Out of His Mind

“Your great learning is driving you out of your mind.”

So declared Porcius Festus, fifth procurator of Judea, to the apostle Paul at one of his trials in Caesarea.

To be fair, Paul was representing himself in court with a rather unlikely defense. Instead of dismantling the prosecution’s case or putting forward arguments for his own innocence, he enthusiastically proclaimed Christ risen from the dead, a light to Jews and Gentiles alike, truths that nearly got him killed in Jerusalem.

So Festus assumed he was nuts.

The Folly of the Cross

Sometimes that happens. The message of the cross, as Paul says elsewhere, is folly to those who are perishing. It makes no sense to unbelievers at all. It’s only the Holy Spirit of God who brings conviction and makes it all add up. We should probably expect the reaction Paul got from Festus from time to time, whenever our audience is too powerful or too impolite to hold its peace. Scripture teaches us to do that.

So then, Festus was wrong about the Christian faith: Paul wasn’t crazy, he was telling the truth. But Festus wasn’t wrong about the general principle he was expressing. There is such a thing as too much education. Many very smart people are incredibly stupid about the things that matter most.

God Was in Christ

I was reminded of this last week on my way through D.M. Baillie’s God Was in Christ, coming up on its eightieth anniversary sometime soon. Baillie was a Scottish theologian and professor of systematic theology at the University of St Andrews. He died in 1954, so the arguments he put forward to counter then-prevalent heresies within both liberal Protestantism and neo-orthodoxy were won and/or lost in other generations. I found a battered copy for $1 at a used book sale in my local Church of the Epiphany basement, and picked it up because of the title. Hey, what’s not to like about an essay on the Incarnation?

Well, quite a bit, apparently. That’s not Don Baillie’s fault.

Jesus taught that it is impossible to enter his kingdom without approaching the search for spiritual truth with the humility of a child. If that was true in the first century, it remained just as true in the years around WWII, when European theologians theorized and fantasized about the Incarnation with ever-increasing detachment from the text of scripture, not to mention from reality. The mind and personality of the Word Made Flesh are not fit subjects of debate for smart boys with seminary training. Without childlike humility and faith, any discussion of the deity and humanity of our Lord is bound to be fruitless. Worse, it may verge on blasphemy. God Was in Christ was Baillie’s attempt to respond to the extremes of his day from religious intellectuals who had lost the plot in one way or another.

Two Common Errors

Two errors are common in approaching the great mysteries of scripture. One the one hand, the neophyte reads the text, accepts its plain meaning as it appeals to him in his ignorance, and carries on, believing he has grasped the writer’s intent and gotten something useful. He never stops to ask why the writer put it the way he did or what those words meant to those to whom they were originally addressed. He simply assumes that the language of scripture and the words he uses when he goes to work on Monday morning may be understood the same way. Translation issues, cultural differences, Western vs. Eastern mindset … none of these issues occurs to him to investigate. If he is oblivious to his errors in interpretation, it is because he has given himself nowhere near enough information to go on.

On the other hand, the religious scholar spends years learning (or usually half-learning) Greek and Hebrew, principles of interpretation, systematic theology and the arguments of this, that and the other school of religious philosophy. He has marinated himself in the finer details of so many arguments that often he has begun to lose the big picture. His analysis of the text may be incredibly complex, generating thirty pages of analysis of a single verse. But his education has predisposed him to accept egregiously false assumptions without the least critical thought because his esteemed teachers and peers believe them unquestioningly. If he is oblivious to his errors, it is because he has given himself far too much information to go on. He winds up constructing ingenious novelties while ignoring blatant counterevidence the average semi-literate Bible-reading farmer would produce in a heartbeat. The only difference is that the world will take him seriously because he has a degree, while discounting the farmer because he is of the stratum of society that produced fishermen and carpenters in the first century.

Boldly, Yet Most … Er, What?

An example may help. Baillie writes about scholars of his day who held that Jesus’ knowledge was “essentially the limited knowledge of a man”. In his book And Was Made Man, Leonard Hodgson “boldly, yet most reverently” maintained that position. Explaining Hodgson’s view, Baillie writes:

“His knowledge of the past history of the woman of Samaria in John iv, 17, 18, if we are to credit such a detail at all, may be rendered credible not by the ascription to Jesus of omniscience or superhuman ways of knowledge, but by the fact that Orientals do seem even to-day to have sometimes a mysterious gift of insight into what is going on in other people’s minds.”

Hodgson puts it this way:

“His knowledge was limited to that which could find a channel into His human mind.”

Hello? Are any synapses at all working here?

Educated Idiocy

This is what I call educated idiocy, the sort of comment we ought to consider undeserving of reply were it not for the third parties who, unfamiliar with the text of scripture, might take it seriously out of respect for Professor Hodgson’s credentials. The scripture is what we are all relying on to make our cases: Hodgson in his unbelief, Don Baillie to analyze his argument critically, and me to say, “Wait, that’s stark raving nuts!” There is no alternative source of knowledge about Messiah’s thought processes available to any of us no matter how many degrees an expert may accumulate.

Consider the testimony of John about the knowledge of Jesus:

“Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him and said of him, ‘Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit!’ Nathanael said to him, ‘How do you know me’?’ Jesus answered him, ‘Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.’ Nathanael answered him, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’ ”

That marvelous Oriental gift of insight Professor Hodgson refers to might lead Jesus to praise a new disciple by declaring him a guileless man of premium quality. He was gathering followers, after all. I once had a man who wanted my money tell me something equally flattering. So the Lord’s character assessment of Nathanael says nothing that matters to anyone but a believer. Judas Iscariot would have received the same compliment with a great big smile, as deceivers are wont to do.

However, the Lord’s supernatural knowledge is not in the character assessment, but in the casual observation that he had seen Nathanael under a fig tree prior to Philip calling him, a fact Jesus could not possibly have known by natural means and that Nathanael evidently considered miraculous, as did John, who recorded it.

The Shekel Out of Nowhere

Matthew’s testimony is that Jesus once told Peter:

“Go to the sea and cast a hook and take the first fish that comes up, and when you open its mouth you will find a shekel.”

One of two things the devout can swallow was happening here. Either Jesus was miraculously controlling the natural world, planting shekels at will wherever he pleased, or else he knew to the square inch where an existing fish that had just gummed a coin but not yet swallowed it would be swimming in the next few minutes. Omnipotence or effective omniscience, however it was achieved. The other option is that the account is false.

That’s two, but we need not stop there. Jesus correctly predicted the complete destruction of Herod’s temple in Jerusalem. All buildings eventually fall apart with time, but precious few have their stones “thrown down” with not one left on another. There is Peter’s triple denial of Christ, timed right down to precede the rooster’s early call. You can bet Peter did not deliberately participate in fulfilling that one. It was pretty much his lowest point. Perhaps the Lord hypnotized him. There were the donkeys for the triumphal entry. There are many others. Hodgson’s theory of the Incarnation even gives short shrift to the account of the Samaritan woman. The Lord did not merely intuit with his “Oriental insight” that she had a checkered sexual history. He told her the exact number of partners she had and the status of her current partner. We may not think that indicates something approaching omniscience. She certainly did.

That Mysterious Gift of Oriental Insight

The Lord did these sorts of things constantly, and no mysterious gift of Oriental insight can possibly account for them. He did much more than correctly guess what people were thinking, and he did it over and over again. Perhaps Professor Hodgson has never read any of these accounts, in which case he has no business writing books, offering opinions about Christ, or holding himself out as a biblical scholar. Alternatively, perhaps he questions or dismisses the Gospel narratives at every point where they seem to him unlikely, in which case he ought to have even less credibility with serious scholars grappling with the mysteries of the Incarnation. He is wasting our time speculating about an act of divine intervention in which we cannot be sure he has any intellectual or spiritual investment at all. Having dismissed the only source of accurate knowledge about the Word Made Flesh, he can having nothing useful to say about him to us.

In any case, great learning and spiritual insight are rarely the best of friends. Professor Hodgson would have done better to approach the search for truth with the humility of a child.

Any devout farmer could tell him that.