Cinemorphosis

Tag: god

  • The Messiah Test

    The Messiah Test

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère argues that Paul built Christianity upon a single indispensable claim: the Resurrection. Remove it, Paul tells the Corinthians, and the entire edifice collapses. If Christ did not rise from the dead, then Christian hope is an illusion, preaching is empty, faith is futile, and there is nothing left but to eat, drink, and await extinction.

    Carrère is unconvinced that unwavering belief in the Resurrection can be explained solely by historical evidence. He is more interested in the psychology of conviction. Again and again, he observes, reality does not always weaken faith. Sometimes it hardens it.

    His favorite illustration is a familiar one. A charismatic guru predicts that the world will end on a particular day. The day arrives. The sun rises. Children go to school. Banks open for business. Reality appears to have delivered a humiliating verdict.

    Yet the faithful do not disperse in embarrassment.

    Instead, they reinterpret the outcome. The prophecy did not fail, they insist. A profound spiritual transformation occurred, invisible to ordinary eyes but unmistakable to those with genuine faith. The skeptics see only another Tuesday. The elect perceive eternity breaking into history.

    Failure itself becomes evidence of success.

    Those who abandon the movement demonstrate that their faith was shallow all along. Those who continue believing prove they are the wheat separated from the chaff. As Carrère writes, they learn to distrust their senses. If reason and observation contradict revelation, then reason and observation must yield. The very willingness to appear foolish becomes proof of election. They have passed the test.

    Social psychologists describe this phenomenon as the paradox of commitment under disconfirmation. When identity fuses with belief, contrary evidence no longer serves as an external check. Instead, the evidence itself is absorbed into the belief system and assigned a new meaning. Disconfirmation becomes confirmation by another name.

    Carrère sees Paul confronting precisely this dynamic.

    The Thessalonians have accepted the scandalous claim of the Resurrection, much to Paul’s relief. But another crisis erupts in Galatia. Missionaries have persuaded the Galatians that fidelity to the Jewish law remains essential. Paul responds with extraordinary vehemence. Even if he himself—or an angel from heaven—should later preach a different gospel, he writes, that messenger must be rejected.

    The true gospel has already been delivered.

    Paul’s confidence is striking because his authority rests on a different kind of encounter than that of the original disciples. Peter, James, and John knew Jesus during his earthly ministry. Paul did not. His authority derives from visions and revelation rather than firsthand companionship.

    One might suppose that the disciples who ate with Jesus, traveled beside him, and listened to his teaching would possess the stronger claim to authority. Paul turns that expectation upside down. His mystical encounter with the risen Christ, he argues, is not inferior to theirs but divinely authoritative. The churches must trust the revelation given to him, even when it conflicts with competing interpretations.

    Carrère detects the same psychological pattern operating here as in the failed apocalypse. Membership in the community depends not merely upon accepting a proposition but upon accepting a particular source of authority. To believe Paul despite the absence of ordinary historical verification becomes the very mark of authentic faith.

    Paul ultimately prevails.

    His letters come to define Christian theology far more decisively than the remembered voices of those who walked beside Jesus during his earthly life. One might describe this victory as Epistemic Promotion: the elevation of private revelation, mystical experience, or ideological certainty above ordinary evidence, historical testimony, or empirical reasoning. Whether one views that promotion as divine inspiration or as an extraordinary feat of theological persuasion depends largely upon where one stands. What cannot be denied is that Paul’s vision reshaped Christianity more profoundly than that of any other single figure after Jesus himself.

    Paul’s reshaping of Christianity raises an unavoidable question: What were his motives?

    Paul famously writes that prophecy, knowledge, eloquence, and every other spiritual gift are worthless without love. Love, he insists, is the measure by which all religious authority must be judged. But that standard inevitably turns back upon Paul himself.

    Was love the governing force behind his extraordinary confidence?

    Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that Paul was entirely sincere. Even then the question remains. Did he need to prevail over the other apostles because he loved Christ and the churches? Or because he hungered for authority, validation, and the satisfaction of being right? Was it love? Ego? Power? Some unstable mixture of all three?

    These are not merely questions about Paul. They are questions about every religious founder, prophet, guru, apostle, messiah, revolutionary, and ideological visionary who asks us to entrust them with our minds and souls.

    Do they genuinely seek our flourishing?

    Are their methods honest?

    Are they persuading us—or manipulating us?

    Does the enthusiasm of a crowd testify to truth, or merely to the contagiousness of conviction?

    Before surrendering ourselves to any movement, we would do well to apply what I call The Messiah Test: the practice of asking whether a leader’s authority exists primarily to serve those who follow—or to serve the leader himself.

    Carrère subjects Paul to precisely this test.

    He is fascinated by Paul’s insistence that he is Christ’s authentic messenger despite never having met Jesus during his earthly life. To illuminate the audacity of Paul’s claim, Carrère imagines an analogous scene in 1925. A former White Army officer arrives in the Kremlin demanding an audience with Stalin. He announces that he has received a private revelation of Marxism-Leninism more profound than anything the Party itself has ever understood. On that basis, he demands full authority over the movement while refusing to submit to Stalin or the Politburo.

    The analogy is intentionally absurd.

    Carrère’s imaginary officer is no heroic reformer. He is a spectacular crank. His confidence borders on the operatic. His self-assurance is matched only by his breathtaking inability to recognize how implausible his claims appear to everyone around him.

    He suffers from what might be called Revelation Inflation: the tendency to elevate private revelation until it outranks every competing authority. The visionary no longer argues that he possesses a valuable insight. He insists that his insight is the decisive one, superior to history, institutions, eyewitnesses, and every rival claim to truth.

    Whether one ultimately sees Paul as a divinely inspired apostle or as an astonishingly persuasive religious entrepreneur, Carrère’s thought experiment forces the same uncomfortable question: How do we distinguish authentic revelation from magnificent self-certainty?

  • Watermelon Theology

    Watermelon Theology

    In 1979, around the time of my conversion, I was a seventeen-year-old bodybuilder performing barbell curls in the family den while the television droned in the background. On the screen stood a large Southern preacher wearing a green seersucker suit and speaking in a voice that sounded uncannily like Foghorn Leghorn’s. Amid all the sermons I have forgotten, one metaphor lodged itself permanently in my mind.

    “Religion,” he said, “is like a watermelon. You enjoy the sweet fruit, but you have to accept the seeds. A lot of people can’t accept the seeds, so their faith fails.”

    I have been chewing on those watermelon seeds ever since.

    The fruit has never been my problem.

    If I step back from the Bible and read it as the grand narrative of moral order and moral dissolution, of humanity’s perpetual struggle between sanctification and self-destruction, I find myself repeatedly stopping in admiration. Surely there is such a thing as spiritual health and spiritual decay. Surely the person who learns humility, self-control, forgiveness, courage, and sacrificial love becomes someone fundamentally different from the person consumed by vanity, resentment, lust, greed, and appetite. We become what we repeatedly do, and eventually our habits cease to be things we perform; they become the substance of our character.

    Christianity also explains something else with remarkable psychological precision. It understands the persistent ache that seems woven into the human condition. We are creatures forever searching for transcendence while repeatedly mistaking stimulation for transcendence itself. As the Reverend Eugene Peterson observed, many of us pursue moments of escape through recreational sex, drugs, alcohol, celebrity, politics, or the intoxicating madness of crowds. We mistake emotional intensity for spiritual fulfillment.

    The Sermon on the Mount and Paul’s Letter to the Philippians propose something radically different. Happiness is not found through self-assertion but self-emptying. Power is discovered through service. Life is found by relinquishing the desperate project of preserving it. The Gospel’s diagnosis is humiliating precisely because it leaves so little room for self-congratulation. Paul, who knew his own failures intimately, dismissed the self-help philosophies of his age with astonishing brevity. Human beings, he insisted, are not merely uninformed. They are unable. They require grace.

    Whenever I read Jesus or Paul, I cannot escape the feeling that they have perceived something enduring about human nature. This does not strike me as one religion among many, each pointing politely toward the same destination. It confronts me with a diagnosis that continues to unsettle me.

    Then come the watermelon seeds.

    There are, first, the supernatural claims.

    I would be dishonest if I claimed to believe them literally. Noah living nearly a thousand years. The ark. The parting of the Red Sea. The Virgin Birth. The dead emerging from their tombs during the Crucifixion and walking through Jerusalem. Jesus raising the dead. Paul doing the same. Above all, the Resurrection itself.

    Then there are the historical seeds.

    The expectation that the Kingdom of God would arrive within the lifetime of Jesus’ contemporaries appears to have receded as history stubbornly refused to cooperate. Scholars argue that later editors softened or reframed passages whose original urgency had become increasingly difficult to defend.

    Then come the institutional seeds.

    Paul’s breathtaking declaration that “there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” gradually yielded to later church structures that proved considerably more interested in hierarchy than equality. Letters now widely regarded by many scholars as pseudonymous instructed women to remain silent, submissive, and excluded from leadership. The liberating impulse of the earliest Christian communities became entangled with the far less inspiring politics of institutional preservation.

    And finally there is perhaps the hardest seed of all.

    Hell.

    Infinite punishment for finite creatures.

    A doctrine that has haunted Christian thought for centuries.

    The temptation, of course, is simply to spit out the seeds.

    Many people do.

    The miracles become metaphors.

    The Resurrection becomes symbolic.

    Sin becomes psychological maladjustment.

    Judgment becomes poor self-esteem.

    Christianity quietly dissolves into a soothing spirituality where every religion points toward the same divine reality, nobody is terribly mistaken, vice is largely a matter of perspective, and the highest commandment is simply to relax and enjoy yourself because life is short.

    Once I begin removing the seeds, how do I know which ones are merely unpleasant and which ones are load-bearing?

    Where does revision end and reinvention begin?

    At what point have I ceased pruning Christianity and quietly invented another religion that merely borrows its vocabulary?

    This is what I have come to call Foundational Anxiety: the fear that questioning one foundational belief will begin a cascade of doubt that ultimately leaves a person without any stable moral, philosophical, or spiritual ground.

    It is also why I think of my predicament as Watermelon Theology.

    Watermelon Theology is the attempt to preserve the nourishing moral and spiritual fruit of a religious tradition while wrestling honestly with doctrines, miracles, and historical claims that resist belief. It refuses both naïve certainty and fashionable dismissal. It insists that the fruit is too nourishing to discard lightly, even while acknowledging that the seeds remain stubbornly lodged between one’s teeth.

    Can I resolve this dilemma in a thousand-word essay?

    Hardly.

    Millions of people have spent two millennia arguing over these very questions. Many of them are smarter than I am. Augustine stood in this line. Aquinas stood in this line. Luther, Calvin, Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, C.S. Lewis, and countless others stood here as well.

    I do not get to complain that the line is long.

    I simply take my place in it.

  • The Book That Failed to Cure Me of Paul

    The Book That Failed to Cure Me of Paul

    For more than twenty years, I have lived under the spell of Hyam Maccoby’s portrait of the apostle Paul in The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity. No book has done more to persuade me that Christianity might be the brilliant invention of a single, insecure, wildly ambitious genius. In Maccoby’s telling, Paul transformed a small Jewish sect into a universal religion by fusing Judaism, paganism, and strands of Hellenistic thought into something Jesus himself would scarcely have recognized. In the process, Paul elevated his own authority, turned Christianity against Judaism through supersessionism, and helped lay the theological foundation for the antisemitism that would spread through Western history like a centuries-long contagion.

    It is an intoxicating argument.

    Maccoby writes with the confidence of a prosecutor who has already secured the conviction before the trial begins. His prose is lucid, forceful, and relentlessly persuasive. He marshals his evidence with such authority that resistance feels almost irrational. Reading The Mythmaker is less like weighing competing historical interpretations than being swept into a courtroom drama where every witness seems to strengthen the case against the defendant.

    I was hardly alone in falling under its influence. On Amazon, the featured review is by the late novelist Anne Rice. After spending what she called “twelve earnest years” trying to become a Christian, her faith collapsed beneath what she regarded as Paul’s supersessionist theology and well-worn theological clichés. Maccoby, she writes, finally explained the confusion that had haunted her. Although she did not endorse every argument, she declared that the concluding chapter alone justified the price of the book.

    In many ways, I envy Rice.

    Maccoby gave her precisely what she had been searching for: an intellectually satisfying deconversion. His argument untied the theological knot that had troubled her and allowed her to walk away with a sense of clarity and peace.

    My own journey has been perversely different.

    The deeper I investigated Maccoby’s claims—and, just as importantly, the criticisms of his excesses—the less certain I became. Instead of confirming my doubts about Paul, the evidence steadily eroded my confidence in Maccoby’s portrait. The elegant certainty I once admired began to look increasingly overstated. The villain proved more elusive than the indictment suggested.

    Today I find myself in an unexpected place. My admiration for The Mythmaker has diminished, while my fascination with Paul has grown. Not because I have ceased asking difficult questions, but because Paul has become a far more complex, intelligent, passionate, and psychologically compelling figure than Maccoby allowed him to be.

    Much of that transformation can be traced to Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, my favorite novel. Carrère approaches Paul from almost the opposite direction. He does not write as an apologist, nor does he write as a prosecutor eager to secure a conviction. An agnostic by his own description, Carrère remains captivated by Paul, Luke, and the improbable chain of events that produced Christianity. He grants them neither sainthood nor villainy. Instead, he treats them as astonishingly gifted human beings whose words continue to exercise an almost gravitational pull on the Western imagination.

    That difference has mattered enormously to me. Maccoby offered the comforting simplicity of a conviction already reached. Carrère offered something rarer and ultimately more valuable: the unsettling experience of remaining in the presence of a man who refuses to become either hero or monster.

  • The Atheist Who Loved Church

    The Atheist Who Loved Church

    In 1979, I asked Christ to save me from hell and got baptized in a church. The minister dunking me held me under the water a little too long, triggering a claustrophobic panic. For a split second, I fought the urge to wrestle him underwater and put him in a headlock.

    The truth is, I never felt comfortable in church. The music grated on me, the displays of piety felt forced, and I was already battling social anxiety that made the whole scene intolerable. My Christian friends from high school were there, but they didn’t seem to understand me. Their conversations were peppered with Christian clichés, the kind that make your skin crawl. I felt crushed by a constant thought: all my Jewish relatives, long gone, were suffering in hell. The “good news” wasn’t working with me. I was depressed, and the sheer cheerfulness of everyone around me only magnified the dissonance I felt.

    At the time, my mother was dating Bill, a man in his fifties with a grim past. Abandoned by his parents, both alcoholics and addicts, he was found half-dead and drunk in a gutter at the age of eleven. He got sober as an adult and spent his life helping others do the same. His blue eyes, sad and weathered, hinted at that broken boy inside him. I couldn’t look in his eyes without seeing that eleven-year-old boy drunk and alone in the gutter. 

    One Sunday morning, as I was begrudgingly getting ready for church, Bill surprised me. He said he loved going to church, even though he didn’t believe in God. He wasn’t moved by the theology—he was an atheist, after all—but the hymns, he said, brought him joy and a sense of community he couldn’t find anywhere else. This stunned me then, and it still does now. How could someone, an atheist no less, attend church just to soak in the music and camaraderie? But Bill embraced that contradiction without a second thought.

    A few years later, my mother, in tears, told me Bill had died of lung cancer, the kind of death you might expect from someone who had smoked like a chimney. The news hit me hard, but what lingers most is the memory of those sad blue eyes, the ones that saw through me and seemed to carry the weight of that abandoned child in the gutter. Even now, the thought of him, lost and broken at eleven, leaves me feeling a heaviness that’s hard to shake and brings tears to my eyes.

    In her book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, religious studies author Elaine Pagels writes about the pagans during the early Christian era who threw their unwanted babies in the trash. The Christians loved those abandoned babies and did all they could to save them. Their belief in God made such abandonment repugnant. Part of me thinks, I don’t know if I’m a Christian or not, but God bless those Christians for saving those babies. 

    I want to believe there is a part of me that wishes to love God for the same reason I was heartbroken when I learned of how Bill was abandoned as a small child and treated like unwanted rubbish. I want to believe that God would embrace such a child and bring him into His fold.

  • The Rich Writer Walks Away

    The Rich Writer Walks Away

    As Carrère wrestles with the Christian faith in The Kingdom, he finds himself tortured by the usual suspects: happiness, success, and self-actualization. This is a man dripping in privilege. Money? Check. Education? Check. Artistic genius? Double check. He’s a published writer, for God’s sake. And yet, all this supposed “success” builds not a kingdom but a fortress—a fortress of pride so impenetrable it doesn’t just fail to make him happy, it traps him in his own personal hell. Enter Jesus, stage left, with a nice, tidy warning from the Gospel of Luke: to find salvation, the rich man must give up all his money to the poor and follow Jesus. And, surprise surprise, Carrère immediately identifies with the rich guy. How do we let go of our wealth and worldly success when it clings to us like a designer straightjacket?

    What if, Carrère wonders, our success is creative? Surely, that’s different. Surely, success that flows from some deep, tortured well inside ourselves is something noble—something to be admired, right? As he spirals into these questions, he flips through his notebooks and stumbles upon a gem from a second-century Apocryphal Gospel: “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.” He muses that this would fit nicely in the pages of “upmarket personal-development books.”

    Carrère, now neck-deep in his existential quandary, asks himself the obvious question: shouldn’t he pat himself on the back for bringing forth the depth within him? Shouldn’t he be congratulating himself for writing novels that not only get published but are devoured by readers and spark weighty conversations about the meaning of life? Or is he just walking the well-worn path of the cocky artist who loves to sniff his own brilliance? He’s genuinely worried that he’s morphing into the literary equivalent of a boastful fool. “Nevertheless, a stubborn little voice persistently interrupts these moments of pharisaical smugness,” he writes. “It says that all the riches I enjoy—the wisdom I pride myself on, the confident hope that 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!”

    Carrère tries to shut this voice down, telling himself he’s sabotaging his own happiness with pathological tendencies to glorify his suffering, wallow in guilt, and indulge in self-flagellation like some kind of masochistic monk. But let’s be honest—his rebuttals are about as effective as trying to stop a flood with a roll of paper towels. “Nevertheless, I think that the little voice of the Gospel is right,” he admits. “And like the rich young man, I walk away, sad and pensive, for I have great wealth.”

    And there it is—Carrère, the writer who has everything, still can’t shake the feeling that his wealth is not just a blessing but a curse. If he’s really honest with himself, all his accomplishments might just be getting in the way of something deeper, something real. But giving it all up? Well, that’s a whole other story.

    Carrère observes, with his usual flair for the uncomfortable truth, that no one challenges us quite like Jesus when it comes to interrogating our priorities. What do we really love? And like Carrère, I cringe at the answer. I am embarrassingly devoted to my creature comforts, pleasures, and soothing routines. I wrap myself in them like a cozy blanket of denial. While Jesus is over there asking me to sacrifice my trivial, cushy existence and actually engage with the world for his sake, I stand frozen, as if glued to my recliner, as inert and useless as a pillar of salt. 

  • What’s a Guy Like Paul to Do?

    What’s a Guy Like Paul to Do?

    Revisiting The Kingdom, I’m struck once again by how Carrère dives into Maccoby’s The Mythmaker and finds himself, as usual, both stimulated and somewhat convinced. Maccoby’s portrait of Paul is a scathing one: a man whose letters reveal a wannabe Pharisee who never quite had the intellectual chops to measure up to the great Gamaliel’s rigorous logic. Instead, Paul, the ultimate malcontent, resents his way to the top by any means necessary. He’s a Pharisee reject, a man in need of a new ladder to climb. Enter the Sadducees, Paul’s new benefactors. Maccoby gleefully paints him as a “mercenary” and a “hatchet man” for the Sadducees—a hired thug for the enemies of the Pharisees. 

    In Paul’s self-serving retelling of his story, he demonizes Judaism and aggrandizes himself, projecting all the worst qualities of the Sadducees (and himself) onto the Pharisees, making them the convenient scapegoat. Naturally, the New Testament follows suit, reworking history with reckless abandon, making the Pharisees the Big Bad while carefully crafting a narrative that the Romans—those kindly, civilized overlords—might find palatable. No one, apparently, worried about the minor detail of two millennia of anti-Semitism that would follow. The idea of Christian love and kindness? Well, that got lost somewhere between rewriting history and needing Rome’s approval.

    Paul’s stint as a Sadducee’s henchman ends at Damascus, where he’s allegedly compelled by his vision to stop tormenting the Jesus followers and instead join them. But of course, Paul being Paul, even his conversion manages to be another way to torment the original Jesus-followers by hijacking their Torah-based teachings and replacing them with his mystical mishmash of mystery cults. Suddenly, Paul’s version of Jesus requires no Torah and offers a much more user-friendly religion for the gentiles. And in this religious battle for supremacy, as Carrère grimly notes, “it’s Paul who wins out, because, as we’ll soon see, the Temple is destroyed, Israel as a nation is annihilated, and the church of Jerusalem dispersed.”

    Maccoby, never one to hold back, sees all of this as a colossal fraud—a case of the victors rewriting history to suit themselves. He argues that Christianity is “nothing more than history written by the victors, the result of a huge falsification aimed at having people believe that Paul and his new religion are the inheritors of Judaism and not its detractors.”

    Paul didn’t just invent a religion—he gave Jesus a full makeover, complete with a brand-new mission statement. Suddenly, this Jesus wasn’t keen on the Pharisees anymore, despite the fact they were practically swapping parables like trading cards. Paul’s freshly-minted Christ had no interest in leading a political uprising like the Pharisees might have hoped. Paul’s Jesus had moved on to loftier things—”a nebulous identification with God,” or, as Paul might say, a VIP pass to the divine without the hassle of earthly concerns. 

    In Paul’s revisionist masterstroke, he conveniently positions himself as the only guy who really gets Jesus, surpassing the original apostles because, let’s face it, who wouldn’t trust a man who only met Jesus in a blinding light show? Paul’s newfound authority becomes so overwhelming that he practically files the Old Testament under “Miscellaneous”—a dusty collection of angelic telegrams leading up to the Jesus Show. And for anyone who dared to question his creative liberties? Let’s just say, there was no room for constructive criticism when your Yelp review could end in a good old-fashioned burning at the stake.

    Fast-forward two thousand years, and enter Maccoby—the intrepid Talmudic scholar—swinging a wrecking ball at the Pauline edifice. In The Mythmaker, Maccoby takes it upon himself to do what no one else apparently could: drag humanity out of two millennia of theological fog and into the light. In a move that rivals Paul’s own grandiosity, Maccoby essentially declares, “Don’t worry, folks. I’ll handle this.” And with that, he positions himself as the savior of our two-thousand years of confusion.

    Carrère, ever the skeptic, makes it clear that while Maccoby’s arguments are compelling, he doesn’t buy them hook, line, and sinker. “Passing off two thousand years of Church history as complete revisionism strikes me as the height of revisionism.” He points out that Jesus may have clashed with the Pharisees not out of sheer opposition, but because they were wise—and, like all wise people, they probably questioned the company Jesus kept. Carrère also acknowledges that, while anti-Semitism runs rampant through Christian history, we don’t have to deny that the Jews clashed with Jesus in a way that resulted in his death. His personality likely clashed with both the Jews and the Romans, so there’s no need to twist the historical narrative into an anti-Jewish screed.

    Then, of course, there’s Paul. To portray him “as a goy informer to the secret police” is to reduce his complexity to a cartoonish level. Carrère insists we don’t deny the “Dostoyevskian” depth in Paul’s letters, with all their contradictions, spiritual torment, and raw humanity. Paul may have been maddening, but he wasn’t a mere caricature.

    And in rereading Carrère’s analysis, I’m jolted by a moment of almost tragic comedy: Luke, the starry-eyed biographer, grappling with the same unflattering caricatures of Paul that Maccoby gleefully tears into. Luke had heard these damning whispers circulating about his golden boy—rumors painting Paul as something far less glorious than the saintly hero Luke immortalized in his breathless chronicle. It clearly rattled him to the core, probably like finding out your idolized childhood superhero moonlights as a mall Santa. 

    Maybe, just maybe, there’s more to Paul than the hatchet-wielding mercenary we love to despise. He’s a complicated man, a genius even—capable of crafting words so achingly beautiful they could make angels weep, and other times spewing rants so unhinged you’d think he was a madman scribbling manifestos in his lonely, dimly-lit cave. Paul, the poetic prophet of human frailty one minute, and the rabid, impoverished soul screaming into the void the next. 

  • Beyond Reciprocal Claim-Making

    Beyond Reciprocal Claim-Making

    Once you see yourself as having a religious mind, there’s no crawling back out of that rabbit hole. A religious view isn’t the same as joining a cult where some bearded leader hoards Kool-Aid and controls your mind. No, the religious mind is about recognizing that life’s stakes are sky-high—you either spiritually flourish or rot. Your actions matter. You’re not just competing in some zero-sum, Darwinian cage match, battling your fellow humans for scraps of survival. No, you’re building something deeper: a soul. And, lucky you, you’re accountable for that construction.

    I’ve fantasized plenty of times about being free from this religious wiring. In my fantasy, I’m a “free thinker,” sipping espresso while smugly dismissing religion as man-made fluff—imperfect, tribalistic, derivative, and, let’s not forget, violent. Religion in this dream isn’t the root of morality; it’s an obstacle to reality. Enter Elizabeth Anderson, the philosophy professor who drops a truth bomb in her essay, “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” Anderson argues that morality doesn’t come from God but from people learning how to cooperate. Morality, she says, is baked into our DNA, so religion is at best redundant and, more often than not, a corrupting force.

    I’ve seen Anderson’s point play out with some of my most moral students, both professed atheists. One was a Hungarian transfer student who swore her father, also an atheist, had stronger morals than any theist she knew—and I believed her. She was one of the hardest-working, most decent students I’d ever taught. Then there was my Vietnamese student, the lone atheist among her five Christian siblings, who let it slip that when their mother was dying of cancer, she was the only one who flew back to Vietnam to care for her. Her devout Christian brothers and sisters? Nowhere to be found. Her hatred for religion as hypocrisy was as strong as her love for her mother.

    Students like these could easily be poster children for Anderson’s argument that we don’t need theism to have morality. In fact, she’d argue, it might be better if we ditched religion altogether. Anderson kicks off her essay with a field trip to the Institute for Creation Research Museum in Santee, California, where creationists divide the world into two paths: “Creationism” and “Evolutionism.” Creationism, naturally, is the road to moral purity, while Evolutionism is the fast track to fornication, nihilism, addiction, humanism, Communism, and every other horror under the sun.

    Anderson doesn’t hold back: she writes that creationists’ beef with evolution isn’t scientific—it’s moral. Evolution leads to immorality, they argue, because it denies the existence of God. And, as theists have been shouting for centuries, without God, morality’s got nothing to stand on. As Dostoyevsky famously didn’t say, “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.” In other words, belief in God is the cork keeping the sinful champagne from exploding all over the place.

    But Anderson asks the obvious question: Can we know right from wrong without God? Do we really need the Ten Commandments to figure out that murdering your neighbor for his fancy new donkey might be a bad look? Of course not, she says. Every society—whether it’s religious, atheist, or somewhere in between—figures out basic moral rules: don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t bear false witness. These rules existed long before monotheism waltzed onto the scene, suggesting that moral knowledge comes not from divine revelation but from the messy experience of living together and figuring out how not to kill each other.

    Anderson’s takedown of theistic morality doesn’t stop there. She argues that the belief in God doesn’t just supply unnecessary rules; it’s often a crutch, relying on the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell to goad people into behaving decently. Her rebuttal is simple: people are motivated by love, honor, and respect, not divine bribery. In her view, these attributes can flourish just fine without a belief in God.

    Next, she dismantles the idea that we need God to give moral rules authority. If you need a deity to tell you murder, rape, and genocide are wrong, Anderson suggests, you’ve got bigger problems. We know these things are wrong without divine intervention—and, if your reasoning leads you to think everything is permitted, that’s a pretty solid clue you’ve gone off the rails.

    But here’s where Anderson flips the script. She argues that the moralistic “everything is permitted” problem applies more forcefully to theism than to atheism. If God’s laws are based on authority and not inherent goodness, then “in principle, anything is permitted.” Take Calvinism, for example. Predestination’s divine lottery, where God saves a few lucky souls and damns the rest to eternal hellfire, isn’t based on any moral reasoning—it’s just God’s will, and you better deal with it.

    Anderson’s critique of fundamentalist religion is merciless. She argues that if you take the evidence for theism seriously, you end up committed to the idea that even the most heinous acts are permitted. Since we know these acts aren’t morally permitted, she says, we should doubt the evidence for theism.

    By “theism,” Anderson isn’t just talking about some vague belief in a higher power. She’s talking about the God of Scripture—Old Testament, New Testament, and the Koran. And if you take the Bible as inerrant, Anderson argues, you’re forced to reckon with a God who’s often cruel and unjust, punishing people for the sins of others, hardening hearts, ordering genocides, and permitting slavery and rape.

    Of course, Christian apologists love to claim that the Old Testament God is the angry one, and the New Testament God is all love and forgiveness. Anderson’s having none of it. She points out that Jesus’ so-called “family values” include hating your relatives if they get in the way of your loyalty to him. And then there’s the doctrine of eternal damnation—a New Testament specialty—which, in Anderson’s view, is both cruel and incoherent.

    In the end, Anderson concludes that the God of the Bible is a moral disaster. But she’s sympathetic to thoughtful believers, the ones who struggle with the Bible’s moral atrocities. Their options, she says, are pretty grim. You can “bite the bullet” and accept the Bible’s horrors, bitter seeds and all, like a true believer. Or you can try a stopgap measure, arguing that God’s commands were appropriate in biblical times but don’t apply now—a strategy that doesn’t really hold water if you believe in a timeless God.

    Anderson’s conclusion is blunt: we’re better off abandoning theological claims as a foundation for morality. She draws on Hobbes to argue that worshiping God out of fear of his raw power isn’t love—it’s survival instinct, and that’s no basis for morality. Instead, Anderson suggests, morality is a system of reciprocal claim-making, where we hold each other accountable, no gods required.

    As compelling as Anderson’s essay is, I’m still not convinced. The world isn’t some rational, orderly place. There are shadows, mysteries, omens, and prophecies—strange phenomena that transcend the cold logic of reciprocal claim-making. Religion, in all its messiness, is the story of a fallen people trying to reconnect with their Maker. And as much truth as I see in Anderson’s rejection of theistic morality, I can’t shake the religious mind. I see myself as someone who’s fallen and in need of a path, a true path, to becoming the person I’m meant to be. Anderson’s talk of reciprocal claim-making? It doesn’t even come close to satisfying that deeper, spiritual hunger.

  • The Theology of Loose Ends

    The Theology of Loose Ends

    Ironically, the book that comes closest to expressing my own questions about Christianity—Emmanuel Carrère’s autobiographical novel The Kingdom—barely touches the one theological obsession that dominated my adolescence: hell.

    As a high school senior, I wasn’t driven toward Christianity by the promise of heaven nearly as much as I was terrified by the prospect of eternal damnation. My Christian classmates casually informed me that my Jewish relatives were burning in hell. It wasn’t merely the outrageousness of the claim that unsettled me. It was the manner in which they delivered it. Their verdict came with the breezy confidence of teenagers discussing last Friday night’s football game. They spoke of infinite punishment with astonishing emotional indifference. The certainty chilled me more than the doctrine itself.

    Yet even that wasn’t the most disturbing thing I encountered.

    The church we attended used The Living Bible, a popular paraphrase whose study notes included the astonishing suggestion that the Holocaust represented God’s punishment for the Jewish rejection of Christ. I remember reading those words in disbelief. To reduce one of history’s greatest atrocities to divine retribution felt not merely offensive but morally grotesque. If this was Christian theology, I wanted to wash my hands of it altogether. I longed for a world in which hell—and every conversation orbiting around it—would simply disappear.

    But what if it did?

    Suppose I abandoned infernalism entirely. Would I become one of those Christian Universalists—the thoughtful believers who reject eternal conscious torment and insist that love, rather than fear, should be the foundation of faith? I find myself instinctively drawn to them. They argue that the threat of hell cheapens our relationship with God, reducing love to coercion. Their vision of the afterlife resembles less a cosmic torture chamber than an infinitely patient schoolroom. No one is abandoned forever. Every soul is eventually healed, even if that healing requires painful correction.

    There is something deeply attractive about that picture.

    There is also something that makes me uneasy.

    If the worst imaginable outcome is temporary purification, what becomes of moral urgency? Human nature being what it is, wouldn’t many of us quietly conclude that we can indulge our appetites now and settle our spiritual debts later? Universalism can begin to resemble the theological equivalent of Universal Basic Income: everyone eventually receives the same eternal inheritance regardless of how recklessly they spent their earthly lives. Why struggle against the gravitational pull of selfishness if, in the end, the bill is always paid?

    Then again, infernalism carries its own unbearable cost. A universe in which billions suffer endlessly is hardly a satisfying resolution either.

    Neither vision leaves me entirely at peace.

    Paul, interestingly enough, occupies both sides of this debate. Depending on the interpreter, he becomes either the great defender of eternal punishment or the great herald of universal reconciliation. What virtually everyone agrees upon, however, is that Paul’s own life embodies Christianity’s defining redemption story. The persecutor becomes the apostle. The anxious, self-divided voice of Romans discovers liberation through surrender to Christ. His life unfolds with remarkable narrative coherence: chaos gives way to grace, alienation to reconciliation, death to resurrection.

    It is a magnificent story.

    But must every true story end that way?

    Dara Horn raises a question that has lingered with me ever since I read People Love Dead Jews. She recalls a reader complaining that her novel The World to Come, centered on the survivor of a pogrom, wasn’t “uplifting” enough. The complaint revealed something curious. Even sophisticated readers seem to hunger for stories that gather their loose threads into a satisfying knot. We crave endings that reassure us the universe is fundamentally coherent.

    Horn is suspicious of that craving.

    Drawing upon Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, she argues that our expectation of tidy resolutions owes much to Christianity itself. Christian history moves toward fulfillment. Its central drama is redemption. The scattered fragments of existence are ultimately gathered into a meaningful whole. Jewish storytelling, by contrast, often refuses such closure. The Hebrew Bible concludes not with final resolution but with an unfinished journey. Questions remain unanswered. Promises remain unfulfilled. The story continues beyond the final page.

    That difference fascinates me.

    Christianity often invites us to see history as one grand redemption arc. Jewish literature is more willing to leave us standing inside the mystery. Rather than explaining suffering, it teaches us how to endure it. Rather than dissolving ambiguity, it learns to inhabit ambiguity with patience and humility. These stories do not pretend that chaos can always be conquered. They suggest that wisdom may consist in remaining faithful while chaos refuses to yield.

    Perhaps that is the more mature vision.

    Or perhaps I tell myself this because it allows me to avoid the far more demanding claims of Christianity. Perhaps my admiration for ambiguity is simply an elegant rationalization—a way of escaping the moral revolution that Carrère identifies at Christianity’s heart. If N. T. Wright and other defenders of Paul’s theology are correct, then Paul’s redemption story is not sentimental optimism but the astonishing claim that God has actually invaded history, overcome chaos, and begun dismantling what I have elsewhere called the Default Kingdom.

    I still do not know which story is true.

    I only know that I am no longer satisfied with easy answers, whether they arrive wrapped in eternal flames or universal embraces.

  • The Default Kingdom

    The Default Kingdom

    One of the central questions the self-described agnostic—or perhaps more accurately, currently agnostic, since Emmanuel Carrère never entirely closes the door on belief—explores in The Kingdom is this: What, if anything, makes Christianity fundamentally different from the world’s other religions and moral philosophies?

    Carrère readily acknowledges that the great religious traditions share a common ethical grammar. Nearly all contain some version of the Golden Rule. A contemporary of Jesus, the rabbi Hillel, famously taught, “Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you.” Do not lie. Do not boast. Do not humiliate. Do not bully. Compassion, honesty, and restraint are hardly unique to Christianity. They are the moral glue that binds much of humanity’s spiritual inheritance together.

    Where Christianity tears away from the others, Carrère argues, is in its astonishing redefinition of power.

    For Paul and Jesus, the path upward begins by descending. Better to be poor than rich, weak than strong, last than first, servant rather than master. Blessed are the meek, the persecuted, the hungry, and the broken, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. This was not merely unconventional wisdom. To the Greeks, whose highest ideals celebrated strength, excellence, beauty, and glory, it sounded like madness. Christianity did not merely revise the ancient world’s understanding of greatness; it turned it upside down.

    To illustrate this moral inversion, Carrère turns to Henryk Sienkiewicz’s historical novel Quo Vadis. A sophisticated Roman officer, accustomed to luxury, power, and the refined pleasures of imperial life, is captured by Christians whom he has persecuted. Certain that revenge awaits him, he braces himself for torture or execution. Instead, his captors quietly set him free.

    The gesture is so alien to his imagination that he cannot process it. Surely this is some elaborate mockery, he tells himself, a cruel joke whose punchline has yet to arrive. Mercy, in his world, is incomprehensible because mercy possesses no strategic value. It gains no territory, wins no battles, and intimidates no enemies.

    Yet that very mercy becomes an ambush. Slowly, the Christians’ refusal to answer violence with violence dissolves the officer’s moral certainties. Their forgiveness reveals a form of strength that eclipses the imperial virtues he had spent his life admiring. He comes to see that domination is not the highest expression of power after all. Love is. So profoundly is he transformed that he embraces the Christian faith, becomes one of its fearless defenders, and ultimately accepts martyrdom, facing the lions with the same courage he once believed could exist only on the battlefield.

    For Carrère, this inversion of values constitutes Christianity’s greatest “force of persuasion.” It challenges what we might call the Default Kingdom: humanity’s instinctive moral operating system, in which strength, wealth, beauty, status, and dominance appear to be self-evident proofs of success and virtue. As Carrère observes, most people naturally “prefer to be strong rather than weak, rich rather than poor, big rather than small, dominant rather than dominated.” Such preferences seem so obvious that they rarely require justification.

    Christianity refuses to grant them that obviousness.

    In Carrère’s reading, neither Greek philosophy nor Jewish tradition overturns the Default Kingdom in quite this radical way. Christianity alone proclaims that the first shall be last, that the poor are blessed, that enemies should be loved, and that the victorious are often the defeated. Its revolution is persuasive not because its teachings are clever, but because its earliest followers embody them. The Christians of the Acts of the Apostles do not merely preach this impossible ethic—they live it. Their willingness to forgive, to suffer, and even to die rather than imitate the world’s pursuit of domination sends a shock wave through the Roman Empire. With every act of inexplicable mercy, the Default Kingdom loses a little more of its authority, and history itself begins to bend toward a radically different vision of what it means to be powerful.

  • The Authenticity Paradox

    The Authenticity Paradox

    Damascus is the mother of all superhero origin stories. Before Peter Parker is bitten by a spider or Bruce Wayne enters the Batcave, there is Saul of Tarsus riding toward Damascus with murder in his heart. He is not searching for truth. He believes he already possesses it. He is intent on hunting down followers of “The Way” and dragging them to their deaths. His path is one of certainty, violence, and righteous darkness.

    Then, against every instinct and every intention, his story is hijacked.

    A blinding light crashes into his world. The risen Christ—the very Savior whose followers Saul has dedicated himself to destroying—confronts him directly. “Why do you keep goading the ox?” the voice asks. Then comes the devastating revelation: “I am your Lord.”

    The encounter leaves Saul shattered. Blind. Disoriented. Helpless. For three days he sits in darkness while a far greater darkness collapses inside him. His old identity has suffered an internal earthquake. The architecture of his soul has cracked beyond repair.

    Then a stranger arrives.

    The man claims to have been sent by the Lord. More unsettling still, he addresses him not as the man Saul understands himself to be but as the man history will remember: Paul.

    The new identity feels like an insult.

    Saul wants nothing to do with this strange future. He wants his old certainties, his old mission, his old enemies. Like nearly every great hero, he is reluctant. He does not answer a call to adventure with enthusiasm but with resistance. He loves the familiar darkness more than the terrifying demands of the light.

    But the light proves stronger than his will.

    He can no longer goad the ox. He can no longer wage war against the truth that has invaded him. At last he surrenders, becoming Paul the evangelist, whose letters would shape Western civilization more profoundly than those of any emperor, philosopher, or statesman.

    Paul’s conversion reminds me of one of the strangest moments in Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” After exhausting himself trying to remove Bartleby from his office, the narrator presses money into Bartleby’s hand in hopes that he will finally leave. Bartleby lets the money fall to the floor. Then the narrator confesses:

    “But it dropped to the floor, and then strange to say, I tore myself from him whom I had so longed to be rid of.”

    It is one of literature’s finest descriptions of divided desire.

    Like Paul, Melville’s narrator longs for change while simultaneously resisting it. He wants liberation, but only on terms that preserve the person he already is. He discovers that the obstacle standing in his way is not Bartleby but himself.

    Perhaps this is the hidden struggle behind every genuine transformation.

    Each of us carries within us a pillar of salt—a hardened identity built from habit, fear, pride, resentment, and old certainties. We mistake this calcified self for our true self because it has been with us for so long. Yet the longer we cling to it, the heavier it becomes. Eventually it drags us beneath the surface, where it is no longer an anchor but a tomb.

    Most of us never let go.

    The pillar of salt sinks us.

    But for the rare few who are not merely called but chosen, another possibility emerges. Their lives reveal what novelist Emmanuel Carrère sees at the heart of Paul’s Damascus encounter. Reflecting on Paul’s conversion, Carrère writes:

    “Paul was no longer himself; he was finally himself.”

    It is one of the deepest paradoxes of the spiritual life.

    We usually imagine authenticity as self-expression, the freedom to become more completely the person we already believe ourselves to be. Damascus turns that comforting assumption upside down. It suggests that our deepest self may be buried beneath the very identity we defend most fiercely. Before we can become who we truly are, we must relinquish the person we cannot imagine living without.

    Paul’s conversion thus reveals what might be called the Authenticity Paradox: the condition in which becoming one’s truest self first requires ceasing to be the person one believes oneself to be. Authenticity is not achieved by polishing the old self until it shines. It is achieved by surrendering the old self altogether, trusting that what feels like annihilation is, in fact, the beginning of a more truthful life.