ELEVEN

 

THE SCANDAL OF PARTICULARITY

Most theologians would argue that Christian theology is necessarily Christocentric: that is what makes it Christian. So it is necessary to look into the role of Christ the man in relation to the ideas sketched out above.

It is clear that the epic quest of the historical Jesus, as grand and brave as it was, has not reached its goal and, in the absence of new evidence, is not about to. I have set out my reasons for believing this in How God Became God, but here let me restate one of the most important ones in someone else’s words. Literary critic Gabriel Josipovici writes:

My feeling is that we will never be able to know, of Paul any more than of Jesus, just what they said and what was added later, and that such attempts are doomed to circularity: you dismiss as inauthentic what does not fit with your notion of the man, and then use what is left to confirm your vision.¹

Josipovici makes a similar remark about the circular arguments “common to biblical scholarship, which is so often both meticulous and fantastical in about equal proportions.”²

For these reasons, I believe it is wise to be conservative when treating the primary sources about Jesus’s life. These are principally the canonical Gospels, although I believe that the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas could also date to the first century and may even be older than the New Testament texts.

As has been said often, it is not possible to sift out the genuine acts and utterances of Jesus from those that were fathered upon him later, but it seems sensible to take the core narrative at face value, particularly since, for all their differences, the four Gospels agree about it. This narrative says that there was a man named Jesus, who came from Nazareth in Galilee, was baptized by John the Baptist, and thereupon started on a career as a wandering preacher and healer. He denounced the hypocrisy and corruption of the religious authorities of his day. At one point he defied the priests in their own sanctum—the Jerusalem Temple—and they contrived to destroy him. They persuaded the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, to have him crucified.^*11 After his death, some of his disciples had visions of him risen from the dead. From this impulse Christianity was born.

The debate about the nature of Jesus Christ, as expressed in the early centuries of the Christian era, has filled many volumes. The positions taken over this period ring practically all the possible changes on such questions as the human versus the divine nature of Christ. These positions are deftly summarized by Ioan P. Couliano in the introduction to his 1992 book The Tree of Gnosis. Couliano helpfully sets out the dichotomies of these possibilities (Jesus: divine or human? One nature or two?), and their possible permutations, in a table.³

The history of this debate is an unpleasant subject to investigate, because, as Couliano says, “whoever has the slightest knowledge of early Christianity knows how terrible theological debates could be, . . . and how inconceivably obnoxious were many of those whom the Church has canonized.”⁴ Fortunately for me, this ground has been well covered over the course of theological history, so I don’t have to do so here.

The ferocity of the debate over the nature of Christ seems to point to something beyond itself. Why, after all, would the church fathers—who were, for all their nastiness, among the best minds of their time—squabble so bitterly about the degree to which Jesus was divine or human, or about whether he had one nature or two? Although they did not know it themselves, I suspect that, falling into a kind of psychological displacement, they may have been unconsciously fighting about the nature, not of Christ, but of man himself. Is man divine, or merely human? Does he have one nature, or two? Put this way, we can see how the issue would be much more important, indeed crucial, to the goal of human self-understanding. Nevertheless, man’s psychological defenses against seeing himself as divine made the question impossible to address directly, so it was projected upon Jesus. This is still the case, more or less.

Maybe this intuition suggests a way out. Maybe the real messianic secret was that Jesus was speaking not only of his own nature but that of all humans.

All this said, most Christian teaching holds that the coming of Jesus Christ was the central moment in history—what Karl Barth called “the Krisis”—the juncture at which God meets humanity.⁵ Conventional Christian theology propounds what has been called the scandal of particularity—the idea that God would incarnate in human form once and once only. (Scandal is used here in its etymological sense: one meaning of the Greek skándalon is “stumbling block,” as in 1 Corinthians 1:23: “But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.”)

The scandal of particularity, although always a problem for Christian apologetics, was less of one in the early days of Christianity, partly because the conceptual time scale of the era was so small. The Greco-Roman world did not have a well-defined sense of the remote past. The Trojan War (which was more or less accurately dated to around 1200 BC) was always taken as a kind of starting point, before which history was indistinguishable from myth.⁶ Although some thinkers, such as Plato in his Timaeus, show a wider sense of time, these views do not seem to have penetrated into the culture as a whole.

Thus when Christianity came on the scene and insisted that the Old Testament—and the Old Testament only—gave the correct view of ancient history, the claim seemed at least plausible. And in the context of the four thousand years that had supposedly taken place since creation, it was conceivable that God could come down to earth once and once only.

Today it is different. Current science says the universe came into existence around 13.8 billion years ago, meaning that we humans are late arrivals on the scene. The human race itself (depending on how it is defined) goes back 200,000 or 300,000 years. This scale too makes the scandal of particularity hard to swallow. God came down to earth only once in all this time?

Furthermore, some world religions—Hinduism, for example—have a much broader time scale than Judaism and Christianity. Hinduism posits the coming of not one divine being, but of many, known as avatars, to the earth over the course of the ages. In this context, it would make sense to do as some Hindus do, and regard Jesus Christ as one, but only one, of many such divine incarnations. But this would topple Christianity’s claims to the sole and exclusive franchise on access to the divine.

A Course in Miracles is also Christocentric, but in a different way from orthodox theology. According to the Course, the historical Jesus was not qualitatively different from the rest of humanity, who are all part of the Sonship. Jesus was simply the first human being to fully accept the Atonement for himself. “The name of Jesus is the name of one who was a man but saw the face of Christ in all his brothers and remembered. So he became identified with Christ, a man no longer, but at one with God” (M, 87; emphasis in the original). That was his distinction. Speaking in the first person, Jesus says, “I am in charge of the process of Atonement, which I undertook to begin.” Indeed, he continues, “I am the Atonement” (T, 8, 9).

The Course does not occupy itself with the mystery of the incarnation of Jesus. There was no incarnation, because the physical body, made by the ego as a means of hiding from God, does not ultimately exist. Nor is Jesus different from the rest of us. He is in charge of the Atonement simply because he was the first human being to fully accept it.

Again, the Course uses Christian terms in ways that are radically different from convention. In the Course, the Atonement is simply the process by which God’s answer to the “tiny, mad idea” of the ego is worked out in time. But the usual connotation of the word atonement has to do with sacrifice: you atone for your sins by repenting and renouncing your old ways and, very likely, accepting some punishment. According to the orthodox doctrine of the vicarious atonement, Jesus, for reasons that are never completely clear, has to offer himself up as an acceptable sacrifice to his Father, thereby appeasing his wrath.

This doctrine was developed only over the course of centuries, culminating with Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century, but its roots are not hard to find.^*12 They lie in the New Testament. Ephesians 5:2 says, “Christ . . . hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour.” Hebrews develops the concept further, making Jesus both priest and sacrifice: “And every priest standeth daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins: But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right side of God,” thereby becoming “an high priest over the house of God” (Hebrews 10:11–12, 21).

This idea is understandable in its context. The religions of antiquity, Jewish and pagan, were centered around animal sacrifice; it would be only a small exaggeration to say that ancient religion was animal sacrifice. Consider the Jerusalem Temple. Certainly it was splendid: Josephus, who provides one of the few surviving firsthand descriptions, says that “it radiated so fiery a flash that people had to avert their eyes as if they were looking directly at the sun.”⁷ But the Temple had another feature that impressed someone else who saw it firsthand: the author of the pseudonymous Letter of Aristeas, usually dated to the second century BC. He writes, “There are many openings for water at the base of the altar which are invisible to all except those who are involved in the ministration, so that all the blood of the sacrifices which is collected in great quantities is washed away in the twinkling of an eye.”⁸ The Temple had to have an elaborate plumbing system to drain all the blood off.

Why was sacrifice performed? The familiar picture of ancient animal sacrifice is not entirely correct. Many assume that the animal was killed and burned whole on the altar as an offering to the gods. Frequently it was not. As a rule, the bones and entrails were burned. The meat was cut up and served at the sacrificial feast; the surplus was sold commercially. That was why Paul’s students had concerns about eating meat offered to idols: it was sold at the butchers’ stalls—what the King James Version calls “the shambles” (1 Corinthians 10:25). The animal’s blood was carefully collected and sprinkled around the altar.⁹

Originally, then, it was not the meat that the gods desired; it was the blood. As Mephistopheles told Faust, “blood is a very special fluid.”¹⁰ It was and is believed to be the vehicle of the life force, known variously by such names as chi or prana, or in the Hebrew of the Bible, the nefesh. Leviticus 17:11 states: “The life [nefesh] of the flesh is in the blood.” The Odyssey illustrates this belief gruesomely: When Odysseus makes sacrifices in preparation for his descent to Hades, he says,

I cut the sheep’s throats over the pit,

and the dark-clouding blood ran.

And from Erebus gathered the souls of the dead:

Girls and youths and long-suffering elders;

skipping virgins with hearts new to sorrow;

men stabbed with brazen swords,

killed in war, with bloody armor.

The crowd of them flitted around the pit with eerie shrieks,

and green fear took hold of me.¹¹

The dead, having no vitality, no nefesh, of their own, try to suck it from the freshly spilled blood. (Vampire myths must have something to do with this belief.) The gods too feed on this life force.

In this context, the early Christians were bound to see the death of Jesus as a sacrifice, however different qualitatively from offerings of lambs and bullocks. The Epistle to the Hebrews illustrates this shift with its ambivalence toward sacrifice. Blood offerings are required for purification: “Without the shedding of blood there is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22). But they do not purify for good, because if they did, “would they not have ceased to be offered?” (Hebrews 10:2). Besides, they only purify earthly things: “It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these; but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these” (Hebrews 9:23). In fact, these sacrifices do not really purify: “It is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins” (Hebrews 10:4). Therefore a better sacrifice was needed: “the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10).^*13 But the author does not face a deeper question: why blood should purify at all. He simply takes it for granted, on the authority of the Old Testament.

The doctrine of vicarious atonement, developed over the next thousand years, is still defended by learned arguments and celebrated in elaborate rituals. Belief in it is touted as a sine qua non for salvation. But today, when nobody (at least in Western culture) believes that God could be appeased by spilled blood of any kind, it is incomprehensible.

Think of it this way: God is infinite love, but he got mad at the human race because a couple of people ate a piece of fruit in Armenia six thousand years ago. He got so mad, in fact, that he damned everybody for eternity. The only way he could make up for it was to send a part of himself down to earth and have it tortured to death, which somehow made everything all right. Except not really, because unless you believe this story, you will be damned anyway.

Many people accept this doctrine, not because it makes sense to them, but because they have been bullied into it: believe it or face the unquenchable flames.

A few years ago, we had next-door neighbors who were fundamentalist Christians. Despite our religious differences, our relations were amiable, and our sons played with their children. One hot summer day the neighbors put up their aboveground pool. My sons ran over, but one of the neighbors’ children said, “You can’t come in unless you believe in Jesus!” “I believe in Jesus! I believe in Jesus!” cried my son William, who was thereupon admitted to the glories of the pool.

A cute story about small children, but it is not very different from the situation of the conventional Christian. She has to believe in something that may not, probably does not, make the slightest bit of sense to her, because she fears that if she does not believe it, she will bring upon herself a far graver penalty than exclusion from a swimming pool. Although Catholicism and liberal Protestantism have backed away from this doctrine in its starkest form, even there it still lies in the background.

For the Course, the redemptive action of Christ on the cross is quite different. It is a kind of object lesson. Speaking in the first person, Jesus says, “I elected, for your sake and mine, to demonstrate that the most outrageous assault, as judged by the ego, does not matter. As the world judges things but not as God knows them, I was betrayed, abandoned, beaten, torn, and finally killed” (T, 93). But in the end it did nothing, because nothing in this world is real, including the body. Jesus does not want anyone else to follow his example: “I will with God that none of His Sons should suffer” (T, 94). Indeed more than once the Course calls the crucifixion the “last useless journey” and warns, “Do not make the pathetic error of clinging to the ‘old rugged cross.’ The only message of the crucifixion is that you can overcome the cross” (T, 52). Elsewhere it says:

The crucifixion did not establish the Atonement; the resurrection did. Many sincere Christians have misunderstood this. . . . If the crucifixion is seen from an upside-down point of view, it does appear as if God permitted and even encouraged one of His Sons to suffer because he was good. This particularly unfortunate interpretation . . . has led many people to be bitterly afraid of God. Such anti-religious concepts have crept into many religions. Yet the real Christian should pause and ask, “How could this be?” Is it likely that God Himself would be capable of the kind of thinking which His Own words have stated is clearly unworthy of His Son? (T, 36)

As this passage shows, the Course also accepts the resurrection as a fact, and indeed emphasizes it far more than the crucifixion. The resurrection proved that the body is ultimately inconsequential, and can be destroyed without affecting the Self.

Thus the Christology of A Course in Miracles does not posit a Jesus who differs ontologically from the rest of the human race, because the race as a whole constitutes the Sonship. Jesus is merely primus inter pares—the first human who has fully accepted the Atonement, and who is therefore put “in charge” of it (T, 8). The passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus is best understood not as a human sacrifice that somehow expiated the sins of humanity, but as an object lesson.

To explain what I mean, let me turn to the ancient mystery religions, such as those of Delphi, Eleusis, and Samothrace. We only have a dim idea of what went on in their initiations, because the initiates were sworn to secrecy, and they kept their word. One clue lies in a remark of Cicero’s about the mysteries, “by which we are led from a crude and rustic life to humanity, and are made gentler, so that we have acknowledged these initiations, as they are called, as the true principles of life, and have received a method not only of living with happiness, but of dying with a better hope.”¹²

The ancient mysteries had to do with death and rebirth. Reductionistic thinkers say they merely commemorated the vegetative cycles of nature, but as far back as the first century AD Plutarch criticized the “dull crowd” that held to this view.¹³

On the passion and resurrection of Christ in relation to the mysteries, P. D. Ouspensky writes:

There is a remarkable analogy between the content of the Mysteries and the earthly life of Christ. The life of Christ, taken as we know it from the Gospels, represents the same Mystery as those which were performed in Egypt on the island of Philae, in Greece at Eleusis, and in other places. The idea was the same, namely the death of the god and his resurrection. The only difference between the Mysteries as they were performed in Egypt and Greece and the Mystery which was played in Palestine lies in the fact that the latter was played in real life, not on the stage but amidst real nature, in the streets and public places of real towns, in real country, with the sky, mountains, lakes and trees for scenery, with a real crowd, with real emotions of love and malice and hatred, with real nails, with real sufferings.¹⁴

What is the meaning of this sacred drama? That what is true of this god is true for all of us: the death of the body is not the death of the Self, indeed it is ultimately irrelevant to the Self. “Assault can ultimately be made only on the body. There is little doubt that that one body can assault another, and can even destroy it. Yet if destruction itself is impossible, anything that is destructible cannot be real” (T, 92).

This could have been the lesson imparted to initiates by the mysteries, and demonstrated in the passion and resurrection of Christ.

We do not need to imitate this martyrdom. We are merely to learn the lesson that the crucifixion teaches. “You have probably reacted for years as if you were being crucified,” says the Course. But “if you react as if you are being persecuted, you are teaching persecution. This is not a lesson a Son of God should want to teach if he is to realize his own salvation. . . . You are not asked to be crucified, which was part of my own teaching contribution. You are merely asked to follow my example in the face of much less extreme temptations to misperceive, and not to accept them as false justifications for anger” (T, 92–93). Hence the final answer is, again, forgiveness.

In any event, let us look at how the resurrection appeared at the time and what it may have meant. The Gospels give only vague clues. The risen Jesus seems at times a phantom, appearing and vanishing at will, at times a palpable being, eating fish and honey. In these instances, we are not dealing with firsthand accounts, except for Paul’s description of his encounter with the risen Christ in 1 Corinthians 15:8—but Paul gives us no specifics. All we know, really, is that his experience was enough like that of Jesus’s disciples to permit them to accept Paul as one of them.

Paul does not believe in a physical resurrection, which he explicitly denies. The resurrection is of a “spiritual body” or a “glorified body”: “It is sown a natural body [sôma psukhikón]; it is raised a spiritual body [sôma pneumatikón]. . . . Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption” (1 Corinthians 15:44, 50). But he does not say how he conceives of this spiritual body.

For some light on this matter, I will turn to some of the material that emerged alongside of A Course in Miracles, by which I mean passages that were dictated by the Voice to Helen Schucman but did not appear in the final, edited version of the Course. In 1976 Schucman and Bill Thetford asked the Voice about the nature of the resurrection. Speaking in the first person as Jesus, it replied:

My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it. The last one had gone. It was laid in the tomb, but there was nothing left to bury. It did not disintegrate because the unreal cannot die. It merely became what it always was. And that is what “rolling away the stone” means. The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond. It merely ceases to interfere with vision. To roll away the stone is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body’s nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear.¹⁵

As I have stressed, the Course is self-consistent. If the body is not real, then it does not exist. Under certain circumstances, then, it can simply vanish.

But Jesus did appear to his disciples. What sort of body was that? The Voice continues:

I did assume a human form with human attributes afterwards, to speak to those who were to prove the body’s worthlessness for the world. This has been much misunderstood. I came to tell them that death is illusion, and the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. They did not understand. But now I talk to you and give you the same message. The death of an illusion means nothing. It disappears when you decide to awaken and dream no more. And you still do have the power to make this decision as I did.¹⁶

There is not much in the Western traditions that can explain this idea, although it is reminiscent of the concept of the tulku in Tibetan Buddhism. The Dalai Lama explains that a fully enlightened being achieves “the empty nature of . . . all-knowing enlightened mind.” But such a being can only manifest in its pure form to those who are equally enlightened. For ordinary mortals, such beings manifest as “gods or humans.” As such they are “accessible even to ordinary beings.” This “emanation body” is known as nirmanakaya or, in Tibetan, tulku.¹⁷ Descriptions of the tulku bear some resemblance to the form in which the risen Jesus is said to have manifested himself.

These manifestations are supernatural. They are impossible according to the current laws of physics and biology, no matter how creatively interpreted. This may cause some discomfort, because many forms of Christianity today deny or avoid any concept of the supernatural in their theologies. But if you are going to deny any possibility of supernatural manifestations, you may as well drop your religious pretenses and admit that you are a secular humanist.

I also think it best to be cautiously open-minded about the resurrection of Christ. It seems likely that the disciples did have some experience of the risen Christ. But because we have no firsthand accounts of such experiences, we are left with many questions about what that experience was and what it meant. The answers set out above are possibilities and possibilities only. So, for that matter, are all other answers.

If the early followers of Christ believed that the resurrection of the faithful would be a spiritual event rather than a resuscitation of corpses, and the later church believed the exact opposite, we could wonder how this doctrine could have transformed itself so radically. Robert Perry, editor of a recent and comprehensive edition of the Course, theorizes cogently about how the early Christian concept of the resurrection of the body developed.¹⁸ Those who encountered the risen Christ, by all accounts, encountered one with a body that was different from the one he had before. The first step was to conceive of him in a “spiritual body” or “glorious body,” as Paul did, for example in Philippians 3:20–21: “We look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body [sómati tēs dóxēs].” (See also 1 Corinthians 15:44, quoted above.) But this glorified spiritual body is extremely hard to conceive of, and in later centuries the concept mutated into the idea of a resurrected physical body.

Of course this would mean that the Christian church today teaches the exact opposite of what Christ originally taught. But this is so true of so many aspects of Christian thought that it need not surprise us.

In the end, Christocentrism seems to entail the scandal of particularity in some form, even in the irenic form presented by the Course. In making Jesus the first person in the human race to have fully accepted the Atonement, it seems to push aside all the other great religious figures who preceded him. We are led to suspect that Zarathustra and Lao-tzu and Confucius did not quite grasp the whole picture, and that even the enlightenment of the Buddha was not as complete as he claimed. All this could lead to a religious polemic of the most poisonous variety.

Personally, I do not know who Jesus was. I am familiar with the theories and the doctrines, but that is all they are. To my mind, it makes most sense to think of the nature and person of Christ in this way: Occasionally beings appear who are, both cognitively and ethically, far in advance of the usual run of mortals. Christ was among them, but so very likely were other great spiritual presences. These beings are often seen as divine. They may be, or they may not be; there is no way of saying—if we can even say what divine is supposed to mean here. In any event, those of us who are more ordinary have to admit that we have no real criterion for evaluating them: they are, in some important ways, above us, and that is all we can say. But rather than pitching ourselves into a cynical agnosticism or a superstitious credulity—or even a seizure of theologizing—I think we can accept the simple possibility, even the likelihood, that such beings exist and that we can have recourse to their help if we ask for it.