Faith, Works, and Christ

Christians have argued -- it seems endlessly -- whether we are justified before God by faith or by works. Too easily, we forget what was taught us by those who wrote our Scriptures: we are justified by Christ. What is faith? Faith is the open door through which Christ flows into us and fills us. What are works? Works are the love of Christ in us, pouring out to our neighbors through us.

Salvation is simple. God's grace flows through Christ to us, and through us to our neighbors. To be saved by faith and judged by works is not difficult to understand. Though it will seem complicated if we take our eyes off of Jesus -- such as when our inner lawyer wants to know something about works other than how to love our neighbor as ourselves.

Summer series note (Religious experience)

Blog note: My summer series this summer is already written, and in my "drafts". However, it is waiting for the publication of a certain related book, scheduled for release this June, before the first post can be published. So it's not that I've forgotten that I said I'd write on religious experience ... it's just a very small wait before the timing is right to start them. Thank you for your patience.

Are "religious experiences" real?

Over the coming weeks I hope to write a few posts exploring religious experiences, whether they mean anything, and what (if anything) we could understand by it. But I'll begin this undertaking with remembering one religious experience I had. It wasn't the first, and it wasn't the most recent, but it was (to me) the most memorable. I don't remember that I've ever put it into words before, but I'll try it here.

One early summer afternoon, while I was sitting indoors, I looked out the nearby window. At first it was just the usual pause to notice that the outside looks better than the inside. That became a still longer pause as I realized that it was a finer day than usual, and stopped to really look. But next ... it was no longer a simple instance of me looking out the window. The beauty of the world was so intense it was piercing. The scene was gripping, in a way that my whole focus was given over to it, and it came with a sense of amazement. The details were vivid -- the color of the sky, the bright and shaded patches on the clouds, the intensity of the light, the color of the crape myrtle tree. It felt like I was seeing them -- really seeing them -- for the first time. There was a sense of a deep current of goodness flowing through all of reality. There was a sense that this reality that I was seeing was always there, timeless. At the time I felt joy, and wonder, and delight -- and those words are nearly too shallow. I felt like I was overflowing with that sense of goodness.

And that gripping moment -- that seemed timeless, while experiencing it -- I'm sure on a clock it might have only been some short minutes. I've never used this word to describe the moment before, but if I were to call up language that someone religious might understand, I'd say the world was transfigured, where the glory was seen without any disguise. I wonder now, does my everyday apathy prevent me from seeing it like that all the time? What did it take to break through my routine expectations of a simple glance out the window? When I felt like I was overflowing with that sense of goodness -- had I reached the capacity of my heart and mind to experience it? Would it be possible to come back with a greater capacity, and experience it more fully?

These days I have an idea that our minds -- the parts that see the world in video -- don't work too differently from the way computers render video: that is, I wonder if our minds only render the part that changes from one moment to the next, from one day to the next as we see the same thing time after time. I wonder if we learn to tune out the rest as background. I wonder how much of the world is right in front of us that we never see, or have trained ourselves not to notice. 

Prophetic Dreams

The Bible mentions quite a few prophetic dreams. The current book I'm reading -- Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed -- contains some passages showing the author had given extensive thought to the topic of prophecy, vision and dream.

Despite Maimonides' acknowledgment that the will of God is required for prophecy (Part II Chapter 32), there are times when his thoughts run along nearly naturalistic lines: 

Prophecy is, in truth and reality, an emanation sent forth by the Divine Being through the medium of the Active Intellect, in the first instance to man's rational faculty, and then to his imaginative faculty; it is the highest degree and greatest perfection man can attain; it consists in the most perfect development of the imaginative faculty. (Part II, chapter 36).

Both philosophy and prophecy, in Maimonides' view, are human perception of the Divine Intellect -- the philosopher being limited to the rational faculty, while the prophet has also developed the imaginative faculty. As for dreams:

In Bereshit Rabba (sect. xvii.), the following saying of our sages occurs:

Dream is the unripe fruit of prophecy.

This is an excellent comparison, for the unripe fruit is really the fruit to some extent, only it has fallen from the tree before it was fully developed and ripe. In a similar manner the action of the imaginative faculty during sleep is the same as at the time it receives a prophecy, only in the first case [the dream] it is not fully developed, and has not yet reached its highest degree. (Part II, chapter 36)

Maimonides believed that these prophetic visions and dreams were things for which someone can train and prepare himself. In his comments on what makes a person fit to receive a prophetic vision or dream, this one passage particularly caught my eye:

... all his desires must aim at obtaining a knowledge of the hidden laws and causes that are in force in the Universe; his thoughts must be engaged in lofty matters; his attention directed to the knowledge of God, the consideration of his works, and of that which he must believe in this respect. (Part II, Chapter 36)

Our dreams naturally tend to follow the aim of our desires, and what engages our thoughts, and that to which our attention is directed. Wouldn't that tend to cause dreams on those topics? Maimonides acknowledges that there are people who dream things that are not fit to be called prophetic dreams, despite the dreamer's insistence.  Still, in Maimonides, the line seems thin between a dream of Divine Things and that "unripe fruit of prophecy".

The Synoptic Puzzle Meets My Word Processor

There are various theories about how the different early documents about Christ's life are related. Which account of Jesus' life is earliest? Which authors had access to which other materials?

Comparisons of the gospels started in the very early centuries of Christianity as a tedious manual process of comparing texts line by line. But these days there are other tools to help with such a comparison. Today, any standard word processor contains basic tools to compare different versions of documents and show modifications and matches. I used Microsoft Word.

So what happens when you compare the Greek texts of Matthew and Mark in a standard word processor? First, you find that the computer cannot successfully compare the documents as a whole. They are too different for a comparison at the level of the whole document. There is so much additional material in Matthew as compared to Mark that the word processor stopped the comparison. To get a comparison from the word processor, it was necessary to separate the documents into individual accounts -- for example, to compare the sections containing the parable of the sower, or the sections relating the death of John the Baptist. Comparing two documents the size of Matthew and Mark, account by account, is no quick task even with a word processor.

Here is an example of a comparison between Matthew and Mark. The text below is a comparison of the accounts of the discussion, "Whose son is the Messiah?"

ΚΑΙ ΑΠΟΚΡΙΘΕΙΣΣΥΝΗΓΜΕΝΩΝ ΔΕ ΤΩΝ ΦΑΡΙΣΑΙΩΝ ΕΠΗΡΩΤΗΣΕΝ ΑΥΤΟΥΣ Ο ΙΗΣΟΥΣ ΕΛΕΓΕΝ ΔΙΔΑΣΚΩΝ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΙΕΡΩ ΠΩΣ ΛΕΓΩΝ ΤΙ ΥΜΙΝ ΔΟΚΕΙ ΠΕΡΙ ΤΟΥ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΥ; ΤΙΝΟΣ ΥΙΟΣ ΕΣΤΙΝ; ΛΕΓΟΥΣΙΝ ΟΙ ΓΡΑΜΜΑΤΕΙΣ ΟΤΙ Ο ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΥΙΟΣ ΔΑΥΙΔ ΕΣΤΙΝ; ΑΥΤΟΣΑΥΤΩ ΤΟΥ ΔΑΥΙΔ ΛΕΓΕΙ ΑΥΤΟΙΣ ΠΩΣ ΟΥΝ ΔΑΥΙΔ ΕΙΠΕΝ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΠΝΕΥΜΑΤΙ ΤΩ ΑΓΙΩΚΑΛΕΙ ΑΥΤΟΝ ΚΥΡΙΟΝ ΛΕΓΩΝ ΕΙΠΕΝ ΚΥΡΙΟΣ ΤΩ ΚΥΡΙΩ ΜΟΥ ΚΑΘΟΥ ΕΚ ΔΕΞΙΩΝ ΜΟΥ ΕΩΣ ΑΝ ΘΩ ΤΟΥΣ ΕΧΘΡΟΥΣ ΣΟΥ ΥΠΟΚΑΤΩ ΤΩΝ ΠΟΔΩΝ ΣΟΥ ΑΥΤΟΣ; ΕΙ ΟΥΝ ΔΑΥΙΔ ΛΕΓΕΙΚΑΛΕΙ ΑΥΤΟΝ ΚΥΡΙΟΝ ΚΑΙ ΠΟΘΕΝΠΩΣ ΥΙΟΣ ΑΥΤΟΥ ΕΣΤΙΝ ΥΙΟΣ; ΚΑΙ Ο ΠΟΛΥΣ ΟΧΛΟΣ ΗΚΟΥΕΝ ΑΥΤΟΥ ΗΔΕΩΣ; ΚΑΙ ΟΥΔΕΙΣ ΕΔΥΝΑΤΟ ΑΠΟΚΡΙΘΗΝΑΙ ΑΥΤΩ ΛΟΓΟΝ ΟΥΔΕ ΕΤΟΛΜΗΣΕΝ ΤΙΣ ΑΠ ΕΚΕΙΝΗΣ ΤΗΣ ΗΜΕΡΑΣ ΕΠΕΡΩΤΗΣΑΙ ΑΥΤΟΝ ΟΥΚΕΤΙ

This particular item was selected for a blog post because of its brevity; it does not illustrate every point that is seen in some of the longer comparisons. But it does show a few of the things which come to light through such a comparison:

• The black text is material that matches, word-for-word, in the Greek texts of Matthew and Mark. In the text shown above, the longest verbatim match is a shared Old Testament quote: "The LORD said to My Lord" (etc). That pattern -- where the strongest match is on a shared quote -- is seen more than once in comparing the different accounts.
• The blue text shows wording that is in Matthew, but not in Mark. Some of that material is also in Mark, but in different words. Or at times Matthew has material that is not in Mark's account. 
• The red text shows wording that is in Mark, but not in Matthew. Over the course of comparing the two gospels, again we see material that is found in Matthew but in somewhat different words. And again, in some accounts, we see material in Mark that is not found in Matthew.

In a later post, I hope to show some other points of interest that have made me wonder whether the current theory "Matthew was based on a copy of Mark" may be too simple to account for the material in Matthew and Mark as we have them. 


I'd posted an early version of this on the Cadre Comments blog, 03/29/2005