Muddled Christianity and Jewish Alienation

How opposite histories produced conflicting theologies

Contrary to certain triumphalist atheists, Jewish monotheism wasn’t likely directed by the fear of having this kind of religion falsified. Jews didn’t just hide God in a realm outside of the known universe to protect their image of the deity, as we learned more about how the natural world works.

Rather, setting aside the detours of Akhenaton’s monotheism and of Zoroastrian process theology, the monotheism that fed the two “great” — as in populous — religions of Christianity and Islam was founded largely on social alienation, borne from the tribulations of ancient Jewish history, as I’ve argued elsewhere.

The God of Jews is hidden from the natural order because Jews were ostracized in world affairs, and they used their stories of God to symbolize their plight. Hence, for all Jews’ scriptural prohibitions on concrete portrayals of their transcendent deity, their fixation on transcendence was itself an ironic reflection of the Jewish self-image.

How, though, has that Jewish alienation impacted Christianity?

At first glance, by identifying God with a lowly Jewish labourer and preacher who was possibly born out of wedlock, whose family and fellow Jews rejected him, and who was crucified by Rome for sedition, Christianity seems to have adopted Jewish alienation wholesale. Here was another shunned Jewish prophet who castigated mainstream society and who suffered and sacrificed himself for having transmitted ideals that were out of place in the Roman Empire and indeed in nature itself.

In the real world, things like the Roman Empire triumph, as Rome did over Jesus personally and over the Jewish people collectively, in the Jewish-Roman Wars. But in the Judeo-Christian imagination, God will triumph at the end of time when God brings nature under supernatural rule. Christians are supposed to yearn to belong not to earthly societies but to God’s kingdom, which is as hidden now as is Yahweh from his creation.

Jesus is the quintessential loser who thus symbolizes not just Jews’ hidden deity whose transcendence is a measure of his evident impotence, but the Jewish people who were likewise perennial losers in world affairs. Even Jesus’s figurative triumph in his resurrection from the dead was short-lived since he “ascended to Heaven” long before he could witness how Christianity would eventually overtake Rome.

But this is hardly the whole story. When you look beyond that superficial Jewishness, you should be struck by Christianity’s syncretic compromises with Roman polytheism. The biblical character of “Jesus Christ” was obviously cast in the Greco-Roman mold of the suffering/dying and rising savior hero/god.

Jews identified their god with something intangible to feel better about their alienation from human success stories. But Christians identified God with a flesh and blood man who wasn’t hidden at all but was part of mundane history.

Of course, there were precedents for this in Judaism, as Jews imagined God was present in the ark of the covenant, and in the Jewish Temple, the holy laws and rituals, and the historic preservation of Jews. But the divine presence was always indirect. God’s power was manifest in angelic form, for instance, or a prophet would speak to a symbolic or visionary manifestation of God. But God himself was always unreachable and unfathomable. Such was the upshot of Jewish monotheism.

In any case, the Christian incarnation doctrine meant that God was literally and fully just a particular man. The son was magically equal to the divine father. So, the Christian god wasn’t hidden but was fully present in the founding of Christendom’s success story. Jesus gave Peter the keys to the kingdom. And that represents a clear break from Jewish alienation and thus from that form of monotheism. Christian polytheism is implicit in the deliberate incoherence of its theology (of the Incarnation and the Trinity).

But it’s crucial to understand the psychological basis of this break. Jews needed God to be hidden to reify their estrangement from the winners in worldly affairs. By contrast, Christians would go on to inherit the Roman Empire, and to rule over the Jews and many others with totalitarian zeal. Christians would persecute heretics, conduct crusades against Muslims, and systematically convert heathens, outdoing the Roman Empire by seeking to enslave minds as well as bodies.

Consequently, Christians had no need of a god of alienation. The Christian deity had to be as tangible as Christendom, or as this religion’s worldly supremacy. Jesus’s divinity symbolized Christian pride in the Church’s natural power, as Christianity conquered by the sword and by Jesuitical obfuscation and Machiavellian ruthlessness.

Whereas Jews weren’t zealous in seeking converts, contrary perhaps to the proverb that misery loves company, Christian numbers exploded. And whereas Christians paid lip service to the Jewish (and quasi-Zoroastrian) emphasis on the coming messiah and on the divine judgment at the end of history, Christians relished their earthly dominance.

Christianity is thus probably the least coherent world religion. The Christian deity is transcendent and immanent, supernatural and natural, hidden and present, beyond our comprehension and as familiar as a fellow human. Jews wrestled with these conflicts, too, as their monotheism developed from Canaanite polytheism. But Jewish theology picked one side of these dichotomies, whereas Christianity wanted to have its cake and to eat it.

Their vastly different histories tell the tale of why Jews and Christians would seize on such opposite theological strategies. Again, Jews needed a way of working through their alienation and their existential grief, whereas Christians wanted a symbol of their union with the power and amorality of the Roman Empire. That is, Jews wanted to soothe their pride for having lost so often in history, whereas Christians wanted an excuse for why they won (thanks to Constantine and Theodosius the Great) and for why they thereby betrayed their Jewish origin.

Thus, as the combination of a transcendent Jewish Creator and a Greco-Roman demigod, the Christian saviour deity is just as incoherent as was the fact that historic accidents empowered this religion despite Jesus’s condemnation of all such worldly organizations.