Christ or Bust
What It Means to Be a Christian
Introduction: The Second Religiosity of the West
Christianity, one of three foundational ideologies of the West (along with Judaism and Greek humanism), is now seeing, as Oswald Spengler predicted,1 something of a resurgence, albeit in a very different form both to that which it took at the innocent, upbeat birth of the West—when what we could call ‘Cultural Christianity’ was born—and to that which its originating master, the man we call Jesus Christ, presented to the world, what we could call ‘Mystic Christianity’. The Christianity we see today, more a matter of fashion, rather than of culture or conviction, is nothing like that of St. Augustine, Thomas à Kempis, Erasmus, John Wesley or even C.S. Lewis. It is a drained and largely disenchanted shadow of both its cultural efflorescence and its mystical origins. Those who proclaim themselves Christians today possess practically nothing of its cultural heritage and the teachings of Christ play very little part in their lives.
The ‘second religiosity’ of the Christian West applies most conspicuously to the middle classes whose interests have, for the last two hundred years, been served by atheism. The upper classes, much of whose legitimacy (not to mention a great deal of whose entertainment) rests on forms of ritualistic pomp founded on tradition, have never wholly abandoned cultural Christianity, while the lower, sensate classes, for whom the church is still a vague irrelevance, have never fully dispensed with a kind of vague half-Christian spirituality (singing hymns at Christmas, getting married in a Church, praying to God) / half-pagan superstition (astrology, belief in ghosts, magical thinking) which serves social obligations and intuitive perceptions that the intellectual classes do not possess. To be sure, the sterile materialism of the intellectual classes also rests on superstitious beliefs (in absolute objectivity, in the conformity of thought to reality, and in the neutrality of science and technology), but until recently the ‘industrial bourgeoisie’ has had little need of either the objective identity or the subjective consolations of Christian belief.
In some respects, the return of religion in the West is a natural and very occasionally even laudable reaction to civilisational collapse. Self finds nothing good beyond itself—in its soulless atheism, in its failing institutions, in its crumbling cities, in its collapsing and self-consuming culture—and so it turns inwards, towards the subjective solace of religion, and backwards, towards its cultural traditions, in an endeavour to find something more enduring, more consoling, than the power it acquired through treating the universe as a lifeless mechanism. The unconscious ego however, unable to see beyond its self-created representations, becomes attached to the agreeable feelings of piety, humility and self-abnegation that religious devotion confers, to a schismogenetic need to define one’s social self in opposition to a threatening foreign culture and to the rituals, symbols and justifications of dogma2 . This is why Christianity is now becoming popular again, not because millions of people are suddenly able to perceive the glories of Christ’s Kingdom.
The justifying dogma of Christianity takes two forms, paternalistic and fraternalistic. Paternal Christianity, as we have seen, appears in the fire and brimstone denominations of Christian authoritarianism, seen in medieval Catholicism, in pre-modern Puritanism, in modern missionary Protestantism and in contemporary American and African Pentecostalism. Fraternal Christianity appears as the meek and mild quietist sects of medieval monasticism, as early modern Anabaptism, as the cosy, pipe-and-slippers Anglicanism of the twentieth century and as the progressive evangelicalism of ‘Christian Socialism’. As with all dichotomous social schisms, the truth—in this case the truth expressed by the founder of mystic Christianity, Jesus Christ, and by his most perceptive spokesmen—plays little more than an incidental role in the lives of the people today who call themselves ‘Christians’ but who have no interest in following Christ’s teachings, which are at best irrelevant to attending church, preaching the gospel, busying oneself with social work, interfering with people’s personal lives and putting a crucifix around one‘s neck; and, at worst, are an irritation and an embarrassment.
But what are these teachings? Why do Christians refuse to follow them? Why does the Church fear independent genius? How did Christ’s teaching of love become distorted into guilt, fear and social conformity? Why is it impossible to find a Christian who trusts in God? And what are the implications of this for the new upsurge of interest in joining the big Christian club?
‘There was only one Christian, and he died on the cross’
‘Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?’
Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.
Matthew 22:36-40 (also Mark 12:28–31 and Luke 10:25–28)
Got that? The number one commandment is to love God ‘with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind’. Have you ever met, or even heard of a Christian who did this, who actually followed the most important law of their teacher? Have you ever met a Christian who puts all their faith and love entirely into God’s hands? Who (like ‘the lilies of the fields’) does not fret for tomorrow, does not worry about money and does not lose sleep in hyper-anxiety for their possessions, their ambitions, their children and their selves? Who is light and joyous with love for the divine, and who shares that love with their friends, family and, most amazingly, their neighbours? Whose thankfulness to the Lord never leaves their lips, or their hearts? Have you ever met or heard of such a Christian? I haven’t, and the reason is very simple. They do not exist. Not just because Christians don’t love God, but because anyone who does finds himself not Christ’s student, but Christ’s equal.
This is the great sacrilege for Christians, that man can equal Christ. It is, in the Christian tradition, blasphemy to say, as the master did, that ‘I and the Father are one’. To suggest that Christ was, ultimately, not special, that his teaching was not an unreachable ideal, is an outrage to priestly authority, which has always insisted on coming between God and man, and to man himself, who loves to cower in his fallen state, exalt in his misery and justify his fretful mediocrity. And what better way to do this than to elevate special people into the unreachable heavens. He is a genius, she is a saint, Christ is the son of God—not little old me! I am selfish, lazy, dull of spirit, overwhelmed with small thoughts, prey to ignoble desires, unable to realise my finest instincts, slave to my emotions and locked within the prison of my mind. That’s who I am, and this is where I belong, because only special people can ever escape from the human condition, only geniuses and prophets. Which is why I fawn over them, and do nothing to free my self, a self that I love more than God.
Not that Christians are alone in refusing to follow the teaching they follow in name. A Hindu who actually ‘sees the Self in all beings and all beings in the Self’ and ‘acts without attachment to the fruits of action’, a Jew who actually ‘does justice, loves mercy, and walks humbly with his God’ and ‘does not bear a grudge against any of his people, but loves his neighbour as himself’, a Muslim who actually ‘places his trust wholly in God’ and ‘repels evil with that which is better’, are all as rare as a Christian who ‘turns the other cheek’ and ‘gives his cloak to the one who takes his coat‘.3 But of course they all have get-out clauses, such as the idea that their holy books ‘speak to the heart’ (i.e. offer the pillow of reassurance, rather than the sword of truth), or the vague sense that their teachers are not really supposed to be listened to, nor their teachings observed, but merely discussed, admired and mythologised. As William James reminds us, religion, for most people, ‘means immortality and nothing else.’ He could also have added group bonding and the agreeable feeling of being part of something bigger than oneself, a little like the pleasurable sense of being in a crowd of fellow football supporters, with the difference that the referee dresses up in a flamboyant costume and the crowd stands around celebrating its own victory. Thus can devotees lead the most sordidly materialist lives, anxious about their money, their careers, their comforts and their possessions and pursuing any goal that keeps their anxieties at bay for a few moments.4 Godless in all but name and secure in the comfort that someone else has vouchsafed their salvation.
Christians, like other club-members, worship themselves, not God. They worship their emotions, their ideas, their desires and their appetites which, in conflict with God, always come first. This is why the most important of Christ’s teachings are utterly baffling to Christians, such as his many parables which confound the moral logic of self. God, in Christ’s account, welcomes sinners (prostitutes, tax collectors, publicans), rewards the undeserving (those who work less than their fellows) and, perhaps most radically of (for the time Jesus preached in, as well as for modern Christians who ally their faith with ‘Western Civilisation’) God’s love is available to those outside the tribe (to Samaritans and Romans; even, shock-horror, to Muslims). Even more bizarrely, the Kingdom of God is compared by Christ to a mustard seed, to the leaven in bread and to the empty space beneath a lifted stone—to nothing at all. Finally, and most troublingly of all, Christ tells his disciples that heaven is spread out over the earth, but they see it not5 and that those who wish to know God should hate their family, give away all their wealth, become as little children, take no thought and ‘put on the perfect man’6. Jesus was not interested in intelligence, he was not interested in politics, certainly not in any kind of tribalism or ethno-nationalism, he was not interested in literalism, or any kind of mind-graspable morality or metaphysics, he said nothing that could be interpreted as sanctioning the bizarre hatred of the flesh that Christianity has always been given to,7 and he had absolutely no interest in personalities. All this, the weird, mystic—yet embodied—heart of Christianity, the actual lessons taught and example set by its originating genius, plays and has always played nothing more than a peripheral decorative role in the actual lives of Christians.
The genius of the greatest writers, artists and musicians working within the tradition of Christianity has not fared much better than that of Christ’s. To the degree that such people have succeeding in entertaining their fellows, to the degree that their work, by dint of its difficulty or remoteness, could be appropriated by later bourgeois intellects and to the degree that their message, such as it could be grasped, had little to do with the teachings of Christ, they have been recognised, patronised and honoured, but to the extent that their work has drawn from the same divine well as Christ—has sought to invert power, logic and worldly wisdom—they have been ignored, misunderstood, or quietly set aside. The genius—the mystic, the prophet, the uncompromising visionary—is tolerated only once his message has been softened into symbol, his words reduced to ornament. What remains is a ‘Christian tradition’—art, literature, music, philosophy—that few Christians have the slightest interest in, while those who do, attach themselves to anything and everything but its radical soul.8
The soul of Christianity—its mystic heart and its cultural mind—is radically different to both Christian ideological belief and to Christian institutional power, whether this belief and power appears in paternalist or fraternalist form. This is why Christian dogma, hand in hand with institutional authority, has always been so keen to crush genius, in much the same way that Jewish dogma and Roman authority crushed Christ himself. The Church—like all institutions, secular or religious—has always feared and hated genius, and defamed, ridiculed or persecuted it wherever it appeared. A great mind is as welcome in Christian society as an intelligent child in school, or a moral man in a court of law, and this has been the case from the very beginning of the Christian story. Even before modern institutions were formed to beat genius from the individual, before Christian missionaries preached heavenly love to subjugated natives, before great artists were marginalised or abused for their inspired mysticism, before radically independent sects were suppressed as heretical, and even before Christians themselves were crucified or burnt alive by the Roman empire, the spirit of Christ’s teaching was betrayed by his own so-called ‘evangelists’.
The ‘Genius of Hatred’
The evangelists—followers who Christ rebuked for not understanding him—wrote their ‘gospels’ between forty and seventy years after Jesus had died, adding personal interpretations which justified Christ’s ministry in terms of Jewish history (e.g. Matthew’s desire to make the story of Jesus echo that of Moses), or established the validity of their new ‘ekklesia’ (e.g. John’s critique of Judaism and Matthew’s foundation of apostolic authority), or interpreted the divinity and crucifixion of Jesus in doctrinal-mythical terms (e.g. John’s framing of the crucifixion as a symbolic sacrifice and later Gnostic reinterpretations of Jesus’ sayings), or adapted its message to appeal to broader audiences (e.g. Luke extending Jesus’ lineage back to Adam to emphasise his universal significance), or simply told a more interesting story (e.g. Mark’s ‘messianic secret’ narrative, in which Jesus’ identity is gradually disclosed, culminating in the ‘big reveal’ at Jerusalem). These interpretations naturally tend to clash with each other in a manner that the memorable sayings of Jesus and the morally bizarre foundation of his parables—the heart and soul of his teaching—do not; for the simple reason that they are, for the most part, inventions of Jesus’ interpreters, who neither shared nor understood the genius of their master and had no great wish to pass that down to others.
Nobody, however, did more violence to Christ’s teachings than the man called Paul of Tarsus, a strict authoritarian who persecuted Christians (cheerfully watching on as Stephen was stoned to death), never met Jesus, and came into frequent conflict with Christ’s disciples. Paul did nothing that Jesus would have done and said nothing that Jesus would have said. He gave the world the potent myth of Christ, to which he added his own pronouncements and justifications, which were radically at odds with those of his master. Imagine, for example, Jesus of Nazareth offering these sweet lessons to his disciples:
Children... obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.
(Colossians: 3:20)Servants, be submissive to your masters with all respect, not only to the kind and gentle but also to the overbearing.
(1 Peter 2:18)Be submissive to rulers and authorities… be obedient.
(Titus 3:1)As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands.
(Ephesians: 5:24)Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution.
(1 Peter: 2:13)Obey your leaders and submit to them.
(Hebrews: 13: 17)But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.
(1 Timothy 2:11:14)Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. He who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgement.
(Romans 13:1–2)
If this rabid authoritarianism and hatred of women (‘It is good for a man not to touch a woman’9) isn’t bad enough, consider the moral implications of 2 Thessalonians 3:10, ‘If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat.’ Consider why precisely the same message was preached by those famous avatars of compassion, Vladimir Lenin (‘He who does not work shall not eat’), Joseph Stalin (‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat’), Ronald Reagan (‘There is no free lunch’) and Margaret Thatcher (who quoted 2 Thessalonians 3:10 with approval). Consider how primal people treat ‘freeloaders’. Consider how the sun and the rain treat layabouts, benefit cheats and kids who play truant. Consider what Jesus Christ himself, who taught that those who do one hour’s work deserve the same pay as those who worked all day, would have made of Paul’s ‘moral’ precept. Consider, for a moment, what Jesus would have made of the real Lord of Christianity, Paul of Tarsus.10
But it gets worse. Jesus, you may remember, had little interest in sin. He forgave it wherever he went and happily consorted with prostitutes, publicans, tax collectors and the like. There is no evidence that he had a bad conscience or was concerned with his own sinfulness. Paul?
…just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned (For until the law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam…) Therefore, as through one man’s offence judgement came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man’s righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one Man’s obedience many will be made righteous.
Romans 5:12-19
This infamous idea, ‘original sin’—the idea that children are born into sin—has, over the centuries, poisoned millions upon millions of Christian souls, damning them to guilt while, at the same time, excusing the very sinfulness it is supposed to root out. Later Christians were quick to soften the moral atrocity of original sin, into being born merely ‘disposed’ to sinfulness, but in either case the implications are as obvious as they are monstrous. We can only guess at what Christ would have made of a belief which used his crucified body to justify eternal damnation to those who did not fall before it, while excusing the moral degradation of ‘sinners’ who could simply lay the blame on Adam and wash it away with a trip to the confessional booth. For Paul, and for all those with a bad conscience who followed (and still follow) him, Christ came as a good excuse.
Paul more or less assumed that he himself was Jesus to the Gentiles, with authority to speak for God as the Jesus he ignored had. Paul was unconcerned with the merely historical Jesus, or his teachings, only with Jesus the Christ, which is to say the ideological significance of ‘the saviour’s’ appearance and the soteriological myth of his birth, ministry, death and resurrection, based on the extremely powerful—and far more ancient—myth of the killed and resurrected god. That this myth may have been based on mythical or even literal truth11 is irrelevant here. The very real spiritual power of the immortal myth of the resurrected Christ, that believers feel when they read the Gospels, or kneel before the chalice and ciborium and drink the blood and eat the flesh of their dead god, none of this is a consequence, as Paul would have it, of a bizarre and sadistic ‘reconciliation’ effected by a God who allowed His only son (who is also Himself) to be brutally tortured in order to expiate the sins of humanity (sins which God sanctioned). Both the ritual and the myth would have the same power if they were translated into another culture; indeed they did have that power for the worshippers of Dionysus, Osiris and the god which may well have inspired Paul, Mithra,12 all of whom were killed and rose again, and whose symbolic bodies were ingested by supplicants, conferring upon them the same feeling as devout Catholics have during their bloody mass.
There is, despite what those religiously attached to humanist literalism assert, nothing wrong with fully identifying with ‘irrational’ myths or with participating in ‘illogical’ sacraments, which have much the same purpose and effect in Christianity as they do in any other religion; allowing the individual to selflessly participate in the shared representation his or her culture presents and, beyond that, in the depths of life itself, which can only appear to the human mind non-literally. As such, albeit on a debased, secular, spectacular level, fairy tales, superhero movies, prize ceremonies and popular sporting events serve similar, and largely benign (if usually childish), ends. The problem is not the ritual itself, nor the myth which sanctions it, even when this myth is patently ridiculous, but its subordination to literalist representation (which makes it worthy of blasphemy), to ideological dogma (which makes it worthy of heresy) and to institutional power (which makes it worthy of sacrilege), a subordination which is inevitable if the anti-literalist, anti-dogmatic and anti-institutional teaching of Christ is not seriously adhered to; as, following the example that Paul of Tarsus set, it is not.
Following Paul, one hears practically nothing of Christ’s radical message in Christian thought. The fraternal mind exalts his cheek-turning humility, his [alleged] doormat docility and the mythic image of the sacrificial lamb, in order to sanctify weakness and suffering as virtues in themselves, affirming what Nietzsche13 correctly condemned as the slave morality at the heart of Christianity. A value system born of resentment, which translates strength into the sin of ‘pride’, elevates meekness as a moral triumph and sanctions feeble passivity before injustice (a passivity which Jesus himself never enjoined14). Today, it is Christ’s radical charity that is most appealing to the fraternal, do-gooding instincts of the terminally institutionalised. As the first ever truly radical spiritual teaching—in that, sanctioned by Christ’s parable of the good Samaritan, it opposed state-tribal power from the very beginning—Christianity had a new kind of moral authority, which the Church was quick to exploit and co-opt: first through the iniquitous institutionalisation of charity of the medieval period, then through missionary expansionism of the modern era, and finally through the postmodern dissolution of national borders, all of which cheered on by the kind and loving Church, and its nice and lovely priests.
The paternal Christian psyche is a little different of course. This version of Christianity is much more interested in Jesus’ professed indifference to worldly affairs, in Paul’s maniacal authoritarianism, in the mystifying hocus-pocus and gruesome table-turning which the book of Revelations celebrates and, needless to say, in the brutally sadistic (and horrendously remote) God of the Hebrews, all invoked in order to justify ethno-nationalist fantasies of ‘Christendom’ and to suppress actual culture—the living, vernacular culture of the peoples of the world—wherever it appeared. Paternalist Christianity is interested in suppressing, overriding and extirpating anything which smacks of independence, innocence or otherness. Where fraternalism, which cleaves to the mild, pacifistic Christ of the gospels, never rests in its zeal to smooth out deviant individuality in the name of professional beneficence, paternalism, drawing its inspiration from the furious mythologising of Paul, is indefatigable in its mission to control, dominate or destroy that which upsets its obsessive proselytising and self-righteous guilt.
It is clear that Jesus Christ, if we can see through the obfuscating fog of his interpreters to his basic character and message, would have had none of this, which was why, during his ministry, he accumulated no more than twelve followers,15 and why the Lamb-and-Lion Church that taught and fought for masochists and sadists the world over in Christ’s name, has acquired two billion adherents. When this two billion speak of ‘being a good Christian’ they may be looking back to a rosy time when the church was all powerful and the lower sorts knew their place, or they may be enjoying the warm, reassuring feeling that performing Christian rituals confers, or they might be recollecting all the lovely old churches of Europe they’ve visited, or they might be enjoying a living relationship with God through the symbolic form of Jesus Christ, or they might be thinking of the wonderful story of Jesus, or the exciting tales of the apostles and early saints,16 or they might be resting in the arms of an ethics that simultaneously justifies and excuses sin. Who knows? Most likely, it’s a vague amalgam of all of those things, combined with their friendship with nice, fellow Christians. What they are almost certainly not talking about is the culture of Christianity, of which they are nearly always completely ignorant,17 and what they are definitely not speaking of, is the actual message of Christ, which they never follow and which, actually, they fear and hate.
Conclusion: Are We Christians?
It should be clear by now that it is impossible to be a Christian for anyone other than Jesus Christ. But what Christ taught was not that you must be a Christian, but that you must be Christ. You must be free of the horrors of guilt, anger and fear, free of fraternal masochism and paternal sadism and free of the mental-emotional ignorance that confines you to a mortal self-informed self. If, then, you honour your teacher, Jesus Christ, with your love, if you enjoy the myth of his life and the truth of his teachings, if you follow those teachings—above all if you love God ‘with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind’—and that inspires you to associate with others who do the same, and to express your love in your life and work, and if all this, drawing from the inspiration of those geniuses who have gone before you, all the Christian artists and writers who helped form Western culture, if that gives you the sense of being a Christian, well that’s fair enough.
In this limited sense we in the West are indeed all Christians, or, once we’ve torn out the psychological horrors of Paulism, potentially so. But we are also, quite obviously, much more than Christians. We are children of our land (with its food, its weather, its language, its mores, its history, its people and its pagan myths), we are humanists (Greek thought has influenced the European mind as much if not more than Hebrew and Christian religious ideas) and we are conscious men and women, unique flowers, irreducible to any collective ideology. Once we have divested ourselves of the bodiless, postmodern hyper-self which has severed our link to our land and our people, once we have rediscovered the healthy modesty of our humanist ideals, once we have reunited with our conscious experience as ordinary and extraordinary men and women, we might find that we have a new, deeper love for the astonishing teachings and example of Jesus of Nazareth, for the extraordinarily potent myth of his death and resurrection, and for the beautiful art and almost impossibly rich culture of the Christian West.
We might not though. Let’s see.
Roll credits
With the formed state, high history also lays itself down weary to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, adhering to the soil, dumb and enduring… And while in high places there is eternal alternance of victory and defeat, those in the depths pray, pray with that mighty piety of the Second Religiousness that has overcome all doubts forever. There, in the souls, world peace, the peace of God, the bliss of gray haired monks and hermits, is become actual — and there alone. It has awakened that depth in the endurance of suffering which the historical man in the thousand years of his development has never known. Only with the end of grand History does holy, still Being reappear. It is a drama noble in its aimlessness, noble and aimless as the course of the stars, the rotation of the earth, and alternance of land and sea, of ice and virgin forest upon its face. We may marvel at it or we may lament it—but it is there.
Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West
We are speaking here of Christianity, but various other forms of spiritualism may serve in this respect, particularly Buddhism and modern paganism.
Occultism and Spiritualism, Hindu philosophies, metaphysical inquisitiveness under Christian or pagan colouring, all of which were despised in the Darwinian period, are coming up again. It is the spirit of Rome in the Age of Augustus. Out of satiety of life, men take refuge from civilisation in the more primitive parts of the earth, in vagabondage, in suicide. The flight of the born leader from the machine is beginning
Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West
Quotes from Bhagavad Gita 6:29, 2:47; Micah 6:8; Leviticus 19:18; Qur’an 3:159, 41:34; Matthew 5:39–40.
Russell (from Unpopular Essays):
Whose authority? The Old Testament? The New Testament? The Koran? People choose the book considered holy by the community in which they are born, and out of that book they choose the parts they like, ignoring the others.
This appears in Thomas, but the original Greek of Christ’s famous dictum (Luke 17:21) that the Kingdom of Heaven is within is (I have it on good authority) ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ ἐντὸς ὑμῶν ἐστίν, where the word for ‘within,’ ἐντός, does not refer to a subjective state, but a panjective one—it also means around (or among).
This is from Thomas 37. Luke 6:40 expresses the same idea;
The disciple is not above his master: but every one that is perfect shall be as his master.
This is the older KJV translation. Modern versions translate the word κατηρτισμένος not as ‘perfect’ but as ‘perfectly trained’ which is, at the very least, misleading, and, more than likely, an appalling distortion of Christ’s original intention, to set his disciples free… including from his own teaching. It would be very strange indeed if Jesus Christ had taken a stance so different in this respect from that of the Buddha, Chuang Tzu, Socrates, Meister Eckhart, Krishnamurti, Barry Long and many other spiritual masters.
Jacques Ellul points out that there is much secular misunderstanding on this point;
We moderns have a very false idea of what Christians believed in the third or the eleventh centuries. We are used to reading that the Greeks separated body and soul and that the Christians followed suit; we find the theologians constantly repeating the same texts about contempt for the body and the need for asceticism; we know that since the eighteenth century the bourgeoisie have turned Christianity into a disembodied wraith. Therefore we are convinced that this is how the Christians of every period lived and thought, right down to our day.
Jacques Ellul, The New Demons
True, but Ellul goes too far. Medieval Christian thinkers were often maniacally puritanical in their mission to ‘mortify the flesh’.
Consider, as one example of many, the fate of William Blake, almost completely ignored during his lifetime, ridiculed and mocked, but now the darling of the comfortable middle class.
1 Corinthians 7. He goes on to say that he, Paul, is spiritually powerful enough to resist women, but ordinary folk had better get married, ‘for it is better to marry than to burn’. George Bernard Shaw clarifies the implications…
This… led [Paul] to insist that a wife should be rather a slave than a partner, her real function being, not to engage a man’s love and loyalty, but on the contrary to release them for God by relieving the man of all preoccupation with sex just as in her capacity of housekeeper and cook she relieves his preoccupation with hunger by the simple expedient of satisfying his appetite.
I assume it goes without saying that it is indeed wrong to steal the labour of others, and to leech wealth from the productivity of the working class. The point here is what monstrous iniquities are justified by prohibiting laziness, shirking and a refusal, or even disinclination, to work. It may indeed make sense within the limited and artificial constraints of a capitalist economy to complain that this fella is doing all the work while that one lounges around smoking fags, but Christ’s moral ambitions were a tad higher.
It’s not impossible for someone who has died to reach across the veil in some way, particularly if the dead person was particularly conscious, as Christ was.
Not in its developed form though, which appeared after Paul. Most likely Paul drew from the same ritualistic-mythic source as the Mithra cult.
Who, don’t forget, admired Christ.
Christ’s injunction to ‘resist not evil’ appeared in translation—the original Greek term for ‘resist’ (ἀντιστῆναι) suggests violent insurrection. Christ, as evidenced in his attack on the money lenders, advocated militant non-violence. His commands to ‘turn the other cheek’ and to ‘hand over your cloak’ to an aggressor were, arguably, artful strategies of resistance: in their cultural context, both acts would have shamed the oppressor; the first by exposing the insult of a backhanded slap, and the second by forcing him to face the indignity of another man’s nakedness.
Actually, twelve is very unlikely, for obvious reasons. The bible mentions 72 (Luke 10:1) and there were probably more than that. But you get my point.
Although, again, they’ll sort of skid past any passages that seem a bit uncomfortable or ‘unrealistic’. Take this passage from Acts 4:32-35, a good description of how the early followers of Christ understood how a church should be run.
All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.
Ever come across a church like this? Ever heard a Christian saying the church should be like this?
One hears right-wingers speak of ‘Western Civilisation’, without having a clue what it means.