The Light of the World

Jesus said in Matthew 5:14, "Ye are the light of the world."
Jesus said in John 12:46, "I am come a light into the world"

By the way, John 12:3 thru 8 also has the awesome part where Judas says, "Hey Jesus, that ointment Mary is putting on your feet is really expensive, why not sell it and give the money to the poor?"  Jesus says, "The poor will always be around, but I won't be."  By way of explanation, John says that Judas planned to steal the money from the ointment sale, though how John knew that is unclear, why Jesus couldn't have simply prevented such a theft is unclear, and why Jesus would need or want such an extravagance is unclear.

But I digress...

I was reading my friend Nathan's latest blog, which you can see here.  The bulk of this blog post is written in response to what he wrote.  I was going to post it as a comment on his blog, but my comment was too long.  To summarize Nate's post, he got into a discussion with some Muslims about intolerance for non-believers written into the Qur'an.  Nathan's point is that allowing people the freedom to discover their religious faith is very important, and edicts of belief, like "believe or we'll cut your hand off," transform religion from a "metaphysical orientation" to a simple "social order."  It's this bleeding into a kind of social order where religion gets mixed up with the state, and religious belief becomes a matter of servile adherence to law rather than a choice.

Nathan cites Kierkegaard, saying this choice is a key feature of Christianity.  Christianity's paradoxes require an active, voluntary choice, a leap of faith.  If I may add my own observation, it would seem to enter Christian the faith required is a more substantial leap because you must sacrifice some of your reason (call it doubt, if you will), which most people hold dear.  Nate goes on to say believers become hypocrites when they decree by law that people must have faith when the believers themselves came to faith through choice.

Nathan closes with this sentence:

I can't speak for Muslims, and by no means do I mean to make any offensive presuppositions, but as Christians we have to walk by faith and not by the law, lest we lift up the law more than our lawmaker, and the text more than the author.

My response begins with 2 John, 1:7-11.

For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.
Look to yourselves, that we lose not those things which we have wrought, but that we receive a full reward.
Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son.
If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed:
For he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds.

I understood God to be the author of the Bible, so I'm not clear on the force of the distinction between the author and the text.  Nevertheless, does this Bible passage not display the same spirit of intolerance for non-believers displayed in the Qur'an, where those who "fight GOD" are to be killed, crucified, mutilated, or banished?  I won't go into the treatment of non-believers in the Old Testament.

I remembered this Bible passage because I just heard a preacher on the radio going over this a few days ago.  He was talking about how to evangelize and said to simply confess the word to non-believers, but not to associate with them.  He specifically said, "and it says 'neither bid him Godspeed,' and so do not even greet them or wish them a good day, because as is written, you participate in their evil-doing."  And this guy wasn't a nutcase, he's on Bott Radio Network, nationally syndicated, mostly on FM stations, pretty "mainstream" for the evangelicals.

But then you have 1 John 4:20

If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?

Nathan wrote about people having the freedom to decide on their beliefs, but any belief system, whether nationalistic or religious, must include intolerance for non-belief in the core ideas of the system.  Without this intolerance, it ceases to be a system and is simply a set of personal beliefs.

So long as you belief your way and I believe my way, we can tolerate each other.  But if we get together and try to establish a system, a structure, an order, we must then agree that some things are true and some are false, some beliefs are included and some are excluded.  And people that want to join our system must agree to the basic beliefs that formed the system, otherwise there is no system.

So for example, I think it's fair to say that all Christians must believe in Christ's divinity.  If the word "Christian" is to have any meaning, I think it starts there.  Most people probably have stricter qualifications, but to be any kind of Christian, you must believe in Christ's divinity.

Further, you can't be in the group if you're undecided or refuse to believe Christ's divinity, because everyone's belief systems are in flux.  We don't really decide on beliefs, we're constantly re-evaluating them.  If someone who doesn't believe lingers in the group, they can disrupt the whole cohesion of the group.  That's why Christians are instructed not to associate with non-Christians, because they can be influenced to change their minds about Christ simply by hanging out with non-believers.  Even if they never talk about religion, the example of non-belief being acceptable slowly eats away at the group.

I think the injunctions against non-believers are more severe in the Qur'an than the Bible because Islam is also a system of government, not simply a religion.  By the same token, treason is the only crime specifically defined in our Constitution.  Non-belief in the system, more than any other possible crime, is the most threatening to the system.  Treason may seem like a much more severe action than heresy, but simple words have much more force when your system is built on ideas and beliefs, like a religion.  Is it hypocrasy?  Perhaps, but it's also the only way a group of people can move from saying "This is what I believe" to "This is what we believe"

Nathan also writes that law "cannot suggest to reflect the morality of God, because it's presumptuous to assume people are capable of the same reasoning or understanding God has."  Yet we must make some law, because people are between purity and corruption, good and bad.  We need some restrictions upon which we can enjoy a fuller flower of freedom than would otherwise be possible.  If we are incapable of understanding God's reasoning, what are we to do with the laws he hands us through religious texts?

Ultimately, we can only judge them with the faculties we possess, apply what works, and pitch what doesn't.  By this process, we become the final arbiters of morality, and God is merely a contributor to its process instead of its source.  Once God is relegated to a secondary position, only then are we capable of looking at his commands to kill or shun non-believers and call them abhorrent.

Again, if God is the source of morality and we cannot understand his reasoning, then we can only accept the rules he gives us without question.  However, if morality has no "source", but is instead cobbled together from our experiences and intuitions, we can test and judge the laws of God.  Nate seems to say that religion starts as a metaphysical orientation and then is corrupted by being moved into the realm of social order.  I think the process is reversed, that historically religions have started as ways of organizing societies and it's only with enlightenment thinking, which recognized human potential, that religion has become a matter of personal choice.

If God is the center and source of the system, the ruler of the universe, then it's inherently a social order, and so non-belief is extremely dangerous.  Once mankind establishes its own system, however imperfect, God becomes optional, a belief to be explored at leisure for personal fulfillment.  But when this happens, God has fundamentally changed.  He no longer rules the universe, but is part of it.  Perhaps he simply is the universe, an idea so vast that it humbles us without command, strikes fear in us without wrath, pulls us closer to one another simply by awe of the emptiness around us.

And so maybe there is the crux of the problem.  We still need wonder, need purpose, need "God" in some sense, but he can finally shed his lightning bolts and locusts plagues and endless hermeneutics.  Maybe if we stop thinking of these holy books as singular, special sources of revelation, we can find God revealing himself all around us in everything.  He can simply be our will to better ourselves, our innate sense of justice, our desire for community.