Sunday Argument #11: Against Jesus the philosopher.

I. His philosophy, such as it is

Shortly before losing the 2000 election to Al Gore and subsequently becoming president, George W. Bush famously identified Jesus Christ as his favorite philosopher. While much of the focus on refuting Christianity has lately been turned to the actual historical claims of the New Testament and the historicity of its most prominent characters, President Bush suggests a woefully underexplored territory for disputation, that being the actual "philosophy" generated by Jesus Christ as it is received in the New Testament.

I put philosophy in scare-quotes above because Jesus actually did very little of what I recognize as philosophy. He put forth few identifiable philosophical propositions, preferring instead to rely on deliberately obfuscatory fables to convey his message. Much the rest of his teaching comes as simple bald assertion unsupported by argumentation, for example his various moral teachings and his varying approval of Old Testament law. Even one of the only compendiums of the actual "philosophy" of Jesus, published by Thomas Jefferson from the few tatters of the Bible that didn't offend Jefferson's own powerful intellect, contains remarkably little actual philosophy, instead mostly providing a biographical sketch with a few aphorisms that, while containing some moral claims, do not really much amount to philosophical argument.

Broadly speaking, however, Jesus does clearly identify himself with certain large categories of obsolete philosophical thought. His moral pronouncements reflect a strongly Stoic influence, commanding rejection of money and family alike in order to keep one's focus on God. His moral pronouncements are largely derivative of the ancient legal code of Israel and the sayings of its own philosophers, and come in the form of moral commands (the "golden rule") rather than meta-ethical statements (which would be something like, "the golden rule is morally good because God commands it"); while he is not explicit on this point in any of the writings attributed to him, we can clearly infer that Jesus subscribed to some version of divine command theory, which is the defunct meta-ethical claim that morality depends upon God and that goodness derives from God. He frequently quoted and misquoted Old Testament passages in order to support his moral framework, but did little to actually give reasons why his moral pronouncements were either compelling or even sensible.

The brand of theism to which he subscribed is weird. It is a modified monotheism in which God, the celestial father of the universe, has various avatars, of which Jesus is one, as well as the mysterious Spirit of Truth, who performs some intercessory function on God's behalf that is not well spelled-out in Christian theology. Later followers of Jesus seem to have mistaken this figure with the Holy Spirit, which is an entirely separate construct from the Spirit of Truth. In this kind of avatar monotheism, God is assisted by these various spirits, and Jesus also occasionally mentions angels in passing. The bulk of his preoccupation with demidivine creatures is not with angels, but with demons, invisible avatars of God's opposite, Satan, who cause pestilence, disease, and mental illness, and who can be dispelled with a few brief words from Jesus or one of his delegates.

His moral theory is confused by his theism because, even though Jesus commands a love of God and a rejection of the world, it is unclear from his own teaching what the reasons are that one should do such things. The great beneficiary of his theological estate, Paul, the true founder of Christianity, interprets Jesus's moral theory as essentially irrelevant, holding that divine rewards are apportioned not among the good and the evil but among the Christian and the non-Christian; Jesus seems to believe that God will provide earthly rewards for obedience to his laws, but unearthly rewards go to the faithful alone.

Curiously, though, Jesus omits from his plagiarism of the Ten Commandments any of those commandments that describe the ritual features of Judaism associated with love and respect for God: while Jesus reiterates his predecessors' proscriptions of adultery, murder, perjury, and theft, he omits commands from the same section of Jewish law outlawing depictions of God, misuse of his name, or work on God's dedicated reverential day. His theological position is a shift away from the distant, fearful relationship with God established in the Old Testament towards a more terrestrial, almost pantheistic God, whose domain (or "kingdom") is actually physically present in this world inside of the people who follow Jesus's ascetic Jewish mysticism.

His moral system is unique for its historical context, however, in Jesus's rejection of what I call moral essentialism and which most people call racism. Throughout human history, we have tended to assign certain moral characteristics to racial categories qua those races: Jews are greedy, Mexicans are lazy, the Orientals are wily and cunning, and so on. Jesus, on the other hand, is concerned with the characteristics of individuals rather than of peoples. He exemplifies this in the parable of the Good Samaritan. In Jesus's time, the Samaritans were despised widely because of their imprimatur as a mongrel breed of inherently defective Jews, but Jesus rightly points out in this parable that the qualities of the individual as a moral actor are utterly distinct from the misguided racial categories we naturally pigeonhole our enemies into.

Jesus was a nihilist about free will. In a famous episode in Gesthemene, Jesus begs God not to let him be crucified, unless it is part of God's divine plan- Jesus seems resigned to his fate, which he believed was spelled out in a prefigured plan, which God was free to change but from which Jesus was not free to deviate. He saw poverty not as a product of human choices but as a natural, inherent condition of the Earth to be dealt with by all generations. Despite his clear affiliation with a theistic version of determinism, Jesus nonetheless makes moral commandments, indicating that Jesus believes that concepts like right and wrong are still coherent when there is no such thing as meaningful choice in the universe.

The only episode in the chronicles of Jesus that plausibly mirrors normal philosophical discourse is Jesus's encounter with the enigmatic Jewish philosopher Nicodemus, who is thought to have been one of the intellectual founders of the Rabbinical movement in Judaism, though this attribution may be anachronistic because the dominant train of thought in Jewish history has been that the Rabbinical school did not develop until after the destruction of the Jewish temple, which occurred decades after Jesus's execution. In this dialogue is found a wealth of information about Jesus's views on truth, the nature of the mind, epistemology, free will, and the proper relationship between God and humans.

In this dialogue, Jesus fortifies his alliance with the divine command theory of morality by identifying evil just as the formal rejection of God's presence in the universe (a very pantheistic notion that has been lost on his intellectual descendants)- God is to light as evil action is to darkness. The one entails not just a rejection of the other, but a natural exclusion of it. He identifies the physical world and the supernatural world as completely exclusive and non-overlapping, and it hardly needs mentioning that from this we can derive that Jesus was what I've called in the past a substance dualist, one who believes that the mind is basically distinct and separable from the body, unalike it in every way, though the mind does exert an incomplete measure of control over the body- incomplete because Jesus recognizes the impervious natural human inclination to defy the teachings of the Old Testament. To Jesus, our bodies actually cause us to sin, as opposed to bodies being completely subject to the mind. Elsewhere in his discourse with Nicodemus, Jesus identifies claims about the supernatural as being somehow epistemically distinct from and perhaps naturally more suspect, or at least more confusing, than ordinary speech about the ordinary world. And, to Jesus, our spirits seem only to be truly free, almost random and chaotic, if they are already in agreement with his odd version of theism. It is ambiguous if other spirits are actually free.

Finally, we here see the fullest statement of Jesus's version of divine command morality: the spirit that is affiliated with Jesus's moral commands is not guilty of any moral turpitude, but the spirit that is not so affiliated is automatically guilty of all moral turpitude. The sole criterion for moral excellence on this moral theory is allegiance to Jesus's version of pantheism. Living by "truth," which appears to be Jesus's own interpretation of the Old Testament plus his teachings on various theological constructs like the Spirit of Truth and the Holy Spirit, is the linchpin of his moral claims.

To recap, the "philosophy" of Jesus can be broadly characterized by:

• Theism, possibly pantheism.
• Hardcore substance dualism about minds and other supernatural substances, including God, Satan, demons, angels, and human spirits. Bodies and minds aren't just separate, they're often enemies.
  
• Compatibilism, which is the view that predetermination and free will are compatible.
• A divine command moral theory that probably contains no meta-ethical statements, with the possibly exception of the claim that morality just is affiliation with Jesus's own interpretation of the Old Testament and of salvation.
• Stoicism about the good things of this world.

And finally, notice that Jesus does not ever make any arguments for the existence of God- he does not dispute with atheists, but with other theists.


II. The problems with it

Criticism of Christianity often begins by targeting those doctrines deemed central to it by Paul and the churches that sprung up around him: the Trinity doctrine, the sacramental rites, things of that sort. I and others have for centuries generated long and I think overpowering critiques of the theological ephemera of later Christian churches, so I will not belabor them here. Jesus did not speak at all about doctrinal issues like Trinitarianism, and he seems to explicitly reject the complete identification with himself as God, calling attention to the yawning differences between his own goodness and God's, his own will and God's, even his own location and God's. So those points I will not belabor.

Any critique of Jesus's philosophy will of course begin with the premise that Jesus was neither God nor himself infallible. By definition, if Jesus was God or otherwise infallible, his philosophical pronouncements would have to have the force of pure truth because such a being would by definition be perfect and incapable of such grotesque error as I think Jesus commits in his systems. I will let the question of Jesus's divinity settle for now, since I think it a foregone conclusion that the doctrine is false and probably not even historical to the original Christian community.

Critiquing the divinity of Jesus likewise entails a critique of his historicity. Again, this question is not germane to a discussion of his philosophy. I think that our historical picture of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle is probably woefully inaccurate because our only records of them come from contrived dialogues written in a disturbingly predictable fiction genre style handed down decades or centuries later by usually anonymous conduits. But, it is still meaningful to dispute Aristotelian philosophy, because it is the body of propositions that matter, not the historicity of the speaker. That being said, however, it absolutely offers demerits to Jesus's pronouncements on the afterlife, for example, if Jesus never existed, or if the New Testament is otherwise unreliable as a document of history, which I think it is. I do not for a moment think that the historical critiques of Christianity are without fatal force against the religion or the bulk of its claims on things like the afterlife, because those specific metaphysical propositions about heaven, hell, and who goes to which one utterly depend on a stupendous and supernatural character that I think probably is a work of fiction, or at least majorly contrived. But, as with our probably-apocryphal Greek super-philosophers, I think that their categorical philosophical statements can still be meaningfully discussed absent a historical figure to point to for their origin.

This fine distinction between those propositions tainted by Christianity's ahistoricity (Jesus's pronouncements on the afterlife, for example) and those easily separable from the historical detritus of Christianity (that the mind and body are distinct, or that one should do unto others as they would do unto you, for example) likewise extends to Jesus's opinions on things like demons. They are strange sayings, today confined to the lips of either madmen in the madhouses or multimillionaires in the megachurches, but they likewise aren't interesting to a critique of Christian philosophy. Aristotle taught that women have fewer teeth than men: it is an oddly avoidable, embarrassing error (he could have just counted) that has no bearing whatsoever on his other philosophical claims, but that would serve as positive refutation of any claim by Aristotle to infallibility or divinity. Same with Jesus: I will avoid the bizarre cast of supernatural characters Jesus seems to find lurking around every corner, and restrict myself as narrowly as possible to his ethical and metaphysical claims.

As with all philosophers, both Jesus's methods and his results are open for debate- the contents of his system and the tools he uses to derive those contents can both be faulted. His philosophical method is utterly interwoven with his version of theism. They are completely inseparable. His ethical claims completely rely on the value of ancient Jewish law for their force. His Jewish audience would have found this reliance on ancient dogma endearing, but I do not. As I've said, Jesus gives us no real meta-ethical statements: he may tell us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, but he gives us no reasons why we should do so, except that God likes it when we do that and that the Old Testament says we should. His method for knowing what God likes just is reading the Old Testament, and he provides us with no reasons for thinking that the Old Testament is at all related to God's own opinions. There is no justification for his moral teachings, outside of their being God's own opinions.

The classic statement of the inadequacy of subrogating the common burden of all moral theorists to provide justifications for moral claims to God, chalking up the "rightness" of your system merely to its agreement with God, is attributed to Euthyphro, who rightly pointed out that the divine command theory of morality basically leaves the moral question still open, just knocked back a step. Is God's command right because God says it? Then either it is because God himself is the measure of goodness, in which case morality is arbitrary and subject to change at God's whim and therefore not universally and eternally binding as we like our moral claims to be, or the claim is good because God is deploying a standard of goodness external to himself, in which case we are still left with the question of whether God successfully meets that standard or not, and if he must meet that standard, then the standard is still external to God and God is therefore unnecessary to firmly grounding moral claims (the standard is self-grounding, on this objection), and since God is not necessary for morality then attributing the core of your meta-ethic to him seems premature.

And even if there were a known external standard, and it were known that God met it, it would remain an open question as to the precise nature of God's involvement in enforcing that command. If the chief reason to obey a principle is that it is good, then God's command behind it simply seems unnecessary. But if the chief reason is to escape the various graphic torments God will inflict upon you if you deviate from his scheme, then it seems that God has twisted what could have been a perfectly good moral claim into a question of sheer pragmatics. If you do what is right because of gunpoint duress and not because it is right, it hardly seems accurate to say that you act rightly in obeying that duress. Rather, you are acting in the kind of radically self-centered self-interest that moral theorists like to pretend is beneath all properly-constructed moral theories.

But Jesus's moral system is made entirely incoherent by juxtaposing the claim that morality derives from God's commands with the claim that, at bottom, God doesn't really care how you act: his punishments and rewards go to believers and unbelievers, not rightdoers and wrongdoers. This is a fundamental tension in his system: Jesus cogitates endlessly on our obligations to the poor and the sick, but ultimately decides that God doesn't care about those things more than he cares about whether you believe in his son - and yet God is the supposed fount of all goodness, supposedly himself perfectly good. Paradoxically, we are admonished, on the foundation of a debunked moral theory, to obey imperatives that come from God that God does not particularly care about, in order to show our love for God even though God only returns that love if we believe in his son, not if we follow those very commandments.

It does not help the case for Jesus's moral system that he champions what we today call vicarious redemption, which is the facile theological term that in normal conversation is called scapegoating. Jesus promulgates the doctrine not that sin condemns you but that salvation forgives your sins, but that if you accept the offer of salvation, you are not guilty of your sins, and if you do not accept the offer, you are automatically guilty of your sins. It would be a straightforward and agreeable matter to say that the acceptance of forgiveness means that your guilt is rendered inconsequential by the victim of your crime, but it is an entirely different thing altogether to say that forgiveness deletes the fact of your guilt. Guilt for a crime means something like, you actually performed proscribed actions x and y, and while after-the-fact forgiveness can nullify the contingencies of your punishment, you cannot change the fact of guilt retroactively any more than you change what your birthname was by changing your name. Had the salvation system advocated here limited itself to the mere forgiveness of an acknowledged debt instead of introducing the concept of absolution, it would not encounter this difficulty. But Jesus does not die for your debts, or for your punishment, he dies for your sins.

Most moral theorists would say that for a choice to have any moral salience, there must be some actual choice going on. Striking a stranger for no good reason seems eminently contrary to most sane moral theories, but the matter becomes a good deal less certain if someone commanding the action holds a gun to your head. Likewise, the choice to prefer sloth over labor is generally worthy of disdain, but if one is paralyzed or otherwise rendered immobile, it seems churlish to hold them to the same standard. Choice makes moral decisions meaningful. This becomes a problem for Jesus's moral claims both on account of his fatalistic, predeterministic theism, and on his account of the relationship between the body and the mind.

Generally, compatibilism in philosophy means that even though the laws of physics make the universe predictable, minds still make choices that are rightly called free because total randomness cannot be free will, the alternative to a law-bound universe is total randomness, and the operation of universal law on brains is only to compel them to choose between limited options but not zero options on questions of self-interest or other interests. In short, atheistic compatibilism works because at least in principle there are multiple possible outcomes to any given situation. Theistic determinism, however, is an order of magnitude harsher. It stipulates that, as Isaiah says, God is literally the author of history: we are no more free to deviate from God's divine plan than the characters in a novel are free to act other than as they are written. There is only one, single divine plan, known in intimate detail from beginning to end, and even if God's own son begs for the plan to be bent to prevent his own personal suffering, God won't allow it: it is a merciless system that couldn't possibly leave open any meaningful choices.

Not only that, recall that Jesus's description of the relationship between the body and the mind holds that your eye can cause you to sin. This is a fine bit of flair. Jesus does not say that you may use your eyes to sin, he says that your eyes can cause you to sin. Sin, which we usually conflate with moral wrongdoing, is what God punishes, but it apparently isn't anything at all to do with free decisions because it seems that other entities can sin for you, or at least make the choice to sin for you. And you are morally remiss if you do not tear that eye out straightaway- at least, morally remiss insofar as it is in your best interests to avoid eternal hellfire.

I will end the discussion of Jesus's moral system with a parting word about his most famous saying, that one should do unto others as you would have them do unto you, a corruption of Old Testament phraseology to identical effect. Suppose that I really, really want to have sex with someone, but sadly, the object of my affection does not reciprocate. Under the Golden Rule, oughtn't I rape her? I want her to have sex with me, so I do unto her what I would have her do unto me: I have sex with her. If the question of consent seems to break the parallel to you, then just imagine that I'm particularly depraved and I really fancy being violated in the way I ultimately violate this person. The Golden Rule seems to allow this. Jesus offers us no good reasons to subscribe to the Golden Rule, and this seems like one good reason to reject. Now, let me turn away from Jesus's clearly defective moral system to those other aspects of his philosophy that I find to be broken.

Jesus's opinions about the foundations of truth are not troubled by problems of contradicting his other doctrines as much as they are troubled by sheer internal incoherence. As I've said, Jesus makes a point of predicting the arrival and behavior of the so-called Spirit of Truth, and frequently indicates that truth is communicated best in opaque parables and in the stories of old. You see versions of this deep intermixing of God with truth in the "worldview-obsessed" philosophy of modern Christianity. Christian philosophy today throws around the term "Christian worldview" like they have a stutter, and it generally refers to that set of fundamental propositions (what is truth, what is the meaning of life, etc.) that are both dominant human concerns and which are best resolved by Christian theism. Jesus and his descendants see truth as something in need of grounding, in need of external justification, and that Christian theism makes sense of the distinction between truth and falsehood. As Douglas Wilson said to Christopher Hitchens, echoing a proposition raised in JP Moreland's apologetical compendium Scaling the Secular City, if there is no God, there is no truth- nothing grounds truth, nothing makes sense of the question "what is true?" other than the existence of the Christian God.

This central proposition of both Jesus's own philosophy and later theistic interpretations thereof rests upon a glaring category error that is self-refuting. Truth does not need a grounding. Truth does not require external justification; it needs no spirit to speak for it, since its universal absence is impossible. Consider the following proposition:

• If there is no God, then there is no truth.

You see the problem: the proposition gives us conditions on which it would be true that nothing is true: the proposition is self-refuting. If "If there is no God, then there is no truth" is true, then if there is no God, it is true that nothing is true, so at least one thing is true, so something is true and nothing is true all at the same time. Any system that seeks to condition the very existence, the very possibility, of truth on some proposition external to truth and falsehood themselves is equally demented in its ambit and equally doomed to prompt self-termination.

Questions about bodies and spirits, minds and souls, all turn on resolvable contingencies of empirical study that have been resolved: it does not appear that we have any minds that are independent of our brains, and we do not have any evidence of minds that operate in the absence of a physical correlate. Jesus stipulates the existence of a number of disembodied minds, both in the vast cast of fictional characters that haunt every corner of the world he lives in and in every single individual person. Whether you categorize such things as essential doctrines or as the mere metaphysical excreta of his system, like demons and angels and things like that, there are more serious difficulty's for Jesus's own philosophical system than trivialities like being utterly at odds with centuries of indisputable mountains of neuroscientific evidence about from where our minds originate. The mere possibility that God could have created disembodied minds in a disembodied mind-space (heaven is supposedly something like this) and also could have created a sin-riddled physical world whose sole purpose (to Jesus) is to transmutate over historical time into the kingdom of God means that God basically was morally deficient in creating both physical and immaterial reality at the same time.

To see what I mean, imagine two options for child-rearing. One way is to create your child happy and keep them happy in perpetuity without interruption. Another way is to create your child unhappy, make them unhappier for a few decades, and then keep them happy in perpetuity, subject to certain conditions about their beliefs, of course. The former way is obviously inferior to the latter, and God could have done either one - but he chose both, the intermingling of systems of which one is inherently inferior to the other. God shows that, just as with the angels and demons that Jesus attests to, God could have created human minds (souls) in heaven, complete with free will, and let them accept or reject him. Don't create them in Eden, populated with dangerous animals and poisonous trees- this seems like a blunder, one which God should have foreseen. No, simply create them in heaven.

Recall that Jesus supposedly wields great power over demons: they do exactly as commanded, and they fear him. If he wants them in some pigs, they end up in some pigs. So it seems that these demon creatures are not free, or at least that their free will can be deactivated very easily by Jesus. Why, then, stipulate their existence at all? What possible purpose could beings of pure evil have in this or any world? Ignore their role in causing mental illness; I'm not attacking Jesus for not understanding biology, I'm saying that this is a problem of internal coherence for Christianity. The twin assertions that God can create immaterial beings and that God can create material beings but that by being material those latter beings are inherently broken (and can even be caused to sin by their bodies) seems to entail that God ought to stick to immaterial beings, because the good ones end up in heaven and the bad ones can be bossed around without consequence anyway.

Whatever content remains to the content of Jesus's teachings is, as I've said, essentially Stoic in character, but Jesus does not quite get the Stoic method right- he apes many of the conclusions of ancient Greek philosophy but does butchery to its methods. Stoicism is just the Greek name for a body of principles adopted independently by many cultures around the world: a Zen Buddhist, a Stoic, and an American Transcendentalist would be very familiar in each others' company, but the element common to all of them that should be found in Christianity is absent. Jesus did get the world-rejection part; like the Greeks before him, Jesus utterly rejected the value of material possession and taught that a life of utter poverty and asceticism is best. But Jesus's motivation isn't clarity of mind or making time to dedicate to pure introspection or philosophy, but because money might make you sin, and the world will end within a generation anyway so there's no need to go about accumulating material things.

But the real reason that Jesus's Stoicism lacks the sincerity and earnestness of its superior versions elsewhere is that Jesus only rejects life and its rewards because he thinks that there are better rewards elsewhere- there is just a better game, greener grass, over another horizon. Stoicism, the honest concession that the world is beyond your control, that death is not just inevitable but an imperative, that the accumulation of things as an end unto itself is a shade more futile than masturbation, that meaning is not delivered to us hand-packaged but rather built up in the toil and turmoil of life, is the golden core of Greek philosophy. But it glows with its honesty, with the courage it takes to face the realities of this world with sincerity- the system that Jesus promotes, on the other hand, does not say to abandon the frivolities of contemporary life, but merely to delay a while longer for the boundless frivolities to come in the afterlife.

At its heart, Jesus's philosophy is centered around the conquest of death, as is Stoicism. Jesus conquers death through cheap mythology, promising the pre-packaged escape trick to any who believe on him. The difficult path of true Stoicism is to transcend death by internalizing it, understanding it, and accepting it, by cognizing constantly on the fact of one's own mortality, of truly knowing that, whatever you choose to value, value it with the impermanence of your own consciousness in mind. In the past I have compared Christianity to Wal-Mart: it will provide a cheap, low-hassle, factory-made template of solutions to the Big Questions that are popular, fun, and easy. Jesus's cheap imitation of Stoicism is the prime example. He offers the smugness of a sense of superiority in the charity that is enjoined, with none of the courage or honesty it takes to confront the fact of mortality. You can have your humble life, but you cannot have a humble death with a God who so utter lacks humility that your own death is to him nothing but a chance to grade you on your devotion to him. The world-rejection philosophy draws its power purely from the free choice of a life uncomplicated by greed and excess. The Christian philosophy is to simply delay the greed and excess a few decades, to treat life not even with honesty and seriousness but with outright contempt, that the world is not merely a place where bad things happen, but that it is the bad place, a sinful place, good only for temptation and the escape from it through Jesus.

That a man like George W. Bush would list Jesus as his favorite philosophy perfectly captures the spirit of my critique: saying that Jesus is your favorite philosopher is the absolute safest, least confrontational, most predictable and comfortable response to what could be a very in-depth, complicated question that says a lot about a man. It is pre-packaged simplicity, very neat and sanitary. Yet the system itself is inadequate, built, as I've shown, on propositions ranging from inconsistent to absurd to simply hollow.