Cinemorphosis

Tag: faith

  • The Meteor That Changed the Mediterranean World

    The Meteor That Changed the Mediterranean World

    As Emmanuel Carrère traces the rise of Christianity in The Kingdom, he depicts Luke and Paul moving through the bustling cities of the Mediterranean world, where three rival visions of human flourishing collided. They were not merely preaching a new religion. They were entering a crowded marketplace of competing moral philosophies, each offering its own answer to the question of what makes life worth living.

    The Romans offered the first answer.

    For them, religion was tolerable only so long as it remained politically harmless. Excessive religious devotion bred fanaticism, divided loyalties, and threatened civic order. The ideal citizen obeyed the law, fulfilled his duties, and refrained from allowing theological convictions to disrupt the smooth functioning of the Empire.

    This was Imperial Pragmatism: the tendency to judge beliefs and behaviors primarily by whether they preserve political order, administrative efficiency, and imperial cohesion rather than by their theological or moral truth.

    The Roman attitude toward sexuality reflected the same practicality.

    Sex was no great moral drama. It belonged in the same category as food or wine: a pleasure to be enjoyed in moderation. As Carrère writes, “The pleasures of the flesh were no more problematic than those of the table: you had to control them, and to be no more a slave to your desire than to your appetite, that’s all.”

    The Jews, therefore, struck the Romans as unnecessarily severe.

    Their sexual prohibitions seemed joyless.

    Their exclusive devotion to one God appeared intolerant.

    Their refusal to worship other gods bordered on civic insolence.

    To Roman eyes, Jewish morality looked less like virtue than cultural eccentricity.

    The Jewish worldview, however, rested upon an entirely different foundation.

    Its highest aspiration was neither imperial order nor personal indulgence, but faithfulness to God expressed through ordinary human flourishing.

    Marriage was good.

    Children were a blessing.

    Prosperity was welcomed.

    Hospitality honored both neighbor and God.

    Carrère beautifully summarizes this vision: “Being happy meant growing and prospering, becoming rich enough to be generous, welcoming friends under your fig tree, growing old alongside your wife, and dying at a ripe old age without having lost a child.”

    Carrère admits that this is the ideal that speaks most deeply to him.

    It speaks to me as well.

    Unlike many later religious traditions that regarded worldly success with suspicion, Judaism sanctified ordinary life. It found holiness not by escaping the world but by inhabiting it faithfully.

    I call this Sacred Flourishing: the belief that material prosperity, family, longevity, and communal joy are proper expressions of a life lived faithfully under God’s covenant rather than distractions from spiritual life.

    Then Christianity arrived.

    It did not gently revise this vision.

    It detonated it.

    Its moral revolution crashed into the ancient world like a meteor.

    Love your enemies.

    Bless those who persecute you.

    The first shall be last.

    The poor are blessed.

    The meek inherit the earth.

    These teachings overturned assumptions that had governed civilizations for centuries.

    But loving one’s enemies was only the beginning.

    Jesus also dismantled the very architecture of Sacred Flourishing.

    He replaced it with something altogether stranger.

    Call it Sacred Withering.

    As Carrère observes, Jesus systematically inverted every conventional measure of success: “Love your enemies, take joy in being unhappy, prefer being small to being big, poor to rich, sick to healthy.”

    Nor did the reversals end there.

    Beware of family.

    Beware of wealth.

    Beware of reputation.

    Beware of self-esteem.

    Prefer solitude to applause.

    Humiliation to prestige.

    Loss to possession.

    Hold everything the world calls good with suspicion, and everything it calls weakness with reverence.

    This was not simply another ethical system.

    It was an assault upon common sense.

    That very impossibility became part of its persuasive force.

    If the teaching felt unnatural, perhaps it was because it originated somewhere beyond nature itself.

    Carrère believes Paul possessed precisely the temperament such a revolution required.

    Paul was a fanatic.

    He embraced Christianity not as one philosophy among many but as a total inversion of human values.

    Luke was different.

    Raised in “a province with gentle, patriarchal customs,” Luke seems to have retained a profound affection for the Jewish ideal of Sacred Flourishing—a stable household, abundant children, material security, and peaceful old age.

    Paul had little patience for such aspirations.

    Everything now belonged to the Kingdom.

    Whatever private reservations Luke may have entertained, he followed Paul anyway.

    By then, retreat had become almost impossible.

    He had crossed too many seas, shared too many dangers, and devoted too many years to the mission.

    He had entered what I call Narrative Captivity: the condition in which a person continues advancing a mission or worldview despite growing private doubts because abandoning it would require abandoning the story that now defines his identity.

    Carrère’s speculation is psychologically compelling.

    Yet another possibility remains.

    Perhaps Luke did not merely submit to Paul’s vision.

    Perhaps he gradually surrendered to it.

    Perhaps repeated companionship, shared suffering, and years spent watching Paul’s impossible faith reshape lives slowly transformed Luke’s own convictions until what had first seemed intolerable eventually became self-evident.

    If so, Luke’s story is not one of reluctant compliance but of conversion.

    He did not simply help write Paul’s revolutionary narrative.

    He became one of its true believers.

  • Why the Rich Writer Walked Away

    Why the Rich Writer Walked Away

    Emmanuel Carrère may call himself an agnostic, but The Kingdom leaves little doubt that he believes Christianity possesses a terrifying kind of power. The tragedy, he suggests, is that many of us fail to experience that power not because Christianity is intellectually implausible, but because its demands are more than we are willing to bear.

    Like Carrère, we have become deeply attached to a particular way of life.

    We cultivate an identity that is worldly, ironic, sophisticated, and clever. We delight in demonstrating impeccable taste—not merely through the books we read but through the books we are seen reading. We proudly own the latest gadgets, make exquisitely informed purchases, and quietly enjoy belonging to that invisible fraternity of people who seem always to know what is worth buying, watching, and thinking. We mistake refinement for wisdom and discernment for virtue. We become connoisseurs of status disguised as connoisseurs of culture.

    Jesus threatens that entire arrangement.

    He insists that what we call power is often a counterfeit. Real power lies not in accumulating influence, wealth, admiration, or control but in relinquishing them. His invitation is not merely to improve our lives but to surrender them.

    That is the problem.

    Even if we admire Christ’s vision of humility and sacrificial love, we remain enchanted by the life we have painstakingly constructed. We love our comforts. We love our reputations. We love the illusion that we are directing our own destinies. We hesitate before following a God who has an unsettling habit of leading people into uncertainty, humiliation, danger, and, in the cases of Peter, Paul, and James, martyrdom.

    Carrère recognizes this reluctance within himself.

    With remarkable honesty, he contemplates his privileged life with melancholy, guilt, and unease. He is an acclaimed novelist. He travels the world. He vacations in beautiful places. He inhabits an aesthetic world polished by wealth, education, and artistic success.

    His confession is devastating: “I live in perpetual worship of and worry about my person, but also that I strongly believe in this person. I know nothing other than my own ego, and I believe that this ego exists.”

    Though agnostic about God, he is utterly certain of his ego.

    That certainty, he fears, is precisely the problem.

    The ego always asks the same question:

    What do I want?

    The Gospel asks a different one:

    What is right?

    The two questions frequently point in opposite directions.

    I know this conflict all too well.

    When I think about factory farming, I arrive at a conclusion I find difficult to escape. Morally speaking, I believe reducing or eliminating my participation in that system would be the more defensible course. The suffering involved troubles my conscience.

    Yet my behavior tells another story.

    I enjoy carne asada tacos. Family celebrations revolve around meat-centered meals. Refusing them would complicate relationships, invite awkward explanations, and separate me from customs that bind me to the people I love. Even if I located a sympathetic vegan community, meeting once a month to encourage one another would hardly replace the ordinary rhythms of family life.

    So I continue with my non-vegan ways.

    There exists a painful gap between my moral convictions and my daily habits.

    That gap exposes what I call Lifestyle Captivity: the condition in which a person’s comforts, status, pleasures, and social identity become so psychologically indispensable that they prevent wholehearted commitment to moral convictions or spiritual transformation.

    My attachment to pleasure proves stronger than my attachment to principle.

    That is not strength.

    It is weakness.

    Jesus’ warning about the rich man and the eye of the needle has always sounded exaggerated—until one realizes that wealth is not merely money. Wealth includes every possession, pleasure, habit, reputation, and identity we cannot imagine surrendering.

    This is the passage in The Kingdom that haunts Carrère most deeply.

    It haunts me as well.

    Reflecting on the story of the rich young ruler, Carrère writes with heartbreaking simplicity:

    “I identify with the rich young man. I have great wealth.”

    His wealth extends beyond money. It includes literary acclaim, artistic fulfillment, intellectual prestige, and the profound satisfaction of having discovered his vocation as a writer. He recognizes himself in an apocryphal saying attributed to Jesus: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

    Writing has become the means by which Carrère brings forth what is within him. It has given his life coherence, purpose, and joy.

    Yet even this gift becomes suspect.

    Whenever he takes satisfaction in his success, another voice interrupts.

    He writes:

    Nevertheless, a stubborn little voice persistently interrupts these moments of pharisaical smugness. It says that all the riches I enjoy—the wisdom I pride myself on, the confident hope I have of being on the right track—are what prevent real accomplishment. I never stop winning, although to really win I’d have to lose. I’m rich, gifted, praised, deserving, and conscious that I deserve: for all of that, woe to me!

    No amount of psychoanalysis, meditation, or self-acceptance silences that voice.

    Modern therapeutic culture encourages him to celebrate himself.

    The Gospel asks him to lose himself.

    Those are not the same project.

    In one of the most moving passages in the book, Carrère finally admits: “Nevertheless, I think that the little voice of the Gospel is right. And like the rich young man, I walk away, sad and pensive, for I have great wealth.”

    He may call himself an agnostic.

    Yet somewhere beneath the skepticism, beneath the irony, beneath the literary sophistication and psychological nuance, an unmistakably Christian longing remains alive.

    He longs to renounce the worldly attachments that have made him successful. He longs to exchange self-possession for surrender. He longs to discover whether lowering himself might, paradoxically, become the only path upward.

    Perhaps that is why The Kingdom refuses to become either an apology for Christianity or an argument against it.

    It is the confession of a man who cannot silence the Gospel’s little voice.

    Neither, I suspect, can I.

  • You Can’t Explain Beethoven

    You Can’t Explain Beethoven

    In his autobiographical novel The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère revisits the three years in his thirties when he became an intensely devoted Christian. Looking back, he is both fascinated and bewildered by the man he once was. He cannot decide whether those years of fervent faith represented a genuine encounter with God or a desperate attempt to survive depression and a crippling creative drought. He wonders whether, like Paul on the road to Damascus, he underwent a kind of mutation—and whether his later deconversion into agnosticism is simply another mutation of the self.

    What is striking is that Carrère refuses to declare one mutant superior to the other.

    He does not write as the triumphant rationalist looking back with condescension upon his younger, credulous self. Nor does he portray his conversion as the last moment of authentic truth before an unfortunate fall into unbelief. He extends equal curiosity to both versions of himself, unable to say with confidence which one saw reality more clearly. The believer and the agnostic remain locked in an unresolved conversation.

    Carrère also discovers an unexpected kinship with Luke. Both are storytellers. Both understand that narratives do more than report events—they persuade, shape memory, create identity, and sometimes become civilization’s most enduring myths.

    For this reason, Carrère navigates the Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s letters with impressive confidence. They invite historical investigation. They provoke questions of authorship, chronology, motive, and psychology. They reward the tools of criticism.

    Luke’s Gospel is different.

    When Carrère arrives there, his confidence evaporates.

    He becomes, in his own word, “speechless.”

    He wonders whether his silence arises because so much of Luke is imaginative, because it overflows with piety, because too many of its characters seem to exist without obvious historical models—or because approaching such a text without “fear and trembling” renders the entire exercise meaningless.

    That question reveals something profound.

    Analyzing Luke’s Gospel solely as an academic artifact begins to resemble explaining Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony through harmonic analysis while ignoring the experience of hearing it performed. The music may be dissected measure by measure, every modulation cataloged, every motif traced, yet none of that explains why generations have emerged from it transformed. It would be like arguing for Beethoven’s artistic greatness by comparing chord progressions with Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life.” Such an argument would be absurd. The argument may be persuasive, but it somehow misses the thing that made the work worth discussing in the first place.

    Luke’s Gospel confronts Carrère with what I call Reverential Limits: the recognition that certain works of art, literature, and religion cannot be fully understood through detached analysis alone because they also demand awe, imagination, and existential participation.

    This realization is one of the reasons The Kingdom rises above the familiar memoir of conversion or deconversion. It refuses the tidy architecture of books entitled Why I Became an X or Why I Am No Longer an X. Those books usually know their destination before the first page is written. They exist to prosecute a case and deliver a verdict.

    Carrère’s novel has a more ambitious purpose.

    It preserves wonder.

    The farther he investigates Christianity, the less eager he becomes to reduce it to a slogan, a certainty, or a manifesto. He discovers that the deepest encounters with great religion resemble the deepest encounters with great art. They resist summary. They refuse domestication. They leave us, not with the smug satisfaction of having solved the mystery, but with the unsettling realization that the mystery has somehow enlarged us.

    Sometimes the highest form of understanding is not another argument.

    Sometimes it is speechlessness.

  • The Seduction of Narrative Tidiness

    The Seduction of Narrative Tidiness

    Emmanuel Carrère finds Hyam Maccoby’s The Mythmaker intellectually stimulating but ultimately unpersuasive. Maccoby argues that Christianity is little more than history rewritten by its victors. In his telling, Paul is not merely mistaken but fraudulent. He is not even authentically Jewish. He hijacks Judaism, invents a new religion, and legitimizes it by claiming direct revelations from the risen Jesus, thereby elevating himself above the apostles who actually knew Christ.

    Carrère cannot resist responding with dry irony. “Then, finally, after two thousand years of darkness, Professor Maccoby appeared.”

    The joke exposes what Carrère sees as the weakness of Maccoby’s thesis. In attempting to strip Christianity of its myths, Maccoby constructs a myth of his own. Carrère writes, “Passing off two thousand years of Church history as complete revisionism strikes me as the height of revisionism.”

    This does not mean Carrère dismisses Maccoby outright. He readily acknowledges that portions of the New Testament contributed to centuries of Christian antisemitism. But he rejects Maccoby’s insistence that Jewish authorities bore no responsibility for Jesus’ persecution. The historical record, however fragmentary and contested, still points to genuine conflict between Jesus and segments of the Jewish religious leadership. Likewise, Maccoby’s portrait of Paul as little more than a calculating “goy informer” strikes Carrère as psychologically implausible. The Paul who emerges from his own letters is conflicted, tormented, contradictory, and profoundly self-aware—a figure possessing, as Carrère puts it, a distinctly Dostoyevskian complexity. Such a man cannot be reduced to a cardboard villain.

    Carrère’s disagreement with Maccoby reveals a broader truth about conspiracy theories and overly ambitious historical revisionism. They are almost always too tidy.

    Reality is untidy. Human beings harbor mixed motives. Historical events emerge from tangled webs of personality, accident, conviction, fear, and unintended consequences. Conspiracy theories sweep away that complexity in favor of elegant explanations populated by unmistakable heroes, obvious villains, and a single hidden key that unlocks everything. They offer certainty at a discount.

    The appeal is understandable. Complexity exhausts us. Ambiguity frustrates us. We long for stories that snap together with the satisfying precision of puzzle pieces. Yet the cleaner the explanation becomes, the more likely it is that reality has been shaved down to fit it. Tidiness often comes at the expense of truth.

    As Carrère wrestles with Christianity—a religion that has fascinated, converted, disillusioned, and continued to haunt him over decades—he refuses to surrender to what I call Narrative Tidiness: the impulse to compress complicated history into emotionally satisfying stories with unmistakable heroes, villains, and motives. He is willing to question Christian orthodoxy. He is equally willing to question the critics who promise to explain Christianity away with a single master theory.

    For Carrère, intellectual honesty requires resisting myths on both sides. The moment history becomes too neat, it has probably ceased to be history.

  • Chronological Humility

    Chronological Humility

    Emmanuel Carrère once believed wholeheartedly in the Resurrection. During his years of Christian conversion, it was not merely a theological proposition but the organizing principle of his life. Today he sees it differently. He describes it as a bereavement fantasy born among a few dozen grieving followers that somehow spread across continents, converted nearly a quarter of humanity, and remains a phenomenon that still “intrigues, fascinates, troubles, and moves” him.

    Notice what he does not say. He does not dismiss believers as fools. He does not congratulate himself for escaping religion. Nor does he portray his conversion as an embarrassing lapse in judgment from which his enlightened self has thankfully recovered.

    That restraint lies at the heart of The Kingdom.

    Carrère explains that he wrote the book to prevent his present, nonreligious self from assuming moral or intellectual superiority over his former believing self. He is suspicious of certainty itself. Rather than explaining conversion and de-conversion with neat psychological formulas, he treats them as mysterious human “mutations” whose causes and meanings remain partly hidden. He refuses to simplify either transformation into triumph or pathology. As he puts it, “I’m writing this book to avoid coming down too firmly in my favor.”

    The book is animated by what I would call Chronological Humility: the refusal to assume that the latest version of oneself is necessarily the wisest simply because it arrives later in time. Today’s certainty may become tomorrow’s embarrassment. The present self has no automatic claim to superior vision merely because it occupies the newest chapter of the autobiography.

    In that sense, The Kingdom is not merely an investigation of early Christianity. It is Carrère’s ongoing apprenticeship in humility, perhaps one of the lingering gifts of his years as a Christian. Humility keeps the mind porous. It reminds us that growth often requires surrendering convictions we once defended with absolute confidence. Every fundamentalism, whether religious or secular, begins with the comforting illusion that the journey has ended and certainty has finally been achieved.

    My maternal grandfather, Richard Meyers, understood that illusion better than he realized.

    Born in 1915 and dying in 2001, he devoted much of his life to Marxism. In his younger years, his politics possessed the unmistakable rigidity of religious fundamentalism. Competing ideologies were not merely mistaken; they were inferior. Religion was a collection of fairy tales, and those who believed in it were captives of childish superstition.

    When I converted to Christianity as a teenager, he was deeply troubled. Eventually he resigned himself to what he considered my intellectual captivity. He once told a fellow Marxist, with genuine sadness, “It’s too late for him.” He believed he could see Christianity’s claws buried deep inside my brain.

    His loyalty to the movement was so uncompromising that even Stalin, despite overwhelming evidence of his atrocities, could not be criticized because doing so, he insisted, “hurt the movement.” The cause demanded silence where conscience demanded speech.

    Time, however, has a way of softening even the hardest certainties.

    Of all the changes my grandfather made, one remains especially dear to me.

    In 1990, while waiting for a play to begin in Hollywood, we wandered the streets looking for a place to eat. Along the way we met a homeless Vietnam veteran who said he was hungry. I bought him a meal at a nearby burger restaurant.

    My grandfather disapproved.

    Feeding one homeless man, he argued, did nothing to solve the structural causes of poverty. Charity was sentimental. Systems, not sandwiches, changed history.

    “I don’t care about solving the future right now,” I replied. “I care about relieving his hunger today.”

    The conversation ended there.

    Or so I thought.

    Two years later, while we were eating together at an Italian restaurant in San Pedro, he unexpectedly returned to the incident.

    “I was wrong,” he said quietly. “You did the right thing.”

    It was a simple sentence. No fanfare. No dramatic confession. Just an elderly man acknowledging that his younger self had been mistaken.

    That moment warmed my heart far more than if I had won the original argument. I wasn’t moved because he admitted defeat. I was moved because he had demonstrated the rarest of human virtues: the willingness to become a different person without pretending he had always been one.

    I suspect that is precisely what Carrère hopes to preserve in himself through The Kingdom. The book is less an argument for or against Christianity than a safeguard against the arrogance of believing that the latest version of Emmanuel Carrère has finally escaped the mistakes of all the previous ones. It is an act of Chronological Humility—a refusal to declare victory over his former self because he knows that someday even his present convictions may become another chapter in the long story of a mind still learning how to change.

  • The Gospel According to Common Sense

    The Gospel According to Common Sense

    I have feared eternity for as long as I can remember. My life has felt less like a spiritual journey than a protracted campaign in a war for my own soul. Much of that campaign has been chronicled in my collection of essays, The Theology of Biceps, where barbells, vanity, faith, mortality, and salvation wrestle each other beneath fluorescent gym lights. Lately the battle has intensified. I am approaching sixty-five, that age when abstractions begin presenting themselves as appointments rather than ideas, and I have reread, for the fifth time, Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, his brilliant, maddening meditation on Christianity. Between Carrère’s relentless fascination with the Apostle Paul and my own inability to leave theological questions alone, I have spent months drowning in what I call Theological Vertigo: that state in which every answer generates three new questions until the mind becomes exhausted by its own seriousness.

    Our family vacation to Carlsbad interrupted the cycle. I read less. I wrote less. For the first time in months, my mind had room to breathe.

    One morning we ate breakfast at the French Corner. I ordered a savory crepe and drank coffee softened with milk, cinnamon, and honey. It was, without exaggeration, one of the most satisfying meals of my life. I left the table neither hungry nor bloated but suspended in that miraculous middle ground where appetite and satisfaction shake hands. For several fleeting minutes I experienced something approaching perfection. The meal did not merely fill my stomach; it seemed to quiet some hidden chamber of the soul that usually refuses to stop talking.

    Then we wandered into downtown Carlsbad. My family disappeared into a used record store while I remained outside. I have never liked the smell of old books or aging paper. To many people it evokes nostalgia. To me it smells like mildew wearing a tweed jacket.

    As I waited, I found myself contemplating the familiar inventory of deficiencies: the thirty extra pounds I continue to carry, my inconsistent discipline, and my growing realization that I need more daily companionship than I once admitted.

    Then I noticed two men walking toward me.

    They appeared to be in their early seventies. Both wore safari hats, T-shirts, shorts, and tennis shoes. Their phones rested casually in their back pockets rather than monopolizing their attention. Their conversation flowed with the easy rhythm of men who had probably taken the same walk together hundreds of times. They laughed. They listened. Neither seemed in a hurry to dominate the conversation or perform for an invisible audience. Their calves were sculpted from years of walking rather than months of gym heroics. They looked younger than many men twenty years their junior because their bodies had quietly become advertisements for moderation.

    I envied them immediately.

    Not simply because they were lean, although I certainly noticed that. I envied the life their bodies implied. These were men who had discovered that exercise and friendship need not compete for time. They had fused physical fitness with social fitness into a single daily ritual.

    I doubted they spent evenings rereading Emmanuel Carrère or wondering whether Paul was history’s greatest religious genius or its most successful narcissist. I doubted they classified themselves as “religious,” “spiritual,” “agnostic,” or “secular.” They probably possessed something rarer than an ideology.

    They possessed common sense.

    You take care of your body.

    You walk every day.

    You eat reasonably.

    You cultivate friendships.

    You show up.

    You repeat the process tomorrow.

    None of these habits requires a bestselling self-help book or a sophisticated theology. They emerge from the accumulated evidence of ordinary life. They are conclusions reached not by speculation but by observation.

    Standing outside that record store, I began to wonder whether I had spent years practicing Existential Overfishing—casting my line ever deeper into the waters of ultimate meaning until I had forgotten the fish swimming near the surface. Had I mistaken depth for wisdom? Had I become so absorbed in metaphysical puzzles that I had overlooked the plain truths available to anyone willing to pay attention?

    Questions flooded in.

    Is common sense enough?

    Is common sense superior to profound religious contemplation?

    Have I submerged myself beneath a sea of fascinating but largely irrelevant abstractions?

    Have I mistaken intellectual complexity for spiritual maturity?

    Have I, after all these years, simply lost the plot?

    Perhaps the life of the Common Sensalist is the wiser path.

    A Common Sensalist believes that flourishing depends less upon elaborate theological systems or fashionable self-improvement programs than upon the quiet authority of ordinary experience: daily exercise, enduring friendships, moderation, meaningful work, simple pleasures, and habits repeated until they become character. Such a philosophy does not reject transcendence. It merely insists that the road toward it may begin with putting on walking shoes instead of opening another theological treatise.

    As I stood there waiting for my family to emerge from the record store, I felt strangely melancholy. I had spent decades wrestling angels while two elderly men had apparently settled for walking with friends.

    I still wasn’t sure who had chosen the better path.

    But I knew exactly where I wanted to eat breakfast the next morning.

  • The Inversion Gospel

    The Inversion Gospel

    Largely because of Paul, Christianity leaves no room for self-help.

    There is no Stoic program of disciplined self-mastery. No Epicurean search for tranquil pleasure. No rationalist confidence that reason can perfect the soul. No wisdom tradition promising that enough insight, meditation, or self-examination will unlock your hidden potential. Paul sweeps every human technology of self-improvement into a single heap and sets it ablaze.

    Discipline.

    Reason.

    Philosophy.

    Human flourishing.

    All of it belongs, in Paul’s estimation, on the rubbish pile.

    There is no meditation to anchor you in your inner self. No koan to awaken your latent divinity. No carefully engineered life-hack to elevate your consciousness. Instead, Paul reaches back to Isaiah and delivers a stunning declaration of war against human wisdom itself: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the intelligence of the intelligent I will reject.”

    Yet Paul does not stop at dismantling humanity’s ladders to self-perfection.

    He demands something even more astonishing.

    You must embrace what the world calls foolishness.

    The crucified Messiah is not merely an inconvenient truth. He is a scandal to the Jews and utter absurdity to the Greeks. The path to salvation does not ascend through brilliance, eloquence, status, or virtue. It descends into humiliation, weakness, dependence, and apparent defeat. Those whom society considers lowly and contemptible are nearest the Kingdom, while the celebrated, accomplished, and admired stand in greatest danger.

    Paul thus proclaims what might be called the Anti-Flourishing Doctrine: the startling Christian paradox that human excellence, self-improvement, wisdom, and personal achievement can become obstacles rather than pathways to salvation. The more impressive you become in your own eyes, the less likely you are to recognize your need for grace.

    Emmanuel Carrère, however, wonders whether theology is the whole story.

    He suspects Paul was also engaged in a struggle for authority.

    Hovering in the background is the gifted preacher Apollos, renowned for his eloquence and learning. Paul never launches a direct attack on him. Instead, he accomplishes something far more ingenious. By portraying eloquence, rhetorical brilliance, and worldly wisdom as spiritually suspect, while elevating weakness, humility, and apparent foolishness, Paul quietly transforms his greatest rival into an example of precisely what Christians ought to distrust.

    It is a rhetorical masterstroke.

    Without naming Apollos, Paul changes the rules of the contest.

    The polished speaker suddenly appears spiritually compromised. The awkward, unimpressive apostle becomes the authentic messenger of God. Those standing high are brought low; those lying in the dust are lifted up.

    Carrère is astonished by the originality of this move. Whether Paul’s motives were entirely pure is almost beside the point. He had written something the ancient world had never encountered. Like Jesus himself—whom Carrère describes as a hapax legomenon, a phenomenon without precedent—Paul seemed to create an intellectual and spiritual category all his own.

    He proclaimed what might be called the Inversion Gospel: the revolutionary conviction that every conventional measure of greatness—wisdom, eloquence, status, strength, success, even virtue—is overturned by the logic of the Cross, where weakness becomes power, defeat becomes victory, and what appears to be foolishness becomes the deepest truth of all.

  • Pauline Mirror Syndrome

    Pauline Mirror Syndrome

    There is no escaping Paul. To become a Christian is, in some measure, to place your trust in him. You must accept that the man who never met the historical Jesus became, through his Damascus conversion and subsequent revelations, an apostle every bit as legitimate as those who had walked beside Christ in Galilee. More than that, you must believe that Paul’s visions conferred an authority so profound that he became Christianity’s most influential interpreter, the man whose voice would ultimately drown out nearly all the others.

    For many believers, this poses no difficulty. Paul is the heroic convert, the fearless missionary, the brilliant theologian who carried Christianity into the Gentile world.

    For others, he is a problem.

    His letters often pulse with an unnerving competitiveness. He dismisses rivals with astonishing confidence, defends his authority with relentless vigor, and repeatedly reminds his readers that his gospel came not from human teachers but by direct revelation from Christ. To admirers, this is prophetic certainty. To skeptics, it can sound perilously close to grandiosity. His confidence is so complete that it occasionally borders on solipsism, as though the final court of appeal were not the testimony of others but the private theater of his own mind.

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère imagines Paul regarding the Jerusalem apostles with something approaching contempt. Their understanding of Jesus, rooted in firsthand acquaintance, strikes Paul as merely “Christ according to the flesh.” Carrère compares him to “those critics who prefer not to read the books or see the films they review to be sure that their judgment won’t be swayed by the work in question.” 

    It is a devastating image. Paul becomes the supreme authority precisely because he refuses to be constrained by eyewitnesses.

    Some readers find this exhilarating.

    Others experience what I call apostolic recoil: the instinctive revulsion one feels toward a revered religious figure whose personality seems morally or psychologically suspect despite his canonical status.

    I belonged to that second camp almost from the beginning.

    I remember sitting in church when I was seventeen as a member of the choir introduced a hymn. His face glowed with affection as he announced that Paul was his favorite apostle. The warmth in his voice startled me because it exposed the opposite reaction within myself. I disliked Paul with remarkable intensity. He struck me as arrogant, combative, ambitious, and intoxicated by his own authority.

    The realization filled me with shame.

    I was a new Christian, yet I harbored deep hostility toward the man who had done more than anyone else to shape Christianity. Surely this could not bode well for my faith. I was suffering from canonical dissonance: the unsettling psychological conflict that arises when one reveres a religious tradition while distrusting one of its indispensable architects.

    What did this say about the authenticity of my conversion? Had I embraced Christianity while instinctively rejecting its chief interpreter?

    Decades later, my opinion of Paul has become more nuanced but no less conflicted. Emmanuel Carrère has supplied historical and psychological reasons to question Paul’s extraordinary self-confidence, yet I have gradually come to suspect that my resistance originates somewhere far less flattering.

    Perhaps the problem is not Paul.

    Perhaps the problem is me.

    I recognize too much of myself in him.

    His ambition.

    His vanity.

    His hunger to be right.

    His tendency to trust the authority of his own mind.

    When I recoil from Paul, I may simply be recoiling from my own reflection.

    I call this Pauline Mirror Syndrome: the unsettling experience of rejecting the Apostle Paul because one recognizes in him the very flaws one struggles to forgive in oneself.

    The mirror is often more difficult to face than the man standing inside it.

  • The Judgment Instinct

    The Judgment Instinct

    Many of us are born with a moral conscience. We do not need religion to experience the sting of guilt or the quiet satisfaction of having done the right thing. Years ago, I had a Hungarian student who described herself as coming from a “very atheist but moral family.” She was one of the most conscientious students I have taught—honest, intellectually rigorous, and incapable of cutting corners. I never doubted her for a moment.

    Conscience transcends religious belief. Religion may give conscience a vocabulary, a theology, and a story, but it does not create it. The impulse to judge ourselves seems to arrive long before we learn the language of heaven and hell.

    One of my earliest memories comes from when I was three years old. A little girl and I wanted a box of raisins before dinner, but my parents refused. Outraged, I threw a tantrum. In the chaos I lurched forward, accidentally knocking the little girl down a flight of apartment stairs. The image seared itself into my mind. I was horrified—not because an adult scolded me, but because I knew, with the terrible clarity that only children can possess, that I had done something wrong. The guilt lingered into the next day. Unable to bear it, I performed my own act of penance. I deliberately hurled myself down the same staircase, as though suffering could somehow balance the moral ledger.

    Around that same time, I became obsessed with the nursery rhyme “This Old Man.” I remember standing in the lunch line at nursery school, trying not to gag at the sulfurous smell of boiled lima beans, singing the song under my breath. When I reached the line, “This old man came rolling home,” an inexplicable vision filled my imagination. I saw an endless procession of people—young and old—watching the old man stand in judgment over the life he had lived. Then, one by one, they understood that they would be judged next. The image carried no explicit heaven or hell, no angels or devils. It was simply an overwhelming certainty that every life would one day be weighed.

    I knew nothing of religion.

    Yet I seem to have been born with what I call the Judgment Instinct: the inborn intuition that our lives will ultimately be evaluated by a moral standard higher than personal preference, social approval, or self-justification. Religion did not implant that intuition in me. It gave a name to something I already sensed was there.

  • The Telos Test

    The Telos Test

    Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange contains a recurring refrain: “What’s it going to be then, eh?” The words linger because they refuse to let the reader remain a spectator. They demand a decision. They ask not merely what one believes, but what one intends to become.

    The question came back to me while reflecting on the Greek word telos—the ultimate purpose toward which every action aims. What, then, is the telos of my fascination with the early Christian church? Why do I keep returning to the conflict between James and Paul, to the expectation shared by Jesus and Paul that the end of history would arrive within their own generation, and to the ways later editors softened those failed expectations by rendering the prophecies more elastic? What is the purpose of exposing cracks in Christian doctrine?

    Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Emmanuel Carrère, Elaine Pagels, or Bart Ehrman successfully chip away at the church’s claim to doctrinal certainty. What then? Burgess’s refrain becomes a philosophical audit. It asks whether my scholarship has a destination beyond demolition. It is another way of asking the question posed by R.E.M.: after losing my religion, what remains?

    In truth, I doubt I could ever lose my religion entirely.

    Whatever label I eventually assign myself—Christian, agnostic, or something in between—I cannot silence the conviction that I will one day answer for the life I have lived. My conscience refuses to dismiss the possibility of judgment. I imagine my thoughts and deeds passing before me in merciless clarity. I see myself shrinking beneath their weight, my knees buckling, my confidence evaporating, reduced to asking not for vindication but for mercy. I do not regard this as a uniquely religious neurosis. It seems to me a universal human intuition. Religion did not invent our moral sense; it gave language, symbols, and stories to an accountability that most of us already feel lurking beneath the surface of consciousness.

    That is why my ambivalence toward Paul is never merely historical. It immediately becomes personal.

    “What’s it going to be then, eh?”

    Am I dismantling Paul’s authority because I seek the truth, or because I seek permission?

    If there is no final judgment, no resurrection, and no afterlife, do I thereby acquire a license to indulge every selfish appetite? If organized religion collapses under historical scrutiny, am I morally obligated to replace it with another vision capable of disciplining my desires?

    Martin Hägglund attempts precisely this in This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. He argues that meaning arises from our finite existence and our obligations to one another rather than from eternity. It is an intellectually serious project. Yet I wonder whether I possess Hägglund’s confidence in human nature. Do we really possess the moral resources to repair ourselves? Or is Paul correct that something within us is too deeply fractured to heal itself?

    Steven Pressfield offers another alternative in The War of Art. For him, humanity’s fallen nature appears under a different name: Resistance. Salvation comes not through grace but through disciplined creative labor. The Muse replaces the Holy Spirit; artistic practice replaces spiritual formation. I admire Pressfield immensely. Yet I hesitate before turning art into a universal religion. Is artistic transcendence truly available to everyone? Is disciplined creativity sufficient to tame the darker regions of the human heart?

    Then there are Elaine Pagels and Bart Ehrman. Both drank deeply from the well of Christianity before becoming two of its most influential historical critics. Both retain profound respect for Jesus while rejecting much of traditional Christian doctrine. In their hands, Christianity often becomes less a supernatural drama than a humanitarian ethic. Hell recedes into metaphor. Divine wrath becomes a cautionary tale about human cruelty. The central question shifts from salvation to compassion.

    As much as I admire their scholarship, I sometimes wonder whether they perform what I have come to call Therapeutic Transfiguration: the transformation of a demanding religious tradition into the language of emotional wellness, affirmation, and psychological flourishing.

    Stephen Prothero voices a similar concern in his review of Karen King and Elaine Pagels’ Reading Judas. He writes:

    I prefer to take my religious history free from demands for contemporary relevance, so whenever someone in the historical-Jesus fraternity makes Jesus mutter moral maxims that might as easily have been uttered by President Bush or Oprah Winfrey, my anachronism antenna goes up. In this case, Pagels and King massage the multicultural sensibilities of their readers by opining that the Gospel of Judas represents a “sharp, dissenting voice” against the “single, static universal system of beliefs” of official Christianity. Preaching to the “spiritual but not religious” choir, they tell us that, like other noncanonical texts they have championed elsewhere, this gospel aims to “encourage believers to seek God within themselves, with no mention of churches, much less clergy.”

    What Prothero objects to might be called Oprahfication: translating historically specific and often unsettling religious claims into therapeutic affirmations about inner peace, self-discovery, and personal fulfillment. The apocalyptic prophet becomes a motivational speaker. The call to repentance becomes an invitation to embrace one’s authentic self.

    I confess that Oprahfication unsettles me as well. Whenever I hear sweeping assurances about “the divine within,” I picture an Oprah Winfrey interview with Deepak Chopra dissolving into a warm bath of inspirational platitudes. Even if there is some truth in the claim that God may be encountered within, it remains a perilous proposition. For every soul who genuinely discovers humility, I fear thousands more will disappear into the funhouse mirrors of narcissism, mistaking self-absorption for enlightenment.

    Of course, the opposite error is no better. Certain Puritans became so intoxicated by the doctrine of human depravity that they all but erased the possibility of salvation, imagining a universe in which nearly everyone was damned. Such despair borders on the demonic. Yet the opposite doctrine—that humanity is innately divine and naturally good—contains its own danger. If everyone already possesses effortless sanctity, then no one requires transformation. Without an exemplar who calls us beyond ourselves, goodness becomes whatever we happen to prefer, and heaven gradually dissolves into a congratulatory mirror.

    Which brings me back to Burgess.

    “What’s it going to be then, eh?”

    That question is no longer about Paul. It is about me.

    Am I searching for historical truth, or am I constructing an elegant rationale for living exactly as I please? Is my criticism an act of intellectual honesty, or an application for moral exemption?

    I hope it is neither cynicism nor rebellion that drives this inquiry. I hope my quest is animated by the desire to see reality more clearly while remaining accountable to whatever goodness ultimately governs it. If I dismantle inherited beliefs, I pray it is not to clear space for selfishness but to discover a foundation sturdy enough to support a life worthy of judgment.