True Believers and Critical Thinkers

I define true believers as those whose religious faith has resolved all existential questions about life and provided a rationale for living in this world and that to come (if such there be). They neither challenge what they are told, nor any longer seriously ponder life’s verities, making adjustments where old beliefs are found to be lacking. There are other definitions of what constitutes being a true believer.¹

            A critical thinker, on the other hand, is one who constantly ponders and probes and for whom nothing is ever finally resolved, particularly life’s verities.²

One example of a critical thinker is found in Plato’s description of Socrates, who, claiming ignorance, spent his time asking questions and probing others as to their opinions and views of virtue [aretē], and pointing out inconsistencies in the views held by others. He was tried for “impiety” and “corrupting the minds of the young,” convicted, and sentenced to death. In his final address to the court, he observed:

Perhaps someone may say ‘But surely, Socrates after you have left us you can spend the rest of your life in quietly minding your own business.’ This is the hardest thing of all to make some of you understand. If I say that this would be disobedience to God, and that is why I cannot ‘mind my own business,’ you will not believe I am serious. If on the other hand I tell you to let no day pass without discussing goodness [aretē] and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and examining both myself and others is really the very best thing a man can do, and that life without this sort of communication is not worth living, you will be even less inclined to believe me. Nevertheless that is how it is, Gentlemen, as I maintain; though it is not easy to convince you of it.³

“Discussing goodness…and examining myself and others is really the very best thing a man can do, and that life without this sort of communication is not worth living.” Is it true do you suppose, that life is not worth living unless one constantly probes oneself and others about goodness/virtue/excellence?

            The Apostle Paul apparently seemed to think so, although I would hardly call him a critical thinker, as I have defined it in this essay. At the very least, however, he seemed to share with Socrates the idea of virtue or excellence in life and recommended that one ponder (logizesthe) those things that are characterized by aretē (Phil 4:8).⁴

            And what about the rest of us, where do we fall on the spectrum: true believer—critical thinker? Hopefully, we might be found somewhere near the middle of the spectrum, at least. There, we have found ways to share in some religious beliefs of a particular gathering of believers, but have not yet surrendered our critical thinking skills. If that is where you find yourself, some things about the faith of the Christian Church must make you mighty uncomfortable. For example, what the church teaches about a Trinity comprised of three divine figures: God, the Father; Jesus, a human being confessed as the Son of God; and the Holy Spirit. These three figures, kept distinct in the New Testament, are finally declared to be one figure, a divine God Head as early as the fourth century.⁵ Nevertheless, if you think about it, three distinct entities cannot in actuality be/become one, although, true enough, they may be regarded as being one. For example, a sponge, a brush, and a rag are regarded as tools for cleaning, but they remain in themselves three distinct entities. Critical thinkers either find ways to finesse that particular dogma of the church, or try to quit thinking about it.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_believer

²https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking

³Plato, The Last Days of Plato: Euthyphro, The Apology, Crito, Phaedo (translated by Hugh Tredennick; England: Penguin Books, 1969), 73–74. The Greek word aretē is translated into English by several words, for example, goodness, virtue, excellence, etc.

⁴See John M. Dillon, “Platonism” in The Anchor Bibe Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 5:381: “Platonism is thus the single greatest outside intellectual influence on Christianity in its formative stages.”

⁵http://blog.charleshedrick.com/search?q=trinity

Curiosity, Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Faith

Can a critical thinker also be a person of traditional religious faith? It is true that many are, or at least appear to be, but who knows what goes on in another’s mind. As a purely theoretical question, the answer must be: perhaps. Two variables skew the response: the thinker’s curiosity and the reasonableness of the article of faith. Faith may not demand that critical thinkers affirm something they know to be patently false. Critical thinkers by their very nature are curious. Leading them to evaluate and critique the evidence before making a decision, or making a faith commitment. Curiosity is the mother’s milk of critical thinking. Without it there will be little critical thought.

            Religion in Western culture is generally conservative and offers its propositional truths as paradigmatically absolute; they are the product of divine revelation, we are told, to be questioned only at the risk of one’s immortal soul. Nevertheless, critical thinkers are not typically so generous as to affirm without critiquing. Regardless of the stakes, an individual who suppresses curiosity and affirms a religious proposition without serious challenge is not thinking critically.

            The real difficulty with religious truths, however, is that the absolute religious truth of one group frequently refutes the absolute religious truth of another group. Here is an example of one divine truth canceling another. Catholics regard the wine and bread of the Mass as transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ. Lutherans reject this view but affirm that in some way Christ is truly present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Baptists and others, on the other hand, regard the bread and grape juice (for Baptists certainly not wine!) of the Lord’s Supper as only symbolical. The bread and grape juice only represent the body and blood of Christ. As long as such ideas as these are considered simply different “beliefs” between religious groups, it is merely an oddity prompting the response, “how odd. How can people in the same religion who use the same holy books believe such remarkably different things?” But when it is remembered that these three groups hold that their respective views are absolutely binding on their memberships as the product of divine wisdom, it should strike a critical thinker as a curiosity for further investigation, particularly into the rationale of each group. Of course, they cannot all be the result of divine revelation! But the solution is not as easy as determining which is the correct view and eliminating the other two.

            The problem really goes to the nature of “religious truth.” Religious truth is not objective like mathematics—like 2+2=4, for example. Rather religious truth is only subjective truth in every case. Like beauty, religious truth lies in the eye, or in this case mind, of the beholder. That the character of the propositional truth is absolute is only true for the one who believes it is true. It is unlike Einstein’s theory of relativity E = MC², which is universally true—although true believers are scarcely apt to agree. Such an uncritical perspective is apt to strike the critical thinker as suspicious—if not worthy of complete skepticism.*

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

*This essay first appeared in Charles W. Hedrick, House of Faith or Enchanted Forest. American Popular Belief in an Age of Reason (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009), 39–41. It appears here newly edited and under a new title.

Personal Religion: should one just "take it all on Faith"?

I am usually given a non-answer when I ask a question that rubs-up uncomfortably against someone’s religious beliefs. For example, I may say “how can the Bible be the Word of God when it contains errors?” God is perfect, right? Then comes back the perturbed answer, “I just take it all on faith,” as though that answered the question.

Here is one of those questions: Was Mark (or God?) in error when he wrote that Abiathar was priest on the occasion that David entered the Temple and ate the bread from the altar (Mark 2:24-26)? Actually, Ahimelech (2^nd Sam 8:17) was priest at the time that David ate the holy bread from the altar (1 Sam 21:1-6; cf. 2^nd Sam 15:35).¹ The discrepancy is not really a problem, however, unless you have the mistaken idea that the Bible sprang immediately from the mind of God, and was wholly and perfectly received through inspiration into the minds of its writers (something like osmosis). Bringing the Bible into print in the language of readers is a much sweatier, human process.²

            Taking matters on faith is not something that people do in virtually any other area of life. For example, in buying a house or a car, people count-up the cost, carefully read the contract, have the house checked that all is in stated condition and in working order, and have the car checked by a mechanic, if it is a used car. The rule in life for virtually all is “trust but verify.” People trust but verify because they believe the old adage caveat emptor (“buyer beware”). Particularly in everyday activities people are led by that adage. They diligently make shopping lists, and follow them, so that they will not give-in to urges and purchase things they do not need, cannot afford, or pay-for. They shop the sales offers and compare the costs of the same item in several different stores in order to pay less for an item. People as a general rule “take with a grain, or two, of salt” political promises made during an election year, and they check the politician’s background, reputation, and public record before casting their vote.

            So, why would anyone take personal religion on faith, without critically examining the beliefs? Surely, one’s religion is as important as buying a house? What happened to the old adage caveat emptor where religion is concerned? Why should religious faith take less critical thought than hanging pictures on a wall?

            Socrates, according to his student Plato, spent his life examining his own life and the lives of others (he was something of a gadfly on the citizens of Athens). Socrates once said (just before he was condemned to death on the charges of impiety and corrupting the youth of the city by means of his persistent questions) that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”³ If one is going to shape one’s life by religious beliefs, those beliefs should be critically examined and probed. How, for example, can anyone claim that the Bible is the Word of God, when text critics decide its content, and translators bring the Bible into your language in their words? Questions about one’s personal religious faith deserve a more thoughtful answer than—I just take it all on faith.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Matt 12:4 and Luke 6:4 eliminate the name of the priest; one possible reason for their omission of the priest’s name is that they recognized Mark’s error.

²Hedrick, “Inspired Writings”: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/search?q=inspired+writings

Hedrick, “The Bible’s Story: A Brief Summary”: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/2023/10/the-bibles-story-brief-summary.html

³Plato, The Apology, 38a.

A Passing Thought about Heaven and Hell

A fleeting thought passed through my mind a few days ago: why do religious folk have such a longing for an afterlife (if such there be)? In my case, since I have persistently, for good or ill, continued to associate myself with those Bible-thumping Baptists, it would be the blessed afterlife of the Christian Heaven. The only options one is given in Baptist theology for the afterlife is Heaven or Hell—and I have no interest in spending eternity in a Baptist Hell (if such there be). It turns out, however, descriptions of Hell in the New Testament are quite minimal. In general, Hell is described as a “place” of torment in fire¹ and the absence of God (Matt 25:31-46). If one was not all that religious throughout one’s earthly life, the absence of God might not be a bother, and a burning of one’s spirit/soul (if such there be) in a (nonphysical) fire might not seem that fearsome, since it is not a burning of one’s physical flesh and bones.² Hence, Hell may be a place of suffering, but not physical suffering. How much can a nonphysical fire hurt a gathering of (nonphysical) spirit “molecules,” one wonders.

Spending eternity in the Christian Heaven, on the other hand, might not be that satisfying either. The New Testament only speaks obliquely or metaphorically³ about Heaven. Compare, for example, the description of Heaven as a physically buffed-up version of a new Jerusalem, although the Christian Heaven is obviously a nonexistent spirit “space” (Rev 21). What takes place in Heaven is, hopefully, also expressed in images. Denizens of Heaven will forever (I Thess 4:16-18) spend their time praising God (Rev 5:11-13; 19:4-8), serving/worshiping God (Rev 7:13-17; 22:3), and extolling God in song (Rev 14:1-3). It sounds roughly like a morning worship service in a post-reformation church of any variety. Doing that all day,⁴ day in and day out, forever, could become a bit tedious, perhaps, and lead one, like the ancient Israelites, to think fondly of what was left behind—the “fleshpots” of life on earth (Exod 16:3), so to speak. Even divinely-prepared activities, like diets (Exod 16:8, 12, 13-16, 31) for example, would tend to become a little old over time (Exod 16:35).

            The creation was once the apple of God’s eye (Gen 1:31), but the primordial couple outraged God, and he cursed the created order as well (Gen 3:16-19)—so goes the biblical narrative. On the other hand, most of us have found that our proverbial three score and ten (Ps 90:9-10), or so, has also brought physical, mental, and emotional pleasure and offered us the opportunity to grow and develop in mind, body, and spirit; to enjoy creation’s diversity; to delight in those sensual pleasures innate to the flesh, and join to become one with another for the journey of life (Gen 2:23-24). Life, even in a fallen universe with its many downsides (viz. cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other terminal diseases for which there is yet no known cure) is still a great ride.  The major disappointments have been life’s brevity and the inevitable goodbyes.

            Of course, there may be more diversity to Heaven and less torment to Hell (if such there be) than the biblical writers were aware-of. In both afterlife scenarios, we are only dealing with ideas expressed in one religious tradition. There were other views in antiquity. In the faith of the ancient Israelites, for example, the dead went to Sheol, a common collective afterlife for the departed dead, much like the ancient Greek belief in Hades,⁵ initially a place for all the departed.⁶ Modern ecclesiastical beliefs about Heaven are usually much rosier than we find in the Bible, and contemporary views of Hell are likely to have been influenced to some degree by Dante’s Inferno.⁷

            I called it a passing thought, and so it was, but, after reflecting on it, my reflections led me to this longer essay. I suppose you, reader, have thoughts on the subject?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Mark 9:43; Matt 13:49-50; Matt 25:41; Rev 14:9-11, 20:12-15, 21:8; Jude 6-7.

²Who knows what a burning of a spirit/soul means, except it is not physical torture.

³A metaphor is an image describing one thing in terms appropriate to another.

⁴Of course, there would be no “days” in the sense of 24 hours, which is tied to the rotation of the earth around the sun, besides there is no night in Heaven (Rev 21:25; 22:5).

⁵Hedrick, Wry Thoughts about Religion, “The Land of Forgetfulness”: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/search?q=sheol

⁶See Alan Segal, “Afterlife,” New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible (Abingdon, 1989), 1.65-68; Richard Bauckham, “Hades, Hell,” Anchor Bible Dictionary (Doubleday, 1992), 3.14-15.

⁷Dante Alighieri, the Divine Comedy, part one is the Inferno. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/langdon-the-divine-comedy-vol-1-inferno-english-trans

Hope and Faith in the New Testament and Modern Science

Hope is not just a small township in Arkansas.¹ It turns out to be the primary anchor that makes religious faith possible: Hope is the slender thread by which believers are anchored to the bedrock of their faith.² Hope for the future and religious faith are attitudes reflecting certain expectations. Yet all of us share hopeful expectations that have no religious associations; basically, it turns out, hope is a secular attitude with secular and existential expectations. Hope is also an essential aspect of religious faith, a necessary complement to religious belief.

Hope is “a feeling that what is wanted is likely to happen, a desire accompanied by expectation”; or stated differently, hope is an attitude that what is desired could come to pass. Faith, as exercised in Christian faith, “is an unquestioning belief that does not require proof or evidence.” As I understand these hopeful attitudes, they are similar but not the same. In First Peter (1:21) and 1 Corinthians (13:13) they are stated as different attitudes. They are both attitudes but they differ in the degree of confidence in which one holds the expectation that what one hopes-for could actually come to pass. Nevertheless, hope is a secular attitude utilized by religious believers in their faith. In its secular form hope is an attitude one holds toward what might be possible (not probable) in the future.³ As expressed in its secular form, hope is not necessarily oriented toward God or a particular God (for example, Acts 24:26; 27:20; Rom 5:4;1 Cor 9:10; 13:13; 2 Cor 10:15).

The word faith is also used in the New Testament to designate a body of religious belief to which one gives mental assent. Hence, in the New Testament faith is both an attitude (for example, Matt 8:10; Mark 5:34; Luke 8:48; Rom 3:28; 4:5, 19-20; 2 Cor 5:7; Gal 3:23-24) and the particular system of religious belief to which one ascribes (for example, Gal 1:23; 6:10; Eph 4:5; 4:13; Col 2:7; 1 Tim 1:2; 3:9; 4:1, 6).

There is a certain arrogance on the part of some writers of the New Testament who completely discount hope apart from that as exercised in their own sectarian faith (for example, Rom 1:21; 1:28-32; Eph 2: 11-12; 4:17-18; 1 Thess 4:13; 1 Pet 1:14). Nevertheless, “in Philebus 39e,” Plato “shows how human existence is determined not merely by the perception (αισθησις) which accepts the present but also by the recollection (μνημη) of the past and the expectation of the future.”⁴ In other words, hope for the future is a natural aspect or corollary of being human. Human beings are born with the capacity to hope. They are endowed by their “creator” with the inalienable right of having future expectations, as best it seems to each one. Someone who shares no religious faith might be led to express the following secular hope for continuity beyond the mortal field:

I hope that the considerable powers of the universe will not consign my personal consciousness to oblivion.

Such a hope would neither be directed toward a supernatural divine entity, nor would it be expressed confidently and unwaveringly. There is no certain proof or evidence to support such a secular hope. Yet, a glimmer of hope is encouraged in the fact that death is the great waster of consciousness in the universe and, to judge from life cycles on earth, the universe resists waste. Countless millions spend their lifetimes developing unique complex personalities that apparently disappear in the moment of death. Such universal waste and the tendency of nature to resist waste might lead someone to hope, in spite of the odds against hope, that something more may yet lie in our future. In earth’s ecosystem of life nothing material is wasted, but all is recycled; even some energy is transformed and reclaimed at each level of the food chain in earth’s ecosystem.⁵ This tendency of nature not even to waste nonmaterial energy encourages the slim hope that something more may yet lie before us. Such a hope is at least as certain as Abraham’s “hope against hope” (Rom 4:18; that is, continuing to have hope even though it appears baseless). Under the second law of thermodynamics, however, every energy transfer reduces the amount of usable energy in the universe and eventually no usable energy will be available. Thus, even this slender thread of hope is a hope against hope.⁶

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Other unincorporated areas and tiny villages in the U.S. also bear the name Hope.

²I posted an essay of the subject on hope on July 16, 2018: See Hedrick. “What lies behind Gospel Music.” http://blog.charleshedrick.com/search?q=Hope

³Kierkegaard: “Hope, as a form of expectation, is an attitude towards the possible.” https://plato.stanford.edu/Archives/win2021/entries/hope/

⁴Rudolf Bultmann, “Ελπις: The Greek Concept of Hope,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Gerhard Kittel, ed.; Geoffrey Bromiley, trans.; Eerdmans, 1964), 2.517-18.

⁵https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/energy-transfer-ecosystems/

⁶Stephen Leacock, “Theory and Common Sense,” pp. 369-70 in Louise B. Young, Exploring the Universe (Oxford, 1971) and https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/cellular-energetics/cellular-energy/a/the-laws-of-thermodynamics

The Lord our God is One Lord

Mark reports an incident in which a scribe asked Jesus, “What commandment is first of all?” Jesus replied using the words of Scripture, “Hear, Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord” (Mark 12:29; Deut 6:4). In Mark this statement introduces the first commandment. The statement is the beginning of what Israelites called “the Shema” (Deut 6:4-9) from the Hebrew word for “hear.”

This part of the answer in Jesus’ response, oddly, is omitted by Matthew (22:36) and Luke (10:26-27), making Matthew and Luke disagree with Mark by their omission of the idea of the oneness of God. This statement (the Lord is one) was voted gray by the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar by a mail vote. There were no red votes; 40 persons voted it pink, 53 voted it gray and 7 black (the weighted average of the vote indicated the saying had a 0.44 percent chance of being original with Jesus), which necessitated a gray color in The Five Gospels.¹ The color gray signified that “Jesus did not say this but the ideas contained in it are close to his own.”² The principal rationale for the negative vote is that the saying has singular attestation; that is, it only appears in Mark.³ Singular attestation for the saying, however, should not disqualify the saying, since the Seminar voted numerous sayings with singular attestation as originating with Jesus (for example, Luke 10:30b-35). A second objection to the saying being something Jesus said is that it is an integral part with the dialogue in which it is embedded. But that is also true of other sayings of Jesus approved by the Seminar (for example, Luke 9:59-60, Mark 2:27-28, Matt 22:21).

            Had Jesus grown up in a social context that was even nominally religious he could scarcely have helped being familiar with the Shema or even speaking its words numerous times:

“You shall teach [these words] diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. And you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be a frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them on the door posts of your house and on your gates” (Deut 6:6-9).

That “the Lord is one” became Judaism’s confession of faith; it both stresses Yahweh’s exclusiveness, and emphasizes that Yahweh is “an integral person, not divisible into a number of other Gods or forces.”⁴ If the Book of the law discovered in the temple (2 Kgs 22:8-13) and that was responsible for the reforms of Josiah in 622 BCE (2 Kgs 23:1-25) was the Book of Deuteronomy, as is generally assumed,⁵ the Shema subsequently would have played an important role in the religious life of the Israelite. I see no serious argument causing me to doubt that Jesus shared the view of the Shema that “The Lord, our God, is one Lord.”

            Mark 12:29, however, surfaces a serious clash between Jesus (if he actually shared this idea) and contemporary Christianity. Jesus’ statement “the Lord, our God, is one Lord” seems to me to be something very different from Christianity’s the Lord, our God, is three persons in one.⁶ What do you think?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹“Voting Records,” Forum (6,3-4 September/December 1990), 271.

²Robert Funk and Roy Hoover, eds., The Five Gospels (Macmillan, 1993), 36-37.

³Five Gospels, 104-105.

⁴J. A. Wharton, “Shema, The” in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, 321-22.

⁵ J. Kenneth Kuntz, The People of Ancient Israel (Harper & Row, 1974), 317-27.

⁶ C. W. Hedrick, “Public Image and a Triune Deity,” Blog: Wry Thoughts about Religion: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/searchq=public+image+and+a+triune+deity

Piety and the early Christian Tradition

Do you think of yourself as pious? In the practice of religion, the word pious is construed today in contradictory ways. The first definition for pious in my dictionary is: "marked by or showing reverence for deity and devotion to divine worship." The second reads: "marked by conspicuous religiosity." The first definition is positive; reverence for deity (if such there be) and devotion to worship of the divine (if such there be, and if one believes in behaving in such a way) is a positive act. The second definition sounds like "excessive religiousness." How could anything in excess be positive? Too much of anything is not a good thing (nothing in excess is an ancient Greek maximum). The fourth definition is divided into two parts: 4a reads: "marked by sham or hypocrisy"; 4b is: "marked by self-conscious virtue."¹ So it seems the definitions for piety range from a humble reverence for deity at one end and conspicuous hypocrisy at the other.

            Several words for piety from the ancient Greek world appear in the New Testament. The verbal forms (eusebeō and thrēskeuō) and their derivatives receive different translations from scholars. These words appear in what I construe as the later books of the New Testament. The words do not appear in the gospels or the undisputed Pauline letters. In the Bauer/ Danker lexicon eusebeō is translated as "to show uncommon reverence or respect, [that is,] to worship." And thrēskeuō is translated "to practice cultic rites; to worship." Here are some passages that use these verbal forms or their derivatives (1 Tim 5:4, Acts 17:23, I Tim 2:2, 2 Tim 3:5, 2 Pet 1:3, 2 Pet 1:6, Tit 1:1, Acts 10:2; James 1:26-27, Acts 26:5, Col 2:18). These words in the New Testament do not seem to have the strange positive/negative definition found in the meaning of the English word "piety." Likely because they do not address the issue of motivation.

In the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 6:1-7:29), created by the gospel's flesh and blood author,² one finds a short section (Matt 6:1-7, 16-18) directly addressing motivation for religious behavior. (Motivation constitutes the reasons why one behaves as one does.) Matthew does not use eusebeō or thrēskeuō. Instead Matthew uses dikaiosunē a word usually thought of as "righteousness." In its context here it is best translated in English as "righteous behavior,"³ but translators have rendered it variously into English as piety, religion, good deeds, charity, acts of righteousness, and righteous deeds in the few translations I checked. In these few verses Matthew condemns conspicuousness in the practice of religion and directs that charitable deeds, prayer, and fasting should be quietly and inconspicuously done.⁴ Those who do these acts in order to be seen by others get no credit with God (6:1, 2, 5, 16). Those who do receive credit with God for their righteous behavior are those who do their religious acts "in secret" (6:3-4, 6, 17-18).

            In Matthew's view righteous behavior (think of it as pious acts) in the earliest Christian tradition consisted of unostentatiously giving charitable gifts (alms), praying privately, and inconspicuously depriving oneself of food (i.e., fasting) for religious reasons. In addition, one must do these activities motivated by the right reasons (Matt 7:35 = Luke 6:45). The writer we call James adds to these behaviors, humane consideration for others (1:27-28; cf. Matt 25:31-46):

Devotion to God (threskeia) that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.

To judge by Matthew's words our modern ecclesiastical ideas about piety may be misguided. Piety does not consist of church-based religious activities. For example, attending a preaching hour of the church is not a "service" rendered to God. (I assume we attend such a gathering for ourselves.) Piety is an attitude toward deity that may be judged positive, negative, or misguided by its behavioral expression. In other words, piety is expressed in specific activities that are commensurate with a certain attitude toward deity. Modern piety, which seems to consist of serving God through group activities in a church context, differs from piety in the early Jesus tradition, which, idealistically, was a deep reverence toward God expressing itself in certain private acts performed with no pretentiousness—or so Matthew thought.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, s.v. "pious."

²There are five addresses by Jesus that the flesh and blood author of Matthew's gospel has arranged throughout the gospel: Matt 5:1-7:28; 10:1-11:1; 13:1-53; 18:1-19:1; 24:1-26:1. Note especially the endings to the addresses: "when Jesus finished these…"

³Some manuscripts use the word "alms" (eleēmosunēn), suggesting the tradition found the word (dikaiosunē), as used in most manuscripts, to be unclear or unsatisfactory.

⁴Very little of this material (6:3 and perhaps 6:6a) was found to have originated with Jesus by the Jesus Seminar: Funk and Hoover, The Five Gospels, 147-48. Two of these religious acts (giving alms and praying) are found linked in Acts 10:2.

What is ‘the Gospel’?

Inadvertently, I stumbled across an interesting question while researching the words "gospel" (or "good news"; in Greek, euaggelion) and "preach the gospel" (or "proclaim good news"; in Greek, euaggelizō). The words do not appear that many times in the New Testament and virtually all the time they are used without any description of the content of the word. There is only one passage I know where the content of the word "gospel" is explained:

Now I would remind you, brethren, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you received, in which you stand, by which you are saved, if you hold it fast—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. (1 Corinthians 15:1-5)

This is the content of the gospel Paul preached and is the only explanation of gospel, of which I am aware, in the earliest texts of the early Christian movement. Nevertheless, it should not be read as the meaning of the word gospel in all early texts. It is specifically Paul's gospel (Rom 16:25; Gal 1:11). It was not the only gospel being preached in the earliest period, as Paul makes quite clear (Gal 1:6-9; 2 Cor 11:4-6, 13-14). What should we think about the content of the gospel being preached in the communities represented by the Deutero-Pauline Epistles (Ephesians, Colossians), the Pastoral Letters (1, 2 Timothy, and Titus), and the rest of the New Testament?

Paul's gospel is mythical in content, meaning at the very least it deals with stories about Gods and supernatural persons.* In Paul's description above the only historical event that can be verified is that Jesus died. Another item (that he was buried) could have been verified had one been present at the time. The rest of the statement evokes a kind of "salvation history" (Heilsgeschichte), which some theologians postulate as "an account of God's saving acts in human history"; these acts of God, however, can only be seen through the eyes of faith; they are not verifiable as historical events.

In the rest of the New Testament and certain later texts one finds hints that others are quite likely preaching a gospel different from what Paul preached. For example, Mark 1:14 has Jesus preaching the gospel of God and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel" (1:15; 1 Clem 14:23). If this latter statement is the content of what Jesus preached, the founder of what later became the Christian movement preached a gospel different from what Paul preached. Luke describes Paul preaching a gospel about the grace of God, something that Paul did not mentioned as part of his gospel (1 Cor 15:1-5). The writer in Colossians preaches a gospel about hope (1:5-6; 1:23), something else that Paul does not mention in 1 Cor 15:1-5. The gospel preached by the author of the Didache contained specific instructions about ethical behavior, prayers, and almsgiving, which Paul does not include in his explanation of the content of the gospel in 1 Cor 5:1-5. One cannot assume that Paul's statement of the content of what was being preached is what all writers of the New Testament would affirm.

What do you consider "good news"? Personally, I like to think of the gospel as the life-changing grace of a benevolent God, who gives freely to all (Matt 5:45). Such a gospel is what brings hope in the face of the absolute certainty of death.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

*Myth as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary is "a purely fictitious narrative usually involving supernatural persons, actions, or events, and embodying some popular ideas concerning natural or historical phenomena. It is properly distinguished from allegory and legend, which imply a nucleus of fact."

Faith and Superstition

In common vernacular superstition is a negative word. It evokes images of voodoo, magic objects, and fetishes. In a milder form in the modern world it might relate to things people carry for luck, such as a rabbit’s foot, or things they wear for protection, such as a cross necklace or the evil eye, or holding certain beliefs about the nature of the universe. Faith, on the other hand, is a positive word, and evokes such acceptable images in a democratic society as family worship in a synagogue, or men praying prostrate in a mosque, or people in pews praying and singing hymns together in a church sanctuary. Nevertheless, the definitions of the words reveal that, as concepts, faith and superstition are similar ways of thinking. Here are the Google definitions for religious faith and superstition. Religious faith is: “A strong belief in God or in the doctrines of religion based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.”¹ Superstition is defined as: “An excessive credulous belief in and reverence for supernatural beings.”² God, Allah, and Yahweh, as generally conceived by religious people, are all supernatural “beings.” Why should not Christian, Muslim, and Jewish beliefs in supernatural “beings” also be regarded as superstition? Many, if not most, people in these three religious groups also share a belief in supernatural spirits. Why should not such beliefs also be labeled superstition?

            I confess that the close similarity between faith and superstition, as revealed by the definitions of the words, has always surprised me and have described their relationship as follows:

Faith and superstition actually seem to function in a similar manner. What I conclude from the shades of meaning accorded the word superstition is that superstition and faith are not two qualitatively different kinds of belief. Rather they reflect a range of similar attitudes best represented by a spectrum [or a continuum] with superstition at one end and religious faith at the other end. They meet somewhere around the middle, depending on who is describing the middle point. In short, what some define as acceptable religious belief, others will define as unacceptable superstition.³

In short, superstition and faith are the same mental exercise. That one is negative and the other positive depends on who is doing the evaluating. In my view, however, they can only be judged good or bad in how they affect believers. In other words, religious faith and superstitious beliefs may only be judged positively or negatively in terms of their ethical effects on believers. Where the behaviors of believers are judged unethical or harmful to themselves or others, their beliefs are best judged as superstition. Where the behaviors of believers are judged to be ethical and beneficial to themselves or others, their beliefs are best judged as faith.

            Google offers a second definition of superstition: “A widely held but unjustified belief in supernatural causation leading to certain consequences of an action or event, or a practice based on such belief.”⁴ This definition fits a short episode in Acts 19:11-12:

And God did extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul. So that handkerchiefs or aprons were carried away from his body to the sick, and diseases left them, and the evil spirits came out of them” (RSV).

This episode in the Bible (and others as well; for example Acts 5:15-16) immediately plunge one into the occult world of ancient magic, superstition, and religious fetishes.⁵ The Bible has many similar accounts fitting the Google definition of superstition; they offer encouragement to contemporary Christian and Jewish believers to think and act superstitiously. The Bible contributes to superstitious beliefs in the modern world because many take it as a handbook for understanding the universe.

How do you define superstition and faith? Where do you draw the line between faith and superstition?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹For the definition of faith, google: “definition of faith.”

²For the definition of superstition, google: “definition of superstition.”

³Hedrick, Unmasking Biblical Faiths (Cascade, 2019), 5. There are various explanations of superstition in Graeco-Roman antiquity, see pages 1-12.

⁴Google: “definition of superstition.”

⁵Hedrick, Unmasking, 7-10.

A Religious Experience?

What are religious experiences and whence do they arise? I raise the question because certain observations seem to challenge the adjective “religious” as being produced by spirit forces outside oneself. Here are the first two observations:

If God is spirit (John 4:24), then God is not an entity existing in space and time, as we human beings do. We humans are existents, bound in space and time during our brief lives. God, on the other hand, appears to be nothing more than a concept, an invention of the human imagination, whose nature and character changes with each religious group and/or individual. Hence, it appears that God, however conceived, has no independent being, which exactly corresponds to any of those ideations of the human mind.

The rationale for this surprising statement is self-evident when viewed from the perspective of the history of world religions. Each religion (and there have been a lot of religions through human history) conceives God differently, yet the adherents of this or that religion believe that God is exactly like what they conceive. In short, they believe their view is the only accurate and true view that captures the essence of God. But, alas, different understandings of God do exist in other religions and the adherents of these other religions likewise think that their understanding of God is exactly how God is.¹

Here is the third observation:

Spirit may still be “tangible,” however; depending on how it is conceived. If spirit is conceived as an entity that takes up space, like visible steam from a tea kettle, or the nearly invisible vapor arising from a heated substance, or the taste left in the rum cake when the “spirits” have evaporated, then it is tangible. If spirit is not left-over taste, or vaporous mist—or something barely visible to the naked eye; that is, if spirit does not leave an image on the retina of the eye, what is it?

I would suppose that God, as intangible spirit, is likely a denizen of a parallel spirit(ual) universe, a complex that does not occupy space and time. In this case, God is not part of the physical universe, but “over there” in the spirit(ual) universe, along with other invisible spirits (good, evil, and unclean), demons, devils, Satan, and other spiritual forces, such as angels, the Prince of the Power of the Air (Eph 2:2), the Principalities and Powers in heavenly places (Eph 3:10), the world rulers of the present darkness (Eph 6:12), the spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places (Eph 6:12), angels, principalities, powers (Romans 8:38), etc.,² and including the myriads of other spirits humankind has invented through time.

I boil these three lengthy observations down into three propositions: (1) God, if God there be, does not occupy space and time and (2) is not part of our universe; (3) our human inability to access God directly renders any description of God completely subjective and idiosyncratic.

If these propositions have any merit, then what we think of as a “religious” experience is simply a human response to a perceived “attraction” from a putative spirit world,³ and the “substance” of our religious experiences is all of our own making; it arises from within an individual and is formed by human experience; that is, it derives from what we have been taught by others, from our personal reading, from social conditioning, and the like. In other words, we humans create at a subliminal level “religious” experiences for ourselves out of our personal experiences.

William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human Nature, examines religious experiences by beginning with individuals who claim to have had such experiences. He examines “the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”⁴ For an experience to qualify as religious, James cites three criteria: it must reflect religious luminousness, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness. He finds that the essence of religion is human feeling “characterized as a zest for life” coupled with a sense that there is something wrong with us that requires a solution whereby we can be saved from wrongness by connecting with higher power. There are two types of religious psyches: the healthy minded who are unburdened by a sense of sin, and the sick souls who are burdened with a sense of sin. Conversion occurs for the latter person, whereby the divided and unhappy self becomes unified and happy. James has been criticized for relying too closely on liberal-Protestant sources and citing insufficient non-Christian anecdotes. This brief statement of the analysis of religious experience sounds very similar to what I stated in the preceding paragraph.

I realize that many will object that I have gone off the deep end by claiming that spirits, Holy or otherwise, are not found in our universe. Spirits, however, like God, can only be analyzed indirectly through the anecdotal claims of human beings who claim to have experienced them. Our inability to examine spirits directly renders any attempt to describe them completely subjective and idiosyncratic. In short, the evidence for spirits, Holy or otherwise, derives from the psychological makeup of the human beings who claim to have experienced them.

Something to think about!

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Hedrick, “God Does not Exist” pp. 168-70 in Unmasking Biblical Faiths, 168.

²Hedrick, “From Where does a Sense of the Divine Come,” pp. 170-72 in Unmasking, 170.

³Hedrick, Matter and Spirit: Making Sense of it All,” pp. 174-177 in Unmasking, 176-77.

⁴Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans, Green and company, 1905). I am following a review of the book by Tim Knepper: http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/relexp/reviews/review_james01.htm

Have you ever Doubted your Faith?

Someone asked me recently: have you ever doubted your faith? The question itself is interesting as a question. For one reason, it seems to be lacking a prepositional phrase specifying the object of faith. For example, have you ever doubted your faith in God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, or the Bible? Or perhaps the questioner intended that the word "faith" in the question evoke the entire spectrum of my religious beliefs. Or perhaps the question is more secular and the questioner was asking whether I have ever doubted faith in friends, family, or country, and in this secular form it has the general thrust of have I ever doubted the confidence I placed in something that I believe to be certain, like gravity, for example. If all these observations are possibilities, then I must refine the question and pick the subject that is most interesting to me.

Here is the question I choose to address: have I ever doubted aspects of my personal religious faith? The short answer is yes, and I suspect that every one of us has moments of doubt about aspects of religious belief. At least I hope so. From my perspective doubting something you think is certain is a positive ability, not a liability. Doubt is a warning mechanism of the mind that can lead to a correction of misplaced confidence.

Like everyone, my personal religious faith has never been static. It began with the child's prayer I was taught, "now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." But through the years it has become more sophisticated, logical, and rational with education, as my understanding of life and my place in the cosmos evolved. My faith began with what I was taught in a Southern Baptist Sunday School in the Mississippi Delta of the 40s and 50s. Hence, it was traditional and conservative. Since childhood, however, my faith has been a thing in process, shedding childish ideas and developing in, what I regard as more mature and philosophical ways. There is a statement attributed to the Apostle Paul (that he likely did not compose), which best characterizes the development and remaindering of the faith of my childhood: "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways" (1 Cor 13:11 NRSV). Doubt has played a major role in developing and remaindering my religious faith. A major premise for me has been the following: faith may not require me to believe something I find to be patently false or impossible given the world as I experience it.

Briefly here are three examples of where this process has brought me. God, if God there be, is spirit and does not exist in the sense that we normally use the word "exist." As spirit, God is not an entity that occupies space and time, as we human beings do. God, as understood by human beings, appears to be an invention of the human mind, whose character and nature change with the confessions of each religious group and individual. God does not correspond exactly to any of the many ideations of the human mind that claim to describe God. And if God does correspond exactly to one of these ideations, how could we tell? The Jewish and Christian Bibles present at least three different concepts of God. Thus, God, if God there be, is shrouded in mystery. There can be no direct knowledge of God. We learn about God from what others tell us, from the study of religions, and from those who claim to have experienced God, but all these sources offer us radically conflicting opinions.¹

Whatever else he may have been, Jesus was certainly regarded as a Judean sage, thaumaturge, and healer, or at least the author of the earliest canonical Gospel, Mark, regarded him as such, and those features are reproduced in the other three canonical gospels. His popularity with the masses and laxity in following the traditions of the elders ran him afoul of the Judean religious leaders. He was arrested, found guilty of blasphemy, and eventually crucified for political reasons by Roman authority. The early followers of Jesus, however, believed him to be much more, and used grandiose titles to describe him: God (John 20:28), son of God, Lord, the Anointed of the Lord (Christ), son of David, King of Israel. These honors are not verifiable by naked eye but rather are verified only through the eyes of faith. These days I prefer to think of Jesus as my brother in faith.

In Acts and Hebrews, Jesus is portrayed as a pioneer (archēgos), perfected through his own sufferings and his suffering qualified him to lead the way to glory for many other sons of God (Heb 2:10; 12:2). In this way Jesus, the Judean sage, became the firstborn among many brothers (Rom 8:29). My view of Jesus may make me appear as an apostate or certainly a heretic (they are not the same thing²), since it by-passes divinity for humanity as a classification for Jesus. There were various views about the nature of Jesus in antiquity, and it depended on whom you asked as to whether Jesus was divine. People holding a view different than the so-called orthodox view must nevertheless be classified as being in the stream of Christian history.³ Whatever group was dominant became the judge of what was orthodox.

In church I was never taught data about the Bible except for the most obvious information. Generally, I was taught to regard the Bible as "God-breathed"⁴ and to pattern my life on its precepts. My views have changed. I no longer think of the Bible as a "Holy Book" but as a collection of texts that reflect the evolution of the faith of two religious communities, Jewish and Christian. There are currently three versions of the Bible: the Jewish Bible, the Protestant Bible, and the Catholic Bible. Their contents are not the same. The Protestant Bible with which I grew up uses the Jewish Bible, which it regards as Old covenant books; to these texts were added certain new-covenant writings, twenty-seven other texts (the New Testament), which were assembled as a collection by the fourth century common era and added to the Jewish Bible. By the fourth century followers of Jesus regarded all these books in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek as in some sense "inspired" by God. Modern Christians transfer that high value to its translation into modern languages, forgetting that no translation is an exact reproduction of the original.

I have only touched the surface of my view of the Bible today as compared to where I began. My hasty summary nevertheless shows that if the Bible is "inspired" by God (a view that cannot be proven), it is also to be regarded as a human product. Human beings collected and canonized the writings, and text critics established what they regard as the original wording of the texts and they still debate what words should appear as the original wording.⁵

I have learned to live with the evident lack of certainty in matters of religious faith. The major difficulty with religion is that too many are absolutely certain that their religious faith is the true faith.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹C. W. Hedrick, Unmasking Biblical Faiths (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2019), 168-70 and in particular: "Out of the Enchanted Forest. Christian Faith in an Age of Reason" pages 13-24 in When Faith Meets Reason (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 2008).

²Hedrick, "How do I Describe Myself," Wry Thoughts about Religion, Friday, February 15, 2019: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/2019/02/how-do-i-describe-myself.html.

³Hedrick, "Is Belief in the Divinity of Jesus Essential to Being Christian," Unmasking Biblical Faiths, 221-233.

⁴But this could only refer to the Jewish Scriptures in Greek (the Septuagint) for the New Testament had not yet been collected and given the status of "inspired Scripture."

⁵Hedrick, Unmasking Biblical Faiths, 87-102.

How is Jesus the Son of God?

This essay aims to be a brief summary of Christology in the New Testament and unfortunately it is longer than my blog essays usually are.

My title is awkwardly stated, unclear, and imprecise. Nevertheless, it must be so stated in order to accommodate the numerous contradictory ways that the New Testament responds to questions about Jesus' divine sonship. The question that my title appears to ask concerns the nature of Jesus: what in his nature makes divine sonship possible? Another way of putting the question asks about the process of his becoming son of God: How is it that Jesus came to be son of God? The first question is appropriate for one text; the second question is appropriate for others. Just figuring the right question to ask about Jesus' divine sonship reveals a fundamental divide in the New Testament incapable of a satisfactory resolution.

            A big part of the problem is that no New Testament text ponders the character of Jesus' divine sonship in an extended essay. A reader must track the issue through the texts searching here and there for fragments of the authors' ideas on the issue and then match them up with related ideas, sometimes from other texts.

            There appear to be in New Testament literature at least four distinct ways that early followers of Jesus explained his divine sonship.

Jesus is Chosen by God to be God's Son

            Mark presents Jesus to the reader as a fully grown man. He was a follower of John the Baptizer (1:4-9) and a skilled craftsman (6:3), who was part of a family unit having a mother and brothers and sisters (3:31-35; 6:3). At his baptism by John he has a private vision in which "the heavens are torn apart" and a voice directly addresses only him "from the heavens, You are my beloved son" (1:9-11; cf. Ps 2:7; Luke 3:22; Heb 1:6; 2 Pet 1:17).¹ Jesus makes the affirmative claim that he considers himself to be son of God (14:61-62). Hence, one is led to conclude that Mark presents Jesus as a human being whom God chooses to be his son at his baptism. In Mark what divine sonship appears to mean is that Jesus has authority over nature, disease, and evil spirits.

Jesus is born son of God

            This view of Jesus' divine sonship is held by the authors of Matthew and Luke who present to the reader two different narratives of his birth. In Matthew the reader is told that Mary has conceived a child from a holy spirit (Matt 1:18, 20) in fulfillment of what the Lord spoke through the prophet Isaiah (Matt 1:23): a young woman will give birth to a child who will be named Emmanuel (Isaiah 7:14). What this means, Matthew takes from the name of the child, which being interpreted is "God with us" (Matt 1:23). Even though the divine sonship of Jesus is acknowledged by the demonic world (8:29), recognized by his disciples (14:33), publicly announced to the people assembled at his baptism by John (3:16-17) and to his inner circle at the transfiguration (17:1-8), Jesus still evades the question of the high priest: "tell us if you are the Christ, the son of God"; Jesus evades the question (26:62-64). Matthew, however, presents the child to the reader as the son of God (Matt 16:16) by virtue of his divine conception and birth, but does not explain the appellation "son of God" further.

            Luke's imagery about the birth of the child is more graphic than that of Matthew. An angel announces to Mary that the Lord is 'with you'" (1:28), which greatly upset Mary (1:29). The angel replies do not be afraid "for you have found favor with God" (1:30) and clarifies that she will conceive and bear a son and name him Jesus (1:31). This child will be great and called "son of the Most High" (1:32). Mary asks how does that happen because she has not "known a man" (1:34). The angel responds in language mildly evocative of a physical encounter:

A holy spirit will come upon you and power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the child being born will be called a holy son of God. (1:35, italics mine)

Powers of the demon world acknowledge his divine sonship (4:41; 8:28). It is announced to Jesus in a private vision at his baptism (3:21-22) and to his inner circle at the transfiguration (9:35-36), where a heavenly voice calls him "my son the Chosen One." Nevertheless, Jesus twice publicly evades the question of his divine sonship (22:66-71).

Jesus is Inherently the Son of God

In the Gospel of John two things are immediately clear. The first is that there never was a time when Jesus was not the divine son of God. In the poetic section on the Word at the beginning of the gospel (1:1-18) the Word is identified as the "one and only from the Father" (1:14) and the "one and only God in the bosom of the Father" (1:18). Thus, he is inherently divine. What I mean by inherently is: "Involved in the constitution or essential character of something; belonging by nature."² Or as the Revised English Bible puts it:

In the beginning the Word already was. The Word was in God's presence and what God was, the Word was. He was with God at the beginning. (1:1-2)

The second clarity of John is that the author insists that Jesus is not "a" son of God rather he is the "one and only" son of God (1:14, 18; 3:16,18). The only passage in which the appellation "the son of God" appears in John without the article "the" (ὁ) is John 10:36, while in the synoptics it appears frequently without the article.

            The Word "becoming flesh" (1:14) in the Gospel of John is not describing a birth. It is an "enfleshment" of the primal Word, who was from the beginning (1:1-2). The description is akin to a pre-Pauline hymnic section, where describing Jesus Paul states:

Although he was in the form of God,

Did not regard equality with God

As something to be exploited

But emptied himself,

Taking the form of a slave,

Being born in the likeness of men.

And being found in form as a man,

He humbled himself…(Phil 2:6-8)

In other words, he wasn't a human being but only temporarily took human form.

Enfleshment was a manifestation of a temporary condition (1:14) that did not affect his essentially divine character.

Jesus becomes a Child of God through Faith

Literary fragments of such a view survive, hinting at what may have been the case—if these fragments ever became fully developed and then were simply swept into the dustbin of history by a rising orthodoxy, and forgotten. One hint that there may have been such a such a view of Jesus is the appearance of a rare appellation for Jesus that survives in Acts (3:15; 5:31) and Hebrews (2:10; 12:2). Jesus is called archēgos, which has usually been translated "pioneer" in the New Testament.³ He is a pioneer, according to the author of Hebrews, in that "it was fitting that he…in leading many sons to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through [his own] sufferings" (Heb 2:10): that is to say, suffering perfected him as the pioneer of a Way of faith. Hence, Jesus was not the perfect son of God who suffered "in our behalf" (Rom 5:8). His own faith and confidence in God (Gal 2:16) and perfection through suffering qualified him to lead the Way to glory for many other sons of God (Heb 2:10). It is in this way that Jesus became the firstborn among many brothers (Rom 8:29).

            A second hint is found in the Pauline correspondence, when Paul refers to followers of Jesus being "justified through the faith of Jesus" rather than being justified "through faith in Jesus." That is to say: it was what Jesus believed that mattered rather than what people believed about him:

…a person is not justified by works of the law but through the faith of Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by the faith of Christ and not by works of the law…(Gal 2:16).⁴

A third hint lies in Luke's description of a sect called "the Way" (Acts 9:2; 19:9, 23; 22:4; 24:14, 22). The name likely derives from members of the group describing themselves as following the way of the Lord or God (Acts 13:10; 18:25-26) or the Way of life or salvation (Acts 2:28; 16:17). Nothing else is known of this group. Nevertheless, if these references to the Way are historical and not Luke's creation, the Way appears to have been an early nascent movement around Jesus growing out of Israelite traditions.⁵

Conclusion

It will depend on who is drawing the conclusions. There are two institutions that have an interest in this material, the institutional church and critical New Testament scholarship.⁶ Let me draw two conclusions in the form of challenges to both. For the institutional church the question becomes how can deference continue to be rendered to the dominance of Pauline Christology in the face of such diversity? On the other hand, scholarship has long been aware of the diversity of ideas in New Testament Christology. For my colleagues the question becomes, has that diversity grown larger? Is the recognition of another kind of "Christology" valid?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹See Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 112-13. The Western reading adds to Mark 1:11: "This day have I begotten thee." In Matt 3:17 the voice from the heavens addresses the crowd: "This is my beloved son."

²Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1990): s.v. inherent.

³Other ways it has been translated is leader, ruler, prince, instigator, originator, founder, author. See Danker/Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago, 2nd ed., 2000).

⁴See Arthur Dewey et al., The Authentic Letters of Paul. A New Reading of Paul's Rhetoric and Meaning (Polebridge Press, 2010), 65-66.  In recent years Gal 2:16 has been mistranslated as "faith in Christ."

⁵See Hedrick, Wry Thoughts about Religion Blog: "The Gospel of Mark and the Way, a Sect reported in Acts," Monday, January 11, 2021: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/search?q=the+way

⁶If Hector Avalos is correct in his assessment of contemporary biblical scholarship, there may be three institutions concerned with the material. Avalos describes what he calls an ecclesial-academic complex in the field of biblical studies, in which "much of biblical scholarship still exists as part of a commitment to specific religious traditions and bears an apologetic subtext." See Hector Avalos, "Review of Charles W. Hedrick, Unmasking Biblical Faiths." Review of Biblical Literature 2020, by the Society of Biblical Literature.