Why It Matters That Jesus Never Shoveled Snow

by John Slattery

Jesus never really experienced winter. Not really. And I find that really interesting.

First, some facts: Israel is geographically characterized as “subtropical” climate, falling between the “temperate zone” and the “tropical zone.” This means that Israel falls between the 35th latitudinal parallel and the Tropic of Cancer (23.27 degrees latitude). Similar temperature ranges would be those of Northern California, with the difference that Israel remains engulfed in the Mediterranean Climate Region, thus experiencing dry summers and rainy winters. Israel does have some snow each year, but it’s limited to the northern mountain region; the rest of the country rarely—if ever—sees snowfall.

An easy look at the geographical placement of Israel, which is inside the red circle. (Link to Israel's climate information)

“Fair enough,” you might say, “but why does this matter? Jesus still said the same words, talked to certain people, died on the cross, was resurrected from the dead, etc. Who cares what the climate was like?”

On the one hand, I’d agree with you. The historical nature of Jesus’ life and surroundings belongs precisely to historical aspects of anthropology, archeology, sociology, etc. On the other hand, winter really affects me, and so I change my answer: the fact that Jesus never had to shovel two feet of snow—or even experience subzero temperatures, more than likely—matters because human experience matters to theology.

How it matters is an enormous question tree with lots of branches, but the why is fairly straightforward in a Christian lens: human experience matters to theology because Jesus was human. God became human, thus giving credence and importance to the most common aspects of daily life: the subjective, personal, unique human experience of my life matters.

As a side note: It always turns me off when a pastor talks about Jesus “experiencing everything that humans experience” or that Jesus’ death was “the worst possible death one could know”—as if Jesus would not have suffered more if he had been imprisoned and tortured for an entire month! As if Jesus experienced the pains of childbirth while he lived! Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ essentially makes this gruesome argument, shaming anyone in the audience who might think that they could suffer worse than Jesus did on that day.

Now, let me push the why of the argument forward: if we accept that Jesus never experienced Winter as, say, residents of Saskatchewan have, we can begin to accept that Jesus’ limited human experience allows us to see both (1) The necessary humility of God as exemplary of “kenosis”; (2) The power of our own subjectivity in understanding Christ.

(1) To begin with, a human life can only ever be full of subjective experiences. Even if you travel the world and experience one year in every possible climate, you will still never know the feeling of someone born in the arctic of Russia, going to school, finding a job, raising a family, and dying in the same town she was raised. We can only know truly what we have personally experienced. This does not make our experiences completely unrelated (a dangerous line of thinking that leads to complete relativity), but it does make them dissimilar and individually unique.

It is precisely this dissimilarity and uniqueness—the fact that Jesus lived and died where he did instead of living in every possible culture and in every religious tradition—which allows us to see another compelling aspect of God’s humility. Now, any definition of Christian humility worth its salt must include an explanation of the kenotic nature of God, a phrase which refers to Philippians 2:5-8. In his letter to the people of Philippi, Paul writes:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
    who, though he was in the form of God,
    did not regard equality with God
    as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
    taking the form of a slave,
    being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
    he humbled himself
    and became obedient to the point of death—
    even death on a cross. (NRSV)

In the original Greek, the verb for “emptied” is “ekenosen,” which forms the English theological word of kenosis—a tricky Greek word which is translated rather widely, from the “emptied himself” of the New Revised Standard Version above, to the NIV’s “he made himself nothing,” to the New Living Translation’s “he gave up his divine privileges.” Because of the difficulty in translating this word, theologians like to speak of the "kenotic" nature of God.

In short, by taking on the form of the perfectly unique and subjective human, God did something drastic and quite revolutionary. God—who must somehow supersede all subjectivity—becomes incarnate as a human being who, by definition, is completely subjective. It remains a mystery, and a very potent one in forming Christian theology—what kind of God gives up objectivity for subjectivity?

With this kenosis in mind, we can understand God’s humility as not only found in Jesus’ actions, but in his very existence: that Jesus came only once, that he lived a human life, that he didn’t travel the world, that he didn’t experience every possible human emotion, that he didn’t test the limits of pleasure and pain. God’s humility is found in the core of Jesus’ human experience of reality as subjective.

(2) Now that we better understanding this compelling aspect of God’s humility, we can begin to see that the intentional subjective nature of Jesus’ Incarnation allows us to see our own subjectivity as renewed. Instead of our subjective experiences as a hamper for living a Christian life, our uniqueness becomes a necessary component of our spirituality. Because God’s humility was so perfectly displayed in the unique life-experience of Jesus, I can acknowledge and utilize my own subjectivity as a Gospel narrative to my own time and place.

God has always been with God’s people, but God’s experience of life in Jesus confirms the individual dignity of every human’s unique experience in a way that had never been done before. The fact that God became human displays a sacrifice of universal significance on the part of the Triune God. No longer should a Divinity be known as a distant, watchful, protector who occasionally hangs out with the locals: Jesus’ existence not only acknowledges our subjectivity, but divinizes—makes as divine—the necessary portion of our life that is completely and utterly our own. All the way down to our experience of a cold January afternoon.

Because Jesus never experienced Winter, never preached about it, never mentioned it—precisely because of this subjectivity—I must employ the metaphor of Winter to preach a Gospel of perfect hope amidst of coldness of perceived reality. I have no knowledge of being thrown around a ship in restless seas, so I can’t really connect to Peter walking on water (Matthew 14) or Jesus sleeping during the storm (Mark 4), but I can certainly connect to the deep and beautiful hope amidst the white death of winter.

Because of this divinized subjectivity, I must employ the metaphor—like C.S. Lewis did in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—because my uniqueness will never be repeated and has never existed in human history. I must speak for Christ because I am the only instance of this specific bearer of the Gospel that will ever exist. An acceptance of Jesus’ subjectivity pushes each of us to preach a Gospel in ways that Jesus could never have done, and helps us to know that we are accomplishing “greater things” (John 14:12) simply by being free to extend a metaphor to an experience that Jesus never had.

Thus it really does matter that Jesus never experienced the deep chill of months frozen and lakes full of ice. On the one hand, we can come to realize more deeply the beautiful humility that inexpressibly defines God. And on the other, we can come to know that in Jesus’ uniqueness, the individual uniqueness of each of us—the simplicity of our daily lives that can never be repeated or perfectly experienced by another—becomes blessed, dignified, and hallowed in the incessant Incarnation of the Divine.

+   +   +

About the author:
John Slattery is a doctoral student in Systematic Theology and the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame. He writes regularly for the blog Daily Theology, and is a Catholic.

---

Photo sources:
1. http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevendepolo/5397347316/
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_indicating_tropics_and_subtropics.png

3. http://www.flickr.com/photos/tabor-roeder/11523990994/ 

Becoming an Evolutionist

"One might say that whereas the Stoic and Josephus reason like contemporary advocates of Intelligent Design, inferring a supranatural power from the symmetries (or, in Josephus's case, the asymmetries) in nature, Jubilees and Philo speak of a self-revealing God who controls nature but is not readily or fully inferable from nature alone. If nothing else, this issues a caution about scientific arguments developed for or against the existence of God. For the God therewith affirmed or denied may not be the God of Abraham."

Inheriting Abraham, Jon D. Levenson, pg. 131 (emphasis added)

+   +   +

A few weeks ago, I got a Facebook message from a conservative Christian friend who wanted to pick my brain on some religious issues we disagree about. As I skimmed the message before preparing to dig in and prepare my arguments, I noticed that there, nestled down in the middle of it, was a word I hadn't seen in a long time, a word my friend was applying to me: "evolutionist." As in, the opposite of a "creationist." And seeing the word gave me pause. Am I an evolutionist? And if so, how did I become one?

As a kid, I was never all that invested in a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible. My parents were pastors (and not fundamentalist ones) so I heard too much exegesis and application of the Bible to really think that all of it could be understood from its plain sense alone. In particular, I never learned to think of the six days of creation in Genesis as a literal fact. For one thing, it seemed to conflict with what I knew from my books about dinosaurs and outer space; for another, I was well aware that there were people who thought of it and the rest of Genesis in non-literal terms.

I was, however, very invested in the idea of Creation, that God was the creator of the universe, of life, and especially of humanity. So I was open to persuasion on the matter of just how Genesis was to be interpreted. I remember being around eight years old and picking up a creation science book in my church's nursery/playroom, which was devoted almost entirely to providing evidence that people and dinosaurs co-existed. As a huge dinosaur fan I was, of course, totally blown away.  Thanks in no small part to a dearth of critical thinking skills, I remained convinced for years that ancient legends about dragons were describing real encounters with dinosaurs. (Also, that the T. rex had sharp teeth for eating pineapples, not meat, because creation science.)

Wouldn't this be great? This would totally be great.

While this conviction wore off eventually, a new one sprang up in its place. Sometime during my teenage years, I encountered Darwin's Black Box, a book by Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe. In the book, Behe lays out a case against the evolutionary origins of certain biological structures on the grounds of irreducible complexity; in essence, he argues that no one has been able to explain how these things arose by evolution, therefore, they didn't. Today I tend to think of this as the creationist version of Bill O'Reilly claiming that You Can't Explain how tides work,* but at the time I was enormously engaged by the idea that there was a real, live scientist (Behe is a biochemist) who had found physical proof of Creation.

Three things eventually changed my mind. The first was, of all things, Catholicism. As a student at a Catholic high school, I was subjected to various classes under the heading of "religion" (barf, amirite?), including a class on the Bible.** I learned in class that the position of the Catholic church was, surprisingly, that evolution is pretty legit. While I remained unconvinced, I was intrigued that Catholics took a less conservative position on the matter than many American Protestants.

The second thing was college. Not so much listening to professors extoll the virtues of evolutionary theory (though that played a small part), but having a chance to discuss my ideas with a friend who actually studied biology. I brought up irreducible complexity to her, wondering what her perspective would be, and she told me that it was not considered legitimate science! In fact, she had major issues with the way the arguments about it had been advanced, and thought that the whole Intelligent Design movement stood on extremely shaky ground.

I was shocked. I started researching Intelligent Design and Michael Behe in the college library, and I discovered that my friend was correct: irreducible complexity had been rejected and discredited as mainstream scientific theory. I was all set to do what humans normally do when confronted with evidence that contradicts a strongly held belief, namely, do everything I could to strengthen said belief. What stopped me was the third thing: another conversation.

I had started to dig in to defend my position on Intelligent Design, checking out library books and brooding about the issues at stake, when I happened into a conversation on the subject with one of my mentors at church. "What do you think about evolution?" I asked, preparing to hear him affirm my stance on the subject, or something like it. "It doesn't matter," he said. My mentor explained that he was a Christian, he believed in God, in Christ, in salvation and freedom from sin and death. The exact terms of how the world came to be were irrelevant to those beliefs; no theory of biology was going to do anything to confirm or refute his belief in a loving God, because that God stood outside of such things.

Thankfully, this broke my resolve, and I did not spend months, years, or a lifetime trying to use science to prove that God, or Creation, is a thing. What's more, today I can pursue any interest I may have in evolutionary biology or related fields, as I would not have been otherwise. Because of two conversations and a high school class, I can read Stephen Jay Gould or Steven Pinker with delight instead of tension or anger. Because a few people took the time to speak gently to me, I can get excited about new research into genetics or paleontology. Because I became an "evolutionist," I was set free.

+   +   +

Like most liberal Christians, I love the Bible. I really love it. I spent all of last year reading it, and now I love it even more. But loving the Bible means taking it seriously; and taking it seriously means trying to read it as honestly as I can.

An honest reading of the Bible can reveal the truth of Creation and God's care for it, without insisting that the Bible has all the historical details of Creation. For me, an honest reading of the Bible includes research about the cultures it was written in and the historical events that took place during its composition. It includes hard thinking, praying, and discernment about what needs to be taken in its plain sense, at the literal level, and what has value on other levels. And that discernment should be based not on my instincts about what is right, but on external principles that can guide me and other Christians.

One of these principles is this: when interpreting the Bible, take into account what humans learn about our world through careful study. This includes not only the careful study of the natural world, which has yielded the theory of evolution, but also the study of human history, which has shown that some parts of the Bible record historical details accurately, and that others seem to have been written not to convey exact history, but messages about historical events or instructive stories about certain historical periods.

At the heart of this principle is Genesis 1, in which God creates the land and the sea, the sun and the moon, the plants and the animals—all of which God declares to be "good"—and last of all, God creates human beings, declaring the Creation that has been completed with them to be "very good." Creation is good, and humankind is good, and studying ourselves and Creation should also be good, because such study can tell us more about their origins in the ultimate Good. If we learn new facts from studying ourselves and our world, this principle implies, should they not be read as a complement to, rather than a contradiction of, the truths found in our Bibles?

---

*Okay, I confess that I actually think it's the creationist version of Insane Clown Posse asking F@#&ing Magnets, How Do They Work?, but I was uncomfortable saying so in the body of this post. Now you know, O footnote reader.
**This was actually a pretty good class, at least in terms of shaping my views of scripture going into adulthood: it was also the first place I encountered the documentary hypothesis and other historical criticism of the Bible.  

Photos:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Huxley_-_Mans_Place_in_Nature.jpg
2. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Largesttheropods_2.svg 
3. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/vinothchandar/7696925948/
4. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/tfjensen/8056427807/

How Not To Write About Religion

by Bailey Pickens

I grew up a Presbyterian (USA) in the Deep South.

This will be the opening salvo to many an essay of mine, I’m sure. This is because it’s important: I grew up a mainline Calvinist (gently Calvinist, I’ll admit) surrounded by conservative Baptists. This means a lot of things—some of which I’ll write about later—but for now, this means I grew up very close to, but just outside of, various permutations of Evangelical Christian culture. My background seems to have me bristling at depictions of Christians no matter where I am: defensive of Christians writ large at my college in Chicago, of liberals when I visit home, of Evangelicals at my divinity school in Connecticut.

This past semester, I audited a class taught by Mark Oppenheimer, an NYTimes columnist, called “Writing About Religion.” A fun, lively seminar, it examined religion journalism of all sorts, from Christopher Hitchens’s hit piece on Mother Teresa (very highly recommended, incidentally—his conclusions are to my mind hysterical, but his obsessively collected and meticulously presented evidence complicates the new saint’s legacy in a real way) to long-form pieces on Scientology to disillusioned ex-Christian memoirs to a prizewinning series of articles on an imam in New York City.

The class gave me plenty to bristle at: though often pleasantly surprised by the writing and my fellows, I was just as often brought up short by what felt (unfairly, of course) like nearly deliberate ignorance. I felt bristlier by the week, and by the end of the class may as well have been a pincushion, exhilarated by the discussions but furious at misunderstandings of my own people and my childhood neighbors. I was given an outlet for my bristles in a paper assignment: “Use what we’ve read to talk about how religion journalism should be done. However you like. Opinions welcome!” And I had plenty.

+   +   +

“I want to take every one of those girls aside and whisper to them the real secret of womanhood” is how Jennifer Baumgardner ends her 2007 article in Glamour on purity balls, leaving me wishing that she would whisper that secret to everyone, including me, who hadn’t realized that womanhood was a monolith with a trademark secret but is glad that Jennifer Baumgardner, at least, has figured it out.

“Would You Pledge Your Virginity to Your Father?” is primarily a portrait of Baumgardner’s own bewilderment that anyone’s answer wouldn’t be a resounding “no.” The article stumbles between statistics that complicate rather than bolster her thesis (viz., that the women and girls she interviews are entranced by the shadows on the wall of the cave [the cave is patriarchy]), poorly situated expert quotations, and words from the girls involved that are relegated to background noise.

The article is bad, and it isn’t bad because Baumgardner isn’t smart or aware or is especially unobservant. It’s bad because she writes about participants in purity culture the way my genteel, racist grandmother talks about black people. Baumgardner is unable to write about the purity ball she attended with any coherence because she is fundamentally unable to sympathize with the people she saw. Perhaps more to the point, she does not think they are to be sympathized with. The girls are to be pitied, the fathers viewed slightly askance, but their words and actions exist in a sphere separate from the sphere of rational people with healthy sexualities—that is, Baumgardner’s sphere.

This is worth pressing. Baumgardner’s total inability to in any way relate to the people she writes about here leads her into a species of pedestrian objectification that is appalling, especially considering her feminist background. She describes body shape, dress cut, and makeup use, as though offended at the thought of people with different, arguably dangerous—but at any rate backward and prudish—understandings of sexuality, buying into precisely the same standards of female beauty and prom fashion that animate every teenage formal event, everywhere in America, that doesn’t mandate the covering of shoulders. The tight fit of a promotional t-shirt “sends a bit of a mixed message,” she says, apparently endorsing the idea that tight clothing signals sexual availability, although the first thing that stfusexists.tumblr.com taught me is that that’s sexist. She is so unsympathetic to her subjects that she falls back on the sort of shaming of young female sexuality that one assumes she would ordinarily abhor. “In patriarchy,” says one of her experts (out of left field and after an ignorant throwaway line about “biblical times”), “a father owns a girl’s sexuality.” What a relief to know that, as my father never worked to prevent my figuring out of mine, I got to grow up outside of patriarchy.

I am not demanding that Baumgardner herself become an Evangelical Christian if she hopes to write an effective article about purity culture.

The problem is not that she isn’t one of them; the problem is that she cannot understand how anyone would be. The problem is that this is too weird to be worth genuinely looking at in light of the importance of father-daughter relationships to girls’ development and self-esteem, which statistics she includes without connecting them to the girls in question at all. The problem is that this is too weird to be worth looking at in light of girls’ ownership of their sexuality—even if it’s co-ownership with a male relative—against, say, the assumption of much of American culture that female sexuality and female bodies belong to everyone else, especially men. The problem is that Baumgardner is too invested in the idea of sexual exploration as the healthy model of teenage development to devote any scrutiny to the Texan she found for this piece who made a pledge (apparently unconnected to the balls) at fourteen, had sex at fifteen, and was pregnant at nineteen, and who is instead merely presented as evidence for the claim that purity pledges are doomed to failure.

The problem is that she wrote this article before she went to the ball at all.

Baumgardner doesn’t understand what she’s looking at. She can’t.

+   +   + 

Contrast this with John Jeremiah Sullivan’s article for GQ. “Upon This Rock” starts out precisely as smarmy and self-congratulatory as I would expect a GQ article about Christian rock to be. Sullivan is smarter than everyone around him, even (or especially) the people helping him get to the people he’s writing about. He pulls a cute bait-and-switch describing Evangelicalism as a cult controlling a dystopian future. He even condescends to the fat girl in the second section. The article is candy to anyone with a taste for too-slick, too-smart writing about people they thinks they're above, until a day or so into the Creation Festival, when Sullivan cracks. He writes it to the rhythm of physical exhaustion and hunger, but the larger point is that he knows the people around him. He can’t keep writing like they aren’t the same kind of person that he is.

Sullivan manages to write about affective community, essential humanity, and the work of Evangelical Christianity in the lonely and the damaged without ever suggesting that his readers should convert, or that Christian rock is good (it is, as he says, very bad), or that Creation Festival is a fun place, or anything else that might reflect a lack of critical distance. Sullivan’s piece is good because, though outside, he can sympathize with those on the inside, and in a way that can’t be written off with a nod to his adolescent experiences. A hip suburban church experience is little like the Evangelicalism of the desperately poor and marginal. The West Virginians who take Sullivan in quote from the King James Verson, not the NIV; Verm and company prepared him, perhaps, for Creation Festival, but much less for Ritter and Jake. Sullivan’s piece succeeds where it might have failed, utterly, as the first third at least suggests that it ought to fail, because he is capable of sympathy with people who are unlike him. He is capable of imagining a world in which their actions and words are reasonable, not foreign, and what's more, he's capable of imagining that that world is in fact this one, and not too far from home.

The obvious question is whether this is a sympathy required of writers about religion in particular, and at first, I thought that it was. I’m religious. I thought I wanted a treatment of religion that recognized it as special. I was wrong. The parallels between sports and religion are easy: insider jargon and shorthand, loyalties that can be arbitrary and fanatical, allusions to previous events and shared histories that outsiders can’t access. But there’s a piece of this analogy that we didn’t touch in class: the defensive Catholic recoil and the rush to protect rapist priests bears startling resemblance to the near-riots in Pennsylvania around Sandusky’s trial and conviction. I don’t need Sullivan to dance around the patness of Evangelical certainty, and I don’t need Baumgardner to decide that purity balls are the way to go if you’re worried about your fifteen-year-old daughter’s sex life.

What I need—that is, what I understand to be the obligation of a religion writer—is good reporting. Reporting cannot be very good if the reporter doesn’t understand what she is looking at. Reporting cannot be very good without a basic understanding of the field of play and an ability to sympathize, on the level of “also a human person,” with the people in it. Religion is a human endeavor that is important to people. It deserves precisely as much respect as, and no more than, any other human endeavor that is important to people. If the endeavor seems bizarre, humanize it. If it seems alien, familiarize it. If it’s harmful, show it. If you write about it, know about it. If you don’t know, learn. This is, of course, not an easy demand to make of reporters of any kind, that they be sympathetic and aware, but it isn’t a demand for special knowledge or for special treatment of the subject. The biggest holes in Alix Spiegel’s piece, “Pray (Can the secular world and the religious world understand each other?)”—the lack of awareness of Colorado Springs’s place in the American Christian jigsaw puzzle—could have been filled by five minutes on Wikipedia. The piece is still better than many because she does not make her subjects freaks; because she finds a deep attraction, a gut level “getting it,” about the way they relate to each other and to her. Andrea Elliot’s series, “Muslims in America,” soars because it does not flinch in front of difference or let difference dominate the story, and she seems to have done her homework.

If religion journalism’s major post-9/11 project is to be explaining religion as a motivating force behind national and global events, it must also treat it as something that is not just other, something simultaneously curious and understandable, like every other thing humans do.

+   +   +

About the author:
Bailey Pickens is a divinity student at Yale, studying in order to become a Presbyterian minister. She went to college with James Davisson. This is her first guest post for In Progress.

---

Photo source:
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/peasap/566255156/