There are some within Christianity that in my opinion have lost their nerve and become confused about just from where does Truth come from. I wish to explain why this is tempting to all of us, but a mirage.
What constitutes the truth?
In the days before Jesus, some three centuries in fact, the ‘world’ became Greek. Taken up was the Old East with all it’s different religions, from the Hebrew to the Syrian. But the meeting of such diverse religions with the Pagan religion made plain “in this medley of conflicting opinions one thing is certain. Though it is possible that they are all of them false, it is impossible that more than one of them is true.†Cicero was not talking about the Hebrew religion or Mithraism, but about the different “religions†of his day, Stoicism and Epicureanism, yet the quote applies even here. These were theories for the understanding of the universe.
The use of sustained metaphors, have been taken by some as liberating and superior in every way to literal interpretation. But these metaphorical systems contain within them an accessorizing theory of what is “literally†the case, which then allows the theologian to “discover†allegoric and symbolic uses of the core form.
That is why the philosophical poet searching for metaphors that liberate from absurdity one religious tradition splashes the acid of literalism on many others to reveal their absurdities for all to see. The search for metaphor occurs when there is a system to be saved and defended from the dangers of irrationality, and this system is valued by the metaphorist. The writer of the Epistle of Baranabas was eager to use his creativity to search for the deeper meaning in the OT, but not in the Myths of the Greeks. And why? Because the Olympic Gods were beyond such attemps? No…
Greek thinkers such as Plato and Chrysippus, were divided on the question of how to assess the inherited Homeric tapestry of images. Some took the defense of the old traditions of Hesiod and Homer and others, like Socrates sought the eradication of such superstition. The apologetic efforts were what some call “translationsâ€. I call it “trans-valuationsâ€. The system in short worked in the introduction of a new theory clothed in the drappings of traditional religions. The new theory was better able to answer the critique of the times, and these points were then introduced by metaphor where the text was flexible enough to do so; that is, as long as the metaphor did not take away from the most important beliefs. These beliefs were the “literal†truth.
The modern Christian who takes on salvaging the faith from the errors of Catholicism and to reveal the true meaning lost in some imagined past still cannot do away with the idea of Jesus resurrection as easily as he destroys the “Virgin Birth Mythâ€, because the resurrection is central to the tradition, while the Birth is no longer so.
Truth, and this is the dogma of our day, cannot be compartmentalized. If Paul wrote something (inspired by God), then it must be true in some sense. But if our reason and common sense shows us something to be the case then it must be compatible (or be made compatible) with all other Truth (Paul’s). The conflicts cannot be final. When the Bible states what is absurd or impious (to our logic and moral sentiment) then we must discover the allegory to wipe away the infraction and make God once more fit for our heads. Feuerbach correctly identified that this leads to God being the God of our reason. That God is not God unless He is reasonable. God being subject to our reason, to what we can understand, reveals that what is divine is not God but our Reason. For Philo for example the story of Joseph and his coat of many colors, for instance, he treated as a metaphor in which Joseph stood for the Ideal Form of the Statesman and in which his many-hued garment signified the complexity of his political policies. The Epistle of Barnabas is creative too in this way. What had become important to them and to their audience now had also become important to the writer of Exodus. Of course, seeing such metaphors, quite elegant and intelligent to put it all in there, hidden in literal expressions, the true message, even for others of the times like Origen, reserved for the initiated, did not pass onto a universal effort of saving and defending all religions, nor even all metaphors that had been conceived, placing Gnostic against Gnostic. Having an allegiance to a tradition, the poet proceeds to update the tradition. Someone like Plato, having no such tethers has little problem with the complete substation of it for something better.
The problem that comes from these conditions is that the transmission of ideas is difficult when the idea is or has become so complex. As a rule, the simplest idea is the one which will be more easily transmitted. As such, orthodoxy presented a greater value to an Emperor trying to unite his new conquered kingdom. The sea of metaphors obscured rather than revealed whatever truth had once been clear. The literal truths were clear enough that at one point Nicea became possible. Not that the Truths that had become clear were the actual truth since the beginning but that the reast of the other previous truths were now effectively eliminated. Jesus might not have been originally observed as God Himself, but as a creature of God, but that loss out and failed to sustain it’s transmission and was selected out in time, even if at some time it had been the very truth of Truth.
The problem facing us today is the problem reality and consistency. This post is written because I am tired of the inconsistent approach of apologist these days who see metaphor in the Virgin Birth but failed to see the same in the Resurrection of Christ. The same beliefs about reality that leads one to label the first as a myth cannot admit that we then affirm the second as real but as another myth. They may want to de-mytholagize, but fail to realize that once the genie is out of the bottle you cannot choose 3 wishes as in the tale. If you bring critical thinking into the stories of Lazarus and the Conception, you cannot, without being logically inconsistent, apply the same thinking to the Resurrection.
Of course, the alternatives are not attractive, but I am here not to call some to become atheist, but to recognize the assumptions they believe with, assumptions that are now under the treath of reason. The more apologists speculate about the meaning of a word or passage, the more each word and other passages lose importance and stability. Soon, little difference will be found, if it is already not the case, between the faith in Christ and the faith in Jupiter, faith defended reasonably and metaphorically to the point that one must ask: what value comes of such faith?
Just as there is little value, in the eyes of God, when one loves those who love us, so too is there little value in having faith in what is reasonable.
Is Jesus born of a Virgin? I don’t know, but if God wanted for such an event to occur, does He lacks the means to bring that about? That is not the challenge to my faith. The challenge is what do I believe can happen? If I believe that the death can rise from the dead and that the lame can walk and in God, then I need no metaphor, for my view of the world is not reasonable but magical.
If God is once said to be walking and another time is said to be Spirit, what business is it of mine to speculate on what a God can and cannot do? Dare I pull the string sticking out from the beautiful tapestry, I might unravel the thing completely.
In fact that has already happened and it is the message of Nietzsche’s Madman.