How To Be An Agnostic
But there’s a risk here. I wonder if it creates a kind of idol out
of the personal. I have this feeling that it was an over-reaction
of early Christians to interpret the ‘Jesus event’ as so strongly
incarnational, and to end up worshipping the Christ. You need
more than just the ethical teachings of Jesus, I can see that. Jesus
reveals something that is true about the human condition: if
you don’t love you die; if you do love they kill you, was Herbert
McCabe’s way of summing it up. But isn’t to identify divinity
with a particular person a kind of category mistake? I can see
the force of the Buddhist saying that if you meet Buddha on the
road, kill him.
Then, there is the related problem of the historical Jesus.
I recall the scholar E.P. Saunders summing up Jesus of Nazareth’s
eschatological convictions in his New Testament lectures – such
as that the world was shortly to come to an end – and I wonder
how such ideas can really sit with the confession a Christian has
to make that this same ‘mistaken’ Jesus is Lord.
Shouldn’t we in some sense be getting over Jesus, not getting
too stuck on him, to put it rather crudely? For the fi xation on
Jesus as an historical fi gure is self-limiting. The problem with
being so tied to the life of the person called Jesus is that his sig-
nifi cance is so tied to events between the dates of his birth and
death too. It’s called the scandal of particularity. Christianity is
anchored in, but also anchored to, a particular place, time and
individual. But we already live 2000 years later. It is quite pos-
sible that humans will exist for some millennia yet. How plau-
sible will referring back to the man seem to our relatives 10,000
years on?
K – is for Kant
Immanuel Kant argued that all scientifi c and moral judgements
are imposed by the mind on the world; that is the only way we
can apprehend things. Not that things do not exist. It is just
that we cannot know what they are as things in themselves. So
there is the world of phenomena, the apparent world, and the