Talk 4: ‘The God of Jesus’
As mentioned last time, Andy starts this talk by reacting to some criticism that he received from more conservative Christians for his earlier talks, condemning him for ‘not believing the Bible’. He defends himself with a summary of his argument so far, which is that, even though he does ‘believe the Bible’, Christianity does not stand or fall on the truth of the whole Bible. Christianity stands on the resurrection of Jesus, which later got written down in what we know now as the New Testament. Once people believed in Jesus and reflected on his life and teaching they found what they believed to be references to Jesus in the Jewish scriptures, our Old Testament, and so even non-Jewish believers became interested in the Jewish scriptures, the end result of which was the compilation of both sets of scriptures into one volume. The point: the Bible came later than Christianity, so it can’t be its foundation. This is all very valid, and would be enough to make a Christian of everyone if the evidence for the resurrection were convincing enough.
Andy at this point picks an example from the Old Testament to illustrate his point about Christian believers’ early interest in the Jewish scriptures — Isaiah 53. But his argument is rather simplistic. He simply says, ‘Does this prophecy sound like Jesus? Yes it does,’ completely discounting the fact that it could easily be referring to anyone suffering torture or nearing death. He cites the case of a Jewish rabbi who admitted that the passage sounds a lot like Jesus, without mentioning that Jewish scholars have dozens of other different interpretations of the passage, many of which don’t even refer to a Messiah figure at all, let alone Jesus.
Now, as a link into the main topic of this fourth talk, Andy picks up that not only did the first followers of Jesus use the Jewish scriptures, so did Jesus himself. He says that we must take seriously anything Jesus said, because he predicted his own resurrection, which then came about. In other words, we should take the Old Testament seriously because Jesus did. Nevertheless, Christianity still doesn’t stand or fall on the historical accuracy of the whole of the Old Testament; it stands on the historicity of the resurrection. Andy repeats his earlier claim from talk 3, that the first believers didn’t need faith to believe in the resurrection because they are supposed to have seen Jesus for themselves.
This is the point at which the series of talks takes a new turn, moving from rejecting false foundations, to using the resurrection as the foundation for what comes next. And it is the point after which any sceptic who has not been convinced so far will find nothing further of interest. If Andy had decided to discuss the evidence for the resurrection in more detail, then he might have kept some interest amongst his target audience, who would be interested to know if he has any new evidence, or any new way of presenting it. But he doesn’t. He takes the resurrection as fact from this point onwards, and builds on top of it, and I suspect that like me, this is the point at which his sceptical non-church audience switched off. It’s not enough to leave us with the simplistic statement that the disciples met Jesus on the beach, when the only evidence for that meeting is in the very document that Andy has already admitted was written at least a generation later by those who already believed. This series of talks has done nothing to shift the opinion of any sceptic who finds the evidence for the resurrection unconvincing.
The main point of talk 4 is that if Jesus predicted his own resurrection, which then took place, then we can trust what he says about anything else, including God. In Andy’s own words, ‘when someone predicts their own death … and resurrection, and pulls it off, I go with whatever they say.’
But why does successfully predicting his own resurrection make Jesus a trustworthy source of information about God? I believe here that Andy is relying on some logical steps that he doesn’t directly state. I assume the content of this unstated argument is that the resurrection was an act of God, and therefore it counts as God’s endorsement of Jesus, and therefore we can trust what Jesus said. But there are some unstated assumptions here, and we need to pause and note them.
The first hidden assumption is that the resurrection, if it happened, can only have been brought about by God. But this is only an assumption, and requires a prior belief in God. This looks suspiciously like a circular argument to me. If Andy’s aim is to demonstrate that there is a God, even if it’s not quite the God you were brought up to believe in, he can’t use the existence of God as one of the premises in the argument. Of course, if you already believe in God, then the resurrection of Jesus would most likely be interpreted as an act of God. But if you don’t already believe in God, the resurrection (if you were convinced by the evidence for it) would simply be a mysterious event whose cause needs to be investigated.
The second hidden assumption is that the resurrection, taken to be an act of God, counts as God’s endorsement of everything Jesus had said. But there is no sound reason for taking this logical step. The resurrection, if it took place and was an act of God, could indeed count as God’s endorsement of something about Jesus. For example, it could be seen as God’s approval of Jesus’s moral character. Or it could be seen as God’s approval of at least some of the aims of Jesus’s ministry. Or more specifically it could be seen as God choosing to ‘complete’ the actions Jesus took at the climax of his ministry to bring about the kingdom of God. All these are possible interpretations of the resurrection, but none of them imply that Jesus got everything right. We know Jesus wasn’t right about cosmology — he was a man of his day and believed in a flat earth with heaven physically above it, as did everyone else. So we need some pretty strong reasons to suspend judgment when it comes to his views about God, which were also shaped largely by the beliefs of his day.
So despite Andy’s claim that his version of Christianity doesn’t require a blind step of faith, that is exactly what he is doing here. Firstly in taking the resurrection as fact despite the questionable nature of the evidence, and secondly in assuming this makes Jesus trustworthy in everything he said.
Now we come to the question of what Jesus said about God. As we found in talk 3, Andy places enormous faith in the accuracy of the gospels as eye-witness accounts. He says, ’the gospel writers documented what Jesus said about God,’ and takes this as fact. Given that this is generally disputed, especially with regard to the later gospels, we might expect Andy to start with an example from Mark, the earliest gospel, as a concession to the sceptics, but instead he starts with John, the last of the gospels to be written, and boldly claims, ‘John who was an eyewitness … documented what Jesus said.’ But not even most Christian scholars would claim this; the majority viewpoint is that John was not written by anyone who was there during the ministry of Jesus. So we need to take great care when reading John, to see whether it gives any direct evidence of the teaching of Jesus, or only reflects the views of the later community in which the author lived.
As it happens, the first passage that Andy has picked from John is one of the most theologically developed pieces of writing that can be found anywhere in the gospels, and is radically different from the simple, practical teaching found in the earlier gospels. It’s the place where Jesus says, ‘anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.’ In Andy’s paraphrase, if you want to know what God says, listen to Jesus; if you want to know what God is doing, watch what Jesus is doing. The sceptic would say at this point that this just reads as Jesus deciding for himself how to act as the agent of an invisible God, and then saying that’s what God is like. (This passage also adds nothing to the flow of the argument in this talk as far as I can discern.)
The next statement of Jesus that Andy picks, also from John, is ‘God is spirit’. But as Andy explains, this is what Jews had always believed since the establishment of Judaism. So we don’t get anything new from Jesus at this point. Andy then tries to align ‘God is spirit’ — that is, immaterial and timeless — with modern science. He claims that an immaterial, timeless God is exactly what we would expect as the cause behind the big bang, where all the time and material that we know about began. And yet, the founders of Judaism had the same belief in an immaterial God even though they had a very different cosmology. So we can hardly say that ‘God is spirit’ fits with our scientific knowledge any better than it fits with theirs.
Now at last we come to a statement from Jesus found in the earlier gospels and therefore more likely to be authentic: ‘When you pray, say “Father …”’. Andy explains this as Jesus teaching that God is personal — not human or male, because God is spirit, but personal in such a way that ‘father’ is the closest concept within our human experience. But this understanding was not unique to Jesus either. Other Jewish teachers around the same time also referred to God as ‘father’. The reason Andy has included this statement is in order to invite his audience to say ‘Father’ as a simple prayer. This is the most obvious of a number of points in this talk where Andy urges this audience to take a step of faith, rather than using the purely evidence-based approach that he originally promised.
Andy now jumps forward to the first letter of John, and the statement, ‘God is love.’ He claims that this is something the author of the letter learned directly from Jesus (although it’s not a recorded saying of Jesus in the gospels). As we have already mentioned, it’s unlikely that the author of the letters of John was there during the ministry of Jesus so this is most likely a refection of the beliefs of the later church community. Nevertheless, the statement ‘God is love’ is certainly consistent with the teaching of Jesus.
As with the statement, ‘God is spirit’, Andy then tries to make a modern justification for the statement, ‘God is love.’ He uses the concept of light and shade as a metaphor for love and what he calls ‘unlove’. (Andy uses the word 'unlove' not in the dictionary sense of the verb, ‘to cease to love’, but in his own made-up meaning, a noun meaning ‘absence of love’ or maybe 'the opposite of love' — because of this, I will use quote marks for the word every time I quote it.) Andy claims that just as shade does not exist without the sun, so ‘unlove’ cannot exist without love. Love must necessarily pre-exist ‘unlove’. Hence the statement ‘God is love’ must be correct. This is a classic example of a false analogy — taking a metaphor literally and using it to deduce additional facts that are not part of the original metaphor. It’s very poor reasoning. When he extends the argument to also infer that good pre-dates evil, therefore God is good, we know he has taken this too far. In fact, it’s perfectly possible for ‘unlove’ to exist without love first existing. Within the contemporary understanding of evolution and anthropology, love is something that has emerged as a result of evolution, while the previous natural world had no love, only the survival of the fittest. Even if you don’t believe in evolution as fact, you have to accept that this is logically possible; it is possible for a world to exist without love, before love has been introduced to it. Andy’s supposed proof that ‘God is love’ is nothing of the sort.
Let’s take a step back and look back at what Andy has been doing here. For two of the main statements he has quoted from Jesus or from John (‘God is spirit’ and ‘God is love’), Andy has attempted to add his own justification that he thinks should appeal to us today. Why does he think he needs to do this? If it’s true that we can trust everything Jesus said because of the resurrection, then why does Andy need to add his own arguments in support of each point? Why not just give us the evidence for the resurrection and leave us to believe everything Jesus said because of it? The answer is, because the evidence isn't convincing on its own. To put it more generally, what is the need for Christian apologetics if the evidence for Christianity is good enough on its own? In the end, despite his best intentions, Andy is doing what all Christian preachers have done before him, which is to use persuasion to urge his audience to take a step of faith. He is trying to drip-feed his audience with a collection of points from different angles, which he hopes will add up to a case for the trustworthiness of Christianity. But if the evidence itself were persuasive, neither he nor any other preacher would need to do this.
Now we reach the end of this fourth talk. Having made the claim that the gospel of John accurately records the teaching of Jesus, Andy assumes we now agree with him on this without question, and invites us to read the whole of the gospel of John and ask, ‘What do I learn from the Son about the Father?’ Once again, Andy isn’t really doing anything different from what previous pastors and evangelists have done — asking his audience to read the New Testament in isolation, in the hope that they will feel emotionally drawn by it, instead of asking them to go away and research all the evidence, for and against, in an unbiassed way. While the earlier talks promised a new evidence-based approach to Christianity, and made a good start by clearing away some of the old dogmas, by this point we begin to see that in fact Andy is still urging the same old faith-based approach as everyone before him.
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