Historicity, Christ, and Faith

Or; Religion is Not a Historical Theory

THIS is, broadly speaking, an attempt to bite in—without any reluctance—to the subject of Christian faith in light of scholarly criticism of Biblical history. It is a bit of a long one, but also a substantial answer to certain pretty large queries I often receive with regard to my Christianity. First I’ll need to lay the groundwork and then get into the subject itself.

I. Hegel wrote in his preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit the following:

In a proposition of this kind [‘God is the eternal, the moral world-order, love, and so on’] one begins with the word ‘God’. This by itself is a meaningless sound, a mere name; it is only the predicate that says what God is, gives Him content and meaning. Only in the end of the proposition does the empty beginning become actual knowledge.¹

Hegel, it seems, was one of the first to truly take stock of the way in which the immanent world conditions itself, which is to say it influences and defines all its inner parts via mutual relation. This basic acknowledgement is one that Christians with a penchant for separating their religion from the rest of the world (whether consciously or unconsciously) should seek to observe. For instance, if one wishes to convert someone to Christianity—that is, if one wishes to convey to another the value of the religion, the reason why anyone would actually wish to call themselves a Christian—one cannot do so on the terms of a supposedly ‘pure’ religious stratum that stands entirely independent of the terms of a ‘secular’ life. Rather, it must be done on terms that belong neither to religion nor secularity, nor indeed any other such distinction, but to the language, semantics, and conceptuality with which we humans navigate the world beyond the borders of particular beliefs. Both the Christian and the non-Christian know the word ‘love’, ‘peace’, ‘compassion’, and so on; the former uses it to try and advertise Christ as a desirable person to the latter. Without these things Christ would be ‘a meaningless sound’.

This appears obvious, almost to the point of being a truism. But there seems to be an implicit belief in the minds of many Christians that for their religion to have any value—especially in this age of its decline, and the opposing rise of secularism—it has to provide a kernel of value that remains entirely absent from the realm of the ‘secular’ world. This is well-intentioned in many respects, but can dangerously slip into a dualism (‘the Church’ and ‘the world’) that believes in the possibility of a religion independent of the influence of other existing forces, whether secular, pagan, or else. This is not merely a matter of communicating across the divide. When we go to church, we profess creeds, sing hymns, and listen to sermons employing human language and concepts. When we find comfort in the love of God as a perfect Father, we are doing so in partial recognition of the limitations of our earthly fathers. The reason the word ‘father’ has any resonance at all is because it already means something to us independent of any religious import. When we are moved by the metaphor of Jesus as the ‘Good Shepherd’, we call to mind the habits and practices of humanly shepherds. Jesus’ exceptionality would mean nothing to us if we did not have the yardstick of human normality against which to measure it. Its actual value cannot be contained except but in its communication. Lutherans—one denomination that bears a predilection for the attitude I describe—will detest the sight of a Pseudo-Dionysius quote, but I cannot help reiterate the point in his words: ‘all Divine things, even those that are revealed to us, are only known by their Communications’.² If it were otherwise, one would imagine that the object on its own terms would be sufficient to cause changes in us. But it is only through reference to what we already know independent of Christianity that the religion earns its truly transformative value; that it makes us want to be Christians, to be moved by the love and grace of God in Christ.

II. This is the first and most obvious reason that prevents us from claiming that the material of Christianity (here, specifically the life of Jesus) contains its value utterly independent of any attitude that we might adopt toward it. At this point, Christians of various stripes (primarily Protestants) may leap to their feet and insist on Christ’s unimpeachable singularity. I do not necessarily disagree with this. I believe that the person and event of Christ contains the power for a richly transformative effect on our spiritual disposition. But if the Protestant in question is insisting, as I suspect they are in many cases, that somehow the person of Christ signifies something categorically unique, appearing as what Barth describes as ‘wholly other’³ to the world in which he is incarnate, then I must simply shrug my shoulders and ask them what this is supposed to mean. I invoke Hegel again. What are you actually talking about when you speak of something that arrives within the conditioned fabric of thought whilst supposedly maintaining an unconditioned quality? The moment Christ exists in the world, he exists in the world. He might be mightily mysterious, deeply paradoxical, deeply troubling, but he is still subject to being conditioned and contingent, for these are simply necessary characteristics of existing within immanent history. The same problem is present in postmodernists like Levinas and Derrida, who seek at all costs to preserve the dignity and so foreignness of a tout autre at the expense of any sort of recognition that they have thereby done the greatest disservice to this ‘other’, smothering it in reverence and inadvertently relegating it to a perpetual stalemate of ‘never arriving’.⁴ It is all very well to talk in rapturous and reverent terms of Christ as a brilliant light not understood by the darkness (Jn. 1:5), but all of this cannot avoid the bluntly and painfully obvious fact that in becoming incarnate, Christ becomes manifest in the world. How can you do theology without talking about Christ? How can you do religion at all without speaking—thinking—of the very subject matter of religion? Rather than impeccably preserving some intransigent alterity in its perfect passage into the immanent (this would be nothing more than Docetism, to be clear), Christianity—more so than any other religion, I think—is obliged to recognise that religion is always already implicated in the conditioned and intelligible manifold of thinkable, immanent reality. This is one of its greatest virtues, and what most firmly distinguishes it from Gnosticism: the incarnation ensures that we must affirm all that exists within the realm of conditioned creation rather than abandon it for an impeccable and distant realm that has nothing at all to do with our current reality.

This peculiar, obdurate fetish for the categorical ‘uniqueness’ of Christ as something set off, over, and against the rest of the world has never held an appeal for me. The only reason it could have ‘appeal’ for anyone at all is if it announced itself in terms that were already appealing to the minds it had not yet touched, and so relinquished its categorical uniqueness. I do believe, to be clear, that there is a way in which these great Protestants of the ‘scandal’—Luther, Jacobi, Hamann, Kierkegaard, Barth, Caputo, and the like—provide something of real, irreplaceable substance, and I do not want to pretend that the Christian tradition is not replete with imagery emphasising a Christ who is markedly distinct from worldly habits and practices, who ‘does not give peace as the world gives’ (Jn. 14:27), and who in practically all respects signifies a real revolution in the order of things as they were previously understood, translating the imperial lingua franca of power, dominion, and hierarchy into a radically egalitarian spirit of universal love and compassion for the downtrodden. In fact, I do not think one could honestly call oneself a Christian in any meaningful way if one did not take stock of this radical ‘subversiveness’ inherent in the Gospel. But I insist that the standard interpretation of this heritage as propounding a Christ who is merely ‘other’ to the world, a grace that arrives as a bolt from the blue to a nature otherwise bereft of his glory (that is, Two-Tier Thomism) underestimates Christ’s role as a visible icon. That is, although there is an infinite reserve of apophatic mystery in the Father which is signified by the incarnation of the Son, that cannot cloud the delightful reality that this mystery has indeed been signified: that it has been given to us, really been made (at least analogically) intelligible to our minds, and that it is good and saving in our own terms. This is the evangel: that it is our salvation that Christ has died for. What would it mean to say that this could be conveyed in such a way that was truly incomprehensible to us, truly scandalous to us all the way to the core? The Great Commission would literally appear to the nations like aliens babbling in an unknown tongue. (Though there is a good polyglossia joke in there, I admit).

Indeed, I would even freely confess that in many ways it is important to recognise that the Gospel seems, to the minds of those opaqued by worldly avarice, nothing more than alien babbling. But it is a babbling that appeals to something latent in them, something only clouded rather than removed by sin. That they cannot understand it there and then is a contingent consequence of their fallenness, not a condition of their actual ontology as crafted and created by God. Christ restores; he does not add. God’s creation ex nihilo does not allow for Christ do anything more. If it were the case that Christ’s redemption were truly making things better than original creation (and some venerable theologians have insisted on this, Aquinas amongst them) then it would suppose that there was a defect in God’s free and original creation, which is absurd. The Fall is only a contingent deviation from an otherwise perfect creation, which is rectified and brought back to itself in the redemptive sacrifice of the Son, the God who shall be and indeed already is ‘all in all’ (1 Cor. 15:28).

III. Right: if you have stuck around thus far, thank you. There is much more I might say, but will stop there. All you need to know from the first half of this piece is this essentially Kantian premise: Christian faith clearly cannot be contained independently in the Christ-event itself, but must be something that the believer (at the very least) participates in, or perhaps more strongly creates via their relationship to it.

Now, to the historical issue. Christianity is unique insofar as it embraces that radical or even paradoxical situatedness of God within history, speaking of Jesus as the one who was, as the Apostle’s Creed states, ‘crucified under Pontius Pilate’, and so alive in a particular, recordable point in human history: 1st century Jewish Palestine. This is often believed to entail, subsequently, a necessary inviolability in the facts of ‘sacred history’ as contained in that creed and vouchsafed in Scripture: the very life of the Christian faith is supposed to depend on the veracity of certain historical claims, such as the virgin birth, miracles, and resurrection. I sympathise with the sentiment, and absolutely agree that Christianity cannot, and should not want to, ‘take flight’ up and away from its historical origin. However, what I cannot abide by is the suggestion that this creedal disposition calls for a blindly dogmatic (and so frankly unintelligent) rejection of all data that might suggest the gospel histories to be flawed. This is the meat of what I want to address here: how Christians can, in principle, take both scholarly data and gospel history seriously.

Before I get there, however, I might as well address the point of scriptural historicity, as was inevitable from the first. One must rip off the band-aid sooner or later. As far as I can tell, general Christian cognisance of the actual academic scholarship on the historical Jesus seems to work as follows. The vast majority of believers are content with the Bible’s account and accept it with fairly uncritical readings. Then, when those uncomfortable questions about ostensible problems in the text begin to creep in—as I am afraid they will—these people find their anxieties assuaged by a set of apologists who have forged careers by coming up with clever ways to explain away inconsistencies in scriptural narratives. These apologists are not taken seriously in the academic world because, well, they are not academic: they are dogmatic. They decide at the outset that Scripture must be without contradiction, that the gospels must all compute with each other in a single historical narrative, and so on, and from thence attempt to navigate a sinuous labyrinth of reasoning to produce something like a cogent apologetics to substantiate the foregone conclusion. Some are better at this than others, and some do provide genuinely interesting and thought-provoking arguments. But it is not without reason that certain of their guiding principles—the literal inerrancy, historical reliability, and perfect preservation of Scripture—are held by practically no respected scholar (whether Christian or otherwise) in academic circles. To be blunt: when one honestly appraises the data available to us regarding an analysis of the historicity of the Biblical and specifically gospel narratives, one cannot reasonably come to those conclusions.

I find it thoroughly strange that there seems to be a genuine reverence for the sanctity of reason and truth until that reason happens to reveal a truth that contradicts prevailing orthodoxies. In light of Hegel’s above quotation (and broader philosophy) elucidating the conditioned and interrelated nature of thought, the suggestion that certain truths can be isolated from others as irrefragable whilst all the rest remain perfectly pliant seems positively absurd. Quite where the borders between such truths are to be drawn is not apparent to me. Moreover, it seems abundantly clear that for people who really do worship Christ as ‘the Truth’ (Jn. 14:6), the only sensible response to revelations about their misconceptions would be to reappraise their own understandings of Christ, and so conform to his glory in an intellectual mode that was not previously available to them, even celebrating the opportunity to develop their understanding. This is in large part why I find catch-all condemnations (or even anathemas) of theological ‘liberalism’ to be frankly rather pathetic. It is a tired buzzword which, when its user is pressed, is more often than not revealed to refer to nothing other than certain very basic facts that anyone would be taught if they passed through any respectable theological seminary (not, to rebuff those silly conservative talking heads, the ‘Neo-Marxist gender-queer atheists’ supposedly running amok at secular universities). For example, facts like the ahistoricality of Luke’s nativity narrative or much of John’s discourses, the false authorial attribution of all four gospels and the Pauline pseudepigrapha, or that all early Christians, including Paul and most likely Jesus himself believed that the Parousia would be occurring within at most a generation or two of Jesus’ life.

But, to this article’s point: whilst most Christians might wince and blush at such revelations, and get to work finding (often contrived) rebuttals to preserve gospel history, I maintain that none of these discoveries regarding literal historicity (or lack thereof) result in something that proves truly damaging to Christian faith. To be slow and clear:

Let us say that a Christian has ‘faith’ in the resurrection. Let us say that by this, they believe that Jesus’ corpse literally, physically rose from death on the third day, walked out of his tomb, and was then seen by many of his followers. What are the implications of this? The first thing to note is that this is clearly a historical occurrence. Whatever other associations and resonances, we are describing an event that is at least on one crucial level univocal in nature to anything else in history, such as Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon in 49 BC. If a witness were present at either event (Golgotha or the Rubicon) they would see a visible, tangible, and recordable event.

Why, we ask, would we need to have faith in such an event? Do we have faith that Caesar crossed the Rubicon? The obvious answer: no, because we have historical evidence assuring us it occurred. Do we have faith that Jesus rose from the dead? Yes: why? If your answer to this question is ‘because we don’t have historical evidence’, then I must point out that you are no longer talking about a religion. You are talking about a historical theory, and a poorly supported one at that. You are suggesting that if we only had better technologies or opportunities to record the event, we would have no need of faith; that faith is nothing but an ancillary means to ‘plug the gaps’ that we would, if possible, far rather dispense of in favour of historical data.

But most Christians would pause and avoid answering in this way, recognising it to be a diminishment of faith, its clear subordination to reason. They would come up with another answer, perhaps appealing to the fact that the resurrection is a miraculous event. But this is not a valid response: if Caesar’s were also a miraculous event—let us say he levitated over the Rubicon—it would also be something recorded and witnessed as history, albeit remarkable history. Supernatural elements provide no alteration.

So, we are forced to a realisation: if by ‘faith’ we mean the affirmation of particular historical occurrences, we are talking about blind belief without evidence. On this account, faith is therefore nothing but an unfortunate contingency, one brought about by a failure of our ability to record the events. If technology were far more advanced at the time then the post-resurrection witnesses would, without a doubt, whip out their iPhones and start an Instagram Live with the risen Jesus. This would be brilliant historical work: they would have definitive proof of his resurrection, and the whole enterprise of Christian faith in the resurrection would be rendered null and void, because there would be no doubt as to whether or not it happened.

If this sounds wrong, that’s because it is. Christian faith, and indeed the spiritual resonance and so essential ‘religiosity’ of Christianity, cannot be exhaustively located in the dry, ‘objective’ observation of a set of contingent historical events, even if they are miraculous. I will put it most scandalously: whether or not Jesus literally, historically rose from the dead is not what Christian faith has to depend upon. I am not making a case either for or against whether it happened here, to be sure. (I think there is good evidence either way). I am simply clarifying that even if it were proven or disproven, it would not alter Christian faith, which does not pertain to mere historical data but rather the spiritual import of the life of Christ—irrespective of whether its various elements are ultimately historical, legendary, or mythical.⁵

IV. A further word, to any who wish to salvage this clearly defunct understanding of faith and give it a glossy sheen. It is a very common tendency of certain modern Christians (again, often Protestants under the guise of sola fidei) to claim that ‘faith’ is nothing other than belief in the historicity of Christian narrative irrespective of any reservations of reason (given reason is a ‘whore’, to use Luther’s words, belonging to the world rather than Christ⁶). Insofar as this is a faithful commitment to the narrative and figure of Christ as the visible sign of God, then I am in wholehearted agreement. To the extent, however, that this signifies a moronic and obstinate rejection of all the relevant data in favour of an irrational clinging to a particular set of historical occurrences, then I am not.

It would be a mistake to think that this latter option has been the function and essence of faith throughout Christian history. It is, rather, a theological misstep greatly exacerbated by the advancements of higher criticism in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Augustine carefully distinguishes between ‘opinio’, which refers to cognitively and empirically standard beliefs (such as the existence of John the Baptist) and ‘fides’, which refers instead to revelation (such as the fact of John being ‘sent by God’).⁷ Only when science became increasingly misconstrued—by paranoid believers and uncharitable disbelievers alike—as an enemy of religion, did it seem as though to be religious one must set oneself against any scientific data that threatened to undermine orthodoxy: that is, to fight opinio with opinio.⁸ Some terrible readings of those aforementioned Protestants (especially Kierkegaard) have followed; insisting on faith’s dignity as some wild, cavalier, infantile contradiction of reason, buttressed by the mystifications of an appeal to ‘paradox’—without ever doing justice to what that concept could actually mean. It must be recognised as the intellectual equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and celebrating your freedom to do this as though it were a triumph over the person speaking to you.

In this vein, scholarship that has the potential to be a real and enriching advancement in our relationship to the Bible is mistaken for an assault on its essential authority. Suddenly, idiocy is mistaken for piety. A resistance to reason—that is, irrationality rather than the far more Kierkegaardian suprarationality—becomes the site for and is eventually conflated with authentic faith. Its pervasion now is saddeningly wide, and represents a tangible regression in our relationship with the Truth. It is also, incidentally, an attitude ignorant of a rich and central theological heritage of allegorical, symbolic, and mystical exegesis which understands that however relevant the ‘letter’ may be in its historical description, it by no means exhaustively contains the meaning of the text, and moreover that there is a real urgency—as Origen, for one, insists—to our recognition that Scripture is not merely meant to tell a history as any old textbook might. Indeed, for Origen, it is the very contradictions of Scriptural literality which awaken us to the deeper spiritual heart of the text in a way that would not be possible were these contradictions not present. If we want a truly ‘literal’ reading of the Biblical text, we need look no further than Augustine, who reads Genesis ‘ad litteram’ and still produces a panoply of allegorical and symbolic conclusions.⁹ Even to Church Fathers without the access that we moderns have to advanced historical and archaeological knowledge, it is abundantly clear that the Bible cannot just be read as though an impeccable and inerrant historical narrative. This has always been a laughable absurdity to me: fundamentalists claim to pay the utmost deference to the text, yet with their reading reduce it to a banal account of history. This is beholden not to Biblical authority at all but rather to the ethos of a secular hermeneutic, one which insists on literality, consistency, and historicality as the sole determinants of value. Meaning to defend the religion, these dance to the tune of secular criticism.

This historical attitude is ultimately guilty of doing Christian faith a profound indignity, enucleating it of all its spiritual weight and replacing it with the same kind of arid, dogmatic manifesto you might just as well find uttered from the lips of an ardent communist, a zealous Scientologist, or indeed a child on the playground being initiated into a secret club, each in their respective formulations. ‘I believe this, I don’t believe that’. ‘Good! You’re in’. And that is all. Apolgetic scraps like these are petty debates that need not occur if we recognise that the moment we have understood our faith to be the blind affirmation of historical particulars, we have already lost it, made it a dead thing. We have rendered it redundant but for certain flimsy contingencies, and so made our religion in general nothing but an arbitrary punt at a far-fetched historical theory, and our piety nothing but the caustic vigour with which we can snarl and bark at any who might tentatively suggest that the truth lies outside of our golden narrative.

V. With all this considered, I imagine many will be spitting at their screens, rebuking me in the name of the Lord, and revoking all claims I may make to be a Christian. How or why do I purport to be a Christian if I allow for such a disparity between faith and history? Is it not the case that ‘if Christ be not risen’ then our ‘faith is in vain’ (1 Cor. 15:14)? This Paul quote in particular I will address in part two. But for now, we have to reiterate the important clarification that Christianity is not a historical theory, but a religion. When we drag the whole religion down to the realm of scientific or historical study, and merely work to set it against the data we don’t like, we forget this. We can now circle back to what I was saying at the outset.

Take a different doctrine: the assertion that Jesus was God. This is not an exclusively historical nor exclusively theological claim, nor it is perfectly both, but an untidy admixture of the two. Unlike the physical resurrection,¹⁰ it is not the same as saying, to repeat the example, that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC. When Christians first started saying that Jesus the Son was consubstantial (homoousion) with God the Father (which was not in Jesus’ life or immediately afterwards: you will find it nowhere in Paul, who even bears a clearly subordinationist ante-Nicene theology in Phil. 2:5-11), they were not doing so because it was historically evident, in the way that it is historically evident that I had scrambled egg this morning, or that Napoleon lost at Waterloo. They were doing so as a result of theological innovation, emanating or arising from the pattern of events that were transmitted in the oral tradition of the early Jesus Movement, combined with the Jewish messianic apocalypticism that Jesus directly invoked and evoked during his life.

It is important to understand that Nicaea was a metaphysical revolution because it attempted to bridge a divide that philosophy has—both before and after—long struggled with. The Christological and Trinitarian debates that littered the first millennium of Christian history were very much metaphysically oriented, and the eventual orthodoxies that were settled on were attempted theological resolutions to questions that already existed in Hellenistic philosophy. Athanasius’ decisive argument at Nicaea defeated Arius by making clear the soteriological necessity of the Son’s consubstantiality with the Father. If the categorical divide between God and creation is not absolutely bridged in Christ, in what way can he be said to have saved us? How have we been returned to the Father who originally created us if the Son in whom we are redeemed is himself still infinitely distant from the Father? (For, of course, it must be an infinite distance if the distinction is qualitative. Even the foremost creature in a dualistic cosmos is still fundamentally not the Creator).¹¹

This should serve to show the following: if, to be a Christian, it is necessary to believe that Jesus was God, this is not, never has been, and never will be a belief exhaustively concerned with the historical data of Jesus’ life. The idea that Christian faith in Jesus as God is nothing more than a bland assertion of historicality which we may or may not find evidence to believe is an utter fabrication, entirely ignorant of the doctrine’s incipience and thoroughly insensitive to any religious value its acceptance might provide. The religion is simply too theologically, morally, and mystically imbibed to suggest something so impoverished. What we see here is an example of a (perhaps the) central belief in Christianity that draws upon history and theology in such a way that does not reduce ‘faith’ in that doctrine to any sort of dogmatism, whether historical or metaphysical. The computation of history and theology results in a real revelation that allows for, well, a religion; a manner of living after God.

It is here that we see why the paranoic defenders against the discoveries of Biblical scholarship need not grip their weapons so tightly. If we believe that Christian faith is a thing to be proven or disproven by the discovery of historical facts, then it is not religious faith in the first place—even if those facts are historically true. We see instead that there is a way of understanding both history and theology that remains religiously valuable irrespective of scientific-historical knowledge. In this instance: when we ask modern questions about whether or not Jesus was historically God, we are applying a paradigm of query which simply does not apply to the matter at hand. It is an implicitly naturalistic lens to apply to any religion, following not just from a naturalist historiography (which presumes that miracles do not happen) but moreover from a naturalist metaphysics, and so does not even possess the dimension necessary for the comprehension of what any Christian—especially Christians around and just after Nicaea—might actually mean when they say that Jesus is God. When posed as a purely historical question, ‘was Jesus God?’ cannot yield any meaningful answer. It is engaged in and referring to a metaphysics that is simply unavailable to our post-Cartesian age, entirely occluded from intellectual view. It is like asking a human what a dog whistle sounds like. And so modern Christians and sceptics alike, without access to classical metaphysical beliefs and already swimming in a cultural and so philosophical naturalism (even if they do not know it), engage in ‘lower’ debates with what they have present to hand, arguing about the particularities of history and paranoically rejecting all data that might let advantage slip to one or the other side. But this has never been the realm where debate over the belief in question should occur, at least not exclusively. I must insist: the starry-eyed proclamation that theology and history are perfectly consonant is a wilful ignorance that does no one any good, least of all Christians.

But, as I evinced earlier, this also does not mean that the claim that Jesus was God is purely theological. There is something concretely and delightfully historical in the groundedness of Christianity in a real life and recorded event. Even if we must dispense of a great deal of what we priorly thought to be infallible, there are many details that we can be assured of regarding Jesus’ life that did and should continue to effloresce in our religion: most importantly, I believe, the prophetic-apocalyptic messianism that urgently calls for the rectification of wealth inequality and the deliverance of real social justice. This is another obvious observation, I think: Jesus was a real historical person, and the real historical events of his life and death and post-mortem appearances (whatever explanation we might have for the last of these) were the direct causes of the religion of Christianity, irrespective of any post-hoc embellishments, alterations, or innovations. The fervour rippling through the hearts of his disciples in the years after his death, coming to understand that death as a truly transformative event—the ‘firstfruits’ of a general resurrection, in the case of Paul (1 Cor. 15:20-3)—in the course of world history was the very lifeblood of the religion, the kerygma without which it would not be, and so nothing that could be annulled by later change, only developed, or—better—realised.

VI. So, to speak in broad and perhaps slightly dramatic terms, what do I mean when I say that I am a Christian? I understand my Christianity to be in my comportment (that is, my faith) toward the event of Jesus Christ in the world, my subscription to the orthodox theologies and Christologies developed by my church tradition, and my devotion (my ‘bhakti’, if you will) toward Jesus Christ as God. This, once more, is why Christianity is a religion and not historical theory. To suggest that it could be making exclusively historical claims, or that all its theology could be reduced to the historical data of Jesus’ life, is to have missed the point altogether; to have failed to understand the rich and profound resonances of Nicaea’s declaration, which, to remind the reader, was not a gathering of historians merely trying to reckon what was the case three centuries before but a group of theologians who used theological arguments to reason between Athanasian consubstantiality and Arian subordinationism. Only when one lacks the capacity to appreciate the theology and metaphysics discussed at Nicaea and at later ecumenical councils (as modern commentators do) does one presume that they were simply bad or deeply prejudiced historians. This is precisely what Wittgenstein reprimanded in colonial anthropologists like James George Frazer who scoffed at the ancients for doing what he took to be ‘false physics’.¹²

So, in sum: there are two orders of Christian doctrine that we can speak of here. The first is an inevitably historical claim (such as a particular miracle or the resurrection) and the second is a historical-cum-theological claim that collapses into neither camp conclusively (such as Jesus being God). In the second, we see the meaning of the first illumined. It does not ultimately matter here whether or not the world contains supernatural events or elements: belief in a supernatural cosmos alone does not constitute religious belief. Rather, religiō, as the Latin word suggests, is at least in its Hellenistic form not a matter of blind adherence to certain epistemic beliefs but a virtuous manner of living, a ‘lifestyle’ (dare I use the terrifying word) that entailed engagement in the cultic and ritual practices needed to appease a local deity or venerate the Most High God, or both. Very few Romans would ever have believed in the kind of naturalistic cosmos popular today—that is, one divested of all ‘supernatural’ elements—and yet even with belief in the existence of a whole pantheon of gods and goddesses, they could be accused of failing to ‘be religious’ in the sense of failing to carry out their ritual duties to those deities. Yes, most Christians in history have believed that Jesus’ flesh physically rose from the dead, but it is their response to this event that actually determines their pistis (faith) and their religiō alike: a response that was, for all the difference amongst early Christian sects, invariably apocalyptic, radically rejecting the ways of the world in preparation for the imminent eschaton. And that, indeed, is what marked the early followers of Jesus out: the relevance of the resurrection was in its indication that the end was nigh (1 Cor. 15:23), and that the house must be in order when the bridegroom comes like ‘a thief in the night’ (1 Thess. 5:2, 2 Pet. 3:10).

Hence why, with this Hellenistic definition in mind, I think these incessant modern debates about gospel historicity—when they are framed as the critical fighting ground for the legitimacy of the Christian faith itself—risk occluding those dimensions of being and thinking which contain practically the entirety of what religion is. We risk, through our obsession with historical apologetics, neglecting how to do religion, how to be religious, because we have ceded so much to the naturalist metaphysics that we presume religion to be nothing more than the blind contradiction of any scientific finding that happens to menace established orthodoxies. It seems, in the most resolutely stupid forms of fundamentalism, that Frazer is correct: religion is nothing more than bad science, and God is invoked as nothing more than a convenient filler of gaps.

VII. To conclude: Wittgenstein stands in a tradition of a number of thinkers who recognised that the standard terms of critical study—historicity, rationality, empirical evidence, etc.—whilst commanding due and even absolute respect within their realms, also need to recognise their own limits. It is at those limits that religion resides: on that strange fissure where a world of rationality seems to fold in on itself, like an object slipping between physical dimensions. From the vantage of a two-dimensional stick-figure, the introduction of a third dimension would be simply imperceptible. You could move an object forward or backward in front of the stick-figure, but the moment you move it left or right (from our three-dimensional perspective) it would disappear from its view. It might become apparent again if we place it halfway in and out of the stick-figure’s line of sight: but at that point, they would be staring at something incomprehensible. The object would just be suspended in air, a part of it visible but another inexplicably invisible. It would, in short be utterly nonsensical to that viewer. One of religion’s many functions is to remind us that we should be concerned with that ‘dimension’ to which we do not have immediate access. Any sort of fundamentalism, trying to fight science (which is a science of two-dimensional knowledge, in this analogy) on its own terms is something that has failed its duty as a Christian endeavour, and fallen from a real concern with Almighty God to a parochial scuffle over worldly boundaries. We must always recall the basic pattern of classical theism: not the affirmation of A, nor (even) the negation of A, but the transcendence of both these options. That tertium quid that envelops and enfolds them, the Ground and Essence of their being, without which they could not be.

So it is in our discussion of religions like Christianity which spread themselves out across dimensions. Either the resurrection (or miracles, or virgin birth, etc.) did or did not happen. Either A or ~A. This will always be the case in creation. But faith is not concerned with the affirmation or negation of A. It is concerned with the Reality that grounds and allows for their distinction in the first place. As such, although there always will be a choice, that choice will not ultimately determine Christian faith, because it is directed toward a higher Source of unity that is not beholden to the principle of non-contradiction that inflexibly governs the lower. Yes, that Source is reflected in these lower dualities, and there is a strong case to be made (which, I reiterate, I have not contradicted) that insists it is unfailingly reflected in one option rather than its opposite. But it would be a mistake to cling to any one of those choices so fiercely that we would risk losing sight of the God that subsumes both of them.

Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

1 John 2:15

1. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §23, p. 12.

2. Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, II.7.

3. See, for instance, Christiane Tietz, Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth, vol. 1, eds. George Hunsinger and Keith L. Johnson (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2020), 12.

4. See John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion and Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being. Forgive the laziness of citations; it’s been a long day. Any old editions will do.

5. But, again, even this modern division between ‘history’ and ‘myth’ is an unhelpful one: asserting that Jesus did not have a bodily resurrection does not preclude the possibility of a spiritual one, and even then we are talking about physiologies, cosmologies, and metaphysics that reside very much within the Hellenistic era, and would not be easily intelligible, let alone believable, by the standards of modern science. Perhaps I should make my ethos clearer: I think science reveals things about the material universe that Christians should take seriously as genuinely good developments in human knowledge. Trying to force the ‘philosophy’ of the New Testament into these new discoveries is to treat them as a Procrustean bed. Better to, as I shall expand on in the next part, take science as a guiding rationale in the onward efflorescence of Christian tradition, and sensitively take stock of what we have to—indeed, what we already have—leave behind in, say, the astrologies of antiquity, no matter how central they were to the Christians of the time, who founded the creeds we profess today.

6. Another similar illusion to dispel, often propagated in light of Luther: that somehow Greek philosophy ‘poisoned’ or ‘polluted’ an originally perfectly Hebraic revelation in the form of Jesus. This is nonsense. Epicureans and Stoics are both mentioned as (polemical) dialogue partners for early Christians in Acts 17:18, Paul is thoroughly philosophically influenced in such a way that turns him out as something like a Jewish Stoic, and of course the author of John has (compared to the synoptics) far less regard for the historical Jesus, caring more about the theological import his life might contain, proudly declaring him the ‘Logos’ that Greek philosophers have spent centuries mulling over and positing at the centre of their systems of thought. Christianity is a Hellenistic religion, one that could not, even if it desired to, shirk its Greekness.

7. Augustine, De Trinitate, XIII.1.2. Elsewhere: ‘Each one, therefore, sees his own faith in himself’.

8. See Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2010).

9. See Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram.

10. Again, expansion to come in the next piece. Early Christians (most notably the Lucan vs. Pauline communities) disagreed even on the empty tomb itself.

11. Athanasius, De Incarnatione.

12. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Mythology in our Language: Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, trans. Stephen Palmié (Chicago: Hau Books, 2018), 42. See also John Hyman, ‘Wittgenstein’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Religion, eds. Charles Taliaferro, Paul Draper, Philip L. Quinn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 176-188.