If You Can Accept, Momentarily, That The Life and Times of Jesus Is Neither Absolutely True Nor False, You Might Then Come to See How, for Western Civilization, It Is Necessarily True
The “Absolute Truth” Trap for Christianity
Contents
Western Civilization teeters on the edge of dissolution and collapse. While Christianity may have originally helped produce Western Civilization, an error in Christianity’s application could now precipitate its collapse. The reason is the subject of this post.
The Christian religion’s unhelpful logic is …
- REQUIREMENT: “Jesus is God”
- For Western Civilization, Jesus is crucial. I’ll explain why this is true in the next section;
- Christendom, therefore, sought to establish the claim that “Jesus is God” is absolutely true. For Christians, this is the most important topic of the New Testament;
- The Bible was, necessarily, declared absolutely true as a Testament to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, thereby offering “proof” that Jesus is God;
- Predictably, Christianity’s adherents thus came to worship an expansive Bible as the revealed word (truth) of God;
- THE UNHELPFUL RESULT: Christianity’s adherents’ capacity for Grace, their capacity to find truth themselves with reason, was directly undermined. Christians were instead conditioned to reach for the Bible for all of life’s truths. Consequently, Grace and free and independent thought, our homo sapien birthright, remained beyond the reach of many of them.
Jesus is critical for Christianity and Western Civilization. Still, Christianity’s approach to end the debate about whether ‘Jesus is God’ (the Bible as the revealed word of God) directly harmed the intellectual development of many of its followers, ultimately placing Christianity and Western Civilization at risk.
The reality of Jesus
Western Civilization required and thrived with reason (punctuated by the Enlightenment). All civilizations require reason. Critically, hominids can’t create civilization until they acquire reason, and apparently, only homo sapiens did. Unfortunately, reason is developmental. In other words, we are not born with it. We are, instead, born with the capacity for it.
Reason is the capacity to contemplate objective truth. Yet many humans, in their intellectual immaturity, cannot. However, God is helpful for reason because, in part, God is entirely conceptual. Conceptual thinking promotes the discovery of objective truth; again, objective truth is the foundation for civilization.
Brilliantly, Jesus was God embodied (not conceptual). Therefore, Jesus, the person, is cognizable to individuals otherwise unable to conceptualize God, the creator. Jesus’s eventual crucifixion and resurrection then transitioned the ‘God embodied’ from the mortal to the supernatural state, thereby connecting perception-based thinking about God (thinking arising from the senses) to the conceptual God “sensed” only through reason.
Jesus was, therefore, humanity’s systematic bridge from dysrationality (perception/reaction-only thinking) to Grace (reason). There may be other equally valid alternatives to get there, but Jesus was Western Civilization’s clever approach.
For Western Civilization, Jesus is thus necessarily true because Jesus was key to moving humanity from tribal intelligence to civilizational intelligence.
Sin or error?
Many individuals reject the concept of sin. In many ways, I do too. But now, if I may add Grace, I see the wisdom/necessity of the concept.
The dysrational (intellectually immature) individual does not contemplate objective truth. Thus, he cannot, as an individual, correct his conceptual errors. The dysrational individual must, therefore, be managed and steered toward truth. This is done with shame (sin) and praise (reward-heaven). This is Christianity’s structural vulnerability, however. The faithful are perpetually treated like children (fallen). In this mode, people/adults eventually rebel because, unable to produce rational people, the “leaders” of the faith are also cognitively immature. Hypocrisy destroys faith/community.
The rational individual by contrast pursues absolute truth. He requires only God’s grace for error. If God’s truth is always the focus, the thinker shall enjoy Grace.
Ideally, faith would move the individual from a perception-based reality to a conceptual one. All humans should enjoy this resurrection-like experience. Buddha, interestingly, did this after ten years of suffering. Suffering is plainly homo sapiens’s developmental impetus to reason.
On X (Twitter) –
Harry Margulies: #GODISNOWHERE If you are agnostic or atheist, you should follow me. Hot takes on religion, theology, politics, and society.
Worshiping the Bible
“The Bible is not God.”
ME: TRUE.
“Jesus is God.”
ME: As established by the New Testament (conditions for Q2 in image). If the Bible was not considered the absolute truth (conditions for Q3), Jesus as God would not/could not be represented as absolutely true. And reason cannot help. Without faith, this is a big problem.
“We do not worship the Bible.”
ME: Ideally true. However, people do worship the Bible because of the prior paragraph (Q2). I wish they wouldn’t because it undermines the development of their capacity to reason (i.e., Grace — Q3). See image. This is the point of your tweet, I think.
On X (Twitter) –
Dr. Kevin Young: Pastor. Author. Doctorate, Early Church Faith Formation. Post-Evangelical.
Worshiping the Bible (as the absolute truth) is a problem.
I think of individuals who worship the Bible as “Biblically Centered.” If anything, and by contrast, I am God-centered. In other words, I only humbly seek the truth. Whereas biblically-centered people look to the Bible for the truth. Yet, this approach may undermine the cognitive development of some people. This is true because, for reason, no one can claim to KNOW the absolute truth. Yet, the Bible, as God’s “revealed” word, does precisely the opposite by claiming to represent God’s truth. Biblically-centered people need spend no more time contemplating life’s truths than it takes to listen to another pontificate about it (the Bible). But absolute truth is never truly found; it is only pursued. So paradoxically, if this last (bolded) statement is alternatively taken to heart, the Bible can help.
Finally, Biblical-centeredness may undermine faith because the individual is often required to defend THEIR UNDERSTANDING of the Bible as absolutely true. What person can do that? For reason, I say none can. And yet, when they fail to do so, their faith could be unnecessarily undone. For Christianity and Western Civilization, this is utterly counter-productive.