Dear Theophilus, 

You mention that some of the discussion was very heavy in the last letter. I agree with you, but I think that if we work through the matter together, we will learn much.

We left off last time talking about Christ's death and its significance. I want to come back to this crucial point because a lot of Christian theology hangs on it.

The point that I want to make very clearly and unequivocally is that there are important reasons why Christ had to die and among them is not to satisfy some deity or some malevolent power.

Salvation means changing the nature or essence of humanity so that it is no longer fragmented with autonomous units working separately for their own ego driven goals. Human nature has become fragmented, like humpty-dumpty, and now nothing can put it back together. No amount of upholding the law, no amount of virtuous behavior can change this fact. Adam passes on this fragmented nature to his offspring and they in turn pass it along until we inherit it. But look at what becomes central to this fragmented nature.

Its prime goal now is survival and it will do this at almost any cost. To counteract this, an action has to be taken contrary to this instinct for survival, and this has to happen through a wilful action. Death has to occur and it has to come through the willing co-operation of Christ and this is what is shown in the New Testament. Christ is said to be sinless and this means that He is what man is intended to be - totally personal and totally free. He accepts His death willingly not through some morbid wish to suffer but to affirm His freedom. Through this practise of His freedom he undoes what Adam did - He affirms and creates a new, unified human nature with a new life which is referred to as immortality. Immortality is the strongest possible word for life. Life in us can become so weak that it cannot be detected and we call this state death. With Christ, we are offered a new life, the life which is beyond corruption and death. The Church is where man realizes this new life in the Trinitarian mode of communion and personhood.

But, you may ask, isn't there something contrived in Christ's death? It almost seems unreal and staged as if it were some drama taking place on the stage of history. There seems to be almost a hint of self-hatred in Christ's passive acceptance of death.

This is a common error that is made. Christ's death seems passive, but it is not. It is active in the deepest understanding of the word. We think of our self-assertion as the ultimate expression of our freedom and of our strength. This, as the beatitudes show, is totally contrary to reality. It is through the exercise of our wills not in our ego driven goals but in conformation of love for someone that we assert our strength and our freedom. Freedom does not mean doing what we want; freedom means doing what we were intended to do as free personal creations.

Christ's death transfigures death in general. Death is a sign of rebellion; with Christ, death becomes the sign of obedience, of accepting the Father's will.

It is, paradoxically, through asceticism that our freedom is expressed. The aim of asceticism is not control, as is often thought. It is a struggle for freeedom, the ability to give something up. It is when we challenge our instincts and our urges that we become most what we are intended to be. It is also important to realize that asceticism does not undervalue the physical; on the contrary, asceticism sees that the material is very powerful and very necessary for a full human existence and therefore, this is why it is important to pay such attention to the physical reality around us and to the physical reality of our bodies. What asceticism underlines is that existence cannot be grasped through abstract concepts. It is the ordinary, the specific that forms the bulk of our lives and it is in this that we are to find our meaning an our salvation.

Now, Theophilus, you bring up the point about science challenging teachings of our faith. You find it very hard to accept what is written in the Scriptures because it sounds mythic and legendary and at odds with what we know of the world. What you say, I am sure is held as true by many, many people. Maybe what we should do at this point, is to consider the relationship between science and religion in some depth.

Science has to do with knowledge but knowledge itself, can be subdivided into various categories. The term science comes from the Latin word scientia which means systematic knowledge. But there are other words for knowledge in Latin. There is the term intellectus which represents intuitive knowledge, a knowledge not necessarily based on some objective facts or information, but a certain sense that something is so. Another term for knowledge is sapientia, which is a term used to talk about ultimate or fundamental knowledge. Thus, we can see that science is only one aspect of knowledge, and a limited one at that. Unfortunately, science has become accepted as the only valid and reliable form of knowledge.

Religion has much to do with sapientia. Sapiential thought uses poetry and symbols to put across what it wants to say. Symbols are often misunderstood in terms of what it is that they are. They point to something but, at the same time, they are part of that something. An illustration of this would be the leaning tower of Pisa. This tower is a symbol of Pisa but it is also Pisa. It is in this sense that religious symbols are to be understood. Religion expresses that which cannot be described through rational concepts. Religion, in a sense, is very concrete whereas science sees in abstractions. Sometimes this concreteness seems a bit naive in religion but it is just this concreteness that gives it its strength. Permit me to expand on this point because it is important. When you deal with abstract concepts, as science does to a large extent, the individual human being becomes unimportant. It is the grand picture that starts to dominate. Thus, for religion you are of infinite importance because of your uniqueness. For science you are just a temporary phenomenon which comes into existence and then disappears. Nothing more, nothing less. It is ironic that as we learn more about the universe, we become more alienated from it as we find less and less room for us in it. We have lost what I may call cosmic symbolism, which is retained within religions. Let me illustrate with an example. Suppose that you are in a room with a window and it is daylight outside and you look through the window to see what is going on outside the room. But, as night falls, you turn on the light and as you look at the window, what you see is not what is outside, but your own reflection. Adam and Eve, before the fall could see through creation to the light that is out there. Now, after the fall, creation has become opaque and we see mainly our distorted image.

Don't misunderstood me by thinking that I am against science. Science is a noble enterprise and it has enriched our lives in many ways but it has a central problem. Whenever a part of life is taken for the whole, distortions arise and they cause problems. This is what has happened with science - it has become the only acceptable way of seeing or studying the universe. When a claim such as this is made, and it is made by scientists, then distortions arise. The other point that I want to make is that the term scientist is used in a rather imprecise manner. Most of those whom we call scientists are really technicians. They devise ways of better making something or of using nature in a manner useful for us. Scientists deal with laws that govern the universe and study these laws and study how the universe could possibly come into existence. But underneath this, there is a major assumption made. Only the natural is permitted to be discussed or studied. Anything dealing with God is banned and this bias is passed along to those who are listening to scientists speak.

Already, there is a foreshadowing of a disaster in science. Scientists, at least some of them, seem to feel that they are on the track of explaining everything. They have forgotten the lessons that Greek tragedies try to teach. Two important rules of existence are hubris and nemesis. Hubris is the satanic self-assertion which results in nemesis, a fatal retribution in which man's vary own power becomes the source of his own destruction. Hubris is the false and arrogant estimate of one's worth and it usually is accompanied by terror. History has been replete with illustrations of this principle. All revolutions place justice and reason on the throne. In the name of abstractions, every violence, every cruelty, every inhumanity becomes possible and even logically necessary. After the French revolution, reason, as Camus has written, 'floated off like a balloon into the empty sky of great principles. To adore theorems for any length of time, faith is not enough; one also needs a police.' We still have not learned that there is no opposition to a totalitarian system aside from religious arguments. If the world has no meaning, as so many scientists are claiming, then the totalitarian is right. The constant credo of the despot is the belief in some paradisiacal future. Someday man will be perfected and then life will become a paradise. Meanwhile, the slaughter goes on in the name of striving for perfection as mass murder, torture, the police state are all justified for the good of some abstract humanity. Against this, science can say nothing and if it can say nothing, then it is deficient as a philosophy of life.

Don't fool yourself. Science will not usher in a new era of peace and prosperity. It, on its own, offers a distorted view of life and if this is taken as the ultimate truth, then we are indeed headed for disaster. But, more in the next letter.

Yours,

Bar-Abbas

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