Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God

-
I picked up this book by Jack Miles a year ago after reading its first paragraph. The book as a whole didn't grab me---it takes a literary approach to the New Testament that doesn't work for me. But it does have a great introduction. Here's how it starts:

"All mankind is forgiven, but the Lord must die. This is the revolutionary import of the epilogue that, two thousand years ago, a group of radical Jewish writers appended to the sacred scripture of their religion. Because they did so, millions in the West today worship before the image of a deity executed as a criminal, and---no less important---other millions who never worship at all carry within their cultural DNA a religiously derived suspicion that somehow, someday, 'the last will be first, and the first last' (Matt. 20:16)."

Later it continues:

"Winners usually look like winners, and losers like losers. But thanks to this paradoxical feature of the Christian myth, there remains lodged deep in the political consciousness of the West a readiness to believe that the apparent loser may be the real winner unrecognized. . . . One of the many implications of this epilogue to God's life story has been that in the West no regime can declare itself above review. All power is conditional; and when the powerless rise, God may be with them. . . . Wherever lines like these or the ideas behind them have spread, human authority has begun to lose its grip on unimpeachable legitimacy. In the West, any criminal may be Christ, and therefore any prosecutor Pilate. As the abolitionist poet James Russell Lowell put it:

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own."

It's funny to think how Nietzsche believed basically the same thing, but with a much much sinister view toward it.

Later Miles addresses further the meaning of the crucifixion:

"The great Western myth is designed to raise a second, more profound and more disturbing question, however: If God had to suffer and die, then God had to inflict this suffering and death upon himself. But why would God do this? Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner, the French say: To understand everything is to forgive everything. Every perpetrator was first a victim. Behind every crime stretches a millennial history of earlier crimes, each in its way an extenuating circumstance. But to whom does this infinite regression lead in the end if not to God? The guilt of God is certainly not a Christian dogma, and yet it is an emotionally inescapable implication of the Christian myth."

Miles then writes about the history of humankind condemned after the Fall: "[It evokes] what many feel on visiting a battlefield where grave markers stretch to the far horizon. So many subjected to capital punishment, and so few, surely, guilty of anything approaching capital crime."

Miles actually talks about Nietzsche in the course of this first chapter. Nietzsche found "the dignification of suffering perverse . . . Spiritually speaking, he said, the early Christian stank in his nostrils like Polish Jews." Nietzsche writes: "What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness." And yet not long before he sank into an insanity that would last until his death, Nietzsche was so distraught by seeing a coachman flog a horse that he flung himself on the horse in a vain attempt to protect it. In this moment of unguarded emotional response, he sides with the weak and vulnerable, not with the powerful. I've always thought Nietzsche was brilliant but brilliantly wrong, absolutely blind to structural deficiencies of his philosophy. Maybe he suspected these deficiencies himself, and this "cognitive dissonance" added to his insanity.

Miles discusses one of Philip's first converts, a eunuch from Ethiopia, noting that "the enslaved eunuch is, if you will, just the kind of convert Nietzsche would have predicted, believing as he did that Christianity is a religion for slaves and other emasculate losers, a cult of resentment deriving all its malignant energy from their bad luck. . . . And yet, so far as we can tell, Philip says nothing to the eunuch about the eunuch's own suffering, only directing his attention to the sufferings of the prophesied Lamb of God. What this kindles in the man, however, is a desire to undergo the death-and-resurrection rite of baptism, uniting his humiliation with God's own and trusting that it will lead to exaltation in just the way that so appalled Nietzsche."

He goes on: "Castration is an atrocity within an atrocity. Perhaps someone in Ethiopia could have been hunted down and punished for castrating Philip's convert, but who can be punished for perpetrating the human condition itself? . . . Our offense was so mild, [God's] punishment so ferocious. Can we avenge himself upon him? No, we cannot; we cannot make him 'bear the awful curse' that he has inflicted on his creatures. But he can make himself bear it. And when he does, all lesser offenses can be caught up in one primal offense, his own, for which, though not without a wrenching change in his character, he can wreak the ultimate vegeance upon himself and deliver the ultimate gift---eternal life---as atonement. . . . as Christ, he can taste death."

I like this statement at the end of this section about what we look for in all great literature and ideas: "The myth tht he once did so [taste death] has within it, as the greatest literature always does, the power to still that rage against the universe which any individual history can engender."

And finally: "The world is a great crime, and someone must be made to pay for it. Mythologically read, the New Testament is the story of how someone, the right someone, does pay for it."

I like these quotes as well. Miles writes of a novel in which the protagonist (a man named Mistler) is dying and says "The death Mistler wants God to notice is his own, and his deepest grievance, to quote the psychologist Allen Wheelis, is his 'awareness that, before we die, nothing is going to happen. . . That big vague thing, that redemptive fulfillment, is an illusion, a beckoning bribe to keep us loyal. A symphony has a climax, a poem builds to a burst of meaning, but we are unfinished business. No coming together of strands. The game is called because of darkness.' "
-