A Response to Marek Glogoczowski's Open Letter to Michael
Jones and Israel Adam Shamir
by Ken Freeland
Now that Dr.
Glogoczowski's piece, subtitled "The Poisoning of the Earth by Ahriman’s
Inspired Fairy Tales of Redemption and Natural Selection," is available on
Shamir's website in clearer English
http://www.israelshamir.net/Contributors/rd4.htm, I would like to make a
lengthy response to this very provocative dissertation by the good doctor.
If I wished
to be critical, there are many parts of his desultory piece I could challenge:
Off the bat, for example, Dr. Glogoczowski (whom I will hereinafter refer to as
Marek not out of lack of respect, but simply because his first name is so much
easier to spell) asserts that Original Sin consisted of natural human curiosity
about good and evil, or, as his beloved Greek philosophers might put it, by
curiosity about the nature of the good. More recently, I read a piece by
another author who more plausibly asserted that Original Sin consisted instead
of putting self-serving, rationalized definitions of good and evil in place of
the innate, God-given principles of right and wrong. I think the case can
easily be made that Jesus is all about trying to restore awareness of the
latter, not about obscuring them, and certainly the prologue to John's Gospel
indicates as much. Later in Marek's piece, we are treated to an argument that
innocent minds, like those of his students, prefer the Muslim/Marcionite version
of Christ's death to the standard Christian one…as if this made some kind of
difference. The question of whether Jesus was crucified or not can hardly be
settled by voice vote of a group of young student. Unless we wish to throw the
baby out with the bathwater we must be concerned here with the matter of
historicity, and not of which version of Christ's death gives us the most warm
fuzzies. I found impressive his later, somewhat philological arguments that the
Bible served as a meta-framework for the theory of evolution, yet I would hasten
to add that the participants in the Scopes "monkey trial" would scarcely have
thought so!
But all of
these points of Marek's that are so susceptible to criticism are really beside
the point, because the gist of what he is really about in this piece hasn’t got
all that much to do with them, and can stand or fall on its own without respect
to any of them (though we can certainly see how they are related: He is trying
to adumbrate the repercussions of his central thesis as it plays out in
intellectual and historical terms). What he is chiefly about here is the
exposition of an ethical (we must say in fairness, possible)
contradiction at the heart of the Old Testament, and of the New Testament to the
extent that Jesus' crucifixion and death are regarded as sacrificial and
salvific, following the example of Abraham and the sacrificial tradition of the
OT.
I identify
three theses at the base Marek's piece:
1) The OT god
is not the same as the Christian God, and is in fact antithetical to it (the
Marcionite "heresy" )
2) Jesus'
death was not sacrificial in the sense in which mainstream Christianity tends to
project it (as in "Jesus died for your sins")
3) The claim
that the crucifixion of Jesus ( an evil thing) is somehow productive of good has
warped the Christian ethical sense (or perhaps, more accurately, its
teleological sense) in a way that has resulted in later attempts by Christians
to do evil so that good may result from the suffering of the innocent, which
suffering is seen to reflect the atonement wrought by the "sacrifice" of the
innocent Lamb, Jesus, a practice destructive to human life and ecology. (In
other words, once people internalize this deleterious belief about the past
sacrifice of Jesus, they tend to effect its recapitulation in the present.)
The first
thesis, as Marek wryly notes, is commonly appellated the Marcionist "heresy,"
of which some of his colleagues consider him a votary.
The second,
which I shall deal with at greater length below, points to a problematic ethic,
but one which Marek appears to want to circumvent by suggesting that the
historicity of Jesus' suffering and death is in itself problematic , which if
true completely moots the question.
And the third
is perhaps the most poignant of his theses, as it takes up much of his argument
where he points to historical crimes allegedly perpetrated on its basis.
Let me admit
at the outset that I am at least a little sympathetic to all of these theses.
And that I say this not as an unbeliever, but as one who, to use Marek's words,
would like to see a Christianity corrupted by unchristian ideas "renovat[ed]
along ideas (the 'Logos') outlined by Jesus as reported by the Gospels." But of
course, these same Gospels all report the crucifixion of Jesus as a real (not
imaginary or illusory) event, so to the extent that Marek wishes to be a pure
Marcionist and challenge the historicity of this event, I must part ways with
him. Yet Marek performs an enormous service by introducing the conclusions of
apostate Catholic priest Weclawski and their implications:
The reason for his painful apostasy (Weclawski
had to change his name in order to avoid harassment in Poland) was his
realization that the Catholic Church has become an institution completely
different from the one Jesus of Nazareth wanted to set up. In a short communiqué
published by the Polish media we read that according to Weclawski “Jesus was
defeated in his battle for the reconstruction of the existing (in Israel at his
time) socio-religious hierarchy. He become a victim of messianic expectations,
which led to his rejection by the elite, and to his condemnation to death. But
Jesus’ most painful defeat happened after his crucification – it was the
interpretation of his defeat as a sacrifice.”
Indeed, these Three Great Defeats, which Jesus
of Nazareth suffered in Israelo-Palestine two thousands years ago, bear enormous
consequences on the fate of the planet, taken as a whole:
1st. The New Testament of Arhiman’s Evil People
suggests that no revolt is possible against the clique of “robbers and thieves”
atop the Chosen People flock.
2nd. The NT warns that everyone who attempts to
fight for more just social relations – and for a clear vision of how society
works – will be condemned as a criminal, and mercilessly punished.
3rd. It informs us that precisely those
enterprising individuals, like St. Paul and his hidden masters, who have
organized the Calvary of the truth-telling Galilean, by turning it into a
sacrifice, have managed to impose themselves as the Pastors of naive Christians.
It is
obvious from even the most cursory reading of the Gospels that Jesus had a clear
mission (inaugurating the Kingdom of God/ Kingdom of Heaven) and that he failed
to accomplish it during his brief lifetime. This is the signature tragedy of
the life of Jesus, which recalls at points the tragic life and death of
Socrates. Whether or not we agree with Weclawski's second contention about the
reason for this failure, it is the alleged third, posthumous failure (or
"defeat") he asserts that is most relevant. Was the "sacrificial"
interpretation of Jesus' death integral to his mission, or was it a subversive
overlay introduced by Paul and other epistle writers? It is difficult to
imagine a more poignant historico-critical question.
Now since
what we are ultimately seeking, as Marek formulates it, is a Christianity
"renovat[ed] along ideas (the 'Logos') outlined by Jesus as reported by the
Gospels," it can only be to the Gospels that we turn to answer this question.
And so, to some relevant exegesis.
Before
treating the question of sacrifice in a Christian or any other context, though,
due consideration must be given to the work of Rene Girard, and his
groundbreaking theory of sacral violence visited on a scapegoat as a primitive
means, however vile and vicious, of providing a foundation for social stability
in the bellum omnia contra omnes. The scope of my response to Marek here
will not allow for treatment of Girard's hypothesis, but we do not in any way
challenge it by noting that Jesus, in the Gospels, is not concerned with the
possible social benefit of sacrifice. I cannot now recall all the writers
familiar to me who have considered this question, but the long and the short of
their conclusions is that Jesus appears to have considered the Temple sacrifice
cult a kind of racket. His implicit (and occasionally explicit, Matt 9:13;
12:17) challenge to it is the only plausible explanation for the mortal enmity
towards him of the Sadducees, the franchisees of the Temple sacrifice cult. The
cleansing of the Temple, a central act of Jesus shortly before his execution,
certainly bears greater witness than mere words ever could to his attitude
towards this practice. And while he seems at times to have condoned the
sacrificial ritual as an ingrained cultural habit of his audience, he never in
the course of his preaching allows that it has any value apart from the
rectification of social relations which must be its concomitant. The
pericopes in which Jesus makes this clear in the Gospels are almost
supernumerary. Jesus was constantly focusing on psycho-socio-spiritual health,
to which he obviously considered the Temple rites at best ancillary. Obviously,
his attitude did not stand well with the Temple authorities, who sought to
preserve their racket against this rabble-rousing Upstart.
Clearly Jesus
was ultimately challenging the whole ethic of Temple sacrifice, holding out
instead for social healing and reconciliation which remain the fundamental
values of authentic Christianity -- the values of practical agape. Is
it conceivable, then, that the Man who stood for these practical spiritual
principles over the empty rites of atoning sacrifice could have thought that his
own sacrifice of himself was called for to propitiate the same angry god? Did
Jesus experience a last-minute change of heart so that , like the writer of the
Epistle to the Hebrews, he thought that only a human sacrifice could seal the
deal with God that his New Covenant required? (In what way was it really "new"
then?) The most plausible argument for this theory is Rene Girard's: that by
allowing/provoking the Jewish authorities to scapegoat him, Jesus was exposing
the corrupt nature of the whole sacrificial cult, of which he was made the
ultimate victim -- all necessary in order to explicate the vile process. But
the alternative, that Jesus had no such intention and regarded sacrifice as an
abomination to the authentic relationship with a loving, forgiving Father he
himself modeled is ably represented here by Weclawski et al. : He argues that
it is only the reactionaries (such as Paul the Pharisee), lacking any other
paradigm than the sacrificial relationship to God, who overlayed the tragedy of
Jesus' death with a triumphalist sacrificial meaning, thus exploiting it to
restore the very propitiatory relationship to God that Jesus had quite openly
challenged. But while the Gospels are chockful of evidence that Jesus was no
believer in the efficacy of the sacrificial cult, there are nevertheless those
words attributed to him at the Last Supper, where traditional theologians
traditionally have argued that Jesus is consciously presaging a bloody sacrifice
of Himself in order to seal the New Covenant, and these form the central ritual
of the Catholic Mass, which is therefore termed by ecclesiastical authorities
"the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass."
Let us leave
this controversy aside and move on to consider Marek's third thesis: Can good
result from an evil, or is this notion contradictory? Is this the way God works
historically? What did Jesus have to say about this? I believe Jesus taught
clearly on this question in his favorite pedagogical form: the parable
of the fig tree and the thistles. Jesus likens the good and those who do it to
a fig and a fig tree, and evildoers and their product as thistles and thorns.
He argues quite clearly that you cannot get good from evil, any more than you
can get figs from thistles. This moral dichotomy is echoed in many other parts
of the Gospel, perhaps most notably when Jesus is infamously accused by his
enemies of driving out devils by the power of Beelzebub. Jesus challenges his
accusers by reasserting the integrity of evil and the integrity of good: you
cannot drive out Satan with Satan…a house divided cannot long stand. Moreover,
in this particular passage he underscores the importance of this principle,
because he condemns as the one unforgivable sin the (willful?) misidentification
of good as evil (and presumably the reverse as well). One may further
conjecture that this is because such action disables the very moral compass by
which man can correct himself (what Marek earlier alludes to as the natural
capacity to discern ethical truth). But whatever the reason, Jesus is
underscoring that good and evil are neither confluent nor congruent, and that to
(deliberately?) confuse one with the other is the gravest sin of which man is
capable. So in his third thesis here, I believe Marek is walking on extremely
solid ground, at least as far as the Gospel texts are concerned. But this
brings us back to the conundrum of his previous thesis: if good cannot come
from evil (and it would appear that Jesus taught quite clearly that it cannot),
how then can the evil done to Jesus be productive of saving good? And how could
Jesus have believed that this would be the case… does it not stand in the face
of his "identity principle" of good and evil? This contradiction is so extreme
that one is almost tempted to argue that there are two Christs here: one who
idealistically preaches the "unum necessarium" as a possibility for all men to
choose over corrosive worldly values, thereby gaining entrance to the Kingdom of
Heaven which is "within" -- the other a somewhat cynical Christ who simply
bides his time, knowing full well that in the end his very life will have to be
brutally sacrificed as the only way to fulfil certain obscure Old Testament
prophecies and to seal a new covenant with a God who might otherwise not be so
forgiving of ubiquitously sinful man. I am not sure that reason can take us any
further than recognizing that a contradiction exists here. It is important to
note this contradiction, but whether it is historically real, or whether it is
the result of later interpolation by scribes or missionaries with a regressive
agenda, as suggested by Weclawski, is a matter for extensive debate for
biblical scholars that would take us quite beyond the limited scope of this
response.
But let us
leave off these questions and consider for a moment the historical significance
of the "Jesus revolution." The Old Testament books are themselves a hodgepodge
of many, sometimes very contradictory, beliefs and opinions (not to mention
problematic histories). But essentially there is one contradiction that
especially concerns Christians: The Old Testament god is of course vindictive,
jealous and extraordinarily violent….an all-punishing kind of god. His "chosen
people" are steeped in what must be termed exophobia, fear and hatred for all
that is different from their own belief system. In the course of time, however,
a second tradition springs up alongside of it, which is called the "prophetic"
tradition. While this is also a mixed bag, in the fullness of time it develops
a kind of cohesion around principles of social justice, equality before God's
law, and preaches a causal relationship between the virtue of the Israelite
citizenry, and the ultimate success of the state. The ancient belief was that
military success was given by Yahweh, and that social welfare followed as a
consequence. The prophetic tradition increasingly argued the opposite: that it
is precisely the level of social justice manifest by the people that determines
the social integrity and therefore ultimate success of the state, the outward
manifestation of the people. Still, these two tendencies subsisted side by side
in the Judaic tradition, and the social justice mandate itself was limited in
its application to the traditional tribe….one's fellow Hebrews Now Jesus does
certainly assert that he, like the John the Baptist before him, stands in
succession to the prophetic tradition, but unlike all of the earlier prophets
(from some of whom he freely borrows), he is NOT willing to tolerate the
opposing school of thought. It is in this light that we best understand his
often misunderstood statement that he came "not to bring peace but a sword."
These two traditions, in his view, are incompatible, and one must clearly
separate them and choose between them, even though this will lead to serious
social division. And so he maximizes the social justice ethic of the
later prophetic tradition to the point where it alone has ethical value (and in
fact a universal, not merely tribal, ethical value) so that exophobia is
categorically and explicitly rejected, and exophilia takes its place. The
agape of Christianity is exactly that: universal love. All mankind are
included in its sweep, and there is no ground left for the old exophobia. Jesus
warns that those who continue the old tradition (and he knows many will) must
face calamity in the inevitable clash with stronger outsiders, such as the
then-dominant Roman empire. And this comes to pass, exactly as Jesus has
prophetically predicted, in 70 AD.
Now, this is
an important precursor to our large questions, because those who conspired
against Jesus and brought about his execution, the Pharisees in particular,
gained de facto political control of Judaism after the destruction of the
Temple, which destroyed the power base of their rivals, the Saducees and their
sacrficial cult. The new Judaism was based on the oral traditions, the same
ones Jesus had remonstrated against because they were used to supplant the Law
of God, and these were eventually formulated in the Talmud, which is now the
principal scriptural authority of Judaism. Its essence is exophobic, and it
represents the survival of that branch or tradition of Judaism which Jesus
categorically rejected, and which in turn, necessarily, rejected Him. It harks
back to a god of ethnocentrism and malevolence towards all who are not part of
their biblical "tribe." The same god that tells them to love their friends and
hate their enemies, and not only hate them but exterminate them root and
branch. That Jesus explicitly repudiated this posturing tells us that Marcion
was not far off the mark…the same god that tells his people to exterminate all
their heretical neighbors cannot be the same Father of Jesus who commanded us to
love our enemies. There is just no way to reasonably reconcile these two gods.
It is remarked in the Gospels that the people hearkened to Jesus because he did
NOT teach as the scribes and Pharisees (i.e., by citing unchallengable
precedent), but "as one having authority," in other words, as one whose
teachings were independent of that entire legal tradition. This is the moral
revolution wrought by Jesus for everyone who had eyes to see and ears to hear.
But of course, insofar as he moved people AWAY from the desire for the violent
conquest of power, he was, in the view of the traditionalist leaders, an "
anti-messiah.” Because they were seeking a military hero/leader, one who would
vanquish the Romans and the rest of the gentile powers. And Jesus had not the
slightest interest in that (as he tried to convey to Pilate). In any case, we
must see that both of these traditions, the late prophetic tradition
revolutionized and universalized by Jesus of Nazareth, and the contrary
exophobic tradition amplified by the Pharisees and their allies, continue today
in the form of radical Christianity on the one hand, and Talmudic Judaism on the
other. These two make OPPOSING claims to the nature of God and to the moral
obligations of man, that form the real "clash of civilizations" in today's
world. It is, at base, less of a political struggle (though its poltical
ramifications are real enough) than it is a moral struggle between two
diametrically opposed world views which are, as Jesus was the first to argue,
totally incompatible. The universal ethic of Christianity, however much
breached in practice, can never be reconciled with the exclusivist,
particularist mania that permeates the Talmud. And while it is certainly
important to examine contradictions that may be located within Christian
doxology, they pale by comparison with this far more important OPPOSITION that
must never be lost sight of. It is a foundational truth of Christianity, and is
still playing itself out in the contemporary world.
It seems
likely that Marek is correct in asserting that if the sacrificial interpretation
of Jesus' execution is abandoned, then recognition of his various "defeats"
must follow. An interesting exercise, perhaps grist for another essay, would be
an existential analysis of a Christianity which openly recognized these defeats,
at the same time that it recognized for this very reason the heightened
importance of continuing Jesus' struggle today, in memoriam, as it were.
It is unfortunately impossible for reasonable people to deny that evil has not
been vanquished from the earth since Jesus' crucifixion. That being the case,
how efficacious can his "sacrifice" have been, if we observe evil flourishing
in the world today as never before, and often perpetrated by the spiritual heirs
of the same people who orchestrated the evil against Jesus two millenia ago?
Such a streamlined Christianity would recognize the extreme heroism of Jesus,
who remained faithful to his alternative divinity even to the point of incurring
the death penalty for it. In this respect, even if in no other, he truly
conquered "death," which can be reinterpreted as the hold over us that
oppressive religious and political forces maintain by the THREAT of death
(which can be extrapolated to the lesser threats we see them using more commonly
in the contemporary world). Jesus would remain as the paragon of the good life,
or as he himself put it, " the way, the truth and the light." Such a
down-to-earth Christianity would not be expecting miracles at every turn, but
for that very reason would be clearer about those who obstruct progress to the
Kingdom of Heaven today with their earthly power structures, whose methodologies
are ethically opposed to those of the Man from Galilee and his followers. Would
this be throwing the baby out with the bathwater? We can expect mainstream
Christian religious leaders to tell us that it is, but after all, the rituals of
Christianity are what provide them stature (as noted by Marek) and sustenance.
Reasonable people must independently ask themselves, which Christianity best
approximates the life and teachings of Jesus? Which would he vote for? Which
gives us the clearest and most useful understanding of good and evil in the
world today, and the actual relative power of both? These and related questions
will not trouble rational Christians, but serve as useful guideposts in deciding
such matters.
On the issue
raised by Marek about whether Christianity opposes moral reason, I would suggest
that the Natural Law thinking of the medieval Scholiasts demonstrates otherwise
(of course, to be fair, this did come after the introduction of Aristotle to the
curriculum). But it must be noted in passing that Jesus himself constantly
appealed to (and therefore honoring and recognizing, we might rather say,
empowering) human moral reason. How else are we to understand the questions he
posed to his listeners, such as "What does it profit a man to gain the world and
lose his soul?" Every Christian understands that question and its answer fully,
but that answer requires the use of moral reason, not blind faith. Indeed, at
one point Jesus remonstrates his audience for NOT using their moral reason:
“Yea, and why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?”
Luke 12:57 I am reminded here of the engraving on the cornerstone of a
church I once passed: "Religious maturity is having a faith worth trying to
understand." I think Jesus would be the first to agree.
In any case,
it is my hope that others on Shamir's list will contribute to this dialogue, and
that Marek will continue his invaluable contribution to it. The issue is not an
easy one, but once provoked commands our attention to resolve it. Marek is to
be commended for his boldness in raising it, but it is up to the rest of us to
respond to his challenge.
