Three Conditions of Belief

Three conditions need to be understood when considering the idea of "belief" in regard to the canonical Christian gospels (as prefixed necessarily by the earlier Scriptures to which Jesus subscribes.)

The first of these is the condition of gradation.  Ideas, of course, must be affixed with that quality of discrete, isolatable terms, statements, or notions--such is the nature of anything that can be expressed verbally and therefore in the nature of words and their meanings.  There can never be a perfectly smooth transition from one idea to another.  However, just as assuredly, there can never be perfect confidence that an idea is not meant in its transmission to be shown as progressing smoothly through certain conditions from one form to another.

This phenomenon can be seen in the idea of sin as expressed in Genesis.  It can be called a "sin" that Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit, but it would be ridiculous to think of the "sin" as not occurring until the fruit was bitten--to say nothing of the complication, introduced in the Epistles, that the "sin" was Adam's conscious act, rather than Eve's succumbing to deception.  The first couple had first to conceive of the sinful act, and that conception was sinful in itself.  Indeed, it can be stated without contrivance that Eve sinned when she entertained the improper speech of the serpent.

As I have belabored continually in "Roused, Readied, Reaped," the pronouncement that it was not good for the man to be alone was also a pronouncement that the man was not satisfied with nearness and untrammeled communion with God--sin in its infancy.  The idea of "sin" spills from the very first parts of Genesis.  The idea of "sin" has its stirrings in the very phenomena of the first plants vying against each other for the wafting pollen.  The idea of "sin" has its birth-tremors in the negatively-described "darkness" that is beaten back by the light of the Creation week--a week that seems at once to have a timing and yet no definite beginning.  Such is the nature of gradation.  Gradation militates, of course, against the very notion of "belief" in the Western World, such "belief" being stated almost invariably in terms of some stark initial proposition--some discrete claim about what can be believed followed ostensibly by equally discrete derived claims.

As regards the Gospel of John, for example, the notion of the beliefs to which the follower of Jesus must subscribe often includes some pronouncements about what it means that Jesus "came unto his own."  The phrase "came unto his own" might be a reference to his family, to the larger family network of his birth region, to the more expansively-described family of the tribe of Judah, to the remnant elements of the "Southern Kingdom" which was predominantly of Judah, to the larger, more-or-less faithfully preserved architecture of Israel (which would include the Samaritans and others quasi-Jewish by virtue of intermixing,) to all of the descendants of Isaac, Abraham, or even Noah--the last of these having been selected because of some positive quality that made him presumably more "Jesus-like" than those who drowned in the Flood.

A quick survey of those described above as possibly being Jesus' "own" will show that all of those groups were predominated by persons who would rather have nothing to do with Jesus.  All of the candidates above are properly understood as being those who "received him not."  An attachment to attempting to experience the teachings of Jesus to the full will lead to understanding the passage about 
"came unto his own" as being most important in regard to the rejection of Jesus that characterizes us all--this is the condition of gradation.  Attempting to define some discrete group that was Jesus' "own" merely saddles belief in Jesus with an accretion of unnecessary and possibly misleading belief about idea-schemes that purportedly frame his teachings.

The second condition of the idea of "belief" in the Gospels is the realization that the elements of belief are generally described in negative terms.  For example, a powerful element of non-Gospel New Testament teachings is the idea of the "church" as the "bride of Christ"--a conceit that is necessarily attached to the idea that it builds on a divine sanction of marriage.  Jesus, of course, preaches about the sanctity of marriage--but he also instructs people, for example, to heed the teachings of the Jewish authorities as "sitting in Moses' seat," though Jesus regularly flouted such teachings (even some indisputably grounded in the Law rather than being merely men's inventions.)  So Jesus' teaching about the sanctity of marriage as an existing social institution does not mean that he subscribes to some notion that it was always God's intent.

And marriage was not always God's intent.  A backwards progression through the history of marriage will reveal this (as well as revealing the sort of gradation I described above.)  The disputes about divorce that confronted Jesus involved several fascinating elements, such as the notion that to be in the kingdom after death was necessarily to be in a state "like the angels"--without marriage, a characteristic that is scarcely more surprising than Jesus' evident notion that such a post-marriage condition in heaven ought to be obvious to his hearers.  And his hearers were also confronted by Jesus' amazing admission that divorce in the Mosaic Law was a less-than-ideal arrangement attributed--fascinatingly--to Moses.  While this latter rejection of divorce on Jesus' part as being against God's intent is of course a ratification of marriage, it is only a back-handed gesture--attended by that very quality of negative assertion that characterizes the Bible's approach to marriage.

While a man's marriage to multiple wives is generally (or at least most usually) shown in the Bible to be an unfortunate thing, it is only characterized so negatively.  Solomon's and David's polygamies are lamented in that they are attended by distraction from God's missions for the men--as is the polygamy of Abraham.  Let the mission of any man of God be furthered by polygamy--such as with Jacob--and the one-to-one sanctity of marriage is left to wither.

The negative quality of marriage as an example of the negative quality of belief is shown better still as we go farther back in the Bible.  God brings Eve to Adam, and Adam exclaims that she is "bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh"--a pronouncement found endearing only to those who would have it so.  How much better it would have been for Adam to have rejoiced in a special creation made for him by God, a creation all the more special because Eve was herself, with all of her individual characteristics.  As it is, Adam might have expressed a similar delight in discovering such "flesh of his" that afforded him auto-erotic delight.

Eve was found for Adam because the creatures of the earth would not suffice as his companions.  The trees of God's special garden were there for Adam, but they were not enough.  The fecund soil from which he was extracted was there for Adam--with the other-than-negligible companionship of God, to which we are said to all aspire--and that was not enough.  Communion with God was not enough--that is what underlies the perennially-celebrated institution of marriage that is so perversely described as God's plan.  It is small wonder that Jesus casts aside both marriage and family attachments when addressing himself to what should really matter to the believer.

The history of human experiences--indeed the totality of human experiences--is rightly understood and forthrightly observed as a torrent of observation-spectra of inseparable gradations, and also as a mass of the evidences of what things do not exist (the "negative" to which I have referred) rather than positive and positively-ascertainable phenomena.  We address ourselves to experience honestly when we accept experience as consisting of things we do not know, and of things we cannot but in our conceit consider to be discrete entities.

This all leads to the inescapable conclusion that "belief" expressed in terms of foundational premises ("There is a God and he created heaven and earth and they are subject to his will," et cetera, to which great and small might nod assent as though beyond question) is balderdash.  If we believe such things, it is because they have infused our characters--for good or ill.  To believe that such things are extractable from dispassionate observation is always for ill.

This leads to the third condition of belief as pertaining to the Gospels.  Along with the conditions of gradation and of things described in the negative, there is the necessary understanding that the very idea of foundational belief statements is perverse.  Belief in the supernatural arises by necessity from that which cannot be ascertained--from the wind that blows from we know not where, to paraphrase Jesus from John.  This is the proper "ground" upon which to base belief, this being a "ground" that is most importantly understood in contradistinction to those "grounding" or "foundational" statements of the most level-headed-sounding "believers."  The conceptual scheme of Genesis--with earth existing between the waters above and below--is of course physically impossible.  This scheme, however, is in no way inferior to any other conceptualization of a belief-realm, and it is immeasurably superior to any belief system that "rests" on concepts of "foundations."

A "foundation" of belief calls up, of course, a metaphor of physical solidity, to which one is drawn metaphorically by an analog of gravity.  Of course, if the metaphor of physicality is one of a simple flat surface, then it is a physicality of fancy--neither the earth nor any other body is flat.  And even if we confine the metaphor to an arbitrary realm (such as thinking of all things as needing foundations, either physical or conceptual, because, well, that's just the way it is) the realm of our considerations is not merely one that we have limited in scope, but one we have twisted in its intrinsic elements.  To say that our beliefs must rest on solid foundations even as our optical-view "flat" earth calls up a metaphor, is to ignore qualities of our local earth that are perhaps instructive.  Our ability to survive in our atmosphere is inescapably affected in part by the conditions of our atmosphere (pressure, for example) that are affected by our far-off sun as experienced in here-and-now radiation.

If notions of our belief systems about the supernatural (or about the rejection of the supernatural) are about our experiences of life within the realms of our experienced lives, then we might as well say that we are suspended from the sky--receding as it does from our perceptions--as to say that we are borne up from the ground beneath our feet, reassuring though it may be in its solidity.

These are the conditions of belief that I have attempted to describe.  There are no "foundations" of belief because there is nothing that cannot be understood as an arbitrary picture of discrete quality while yet everything exists in gradations.  There are no "foundations" of belief because everything that can be known can be known only in the negative--we hold things to be certain only if we fool ourselves into thinking we are not bound by the negative conceptualization as expressed by Peter to Jesus, "Where else can we go?"  That Peter then says that Jesus has "the words of eternal life" merely casts the matter into the discussion-realm of the above paragraphs.

And, finally, there are no "foundations" of belief that are any more solid than our experience-derived (not supernaturally-derived nor even "anti-supernaturally derived") preconceptions.  Belief systems, lamentably, are thought in general to be found on hard bedrocks rather than in wafting winds because, well, they just are.