Many traditionalist Christians rely on the primacy of Scripture, and specifically of the New Testament, as the foundation of what they claim to be the historic apostolic faith. (To me, there's an issue how much of that faith was actually held by Jesus or his original followers -- Peter's speeches in Acts raise some interesting questions, especially in view of what he did not say -- but that's a topic for another day.)
Does it matter whether Scripture has primary authority in all circumstances and at all times? Would Christianity still be a credible basis for life without it?
A Split of Opinion
Some orthodox believers may fear that if Scripture doesn't have primacy, we'd have no basis for continuing to be Christians. But I suspect that large numbers of the unchurched have the opposite reaction. Uncomfortable with the notion that a collection of human-authored documents from 2,000 years ago can still have preemptive spiritual authority, many such people have drifted away from -- or flatly rejected -- the church.
It's possible to take a more moderate view of scriptural authority; many Christians do. They accept the New Testament as containing, on the whole, a reasonably reliable record of the main points of Jesus's life and teachings and of his death and its aftermath. But they also recognize that the New Testament is not without issues of manuscript reliability and internal inconsistencies in the constituent documents, especially as to some of the finer details of what we now call "Christianity."
A Thought Experiment: "Core Christianity"
Purely as a thought experiment, let's (temporarily) forget about whether the orthodox have proved their case about the primacy of Scriptural authority.
And for the sake of argument, let's define "core Christianity" as those specific professions and promises set forth in the Episcopal baptismal rite, including the Apostles' Creed. After all, that's what it takes to become a Christian in the Catholic / Anglican / Episcopal tradition.
Even without Scripture as primary authority, this core Christianity seems eminently worth Pascal's wager. I can't begin to do justice to the subject in a document like this, but I will try to scratch the surface below.
How Do We Know There's a God?
When I taught Sunday school for high schoolers, I asked students at the beginning of the year to write down the questions they would like to talk about. The most frequently-asked question was "how do we know there's a God?"
Over the centuries, lots of purely logical arguments have been made about the existence of God. But logical arguments without sufficient facts can be like bricks without straw. As I note in another posting, if you look outside at dawn, you will naturally assume that the sun is rising in the sky. That's the logical conclusion; it was universally accepted for thousands of years. It's also dead wrong. For similar reasons, there are some people whom logic alone won't convince that there's a God.
So let's see if we can look at facts more than logic. We certainly know a lot more facts about the universe than we did in those prior centuries.
Some of the cosmological facts we've learned in the past 100 years are, to say the least, consistent with the existence of God. Many, I among them, would argue they are strongly suggestive of it; my own faith is bolstered significantly by those facts.
We now have a pretty good idea that, in the 14+ billion years since the Big Bang, an interacting set of incredibly complicated natural processes has been operating. During that time, those processes produced the first generation of stars. Then, from the ashes of those first stars, a set of second-generation stars and planets was formed, likely including our own.
Moreover, these creation processes also produced us. And on the whole -- certainly not always -- we humans have contributed to the increasing orderliness and goodness of our corner of the universe. We seem to be active participants in the continuing processes of creation described above. One Lutheran theologian has referred to the human race as "created co-creators."
Furthermore, we've found some pretty amazing "cosmic coincidences" in these creation processes. Those coincidences are sometimes referred to as the Anthropic Principle. See, e.g., here for a summary of some of these coincidences. Scientists, even skeptical ones, have taken note. For example:
- "The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications." --Prof. Stephen Hawking, quoted in Ian Barbour, When Science Meets Religion, p. 58 (2000)
- "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question." --Sir Fred Hoyle (astronomer & atheist) (1982)
- "The simultaneous occurrence of many independent improbable features appears wildly improbable. … [T]his fine-tuning could be taken as an argument for the existence of a designer, perhaps a God with an interest in conscious life." --Prof. Ian Barbour, When Science Meets Religion p. 58 (2000) (emphasis original)
- "The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming." --Prof. Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (1979) p. 250
- “My claim would be that theism has a more profound and comprehensive understanding to offer than that afforded by atheism. Atheists are not stupid, but they explain less.” -- Rev. Dr. Sir John Polkinghorne, KBE, FRS
All this calls to mind the opening verses of Psalm 19:
The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.
What About Jesus - Was He "Son of God"?
The evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was an actual man, not a literary fiction, is as solid as for virtually any other ancient personage. The faith preached and lived by Jesus, as recorded in the New Testament, appears to be remarkably resonant with the way human nature seems to work, both in individuals and in communities.
In particular, the love of neighbor that Jesus preached seems to be part of the fabric of the universe. If you're interested in reading more, I recommend the book Non-Zero (try here if it's out of stock at the previous link), by Robert Wright. It's a sophisticated yet very readable work about evolution, game theory, and social science. The author sticks to the facts, but concludes that the evolution of the human race, and especially its qualities of love and reciprocal altruism, seem to point to the existence of a God and perhaps even a divine plan.
Does this mean that Jesus was the Son of God? People of widely divergent views can agree that, whatever else Jesus might or might not have been, at a minimum he is fairly described as "son of God" in the same sense that --
- James and John were "sons of thunder";
- Joseph the Levite was called Barnabas, which means "son of encouragement";
- those who love their enemies are "sons of your Father in heaven";
- those who put their trust in the light are "sons of the light";
- the good seed in the parable of the sower is a symbol of "sons of the kingdom" while the weeds symbolize "sons of the evil one";
- certain other Jews in the Gospels are referred to as "son of Abraham" or "son of Israel";
- Jesus himself is sometimes called "son of David" or "son of man"; and
- like Jesus, peacemakers are also called "sons of God."
What about Jesus as Lord? I don't read Greek, but scholars have noted that the term kyrios, translated as "Lord," is used in a variety of ways in the New Testament, including a polite form of address such as "sir."
As to Jesus being our savior, Paul's theories about the mechanism of salvation weren't brought down on stone tablets from Mount Sinai, and the evidence indicates he never even met the man during his lifetime. Surely we're not forbidden to consider other possibilities for that mechanism in light of our increasing knowledge of the universe and of human society.
And the Resurrection? We don't know exactly what occurred in the aftermath of Jesus's execution. The Gospel accounts are not entirely consistent. But it's indisputable that something dramatically transformed Jesus's followers, who had been left demoralized by his death. That's something to ponder. If we seek to be open to truth, no matter what truth turns out to be (paraphrasing here the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor's definition of faith), then we can never ignore evidence of this kind; to do so would elevate our own conceptions of the universe above what God has actually wrought.
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To me, what all this says is that not everyone will accept Scripture as the primary spiritual and moral authority in all circumstances and in all times. Even so, it still makes sense to commit our lives to the faith of Jesus of Nazareth.
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--D. C.
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