The Case for Christ: On the Problem of Extracting History from Faith Narratives

A film narrative oriented to an investigation of Christianity is tailor-made to illustrate the potential of film as a medium to convey abstract ideas and theories. In The Case for Christ (2017), a skeptical journalist—Lee Strobel—takes on the contention that Jesus’ resurrection in the Gospels was also a historical event (i.e., happened historically). Lee states the proposition that he will investigate as follows: “The entire Christian faith hinges on the resurrection of Jesus. If it didn’t happen, it’s a house of cards. He’s reduced to a misunderstood rabbi at best; at worst, he was a lunatic who was martyred.” The journalist’s initial position is that the resurrection didn’t happen historically; it is just part of a faith narrative (i.e., the Gospels). Lee wants to test the proposition by interviewing experts. The dialogues between the journalist unschooled in theology and the scholars of religion provide a way in which complex ideas and arguments can be broken down for the viewer and digested. The journalist stands as a translator of sorts similar to a teacher’s function in breaking down knowledge new to students so they can grasp and digest it.

The full essay is at "Case for Christ."

From Being “Real” to Mythic: Do Religions have Lifespans?

Thousands of years ago, Greeks acted out narratives from what we now refer to as myths. The word myth connotes a religious narrative that has long-ago expired from being believed to be actual. Of course, no Christian in modern times would refer to the Passion as a myth; to refer to the crucifixion and resurrection as mythic would be insulting. Yet as a society increasingly secularizes, the events in the religious story gradually give up their all-embracing signature. As Good Friday or Easter becomes “just another day” for more and more people in the increasingly secular West in particular, the respective events lose their hegemony in defining for people in their daily lives what the Friday and Sunday are about. That is, the events "deflate" from being perceived as all-embracing in the sense of defining the significance of the days. If sufficiently relegated, the story itself can more easily be viewed as myth, rather than real. Notice religion’s appeal here to history or at least empiricism as a validator. Without such a basis intact, religious events are somehow less real in a religious sense of meaning.[1]

In fact, a religion’s situs in a society can go from default-status to ultimately being replaced. Nietzsche’s “God is dead” in the late nineteenth-century prefigured the rise of secularization—the discrediting of the reigning concept of the deity by ascribing the vice of vengeance to it inexorably deflating the Abrahamic religions. Particularly astonishing is not the fact that religions have lifespans, but, rather, that any given religion in decline can endure an incredible amount of time at that stage. This phenomenon can prompt a person to wonder whether the religions are not human, all too human.

The full essay is at "Religion and Myth."

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1. Here I’m relying on ch. 12 of my book, “God’s Gold.” In that chapter, I contend that religion overreaches in claiming history for itself. For a religion to use history as a sort of anchor is to make a category mistake.

God's Gold

As promised, I have stepped away from the obtuse academic writing to write a book geared to people "in the real world" who are interested in the topic of Christian ethics on money, profit-seeking, and wealth. People keep telling the topic is "hot" now (as if I should have a clue). I would think the interest will have died down since 2008 during the financial crisis. 

Anyway, I've been trying to come up with a book that a Christian and/or business practitioner could pick up and read without the aid of a dictionary every other line. This is not to say that the book is bereft of substantive ideas; in fact, I did additional research since Godliness and Greed came out. Also, I was able to build on some ideas and toss others after chewing the cud on the original content. Therefore, I think God's Gold is better even academically-speaking. Let me know what you think; after you have read the book, post a review at Amazon. 

The book traces the historical shift in Christian attitudes toward profit-seeking and wealth. Through the centuries, the dominant position shifted from anti-wealth to pro-wealth, meaning that the coupling of greed to profiting and accumulating wealth was at first thought to be very tight, but then loosened--eventually to the extent that a camel could get through the eye of the needle. With both anti-wealth Luther and pro-wealth Calvin living in the same economic context, the commercialization of Europe cannot fully explain the shift. As one possibility, a bias in a core theological doctrine may have been subtly tilting the ground in the pro-wealth direction. If so, the implications for Christianity, and for religion more generally as a phenomenon, would be nothing short of earth-shaking.

The Consolidation of Power in the American and Roman Empires: On the Rise and Fall of Empires

The American federal government was for at least a century, and perhaps even longer, primarily involved in defending the new empire and regulating commerce between the republics (or states more generically). By the dawning of the twenty-first century, the U.S. Government had grown both in scope and in the number of employees on its payroll while the governments of the republics had been reduced to functioning as little more than local governments. In other words, Congress had come to act like a state legislature, while the states had accepted their status as mere localities. This fundamental shift with respect to American federalism, as well as the empire-“kingdom”-city arrangement, bears a striking resemblance to the Roman empire. By implication, this similarity might lead us to some conclusions regarding the future the United States within the larger story of the rise and fall of empires.

The complete essay is at Essays on Two Federal Empires.