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Was Jesus rational? If you are a modern Christian, this is a question that probably sounds intentionally offensive or unintentionally ignorant. It suggests the person asking the question thinks Jesus was insane. Calling Jesus a crazy person therefore could sound deliberately provocative. On the other hand, someone asking the question could simply be ignorant. Only someone unfamiliar with Scripture or Christian theology could suggest that God’s only son was a lunatic.
This is not a question that would have offended early Christians, however, because they had a different relationship with faith and reason. The gods of the ancient world were not the defenders of logic and reason. Often, the gods were the greatest offenders of logic and reason, using tricks and magic to bring down the hero, even though the hero was acting rationally. After all, the tragic hero is often the man who does the rational things but is brought low despite his reason.
The ancients did not look at reason like modern man. They had to solve problems like all humans, but they did not worship reason like a god. In fact, reason was often viewed as a hinderance to understanding the gods. Understanding the gods and their relationship to man started with the understanding that the gods operated outside of the rationality of mankind. They had their rules, man had his rules, and the story of man was the interplay between these two worlds.
Of course, there was that sense that the fate of men and the individual man was controlled by things beyond human comprehension. It was not just the capricious gods who tripped up men, but that sense that there was something else going on to determine the outcome of life, something that was well outside the domain of man, a thing called fate. Just as the tragic hero was undone by fate, the hero was the man who recognized and submitted to his fate.
For most of human history, the key to making any sense of life was in accepting the mystery of the natural world and man’s place in it. That acceptance never meant understanding it, much less conquering it. The natural world was not a thing to be conquered or even challenged. It was a thing to be accepted. Therefore, for the early Christians, the irrationality of Jesus and his life would have made far more sense to them than the far more rational version of this age.
The phrase, “Athens and Jerusalem”, which turns up in certain parts of American conservatism has its roots in this question about the rationality of Jesus. The second century Christian writer Tertullian famously asked, “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem” in response to those trying to make sense of faith. The absurdities within the story of Jesus are what gives power to faith, because the truly faithful believe the message despite the absurdities.
As an aside, “Athens and Jerusalem” was reintroduced to us by Strauss, who used it for a series of lectures and essays. No one knows what he meant by it as the main project of his students is to make themselves and their mentor as incomprehensible as possible on the assumption that “Straussian” is code for incoherent. Others have picked up the phrase as a way of weaving their ancestors into your family tree, thus making Western civilization the fruit of the Greeks and the Jews.
It is debatable as to whether Strauss clipped this phase from Tertullian in order to open the gates to ideas outside of Christianity. In the hands of lesser minds, it has led to idiotic concepts like “Judeo-Christian.” Tertullian would have happily lit the fire underneath the heretics promoting such an idea. Like the other Christian writers of his age, he was hostile to the Jews and wrote polemics against them. For their part, the Jews have never forgiven him for it.
That aside, there is little doubt that Christianity, as it spread throughout Europe, became a vehicle to introduce Greek thought to Europe. Not only did the Church preserve and reproduce ancient works, including the Greeks, it began to absorb the rationality that Tertullian would have found difficult in the organization of the Church and its relationship with the secular authorities that evolved in the Middle Ages. The irrationality of faith planted the seeds of the rational rejection of faith.
Therein lies the problem for the modern Christian. He has grown up in a world that worships reason to the exclusion of mystery. The point of human thought is to locate every mystery and strip from it all of its irrationality, so that it is reduced to a mechanism explained by mathematics. Reason is the hunter who poses with his kill for a picture he can use on his internet profile, because the beauty he sees in the image is him posing next to the kill, not the bit of nature he harvested.
The Christian who bristles at the “absurdity” the question posed at the beginning is a Christian forced to explain faith by the rules of reason. It is a hopeless project, which is why the churches have emptied out across the West. If the churches are to fill up again or new churches are to be founded, the modern Christian must confront the fact that the god of this age is rationality. That god must be overcome in order to be restored to his proper place alongside the mystery of life.
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History has the answer: those who have faith survive, the purely rational kill themselves off
You mean sacrificing your children for an AUDI isn’t rational?
An Audi no. A Bentley or a Rolls, yes.
Yes and no. Man isn’t a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal. This is why the church is falling – we see it with the idiocy coming out of the Vatican these days. Believers are flipping off the church, not the faith for the most part.
Pilate saw Him as a harmless loon too. It’s said you can judge a man by his friends. You can judge him accurately by his enemies too. Moslems and jews are good enemies to have, if history is any guide…
I was re-reading Xenophon’s Anabasis last month and I chuckled when Xenophon made an incredibly rational, linear speech to his men on the proper strategic plan for their campaign and then sacrifice some animals to confirm or reject the same plan. The Greeks understood the two realms of faith and reason.
Reading the entrails added an essential element of unpredictability. The enemy could not assume that the other side would do the rational thing. I think we could incorporate this randomness and spirituality into modern life but I’m not sure how.
1 Corinthians 1 23-25: “But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” Rationality is entirely based on priors, either derived from logic or experience. To the Greeks, the idea of God dying for his love of humanity is irrational, as it completely contradicts their implicit assumption of what it means to be a god. Our… Read more »
Try explaining that to your plumber. Yet another problem with Christianity: it relies too much on IQ to sustain it’s complicated doctrine. Put another way, if you can’t explain this stuff to a 90-IQ individual without recourse to “magic”, you have to resort to fear. Fear is not a good path to enlightenment.
The IQ problem explains the rise of Islam, its the perfect religion for Africa and other low IQ areas. Expect rapid growth of Islam and Europe in the years ahead
John 3:16:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
That’s all he needs to know. Understandable to anyone.
Nonsense. Most Christians through history were illiterate. The clergy trained academics to read and interpret the bible for them and they paved the way for the most powerful nations on earth. Britain alone controlled 3/5 of the globe. The faith encouraged and grew by extolling the value of good judgement, harmony, peace, duty and loyalty. It succeeded in doing that in a world filled with mortal enemies. One also has to wonder what (hork, spit) “enlightenment” is. For some, an enlightened society lets women make the decisions which has resulted in mass abortion, pedos chasing your kids around the public… Read more »
The great English writer W. S. Maugham once famously stated that it would be impossible to live precisely as Jesus prescribed because you would not be able to reconcile the reality of this world with the otherworldly code that Christians follow. You would end up dead…or worse. Turning the other cheek rarely ends well. He actually wrote a novel, The Razor’s Edge, based on the life of a man who was totally good. The other thing I remember from my reading of Maugham was his statement that Christianity could not handle too much investigative activity because it is “all of… Read more »
The symbol of the age of rationality is the machine. The ultimate real-world machine is the one-armed, yellow-painted factory robot. By contrast, the ultimate fictional machine is the T-800, the killing Terminator created by auteur James Cameron. It is not a coincidence that the final scene in the hunt takes place in a factory full of moving one-armed gadgets. What are the attributes of any machine? It is soulless It is deathless; it can be repaired It lives off electricity, a mysterious force few understand The machine is antithetical to man. Farting, burping man, guzzling his burgers, has nothing in… Read more »
The savages running the French Revolution replaced the altar at Notre Dame with an altar devoted to Reason. Well, isn’t that all you need to know?
And the savages the French elite invited into France burned down Notre Dame a few years ago. That’s all I need to know.
An alter devoted to reason doesn’t seem very logical to moi
Russell Kirk’s “The Roots of American Order” posited three major roots: Jerusalem, Athens and Rome. The latter for the Republic, obviously a model for early America, and for the Empire that adopted Greek ideas, while imposing order through Roman laws along the roads it built throughout the ancient world.
As a mostly lapsed Anglican (the church left me, not the other way around) the question I struggle with is are there eternal human truths that exist in Christian theology that can be applied to modern society as a framework for running it, or have we changed so much that a dusty 2000 year old philosophy and religion, while aesthetically pleasing cannot serve to order modern human affairs..? I’m not talking about the basic Ten Commandment type rules, but elements of the religion specific to it that apply to this day?
And yet in the lifetime of our parents/grandparents it served well enough. It’s more the problem that today’s humans are unfit to serve a Christian world than Christianity is unfit to serve a human world.
Yes, the sanctity of motherhood and fatherhood.
If given a choice women in general will choose not to bare children.
Without motherhood being raised as the highest achievement we are doomed to destruction.
I should say if given a choice in a system that tells women to be a girl boss is the highest achievement why are we shocked that women choose not to have children and instead become girl boss?
The Gospels make it very clear that many, many, many people, including many who followed Jesus, thought he was crazy or at the very least harbored serious doubts and questions. His followers, though, kept walking with him because they saw his miracles and trusted him, and his enemies, who always doubted him, were in the end defeated after his resurrection. I don’t think that Christianity makes much sense without this narrative, honestly, but it is also a narrative that is not often discussed or taught, even to many Christians. Yet it’s really, really important. Without this narrative, how different is… Read more »
Meh. Different times, different solutions. It’s one thing when you are living in times where we didn’t understand science as well as we do today and your audience is comprised mostly of peasants. It’s a completely different situation today with so many people being literate and understanding the logical way our world and universe was created and exists. I’ve never doubted that there is a rational explanation for what we’ve been told to accept on faith. That doesn’t negate the faith in my mind, that helps prove it to me
It is not so much the atheist who believes Jesus was a lunatic, as it is those who believe he was a wise teacher but not divine. “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a… Read more »
1. “idiotic concepts like “Judeo-Christian.” What’s so idiotic about trying to accentuate what we have in common, I.e. the Old Testament? But if you’re talking about Judeo-Christian as a concept where it is an entity separate and alone from Christianity and Judaism, then maybe you have a point. I don’t get my panties in a bunch over it either way. I know when I am and what I am not. 2. “churches have emptied out across the West” Have they? They seem to be pretty full on the holidays, even in Europe. We had a full house for the Dormition… Read more »
To appreciate the mystery’s of the faith we have to have both the ability to self reflect on ourselves and the ability to think about the nature of the universe. Some people have this ability, many do not, and our rulers make sure that every waking moment can be occupied with techno gadgets, sports ball, and the latest Hollywood creation or piece of information in the news cycle. It’s almost like they don’t want us thinking about a God. Mmmm. Modernity and it’s metroplex separate from nature creates an environment where God and the meaning of our lives does not… Read more »
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”
Reason is an excellent servant but a terrible master.
Faith is the cause, the energy, the oomph. Reason tempers faith, directs it, makes it workable. Unchecked, reason sucks the life out of everything. See the empty churches, as Z notes. You have to let it hang out, just not too far lol. Matter is subject to both but gets its say. The flesh desires and suffers, goes the way of flesh: you get tired, hungry, happy, sad, angry, aroused, old, dead. Jesus’ Passion was His physical suffering. The Puritans weren’t wrong about subjecting the physical world to the individual’s will, but imo they went too far in thinking it… Read more »
Is it not likely that science and religion are separate areas orthogonal to each other? Reason is the proper cognitive tool for understanding the physical work (including human physiology). Religion is the tool for figuring out purpose, meaning, and intent. This seems the proper approach to me. However, the latter, not being based on reason, is not objective. Thus,religion must be treated as individually specific.