“Christianity without God” - Lloyd Geering¹

The problem with celebrity

Whether they acknowledge it to be the case or not, fundamentalist, evangelical, liberal, charismatic and sceptical theologians have their varying selections of biblical passages that they use to confirm and justify their theological positions. This in itself is fine, since there are many theologies to be discovered in the Old and New Testaments, and different personalities may be attracted to the one, or to the other. In the case of Christianity without God, Lloyd Geering is no exception. His view on Christianity is determined by his materialist or naturalistic philosophy, and therefore he does not accept the reality of the transcendent, and of course does not believe in the afterlife. So he selects his Bible references accordingly. This is quite legitimate and there are many scholars of standing who will agree with his stance. In addition there are many clergy who are drawn to his point of view, and find his stance exceptionally well articulated. Moreover, Lloyd is a fine teacher, and has considerable charm.

His celebrity, and the honours bestowed upon him by the New Zealand government, however, do pose a problem. Lloyd, already a C.B.E has been given the title Principal Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, equivalent to the designation “Knight Grand Companion” in the NZ honours system. Because he is such a public figure, and because he has been a professor of Old Testament Studies, we might put our trust in his scholarship and take the information he gives us about the New Testament for Gospel, so to speak.

In his own words, Geering flies two kites (p.16)

“1. When examined closely, the living stream of Christianity does not, as has been commonly assumed, depend on traditional (theistic) belief in God.

“2. Christianity, even in its origins, was already moving towards the rejection of theism.”

We can begin our discussion of the kites by quoting Geering on mysticism, (p.55):

“Mysticism, like panentheism, has associations with both theism and pantheism. It is the belief that the only reality is one undiversified Being. In mystical thought, and in much of its practice, the multiplicity of things is ultimately repudiated. Many have dallied with mysticism, both in medieval and modern times, but it is generally rejected by Christian orthodoxy, which likes to affirm an unbridgeable gap between God and all he has supposedly created, including ourselves.”

End of story, according to Geering, it seems. These statements about an unbridgeable gap and mysticism – are they not questionable? The doctrine of incarnation, very Christian, denies the gap. It asserts the marriage of the transcendent and the physical. And mysticism also asserts that marriage. Consider John's Gospel. There is much in John that seems mystical to me: one example is Jesus' prayer in chapter 17: “The glory thou gavest me I have given to them, that they may be one as we are one; I in them and thou in me, may they be perfectly one.” And we remember the parable of the Vine and the branches. What is more Geering is mistaken about “undiversified Being”: the Vine and the branches, Paul's Body of Christ, and the parts of the body.

“Generally rejected by Christian orthodoxy,” what does that mean? Take the Mass, or the Communion service: is this not an act of oneness with each other and the Risen Christ as an aspect of God? Is this not incarnation, is this not mysticism?

Does Christian orthodoxy reject Ephesians 4.4: “There is one body and one Spirit, as there is one hope held out in God's call to you; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”? Hardly. And doesn't this quote smack of panentheism?

The above passage and John's parable of the vine and the branches, and Paul’s Body of Christ imagery, parallel Arthur Koestler’s idea of Holarchy, namely a hierarchy of wholes. For example an atom is a whole existing within a molecule, also a whole, in a cell, in a human body in a tribe, in the Earth, in the Solar system. We see a succession of ascending orders of being. We have individual minds but these individual minds can be subsumed in the universal mind of Christ. As there are ascending orders of physicality, so there are ascending orders of mind/consciousness. The higher order transcends the lower. The lower incarnates the higher. With incarnational thought God is not viewed as some external Thing.

The teaching ascribed to Jesus, about the Kingdom of Heaven, the theology of John, Paul's union with the Risen (and Cosmic) Christ, Revelation's New Jerusalem are all incarnational, mystical. The later theologies that came to be termed heretical, usually modify and water down the incarnational and the mystical in one way or another. If we are familiar with these heresies, I believe we can confirm this to be the case for ourselves. Later patristic speculations that eventually became doctrine also perverted the understanding of incarnation and mystical union. The figurative use of “ransom for many” applied to the martyrdom of the Widow and the Seven Sons in 4 Maccabees is made literal by Irenaeus in reference to the death of Jesus. A ransom, a price has to be paid to the devil, to satisfy a non-incarnate God's imagined wish to punish wrongdoers, becomes a key part of the doctrine of the Atonement, in sharp contrast to Jesus' teaching about the Prodigal Son.

Lloyd Geering sees the doctrine of the incarnation as the first step towards a Christianity without the transcendent, without God. He surely sees it as such because for him the transcendent is without meaning. (He can however use the word, but change its significance to something like “a sense of the numinous.”) Geering's philosophy is that of the Enlightenment, and materialist. He does not seem to be familiar with the thought of modern quantum physicists depicting the universe as a psychophysical whole, just as seen by incarnationists and mystics.

Do I have to list all the mystics that the Catholic church approves of, and doesn't approve of? John of the Cross, for instance? Granted that some streams of Christianity emphasise mysticism more than others, we might have imagined that mysticism was fairly central to Christian spirituality.

Geering, St Paul, and the nature of the Gospel

In considering the teachings of the historical Jesus, the striking omission from his thinking, is St Paul. In a six-column word index at the end of the book there are references to Shakespeare, Purgatory, Moses, William Paley, but no reference at all to Paul. St Paul is plainly a mystic. What is more, he is a witness to the resurrection, which Geering with his personal assumptions about reality cannot accept. The importance of Paul is that his writing comes from a time when St Peter and St James and other disciples, were still alive, and indeed Paul spent a fortnight with Peter, three or four years after the crucifixion. There is no controversy amongst scholars as to who he was, or about whether or not he wrote a certain number of the epistles in his name. We don't suspect that he was making up fairy stories, although scholars are generally agreed for instance, that Ephesians and Hebrews were not written by Paul. But in the case of Galatians there is absolutely no controversy.

In Galatians1.10² Paul writes, “I must make it clear to you, my friends, that the gospel you heard me preach is no human invention. I did not take it over from any man; no man taught it to me; I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” [It is plausibly argued that Paul's vision on the road to Damascus occurred late 33 CE or 34.³]

Verse 18: “Three years later I did go up to Jerusalem to get to know Cephas (Peter). I stayed with him a fortnight, without seeing any other of the apostles, except James the Lord's brother. What I write is plain truth; before God I am not lying.”

Chapter 2.1: “Next, fourteen years later,⁴ I went again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus with us. I went up because it had been revealed by God that I should do so. I laid before them - but with a private interview with the men of repute⁵ – the Gospel that I am accustomed to preach to the Gentiles, to make sure that the race I had run, and was running, should not be run in vain.” “Recognizing, then the favour thus bestowed upon me, those reputed pillars of our society, James, Cephas, and John, accepted Barnabas and myself as partners, and shook hands upon it, agreeing that we should go to the Gentiles while they went to the Jews.”

I hope it is clear why I am quoting these verses: I am pointing out that according to Paul, he and the Jerusalem apostles agreed that all were preaching the same gospel. And this gospel was not primarily a gospel of a kind of humanism as Geering maintains.

What was this gospel?

In the sermon that the theologian Paul Tillich preached on the occasion of his retirement, he said, “If I were asked to sum up the Christian message for our time in two words, I would say with Paul: It is the message of a “New Creation.” We have read something of the New Creation in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. Let me repeat one of his sentences in the words of an exact translation: “If anyone is in union with Christ he is a new being: the old state of things has passed away; there is a new state of things.”

Was this the theme that Paul, James, Cephas and John shook hands about? I believe so, although the language that Jesus used in the Synoptic Gospels differed. With due deference to the opinions of the members of the Jesus Seminar, teaching about spiritual transformation in the Kingdom of Heaven is a major theme in the Gospels. Mark 1.14-15: “Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the Gospel of God: 'The time has now come; the kingdom of God is upon you, repent, and believe the Gospel.' ” We remember the parable of the mustard seed, the pearl of great price and dozens of others on the same theme. The Lord's Prayer itself prays for the will of God to be done in heaven and earth. Jesus preaches about becoming aware of the Spirit of God within. (Paul's equivalent of the Kingdom of Heaven is “Union with the risen Christ.”)

Paul also recounted part of the story of Holy Week, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and very definitely the Resurrection. These events loom large in Paul's teaching. He claimed that Jesus had appeared to himself and completely changed his life.

Lloyd Geering does mention Paul at least once, and finds a (limited) good word to say about him.. On page 134 he notes, “Paul battled hard to promote and safeguard this new life of freedom which was to characterise the Christian way. He urged his Galatian converts not to allow themselves to be drawn back to their former enslavement to the Torah. 'You were called to freedom' he exclaimed, and went on to say that 'The whole Torah is fulfilled in one word “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”.' (This, incidentally, is a surprisingly humanistic statement in the otherwise theistic writings of Paul, and it has been traced back to his Jewish teacher Gamaliel.)”

Paul is theist, and is thus to be dismissed. His redeeming point is that he quoted the words “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”, but even that he got from Gamaliel. Paul is no help for the picture that Lloyd wants to paint of Jesus. (One would like Paul also to have had credit for 1 Cor 13)

In detail.

We can agree with him in his Chapter One that religions are human creations, along with the languages and dialects in which they are expressed. It is healthy to remember this, and to remember that the Bible contains the testimony of our spiritual ancestors as to how they understood and responded to the Divine, and that they were fallible. (Although Geering would baulk at “Divine” in that for him it does not exist.) We might be grateful to remember that it is such a testimony, because that frees us to pick and choose what we find spiritually useful. But if we were to agree with Geering entirely, then we would be denying the transcendental and the reality of Paul's visions and his teaching from Christ a priori.

In any case we can agree that the Bible should not become our idol, and agree also with him that we should not make an idol of science.

On page 20 he writes: “...it is only from the sixteenth century that people began to talk about an entity they called Christianity”. I wonder whether this is true? I find that Clement of Alexandria who died in 215 CE used the word Christianismós to mean Christianity; so also Basil. (d. 379 CE.) Justin Martyr (d.165 CE) used Christianikós to mean “befitting a Christian”. Acts 11.26 states that it was at Antioch that people were first called Christians.(Christianoús) Pagan writers prior to 150 CE also refer to the Christians: namely Lucian, Celsus, Trajan, Juvenal and Seneca. Nero was aware of the Christians, for he scapegoated them after the great fire in Rome.

Page 22: Adolf Harnack´s What is Christianity? is quoted: “The Christian religion is something simple and sublime; it means one thing, and one thing only, eternal life in the midst of time, by the strength and under the eyes of God.” “Elsewhere he described this in terms of loving God and loving one’s neighbour.” I would disagree with Geering, and affirm that this is the basis of Christianity. It is implied by Paul’s “union with Christ”, and Jesus' Kingdom of Heaven. It is rather the additional doctrines added in that have created Babel. If Aldous Huxley’s account of comparative religions has any truth in it,⁶ Harnack’s basic Christianity is close to the basis of any religion.

Of greater importance is Geering's discussion of the resurrection stories on pages 77 ff.

He quotes Mark's version of the story of the transfiguration, and notes some parallels from the Jewish tradition.

Firstly, “When Moses went up Mt Sinai the glory of the Lord enveloped it in a cloud, and when he went down his face glistened.” And, “Elijah is said not to have died but to have been taken to heaven in a whirlwind.” “Though Moses had died and been buried, a late Jewish legend told how Moses had been taken by God into heaven. Moses and Elijah were thus the only two Israelites believed by the Jews to be already with God in heaven.”

He writes [pp 76-77]

“It has been suggested that the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus does not belong chronologically within the ministry of Jesus, where Mark's Gospel has mistakenly placed it... rather, it originated as an early glorification vision which later sparked the resurrection stories.”

He says that Heinrich Mayer, Julius Welhausen, Adolf Harnack, Alfred Loisy, Maurice Goguel and Rudolf Bultmann agree with this suggestion. Even if it is the case that these scholars accept this theory, it is actually a suggestion, and a theory, not a known fact. Geering continues exploring the idea that the story of the resurrection developed at a much later date as the stories and traditions were being assembled to produce the gospels. And while we may agree with Geering that there is much of the gospels that may have been developed in this way, such as the stories of the Virgin Birth, and all Matthew's alterations of Mark to conform the stories to prophecy, it is very perverse of Geering to so steadfastly ignore his disliked Paul.

We have already noted how Paul got to know Peter, and that it would be inconceivable that he didn't hear about the crucifixion and resurrection from Peter's own lips, when staying with Peter in Jerusalem. As indicated earlier, it is very plausible that Paul's conversion was not more than a year after the crucifixion, therefore that Paul was staying with Peter not more than four years after the crucifixion. The traumatic events of the crucifixion together with the resurrection appearances would still be vivid in Peter's mind. As the crucifixion and resurrection were so central to Paul's theology it would be unbelievable that Paul and Peter had not communicated intensively about these events. As a former Pharisee, the resurrection of the dead was an accepted phenomenon for Paul, owing nothing to later theological shenanigans as Geering seems to suggest. “How can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there be no resurrection then Christ was not raised; and if Christ was not raised, then our gospel is null and void, and so is your faith.” (1 Cor 15.13-15) About the burial of the human body at death he writes, “What is sown in the earth as a perishable thing is raised imperishable...sown as an animal body, it is raised as a spiritual body”. For Paul resurrection was a natural occurrence.

It is also common knowledge that many people living today believe that they have experienced visitations from the recently dead. I personally know a number of such people, and I am one of them. I also accept that there is a large literature produced by trained minds, keeping to rigorous academic methods, that testifies to the reality of these experiences.

Be that as it may, whether or not we accept the objective reality of these appearances, people believe they have had them. Whatever our interpretation, we should accept that they believe that they have had them.

Geering would have been more persuasive if he had respected Paul's testimony. There could still be belief withheld with regard to its ultimate significance. True, the reports in the Gospels are inconsistent. They have a spiritual body of Jesus passing through locked doors, and they have him seemingly with a physical body eating broiled fish. We cannot be sure of the details of the appearances, but there is no need to doubt that Peter and the disciples, followed by Paul, believed there had been resurrection appearances. That they were believed to have occurred is a good reason why Stephen was prepared to die for his faith, and the Christians also who were killed by Nero in 64 CE. We may ask how likely it would be that they would have died for an itinerant teacher of human relationships based on the Wisdom literature, for whom “God” was not much more than background noise, as Geering sees Jesus.

“Was Jesus the wise man par excellence?” (Chapter Nine) p 117

From our argument using the testimony of St Paul, we would have immediately to say No. But to continue: Chapter 8 is entitled Where did Christian humanism begin? Geering lists Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, some psalms, Ecclesiasticus,and Wisdom of Solomon as Wisdom literature. He notes that Wisdom was frequently expressed in a form called a mashal e.g. “He who meddles with a quarrel not his own is like one who takes a passing dog by the ears.”

He says, “It's not that the sages did not know about the [great themes covered in the Law and the Prophets] for they do occasionally mention God or Yahweh; it's rather that these subjects have become all but irrelevant to daily life and therefore relegated to the margins of their field of interest” [pp107-8] With regard to Job he remarks, “having raised a very serious moral problem about theism, actually left it unresolved.” “It is not too much to say that the author of Job drove the first nail into the coffin destined for theism, even though it was not until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries... that 'God' finally expired. [p.112] “The sages had always affirmed the complete mortality of the human condition, as did Israel as a whole; they did not regard departure to Sheol . . . as in any sense a 'life after death'.” (This is just not true of Israel after the Exile. Groups of returning Jews came with a belief in God and the Devil, and resurrection, derived from their Persian overlords. The Pharisees had these new beliefs, the Sadducees did not. Josephus says that the Essenes, of whom there were many, believed in reincarnation.) [p.113] Geering regards the Wisdom writers as humanist.

He sees the Epistle of James as being in the humanist tradition, accepts the tradition that it was written by James the brother of Jesus, and therefore “that it reflected the sentiments embraced by the primitive Jewish Christians”. [p.127] James may well do so, but were the primitive Jewish Christians humanists? If we quickly scan James we find “God”, the “Father”, “the Lord” in almost every verse. In common with Paul, the author of James expects a future coming of the Lord. We can grant that the epistle can be more liked by humanists, in that it focuses rather more than Paul on how we should live our earthly lives. But how we live our earthly lives is also important for Paul. One well-known example is the hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13. Martin Luther thought James was an epistle of straw, because of his own doctrine of salvation by faith alone. But that was Luther not Paul.

To show that Jesus is in the humanist tradition Geering takes some sayings of Jesus approved by majority vote by the Jesus Seminar, and compares them to similar Wisdom sayings. To take just one example:

“Jesus: Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal but lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven.

Sirach: Lose your silver for the sake of a brother or a friend, and do not let it rust under a stone and be lost. Lay up treasure according to the commandments of the Most High and it will profit you more than gold.” [p.123]

[p.126] Jesus “was no doctrinaire atheist and yet he was almost exclusively concerned with the human condition rather than with God. So were the Jewish sages, and so was Jesus.” (In the above example even “treasure in heaven” sounds suspiciously non-atheistic.)

How does Geering come to make this surprising statement?

I began this study saying that the problem with Lloyd Geering is that he is a celebrity. We tend to believe celebrities, and not check on them. We have to remember that there have been any number of professors who have come up with wildly differing pictures of Jesus. Read The Quest for the historical Jesus by Albert Schweitzer. Geering himself points to that book.

Perhaps we also remember the joke about a professor of theology who was said to be writing his autobiography. “What's he calling it?” asked someone. “The Life of Jesus”, was the answer. And Geering's picture of Jesus does in fact resemble himself.

So how does he come to his picture of things?

1. He removes St Paul as a witness, and all his writings. That Paul knew Peter and James and will have discussed the death and resurrection of Jesus with them is ignored. That the Jerusalem church agreed with the basic Pauline gospel is ignored.

2. James is treated as a fair picture of the teaching of the Jerusalem church. While this may to some degree be true, I do not believe Geering presents a picture of James that matches the reality of what is to be read there.

3. Q (the material peculiar to Matthew and Luke) largely a collection of Jesus' sayings, is treated as the only reliable source of information about Jesus. This material does not mention the resurrection, ergo the resurrection did not occur. It should also be noted that Geering is basing his whole thesis on accepting opinion (and only majority opinion) from a self-appointed group of sceptical Biblical scholars. A radical new theory about Jesus should be based on far harder evidence than that.

4. Mark, “M”(the material peculiar to Matthew), “L”(peculiar to Luke), and Mark, John and Acts also disappear off the radar.

5. Much has been written about the strong possibility of Essene influence in Jesus' teachings, and what was in common with the Pharisees (who also believed in the resurrection). This too disappears off the radar.

6. No explanation is given of how a teacher giving good humanistic advice on how to live one's earthly life, inspired Jewish Christians as well as Pauline to court death preaching an evangel that we know to be far more than advice, and including the resurrection, right from the beginning. How did this imagined transfiguration story get transformed into the story of Holy Week and Easter? Not the breath of an explanation.

Lloyd Geering has painted a picture of Jesus as a kind of humanist giving advice on how to live the good life. He also makes generalisations about Judaism and Christianity that are not sustainable.The scriptures have been written by a great number of writers over 1200 years, who have varying theologies which cannot be worked into a consistent whole. There is spiritual truth and the questionable, there is history and something that a writer would have liked to have been history. Churches have selected readings they deem acceptable for use in church, for their lectionaries, and as they see reality. Professor Geering has made his selection, but how justified is he in selecting so little?