The Historicity of the Scriptures

I got a note yesterday from someone who is leaving religion, because they don’t any long believe in the “historicity” of the scriptures.

Bronze ceremonial standard of the Hittites; he...
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I don’t know why people feel compelled to announce this sort of thing. I mean what, are we supposed to keep an empty chair down at the “club”? I don’t even know this person, not really. Maybe it’s to make a clean break. Maybe it’s because we’re all supposed to rush out with “don’t go”. It’s sort of like standing on a ledge, maybe. But invariably these sort of notes are arrogant. This one worried about wounding any “weaker brothers”. It made me sort of chuckle but also wince, like when a TV anchor says something stupid and doesn’t realize it.

The other thing about these sort of notes is that they might as well be multiple choice. They usually contain one of a handful of reasons that we’re all familiar with. I’d really rather get a form letter, like when someone unsubscribes from one of my  mailing lists. “We’re sorry to see you go (or uninstall). Is it a) you’re planning to reinstall, b) service didn’t meet your needs, or c) you found one you like better.” Actually, I shouldn’t joke, there are mega-“churches” who actually do that sort of thing. And you know, if you don’t take them seriously, they send their parking lot security goons out to your house to let the air out of your tires.

This one was “I just can’t believe anymore in the historicity of the scriptures.” Yep, that’s one of the usual five. It’s a real yawner though because, only an idiot casts a blanket aspersion against the historicity of the scriptures. What, you don’t believe there were Hittites? Heck, a lot of people didn’t, until we dug them up. I mean, which part? I had a friend who once said he wasn’t sure there ever was a person called Jesus. I pointed out that there’s better support for the existence of Jesus than for Homer. I mean the documentary evidence kept by his enemies is pretty darned good. No serious scholars say there wasn’t a Jesus. They doubt that he is God, but not that he exists in history. There are nut jobs like Madeleine Murry O’Hare, of course, but come on. She’s like the Shirley McClain of atheism. Not to offer an ad hominem, but she’s not exactly basing her thinking on science. It’s like taking financial advice from Joel Osteen.  My friend relented, of course, and then we could have a more honest discussion. You can’t even be honest about what’s bothering you unless you’re willing to stipulate to the obvious facts. After all, it’s hard to claim religious people live in a fantasy world when they’ve got logic, science, and archeology and you’ve got blithering belief in the absence of something.

So anyway, no great refutation here. I just don’t care. You want to go, “I’ll hold the trap door to hell open for you”, as a Protestant comedian once said. Why be impolite? Blunt, perhaps, but courteous is my approach. We all know someone who doesn’t believe in something, and goes off to grow their beard (all we Orthodox men should have beards if they grow on us), or live on granola, or tour Buddhist shrines, or whatever. Send me a postcard. But it’s not something that needs a lot of drama. “I mean it, I’m going…” Did you ever run away from home, when you were a kid? “Dinner is a 6:30.”

Look, you want to claim that there was no King David, even though there’s better evidence for that than for who built the pyramids, you go ahead. People “believe” or “don’t believe” all sorts of things. If we were Protestants, we might get all bent out of shape and have a prayer circle around you. But if you’ve been involved with genuine Orthodoxy, we’re not really built on a foundation of beliefs anyway. When people ask, “What do you believe,” the best response is that that’s a Protestant question, and we should really refuse to commoditize (commodify?) our Faith in that manner. Protestantism is the religion of mental beliefs, which is one reason everyone goes out and starts their own ‘talk show’, so to speak. You get gazillions of groups in storefronts, precisely because belief is central, belief is everything, belief is the basis for it all.

Orthodoxy is based on history, not belief. We’re not a knowledge-based religion, like Gnosticism and its modern equivalents in Protestantism – we’re historical. For us, the “I’m leaving” spammer got one thing right, it really is important that there was a David. Not that you believe there’s a David – that’s different. Only a neurotic confuses his own belief with whether something is actually there or not. It matters not whether you believe, or even whether you exist (I push you off a building, and your belief ceases to matter much – you’re gone, the world goes on). It matters whether something is real. And since we live in time, live in history, all real things are historical. That’s why we don’t share a theology with the Protestants or Roman Catholics. Time is a creature. Reality is a creature. They’re created. In that sense, we don’t say that God is “real”. We don’t believe in God’s “existence”. You can’t think like that and really be Orthodox.

In fact, Orthodoxy is the religion of unbelievers. Our Faith is really historical. But our doctrine is really antithetical – to everything else. Our theology is negative theology – the via negativa – we deny things – we disbelieve things. If you look at  how our doctrinal statements have been formulated and why, they’re mostly statements that we, like the “I’m leaving” spammer, “don’t believe” – a whole host of things – or that we are “not persuaded” and so don’t intend to convert to something else. It is because I am an unbeliever that I am Orthodox in a sea of neurotic religious speculation. Our councils came about, because it was necessary to rise up and deny things – namely things that religious people had come up with by doing “positive theology” – cooking their own meth, so to speak. All our various statements, which we don’t like making for their own sakes (“Hi, welcome to our church. Here’s our doctrinal statement. We have a great youth program!”), are statements of disbelief or of opposition to belief foisted upon us by others – they’re refutations of the insanity and nuttyness of religion. To quote Vladimir Lossky’s “Mystical Theology” (emphasis is mine):

Unlike gnosticism, in which knowledge for its own sake constitutes the aim of the gnostic, Christian theology is always in the last resort a means: a unity of knowledge subserving an end which transcends all knowledge. This ultimate end is union with God or deification, the theosis of the Greek Fathers… All the development of the dogmatic battles which the Church has waged down the centuries appears to us, if we regard it from the purely spiritual standpoint, as dominated by the constant preoccupation which the Church has had to safeguard, at each moment of her history, for all Christians, the possibility of attaining to the fullness of the mystical union. So the Church struggled against the gnostics in defence of this same idea of deification as the universal end: ‘God became man that men might become gods’. She affirmed, against the Arians, the dogma of the consubstantial Trinity; for it is the Word, the Logos, who opens to us the way to union with the Godhead; and if the incarnate Word has not the same substance with the Father, if He be not truly God, our deification is impossible. The Church condemned the Nestorians that she might overthrow the middle wall of partition, whereby, in the person of the Christ himself, they would have separated God from man. She rose up against the Apollinarians and Monophysites to show that, since the fullness of true human nature has been assumed by the Word, it is our whole humanity that must enter into union with God. She warred with the Monothelites because, apart from the union of the two wills, divine and human, there could be no attaining to deification—’God created man by his will alone, but He cannot save him without the co-operation of the human will.’ The Church emerged triumphant from the iconoclastic controversy, affirming the possibility of the expression through a material medium of the divine realities—symbol and pledge of our sanctification. The main preoccupation, the issue at stake, in the questions which successively arise respecting the Holy Spirit, grace and the Church herself this last the dogmatic question of our own time—is always the possibility the manner or the means of our union with God. All the history of Christian dogma unfolds itself about this mystical centre, guarded by different weapons against its many and diverse assailants in the course of successive ages.

In short, we are an army of unbelievers who wish to be united to God, and defend ourselves against the seduction by which religion would deprive us of it. We are very practical about it. Try to force your religion on us, and separate us from God by means of it, and we declare an anathema against you, and all our people cross their arms, turn their backs, and leave your “belief system” to die in the ashheap of history. We are the people of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Daniel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and of the seed of David, Jesus Christ. So yeah, if you become ahistorical like the Protestants and create a religion based on a belief system, or you become anti-historical like the “I’m leaving” spammer, and start denying the holocaust or the existence of Assyria (same thing, in principle), or whatever, then you’re right, you’re leaving. You’ve left. Good luck. But let’s not be confused about it – it really doesn’t matter what you “believe” or “don’t believe” in and of itself. What matters is what happened. History doesn’t need our belief to make it so. Once you accept that, you might as well believe you’re Elvis, because the distinction between belief and tangible, historical, scientific reality – the rock under our feet – well, that’s just gone off into lulu land.

Anyway, I still like the form letter idea. Maybe one of the atheist groups should create an online form, and you can fill in (by blind copy) the e-mail addresses of your religious group, and check off the appropriate boxes, before hitting send. I’ve got a belief system or two in my past I wouldn’t mind sending a test form to. 🙂 But come on, because of history? Next you’ll be denying Masada, and that’s just wrong!

4 thoughts on “The Historicity of the Scriptures”

  1. This is fantastic post, in my opinion.

    My orthodox friend tried to tell me something like this once and it did not compute. Thank you so much.

    I see some value in these thoughts for other groups of dis-believers who feel God and their relationship with God is just bigger than creedal unity.

    Nice routine on the front end of the post (very funny!) and all very well with the quote from Lossky (I think I have that book!) and your summation.

    loved this:
    “In short, we are an army of unbelievers who wish to be united to God, and defend ourselves against the seduction by which religion would deprive us of it.”

    -John

    1. I’m glad it helps. Of course, creedal unity is important in the extreme in Orthodoxy. Meaning we don’t get to stand in the liturgy and attribute whatever meanings we like to the creed and then receive the mysteries, as one can in some confessions. But what a lot of people miss is three points.

      1. We wrote the creed. It isn’t the creation of Luther or Charlemagne or Pope Benedict VIII. We wrote it, when there was no other ‘church’ but the Orthodox Church, when there were no ‘christians’ who were not the children of St. David and of St. Daniel. We who have guarded the creed as it exists in the law since St. Moses, and as it exists in the covenant with St. Adam and St. Eve since the creation. And so, it is we who say what it means theologically and historically, because it is our theology and history that is the subject. And, most importantly for the points made here, we say what it does *not* mean. One cannot separate the creed from the covenant, the creed from the people of the covenant, the creed from those who wrote it, from our history and story, from our meaning and thinking, from our way, and take it outside, and make it it’s own thing, anymore than you can take the mission statement of Google and interpret it for board policy at Microsoft. The Book of the Dead really doesn’t have much meaning outside the community that wrote it. It is their history, not a coffee house novelty designed to inform yet another belief system, to which it is in fact antithetical – it is a burial practice and a religion of specific and integral activity. The next points are closely related to this one: The creed is two things: negative theology and a history – a historical account of the gospel.

      2. It is negative theology: the heart of it might be said to be “begotten, not made”, a rejection of something (e.g. Arianism), because the creed as a documentary matter came about not at the beginning of Christian activity, but after centuries of it. It has been spoken in Orthodox liturgy since the beginning, first in the law, in the temple, second in the liturgics you see in Holy Scriptures that we now see in the documentary Creed. But we always said the creed in our worship. There was never a time that we didn’t. The documentary creed is negative theology, because it is in the context of gnosticism (the religion of knowledge and of belief) that we stood up and said “No. Here is that which we have always said, offered in *your language* with the initial words “I believe…”, and these are said in rejection of your innovations, your religious constructions, your erection of an edifice – a babel – of belief over the top of the people, of who we are, and our history, the story we have always told, and what we are doing. Here is the refutation of the belief system you would offer us in place of – as a substitute for – union with God.” If you look at the points of the Creed, theologically, they are not everything we think is true – they are the minimum truths it has been necessary to articulate to refute the beliefs, the systems of religious philosophy, offered to us like wampum and brandy against union with God. It is because Christ is begotten, not made that union with him is union with God. It is because he was born of the Virgin that it is not a merely “spiritual” union, but union of the whole person, without the genocidal destruction of some part of every person in the angry fire of a hateful deity, because God himself is flesh of her womb, flesh of our flesh, flesh of David, and so flesh of every man.

      3. It is history. It is not just negative (apophatic) theology, it is history (what we call “economy”) – it is the gospel of the relationship of God to all that is not God, a relationship of union (which is what we mean by ‘salvation’): “Who for us men and our salvation… was incarnate.” It is the very history that saves us, and it is the same history as the pillar of cloud that saved us in the wilderness, the serpent raised up in the wilderness that saved us, the manna from heaven that saved us, the ladder of heaven on which men ascend and descend – it is union with God, and thereby union with all other men, and thereby union with all creation, ecology, and nature, and all matter, and all things. It is the union of all things that Christ spoke of.

      So creedal unity, of course, is perhaps the most obvious trait of Holy Orthodoxy. After all, it is in 1014 when the Roman Patriarch (of the Orthodox Church) modified the Creed. Having been placed in his seat by Charlemagne, and puppet of the Carolingians, agitating against the Holy Orthodox Church, he made the court religious philosophy of the Carolingian throne the rule in the Roman see. The silver plates of the creed that St. Leo had placed on the walls of St. Peters were taken down, and the words were modified, seemingly trivially in themselves, but in order to modify both the theology and the history, and for this reason the Orthodox Church took the name of the Roman patriarch out of the dyptichs (the prayers of veneration that include all Orthodox patriarchs). Whatever they now were, they were not our people, and we cannot now know them, they have broken with our history, the history of the patriarchs of old. It is the most profound thing we could do to mark that they are not now our people. And we continued. And 40 years later, a new Roman patriarch violates the equality of the college of bishops, ordering all patriarchs in the world to bend the knee, submit to rule by one patriarch, and use the replacement creed. But of course, we can’t do that, and still be the people we have been since Eden, since the cold, thorny world outside of the garden became our home. We would not be the people of the desert, nor the people of the pillar, nor the people of Christ. And so of course we let the Roman patriarch pronounced his “excommunication” and so we did likewise (although for him, that meant consigning someone to hell, where for us, and for all Orthodox there is no such thinking – for us “excommunicaton” means to be separated from communion until one repent or until Christ comes and judges the matter – we cannot consign anyone to hell – we are not the righteous judge). After all, what more can we do but say, ‘you are not our people – we don’t know who you are anymore – and now you have tried to take over all the churches of the world and put a belief system in place of the faith, which was never built on the edifice of mere belief – and you have tried to modify the creed to turn it into a philosophical document of belief, changing both the history and the theology, depriving us of union with God, and offering us a religion of gnosis – of mere dogma, and so we cannot admit you to the holy mysteries, or share them with you, because they are for our people, the people of the beginning, with sadness, we wait for your repentance or until the first one of us return to judge this matter. Lord have mercy.’

      This is the history of why when people look at us, they often don’t understand. And even many of our own people don’t, because they are born into a society dominated by the very product of that schism – the West – or into nations decimated by belief systems imported from that system – e.g. the ideas of Marx and Engels. All of our history has been the battle against belief systems that people offer as seduction, or by force, or by subtlety to replace what it is we really have received and guarded since the beginning. Even our own Creed is given back to us with either changed words or changed belief or both. So, our creedal unity is in refusing to be moved, and if people fall in that battle, they are casualties of a war against religious genocide – a war to allow us to merely continue to exist w/o happening to us what happened to the American Indians. We aren’t an ethnic people. We are Jews and Greeks both. The original Hebrews (who found the Messiah) and the original Greeks (who never lost the new testament – we actually wrote it – in the same koine in which the liturgy is sung). But we *are* a people. Our tradition never stopped speaking of a people, and our job is to guard the possibility of salvation for all men, by refusing to be overrun with a belief system, by refusing to be flanked, give ground, or retreat. It is for all human beings that we must do this, and never yield. “For us men, and for our salvation”.

      Mercy. And again, Lord have mercy. Grant us strength, and peace, and deliverance from the Evil One. Keep us this day without sin. Make us to stand. Apart from Thee, we can do nothing. Keep us and save us. And save the bishop, rightly dividing the word of truth.

      If you think of me at all, make it a prayer. That I don’t yield in my part, or fall, or become a shame as a simple soldier, but hold the line. The general is coming, and then we can rest, when we have overcome. I will not give in to mere belief. I want to be one of the people. But that’s all I have to say. I’ll go back to my confession now, because if not, I risk offering up religious philosophy, a belief system, and then I have broken ranks and fought Christ. I only want to confess, and be saved, not to pretend to be a luminary. Christ is coming quickly. It is enough. Sing praises to our God on high. He is born of the Virgin, and so all we are being saved.

  2. What a treasure in a comment! Thank you; I can feel the power of truth here as if in a new key. “New” to me, but how ancient, I also see.

    There’s certainly something here for the world, but how to “bring it” without “giving in to mere belief” ??? I think I see your point. Believe me, I have the prerequisite experience to be astonished by your words.

    I hear you saying that it is not “creedal unity” that militates against or substitutes for union with God, but something more like formulaic unity or theologic unity. The unity of “party.” OK.

    No need to break ranks. There is something new of Christ’s spirit I can perceive in all this that is quite outside (or inside) the details – – inside, it seems to me, because it seems to shed the details as it steps into the heart.

    In fact, I think it a diservice even to brush with the details. I have my “standards” too, after all. But don’t stop writing,

    brother!

    -John

  3. By the way, I see I don’t have the Lossky book.

    When I went to the bookshelf for the book I remembered, I found Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism.

    I must have associated my memories of reading OC with your VL quote because of the Orthodox emphasis in Clement’s book. Every Father he quotes who is writing after the Western-Orthodox split is from the East!

    This really has my interest now. For me it’s a new way of viewing the Patristics. I needed a recharge on that literature, thank you. And I want the Lossky.

    -John

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