In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
From the conclusion to William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience
“Science catalogues her elements and records her laws indifferent as to what purpose may be shown forth by them, and constructs her theories quite careless of their bearing on human anxieties and fates. Though the scientist may individually nourish a religion, and be a theist in his irresponsible hours, the days are over when it could be said that for Science herself the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen now as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can exist. In a span of time which as a cosmic interval will count but as an hour, it will have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion of chance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest as well as to the smallest facts. It is impossible, in the present temper of the scientific imagination, to find in the driftings of the cosmic atoms, whether they work on the universal or on the particular scale, anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no result. Nature has no one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a sympathy. In the vast rhythm of her processes, as the scientific mind now follows them, she appears to cancel herself. The books of natural theology which satisfied the intellects of our grandfathers seem to us quite grotesque, representing, as they did, a God who conformed the largest things of nature to the paltriest of our private wants. The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals. The bubbles on the foam which coats a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and unmade by the forces of the wind and water. Our private selves are like those bubbles,- epiphenomena….; their destinies weigh nothing and determine nothing in the world’s irremediable currents of events.”
The world that James describes, perhaps our world, is a world where possibility does not truly exist. The cosmos that James inhabits is determined from birth to death, from the tiniest molecule to the incomprehensible cosmos. This world, as James described it, is perhaps what we all fear that our world is, pointless, incarceratingly predictable, and cruel. James’ world is a world where the great darkness of space is populated by an appalling wilderness of worlds and where the universe is cold and essentially life prohibiting. Our life spans only a few moments when the universe’s age is considered, and our galaxy which came into existence haphazardly will blink out of existence just as fast according to cosmic time. After gazing into the darkness, apprehending our limited time in it, and coming to terms with Darwinian randomness, one cannot help but feel diminished. The all encompassing senselessness opens wide the door of nihilism’s delight. But, “We are Christians,” you might say! In light of such a predicament, one might ask, “How dare we Christians claim purpose and meaning for our tiny lives. There is a god? What god? Where?” The charge that believers create a god not to worship but to give their own lives meaning seems more plausible when the blood soaked volumes of human history are considered.
The charge of idolatrous believers rings true given our inability to break free from endless cycles of apprehended pain, retribution, and scapegoating. We, in scapegoating, appease the gods of our own making by creating meaning out of senseless violence, injustice, and inequality. Just like always, the war, all wars, are carried on in order to honor the blessed dead, to give their “sacrifices” meaning, to make mothers and fathers feel better about the strange fact that America has never conceded that it has lost a war while wrestling with the fact that we have lost millions of people to it. So war continues unexamined for the sake of meaning in response to nihilism. Meaning then, is not contingent on virtue, purpose, or teleology, but on the need to create meaning. And here, our meaning is based not upon intrinsic qualities nor goals but on appeasement and acquiescence to “history,” the status quo, or a lack of imagination. The same schema functions for the death penalty. In order to appease troubled consciences the perpetrator of a crime is sacrificed to make a horrible situation which is utterly broken right through the sacrifice of blood. Blood is used to comfort the bereaved. The vicious cycle of gang related violence, drug related violence, pedophile priests and teachers, both men and women, plagues human history so as to color even the Christians as participants in one great blood sacrifice to the god who is a god who looks strikingly like us. Today, a symptom and purveyor of meaninglessness and determinism is our apparent inability to attain Social Mobility. We, whatever economic class we are born into, will most likely die in that same economic class. From birth to death, under the veil of freedom and choice, we will die unremarkably same as whatever economic class our parents were. Given our inability to change, to acquire genuine freedom, to break out of an endless cycle of violence, to find a way to feed, clothe, and shelter billions of people in the world, it would seem as though James’ assessment of reality is correct. Perhaps we do live in a world that produces no proper history, or no history at all. Perhaps our lives are determined by the weather and not the will? Perhaps we are all idolaters whose god demands blood for blood, calls slavery freedom, and death life?
In such a hypothetical world, a world conditioned not by human agency, but the wind and water interacting with matter in such a way to produce a people who question, is there anything then that is true? That we live but a few years, is there time for truth? And, even if there was, wouldn’t it soon be forgotten or rendered unintelligible due to the passage of time? Is the only truth unsatiated desire?
“What is truth?” Pilate asks the question.
Pilate lives in James’ world, his truth, if there is one, is to get by. He seeks to satisfy an angry mob because it is politically expedient to sacrifice justice to satisfy a mob’s desire. For Pilate, truth is a democratic process where the ends, maintaining power, and the means, crucifixion of the innocent, are seperate categories.
The Jewish Religious Leaders are paradigmatic not of Jews, but of any religious person who endorses a hermeneutic of death, a way of comprehending God that legitimates the use of violence to maintain political power, and an apprehension of history that endorses the efficacy of wrath while condemning grace to die.
The crowd, the purveyors and captives of determinism and “fate,” want death, not life. They want death and spectacle now, not eternity, because for them God does not exist, thus eternity does not exist. The crowd claims liberty and justice yet in an attempt to liberate they perpetuate their own slavery to violence and retribution. Their story has been our story for 2,000 years and shows no signs of letting up. All of those who have a hand in Jesus’ death, all of us, do so because the status quo, the poor, homeless, sick, middle class, imprisoned, war, death, and violence are part of a process that we have no freedom to thwart. It is, perhaps as James would put it, a moving equilibrium in the heavens, it is a zero sum game. We, humanity, cannot break free from ourselves, our culture of violence, nor our myriad contingencies whose determining factors were decided and acted on long before our lives began. Examples of actions determing our present and future are: the fall of Russia, being brought up in a rural area, our race, sex, and gender, access to material resources, nation of origin, and availability of natural resources. All of these things lead to far reaching social realities that condition our present experience and determine our future (see Social Mobility above).
But the great irony of God in Jesus Christ is that we were given genuine freedom in killing God, and unlike the charge that we have created the God we want to give our lives meaning, we crucified the God we didn’t want only to realize that in so doing those things we used to crucify him, pride, doubt, injustice, and fear are the hallmarks of meaninglessness. We killed the one who stood for justice though it was denied him, the God who bestowed grace even though none was offered to him, the God who looked human, yes, but did NOT act like us or value the things that we value, and we couldn’t stand him. As Caiaphas said, “It was better to have one person die for the people.” The denigration of one life is an utter denial of God’s existence and purpose.. .
This we KNOW is truth because in crucifying the truth our sin and meaninglessness has been exposed. We crucified the way so as to see that we had lost ours. We crucified justice so that we can see our injustice. We crucified equality so that we may see our inequality. We crucified the life so the life might die and in so doing that we might finally live not for just a moment, but for eternity. And in our apprehension of what is false, a new possibility of truth emerges, in our understanding of death, we can finally see life, in our attempt to conceal justice in a tomb by means of injustice, we can perhaps perceive that those things, all those things that led up to Jesus’ death are the bringers of death. In our revelation that those things that killed Jesus are wrong, meaning emerges and determinism, that is slavery, which exists contingent on our in ability to break free from the cycles of violence, oppression, and inequality are finally brought to the light of Christ and exposed for what they are, death. This is the theology of the cross, the paradox that in taking God’s life we have received life. In Jesus’ words, “It is finished,” but upon uttering them our lives have just begun anew, and that the Psalmists words, “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me” understood through the lens of the cross are properly uttered, “My people, my people, why have you forsaken your God?” Amen.
