Christian Otherworldliness

A common critique of Christians and Christianity by secular critics today is that the Christian focus on the significance of another world -- a spiritual world and/or future world, fundamentally 'apart' from this reality -- causes Christians to withdraw from the world; to disdain the world; to -- if not celebrate -- at least downplay the significance of decay, destruction, and death; to defer responsibility and actions in the troubled world around them. The critique finds its most robust, vibrant articulation in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, and he isn't entirely wrong. There are certainly some bitter fruits associated with just such a Christian Otherworldliness, to the extent that it exists. The question becomes whether it in fact exists and to what extent, and whether it is a particularly Christian Otherworldliness that is really at issue, or otherworldliness as such which just happens to have a Christian variant.

Re-visiting David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite, this passage stuck out to me, in which Hart addresses the issue, and traces the true genesis of this otherworldliness to pre-Christian sources, which in turn infected elements of Christianity, but which was never proper to its essence.

[H]owever just [Nietzsche's] condemnation of pious otherworldliness  may be -- and the church has seen no end of it -- it is the unambiguous renunciation of gnosticism, and not the paradoxical renunciation of classical Christianity, that would correspond most nearly to his account. Indeed, no one familiar with late antiquity and the world in which the gospel was first preached can be unaware that a prevailing spirit of otherworldliness had long been moving inexorably through the empire: not only gnosticism, but every variety of etherealizing devotion, mystery religions, Eastern esoterica, mystical Platonisms, and the occult; the contempt for the flesh expressed by Valentinus, Ammonias Saccas, Plotinus, the Mithraic mysteries, or even the sanctimoniously ungroomed Emperor Julian was more bitterly world-weary than any of the exorbitant expressions of spirituality to which the church fell prey.

One may agree with Nietzsche that this atmosphere of acosmic and incorporeal religiosity defames the world, and one may acknowledge that it infected every institution and spiritual aspiration of its age, including those of the church; but one should also recognize it as first and foremost a pagan phenomenon. [...] Christianity suffered from this contagion in some considerable measure. [...] But it was also into this crepuscular world of transcendental longings, of a pagan order grown weary of the burden of itself, that the Christian faith came as an evangel promising newness of life, and that in all abundance, preaching creation, divine incarnation, resurrection of the flesh, and the ultimate restoration of heavens and earth; a faith, moreover, whose symbols were not occult sigils, or bull's blood, or the brackish water and coarse fare of the ascetic age, but the cardinal signs of fellowship, feasting, and joy: bread and wine.

[...]

And surely there is something almost tediously wrong in asserting Christ's crucifixion has ever figured in Christian tradition as a repudiation, rather than ultimately an affirmation, of the fleshly life Christ was forced to relinquish (pp. 106-107)

The Christian faith, uniquely, provides the resources for "renarrating the cosmos from the ground up", and affirming the goodness of creation -- in all of its glorious materiality -- while also providing a metaphysical account of evil. Hart continues:

The orthodox doctrine of creation out of nothingness, and its attendant doctrine of the goodness of creation, led the church (more radically than even Neoplatonism) to deny evil any ascription of true being, to define it not as an essence or positive force but as mere negation, reaction, a privation of the good, a perversity of the will, an appetite for nonbeing -- but no thing among things: all things had to be affirmed, with an equal emphasis, as God's good creation. (pp. 106-107)

One take-away from all this, on a meta level, is that we need to avoid being so reactionary that we immediately reject everything critics of the faith have to say out of hand; we need to recognize the nuggets of truth that may be contained therein, but to shed the full light of truth on them, separating the wheat from the chaff. In this case, Nietzsche and his modern ideological descendents are right to be wary of otherworldliness, but the solution is not to turn away from Christ and the orthodox Christian tradition, but toward them.

Pagan Devotions and Christianity

Many critics of Christianity often take the 'resemblance' of Christianity to various pagan myths to be evidence that Christianity itself is merely a variation of these myths, though perhaps mapped onto actual history. With that last qualification begrudgingly conceded to due to the wealth of available historical evidence corroborating Christian claims. Though, this very fact of historicity undermines the claims of similarity immediately, at one level, because pagan myths lack this element almost entirely.

Still, these critiques do present some questions that Christians have to confront: Is there such a resemblance? If so is it a significant resemblance, or merely a superficial one? If there is some substantial resemblance on some level, what does that mean? Does it mean that Christian claims are untrue, or that scripture is merely a re-tooled pagan myth?

Without even being particularly well-versed in history and simply utilizing formal logic, it can easily be seen that, even if there were substantial pagan precedents to Christianity, it wouldn't say anything about Christian truth claims, nor necessitate the conclusion that Christianity is also fully -- or largely -- myth, even if it had -- in some sense -- been preceded by religious practices and devotions in late antiquity. And, once you actually do delve into the details of history, this becomes all the more obvious because many of the supposed similarities to Christian belief and thought are superficial or non-existent, while the similarities that do exist are easily explicable within the bounds of Christian thought.

A podcast I listen to regularly (Take the Stand) recently tackled this issue, and they do a good job of employing the traditional (and potent) Christian apologetics on the issue. Some supposed similarities are simply fabricated; others are exaggerated; others exist but are superficial; others are legitimate similarities but only analogous to a single aspect of Christian belief (if that), not to the whole; Pagan myths differ in their very intent and content, whatever details may be vaguely similar.

On top of this, Christian thought maintains that Christ is the creator of all things and that Creation expresses the work of the creator in its fabric. With this being the case, its even less surprising that humans -- even prior to the Incarnation -- should stumble upon this truth, though necessarily in a pale, shadowy, incomplete form.

After I had just listened to this episode, David Bentley Hart wrote a new article on this matter as well. Hart takes a much different approach, instead choosing to acknowledge significant pagan analogs to Christianity "in the intensity of piety, in the spiritual longings it answered, even in its liturgical and sacramental conventions." Part of the intent of Hart's piece seems to jolt Christians out of their reactionary denials of any similarity, instead noting that certain stylistic and spiritual similarities are undeniable, and that this fact should hardly be surprising (though Hart deliberately narrows his focus to the styles of religious devotion, rather than the areas of moral or narrative content, historicity, truth, etc.)

Christianity is, in fact, historically rooted, so there's no reason to suspect that its worship, devotions, or language would differ markedly from the prevalent styles of the time. What we as Christians need to maintain is not complete originality on all matters, though we must argue in favor of the historicity of Christ, and deny claims of 'legend' or 'myth' being significantly present in scripture. What makes Christianity important and different is that it is true, not that it is wholly original in its human devotions or stylistic conventions.

Christian thought does make significant claims to telling a new narrative of reality and being and professes a content that is unlike any other in the ultimacy and finality of its truth (pagan myths were not even believed to encompass a complete account of being, but rather were almost always accounts of gods within an economy of gods) and on this count we should persist and be vigilant. The actual content of the Christian faith is something entirely new and original and true, and none of the vague, imprecise approximations of that content that existed in late antiquity (some of those being influenced by Christian thought, and not the other way around) do anything to circumvent this claim. Nor do they make the conclusion that the authors of Biblical texts 'copied' or 'appropriated' significantly from pagan myths any less untenable.