A BRIEF APOLOGIA (FOR THE MYSTERY OF THE INCARNATION)

Tom likes what I wrote about freedom ("I agree!" his blog exclaims) but has more questions:

There's actually only one rule, and it's such a simple rule, yet it makes so little sense that many people have a hard time following it: believe that Jesus is the son of God. What does belief in Christ's divinity give you except a pass into Heaven? If there are earthly reasons for believing such a thing, they sure aren't apparent.

Well, point taken. My intellectual journey to the Christian creed (by which I mean, not how I arrived at it as a biographical matter, but how I would go about rebuilding it if challenged to make a Descartes-style doubt-everything move and then re-justify my beliefs) has a few steps: 1) the existence (and nature) of God, 2) the moral order of the world, 3) the fallen-ness of the world (from that moral order), 4) the hope of redemption... and only then 5) that in Jesus Christ God was made incarnate and suffered for our sins to bring about the atonement and redemption of the world. The first four I take to be prove-able, at any rate in a loose sense and to my own satisfaction; the fifth, though always retains the character of an intellectual gambit, a mystery, in which faith, which begins as the mundane (though strange and wonderful if you think about it) belief in patterns to render (practically indispensable) inductive reasoning legitimate, turns into an acrobat, climbing an ascending tightrope into the Light; and while I sometimes dare to follow for a little ways, I always lose my balance and sooner or later (usually sooner) fall off in one direction or another; but I've become used to the bruises from falling, and after a moment I pick myself up and begin ascending again, as opportunity permits. As one ascends higher, one sees farther looking down, one learns and understands more and more...

1) God. Cogito, ergo sum: I start, like Descartes, recognizing my own mind, its thoughts, its free will, by introspection. Next I discern object permanence, gravity, and the basic array of natural laws by induction from sensory experience; and for this, the first application of faith is required (for just because the sun has risen every day does not prove it will rise tomorrow, except inasmuch as the universe, by assumption, is law-abiding and orderly). Certain entities I encounter in the course of my sensory experience are special in that I discern behind them the working of ideas, and conclude that they are not merely physical objects but beings with minds/souls, like me; for this the second application of faith is required (for no mere deduction can distinguish with certainty true cognition in another being from the pseudo-cognition of sophisticated computers). I then discern that reason in these beings, as well as in myself (so other beings tell me) wakes and sleeps, lives and dies, is in short impermanent, and subject to, vulnerable to, the physical matter to which it is self-evidently superior and which it is able to manipulate and colonize; I discern, furthermore, that rational beings contain with him them a certain moral/aesthetic compass, which seems to point towards something, or towards Something, which stubbornly tugs in a certain direction despite changing circumstances... by a third application of faith, I conclude that the Something that rational beings are drawn towards actually exists, a certain Absolute of truth, of beauty, of right, of love, and this I call God. Tom remarks that

Even if God is omnipotent, She [a stylistic point: Tom enjoys the irony of referring to God as "She," suggesting that, despite his atheism, he is firmly convinced that God is female; for my part, I'll defer to custom and use the masculine pronoun] is still subservient to logic, or, if you don't like that phrasing, She is pure logic and cannot go against Her own nature.

No, God is not (in my view) "pure logic," that is the Stoic view; God is love.

Moral order. We humans are indelibly moral creatures, who quarrel with each other, and in the act of quarreling, by justifying ourselves, no matter how materialist our core philosophy, display an instinct that we ought to act according to certain rules. It is not all that hard to realize that the world would be a much better place if we all listened to our consciences more, and much of the suffering results from people betraying their consciences, being dishonest, or selfish, or cruel. Every civilization has legislated and enforced certain moral codes, of a limited nature: you must pay a poor man the wages you have agreed to, but no more; you must not kill, but you may hate. General obedience to these rules makes civilization possible. Christianity introduces a higher morality, pertaining not only to external actions but to moods of the heart, not limited in its demands but total. Obedience to these rules, though never individually, let alone generally, achieved to completeness, would make life a paradise, like the dreamy imaginary socialism which certain idealists once exhorted, only combined with perfect freedom.

Fallenness. Yet we cannot achieve this, and our failure is a bit more radical than simply that we don't get things right all the time: we have a perpetual urge to alienate ourselves through pride, to hate those who threaten that pride, to exploit and dominate and destroy one another even though it yields no happiness: all of this justifies the doctrine of "original sin," which is something a bit stronger than that we have the capacity to sin. An angel with a flaming swords guards the way back to Paradise. Clothes, which are highlighted in this connection in the Adam and Eve story in Genesis, are a good illustration of the radical character of original sin. Why do we wear clothes? It's not the weather. If it were, we would expect people to wear them in cold climates in winter, but, on balmy days, to cheerfully strip to the skin. No, we are ashamed for some reason to show our private parts; this shame has a stubborn, universal, irrational character. Our refusal to expose the private parts of our bodies (though we get great pleasure when we do so) has its counterpart in our refusal to expose the private parts of our minds (though at any moment a frank and confessional conversation may create a deep and lasting friendship and assuage deep loneliness and grief!)

The hope of redemption. A universal urge, weak, confused and intermittent among the broad masses of people perhaps, but articulated by the great poets again and again; individually and collectively. "We live in hope of deliverance / Hope of deliverance / Hope of deliverance from the darkness that surrounds us," sings Paul McCartney. The most relevant expression of this universal Desire for Christians, and one with extraordinary literary merit (so I'm told; I've read them only cursorily myself) is found in the Hebrew prophets. But they are not the only ones.

But why should that hope be incarnated in Jesus? One argument against it is that Jesus anticipated (so it seems) a swift world-transformation, "the Kingdom of God." Well, we're still waiting. Nonetheless, I find a sublimity and perfection in his words, in the context of the Jewish tradition expressed in the Bible, a tradition that had a lot of things right though it needed to be transcended in some respects, such as its narrow nationalism and its rule-obsessed morality. One of many deeply problematic aspects of the Incarnation is that it occurred at a particular time in history, creating problems like those Tom mentioned of the salvation of uninstructed infants. I don't claim to have answers to all of those questions. But as a practical matter it does seem to me that revelation is somehow necessary. Moral and philosophical debate without Jesus is interminable, and with Jesus, it is still interminable; but without Jesus, it leads to various forms of madness, whereas with Jesus, with his miraculous words as a focal point (which testify to age after age of their truth, needing in the end no authority to justify them other than our own experience of life) moral and philosophical debate converges to what Christians call a "mystery," as in the Creeds, which hedge the truth and protect against errors but ultimately retain their indefinite character, which do not bind, but rather loose the mind...

Does that make any sense?