One of the best students I ever had was Neil Elliott. I knew he had gone to Princeton Theological Seminary after graduating from Pepperdine, but lost track of him subsequently. After nearly forty years, it is a remarkable joy that he has turned out to be my brilliant and helpful acquisitions editor at Lexington Books/Fortress Academic as well as a recognized scholar of the thought of the Apostle Paul. Gayla Freeman, his assistant editor, has also been a real asset in assisting me with logistics and understanding the whole process. I would like to express my great appreciation to them for their patience and encouragement, and to Julie E. Kirsch, vice president of publishing at Lexington Books, for the commitment to publish my research, as well as the assistance to Ashleigh Cooke, Assoc. Production Editor with Rowman and Littlefield, and Hariharan Siva, Project Manager of Deanta.
I wish to express gratitude to the following authors and publishers for giving permission to reprint short quotations from their works:
Rubenstein, Richard L. After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism. Second Edition. pp. xii, 3, 13, 17–18, 24–28, 43, 47, 143, 146–149, 158, 172–174, 179, 200, 208, 243, 245, 250, 255, 261, 264, 297, 303–304. © 1966, 1992 Richard L. Rubenstein. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus—God and Man, translated by Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe. Copyright © 1968, reprinted with permission of Westminster/John Knox Press.
Twenty-seven quotations (726 words) from The Birth of Christianity by John Dominic Crossan. Copyright © 1998 by John Dominic Crossan. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (491 words) from The Brothers Karamazov, translated by David McDuff. Translation and editorial material copyright © David McDuff, 1993, 2003. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
NOTE
1. Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again (New York: Harper Perennial Classic, 1998), p. 666.
The “Camel” Burdened with a Metaphysical Absolute
As physicist Sean Carroll summarized in his profound book From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, “it’s most likely that our future is absolutely unlike our past.”1 So I make no predictions about the future. But if he is correct, we humans cannot depend upon our past to relevantly address the future. Inasmuch as time produces change, and humanity is becoming more interdependent, single cultural pasts will prove ill equipped to provide guidance for a new global culture. While global warming could perhaps already spell out the demise of humanity, if it or other more natural causes do not, the survival of humanity will rest upon human relations themselves. If human relations can easily determine whether humanity survives or obliterates itself, some universal guidelines on ethics must be found and voluntarily embraced by all people.
Whether “humanity will survive religion” would be a moot question if we continue to answer it from the past, since many times during the past several centuries, the demise of religion has been predicted, but it did not happen. However, we no longer live in the worldview of ancient times and no longer base our knowledge on a “metaphysics of infinity,” so our present is as separated from our past perhaps as much as our future will be separated from our present. Science does not attempt to be guided by understandings that are five or ten centuries old, nor do multinational corporations, political structures, or governments. When the U.S. Constitution is still paid lip service as the determining document for present U.S. citizens, that can be true only by ignoring such essential differences as the place occupied in that Constitution by women and non-white people, the simple business structures and governmental structures envisioned within the document, and the degree of global independence it envisioned. But at least it provides the possibilities of formal amendments.
Religions, however, are the single exception, insisting that some spectacular or miraculous event in the past is and must be the guide for all people from then on. The religions that dominate the greatest number of people on earth today range in age between 1,400 and 3,500 years, with their professed traditions pre-dating that from a couple of millennia to what they refer to as myriads and myriads of years. In several of these religions, the basic position is that they have not ever changed essentially and, further, that they should never be expected to. That presupposition creates a tremendous cognitive burden because of the tension it creates between the worldviews of the ancient religion and its ethics vis-à-vis the modern world with its ever-changing natural and human sciences. The chasm between that which is regarded as Absolute and a worldview based on relativity creates no victors, only victims.
The issue is not one between the good guys and the bad guys. The title of this book is not defining “religion” as a degenerate, perverted, or destructive force, and humanity as the innocent ideal. Religion, after all, was articulated by humanity. In fact, many people seem persuaded that were it not for religion, humanity would have no ethical motivation whatever. To try to solve the problem by exaggerating the virtues or flaws of either side, to try to decide which side is good or bad, is to miss the cause of the division. All human institutions involve ambiguity, and that includes moral ambiguity. The question is also not simply whether a religion will motivate people to physically force others to convert or die, though such a method is not uncommon in the history of religions. The cause of the division and therefore problem is the absolutizing or setting one’s answer or position beyond all legitimate human questioning.
The real issues are (1) whether diverse ancient Absolute ethics grounded in ancient religious metaphysics, or their equivalents, can be compatible with any different positions rather than divisive, or (2) whether they even have any credibility to heal our present social dehumanizing wounds. Even prior to any question of human behavior or the ethics of relationships among humans lies a more fundamental, though connected concern about what the problem is when a huge area of one’s life and inquiry is answered by an institution, and the institution makes it off-limits to question. It is Absolute, not open to negotiation or alterations or innovative thinking. That challenges two elements that are vital parts of the humanization process. First, it prohibits autonomy, thinking for oneself, becoming a law for oneself, deciding for oneself. Second, it ignores the diversity of perspectives one can observe on nearly any major inquiry or subject, as well as the relativity of the knowledge manifest in each. If humans need to realize their humanity, then both relativity as well as autonomy have to be acknowledged and accommodated. Most religious institutions have done neither.
This book is formed not as a negative indictment of any or all religions, but asking a question of whether such exclusive ethics based on exclusive and divisive metaphysics can really solve the world’s problems, or whether the divisive Absolutes will create such cognitive dissonance that it will take its toll on the whole humanization process. We can only explore some of the most obvious burdens within our present religious situation and process, to see possible clues for a possibly better future.
Life as we experience it is always in process. To try to stop the process, to desire to see ourselves static, is to flirt with neurosis. In our present scientific age, we recognize that humans are always in a process of becoming, and of forming themselves as their own unique “project” as Sartre called it. A part of that becoming includes the entropy, but entropy also spells out our