Having been brought up in a pragmatic family background where the issue of religion was hardly ever mentioned, and having been educated in a country where religious freedom is absolute, so that no government can force schools to perform a 'daily act of worship', this question never ever interested me. If Jesus had existed, that was fine with me. And if he had not existed, well, that was fine too. What I could never accept however, was the idea that he was some kind of supernatural being.
For I had never believed in supernatural beings. At least after childhood. Beliefs of that kind in an adult, I reasoned, were essentially remnants of the child's feeling of powerlessness and ignorance in a world controlled by sapient adults, and a vestige of prehistoric times when men personalized the powers of nature that terrified or sustained them.
Did Jesus ever really exist? I was satisfied with the widely-held view that there was no proof that a man such as Jesus had ever lived. However I was moved to consider the question a little nearer one day when a middle-aged man called John landed on my doorstep, driven by a mission to persuade people like me that the Jesus of the Gospels did in fact exist.
He gave his view, or rather he gave the established view of the religious group he belonged to, often paraphrasing C. S. Lewis, who, I learned for the first time was a Christian convert. I gave mine too, paraphrasing Fredrich Nietzsche, and I thought that the end of the matter. But the fellow was a bit of a limpet and sent me a letter. In it he said he'd 'not made a very good job of quoting Lewis' and then quoted the pertinent passage, or rather he quoted words attributed to Lewis in a book entitled Does God Believe in Atheists by a modern author on religion called John Blanchard.
The John that had called on me was obviously an avid follower of his namesake, for he appended to his letter several pages photocopied from Blanchard's work, and even offered to buy me a copy of it 'if I thought you would read it'.
In my reply I declined the offer, citing the fact that I had a reading list as long as my arm. But I couldn't resist the temptation to write a critique of the arguments Blanchard marshalled in this excerpt as evidence that Jesus really existed.
He begins with several bullet-pointed remarks to create an aura of scientificality:
* We have no record of his date of birth, yet all the world's chronology is linked to it.
* He never wrote a book, but more books have been written about him than about anyone else in history, and the output is still accelerating. The nearest thing we have to his biography has now been translated in whole or in part into over 2,000 languages.
* He never painted a picture, or composed any poetry or music, yet nobody's life and teaching have inspired a greater output of songs, plays, poetry, films, videos and other art forms. One film, based on his recorded words, has been produced in over 100 languages and has already been seen by more people than any other film in history.
* He never raised an army, yet millions of people have laid down their lives in his cause, and every year thousands more do so.
* Except for one brief period during his childhood, his travels were limited to an area about the size of Wales, but his influence today is worldwide, and his followers constitute the largest religious grouping the world has ever known.
* He had no formal education, but thousands of universities, seminaries, colleges and schools have been founded in his name.
* His public teaching lasted three years and was restricted to one small country, yet purpose-built satellites and some of the world's largest radio and television networks now beam his message around the globe.
* He set foot in just two countries, yet an organization committed to his cause claims to make regular flights to more countries than any commercial airline.
* He was virtually unknown outside of his native country, yet in the current issue of Encyclopaedia Britannica the entry under his name runs to 30,000 words.
* He is by far the most controversial person in history. Nobody has attracted such adoration or opposition, devotion or criticism, and nobody else's teaching has been more fervently received or more fiercely rejected. For centuries every recorded word he spoke has been... (last words obscured in the scan I made of the photocopy)
* Even the most dyed-in-the-wool sceptic must acknowledge that this man was something special, and any open-minded student of human history should agree that he deserves meticulous attention.
Blanchard's first claim is that all the world’s chronology is linked to Jesus’ date of birth. Everyone knows, or should know, that Jesus’ date of birth was arbitrarily fixed by the Catholic Church. Thus all the world’s chronology is linked, not to anyone’s date of birth, but to the calendar of the Church. It’s even named after a Pope! The fact of the widespread use of this calendar has little to do with Jesus’ real or supposed existence and everything to do with the worldly power of the West. Surely nobody thinks that the Chinese or Japanese, for example, use this chronology because they believe in Jesus! If they want the wealth and power possessed by the West – and they do – they must use it.
Next the number of books written about Jesus is given as evidence. Number, as such, has not the remotest connection with truth. This is on a level with ‘more people use Daz than any other soap powder’.
Then we are supposed to be convinced by the number of films, videos, etc. devoted to the life of Jesus. Once again all this is evidence of is the industry of those busy bees committed to propagating the Christian faith. Number has nothing to do with truth.
The number of people who gave their lives in his cause is now adduced as evidence. Here Blanchard has surreptitiously replaced the ‘existence’ of Jesus with his ‘cause’, for a man’s cause or teaching is much harder to refute than his existence. But one should realize that sacrifice of life is not only no proof of the existence of anything, it is furthermore no proof of the truth of a cause either. During World War II thousands gave up their lives in Hitler’s cause. Does the fact that they did so prove that his cause was true or just?
Could anyone seriously believe Blanchard’s claim that Jesus’ influence is felt worldwide? Do the millions who die of starvation every year or watch their children die feel his influence?
Blanchard’s claim that Jesus’ followers ‘constitute the largest religious grouping the world has ever known’ is manifestly false. I quote Nietzsche here: ‘With my condemnation of Christianity, I should not like to have wronged a kindred religion which even preponderates in the number of its believers: Buddhism.’ And do I need to repeat: number is no guarantee of truth? This obsession with number is just a thin disguise for the worship of power. Hitler used this connection very effectively in his torchlight processions. Millions, then and now, were and are only too willing to forget their own ideals, which seem to them petty and insignificant, and instead to merge their own personalities with millions of others in submission to a powerful authority.
The number of universities, colleges, etc. that have been founded in Jesus’ name is now cited as evidence for Jesus’ existence, as if their existence was somehow a proof of his. The primary purpose of these institutions is to propagate the Christian faith, in other words to increase the numbers of those who believe in the Christian faith, in other words to increase the power of the Christian faith – more specifically the power of the particular sects that founded the universities, colleges, etc.
How silly of Blanchard to dragoon television networks into his crusade. Anyone would be hard put indeed to dig out Jesus’ message from underneath the nightly spectacle of affluence, poverty, conflict, crime, violence, war and natural disasters. And even if you could, it is not Jesus’ message that is supposed to be under test of ‘evidence’ here but his historical reality.
Blanchard’s next point is that an anonymous ‘organization committed to his (Jesus’) cause claims to make regular flights to more countries than any commercial airline’. Quite apart from the fact that a mere claim is not evidence, as such, we are again faced here with the equation great numbers = truth. Only for a certain type of character does this equation have any meaning. The type who has no courage for an opinion of his own but who is compelled instead by his instincts to seek warmth and security in a great herd under the control of a powerful authority.
Even the Encyclopaedia Britannica is dragged in next as a prop to Blanchard’s contention that Jesus existed, for the entry under his name runs to 30,000 words, he tells us. Well, what can you say? Who could argue with such a huge number of words? Obviously the question of what the words say is irrelevant. In my own humble Concise Oxford Dictionary Jesus merits just 11 words, while Prometheus attracts 22. Would Blanchard allow me to argue from this that Prometheus has a better claim to historical reality than Jesus?
Finally Blanchard drops his obsession with numbers and pins his argument to another contention: that Jesus was ‘the most controversial person in history’. And then he goes on – yet again – to confound Jesus’ existence with his teaching, his cause. For most of the last 2000 years Jesus has been the object of emotions ranging from adoration to reluctant submission, but not really of controversy. It is only with the decline of Christianity that controversy sets in. That controversy revolves about the superstitious element in Christianity, the contention that Jesus was a god. There is no real controversy over Jesus’ teaching. Most people, I think, are quite happy to subscribe to the injunction ‘Love thy neighbour’. Their moral dilemma does not issue from a criticism of or a rejection of Jesus’ teaching, though it may well flow from a failure to comprehend that teaching, or even a genuine puzzlement about how to reconcile that teaching with the demands of a society driven by greed.
With his last point Blanchard seems to have forgotten what the argument is about, for he says ‘even the most dyed-in-the-wool sceptics must acknowledge that this man was something special’. Nobody would argue that the Jesus of the Gospels was not something special, any more than they would argue that Prometheus, say, was not something special. What they might argue, though, is that either of these figures was a man and a god.
Blanchard finishes this section by saying: ‘He (Jesus) presents an enormous problem for the atheist,’ as if his woolly thoughts really did constitute some kind of proof that Jesus existed. During the past century or more there has been a mass exodus from Christianity, leaving the churches deserted. I think the ‘enormous problem’ rests with the rump of Christianity and the sacrificium intellectus it is stuck with in a world dominated by science and technology. And why is it an enormous problem particularly for the atheist? Why not for the people of other faiths who hugely outnumber Christians in the world? Why does Blanchard fail to mention them? Because his market does not lie there.
The question of whether or not a man named Jesus ever existed is not important. (Scholastics in the Middle Ages used to exercise their minds by questions like: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?) What is crucial for man, here, now, at this critical juncture in his history, when he stands at the verge of self-destruction, is not some abstruse question about what might or might not have happened twenty centuries ago, but the legacy of the teaching attributed to the name of Jesus.
In a section entitled ‘Anybody there?’ Blanchard resorts to the same kind of slandering of the opposition that Lewis indulges in. Bertrand Russell’s sincerely-held and deeply-thought-out opinions, he says, are ‘rehashed ideas put forward by cynical nineteenth-century German scholars’. And what had Russell done to deserve this disparagement? He'd said the question of Jesus’ existence was open to doubt. Ah, yes, we must never let the worm of doubt bite at the white bosom of our dearly-held dogmas, must we? Only the most raging zealotry must prevail. Everyone knows that the Gospels are based on revelation, but Blanchard calls this collection of stories a ‘mass of data’, thereby attempting to give them a pseudo-scientific integrity. Nietzsche said that you needed to put on gloves when opening the New Testament. Looking under the stones of Blanchard’s words you need a peg on your nose to boot!
Next he quotes a completely unsupported claim, namely that doubts cast on the historical reality of Jesus are ‘unworthy of serious attention’. What doubts? Any that have ever been or ever could be? We are no longer in the realm of rational debate here. Iron shutters clang down around the castle of comforting notions to keep the dogs of doubt at bay.
Now we career like a drunken sailor from the supercilious view of a ‘British anthropologist and historian’ - just quoted - to one of a right-wing journalist, Paul Johnson, who opines that the argument that Jesus never existed has been ‘demolished’ by ‘the march of historical research’. Once again no evidence of any ‘demolition’ is offered. There doesn’t even seem to be any embarrassment at the lack of any evidence. The place of evidence has been usurped by empty ringing words, the type of tub-thumping words hacks like Johnson use to justify appalling acts like the invasion of Iraq. Instead of considering a rational argument, all the reader is expected to do is fall in step like a marching soldier. As for Blanchard – why, why, why, would anyone who could supposedly rise to the heights of the great passages of the Bible ever wish to descend again to the level of the Daily Mail – a comic book for overgrown kids!
In a section called ‘One of us’ Blanchard says Jesus is ‘a genuine human being, not some kind of biological freak or extra-terrestrial alien’. Has anyone ever suggested that he was a biological freak or extra-terrestrial alien? The use of such outlandish terms serves just to cloud the issue, to close off a more rational avenue of approach to the figure of Jesus. Jesus could not have been ‘a genuine human being’, as Blanchard claims, for he was supposed to have possessed supernatural powers, and that is irrational. In my view Jesus is a symbol of human potentiality, of all that is best in man: that is the only rational view of Jesus, a view held by two great psychoanalysts and thinkers of the twentieth century, Erich Fromm and C.G. Jung. But Blanchard has no intention of permitting his reader to consider that view. He decoys him instead with figures from horror stories and science fiction.
Just a cursory analysis of Blanchard’s language shows not only an obsession with number and quantity – ‘more books’, ‘more people’, ‘more countries’, ‘nineteen celebrated authors’, ‘100 facts’, ‘over 100 languages’, ‘30,000 words’, ‘thousands of universities’, ‘millions of people’, ‘thousands more’, ‘mass of data’, ‘reams of writing’, ‘forty generations’ – but also an obsession with size and extensiveness – ‘world’s largest radio and television networks’, ‘largest religious grouping’, ‘greater output of songs’, ‘the output is still accelerating’, ‘enormous problem’, the size of Wales’, ‘one small country’, ‘scruffy little town’, ‘one of the world’s smallest countries’, ‘all the world’s chronology’, ‘his influence … is worldwide’, his message is beamed ‘around the globe’.
What are we to make of a man who seems incapable of evaluating phenomena in any terms other than size and quantity? He should have been a salesman. – But he is! And he knows his market too!
Blanchard now claims that ‘at least nineteen celebrated authors in the first and second centuries …. record more than 100 facts about Jesus’. Unfortunately, this inexhaustible number generator names only four of them. 'Since very little literature has survived from their time', he says, it is 'all the more remarkable that these historians, seeking to record the major events of their day, should devote reams of writing to a penniless peasant who lived in a scruffy little town (Nazareth) in a remote part (Galilee) of one of the world's smallest countries (Palestine), especially as they all rejected the main thrust of his teaching.'
The main thrust? As if they'd analysed it or something. By Jove, how? Blanchard himself says that Jesus never wrote a book. How in Olympus' name could three noble Romans and one highborn Jew be familiar with the words of 'a penniless peasant', who had apparently been executed at least 37 years before the earliest of the four relevant works had been written (Josephus, AD 93 or 94). Does he mean to imply that they had scrutinized the Gospels? But the earliest surviving complete copies of them date only to the 4th century AD! But he goes further. He says that Tacitus branded this teaching as 'a mischievous superstition'.
More on that in a moment. First let's see what these four historians say about Jesus. I take Suetonius first because I happen to have in my library a copy of his ‘Lives of the Twelve Caesars’, a work that covers the period in question. We find in fact that Suetonius devotes not a single word to the name of Jesus. He did, on the other hand, mention the Christians. Only, however, in connection with measures taken by the Emperor Nero. But far from the ‘reams of writing’ Blanchard claims, Suetonius’ reference is just half a sentence long, 16 words in English to be exact: ‘Punishments were also inflicted on the Christians, a sect professing a new and superstitious religious belief.’ The other half of the sentence deals with restrictions imposed on the behaviour of charioteers.
I had to get books from the public library to pursue my researches further. In his ‘Annals’ Tacitus mentions the Christians also only in connection with the punishments meted out to them in the reign of Nero, who, Tacitus suggests, sought scapegoats for the burning of Rome. Their name, he tells us, derives from ‘Christus’ who ‘suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus'.
It was not precisely Christ’s teaching that Tacitus called ‘a mischievous superstition’. The phrase would hardly have made sense used in that way. No, it was what these Christians believed that he called ‘a mischievous superstition’. There is a profound difference between what Christ taught and what Christians believed in any era. Not only history shows that but the growth of hundreds of different Christian sects shows it too. Why would Blanchard try to blur the difference? The answer is, I think, that he wants to make an attack on the beliefs he is trying to spread appear like an attack on Christ himself. Lewis used the same kind of tactic in one of his writings when he implied that anyone who did not believe in Jesus as a god would be no better than one of his executioners. ‘If you do not believe what I believe, you are no better than a murderer of an innocent man’, so runs the spurious logic of this arrogant argument.
However that may be, ‘a mischievous superstition’ shows Tacitus’ contempt for the Christians at its mildest form. In the very same sentence Judea is named as the ‘source of the evil’, and in the previous sentence he refers to the Christians as ‘a class hated for its abominations’. Later he says that upon information given by some who pleaded their guilt ‘an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind’. What was the exact nature of this hatred? I wonder. Could it have been the kind of slander both Lewis and Blanchard indulge in?
I knew nothing at all about Flavius Josephus before researching in his book, ‘Jewish Antiquities’. Apparently he wrote it in Aramaic, which he himself translated into Greek. He was a Jew, of course, so that Blanchard’s classification of him as a man who ‘shared Russell’s atheism’ shows how little he knows (or admits) about his own supposed sources. Josephus was a man of high descent, we learn, a soldier and statesman, learned in Jewish law and Greek literature and he became a Pharisee. Blanchard called him ‘a distinguished historian’, but Christ himself called the Pharisees ‘wicked’ and ‘adulterous’, if we can believe St. Matthew. (Matthew xvi, 1-4) In fact Blanchard himself quotes Christ on the Pharisees: ‘brood of vipers’, ‘blind fools’, ‘white-washed tombs’, ‘hypocrites’.
I must say, there seems nothing very distinguished-sounding in any of this, at least to me. Again it shows Blanchard’s ignorance of his own sources. In his book Josephus does at least mention Jesus by name. In fact he mentions 21 Jesuses by name. Some of them attract very long comment indeed, but the Jesus we are interested in draws just seven sentences.
This Jesus was ‘a wise man’, Josephus tells us, and a ‘teacher’ who ‘wrought surprising feats’, and he was ‘the Messiah’. Pilate, ‘upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us’ condemned him to be crucified. ‘On the third day’, we are told, ‘he appeared to [his disciples] restored to life.’ In a footnote the English translator quotes an authority (Richards and Shutt) suggesting the words ‘according to their report’ have ‘been removed by the Christian censor’. This seems all the more likely when you see that Josephus himself seems quite happy to identify himself with Jesus’ accusers. There seems also to be a certain inconsistency in tone here. The view that Jesus ‘was restored to life’, as though he really were a god, is a little inconsistent with the idea that he ‘wrought surprising feats’, as though he were some kind of circus entertainer.
The translator refers to sources that point to other inconsistencies too, such as that Josephus, ‘a loyal Pharisaic Jew’, could not have written that Jesus was the Messiah, and that Origen, one of the Church Fathers, explicitly states that ‘Josephus did not believe in Jesus as the Christ’. One writer even suggests that ‘wise man’ should have been ‘wizard of a man’, which, I think, would be more in keeping with ‘surprising feats’. The translator concludes: ‘The most probable view seems to be that our text represents substantially what Josephus wrote, but that some alterations have been made by a Christian interpolator.’ In other words Josephus’ text has been tampered with.
But why would anyone who wishes to ‘believe’ bother himself about such doubts. ‘Belief’, after all, ‘makes blessed’, doesn't it? The ‘believer’ can simply thrust any doubts aside as ‘unworthy of serious attention’, or alternatively he can persuade himself that they don’t really exist, for they have been ‘demolished’ by ‘the march of historical research’. – Or can he? Regression to an authoritarian morality can never be completely successful. The old doubts still come creeping in so that there is always a recurrent craving for reinjections of the juvenilising drug from peddlers like Blanchard. However, one must want to believe very badly indeed to be taken in by his transparent quackery.
Of the hundreds of letters that Pliny the Younger wrote, he devoted just one, not to the subject of Jesus, but to a now familiar topic: the punishment of Christians. As governor of Bithynia in the reign of Trajan, he had occasion to write letters to the Emperor on matters of public concern. In Letter 96 of Book X of his ‘Letters’ he seeks advice on the interrogation, trial and punishment of Christians. Christ is mentioned by name only twice, once when Pliny claims that some of the suspects admitted that they ‘sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ as a god’, and secondly when he said that cursing Christ was required as a proof that they were not or were no longer Christians. As for Christian belief, he calls it an ‘infatuation’ in one place and ‘a contagious superstition’ in another.
So, where are the ‘reams of writing’ that Blanchard claims that these historians have devoted to ‘a penniless peasant who lived in a scruffy little town in a remote part of one of the world’s smallest countries’? And what of the 100 facts about Jesus? Suetonius doesn’t even mention his name, while Pliny refers to the name but provides no facts about the man. What Tacitus and Josephus say about Jesus could be put into a single sentence. To call it ‘reams of writing’ is just downright dishonesty.
There is not a glimmer of human feeling in anything Blanchard says in this excerpt. He is just a muddied well of the kind of cynical propaganda peddled by any politician or soap powder salesman of our day, just an opportunist cashing in on the religious perplexity that besets our age. Like his counterparts in politics and marketing he is an unconscious worshipper of power, an idolater who has the temerity to slander a man of integrity like Russell, who after all took a stand against idolatry – state idolatry – by marching, old as he was, and giving speeches in the ban-the-bomb protests of the sixties. Blanchard couldn’t take a convincing stand against anything at all. His conception of an argument is to cement together figures and words with small concern for the quality of the resulting combinations, so long as they suggest something numerous or big, and to pile them together relentlessly like stones, one upon another, into a Tower of Babble that he hopes will turn the head of the dizzied reader by making him feel insignificant and awe him into submission.
The undiscerning reader may well feel flattened by the tactic for he runneth upon him like a giant, but any perceptive shepherd lad would know where to aim his stone. Blanchard exaggerates, he misleads, he deceives, he even lies, for the purpose of duping unwary people - people unlikely to check his claims - into buying his own brand of salvation, and all with a good conscience too, for what matters a little lie or two – what matters any means at all – when the end is the glory of God! You get the feeling there would be no improbity to which he would not stoop to peddle his wares. He is kept in check only by his assessment of the extent of his readers’ credulity, a crafty little man with pretensions of grandness, who, instead of presenting an honest case grounded in diligent research, emphasises factors that have nothing to do with the issue at hand – for their sole purpose is to numb the reader’s critical capacities and paralyze his power to resist – or he selects an opponent like Russell, who is dead and therefore past reply, and fastens into his corpse his feeble little fangs!
Analysing Blanchard’s propaganda has caused me to wonder about the contempt that Suetonius, Tacitus and Pliny directed at the Christians of their age. What were the reasons for that contempt? I begin to wonder whether it was not the same kind of contempt that Nietzsche felt for Christianity. At its prudery and intolerance, for example: ‘Here the body is despised, hygiene repudiated as sensuality; the Church even resists cleanliness (-the first measure taken by the Christians after the expulsion of the Moors was the closure of the public baths, of which Cordova alone possessed 270). A certain sense of cruelty towards oneself and others is Christian; hatred of those who think differently; the will to persecute.’
Or was it Christian intellectual dishonesty (another kind of uncleanliness) that was found so contemptible? ‘Whoever has theologian blood in his veins has a wrong and dishonest attitude towards all things from the very first.’ Elsewhere Nietzsche says: ‘Out of this erroneous perspective on all things one makes a morality, a virtue, a holiness for oneself, one unites the good conscience with seeing falsely – one demands that no other kind of perspective shall be accorded any value after one has rendered one’s own sacrosanct with the names “God”, “redemption”, “eternity”. What a theologian feels to be true must be false; this provides almost a criterion for truth.’
Nietzsche’s remarks on theologians characterize precisely Blanchard’s approach. ‘Another mark of the theologian is his incapacity for philology. Philology is to be understood here in a very wide sense as the art of reading well – of being able to read off a fact without falsifying it by interpretation, without losing caution, patience, subtlety in the desire for understanding.’ And again: ‘”Faith” means not wanting to know what is true.’ And further: ‘”Faith” has been at all times … only a cloak, a pretext, a screen, behind which the instincts played their game – a shrewd blindness to the dominance of certain instincts.’ And lastly: ‘One has always spoken of “faith”, one has always acted from instinct.’
Was it Christian hatred of knowledge itself that was so reviled? ‘Man himself had become God’s greatest blunder; God had created for himself a rival, science makes equal to God – it is all over with priests and gods if man becomes scientific! – Moral: science is the forbidden in itself – it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the germ of all sins, original sin. This alone constitutes morality. – "Thou shalt not know" – the rest follows… How can one defend oneself against science?... Answer: away with man out of Paradise! Happiness, leisure gives room for thought – all thoughts are bad thoughts…Man shall not think.’
Or was it their obsession with guilt and punishment: ‘The concept of guilt and punishment …was invented in opposition to science – in opposition to the detaching of man from the priest.…Man shall not look around him, he shall look down into himself; he shall not look prudently and cautiously into things in order to learn, he shall not look at all: he shall suffer….And he shall suffer in such a way that he has need of the priest.’ Or nowadays, I might add, the likes of Mr Blanchard, although this modern God hawker neglects any mention that man shall suffer, as likely to distress the sensitivities of his readership.
Obsession with guilt and punishment belongs to Christian teaching, but not to the teaching of Christ. ‘In the entire psychology of the “Gospel” the concept guilt and punishment is lacking; likewise the concept of reward. “Sin”, every kind of distancing relationship between God and man is abolished – precisely this is the “glad tidings”. Blessedness is not promised, it is not tied to any conditions: it is the only reality.’ And what were the ‘glad tidings’ exactly? ‘What was abolished with the Evangel was the Judaism of the concepts “sin”, “forgiveness of sin”, “redemption by faith” – the whole of Jewish ecclesiastical teaching was denied in the “glad tidings”. The profound instinct for how one would have to live in order to feel oneself “in Heaven”, to feel oneself “eternal”, while in every other condition one by no means feels oneself “in Heaven”: this alone is the psychological reality of “redemption”. – A new way of living, not a new belief.’
So what does it mean to be a Christian? ‘It is false to the point of absurdity to see in a “belief”, perchance the belief in redemption through Christ, the distinguishing characteristic of the Christian: only Christian practice, a life such as he who died on the Cross lived, is Christian.’
Which brings me back to the John whose letter I replied to. He replied with another wherein he said what he thought a Christian was. 'A Christian is a person who realizes his need of having Jesus as a Friend and an Enabler in life, who follows His teachings (eg. Love your neighbour as yourself, love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, etc.)...'
Later in the same letter he asks, '...does it not offend your sense of justice that so much wrong goes unpunished? I think justice demands retribution. The Bible speaks about it. 'It's appointed to men to die once and after this, judgement.'
Maybe so, John, but not by you.
Isn't it ironical that this man, who calls himself a Christian, and who expends so much energy attempting to spread his conception of Christianity, has not the least idea of what Christianity is, nor what a Christian should be?
The problem with John, and others like him, is not that he is appalled by so many things that go on in human life. Anyone possessing truly human feelings would be. But he is wrong to seek a solution to them in imaginary beings. That all belongs to the childhood of humanity. He needs to understand that the fundamental cause of human problems lies with human beings themselves - all of us! - and that the way forward is not to be sought in 'beliefs' of any kind, but in the power of human thought.
The Thinker by August Rodan
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