Jesus is not the ONLY person in human history to die under horrible circumstances. Each person placed in a Nazi gas chamber went through an excruciating death. Each woman who is raped repeatedly, then murdered, goes through her own agony. And people with horrid diseases and NO health care must endure an elongated period of massive suffering.”
I’m not claiming their suffering is second rate. I can’t imagine the pain of someone who went through a Nazi death camp. I’m not making any pronouncements whatsoever about the lack of worthiness of someone’s suffering. All I’m claiming is that Jesus’ knowledge about His resurrection doesn’t diminish His suffering. I gave examples and reasons in my post…I even gave reasons in my post to suggest that knowledge of an upcoming suffering might even *increase* the suffering!
Let me reiterate: *in certain circumstances,* I agree with you that not knowing what you are getting into increases one’s feeling of pain. I went to a water park recently where I went down one of those “black hole” slides–The slide was closed in on all sides by darkness. I went down that sucker…and I was in for more than I bargained for! I couldn’t see a thing, and that made the feeling in the slide more intense.
But why think this is the case with Jesus? And why would His knowledge *significantly diminish* (this is the way you put it) His suffering?
Part of me marvels that you’d even say that. Think of it this way: say I read a story about a Jewish man in Auschwitz who knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’d survive. His knowledge is knowledge–not just blind belief: he knows a mole in the SS guard at Auschwitz who guarantees his eventual safety. Yet, he still goes through the horrendous conditions…he still slaves away at the bricks, still gets beaten to within an inch of his life, still sees his family get executed, still gets starved horribly, still witnesses his people be hanged, incinerated, and raped every day.
Say I respond to that story by saying, “ah! This guy has it easy! He *knows* he’s safe in the end. Any suffering he undergoes is significantly diminished.” How pompous of me! Why is your claim any different? Yeah, so Jesus knew He was going to rise from the grave. He still went through the incredible physical agony of being crucified (you ever been crucified?), still spiritually bore the weight of the world’s sin, still experienced separation from His Father, etc, etc. That’s second class suffering? No way!
Jesus didn’t need to undergo the maximal suffering possible in order for us to admire His sacrifice, and no Christian doctrine out there suggests that He had to go through the maximal suffering possible in order to save human beings…..and I say again, He didn’t need to go through the maximal suffering possible in order for the event to be historical (that is, it does not follow that just because you could increase His suffering in the story, that the suffering isn’t historical).
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