THE JESUS STORY CONTINUED

HIDDEN MIND REVEALED

Continuing the Jesus Story

Search for the Real Parents of My Soul

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 30, 2015

This was first written in my thirties, fresh back from a disturbing and revealing experience in South Africa at the time of apartheid in that country.  This now finds me in my eighties.

South Africa was disturbing, not only because of the draconian practice of apartheid or separation of the races by the Afrikaner government, but this practice compounded with the slim white minority (20 percent) totally controlling the lives and livelihood of the black and brown majority (80 percent).

Imagine a rather idealistic young man with his young family who had risen out of modest circumstances being treated like colonial royalty.  Then add to this seeing the hidden side of his own white society and culture, as well as being introduced to the hidden side of his own mind.  It proved shattering as he thought himself strong, and found himself fragile, and this sense has never left him.

He came home to the United States a broken man, resigned his promising career, suspending himself and his family in an ambivalent economic limbo, while he spent his days reading books, playing tennis, freeze framed in this modus operandi for two years, then once nearly broke, going back to school for six years, changing disciplines from the hard to the soft sciences to earn a Ph.D.

The straitjacket world of the corporation and all its institutional antennae would never again have the same hold on him that they had had previously.  That included his Roman Catholic faith.

He was no longer affluent, but poor; no longer a person of distinction and achievement, but one of the rank and file.  He was, however, free, freer than he had ever been, free to make choices, free to fail, pick himself up and try again, free not to care or too care too much, free to return to his modest roots and make connection with the person he had left behind.

He discovered in his eclectic reading, Krisnamurti, and his theosophy, a man who seemed to speak to him in his dilemma:

The hidden mind is far more potent than the superficial mind, however well-educated and capable of adjustment; and it is not something very mysterious.  The hidden or unconscious mind is the repository of racial memories.  Religion, superstition, symbols, peculiar traditions of a particular race, the influence of literature both sacred and profane, of aspirations, frustrations, mannerisms, and varieties of food, all these are rooted in the unconscious  (Krishnamurti 1963).

From my earliest memory, I have been schooled to think of God in general and my Roman Catholicism in particular in painfully subjective and absolute terms.  Through education, and experience, this proved a myopic view of my situation and a condition that discouraged me from exploring my hidden side. 

It was a strange feeling to discover that I had tunnel vision as if I was looking through the wrong end of my telescope.  From this aspect, reading widely if not always wisely of the major and minor religions of man, from the animism of the tribes of South Africa to the esoteric mind games of the parapsychologists, I felt my Roman Catholicism superior to these more primitive preoccupations. 

Moreover, were I not a member of the only true church established by Jesus Christ?  This I had heard from birth on, never questioned, but internalized with full confidence that it was true.

It found me an engaged student and participant in all things Catholic: from religious attendance at mass every Sunday and Holy Day, and weekly Confession on Saturdays and Holy Communion on Sundays from elementary, high school and through college. 

Then as a husband, father and tither as a young adult, I followed the Ecumenical Second Vatican Council (1962 and 1965) while Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI reigned in Rome.

Before that, I was an altar boy at St. Patrick’s Catholic Elementary, winning the Christian Scholarship and the Latin Scholarship medals in eighth grade for excellence in those disciplines, in a word, I was a receptive Catholic sponge.

By a matter of serendipity, I would have the occasion to visit with Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen at the Shrine of Fatima in Lisbon, Portugal, and to be part of a US military audience with Pope Pius XII and Pope Paul VI. 

Through my military and executive careers, I would have an opportunity to visit many of the great Cathedrals in North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and South Africa, many described with eloquence by in The Mind and Art of Henry Adams (1957) and Henry Adam’s Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1905).

From 1956 on, I have had the privilege to observe Christian edifices from splendid opulence to ravishing neglect across four continents, writing something of a polemic of these observations in a 1970 book titled, The Silent Sentinel Speaks Out, which happily a Catholic publisher Paulist Press rejected.  It was written when I returned from South Africa to the United States in 1969.

During the 1990s, extensive research was conducted with a dozen visits to my hometown of Clinton, Iowa with the purpose of writing a book about what it was like to grow up as a preteenager during the Second World War (1941-1945).  That book was published as In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (2003).

During that research, five Catholic churches and schools were razed as the Davenport Dioceses had been forced to downsize radically in the wake of the sexual abuse scandal of Catholic priests across America, which costs the Catholic Church hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in reparations to the victims. 

St. Patrick’s church, rectory and school were demolished with the intention of building a senior adult center on the real estate.  That was more than a decade ago.  The naked land stares at passersby with these beautiful edifices now only in old timers’ memory.

With it being 2015, and me in my eighties, the sense of the Roman Catholic Church has never left me, although I no longer attend services, no longer make visits as I once did routinely, no longer make the “Sign of the Cross” when I pass a Catholic Church, and no longer see organized religion as important in my life, or me important in the church’s.  Like a father’s voice that never leaves your head, the church has never left mine.

As society has become increasingly secular, and the church with it, I have found myself becoming more attentive to my hidden side where my spirituality resides.

In renewing this Search for the Real Parents of My Soul, the church has faded into the secular shadows but strangely, the Jesus Story has not as it has come to fill the spiritual void. 

Dutifully, I have surveyed many of the tens of thousands of views on the Jesus Story, incorporating samples here, rereading academics in psychology, psychiatry and sociology who have taken positions on Christianity and on Jesus in particular, all to gain a more meaningful and authentic perspective on the Jesus Story for me. 

With sociologist and economist Max Weber as my guide, I have conducted this journey through the social psychology of religion only to discover it is actually the religion of social psychology.  To wit:

The sociological study of religion is relatively recent.  Auguste Comte (1798- 1857), credited with being the father of sociology, was one of the first to direct attention to what may be called the sociological problems of religion.

Some scholars in this field did, however, allude to religious beliefs as myths, and hence wrote as if the truth or falsity of religious statements were of sociological concern.  This was the case with Richard R. Tawney’s book, “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.”  He saw the Protestant Church, in particular, as having uncritically and unfortunately advance the cause of capitalism.  The conclusions reached in his study do make value judgments about religion.

The question, however, is whether he wrote as a sociologist or a moralist.  A similar question may be raised with regard to Max Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.  There seems to be little doubt that Weber was unsympathetic toward many of the allegiances which Protestants had demonstrated.  Are such expressions of antipathy sociological conclusions, or philosophical conclusions, or are they simply part of Weber’s autobiography? (Wells 1962)

Besides Wells, Elton (1963), Samuelsson (1961), C. H. and K. George (1961), W. S. Hudson (1961) and R. W. Green (1959) have wondered in print about this problem.  Now, we have Pope Francis I who sounds much like them only as something of a scold from the perspective of institutional Catholicism as a social psychologist if not a social psychiatrist and moral philosopher.

His Supreme Eminence became pope in March 2013 when Pope Benedict XVI resigned unable to cope with a church that didn’t behave as he would like, not to mention the scandals and dysfunction at the heart of the church.

While the popular Pope John Paul II resembled the arrogance and charisma of St. Paul in his ministry, Pope Francis I reminds one of servant leadership more in the unscripted style,  spontaneity and humility of Jesus. 

It would appear that I’ve been looking for someone like Jesus to emerge out of the firmament.  Permit me to explain.  In my novel, “A Green Island in a Black Sea,” Dirk Devlin, the young conflicting American executive in South Africa reflects:

Dostoyevsky had a fever for the Special One, not as the Anointed Christ but as the vine to which he felt tethered.  The “God” thing was a problem for him.  Why did the Special One have to be God, when clearly Jesus was quite a man?

He doubted if he would see faith and science on a collision course but rather believed they were parallel universes.  Devlin’s faith was the heart of his imagination, science the mind of his reason.  Why should these two worlds collide?  Yet they did for the Special One whose faith was His science.  Jesus told it as He saw it and saw it as He told it, and for that He was crucified? 

The Special One had contempt for hierarchies, for pomp and circumstance, for grand costumes and exalted pretense.  He wore his badge of lower class like knighthood.  Devlin wondered why this had not survived in his church.

The Special One was a rebel, an outsider, who despised the herd mentality.  He formed a community of dregs and sinners.  What would the Special One think of the church in his name? 

When Devlin was a small boy, he went to St. Boniface Church and School, there Father Sunbrueller could not raise his rhetoric above sin or the fire and brimstone of hell.  Never did Devlin hear a single word in love about the Special One.  Jesus rarely talked about sin or hell.  Devlin wondered if the Special One would accept the seven deadly sins, or see sin as he did in terms of waste and deceit. 

“Dear Jesus,” he whispered as he thought of his life going forward with a potpourri of marginal but pressing demands, “I am younger than you were when you died.  My cross is my refusal to be predictable.  My wonder is whether my life is about over or ready to begin.” 

He waited in silence for an answer.  When none came, he got up from the pew and walked into the late morning sunlight to take on the world.

Pope Francis I reminds me now, in my eighties, of the Special One, the Good Shepherd, when Devlin, my alter ego in the novel, was but thirty-years-old.  But is Pope Francis too late to save a dying religion as well as a dying church?

His Holiness doesn’t talk in hyperbole about the world as did Pope Benedict who blamed the increased marginalization of Christianity in Western society on a collective apostasy rooted in the materialism of secular modern society. 

Pope Francis, like Jesus, was local and specific with the focus on the poor, the disadvantaged, the forgotten and the unloved. 

He refuses to blame the church’s spiritual ailment on secularism for that had no purchase with him, but on institutional Catholicism, that is, the church itself sounding much like a social scientist. 

His Christmas message in December 2014 was replete with catchy phrases that were like punches to the solar plexus as were those of Jesus in Jerusalem to the Chief Priests and Elders in the Temple who had varied from their appointed tasks.

Not commonly understood, the conclave of Roman Catholic Cardinals in the Curia dictate the church’s business and create its ubiquitous but shadowy profile.  It is from here that church’s money laundering and fraud have been traced.

Popes come and go but the Curia is immortal.  That is especially disturbing with this pope clearly the Good Shepherd, a servant to all men, but alas, living with one lung. 

That notwithstanding, Pope Francis hit the Curia where it lives, speaking of its “spiritual narcissism” and “pathology of power.” 

He also addressed the “Martha complex” of excessive activity as surrogate to doing anything meaningful.  He accused the church hierarchy of being incapable of “weeping with those who weep,” but instead acting like “lords and masters.”   

When this behavior is brought to light, the pope claims the clergy are beset with “spiritual Alzheimer’s” which leads to building “walls and routines around them and forgetting the spirit of the Gospels.” 

He attributes this to cliquishness, acquisitiveness, careerism, competitiveness, leading to “progressive spiritual emptiness.”  Because these inclinations can become habitual “many abandon their pastoral services,” restricting their indulgence to bureaucratic matters.   

The pontiff was not through in his Christmas message. 

The “theatrical severity and sterile pessimism” comes with a “funeral face” that often “attends the use of power.”   Those so afflicted, he emphasized, “cowardly use the terrorism of gossip by which to slander, defame and discredit others, even in newspapers and magazines.” 

If these people in elevated stations in the Roman Catholic Church appear to be behaving like adolescents, I can assure you from my long corporate executive and consulting career, it is par for the course.  Look at the American Congress and its gridlock and corporate America’s industrial-military-commercial malfeasance and pettiness, and you might think those in power never left the sixth grade.

Permit me a small smile at the pontiff’s scathing rebuke of the Roman Curia and the papal administration.   His remarks, although more poetic, could easily have been lifted from one or more of my books on the state of the corporation, which I call “corpocracy.” 

For this, I have been seen as “angry.”  I write of “pyramid climbers,” who are always campaigning for the next job never having time to perform their own; on the duplicity of management which is atavistic and dysfunctional, on the internecine feuding within mahogany row, on schadenfreude that ruins careers, on the cowardly “six silent killers” that handicap organizations and institutions, but frankly, in less incendiary terms than his eminence, Pope Francis I. 

Will the church hierarchy and clergy heed the pope’s words?  His papacy appears to be turning away doctrinal and institutional concerns to a bona fide interest in and loving engagement of the poor who make up most of the world’s population.  The pope’s hidden mind is showing.  Can this lead to revealing the people’s as well?

*     *     *

"TIME OUT FOR SANITY!" -- an excerpt

Is Society Sick?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 28, 2015

REFERENCE:

Another excerpt from “Time Out for Sanity!”  Due for publication April, 2015 by Tate Publishing Company.

“Sickness is the vengeance of nature for the violation of her laws.”

—Charles Simmons (1798-1856)

American clergyman

“The proposition that the madman does not know what he is talking about, or that his utterances are untrue, is explicitly contradicted by an old German proverb which asserts ‘Only children and madmen tell the truth’.”

—Thomas S. Szasz, American psychiatrist

The Manufacture of Madness (1970)

MADNESS AS A GOAL-ORIENTED MASK & STRATEGY

Shakespeare once lamented that if a thing were real in our minds, it would be real in its consequences.  So, if we think of ourselves as in a sick society, according to the Bard, in all probability we are. Yet the evidence suggest we are functioning if ineptly so. You may say, “When was a society not sick?” Good point. Perhaps that is why we seem to push the envelope constantly as if it has an unlimited capacity to give.

It is also Shakespeare that gave us the famous phrase likening devious method to madness: “Polonius: Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.”

It would appear Elizabethan England (early seventeenth century) understood that insane behavior, no less than sane behavior, is goal-directed and motivated. Shakespearean audiences regarded the behavior of the madman as perfectly rational from the point of view of the actor or affected individual. This perspective has had to be rediscovered and defended by modern psychoanalysts and existential psychologists.

For English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) claims the difference between an insane man and a fool are that a fool draws the wrong conclusions from the right principles, while an insane person draws a just inference from false principles.

What are false principles? They are principles that fly in the face of natural law and law civil. Such would be the case of a man who kills his family because they are possessed by the devil.  Madness less extreme, however, is an everyday affair.

There are constant reminders that a tinge of madness accompanies our behavior. We insist in seeing ourselves as immortal, burning the candle at both ends, treating our bodies, minds and souls as if they can take unlimited punishment, still holding confidently to the myth of resiliency as our lungs collapse, our liver shrinks and our kidneys fail. Madness masquerades as self-indulgent modernity.

Madness is given permission to flaunt itself during social and political upheaval. Death and destruction become the norm of society as leaders save their countries by destroying them. What is war but collateral damage of the innocent as a necessary price to save a culture? You have to be a little mad to endure all this and yet function.

Kahlil Gibran catches the flavor of this in “The Madman” (1969):

“You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: one day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen—the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives-I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, ‘Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves.’  Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me. And when I reached the marketplace, a youth standing on a housetop cried, ‘He is a madman.’ I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, ‘Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks.’ Thus I became a madman. And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us. But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a thief in a jail is safe from another thief.” 

That is the dilemma. We all wear masks (our personalities).  They can imprison us if not balanced sufficiently with our essence (our character) into something approaching authenticity. And what is that?

Being authentic is having our minds, bodies, hearts and souls working in consort with us as opposed to against us. It is the difference between producing music in life consistent with our gifts rather than disruptive noise. It is being healthily skeptical of circumstances as they materialize rather than retreating into disabling cynicism. It involves knowing when to be independent and interdependent without ever falling prey to counter dependency.

In a word, it means embracing rather than retreating from life.  As an authentic person we respect our assets but are aware of our limitations, acting consistent within that framework. It is recognizing we are part of nature and thus confined to its edicts.  It is showing kindness first to ourselves so that genuine kindness can be shown to others.

THE BRACING RANT OF A REFRESHING AUTHOR

It is difficult to get through to us because of all these masks we wear that lead to self-deception. So, it should come as no surprise that serious observers often use shock as a framework to penetrate these barriers and garner our attention.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. demonstrates this in “Breakfast of Champions” (1973), a novel in which Kilgore Trout, the author’s second self, leads a thoroughly dysfunctional life. When I asked a bookseller, Charles Haslam of St. Petersburg (Florida), not a fan of Vonnegut’s writings, why this book was doing so well, he answered: “I suppose it’s because crazy as the book is he is saying something nobody understands yet seems to think, whatever it is, is important.” Haslam claims Vonnegut makes no sense to him, revealing one of his own masks.

Admittedly, Vonnegut is not for everyone as his opinions are often quite caustic. This comes through in an interview he had with the “World Peace News” (May 1972):

On the state of the arts: 

“Our arts are just another way of excluding the poor from participating in civilization. We pay two million for six feet of canvas. Opera we think is nice. So is symphony music. It seems to me there is a stupidity in all this, a case of damaged brains.”

On corporate malfeasance: 

“There is the ITT stupidity. A large idiot company finds out about playing with loaded dice! They’ve been shooting crap with everybody else, why not the government?  What’s wrong with that?”  On the state of the poor: “Of course we are now beginning to see that it’s useless to exploit the poor. We don’t have to anymore. We don’t need large labor pools anymore. We have no reason to care about what goes on in the slums. The poor rob each other, not us!  Meanwhile, someone paints blue colors on canvas and calls them the ‘Stations of the Cross.’ He wins extravagant praise! The poor don’t get it, and because they don’t get it, the poor are excluded from the ruling class. That is what art is for. A person needs to pretend an interest in these things in order to qualify. He has got to find out about art in order to prove that he’s acceptable.”

On the United Nations: 

“It’s an East Side operation.  Ambassadors, delegates, secretaries, and undersecretaries frequent parties all over the East Side. There are the decent parties of the rich. These people share the same artistic interests.  They agree Picasso is the greatest artist since Shakespeare, or maybe since Mozart. They all enjoy the opera and symphonic music. They admire each other’s furniture, and they persuade themselves that they have higher sensibilities because it is difficult to admire these things. These art things seem to baffle poor people. Some people in the ruling class suspect that poor people are too dumb to appreciate these fine things and that, therefore, the poor are not fit to rule. All this represents dumbness on everyone’s part.”  How to change all this: “We will need to teach anthropology in the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. We’ve got to get it through our heads that all cultures are equally rich.  Levi-Strauss was right. As of now, the poor man doesn’t have culture good enough to qualify him for the ruling class because he doesn’t have a beautiful apartment on the East Side. We’ve got to get through our heads that this is wrong.”

On UN delegate representatives:

“They do let some funny looking people in. Some hate symphonic music. They should be represented, too. Let someone into the UN who thinks it’s a crime to spend two million on a Velasquez or a Rembrandt. Let someone in who hates opera. Let someone in who wears suede shoes. The key is this: let someone in with bad teeth, with real root damage showing, with unstraightened rotten teeth!”

On the canary in the coal mine: 

“I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts were. The best thing I could come up with was what I call “the canary in the coal mine theory” of the arts. This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever.” 

On high school: 

“High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.” 

On writing books: “Why write books...why are we teaching people to write books when presidents and senators do not read them, and generals do not read them. And it’s been the university experience that taught me that there is a very good reason, that you catch people before they become generals and presidents and so forth and you poison their minds with...humanity, and they become generals and presidents and so forth, and however you want to poison their minds, it’s presumably to encourage them to make a better world.”

On evolution and a divine engineer: 

“I do feel evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can’t help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That’s why we’ve got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap.”

Vonnegut does not hide behind language to mask his refreshing madness. Instead, he uses plain speak to display his unconventional attitude in mind bending ways with straightforward English.  He was at the University of Iowa in the mid-1950s when I was there, and didn’t let the students down when he conducted his seminars in creative writing. Only in his early 30s at the time, he was already craggy faced from being a chain smoker of unfiltered Camels. Yet there was magnetism to him, as if devilish angels danced behind his sparkling eyes. These eyes peaked out from elephant like folds to display the pain and pleasure he observed in a dysfunctional universe.

He sent his students out to study workers in the workplace, asking them to wonder about the person that would be so employed, suggesting that work and workers after a time come to be indistinguishable from each other. For example, a powerhouse superintendent moves with the precision of the turbines he maintains and appears almost devoid of human emotion.

MADNESS AS PALLIATIVE

R. D. Laing subscribes to a similar madness. For him, everyone is crazy because everyone sees the world within through a culturally neurotic perceptual system. The only one who has a chance of getting ut of it is the one who is mentally ill, who has a breakdown and so leaves the old perceptual system behind and emerges into a new one that is less automatic and constricting.

When he was touring a schizophrenic ward with a cadre of medical students, he came to a man lying on the floor, completely nude, viewing the group quizzically. The good doctor smiled at the man, and then unceremoniously proceeded to completely disrobe and join the man naked on the floor. The two men immediately engaged in conversation. The students were shocked. One whispered to another that he was going to report the doctor.  Sensing the concern, Laing advised the students that sometimes the only way to know your clients is to meet them at their level, doing whatever that takes.

Vonnegut and Laing are asking us to step outside convention, drop our masks, and embrace a little madness because it is where we are most alive. We use the filters of sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers to separate us from ourselves by explaining our natures away. But it doesn’t appear to work, and therefore, is a waste of time and energy.

These rebels to convention imply, as does Gibran, that it is high time that we drop the pretense and shrink from the grasp of convention to discover our naked minds. This takes getting past the conceit of organic medicine, which separates physical illness from mental illness as if treatment of the body is different from the cure of the soul. This arbitrary dichotomy must be understood if we have any chance at all in being fully human, as well as our own person.

If we do, we will see it takes a little madness to get from here to there. Now, if we have little such interests that is another story.  We don’t have to worry. All our masks are in place, and “they,” whomever “they” happen to be, own us.  We may have straight white teeth, a good education, a nice home, people that care about us, so to our minds, what is all this noise about madness and society being sick? I’m just fine, we say, thank you very much. Vonnegut would suggest we have a lot in common with the powerhouse superintendent who is on automatic pilot with a dull hypnotic affect.

For argument’s sake, let us say that society is not sick. If not sick, can we say with any confidence that it is not becoming progressively passive?  It would seem the evidence is overwhelming. We spend an astonishing amount of our hard earned money and time on celebrity entertainers. We use them to escape active involvement in our own lives beyond living in insulated islands of grandeur cut off from the rest of the struggling world. What is saddest about this is that we live vicariously because we can afford it, not because it enhances our sense of self-worth.

Quite the contrary, it is a way to self-forget while being mesmerized by the sights and sounds provided by others. And now we are in the marvelous age of electronics with tweeting and texting on our mobiles to our hearts content all of our waking hours, being in the same room with others, at dinner with family or friends, in a classroom or in a work station, being cut off from life and others while being totally distractedly engaged in the social network. If this is not madness, what is?

Entertainers, technologists and entrepreneurs are the true doctors of civilization. They medicate us with their madness masquerading as artists or athletes, or innovators, while keeping our own madness at bay. We watch tennis on television rather than play the sport. We watch brainless television programs every week with an ensemble cast mouthing the same sick jokes or sorry plots ad infinitum. We post pictures and personal messages on Facebook and other social media, and when we communicate in a personal sense with others we have nothing to talk about with each other than the latest exploits of our soap opera family, or sports heroes. It led William Goldfarb to rephrase Descartes’ famous philosophical dictum: “I am doing, therefore I am.”

Emerson and Nietzsche saw man as “a god in ruin,” who must be awakened in order to fulfill his godly potential. Colin Wilson shares the sentiment. Using phenomenological analysis in his futuristic novel, “The Mind Parasites” (1968), Wilson argues man can capture and extend moments of vision and wholeness; he can expand consciousness; he can be at one with the evolutionary life force in his being; and he can chart a geography of the world of the inner mind. I, too, think he can, but will he?

British American poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) finds this doubtful. He writes in “The Hollow Men“(1925):

Between the idea

And the reality . . .

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the shadow

The “shadow” is the twinge of mistrust, the shrinking from self, the conviction that this life is all an illusion. We only have to glance at the enormous volumes of history, philosophy, theology, anthropology and psychology on the library shelves to see that very few of these authors got beyond their own shadows and around to living their own knowledge. Virtue to them was knowledge. So it has been throughout our Western history from classical Greek philosophy to the rise of Christianity to the Renaissance and the Reformation, through the American ……

PRISONER OF THE MIND (excerpt from TIME OUT FOR SANITY!)

PRISONER OF THE MIND

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 27, 2015

REFERENCE:

Excerpt from TIME OUT FOR SANITY!  It is due to be published by TATE Publishing Company in April, 2015.

“Psychological manipulation pervades all areas of society, not only through the use of skills and techniques, but through the conveyance of oppressive behavior to the oppressed themselves, and through the use of psychology as an ideology for the defense of the status quo.”

—Phil Brown, Radical Psychology (1973)

There is a reluctance to focus on the question: is society sick? This is not only a problem for professional thinkers but also for laymen. There is a kind of normalcy to the idea that society is sick and people are sick in society. So what? When has society not been sick?

The frenetic pace of society, the compulsive waste making, the robbing Peter to pay Paul, the planning for planning sake, the living without consequences, the lifestyle diseases, the looking for miraculous drugs to cure addictions, hey, what’s all the fuss about? It’s the way it is, Mac! But is it? And if so, why?

We are told we are a nation of believers in God but that doesn’t include going to church. We are told we are religious and a caring nation, but that doesn’t include knowing and fraternizing with our neighbors next door. We are told we are a melting pot of nations, but that doesn’t include socializing with other ethnic groups. We have had our portrait painted as to what we are and have had this freeze framed to be our reality, when it has little in common with our real self.

The religion of the West is imbued with the idea of God and the individual as infinitely precious and irreducibly real for his having an immortal soul. Yet, the history of carnage in the West, and violent crime in the United States, contradicts this perception.

Thinking and behaving are worlds apart.  Churches are constructed as houses of worship, but have become increasingly empty of worshipers, as modern society has moved away from religious doctrine to secular dogma.

In Freudian speak, religion once kept the “Lid on the Id,” but no longer. The moral highway has no speed limits, no consensus rules of the road, and so crashes have become the symphony of the times. We lost 55,000 Americans in the Viet Nam War. We lose that many every year on American highways as a gauge of this reckless carnage and despair.

The Id (our compulsive self) is running rampant, as there is little Superego (moral self) in evidence. We have lost our moral compass and thus our way.

The paradox is that everything is set on the rational while the emotional needle seems fixed on the irrational. Incest and murder, corruption and malfeasance, and coveting the neighbor’s wife and property have become banner headlines, not only in the supermarket rags, but also in traditional newspapers. We have lost our way. Even being nice has been replaced by being with it.

The idea of the immortal soul has been superseded by the idea of the individual personality, which is not immortal, but is considered all the more precious for not being so. Identity and role relationships have become the new psychology. The irony is that psychology rose out of philosophy and has never found its own identity much less its role. So, rather than create that role, it continues to search for its identity.

The evidence is demonstrated as psychology develops a new branch every time a perplexing problem surfaces. Currently, we have existential psychology, which rises out of the philosophy of the absurd, and humanistic psychology, which attempts to be everything and to please everybody suggesting the philosophy of the Pollyanna. The clergy, desperate for survival, grab these new psychologies as if long lost relatives, accepting their premises, and incorporating them into their sermons as if pure wisdom.

This was patently evident when Eric Berne took Freudian psychology and its quid pro quo implications and wrote “Games People Play” (1964), simplifying Freudianism to “transactional analysis,” creating the “Adult” (Ego), “Parent” (Superego”) and “Child” (Id) egostates to illustrate the dynamics of interpersonal relationships.

Thomas Harris then came along, turning Berne’s transactional analysis into a practical guide with his “I’m OK—You’re OK” (1967). A decade later, John Dusay came up with “Egograms” (1977), solidifying the role of the “Adult” (Ego), but further differentiating the “Parent” (Superego) into the “Nurturing Parent” and “Critical Parent,” and the “Child” (Id) into the “Free Child” and “Adaptive Child.” Parents, teachers, and preachers, as well as gurus latched onto this new nomenclature seeing children, as well as people in general in these schematic terms.

In this new age of the idea of the individual, we measure a person’s worth not by his bond, or what he has done, but what he can become. Becoming, not being, is the philosophy of instant celebrity consistent with instant everything.

Syndicated columnist and practicing psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer saw this trend apparent in national politics in 2013. “President Barak Obama is perhaps our greatest president as campaigner,” he reflects, “but this excellence doesn’t appear to extend to governance.” The columnist was referring to the procession of “fiscal cliffs” that had stalled monetary policy between the President and Congress from 2011 on.

Then in the fall of 2013, while promising everyone could keep their health insurance if they wanted to, which proved not to be true, the president delegated the problem solving to the bureaucracy on the Affordable Healthcare Act. Instead of rolling up his sleeves and taking charge of the enrollment computer glitch, he went on a national whistle stop campaign across the country to sell the program.

Barak Obama, the first African American President of the United States, not only shocked the nation by winning the presidency in 2008, but also confirmed the power of his personality and charismatic presence by being reelected in 2012. That said he has unwittingly personified phantom leadership or leaderless leadership, which allows events to dictate circumstances rather than initiatives to dictate events.

This is the role of the consummate actor who demonstrates neither the will nor the way to lead. And like that actor, he emotes what has the widest appeal where substance is reduced to shadows of the mind. The only problem is you cannot eat shadows and they provide little shelter or security.

Should the reader think I am taking unfair measure of our president, nothing could be further from my intention. The state of the presidency, at the moment, seems to represent the highest profile of the American collective conscience being “prisoner of the mind.” We acquire the leadership we deserve which is confirmed by our feet in voting President Obama into a second term.

President Jimmy Carter sought reelection handicapped with similar economic circumstances, but he didn’t see the role of the presidency as that of an actor, and of course actor Ronald Reagan unceremoniously replaced him.  Carter, Reagan, Obama, indeed, all presidents since the 1970s have promised “transparency,” including President Clinton, but only President Carter attempted to practice it, one time addressing a national audience on television in a polo shirt and cardigan sweater (July 15, 1979), insisting the nation had “a crisis in confidence.”

Listeners took it as a scold and were none too happy for the reminder. Viewers preferred a presidential euphemistic “hope rope a dope,” which is quite Machiavellian. The author of “The Prince” (1532) provided a practical guide to leaders on how to win and stay in power, which had little to do with virtue much less transparency, but much to do with using any means to a desired end, while giving a nod to virtue in rhetoric if not reality.  Reagan, Obama, Clinton, et. al., knew what the Renaissance author was advocating, being as clever as a fox, ruthless as a lion, while seemingly as docile as a lamb.

Leadership in the American Republic has devolved to presence and platitudes, which takes good actors, but doesn’t necessarily translate into prudent action. The more a leader can astonish us with his glibness the more vivid he is. We connote “brilliance” to presentation skills forgetting how seldom such command relates to action. Whatever the discipline, we see leadership of a politician, an artist, scientist, businessman or entertainer, not on the strength of his contribution, but on the mesmerizing quality of his presentation skills. We may see this presenter as a phantom chasing shadows, but it never occurs to us that he is our invention.

“Phantom” here is used in the Buddhist sense. The Buddhist would read the careerist’s resume with a smile as a picture in the mind without blemishes and not as a person. You cannot shake hands with a picture. A picture is a cold medium devoid of feeling other than what the observer projects of himself into the image.

There is no exchange. This makes the individual appear near perfect if unreal, while projecting that phantom world he has created as real. The motivation is to connect, but at the price of being empty of individuality, and therefore a shadow of the self. The first electronics guru of the Information Age, Marshall McLuhan, defined this as “The Medium Is The Message” (1967). He discerned that television is a cold medium and the viewer puts his subjective warmth into that cold phantom object on the screen. The aim of the televised personality is to capture the viewer’s attention with one objective in mind, to influence.

JESUS STORY CONTINUED: THE MAN JESUS: SEPARATING THE MAN FROM THE MYTH!

 THE MAN JESUS: SEPARATING THE MAN FROM THE MYTH

THE JESUS STORY (CONTINUED)

Search for the Real Parents of My Soul

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 23, 2015

 Religious scholar Reza Aslan maintains in his book “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” (2013) that it is unlikely that Jesus was able to read or write.

NOTE:

This is the last excerpt on the Jesus story.  What follows in the next section of Search for the Real Parents of My Soul is the view of the Jesus story from the perspective of a practicing social psychologist. 

*     *     *

Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry has published an article by Matt Slick who asserts “Jesus is a Man.”  Other writers, critics and scholars are making similar declarations.  Where Slick departs from the demystification is his assertion that Jesus is both divine and human in nature.  He writes:

It is biblically correct to say that Jesus is a man … But, it would be wrong to say He was only a man.  He is both divine and human in nature at the same time (Col. 2:9); He is both God and man right now.

Furthermore, Jesus' humanity now is important for two reasons.  First, this is what the Bible teaches.  Second, as a man, Jesus is a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.  As a priest He forever intercedes for us.

"Where Jesus has entered as a forerunner for us, having become a high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek." (Heb. 6:20).

"Hence, also, He is able to save those who draw near to God through Him, since He  lives to make intercession for them." (Heb. 7:25)

In order to be a priest, Jesus has to be a man.  A spirit cannot be a priest after the order of Melchizedek; if Jesus is not a man now, He could not hold His priesthood, and He could not be interceding for us.  Therefore, to deny Jesus' present humanity is to deny His priesthood and His intercession on our behalf. Without His intercession, we are lost.

Jesus died

There is no dispute that Jesus died on the cross--except for some non-Christian religions and various atheistic groups who deny the biblical record.  Nevertheless, the scriptures teach us that Jesus died.

"For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus." (1 Thess. 4:14).

Jesus rose from the dead physically

The bible teaches us that Jesus rose from the dead.  Unfortunately, some Christians are not aware that Jesus rose from the dead in the same body in which He died though it was a glorified body.  We see that Jesus prophesied the resurrection of His physical body in John 2:19-21 and fulfilled this in other verses:

"Jesus answered and said to them, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." The Jews therefore said, "It took forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?"  But He was speaking of the temple of His body." (John 2:19-21).

"See My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself; touch Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." (Luke 24:39).

"When therefore it was evening, on that day, the first day of the week, and when the doors were shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst, and said to them, "Peace be with you."  And when He had said this, He showed them both His hands and His side.  The disciples therefore rejoiced when they saw the Lord." (John 20:19-20).

"Then He *said to Thomas, "Reach here your finger, and see My hands; and reach here your hand, and put it into My side; and be not unbelieving, but believing." (John 20:27).

"And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain." (1 Cor. 15:14).

Merely asserting that Jesus rose is not enough.  It must be stated that Jesus rose physically lest the very words of Christ be denied.

After Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection

Jesus appeared to various people to demonstrate that He had risen physically.  In these verses we see that Jesus said He would raise the temple of His body.  This He did, and the body He rose in was the same one He died in since it retained the physical wounds of His crucifixion--He still had holes in His hands and side!

If anyone denies the resurrection of Christ, his faith is in vain; and he is not a true Christian.  It is not enough to say that Jesus rose.  You must acknowledge that He rose physically. A "spirit" resurrection is not a resurrection of the body; and without the resurrection of the body of Christ, death has not been conquered, and our faith would be in vain.

Jesus' resurrected body was a glorified body.

Jesus rose from the dead physically in the same body in which He died. But, what kind of a body was this physical body in which He rose?  Was it subject to death again?  Would it grow tired or grow old?  The Bible tells us about the resurrected body of which all Christians will receive in the future.

"But someone will say, How are the dead raised?  And with what kind of body do they come? . . . There are also heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one, and the glory of the earthly is another.  There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory.  So also is the resurrection of the dead.

"It is sown a perishable body, it is raised an imperishable body; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.  If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.  So also it is written, The first man, Adam, became a living soul."  

"The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural; then the spiritual.  The first man is from the earth, earthly; the second man is from heaven.  As is the earthly, so also are those who are earthly; and as is the heavenly, so also are those who are heavenly.  And just as we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly." (1 Cor. 15:35, 40-49).

These verses tell us that something happens to the body that is raised from the dead.  Notice that verse 44 says that "it is sown a natural body.  It is raised a spiritual body."  The same body that is sown (dies) is raised.  The natural body is the body with which we are born. The natural body dies and is raised from the dead.  But, when it is raised, it is changed into a spiritual body.

The resurrected body is different from the natural body in its abilities and qualities as Jesus demonstrated; however, and this is vitally important, it is the same body as before--only "improved," "glorified," "spiritualized," etc. 

We see this in the fact that Jesus retained the wounds of His crucifixion as evidenced by the holes in His hands and side (John 20:27), yet He was able to simply appear in a room with the disciples without entering through the door (John 20:19-20).  He was raised in the same body He died in though it had been glorified.

Jesus is a man in a glorified body.

We have already seen that Jesus was raised from the dead in the same body in which He died, but that body is a resurrected body. However, some people believe that at Jesus' ascension, He was somehow changed, and His physical body was no longer needed.  But, this is not what the Bible teaches.  There is no place where it states that Jesus stopped being a man.  If anything, the New Testament says He is still a man.

"For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form," (Col. 2:9).

"For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." (1 Tim. 2:5).

We see here that Jesus is called a man.  Like Col. 2:9 above, this verse uses the present tense ("is").  It clearly states that Jesus is a man.

"And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as a dead man.  And He laid His right hand upon me, saying, “Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living One; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hades." (Rev. 1:17-18).

Notice that in Col. 2:9 it speaks in the present tense ("dwells").  Colossians was written well after Jesus' ascension into heaven, yet Paul tells us that Jesus is in bodily form.  What body would that be?  Why, it would be the same body in which He was raised.

To clarify that Jesus is a man, read the next verse.  In Rev. 1:17-18, Jesus is in heaven, and John the Apostle falls at Jesus' feet; and Jesus laid His right hand on him.  Clearly, from these verses we can see that Jesus is in bodily form as a man.

Objections Answered

Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.  Some argue that the Bible says that flesh and blood cannot go to heaven as is stated in 1 Cor. 15:50, "Now I say this, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable."

The term "flesh and blood" is a phrase used to designate the natural state even the carnal state of man.

"And Jesus answered and said to him, "Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven." (Matt. 16:17).

"To reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with flesh and blood" (Gal. 1:16).

"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places" (Eph. 6:12).

"Since then the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil" (Heb. 2:14).

After the resurrection, Jesus said, "See My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself; touch Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have" (Luke 24:39). Jesus specifically stated that He had flesh and bones--not flesh and blood. 

This may seem like a word game, but it is not.  Every word is inspired in the Bible, and Jesus chose His words for a reason.  Remember, Jesus' blood was drained out of His body on the cross.  It is His shed blood that cleanses us of our sins: "but if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin." (1 John 1:7). Jesus was the sacrifice, and His blood cleanses us.  Therefore, flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, but flesh and bones can.

The last Adam became a life-giving spirit.  1 Cor. 15:45 says, "The first man, Adam, became a living soul.  The last Adam became a life-giving spirit."  This verse is not saying that Jesus is without a body, but that He is a life-giving spirit.  That is, as the last Adam, He is the one who gives life to people (John 10:27-28).  Furthermore, it is designating that Jesus' resurrected body is equipped to be in both the physical realm and the spiritual.

*     *     *

Matt Slick’s summary is more or less consistent with Christian indoctrination into the faith.  In the Jesus story that is this odyssey it is less focused on Jesus’ divinity and more on Jesus the man, a man who walked this earth, a man of flesh and blood, who thought and felt, taught and listened, and left but a mind print in the gospels.  Search for the Real Parents of My Soul is a walk through that mind print to establish some semblance of a connection with spiritual temporal reality.

*     *     *

Religious scholar Reza Aslan maintains that it is unlikely that Jesus was able to read or write.  Given his obvious deep research into the matter, it is still difficult to fathom much less take seriously this accusation.  

His book “Zealot” (2013) deals with this and other controversial matters regarding Jesus the man and Jesus the Messiah.  In all such references, he is consistently critical.  This excerpt from a candid interview with National Public Radio (NPR) provides a sense of his perspective on Jesus, the Man:

On the Gospels

"What I think is important for Christians to understand is that every Gospel story written about Jesus of Nazareth was written after that event, this apocalyptic event which for Jews signaled the end of the world as they knew it."

On Jesus as a political figure

"[In one story,] Jesus walks into the temple, and he begins to cleanse it. He turns over the tables of the money-changers, who are exchanging the foul foreign currency of the Roman Empire with the Hebrew shekel, which was the only currency that the temple would accept. And then, of course, in a loud, booming voice, he says, 'It is written that my house shall be a house of prayer for all nations, and you have made it a den of thieves.'

"Now, as all historians recognize, this was the action that precipitated his arrest, his torture and his execution by the state. And there's a very simple reason for that: The temple was not just the center of the Jewish cult; it was, in many ways, the representation of the power and the presence of the Roman Empire."

*     *     *

NPR also interviewed historian Bart D. Erhman who weighs in on this discussion with reference to his book “Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who changed the Bible and Why” (2005):

On using The Bible as a source

"I see the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament very much the same way that I see the scriptures of the Quran or the Gathas or the Vedas or what have you. I think that these scriptures are inspired by individuals who, in a moment of metaphysical contact with the divine spirit, have been able to communicate something about God to us.

"But I also recognize as a historian that this is sacred history. ... They are valuable in the sense that they reveal certain truths to us, but that the facts that they reveal are not as valuable as the truths are."

On his religious affiliation

"I wouldn't call myself a Christian because I do not believe that Jesus is God, nor do I believe that he ever thought that he was God, or that he ever said that he was God. But I am a follower of Jesus, and I think that sometimes, unfortunately — I think even Christians would recognize this and admit it — those two things aren't always the same, being a Christian and being a follower of Jesus."

Erhman offers the ultimate caveat in “Misquoting Jesus” for those who would ponder the Jesus story:

I came to see early on that the full meaning and nuance of the Greek text of the New Testament could be grasped only when it is read and studied in the original language.  The same thing applies to the Old Testament as I later learned when I acquired Hebrew (Erhman 2005). 

*     *     *

Wondering what manner of man was Jesus

There is little definitive knowledge available other than the gospels, and now, as in the past, many scholars are having issues with these gospels. 

For me, it is not Jesus' teachings that make him so remarkable, so real, although they are inspiring and distinctively informative, but the combination of his teachings with the struggle of the man in that ancient time to fulfill his purpose as it was revealed to him. 

The two cannot be separated as they resonate as one within me.  But if they could be separated, would the man or his message be more prominent, more important to me?

Perhaps the question is moot as Jesus the man made a distinct footprint in the sand and a mind print in my mind, as other men such as Abraham Lincoln and Sir Winston Churchill have.  Their character cannot be easily separated from what they thought, did, and were as mortal men.  With the parables as my guide, the same is true for me with Jesus.

We are mindful of the writings of Lincoln and Churchill, and have access to them through their words.  But we have no such access to Jesus who never wrote but in the dirt, dust and sand of Judea. Alas, our knowledge of him is confined to secondary sources.  

In Jesus’ time few could read or write, and so to suggest that he was so limited in these skills is not beyond the realm of possibility.     

Yet, quite remarkably, we feel (I think that is the operational word) Jesus, and think we know his divine character through the gospels.  

That some scholars define Jesus’ character in psychoanalytical or psychopathological terms man may gain credence today, but imagine how it would play 2,000 years ago.

*     *     *

Koenraad Elst in Psychology of Prophetism: A Secular Look at the Bible (1993) asks the question: 

Can an intelligent and critically disposed person, who has abandoned childish beliefs and childish prejudice, seriously doubt that Jesus is a case of psychosis? 

For the scholar Elst, psychosis is so clearly discernible in Jesus that he would expect even the layman to make a similar diagnosis, but a layman today or 2,000 years ago?  

Elst writes:

Jesus destiny cannot possibly be understood without the aid of psychopathology.  The dark misgiving which historical theology has had for the past 100 years was on the right track.  Anyone who surveys the extant literature can see it with shocking clarity.  

The notion that Jesus was a mentally ill person cannot be removed anymore from the scientific investigation.  First, science has brought Jesus down from his divine throne and declared him human; now it will also recognize him as a sick man.

A confirmation that the dispassionate study of Jesus as a human person leads irrevocably to a psychopathological diagnosis is given by a Protestant preacher, Hermann Werner.  Objecting to liberal theology with its humanization of the divine person Jesus, he shows what becomes of Jesus when he is measured with human standards:

The image of Jesus … is, no matter how much one would want to ward off this conclusion, mentally … sick.  Although man’s and certainly Jesus’ deepest life is a mystery which we cannot unveil down to its deepest roots, yet certain limits can be agreed upon within which one’s self-consciousness must remain if it is to be sane and human. 

There are, after all, unassailable standards which are valid for all times for the ancient oriental as well as for the modem western.  Except in completely uncivilized times and nations, no one has ever been declared entirely sane and normal who held himself to be a supernatural being, God or a deity, or who made claims to divine qualities and privileges. A later legend may ascribe such things to this or that revered person, but when someone claims it for himself, his audience has always consisted exclusively of inferior minds incapable of proper judgment.

Perhaps Rev. Hermann underestimates the belief of the ancient civilized Pagans in the possibility of divine incarnation, of having a divine person in their midst, in which the meaning of the word “divine” can be stretched a bit; but then he is right in assuming that this divine status is normally only ascribed to the revered person after his death. 

That the modem skepsis towards claims of being a divine person were shared by Jesus’ contemporaries, can be seen from the Gospel itself. The Jews (for whom this skepsis became indignation for reasons of exclusive monotheism) wanted to kill Jesus because he not only broke the Sabbath but also called God his Father, making himself equal with God (John 5:18), and because you, being a man, make yourself God (John 10:33).

Either Jesus was really God’s only-born son (and by accepting that, you become a believing Christian), or his claim to divine status was absurd and abnormal by the standards of both ancients and moderns.  A liberal theology which humanizes Jesus and yet remains Christian, is impossible: it is either the fundamentalist belief in Jesus’ divinity, or no belief in Jesus Christ at all.

Rev. Hermann concludes: Everyone knows that the sources on Jesus life are insufficient for writing his biography.  But they are sufficient to reach the conclusion that he was a pathological personality.  At any rate, these are the conclusions which liberal theology has reached by thinking and taking into account the findings of modern psychiatry.

*     *     *

Assault on Christian beliefs and believers

Surely, this analysis of Jesus as being essentially mad may rankle orthodox Christian believers, but it needed be so.  Author Elst is wrong, not necessarily in his analysis, but in his conclusions, failing to understand that Christians can accept Jesus as their spiritual leader of mystifying dimensions as a man and not feel the necessity to label mad or otherwise. 

After all, Jesus of humble origins inspired radical change through the gospels with a moral spiritual ethical platform that was revolutionary and has resonated throughout the world for the past 2,000 years.  Jesus was a leader with a mission that has even more validity today than ever before. 

So, if he be mad, we need more not less such madness.  We need to be blessed with the palliative powers of his madness as we are on the brink of Armageddon in this thermonuclear age, an age where madness, real madness, is palpable in every community across the world without exception.   

Psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi writes of “First Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links between Leadership and Mental Illness” (2011), and claims the greatest presidents of the United States were touched with madness, indeed, half of all those who have risen to this office are likely to have suffered mental illness.  He suggest leadership and madness may be twin coordinates.     

Paradoxically, as it happens, Jesus has become more believable as a god-figure as critical scholars have authenticated his character as a man, which obviously is not their intent.  Could religious scholars be conflicting over that possibility? 

As a man, Jesus was a great lover of nature.  His sayings abound with reference to the sun, the clouds, the rain, the birds, the flowers, seed-time and harvest-time, to growth and decay, to the wonder of the sun rising and setting not simply in the heavens but in the moods of man.  

Jesus understood man as he walked among men as a man, as he behaved as a man, but always with a heavenly conscience that reached beyond the temporal transcending comfortably into the timeless.

Christmas and Easter, birth and death are touchstones in Christian history as well as in the history of man, and celebrated with reverence knowing Jesus once walked this earth as man.

With a few pregnant words, Jesus could make the complex simple and comprehensible.  In the technical sense, he was not a philosopher as his wondering was full of knowing and his knowing full of wondering. 

Jesus was earthbound for a brief time, and comfortable in that knowledge, seemingly conscious of everything and everyone while never reverting to abstract terms to discuss good and evil, sovereignty and righteousness.  

What could be clearer then when he was questioned as to his allegiance:

“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” 

He would contrast flowers to good and weeds metaphorically to evil and build a story around that distinction.

Jesus liked to be with people, some people like to be with others to suck the veritable oxygen out of them, whereas he would leave his audience heady with his. 

He enjoyed social gatherings and good fellowship and could give as well as he could take in humorous exchange.  But he was also quick to discern the phony from the sincere, the pompous from the humble, the prideful from the contrite.

His sympathies, we learn from the gospels, were as broad as the human race.  Yet, on occasion this did not come through.  Once he put off the plea of a woman of another nation by saying that he was sent only to find “the lost sheep of the House of Israel.”  In another instance, he dispatched his disciples with a rebuke, declaring they were not to minister to non-Jews, whether they be Gentiles or Samaritans.  Yet in the face of this, there is the story of the Good Samaritan and the healing of the Roman servant.

Jesus was in tune with the ancient prophets of Israel and was inclined to interpret his mission in terms of fulfilling these prophecies.  This mission, and his sense of it, was wrest from him and expressed otherwise after his death by St. Paul, and made into what would become Christianity, but that is another story.  

Could Jesus, who was a devout Jew with a reverence for Jewish Law, have been other than the leader of a movement that was but a sect of Judaism?  That, too, is part of St. Paul’s story.

Christian scholars debate such questions with some making a case that Jesus was xenophobic.  Perhaps more revealing is that Christianity as orchestrated by Paul became a proselytizing religion and Judaism is not.  Jesus was not a proselytizer, but Paul was.  

Jesus could become violently angry.  We know he was impatient with Jewish chief priests and the elders in the temple whom he saw as inept and given to unconscionable acts in defiance of Jewish Law.

He also had a keen sense of humor, and used it with skill when his ideas were challenged in contrast to the absence of such humor in the gospels of first century Christian writers.  Imagine if the New Testament had such spirited prose. 

Jesus could wax metaphorically to pluck the spec from a self-righteous person’s eye so that he might see.  We see this same engagement with the solemn and meticulous lawyer who is conscientious to a fault in his profession, but blind to his moral turpitude.  Such blindness, Jesus said, was like the man anxious lest his food and drink be contaminated, straining out the minutest gnat, but then, without forethought swallowing the equivalent of an entire camel, hair, hoofs, humps and offensive breath, and not register surprise. 

He could laugh observing children playing in the marketplace, especially those pouting and refusing to join in the games, even when their friends willingly changed the games to accommodate them. 

He could even scoff at his cousin John the Baptist for his asceticism:

“What went ye out into the wilderness to see, John?  A reed shaken with the wind …. A man clothed in soft raiment?”

Jesus had the soul of a poet for his mind crackled with visual electricity and effusive colors, a fulsome mind like a painter only in a rainbow of words.  For that reason, if for no other, the parables are difficult to forget.

There was also a quickness and directness to Jesus that no reader of the gospel narratives can miss.  He could blaze with anger, take measure of men with a glance often described as looking hard at a person: for example, at the rich young ruler and loving him; at Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane, saying, “Couldn’t you keep watch with me for one hour?” and at Mary, the sister of Lazarus, and weeping with her.

He condemned the aimlessly drifting unthoughtful life of a person; had no use for the indecisive; and declared that the man who put his hand to the plow and looked back was not fit for the Kingdom of Heaven. 

His disciples, who would walk with him, were ordered to renounce all that they had and were.  On the other hand, his draconian flair was tempered with admiration for the deceptive steward, who, when his dishonesty was discovered, adopted a bold strategy to again make himself secure. 

Jesus humanity multidimensional

Another quality, which often has been ignored or misunderstood, was the absence of any sense of personal corruption or sin.  While he taught his disciples to ask forgiveness of their sins, there was no hint of such a need for himself. 

Nor is there any asking of pardon either from those about him or from God.  Missing is the inner conflict reputed to be a necessary precursor to reaching a higher state of being.  Once again, Jesus is confounding, as he frees himself from such needs but sees others controlled by these selfsame needs. 

As the Jesus story is pondered, it is clear that Christianity has not followed the lead of Jesus, but that of the anxious Paul who better reflects the obsessive compulsive psychopathology that writers would attribute to Jesus.

Although there is humanness to Jesus, there is also psychosocial distance of him from his disciples and followers that defies explanation and adds to his baffling intrigue.  We are left to struggle with his humanness and godliness.  

Is he a man or the Messiah?  Can we believe in his mission and miracles, his passion and prophecies, his death and resurrection?  Is he the Redeemer and truly “the Son of God,” or not?  The debate is likely go on as long as man exists.

Incredibly, at this point in this odyssey, what has been described here does not seem apparent in the Christian church that carries his name.  More apparent is that he is “the Son of Man.”

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