The Evolution of God

Wright tackles much of the same ground that Karen Armstrong covered in History of God, mainly the conception of god as it expands and grows--evolves--from the earliest hunter gatherer tribes through the three Abrahamic religions. And it pretty much comes down to this: "Cultural evolution was all along pushing divinity, and hence humanity, toward moral enlightenment." Man's conception of god has grown to include more and  more peoples and ideas  as he has come into "non zero sum relationships" with them. A win-win philosophy underlies our developing sense of humanity and the extension of our moral compass and compassion.

"the births of all three Abrahamic religions were exercises in large-scale social engineering. With ancient Israel, once-autonomous tribes drew together, first into a confederacy and then into a state. The birth of Christianity saw a second kind of social consolidation, not of tribes but of whole ethnicities.…With the birth of Islam both of these thresholds—the conglomeration of tribes and of national ethnicities—would be crossed in short order"

While Wright begins with chapters on hunter-gatherers, kingships, and early middle eastern states, the heart of the book really focuses on the development of god and moral compassion in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Perhaps the best part of the book for me was the growth of Yahweh from a small-time Canaanite deity in the court of El (There is no evidence for the whole exodus story and the conquest of Canaan by Joshua et. al--The Israelites seemed to have coalesced as a people in the late Bronze age) and taking on more characteristics of the other gods in the court--especially Baal--as he grew in importance and influence. Josiah and his main man Hilkiah--he who miraculously found the Deuteronomic  Code in the rebuilding of the temple of Jerusalem--enforced monolatry on the people of Judah, forcibly destroying the temples and the priests of the other gods in the region, as reflected in the famous showdown between Elijah and the priests of Baal. This allowed Josiah to consolidate power in Jerusalem and consolidate the ethnic identity of the ancient Israelites. This monolatry was eventually pushed into monotheism by the time of the second Isaiah. Eventually, Philo pushed the idea of god to the intellectual conception of the logos, or as the creation and design of the universe.

Wright picks up with the story of Paul, here. He really doesn't have a lot to say about Jesus, for he maintains that there really isn't much to say. Jesus burst upon the scene proclaiming that the kingdom of god was coming very, very soon, but it was really up to his followers to establish a religion. Paul was the winner here,  bringing the message to the gentiles and hence transcending ethnic boundaries and enlarging the conception of god again. Wright does a good job of deconstructing Paul's message, especially his message of brotherly love that appears in his letters to some of the churches he founded, primarily as a means of consolidating his control over those churches after he moves on. It is a message of how church members should treat one another, not for mankind in general. But the gospel of John picks up on this and extends the idea with Philo's logos.

Wright is less convincing in his treatment of Islam. He maintains that Mohammed pushed the idea of god further than Paul and John as his worship of Allah grew beyond a small sect worshipped in Medina into a multinational empire controlled by religion. Mohammed's treatment of non-believers then also vacillated between intolerance and tolerance depending on how much he needed alliances with other peoples.

Finally, Wright seems to speculate this this growth in the conception of god might even present a good argument of the existence of god. "The existence of a moral order, I’ve said, makes it reasonable to suspect that humankind in some sense has a “higher purpose.” And maybe the source of this higher purpose, the source of the moral order, is something that qualifies for the label “god” in at least some sense of that word." It seems a bit far fetched to me to jump from talking about win-win strategies between people based on "non zero sum" relationships to assuming some kind of moral order and higher order to the universe.

Author: Wright, Robert

Date Published: 2009

Length: 567 pp & 18hr 27 min

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Narrator: Morey, Author

Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

I don't know if I can say that I was really blown away by McCulloch's Reformation two years ago, but it made reading Durant's books seem very dated and almost simplistic. I had high expectations for Christianity this summer, making it my major reading project of the summer. And reading it screen by screen on an ipod touch added significantly to the feeling of major task. The ability to highlight and review through the Kindle website, really added to the feeling of accomplishment, however, and made the summer's major read feel like something special. It certainly took enough time.

McCulloch captures the main theme of the book in the introduction: "I live with the puzzle of wondering how something so apparently crazy can be so captivating to millions of other members of m species" but also "I still appreciate the seriousness which a religious mentality brings to the mystery and misery of human existence." And that's where we part company, too, as I am just more taken by the craziness of it. Let's begin with the fact that both Jesus, the main character (kinda, sorta), and Paul, who really founded the religion--and who essentially paid no attention to Jesus's life or to what he said--were both flat wrong. They both spoke with great urgency about the imminent end of the world, and the following believers were left in the tough position of explaining to themselves why the world didn't end, after all.

Of course, politics underlies the whole story--going back to David, at least, with the establishment of the temple in Jerusalem to consolidate his power and his rule after usurping the kingship of Israel. Bring it through Josiah whose priest "discovers" the Deuteronomic code in 640 BCE after ursurping the throne from Amon of Judah, and Constantine's vision on the Malvern Bridge and his use of Christianity in consolidating his power, and Clovis adopting Martin of Tours as his personal saint because of the power that it give him when he begins to unite northern Europe under Frankish rule.

Central to understanding the history of Christianity is the compromise reached at Chalcedon, based first on the homousion controversy, inadvertently spurred by Constantine at Nicea in 325 CD, with a major battle between the miaphysites (monophysites), who argued that the three persons of the Trinity (which is probably never mentioned in any part of the books that make up the modern Bible) share one nature, while the dyophysites insist that Jesus had two natures--one human as the person Jesus and the other divine as the Logos. And add the Tome of Leo that declares Jesus as perfect in divine nature and perfect in human nature as well. It al seems to technical and even irrelevant to make these distinctions, and yet they underlie centuries of schism and violence.

Another main argument runs through the area of authority--does it come from the line of apostolic succession, from scripture, from faith, from personal revelation. One conclusion is that the Reformation represents Augustine's doctrine of salvation over his doctrine of the church. Luther, following Augustine--and Paul before him, emphasizes the complete depravity and worthlessness of man--original sin--and the inability of man to do anything about it except through grace. This, of course, stems from Paul's vision on the road to Damascus and his developing a whole Christ centered theology without having much reference to Jesus's life or teachings.

Even though Paul lays the foundation of the religion, it is Peter who becomes the center of a crazy "mana" centered practices that leads to the formation of the papacy, which finally declared in 1870 (in the midst of being attacked by the Italian army and most of the delegates to the conference had left) that it could be infallible, even though the office had passed through innumerable schisms and moral lapses.

It's important to realize, too, that religion as a personal choice is a relatively recent phenomenon, becoming embraced primarily in England and Holland before becoming institutionalized in the America in the early 18th century. The story of Christianity, especially after Constantine's conversion, is a story of "territorial communality" leading to condemnation, execution, and wholesale war.

In the end, though, there is just too much to cover, even in a thousand pages, to do real justice to the topic. It was a good read and very informative, but so many areas had to be glossed over or superficially described. My own final thought echo Kant when he said that the "Enlightenment is mankind's exit from self-incurred immaturity." This is a book about a particular kind of self-imposed immaturity that helped shape the culture and society that I live in. How crazy is that?

Author: MacCulloch, Diarmaid

Date Published: 2010

Length: 1015 pp

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Paul: The Mind of the Apostle

Art Cunningham gave this to me years ago, and it's been gathering dust on my shelf, but I decided to give it a whirl after reading Karen Armstrong's book on the Bible.

Paul made Christianity into a mystery religion, similar to Mithraism and the salvation found through Hercules, where salvation comes though faith in the cross. It was a much different movement from that of the Way, the church in Jerusalem, or from that of Jesus, a devout and fervent Jew and faith healer in the backwater ports of Galilee. Paul was an urban citizen of the empire who claimed to know Jesus better than Paul  or James, because he had had visions and prophecies of the "true" word of god. This led to his break with the church in Jerusalem as well as from Judaism.

Paul also made it clear that man is utter depraved and unable to do good by himself, for himself. It is only through the love of god through the crucifixion that man can be saved. For Paul, that meant the imminent coming of Jesus where the saved would escape the wrath of God when the kingdom is re-established in Israel and all the gentile worship the one true god. This leads to a poignant scene when Paul is whisked away from Jerusalem and taken to Caesarea without the end having come. 

Wilson makes it clear that Christianity would probably not have lasted without Paul's stamp, although it was not a religion or a movement that Jesus would have recognized or endorsed. It was a fascinating book that read much like a novel.

Author: Wilson, A. N.

Date Published: 1994

Length: 258 pp

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The Bible, A Biography

Karen Armstrong lite, again. She tries to cover too much ground, too much time, in such a short book. The heart of the book is showing how the different writings became the book that we know as the Bible and then how different times and people have read and interpreted the Bible.

The best part of the book, I think, is her take on how the religion of the temple became the religion of the book, first in Josiah's remodeling of the temple when Hilkiah suddenly "found" the lost books of Moses, then in the Babylonian captivity, finally with the destruction of the temple by the Romans.

Armstrong carefully maintains that the different strands really represent a rewriting and a reinterpretation of the religion that wasn't really codified until much, much later. The same is true of the Jesus movement that gained momentum when the temple was destroyed and then was codified as part of the state religion after Constantine's conversion.

The rest of the book is about the different ways that the Bible has been read and interpreted, and Armstrong is at pains to show that literalism and "inerrancy" is really a huge mistake that misunderstands what the Bible and historical context is all about. She returns to her long standing thesis that when the mythos side of man's psyche is undervalued or ignored, it will often crop back up in grotesque and strident forms, as has happened since the Enlightenment.

Author: Armstrong, Karen

Date Published: 2007

Length: 212 pp

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