Cave art all over the world shows digits may have been ritually removed, rendering Christian gospel accounts calling for self-mutilation less exceptional

In a paper presented at a recent meeting of the European Society for Human Evolution, researchers point to 25,000-year-old paintings in France and Spain that depict silhouettes of hands. On more than 200 of these prints, the hands lack at least one digit. In some cases, only a single upper segment is missing; in others, several fingers are gone. ... Four sites in Africa, three in Australia, nine in North America, five in south Asia and one in south-east Asia contain evidence of finger amputation. “This form of self-mutilation has been practised by groups from all inhabited continents,” said Collard. “More to the point, it is still carried out today, as we can see in the behaviour of people like the Dani.”

More. 

 

The Christian gospel accounts have been dismissed perennially as mere hyperbole:

And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. 

-- Matthew 5:29f.

Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.

-- Matthew 18:8f.

And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched:

Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.

And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched:

Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.

And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire:

Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.

-- Mark 9:43ff.

 

This older tradition is remembered in stark contrast to the miracle working Jesus of resurrection imagination who is wont to undo some of these extreme expressions of repentance:

The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. 

-- Matthew 11:5

And great multitudes came unto him, having with them those that were lame, blind, dumb, maimed, and many others, and cast them down at Jesus' feet; and he healed them:  Insomuch that the multitude wondered, when they saw the dumb to speak, the maimed to be whole, the lame to walk, and the blind to see: and they glorified the God of Israel. 

-- Matthew 15:30f. 

And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple; and he healed them. 

-- Matthew 21:14 

And in that same hour he cured many of their infirmities and plagues, and of evil spirits; and unto many that were blind he gave sight. Then Jesus answering said unto them, Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached.

-- Luke 7:21f.

The prophet Ezekiel opposed the spiritual determinism of the Torah, favoring instead the personal responsibility of the individual

The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him. 

-- Ezekiel 18:20 

Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; 

-- Exodus 20:5

And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.  

-- Exodus 34:6f.

The LORD is longsuffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.

-- Numbers 14:18

Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me,

-- Deuteronomy 5:9

'You show lovingkindness to thousands, and repay the iniquity of the fathers into the bosom of their children after them—the Great, the Mighty God, whose name is the LORD of hosts.'

-- Jeremiah 32:18

 

The Fourth Gospel notably makes the issue a burning one during the ministry of Jesus, but makes Jesus not exactly a Solomon for his take on it, which is reminiscent of his answer whether to pay taxes to Caesar or not:

And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. 

-- John 9:2f.

Luke, however, presents a Jesus who takes no prisoners.

He clearly places Jesus against the view of Ezekiel. Jesus explicitly makes his own generation responsible, and liable, for the murder of ALL past prophets, all the way back to ABEL (Can't you just hear his defenders shouting, But this is clearly hyperbole!?):

That the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation; From the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple: verily I say unto you, It shall be required of this generation. 

-- Luke 11:50f.

And Matthew's gospel does the same:

That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar. Verily I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation.

-- Matthew 23:35f. 

 

The truth is the Torah is also divided on the issue.

A proponent of the view of Ezekiel somehow sneaked it into the code and it won enough acceptance to become a touchstone:

The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin. 

-- Deuteronomy 24:16

But the children of the murderers he slew not: according unto that which is written in the book of the law of Moses, wherein the LORD commanded, saying, The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, nor the children be put to death for the fathers; but every man shall be put to death for his own sin. 

-- II Kings 14:6

But he slew not their children, but did as it is written in the law in the book of Moses, where the LORD commanded, saying, The fathers shall not die for the children, neither shall the children die for the fathers, but every man shall die for his own sin.

-- II Chronicles 25:4

 

The perennial problems of good and evil, justice and mercy, the community and the individual, are mightily wrestled with by religion, but hardly resolved by it.

It could hardly be otherwise.

 

The harebrained Peter Leithart writes that "we fill up what is lacking in Christ’s suffering" at First Things

Here.

It's a textbook example of ignorant exegesis, in this case of Colossians 1:24.

Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body's sake, which is the church

Νῦν χαίρω ἐν τοῖς παθήμασιν μου ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν καὶ ἀνταναπληρῶ τὰ ὑστερήματα τῶν θλίψεων τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου ὑπὲρ τοῦ σώματος αὐτοῦ ὅ ἐστιν ἡ ἐκκλησία

Paul isn't saying there's anything insufficient or lacking in Christ's afflictions. He's saying he himself is lacking in them, which is why he says to begin with that he rejoices in his sufferings.

Those sufferings fill up what he asserts to be a deficit of them in his experience, "in my flesh" (ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου), which might seem surprising given his statements elsewhere about their ubiquity in his missionary activity. So Paul is clearly speaking a little hyperbolically about himself here. Or perhaps ironically. In comparison with most every one of his contemporaries, he has already suffered much. The point Paul wishes to make is that his service to the church as Apostle to the Gentiles is validated when he experiences suffering and affliction, and so he welcomes those things. The more he suffers for the sake of the gospel, the more the church should know the validity of his calling. "When I am weak, then am I strong", etc.   

This is an entirely autobiographical statement by Paul as an apostle, an example of the defense of himself he is wont to make against his opponents, rather than a recommendation for or illustration of the normal Christian life (compare his counsel elsewhere to ordinary folk to live peaceably with all men, live quietly, work with your hands, etc.).

To suggest otherwise is ignorant and needlessly feverish.

A Jesuit imagines that he would have been exempt from Jesus' call to discipleship because he has a child to support

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, in "Are Christians really supposed to be communists? A response to David Bentley Hart" in America: The Jesuit Review, here:

Jesus, we are told, did not just speak in parables, he spoke in hyperbole. Quite right: Nobody thinks that Jesus actually wants you to pluck your eye out if it drives you to lust. (Wouldn’t you be just as able to lust after a beautiful person with just one eye?) What is wrong is to stop once we have said this.

Professor Hart is wrong and the church is right. There are vocations, and some Christians are called to total poverty; others are called to live in the world, and therefore to engage in market transactions, to earn wages and to accumulate savings to provide economic security for their families. No church father, catechism, encyclical or council has ever preached the opposite. What is wrong is to stop once we have said this, as his critics would have us.

Here’s the rub: The fact that I can know that God does not want me to give up all worldly goods because I support a child is precisely why I cannot rest easy. The fact that my vocation is perfectly acceptable to God is why Jesus’ thunderous words still apply to me. Jesus’ dramatic, hyperbolic words are a reminder that even while maintaining my vocation as a petit bourgeois, I can always be more radical in how I love and how I give to my fellow man. “Fearful it is to fall in the hands of the living God,” Kierkegaard reminds us in the same passage I quoted above. And how reassuring it would be for petit bourgeois Christians like myself to tell ourselves that the way Jesus preaches is for the others, for those who go into the desert.

To put it simply: poverty sine glosa is not the only way for the Christian. But that reminder should always be followed up by the always urgent reminder that we could still do with a lot less glosa and a lot more poverty.

As usual, this confused mess arises precisely because it is divorced from the all important context of the history of early Christian apocalyptic. Divorce Jesus' message from that and all that remains is one form of compromise with the world or another. Anything can then be made of it, and has. The error arises when the existence of early Christian poverty and communism is not seen simply as evidence of this original apocalyptic context, but instead as a prescription. The same error takes Paul's compromises as an entrepreneur for a blessing of capitalism. "Is" does not mean "ought".

It will not do, as Gobry does, to say "virtually all church fathers missed" the early Christian call to poverty and communism. The great value of Hart's essay is to show the fathers' knowledge of it, and to link it to the evidence for it in Scripture. Gobry simply ignores all this.

The imminent end of the world as imagined by Jesus and even Paul has little to offer in the way of life instruction for an interminable future, whether spiritually conceived, for example as the hermitism of the Desert Fathers or the monasticism still thriving on the eve of the Reformation, or materially, as the base conceptions of mercantilism, capitalism, fascism, socialism or communism now and again embraced by Christian thinkers.  Everything Jesus taught is repentance from this life in the face of the impending judgment. There was nothing hyperbolic about this, nor about the requirements necessary for navigating to the new reality of the arriving kingdom of God. The disciples understood this clearly, as did every hearer of Jesus' message, which is why it was at once so compelling to a few and so revolting to the many:

Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me. And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had great possessions. ... And Jesus answered and said, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel's, But he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life. -- Mark 10:21f., 29f. 

Evidently Mr. Gobry can't imagine any of The Twelve were deadbeat dads.

Paul himself, the first theologian to compromise the teaching of Jesus and get away with it, didn't even recommend his own capitalist industriousness in the service of the gospel, not to mention class struggle nor freedom from slavery nor any other social value, because he himself retained the apocalyptic outlook where everything is impermanent. Paul's was a halfway house of vocationalism where everyone was to remain in the state in which they were called because of the impending end of the world, whether slave, free, married, unmarried, etc.:

Only, let every one lead the life which the Lord has assigned to him, and in which God has called him. This is my rule in all the churches. Was any one at the time of his call already circumcised? Let him not seek to remove the marks of circumcision. Was any one at the time of his call uncircumcised? Let him not seek circumcision. For neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision, but keeping the commandments of God. Every one should remain in the state in which he was called. Were you a slave when called? Never mind. But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity. For he who was called in the Lord as a slave is a freedman of the Lord. Likewise he who was free when called is a slave of Christ. You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men. So, brethren, in whatever state each was called, there let him remain with God. Now concerning the unmarried, I have no command of the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord's mercy is trustworthy. I think that in view of the present distress it is well for a person to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be free. Are you free from a wife? Do not seek marriage. But if you marry, you do not sin, and if a girl marries she does not sin. Yet those who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you that. I mean, brethren, the appointed time has grown very short; from now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the form of this world is passing away. -- 1 Cor.7:17ff. 

This so-called hyperbolism of apocalyptic was anything but. It only waned because history ensued and destroyed its very credibility, including Paul's halfway house of the already/not yet. Faced with its basis in the false predictions of the end, the Christians had to adapt their story to reality or die. What had become no longer conceivable they replaced with something less susceptible of contradiction, something at once more durable because it was by definition social but ironically also actually hyperbolic, something which made sense of the failures and transformed them into victory, the doctrine and practice of the Real Presence:

"Take, eat; this is my body. ... Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins." 

This actual hyperbole became the center of the holy catholic faith, and remains so to this day for over a billion of the world's Christians. Perhaps that's why Christians such as Gobry read hyperbolism into everything which competes with it, especially when it comes from Catholicism's enemies the Orthodox and the Protestants: "Hart, a tireless basher of Protestant theology (not one of his least virtues), has produced a crypto-Protestant theology out of his exegesis".

They know their own error only too well. 

 

The flight of the hyperbole

Hyperboles, so daring and so bold,

Disdaining bounds, are yet by rules control'd;

Above the clouds, but yet within our sight,

They mount with truth, and make a tow'ring flight.

-- George Granville (1666-1735)

A Rob Bell Sympathizer Admits "Spiritual" Experience Can Be Manufactured

"[S]o many Christian teachers oversell, and therefore inevitably underdeliver—or better, put God in the position where he will underdeliver. I suspect that in many cases, they are merely using hyperbole to drive home a point, but I'm convinced that readers and listeners take such exaggerations literally because they desperately want them to be true. ...

"I myself have experienced a healing of severe pain in my leg. I have also almost been "slain in the Spirit" (but got hold of myself just in time!). And as the Spirit leads, I speak in tongues. I have also had ecstatic experiences when the love of God penetrated my whole being.

"And in a life of 60 years, I can count these experiences on one hand. Because I've had such experiences, I understand perfectly the desire to have them all the time, and to imagine that maybe there is a technique, a method, a way to pray, a way to be open and alert—something!—that will allow me to experience this daily. Believe me, I tried that for a while and discovered that, yes, I could manufacture something very similar to a genuine spiritual experience. But it soon became clear that the search for daily wonder was creating a religion of Mark Galli."

-- Mark Galli, here

Yeah, well, what if the "genuine" experiences were in fact manufactured, too? It's the rare, unwilling conversions which interest me, the road-to-Damascus sort which are devoid of "the religion of feeling". Rob Bell's religion of feeling, on the other hand, appeals to an American culture which has finally surrendered to the sentimental in the post-war period because of the triumph of liberalism. And in an important sense Romanticized Christianity from the Great Awakening onward paved the way for that victory, just as it paved the way for socialism and communism in early 20th century Europe. To be converted today is to reject all these forms of Christianity.

"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?"

-- Jeremiah 17:9

"My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever."

-- Psalm 73:26

Missing the Point

In no church at the present day where the Lord's Supper is offered is there even a memory of its original meaning.

This is hardly surprising when one considers that the meaning of the meal was already being lost in the middle of the first century, less than three decades since the death of Jesus. Despite the efforts of modern scholarship to recover it, most notably at the hands of Albert Schweitzer over a century ago in The Quest of the Historical Jesus, the situation in the churches today remains pretty much as it was in the nineteenth century, to the end of which Schweitzer had summed up the situation. But we ourselves aren't just nineteenth century liberals in this regard. We are still first century Corinthians.

Far from being a meal whereby grace was thought to be transmitted to the believing recipient who now resided comfortably in the kingdom of God the church, the meal was instead supposed to represent an occasion for proclamation of a message marked by earnest expectation of something not yet realized, the presence of Jesus: "For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come" (1 Cor. 11:26). It was not a question of the Real Presence, but of the future presence. This longing for the Lord's imminent return had received its inspiration from the eschatological message of Jesus itself, but that message was already in the process of being reinterpreted and was losing its original force. Otherwise the Corinthians would not have inquired of Paul about it, as 1 Cor. 7:1 shows, and Paul would not have so replied.

Close inspection of the correspondence shows that Paul was disdainful of the demeanor of some of the Corinthians, based in part on the false assumption of some who thought that the kingdom of God had already come in some sense. Paul even mocks them for it: "And what hast thou that thou didst not receive? Now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it? Now ye are full, now ye are rich, ye have reigned as kings without us: and I would to God ye did reign, that we also might reign with you" (1 Cor. 4:7-8). But the fact was, they didn't reign, and neither did Paul. As far as Paul was concerned, all the posturing of the Corinthians amounted to nothing but words. If they wanted to see evidence of the kingdom of God, he would come and show it to them in his capacity as an apostle of Jesus Christ, not in words, but in power (1 Cor.4: 19-21). This would not be a meeting of equals, where the outlaw Josey Wales meets Ten Bears.

Eschatological urgency is about the last thing the church wants to talk about today. The subject is too embarrassing, because the data raise uncomfortable questions. This is why one will hardly ever hear a preacher speak candidly about Mark's gospel which introduces Jesus' proclamation of the gospel of the kingdom of God in explicitly eschatological terms: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel" (Mark 1:15). The coming of the kingdom is so close, in fact, "that there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power" (Mark 9:1). Jesus himself expects not to eat the Supper after having just instituted it "until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God" (Mark 14:25). A Jesus of this sort could be someone who never expected to found a church, let alone a sacrament to sustain it. And based upon the relentless unfolding of history and the stubborn failure of it to come to a close, such a Jesus might possibly have been mistaken that the coming kingdom was just around the corner. The church already had had to respond to such questions by the time of the composition of 2 Peter: "There shall come in the last days scoffers . . . saying 'Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation'" (3:3-4).

The rationalization of the data which is now routine in most of Christendom prattles on about "the already and the not yet," wanting to have it both ways because that's what history has forced the church to do. The standard line of retreat is to assert that "the realized dimension of the kingdom of God is incomplete apart from the death-resurrection of Jesus and the coming of the Spirit" (R. H. Stein, The Method and Message of Jesus' Teachings, John Knox, 1995, p. 111). Paul would by no means acknowledge to the Corinthians a realized dimension of the kingdom in such terms. And if the ethics of Jesus as expressed in the gospels are sometimes too extreme, they also must be tamed in service of the hermeneutical expedient. "The ethic of Jesus is not an emergency ethic based on the nearness of the end" (Stein, p. 98). Accordingly, whatever does not fit the pre-conceived schema must not be universal ("Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God" Luke 9:60), or is a literary device of hyperbolic overstatement ("If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple" Luke 14:26). The multiplication of examples similar to these would only serve to underscore that there is a great deal of data which must be explained away.

Were it not for the fact that a piece of correspondence from Paul to the Christians at Corinth survived to become part of what we call the New Testament, we would know even less about the "sacramental" meal than we already do from the Synoptic gospels. More pointedly, however, were it not for the fact that the Corinthians had written a letter to Paul, which does not survive, asking him a number of questions about a variety of subjects, what we call First Corinthians would not have been written in response in the first place. Far from being everything we need to know to live our lives in Christ, the letters of Paul preserve but a matter of fact glimpse into the thought world of early Christianity.