Jews and Arabs in 1930s Palestine: On the Impact of Categorical Overreaches

Writing on theology and ethics and their application to politics and economics in An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, Reinhold Niebuhr runs the risk of fusing the respective domains, which I maintain are qualitatively different, and thereby minimizing or losing outright what is unique to each domain. Besides occasioning category mistakes, such as in labeling divine love as ethical rather than as distinctly theological, overreaches from one domain onto another even at the expense of the other’s own criteria can occur from the underlying error. Besides being extant in Niebuhr’s text, the conflation of distinct domains and the related overreaches of their respective criteria has exacerbated the long-standing conflict between the Jews and Arabs in what was Palestine when Niebuhr was writing his book on Christian ethics in which he discusses the sheer intractability of the conflict.

In Niebuhr’s view, “the full evil of human finitude and sin is most vividly revealed in conflicts between national communities.”[1] Such conflicts “present a tragic revelation of the impossibility of the law of love because no party to the conflict has a perspective high enough to judge the merits of the opponent’s position.”[2] That is to say, every perspective is partial, and thus partisan, rather than wholistic containing tensions and even outright contradictions. “Every appeal to moral standards thus degenerates into a moral justification of the self against the enemy.”[3] To Niebuhr, “self-love is never justified.”[4] This is so both ethically and in religious terms. On the ethical level, Niebuhr insists that, “In spite of the relativity of morals every conceivable moral code and every philosophy of morals enjoins concern for the life and welfare of the other and seeks to restrain the unqualified assertion of the interests of the self against the other.”[5] Any moral justification on behalf of one’s own side against one’s enemy cannot be construed as moral, but, rather, immoral qua egoist. In terms of religion, Niebuhr wrote that “human egoism . . . is sin only from the perspective of the law of love.”[6] Here, Niebuhr’s statement would be more congruent on the religious level if self-love, which is a sin, were substituted for egoism, which is an ethical term. Self-love is a sin because it goes against charity, meaning love in a distinctive religious sense (i.e., caritas). The seventeenth-century Jansenist priest in Europe, Pierre Nicole, penned an essay railing against self-love precisely because it is antithetical to charity understood as love (rather than as philanthropy); even enlightened self-interest is still of sordid self-love and thus not at all consisting of love.

In Niebuhr’s discussion of international conflicts between nations in which distinctly religious love, such as manifests in compassion rather than hatred to enemies, is wholly absent, and taking into account the squalid theological idolatry of self-love that places love of self above love directed to an externally-based divine (e.g., God), Niebuhr’s theological claim, “Parties to a dispute inevitably make themselves judges over it and thus fall into the sin of pretending to be God,” is hardly surprising.[7] The gravitas of self-love that renders any combative perspective partisanship (i.e., partial) is ultimately sourced in self-idolatry, hence presumptuous infallibility and the presumed universalizability of one’s perspective as absolute can be expected. In the mid-2020s, in the midst of Israel’s militaristic decimation of Gaza, which went far beyond the damage that had been committed by Hamas in an attack in Israel in 2023, Niebuhr’s distinctly theological claim readily applies, and may even explain the longstanding intransigence of the aggressor in the multi-year operation that went far beyond justice to vengeance, which, incidentally, is supposed to belong to Yahweh alone.[8]

Writing in the mid-1930s, hence prior to the establishment of the modern state of Israel, Niebuhr perceived the “rivalry between Jews and Arabs in Palestine” as “a conflict between two races and religions, involving not only the natural will-to-live of two collective racial organisms, but [also] the economic differences between the feudalism of the Arabs and the technical civilization which the Jews [were] able to introduce into Palestine.”[9] From a standpoint in time after many decades from the establishment of Israel, it is easy in hindsight to grasp the superiority of the technical civilization not only economically, but also militarily. Even in the 1930s, the conflict must have been generally perceived as frozen in terse intractability. The rule of love based on forgiveness, as in being compassionate to enemies, was so far from the contending mentalities and emotions in Palestine that Niebuhr’s more general claim that such love is impossible in the world of politics appears to be tenable (even though I disagree with his claim).

So, in utter futility, Niebuhr asks his readers rhetorically, “How can a high enough rational and moral perspective be found to arbitrate the issue between” the Jews and Arabs in Palestine? “How is the ancient and hereditary title of the Jew to Palestine to be measured against the right of the Arab’s present possession? Or how is one to judge the relative merits of modern Jewish against ancient Moslem culture without introducing criteria which are involved in and do not transcend the struggle?”[10] Both peoples had some historical presence in the region, and the involvement of religion and questions of ethics in this mess renders the conflict that Niebuhr perceived in the 1930s as even more intractable. Conflating all of these domains doesn’t help.

For example, the claim that the Jews had a hereditary title is dubious if it comes out of a religious story, or myth, and has been superimposed on the political domain, for the religious and political domains are arguably distinct—each having its own unique basis—so criteria from one of the domains supervening on those of the other can be flagged as an overreaching encroachment and thus as out of bounds, to evoke sports. Put another way, the jurisdiction of material in the mythic genre does not extend into the political world, whose genre is that of political power rather than faith narratives. So, it would be more accurate to say politically and culturally that both the Jew and the Arab had (conflicting) historical interests in occupying the land.

Replacing the theological dimension with that of ethics and basing that on history, even fusing these two domains, is also problematic. Niebuhr disparages that the “(p)articipants cannot find a common ground of rational morality from which to arbitrate the issues because the moral judgments which each bring to them are formed by the very historical forces which are in conflict. Such conflicts are therefore sub- and supra-moral.”[11] In other words, ethical analysis would get only so far, rather than resulting in a definitive should that both parties would accept as legitimate as taking into account their respective interests and histories.

At this point, Niebuhr shifts back from the ethical to the religious level of analysis, but even in spiritual terms, he was not optimistic. “The effort to bring such a conflict under the dominion of a spiritual unity may be partly successful,” he admits, but then he observes that such efforts had “always [produced] a tragic by-product of the spiritual accentuation of natural conflict.”[12] Even though religion “may be regarded as the last and final effort of the human spirit to escape relativity and gain a vantage-point in the eternal,” the “introduction of religious motives into these conflicts [has usually been] no more than the final and most demonic pretension.”[13] In other words, the presence of religious motives on both sides contributed to the sheer intransigence of the antipodal political positions.

Again, warding off distinctly religious content from the turf of actual geopolitics between nations in the context of international relations is advisable, but distinguishing related domains is easier said than done, given the proclivity of the human mind to agglomerate different strands as if they were essentially the same stuff. This tendency is especially egregious when at least one of the domains, along with its criteria, is unique and thus not just different from the others. Given the tendency to project or apply religious meaning onto geopolitics, it is worth taking into account Niebuhr’s suggestion that “a contrite recognition of the finiteness and relativity which characterizes human spirituality, even in its moments of yearning for the transcendent,” is necessary in applying religion to political/cultural conflicts between nations lest the “religious aspiration” be “transmuted into sinful dishonesty” and thus make the political matters even worse.[14] In other words, without spiritual humility in line with the true situs of finite creatures, which of course are not deities and thus are not omniscient or omnipotent, religious beliefs can easily become weapons even in the midst of stultifying cognitive dissidence.

Hence Niebuhr laments, “Historical religions, which crown the structure of historic cultures, thus become the most brutal weapons in the conflict between cultures.”[15] This happens too much, and at least part of the problem, I submit, is that religious meaning is so often conflated with differing genres or domains, including those of history, politics, and even ethics. A religious entitlement to land, a title whose jurisdiction is limited to the religious domain, is not itself a political statement. Put another way, the criteria in the domain of religion that undergird the religious claim of being chosen by a deity, or even a shared deity, for the land, or even a chosen people, do not override the criteria of political power that are sovereign in and innate to the political domain; in fact, the criteria innate to religion do not even have validity there.

I contend that religious meaning, as in what religious scholars classify as myth (i.e., a religious story with a message), is qualitatively different, as well as unique, from the contents that are “home grown” in other, even related, domains. International disputes stand a better chance of being mitigated and even solved if all the combatants would “get on the same page” in the sense of focusing on the distinctly political criteria of international relations, whether the criteria are based on international law or the nature of power itself in the state of nature as described by Thomas Hobbes in his classic text, Leviathan. Diverging interpretations of a passage in a distinctly religious text need not complicate matters that could perhaps be solved politically, especially if those interpretations are subject to the gravitas of self-love and thus partial. At the very least, the contention that a convenient interpretation of one’s own text has universal validity incurs a conflict of interest even just in religious terms. For example, the statement, my sacred book says I get to win, inherently lacks credibility, and incurs the “extra-jurisdictional” overreaching of religious content onto the political domain of winning territory.

Category mistakes, consolidation, and especially presumptuous overreaches of one domain’s criteria into another domain even at the expense of that other domain’s own, sovereign criteria have been committed so much that they may be taken for granted, as valid, even as we look back at the Catholic Church’s overreaching onto Galileo’s valid scientific criteria and scoff at the theological overreach. The world is at the center of Genesis in that religious text, but this does not mandate or justify presuming that the religious meaning is astronomical in nature and applying theological criteria onto those belonging to astronomy. From the other direction, foisting criteria of the domain of history onto a faith narrative also counts as an overreach—in this case, at the expense of the sui generis (literally “of its own genus”) religious domain and its own criteria. From such errors, even peaceful international relations can be thwarted.

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1. Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1936), p. 136.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 64.
5. Ibid., p. 116.
6. Ibid., p. 124.
7. Ibid., p. 136.

8. “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” gave rise to Nietzsche’s point that because the vice conflicts with the divine attribute of God’s goodness (omnibenevolence), the interlarding of the former invalidated the concept of the deity, hence Nietzsche wrote, Gott ist tot (God is dead), even as Nietzsche leaves the living deity itself untouched. Misinterpretations of Nietzsche’s famous line presume, in effect, that the actual divinity can be changed by human hands, and thus discredited and even killed. It is a problematic, internally inconsistent conception of the deity that is the object of Nietzsche’s critique. In the movie, Angels & Demons, a priest asks Prof. Langdon whether he believes in God, “not what men say about God.” This distinction reflects Augustine’s point that due to the Fall, divine revelation reaches us as through a smoke-chalked rather than transparent window.

9. Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, pp. 136-37.
10. Ibid., p. 137.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., pp. 137-38.

Confucius on the Ethics of Religious Knowledge

A contemporary scholar of Chinese philosophy wrote, “myths often contain an element of historical truth, and what passes for historical truth often has mythical elements.”[1] By implication, not everything that seems to be historically valid in a religious story is, for it is fair-game in that genre to assuage and even invent “historical” events to make theological points. Lest it be thought that histories are written objectively, it should not be forgotten that historical accounts are written by human beings, and thus are subject to our limitations, including bias. Nevertheless, religious stories, or myth, and historical accounts are different genres of writing, and have very different purposes and criteria. To conflate the two genres, or, moreover, any other domain with that of religion, is to deny the uniqueness of religion (as well as that of other, even related domains). Religion and ethics, for instance, are two, admittedly very closely related, domains of human experience.

Ethics is the field concerned with what a person should do, whereas religion goes beyond conduct to include, and be based on, the experience of transcendence that goes beyond, or is oriented to, beyondness. Religious mystics, such as Ramakrishna in the 1800s and Gertrude in a medieval monastery, would in all likelihood agree with Pseudo-Dionysius’s claim that religion goes beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility (i.e., emotions). More precisely, religion, while being in our world, transcends it and does so inherently. Knowledge of the source, or infinite remainder, of religion inherently eludes us finite, corporeal beings, whereas knowledge currently beyond our grasp in domains such as politics, economics, the weather, and the other sciences can potentially be known by us. This qualitative epistemological difference is just one way of grasping why the domain of religion is unique, and thus warrants its own criteria, rather than any overreaching from historians and scientists. To be sure, the arrow goes both ways; distinctly religious criteria cannot legitimately dominate in the fields of history and natural science. Such overreaching in both directions has been the blight of religion especially in the last millennium at least in Europe.

To be sure, certain other domains are very closely related to that of religion. After all, five of the Ten Commandments contain ethical content, albeit crucially of a divine command rather than a human’s ethical theory. Recognizing that divine commands are not bound in principle to our notions of conduct that is ethical (or unethical), as Kierkegaard makes clear in Fear and Trembling in which Abraham’s attempted religious sacrifice of Isaac trumps the ethical verdict of attempted murder, it is legitimate to include religion in ethical analysis.

For example, whether knowledge is of the transcendent sort or merely potential, it is important not to overreach in what we think we know. This vice may be called epistemological arrogance. In fact, to Confucius, “knowledge (zhi) is to know what one knows and doesn’t know (2.17, 19.5). Such knowledge, in turn, enables one to learn (xue) what one doesn’t know.”[2] The arrogance in thinking one knows more than one does diminishes the knowledge that a person can potentially acquire. Hence, Confucius states in Analects 9.8, “The Master said, ‘Do I possess an all-knowing cognizance? I do not. If a simple fellow asks me a question, my mind at first is a complete blank, and I have to knock at both sides [of the question] until everything has been considered [and some clarity begins to emerge].’”[3] That is, Confucius (Kongzi) “did not think that he must be right; he was not obdurate; he was not self-centered.”[4] Intellectual humility is like a cup viewing itself as empty and thus as able to be filled; additional knowledge must overflow from an already-full cup.

Such humility is especially valuable when it is applied to knowledge in the religious domain, for to lapse there into overreaching as if a person could be omniscient (i.e., all-knowing), is to engage in self-idolatry. This is not so regarding knowledge in other domains. Therefore, the method that Confucius urges for earthly knowledge in those other domains pertains all the more when the human mind enters the domain of religion. Incidentally, to project self-idolatry onto intellectual arrogance in another domain is an example of religious criteria (and meaning) overreaching at the expense of the native criteria (and meaning) of the other domains.

I contend that with respect to religion, given the mind’s proclivity to overreach epistemologically (i.e., thinking one knows more than one does in a certain subject), it is prudent to be  ever vigilant in distinguishing religious belief, which is compatible with faith, from knowledge of divine things, which excludes faith and is ultimately self-contradictory because the essence of divinity is inherently beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion. Analects 2.17 refers to a statement ostensibly made by Confucius himself: “The Master said, ‘You [Zilu], do you know what I have been trying to teach you? To say that you know something when you know it and to say that you do not know something when you do not know it—this is true knowing[zhi].”[5] To be able to say what one knows and admit what one does not (yet) know is premised on knowing where the line between the two is. This in turn is premised on valuing knowledge. In Analects 19.5, “Zixia said, ‘To be aware each day of what you still don’t know and to remember after a month what you were able to absorb—this is proof of your love for learning.’”[6] A love of learning can be intuited by a person’s carefulness in making clear to others the limits of one’s knowledge.

In the religious domain, all that translates into resisting the temptation to presume to know not only what God is in itself (i.e., the essence of divinity), but also what God wants or wills and furthermore that God’s will must surely be behind some event in the world. To know that God caused an earthquake, for instance, lies beyond our ability to discern, and yet such overreaching has not been uncommon. To know that it is God’s will that a close relative dies at a certain time is similarly presumptuous, epistemologically, whereas to have faith, and thus a belief, that the loved one is in a better place fits with the human situs in the realm of religion. In stark contrast, to declare that the person is in a better place is dogmatic, and may say more about the psychology of the person making the statement than anything religious. Whereas a person enunciating more about economics or politics than the person actually knows is just pedantic, presuming to know that which lies beyond the limits of human cognition, perspective, and emotions in principle is of a sort of arrogance that is foisted by an utter self-contradiction: knowledge of that which is inherently beyond the limits of human knowledge. In trying to be akin to God, a human being flies too high and thus inevitably falls on one’s face. Humanity’s grasp of what divinity actually is may be more misguided than we assume. How, for example, is divine, theological love qualitatively different (i.e., unique) from the garden-variety love evinced typically in our world? It is easy to draw on psychology and metaphysics instead of looking below to a distinctly theological sort of love. Augustine’s notion of caritas love in his Confessions is soaked in emotion, and the Christian notion of divine agape love as self-emptying love is typically thought of metaphysically rather than distinctly theologically.

It is ironic that Confucius’s epistemological ethic can be so useful in how a person can approach religion as such. To be clear, in the Analects, Confucius is discussing knowledge that a person can potentially have. Such knowledge is not of the transcendent; in the religious domain, knowledge extends only so far and then belief must take over. This does not mean that the method proposed by Confucius cannot be used by people in discerning the limits of knowledge in matters of religion. The human susceptibility to over-reach in such matters even though faith is tacitly sacrificed in the process is so commonly exploited that more vigilance in distinguishing what one knows from what one does not know is needed. Divine revelation is by definition pristine, but it should not be forgotten that it must go through our atmosphere—or as through a smoky, stained-glass window—to reach us. Put another way, we are hardly pristine receptors, and yet we presume so to be even as we implicitly import psychology and metaphysics in essentially remaking divinity into something more familiar to the mind. David Hume’s The Natural History of Religion gets at the anthropomorphism that the human mind inevitably hangs on divine simplicity. For example, it is much more difficult for us to grasp the Christian theological notion of the Logos than its incarnation as a god-man because the latter is literally more familiar to us than is God’s creative rationale in Creation. To transcend a familiar mask of eternity—to use Joseph Campbell’s term—and be suspended in the mystery of the transcendent that lies inherently beyond our reach (not to mention our human form) is admittedly scary, but also so necessary to getting past religion in human terms.[7]

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1. Bryan W. Van Norden, Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub., 2011), p. 2.
2. Mary Sim, “Why Confucius’ Ethics is a Virtue Ethics,” The Routledge Companion to Virtue Ethics, ed.s Michael A. Slote and Lorraine Besser-Jones (New York: Routledge, 2015), 63-76, p. 70.
3. Confucius, The Analects, trans. Annping Chin (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), p. 133.
4. Analects 9.4, in Confucius, The Analects, trans. Annping Chin (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), p. 131.
5. Confucius, The Analects, trans. Annping Chin (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), p. 20.
6. Ibid., p. 311.
7. This is essentially the thesis of my treatise, Godliness and Greed, which is published by Lexington Books. In my next book, God’s Gold, which unlike the first is written for a non-academic readership, I extend my thinking to how an anthropomorphic religion can be retained without the pitfalls of rendering the divine in so anthropomorphic terms.

On the Ethics of Dispensational Pre-Millennialism

The Christian “belief in the ‘rapture’ of believers at the time of Jesus’ return to Earth is rooted in a particular form of biblical interpretation that emerged in the 19^th century. Known as dispensational pre-millennialism, it is especially popular among American evangelicals.”[1] This biblical interpretation is based on the following from one of Paul’s letters to a church:

“For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”[2]

Presumably the “trump of God” in the King James version of the Bible is distinct from Trump as God, for that eventuality would raise a myriad of questions and difficulties, and at least two difficulties pertain to the verse and, moreover, to dispensational pre-millennialism as a Christian doctrine. That it was constructed only recently by Christian standards raises the question of why the idea did not dawn on Christians closer to Paul’s time. That Paul does not represent himself in his letters as having met Jesus prior to the Resurrection and Paul’s use of mythological/Revelations language, such as “with the voice of the archangel,” also provide support for not taking the passage literally. After his resurrection in the Gospels, Jesus does not have the voice of an archangel. With Paul’s passage viewed figuratively or symbolically, rather than empirically and literally, the underlying religious meaning would of course remain unperturbed: keeping the faith is of value and thus in holding on to one’s distinctly religious (and Christian) faith, this strength will be vindicated even if no signs of this emerge during a person’s life. In other words, faith in vindication is part of having a religious faith, which is not limited our experience. The Resurrection itself can be construed as vindication with a capital V, regardless of whether Jesus rose from the dead empirically and thus as a historical event. In fact, a historical account or claim is extrinsic to religious narrative even though the sui generis genre can legitimately make selective use of, and even alter, historical reports to make theological points. The writers of the Gospels would have considered this perfectly legitimate, given that they were writing faith narratives and not history books. Making this distinction is vital, I submit, to obviating the risk that one’s theological interpretations lead to supporting unethical state-actors on the world stage, such as Israel, which as of 2025 was serially committing genocidal and perhaps even holocaust crimes against humanity in Gaza. In short, the theological belief that supporting Israel will result in the Second Coming happening sooner than otherwise can be understood to be an unethical stance based on a category mistake. American Evangelical Christians may have been unwittingly enabling another Hitler for the sake of the salvation of Christians, while the Vatican stood by merely making statements rather than acting to help the innocent Palestinians, whether with food and medicine, or in actually going to Gaza’s southern border (or joining the flotilla) to protest as Gandhi would have done.

One problem with dispensational pre-millennialism itself is that predictors keep getting the date wrong, and this may be because a category mistake has been commonly committed between the faith-narrative genre and those of history and empirical science. Joshua Mhlakela, an African, whose dream in 2018 predicted that Jesus would return on September 23^rd or 24, 2025, obviously did not pan out, for I write this essay on September 25, 2025 and the Christians are still with us here below. That the Second Coming presumably comes at the end of time means that today should not exist, which would mean that I am not writing this essay (and you are not reading it). Lest we have slipped into a supercomputer’s Matrix, named after the famous solipsistic movie, other people had predicted the Second Coming, also without success. William Miller, a Baptist pastor, had read the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation and concluded that “Jesus would return sometime between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844. When this date passed, he recalculated the date several times and finally landed on Oct. 22, 1844.”[3] Similarly, “Ellen G. White, a founder of the Seventh-day Adventist movement” and “Charles Taze Russell, the founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, predicted Jesus’ return in 1914. Over time, many others have attempted to predict Jesus’ Second Coming. Harold Camping’s 12 failed predictions being the most famous.”[4] Interestingly, all of these Christians had forgotten “Jesus’ own warning that no one knows the timing of this event (Matthew 24:36).”[5]

Moreover, I contend that applying calculation of empirical events from mythic language involves making a category mistake regarding qualitatively different domains. A person would not try to predict next year’s gross domestic product from calculations based on passages in Revelations, for example. Sometimes it’s easier to recognize category mistakes when they are made from the other direction.

Furthermore, Jesus not only says that no one but the Father (i.e., not even Jesus himself) knows when the last judgment will occur—and notice that Jesus is thus not omniscient by his own admission—but also that “this generation will not pass away” until the Son of Man will come “in the clouds with power and great glory.”[6] It is interesting that Jesus would make any prediction, since he is aware that only the Father knows, but, in any case, even this prediction is wrong. Such an uncomfortable conclusion points back to a conflation of history and myth, two distinct genres and domains, each with its own type of valid meaning that cannot be touched by the other domain even in overreaching.

Besides those problems, dispensational pre-millennialism can lead to rather unethical political and ethical stances. Many Christians “influenced by dispensationalism believe that the re-establishment of Israel and the return of the Jews to Palestine, especially since the 1920s, is a sign that the end is near. The centering of the re-establishment of Israel has important political implications, including unquestioned support for Israeli actions by many evangelicals.”[7] Conflating myth, such as is evinced by the Book of Revelations, and empirical, historical events can give rise to giving even a genocidal regime a blank slate and lots of military hardware. Both politically and ethically, even supporting Israel politically in 2025, when God was supposed to take humanity out of its self-imposed misery even in acting as bystanders, had become deeply problematic—especially ethically. In the Gospels, Jesus would obviously not encourage his disciples to support a genocidal regime even though he does not support the zealots acting against the Romans in the Gospel narratives. Giving what is Caesar’s (i.e., Roman coins) to the Romans does not mean actively supporting Rome. Were the imperator Romanorum to decide in the story to kill every Jew in Judea so to build Roman luxury resorts in and around the Temple in Jerusalem, Jesus would likely urge turning the other cheek and loving the enemies rather than either helping them to kill Jews or fighting the Romans as they do so.

To respond to the humanity of those whom a person dislikes (or is disliked by), according to Samuel Hopkins, who was Jonathan Edwards protégé, is the essence of the Kingdom of God available here and now, rather than after a final judgment. In fact, choosing to value and incorporate in practice such a kingdom as Hopkins sketches survives any Jansenist, strict Augustinian, view of free-will as profoundly wounded by the Fall. Looking the other way, not to mention supporting politically, ideologically, or ethically a heinous regime that is starving and killing millions intentionally out of sheer hatred, even relegating the other as subhuman, whether Jews in Nazi Germany or Palestinians in Gaza nearly a century later, reflects how deplorable a human’s use of one’s free-will can be, post-lapsarian (i.e., due to original sin). Even given the mythic fall of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis, we are all responsible for how we use our free-will, even though it is tainted.

It may even be said that there is a special place in hell for Christians who look the other way on Israel’s extermination of the Gazans, as if all of them were culpable for Hama’s day of attack in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and a few hundred taken hostage by a subjugated people occupied by an apartheid regime. The doctrine of collective justice, which Yahweh, not human beings, apply to Israel in the Hebrew Bible, is in human hands nothing but a weaponized fallacy. To give this a blank slate because Israel’s existence empirically is requisite to the Second Coming even raises the question of whether the human brain is inherently compromised cognitively and ethically in relating the domains of ethics to religion/theology. It used to be asked whether atheists could be ethical. Perhaps the question has become whether pre-millennialist theists (i.e., evangelical Christians) can be ethical and politically responsible.

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1. Robert D. Cornwall, “The Roots of Belief in the 2025 Rapture that Didn’t Happen,” MSNBC.com, September 25, 2025.
2. 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 (KJV)
3. Robert D. Cornwall, “The Roots of Belief in the 2025 Rapture that Didn’t Happen."
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. This prediction is in Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21.
7. Robert D. Cornwall, “The Roots of Belief in the 2025 Rapture that Didn’t Happen."

Interpreting Scriptures: On Referential Realities beyond the Text

In Christianity, Paul wrote that if the resurrection of Christ Jesus didn’t really take place, then faith is for naught, but he also wrote that faith without love is for naught. The assumption that if Jesus was killed and raised historically speaking, why be a Christian, has had much greater currency than the assumption that if a person is not kind and compassion in heart and deed to people who have been insulting or have damaged the person, that person is not really a Christian. In short, the value of the religious meaning in the New Testament has typically been assumed to depend on the extratextual (i.e., beyond the text of the Bible) existence of Jesus. Using Vedanta hermeneutics (i.e., method of interpreting a text) in Hinduism, I argue that the assumption is incorrect. This is not to make a historical claim one way or the other regarding Jesus or Krishna; rather, I want to claim that the religious meaning in a scriptural text does not depend on making the assumption that the reality described therein exists beyond the text. Although hermeneutically based, this argument may sway attention back to religious meaning itself as primary, including in regard to engaging in pious actions.

In Hinduism, Mimamsa and Vedanta commentators “’restain’ extra-textual reference within the overarching frame of the text, which is not replaced by knowledge, even if the object of knowledge remains ‘outside the text.’”[1] To be sure, the Brahma-sutras “could lend itself to the idea that the Upanisads communicate various authors’ intentions and point to a reality beyond the text.”[2] This is problematic because “external reference to impermanent realities threatened ultimately to undercut the posited eternity and permanence of the sacred text itself. The system had to be nonreferential, meaningful in itself, and expressive in that meaning, in order to be protected from a changing and unpredictable world.”[3]

What about positing of imperishable, and thus permanent realities as existing outside the text? Doing so would not undercut the posited eternity and permanence of a sacred text itself, but it would mean that such a text is referential and thus not meaningful as a system within itself. Also, is not such a positing of something existent outside of the text necessary for the extra-textual component of the hermeneutic (or else the meditation is just on abstract knowledge)?  Both the Mimamsa and Vedanta schools presuppose that “text and performance—meditational or sacrificial—imply, reflect, and instigate one another.”[4] Perhaps it can be said that the meaning in the text is primary in the textual hermeneutic, whereas the extra-textuality reality is primary in the extratextual portion of the Vedanta hermeneutic. Hans Frei, who wrote in his Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative that neither form nor historical criticism should eclipse the religious meaning of a religious text. In other words, Frei holds that asking about “the historical Jesus” and whether different authors, each having their own agenda, contributed to a text gets in the way of giving the meaning of a religious story enough air to breath in a reader’s heart and mind.

 I wonder if questions concerning reality beyond a text and being referred to textually should also be bracketed so not to eclipse the meaning that is in the text. And yet, the Vedanta project “is permanently about the reading and use of texts, and about brahman as an extratextual reality communicated through texts, without either the text or the reality being thereby rendered superfluous.”[v] Perhaps the question is whether a text alone (bracketing extratextual praxis) can only allow for the nominalist rather than a realist assumption as regards the reality being described or discussed textually.

It may be that making the realist assumption—that the reality described in a text really exists outside the text—makes sense, for why would an author claim writing a text that a reality has meaning if that reality doesn’t really exist outside of the text. On the other hand, making a nominalist assumption keeps the focus on the text itself, whose religious meaning is primary in a hermeneutic. Put another way, even if brahman or Krishna do not exist beyond the meaning in a text, the textual religious meaning can still have value. As Victor Frankl discovered, the human need for meaning can be felt in even very dire circumstances. Distinctly theological or religious meaning can sooth a troubled heart or mind even if God doesn’t exist beyond the text. The textual meaning is real in that it is hardly illusory and can have an effect on people without having to approach a text as a realist rather than as a nominalist. This is not to say that the realist assumption is never the correct assumption to make; rather, it is to say that the validity and usefulness of religious meaning in a scriptural text does not depend on making that assumption. If so, and because we mere mortals cannot be certain whether an extratextual reality exists as it extends beyond the limits of our thoughts, perceptions, and emotions, religious meaning gleamed from a religious text ought to be primary in interpreting one and the basis upon which a religious practitioner acts, whether in worship or interpersonally in daily life.

In Christianity, for example, being compassionate to people whom the Christian doesn’t like or who don’t like the Christian should not depend on whether the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus occurred historically and even metaphysically. Even as a textual illustration, the Passion Narrative has meaning and thus value, which can be put into practice regardless of historical and metaphysical questions. Selfless love as to a detractor or even a hated or hateful enemy as a means to entering a different spiritual condition (e.g., the kingdom of God) has its own meaningfulness and value both in itself and as put into practice. Both Paul and Augustine wrote that God is such love. In Vedanta Hinduism, brahman itself can be grasped as identical to an person's self (atman) in experientially meditation, which, though extra-textual, is based on concentrating on the meaning of a scriptural passage. 

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1. Francis X. Clooney, “Binding the Text: Vedanta as Philosophy and Commentary,” in Texts in Context: Traditional Hermeneutics in South Asia, ed., Jeffrey R. Timm (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), p. 56.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 58.
5. Ibid., p. 61.

Faith Seeking Understanding: On Religious Experience

On October 24, 2024, Pope Francis released his encyclical, Dilexit Nos (“He Loved Us), on the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In the letter, he recounts “Saint Gertrude of Helfta, a Cisterian nun, tells of a time in prayer when she reclined her head on the heart of Christ and heard it beating.”[1] She wondered why the Gospel of John does not describe a similar spiritual experience, and concluded that “the sweet sound of those heartbeats has been reserved for modern times, so that, hearing them, our aging and lukewarm world may be renewed in the love of Christ.”[2] The pope concludes in the letter that this might hold for our times too. I contend that Gertrud’s spirituality can speak to the current modern age, in which that of Gertrud—the thirteenth century—hardly seems modern, but not in terms of focusing on Jesus’ resurrected heart; instead, Gertrud can point us beyond the limits of marital-union imagery with Jesus to experience that transcends the use of imagery that may say more about us and our world than that which transcends even the limits of the human imagination. Turning to the criticisms of Gertrud’s spirituality (and intelligence) by Thomas Merton and William James, I intend to salvage Gertrud in order to uncover her spiritual maturity.

According to Thomas Merton, Jesus said to Gertrud of Helfta, a nun in thirteenth century Europe, “I wish your writings to be an irrefutable testimonial of my Divine Love in these latter days in which I plan to do good to many souls!”[3] Jesus even dictated to her the title for her book: Herald of Divine Love. His rationale was that, as he told the nun, “souls will find in [the book] a foretaste of the super-abundance of my divine love.”[4] The inclusion of latter days flags the nun’s claim that it was actually Jesus who was talking with her, rather than her hallucinating, for in no sense can we say in hindsight that the thirteenth century could be characterized as the latter days of Christianity. This objection is only relevant, however, to the metaphysician (i.e., is Jesus a real entity?), the psychologist (i.e., was Gertrud hallucinating?), and historian (i.e., was Gertrud speaking to the resurrected historical Jesus of the Gospels?). The cost in making these category mistakes—taking religion to reduce to another domain and thus its criteria—is the missed opportunity (hence opportunity cost) to study the nature or essence of divine love, for that is the distinctly religious content in Merton’s report. Although academic study is obviously not necessary for a person to be religious, I, unlike Merton, applaud Gertrud’s intellectual forays into “secular” knowledge because intelligence plus knowledge can facilitate a person’s religious development.

Merton wrote of Gertrud as having been “an intelligent child with a taste for secular literature. Unfortunately, however, this taste became too absorbing. Although in itself it was harmless, or even good, it grew to such proportions and came to occupy such an inordinate place in her life that it choked the development of grace in her soul. . . . She was completely devoured by this one passion for the pleasure she found in reading the literature of the world. Psychologically speaking, what had happened was a completely unhealthy exteriorization of her whole self. She had developed a habit of pouring herself out, wasting her energies in the pursuit of her own satisfaction.”[5] But after some visions of Jesus, she “passed from tepidity to the closest mystical intimacy with the Sacred Heart,” which, being Jesus’s “infinitely perfect love for us,” became “the one big reality of her life.”[6]

Merton’s jejune and petty characterization of the intellectual life is hardly fair. At Yale’s divinity school, where I studied theology (while studying philosophy, history, film and education in the liberal arts college), faith seeking understanding was the mantra for both the students and the “scholarly priests” on the faculty. Of course, no Yale student could ever be accused of being an over-achiever, but this does not necessarily mean that God is thereby slighted by taking studying seriously, for God can be reckoned as the ultimate source even of the sliver of potential knowledge that a human being can learn in a lifetime. In fact, academic study can lead to a more mature religiosity.

William James criticizes Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690), a European nun and mystic who emphasized the Sacred Heart of Jesus, as being “so feeble of intellectual outlook that it would be too much to ask of us, with our Protestant and modern education, to feel anything but indulgent pity for the kind of saintship which she embodies.”[7] So who is right on the religious verdict on intelligence—Merton or James? Surely it is not necessary to religiosity, and intelligence and accumulated knowledge can bolster arrogance if devoid of benevolentia universalis, or simple kindness, as is all too common at Yale and Harvard in New England—far indeed from the Midwest. Even so, to love ideas is not in itself to hate God or reckon oneself to be a deity among mere, stupid mortals. It may be said of intelligence applied to religion that Satan is cleaver and yet God is omniscient (i.e., all-knowing). For us mere mortals stuck in between, ideas about the world and especially about God and even religion as a distinct domain can facilitate our religious development toward maturation. As Paul wrote, “When I became a man, I put away childish things.”[8]

William James had no patience for stymied, or jejune spirituality. He contrasts Gertrud’s “proofs of Christ’s partiality for her undeserving person” through assurances “of his love, intimacy, and caresses and compliments of the most absurd and puerile sort” with the capability of the modern religious person to get past the idea of God as a dispenser of “personal favors.”[9] I don’t believe James was being fair to the pious nun, for she was very mature in terms of religious development.

Gertrud’s use of partiality in describing her relationship with Jesus does not mean that she felt superior or better off with respect to other people; rather, the favoring she perceived from Jesus allowing his “visible presence” to show to her has to do with her own unworthiness, given “such disorder and confusion” within her that “was no fitting dwelling for [Jesus].[10] Given her self-knowledge of her “stiff-necked obstinacy” and her “tower of vanity and worldiness,” favor had to do with the sheer grace that afforded her the privilege of having visions of Christ.[11] “I must confess in very truth that this was a grace given freely and in no way deserve,” she wrote before noting that “severe punishments” were what she deserved.[12] Her sense of being favored was that by grace alone such punishments were obviated and even replaced by visions of Jesus. This had nothing to do with being favored over other people, and as a self-declared wretch, she surely would not have presumed to be favored over anyone. James comes off as a cold and resentful or at least biased member of the faculty at Harvard, and thus hardly alone there, but very far indeed from Gertrud and other mature religious folk whose humility warrants partiality.

Secondly, James neglects Gertrud’s goal being to see God’s face and paradoxically to be in God and thus in God’s love, understood as agape, or self-emptying (divine) love, which goes beyond marital connotations associated with her yearning for Jesus. Circling back to Merton, we can say that Gertrud used her God-given intellect polished by years of study at the monastery, to transcend the bridal language she uses to describe the anthropomorphic marital love between her and Jesus by going on to characterize her goal of blissful union with God, which is mystically higher than merely being married to a manifestation of God.

Although Gertrud antedates David Hume’s seventeenth-century warning of the human mind’s inherent susceptibility to remaking God in our own image by anthropomorphizing familiar ornaments onto the pure idea of divine simplicity, I suspect Gertrud was able to use her studies and her innate intelligence to figure out the limitations of human analogies such as marriage and even erotic language, which compromise God being wholly other, and thus not even a being in the sense that we think of beings.[13]

Describing the liturgically-oriented fifth spiritual exercise in Gertrud’s program, two scholars distinguish Gertrud’s marital (and erotic) analogy wherein a nun “in a wedding dress [and] with a spousal dowry”[14] has is spiritually (and liturgically) married to Jesus, “the immortal spouse,”[15] from the telos, or ultimate goal in the following passage: “Having concluded the nuptial contract with the Lord, the mystic is burning for the kiss of her immortal spouse, for the wedding embrace in the innermost bedchamber of the heart. With the Lord as husband, the offspring of this marital union will be perfect love; it will mean becoming one spirit with God.”[16] I contend that the offspring transcends the marriage union as well as the marital and sexual language.

Gertrud was able to conceptualize her telos as an indwelling union in the divine, which is a closer and less humanlike union than is implicit in her vision of Jesus “leaning towards her like a sweet lover, and giving to her soul the softest kiss.”[17] It is important not to take even such sensual language too literally. According to two scholars, “When Gertrud thus focuses on Christ’s glorified human nature, she does not emphasize the belief that human nature in general is restored through the incarnation of Christ. She often distinguished between the ‘rotten body’ and the spirit. The body-soul dichotomy remains unreconciled in the Spiritual Exercises.”[18] This is only a relative or temporary problem, however, as Gertrud believed that at death, a person can flow back into God,”[19] which obviates even any relationship basis of union by transcending into God as love. Being in God transcends having a relationship with God, and it is precisely by one’s intellect and learning that a person can figure this out. Circling back to James, it can be said that whereas wanting to be married to Jesus can involve a desire for preferential treatment, though there is no evidence that Gertrud thought she alone could be Jesus’s spouse, indwelling in divine, pure (i.e., selfless) love transcends wanting preferential treatment.

With regard to the domain of religion as sui generis (i.e., distinct and of its own type of domain), although God by definition in being omniscient and transcendent is not limited to human systems of logic, it doesn’t hurt to be able to prune off wayward, human, all too human branches of even theological ratiocination as incoherent or really of another domain; otherwise, the human mind’s susceptibility to superstition and emotional enthusiasm in matters of religion could take over. As a prime candidate for pruning, Merton insists that the suddenness of Gertrud’s profound change “only emphasizes the fact that it was utterly beyond her own powers and was a pure gift of God.”[20] His assumption that a sudden change in a person cannot happen or has never happened before in a person without grace, or that sudden, momentous change is somehow contrary to human nature, is specious reasoning. It is similar to concluding that because a sick person prayed to John Paul II after his death and then gotten well without a medical reason (as if medicine were complete), the former pope must be a saint even though he did not act sufficiently on reports of child-rapes by priests and coverups by their respective bishops. Positive correlation is not sufficient to attest to causation. This logical point is often lost to the fervor of religious ideology.

It is also by intellect that we can come to realize the need to uproot the exogenous plants from the religious garden so we can see, understand, and experience the innately religious fauna that has been quietly growing underneath. Ignorance, superstition, and enthusiastic fervor can otherwise lead a person to claim to know rather than believe something that is a matter of faith. This fallacy, which involves reducing religion to some other domain (e.g., empirical science), involves an epistemological category mistake regarding what can be known. Subjecting a faith-claim to the verdict of what can be known from a historical account, or inferred from the result of an “arm chair” psychological analysis, for example, can be thwarted by previous study in logic and philosophy in general. Ironically, such “secular” studies protect the domain of religion from the encroachments of other domains as well as from overstepping onto other domains with an overriding arrogance of superiority based on a religious-domain-only belief claim.

From another shore, Merton saw fit to psychoanalyze Gertrud’s voracious appetite for knowledge, and William James claimed that “the revelations of Christ’s sacred heart” were Margaret Mary’s “hallucinations of sight, touch, and hearing.”[21] The modern mind will doubtless give credence to the rendering of religious experience into psychological terms. In 2023, I attended some lectures of a class at Yale on the results of empirical studies in psychology on religious beliefs. Generally speaking, empirical social-science tests can contribute to philosophy and the subject-matter of religious studies, though it is important to remember that the faith claims themselves do not suffer a consequent loss of validity in terms of religious meaning.

In the 1980s, in reaction to the historical critical method that had emerged in nineteenth-century Europe, Han Frei, a Yale professor of theology, claimed in his text, Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative, that historical questions of, and, one could add doing psychologically analysis on, characters and events in faith narratives such as the four Gospels comes at the cost of grasping the religious meaning in the stories. In other words, let the stories speak to you; don’t interrupt them to get behind the stories.

Just as Donald Trump was deemed an easy target by American psychologists when he was running for U.S. president in 2024 even though none of those “educated” psychologists had subjected him to psychological tests, let alone even met him in person, so too it must be easy as well as tempting to analyze the religious experiences of people whose religious sensitivity enables even elaborate descriptions of such experiences. Applying psychological analyses to nuns who lived many centuries back and claiming that the results trump their respective religious experiences is not only fraught with difficulties that could render the results invalid, but also superimposes another domain onto that of religion without justification. A good education in the liberal arts and a sharp intellect can critically examine such unsubstantiated assumptions in what has become known as critical thinking.

Religion, I submit, should be treated as a distinct domain, and thus with its own sort of meaning, experience, and criteria. This is not to say that the domain cannot intersect or has never intersected with other domains, such as history and psychology; James may be right about the specious ontological basis of visions; Jesus referring to the thirteen century as “latter days” belies Gertrud’s claim that an entity outside of Gertrud’s mind was speaking to her in her vision. Even so, for people interested in the religious domain, whether in regard to faith or a resulting experience or practice, religious meaning is the gold to be dug up, whether or not it is attached to a historical event has come out of a psychological state wherein the contents of a vision are not themselves empirical; the religious meaning is still real in its own sense, and thus such meaning can be related to religious creeds, doctrines, and systemic theologies by criteria innate to the religious domain rather than superimposed by another domain. Not only is it the case that secular knowledge and an analytical and logical intelligence need not be a threat to religion; a good liberal-arts and sciences education can actually facilitate a person’s religious maturation and prune off the dead wood in the religious domain as well as overhanging branches from trees growing in other domains. 

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1. Pope Francis, Dilexit Nos, October 24, 2024, para. 98.
2. Ibid.
3.  Thomas Merton, “Saint Gertrude, Nun of Helfta, Germany,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 38.4 (2003): 452. Merton cites  Héraut 2.10.5.
4. Ibid.  Merton cites Héraut, Prologue.
5. Ibid., p. 453.
6. Ibid., pp. 454, 457, 456.
7. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), p. 262.
8. 1 Cor. 13:11. Paul writing about spiritual growth.
9. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 262.
10. Gertrude of Helfta, The Herald of Divine Love, Margaret Winkworth, ed. and trans. (New York: Paulist Press), p. 96.
11. Ibid., pp. 95-6.
12. Ibid., p. 97.
13. Pseudo-Dionysius makes this point in his sixth-century writings. Moreover, he wrote that God goes beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and sensibility (i.e., emotions). God, in other words, goes beyond the erotic language that Augustine applies to his yearning for God in Confessions.
14. Gertrud of Helfta, Gertrud the Great of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), verse 227.
15. Ibid.
16. Gertrud Lewis and Jack Lewis, “Introduction,” in Gertrud of Helfta, Gertrud the Great of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), p. 15.
17. Gertrud of Helfta, Gertrud the Great of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), p. 263.
18. Gertrud Lewis and Jack Lewis, “Introduction,” in Gertrud of Helfta, Gertrud the Great of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), p. 8.
19. Gertrud of Helfta, Gertrud the Great of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), verse 285.
20. Thomas Merton, “Saint Gertrude, Nun of Helfta, Germany,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 38.4 (2003): 454.
21. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 261.

The Holy Grail: Artifact or Superstition?

Relics are nothing new to religion, whose legitimacy used to be synonymous with being ancient, which is one reason why the ancient Romans did not consider the nascent Jesus Movement to be a religion. The cup that Jesus uses in the Last Supper in Gospels is right up there with pieces of the wood cross of the Crucifixion as the most holy of relics in Christianity. “In Europe alone, there are said to be around 200 cups, each thought to be the Holy Grail—the cup used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper.”[1] They can’t all be THE cup, but I bet if you visited each place, the partisans would insist that their cup is genuine. For example, the website of the cathedral at Valencia, in eastern Spain, proclaims regarding the cup there, “Tradition reveals that it is the same cup that the Lord used at the Last Supper for the Institution of the Eucharist.”[2] Never mind that medieval legend had it that Joseph of Arimathea had brought the Holy Grail near Glastonbury Tor in southern England shortly after Jesus’ death. That would be quite a distance to travel back them to deliver a cup. These two cannot both be right, yet Christians have prayed in both places as if the cup in each place were genuine. That people have gotten carried away with the super relic through history seems clear from “the fact that, over the centuries, legends have arisen of ‘grails’ producing miracles.”[3] That miracles have been said to arise from more than one of the cups ought to be a red flag that something is amiss, for only one cup could possibly be genuine and so miracles could not have come by means of proximity to the other cups. I submit that basic category mistakes regarding genres of meaning (and writing) are a big part of the problem as to why a presumed historical artifact has given rise to puerile superstition in the name of religious truth.

One scholar of religious studies, Joanne Pierce, is realistic in saying, “I honestly do not think that the actual cup from the Last Supper still exists.”[4] In fact, Pierce elaborates that because according to some Gospel accounts, the room was already prepared before Jesus and his disciples arrived, the cup used may not have even belonged to them. I submit that Pierce is conflating historical accounts and faith narratives—two very different, albeit related—genres of writing. That some of the Gospels have the room already prepared is itself an indication that we should not assume that the room actually was prepared beforehand.

Moreover, a faith narrative is not written as a historical account; the concerns of the writers would have been theological rather than to make empirical reports or accounts, especially as the Gospels were written many decades after the Crucifixion. Is it really likely that, for theological purposes, a detail such as how or whether the room was prepared would have been preserved in notes or orally? Pierce gets around this problem by stating that “the idea of the Holy Grail is more symbolic than realistic—in her words, ‘a cultural reality rather than a religious reality.’”[5] We are no longer concerned with the relationship of empirical history and faith narrative; the idea of the cup is what matters, and that isn’t even religious.

I think Pierce is wrong to jettison the religious meaning of the cup, even as an idea, because of the salvific significance at least in Roman Catholicism of the Eucharist in the gradual process of sanctification. Given the theological doctrine of transubstantiation—the real presence of Christ in bread and wine transformed into the body and blood of Christ—in Catholicism, it is interesting that, “(f)or Pierce, a Catholic, the idea of the Holy Grail is more symbolic than realistic.”[6] Zwingli, the Swiss reformer for whom the Eucharist is only symbolic, would be more likely than the Pope to agree.

Essentially, my argument is that faith narratives are neither historical accounts nor just cultural ideas; rather, the distinctive meaning in a faith narrative such as one of the Gospels is religious. It is felt proximity to religious meaning that is important—not whether a given cup was actually used by Jesus in a historical or empirical sense. To conflate the religious and empirical is to engage in superstition, as evinced by the attribution of miracles from Jesus’ historical use of a cup. Put another way, the religious significance of the Last Supper, which is Jesus being willing to follow his Father’s will in sacrificing his life for humanity, does not come down to the trite contention of which cup Jesus actually used. “It was just a cup,” Jesus might say; “You’re missing the point.” In other words, too much attention to the means can obstruct the ends being served by the means. 

Regarding the famous cup, the distinction between artifact and superstition can be transcended, perhaps even in a Hegelian sense of solving dialectics through human history, by focusing instead on distinctly religious meaning. In other words, perhaps superstition results from mistaking historical artifact for religious truth. This is not to say that the latter cannot come through history; only that if or when the transcendent does manifest on the surface of history, a faith narrative still cannot be taken for a historical account. To focus on the historical as if it were the point would be to miss the distinctly religious point, for the validity of religious meaning does not depend on the criteria of any other domain.

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1 Julia Buckley, “They All Say They’ve Got the Holy Grail. So Who’s Right?” CNN.com, August 17, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

The Devil’s Arithmetic

The Devil’s Arithmetic (1999) can be classified superficially as a coming-of-age film, for Hanna, the protagonist, starts out being immaturely contemptuous of her family’s ethnic and religious heritage and current practice. She tries to skip the Passover Seder at her grandparents’ house. That her aunt Eva had been a prisoner at a Nazi death camp makes no difference to Hanna—that is, until she is transported back as her aunt’s cousin (for whom Hanna was named) and experiences the camp herself. Whether she is really transported back in time (and if so, how?) or is merely dreaming is answered in the end but not so blatantly as would insult the viewers’ intelligence. Then again, it’s not every film that has allusions both to theology and The Wizard of Oz. The different ways in which that movie is incorporated and alluded to in this film are actually quite sophisticated in extending the viewers’ sense of synchronicity beyond the film’s narrative.

The full essay is at "The Devil's Arithmetic."

Fatima: The Miracle of the Sun

The film, Fatima (2020), tells the story of the three Roman Catholic children in Fatima, Portugal, who in 2017 claimed to see and hear the Virgin Mary periodically over a period of 6 months. The film centers around Lucia, the oldest of the three children, and, moreover, the question of whether the children really encounter the Virgin, or are lying, hypnotic, or even psychotic. In the film, as well as in “real life,” a miracle is associated with the last visitation. In the story world of the film, the visitation really happens, and the multitudes watching the children come to believe this when the Virgin delivers on a miracle as promised. Historically, believers as well as nonbelievers who were present at the event have testified that the Sun moved around in the sky and even came closer. If this really happened as witnesses have described, then the empirical “proof” in the story world of the film is not the whole story, and the religious truth therein is not limited to the faith narrative, but holds in an empirical, supernatural sense. An implication is that Jesus not only resurrects in the Gospel stories, but also as an empirical event in history. But, then, why have such supernatural events been so rare since the “time” of Jesus?  And, yet, witnesses as far as 40 km away from the visitation of the Virgin reported seeing the miracle of the Sun.

The full essay is at: "Fatima"

On the Infallibility of the Pope: The Assumption of Mary

What does it mean for a human being to be vested with infallibility in a religious organization even though like all humans, that one is a finite being? Ironically, it is often the ignorant who presume that they cannot be wrong (i.e., that they are infallible). That is something else entirely. The sort of infallibility granted by the Roman Catholic Church on its pope does not mean that he knows everything or can’t be wrong about anything. The infallibility is circumscribed to cover only religious doctrine. In short, Roman Catholicism gives the Pope the authority to promulgate theological truths that go beyond, yet are consistent with, the Bible. A pope cannot say that Jesus is no longer to be regarded as the Son of God, for such a claim obviously contradicts the canonical gospels. Yet more could be said that is consistent with Jesus’ divinity, and even about Mary, whose womb is regarded as blessed. The “Mother of God” is itself a title that practically invites further theological elaboration beyond the material on her that is in the Gospels. I have in mind here the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, which is celebrated by the Roman Catholic Church on August 15 annually. The feast-day is not a minor holy day for Catholics, for they are obligated to attend Mass. Indeed, a human body being admitted into a spiritual state is no small matter theologically. 

Aad de Lange, the chief financial officer of the archdiocese of Galveston-Houston in Texas, took to social media on the day in 2023 to give a synopsis of how the holy day came to be. “On November 1, 1950, Pius XII defined the dogma of the Assumption. Thus he solemnly proclaimed that the belief whereby the Blessed Virgin Mary, at the close of her earthly life, was taken up, body and soul, into the glory of heaven, definitively forms part of the deposit of faith, received from the Apostles. To avoid all that is uncertain the Pope did not state either the manner or the circumstances of time and place in which the Assumption took place--only the fact of the Assumption of Mary, body and soul, into the glory of heaven, is the matter of definition." Having degrees both in business and theology, I’m glad to see a CFO being so well-versed in theological-speak. Indeed, his paragraph is dense, so I shall endeavor to unpack it by putting the theological verbiage in contemporary terms.

In particular, I have in mind the telling of a story. I used to tell kids stories when I worked at two summer camps. As the storyteller, I could invent new characters and elaborate on existing characters as long as I did not contradict the story so far. For example, I could say that a group of kids alone in the woods came upon a bear; bears are consistent with forests. I could not then refer to the bear as a wolf unless I obviate the contradiction by saying that a witch changed the bear into a wolf. Furthermore, I could not start referring to the kids as adults without a magical explanation.

As a student at Yale, I took a course called storytelling that was taught at the divinity school. At the time, I just assumed that the course was for preaching, for who doesn’t enjoy a good story, even in church. But then I read Hans Frei’s book, Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative. Frei had been on Yale’s faculty, but unfortunately that was before I matriculated. In his book, he urges readers not to get in the way of the story in the Gospels. Take the story in without thinking about whether the characters existed historically or whether a miracle was an empirical event. Religious truth is distinct from historical facts; faith narratives and historical accounts are distinct literary genres. The writers of the Gospels would have known that they were writing faith narratives, so historical events could legitimately be appropriated or even invented to make theological points. For example, that gospels differ on when the Last Supper takes place—notice I’m not using the past tense!—relative to Passover to make different theological points. In Matthew, which was likely oriented to the Jews, it is no accident that the Last Supper takes place on the night that commemorates the sacrifice of lambs in Egypt so the death would pass over the Hebrew houses. Jesus is to be viewed as the sacrificial lamb who takes away the sins of the world by his willing sacrifice. This is the point, and interrupting the story to ask whether the Last Supper “really” happened is a diversion. Being eternal, religious truth is not affected by time, and is in this sense outside of history. Conflating the object of a faith narrative (i.e., getting at or uncovering religious truth) with that of a historical account (i.e., getting at the who, what, and where in history) not only evinces a category mistake, but also, especially since the Enlightenment, risks the subordination of religious truth to historical fact.

In his paragraph, Aad de Lange obfuscates the two genres. After pointing out that the dogma of the Assumption was added by Pope Pius to the then-extant deposit of faith, de Lange treats the new doctrine in terms of a historical event: “the Blessed Virgin Mary, at the close of her earthly life, was taken up.” It is as if being a historical event is needed to legitimate or justify the religious truth being promulgated. This “need” is merely a symptom of our age in which scientific fact dominates and is the default for certainty. To eclipse even the extended faith narrative, which has Mary go to heaven in body as well as soul, by asking whether or not it was an event that happened historically is to tacitly treat the story-telling as somehow insufficient or subordinate in its own genre. The dynamic, or narrative “arc,” in the Gospels being interrupted by interlarding exogenous questions, the reader (or ancient hearer) undoubtedly has trouble zeroing in on the unique sort of validity that religious truth enjoys. Such truth itself is best grasped from a story if it is not interrupted with distractions.

De Lange unwittingly provides us with a useful way to understand the distinction between historical events and religious truth: “the Pope did not state either the manner or the circumstances of time and place in which the Assumption took place—only the fact of the Assumption of Mary, body and soul, into the glory of heaven, is the matter of definition.” Although de Lange clearly views the Assumption as having occurred empirically (i.e., historically), he does depict religious truth in its own terms—that of definition. A historian would not find the language, “the matter of definition,” to be that which historians use, for they are interested in “the manner or the circumstances of time and place” rather than definitions of truth.

The Pope can be regarded as the chief story-teller as regards religious truth in the Roman Catholic Church. As long as he does not contradict the story so far, he is free to go on telling the story as the spirit and his mind moves him. As long as the dictates of logic (e.g., non-contradiction) are maintained, any storyteller cannot be wrong as one develops a story in progress. In the story of the kids in the woods, I am adding that a helicopter flew in at the last minute and rescued the kids. Once I add this elaboration, someone listening can’t very well say, “No! That doesn’t happen. The kids get eaten.” Notice that I use the present tense—doesn’t—because I am referring to what goes on in a story, rather than to an historical account. Were the listener to say, “No! That didn’t happen,” I would reply, “Of course it didn’t; it’s a story. Now, what does it mean?” Similarly, detecting the leitmotif of a faith narrative distinct from trying to ascertain whether a certain event (or character) existed in history.

To be sure, were the Crucifixion only in the story rather than also a historical event, then it could not be said that a sacrifice happened that restored humanity to God’s graces. Jesus actually suffering is necessary to “pay the price” that no one else would pay. If the only suffering is in the Passion Story in the Gospels, then the reconciliation of humanity with God is also only part of a story. Furthermore, the Incarnation is depicted as God piercing or entering human history—God made flesh. Indeed, the Immaculate Conception of Mary (i.e., she is conceived so as to be without sin) can also be regarded thusly.

Christians are in the unenviable position of believing in religious truth that hinges on historical persons events that historians have so far not been able to determine to have lived and occurred. Faith narratives do not count as historical sources because the writers of such stories can legitimately use, modify, and even invent historical figures and events in the service of making theological points. The risk involved in believing that the Word became flesh as a person who lived historically/empirically is that religious truth comes to depend on history even though truth itself is eternal and thus does not depend on time.[1] In other words, such faith can be in historical fact, which is an oxymoron as facts are known rather than believed and thus of religious belief. In contemporary parlance, it is said that a person is entitled to one’s own opinion but not to one’s own facts. Facts are solid, and thus deemed superior to mere subjective opinions. The danger in subordinating religious truth to historical facts is that truth is relegated as mere opinion.

Just as thinking during a movie in a theater about what to cook later breaks off, or eclipses, the suspension of disbelief that allows a person to “enter” a movie’s story-world, so too does thinking about matters outside of a faith narrative as it is being read. Let the story speak to you so you might grasp the religious truth from the continuity or flow of the narrative. Let history take care of itself. This is not to commit to any answer concerning whether someone existed or something actually happened. Even using words like really and actually for historical claims implicitly subordinates religious truth. Transcending temporal things, truth is really and actually existent. In an age in which some people insist on imposing their ideological opinions as if facts of reason, such presumptuousness shows up much better relative to a discernment of religious truth from a faith narrative.

The infallibility of a storyteller in the telling of a story is much different than the arrogance on ideological stilts that indicates self-idolatry. To be sure, such idolatry can be used to impose even religious truth. At a Roman Catholic church in my hometown, the pastor said in his homily, “Don’t worry if you don’t understand the Marian mysteries; just obey.” That is to say, just obey the pastor. Pope Benedict promoted the pastor to bishop.  Such a decision falls outside of a pope’s story-telling infallibility (as does that Pope’s decision when he was an archbishop to transfer rather than defrock a sexually-molesting priest), and perhaps even outside the purview of the Holy Spirit.  

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1. I deliberately use the word, “Word,” as the second person/manifestation of the Trinity (i.e., the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) to de-anthropomorphize God. To anthropomorphize something is to ascribe human qualities or attributes to it. Doing so in the case of the second person of the trinity risks understating the qualitative difference (i.e., difference in kind rather than degree) that exists between the Creator and creation, and thus the eternal God and temporal history. In my book, God’s Gold, is suggest that viewing God in terms too similar to us (i.e., anthropomorphizing the transcendent) may be one reason why the assumptions of theologians on wealth and profit-seeking in relation to greed have shifted from anti- to pro-wealth through the centuries. If the second person of the Trinity is viewed too much like the flesh in the Incarnation, then it’s easier to overstate the theological significance of the stuff of Earth more generally, including wealth. From such an overstatement, it was written in the Italian Renaissance that a person must be rich to exercise the Christian virtue of munificence (rather than merely liberality). Cosimo de Medici, who made his fortune from usury, a mortal sin, was absolved by Pope Eugene IV by making a large gift to the Church. Had de Medici not been rich, he could not have afforded to pay for the renovation of a monastery. So it turns out that a rich man can get through the eye of a needle, and that money helps.