Many are called yet few are chosen. That is a great truth and the deepest source of my anguish and despair. I am disturbed by my love of money, the things of the flesh, and my dependence on creature comforts. I also love solitude, and not in a healthy way but in a Jonah rotting half-digested in the inflamed intestines of the whale sort of way. I am appalled by my egotism, sloth, avarice, dishonesty, whining, pettiness, parsimoniousness, navel-gazing, selfishness, ingratitude, immaturity, compulsivity, self-regard, nihilism, misanthropy, and cowardice. I am also aware of how tempting it is to conduct a verbose self-flagellation, which in essence is a histrionic performance inviting my ego to proclaim how smart, clever, and funny I am. “Look, everyone, I am the comedian who with unbridled hyperbole will show the world that I am a raging shit show.” Such performances are not only egotistical. They present an implicit excuse for abnegation of responsibility. Shaking one’s fist and unleashing a diatribe of learned helplessness, despair, and self-derision is to beat oneself into a state of demoralization, and to be demoralized is to be in a state of inertia and inaction. This place of moral rot and stagnation is not a sign of being “chosen” and is precisely where an immoral character wants to be.
I have a general grasp of what a moral life is. Secular humanist philosophies and faith-based pieties agree that you don’t live on this planet for your own immediate gratification and selfish wants. You have a responsibility to others. You are greater when you lower yourself to serve others than when you lift yourself up to serve your base appetites.
You therefore are responsible for finding what you’re good at and committing yourself to that endeavor, not just for your sake but for others. You commit to hard work and focus without boasting, without making a big deal out of it, and without heroic self-regard. You are merely doing what is expected of you based on your accurate understanding of the human condition, which to quote the therapist Phil Stutz is three things: pain, uncertainty, and constant work.
There are key parallels between Phil Stutz’s worldview and Judeao-Christian philosophy. Both object to immediate gratification and dependence on the comfort zone. Both object to avoidance of life’s natural conflicts and responsibilities. Both encourage us to connect and reconnect with the Life Force through consistent habits such as a sincere expression of gratitude, an embrace of humility, and a commitment to a higher ideal. Both recognize that the road to hell is wide and the road to heaven is narrow. It’s easy to be a consumer of culture’s addictions and become inured to pleasure to the point that we live a life of meaningless despair. It requires far more strength of character to focus on a higher ideal, commit to that ideal, and sacrifice immediate gratification for a life of meaning and purpose, which is why it occurs so rarely in humans. Look around. Many are called but few are chosen indeed.
But some will rejoice that at least we can take solace in the above from the idea that both secular and religious philosophies have much in common. The message of making our lives a living sacrifice of service to others is contained in Jewish writer Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and there is much in Frankl’s book that is preached by Jesus and St. Paul. Frankl’s message and Christianity have joined hands so we can celebrate.
But not so fast. The devil is in the details. Once you look beyond the commonalities of moral codes, you will find differences that are so dramatic as to preclude any kind of universality that would encourage us to all hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.”
There is no Kumbaya Moment for a Christian blogger who criticizes The Rules by Phil Stutz and Barry Michels. The blogger finds much in the book appealing but is “frustrated” by its half-baked ideas that stop short of the Christian faith and he accuses the writers of offering a semi-challenging creed of New Age mysticism. If Stutz and Michels were going to truly get out of their own Comfort Zone, the writer observes, they would step up to the demands of the Christian faith. I suppose a humanist defending Stutz and Michels would argue that religion is its own Comfort Zone that offers absolute truth on a silver platter.
Regardless of their shared concerns and wisdom, there is also no Kumbaya Moment in Judaism and Christianity. Let us look, for example, at the differences between these two faiths as presented by Rabbi Hyam Maccoby, the author of The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity. For thousands of years, the people of the Jewish faith believed that while as humans they were flawed, they could better themselves by combining their self-discipline, pious habits, and God’s help to become better people.
This image of the human condition is in stark contrast to Pauline Christianity, which paints a much different picture of the human soul. Rabbi Maccoby observes that in the Pharisaism of Paul’s time, there was no morbid view of the divided human soul that makes Paul groan “Miserable creature that I am!” He is miserable because his rational mind acknowledges the need to follow a virtuous life, but his enslavement to sin makes it impossible to do so. Paul makes his condition universal: We are all in a state of innate depravity so base as to make us helpless and totally dependent on God’s intervention. None of our efforts can help us. We have a dark alter ego, also known as original sin, that acts independently of our best intentions. This alter ego sabotages our best efforts. We are so divided that our left hand does not know what our right hand is doing and vice versa. Many of us die in darkness without even any self-awareness of our condition of being lost. Then there is another category of people who miraculously develop the awareness of how screwed up they are. They look around and see that they are lost in the woods. They throw themselves on the mercy seat of God, beg to be redeemed, and become born anew. They are now whole and complete. No longer are they divided souls.
Rabbi Hyam Maccoby, who is no fan of Paul, calls this condition of the divided soul a form of “psychological dualism.” It is a worldview that clashes with Pharisee teaching. As Maccoby writes: “The dichotomy, in Paul’s thinking, between flesh and spirit, in which evils proceed from the flesh, which can be redeemed only by an inpouring of spirit from above, reflects a view of human nature that issued in the Christian doctrine of original sin. This doctrine is radically opposed to the Pharisaic concept of the essential unity of human nature.” Not only is there unity in the human soul; the demands of the law do not crush us into the powder of despair. In the worldview of Pharisaism, Maccoby points out, the view of the soul is not as gloomy as Paul’s. Maccoby writes “that the demands of the law are reasonable and not beyond the power of human nature to fulfill.” Maccoby refers to Deuteronomy, which states that God’s commandments are not too hard for us to live up to but rather these laws live inside our hearts and minds. Without Paul’s despair, we can manage the conflict between the “good inclination” and the “evil inclination” through our own strength. As Maccoby writes: “In this struggle between good and evil tendencies, the human being is regarded as having the initiative in his own hands, and not to require supernatural help.”
Further, we read that Pharisaic psychology “not only unifies the psyche by giving it power over all its own processes, but also declares that the psyche becomes more and more unified as it progresses in the moral struggle.”
There is one other important difference between the Judaic and the Pauline Christian worldview: The very nature of evil itself. Whereas Paul bemoans the evil that enslaves him and rejoices that his faith in Christ has abolished that sin forever and made him a free man, Maccoby argues that Judaism has a different take on “the evil inclination”: It is a natural drive that we learn to control to further the species. Maccoby explains: “Furthermore, in Pharisaic thinking, the moral struggle is directed not so much to the obliteration of the evil inclination as to its sublimation and redirection. It is recognized that the selfish energies of the evil inclination are essential to the vitality of the psyche and of the community . . .” A certain amount of creativity arises from the evil inclination. It’s our duty to redirect those selfish, ambitious impulses using our good side to improve our community. A life of pure piety, on the other hand, is sterile, insipid, and ironically soulless.
In sum, the Pharisaic notion of the human soul is more colorful, more vibrant, and less despairing than the Pauline one. In Judaism, the soul is sound, integrated, and open to common sense. In contrast, the Christian view is that the soul is inherently defective, hungry for darkness, and infinitely woeful. The Jewish estimation of the human soul as being capable of a certain degree of self-reliance contradicts Paul’s spiritual orientation of utter helplessness: “the psyche as hopelessly divided and unable to progress without direct supernatural intervention.”
According to Maccoby, Paul's idea of the depraved soul is not from Judaism. Rather, it is influenced by the Gnostics, a doctrine that the Pharisees opposed. Maccoby argues that Paul, like Augustine, is a man torn apart by two cultures. The divided soul, which informs Paul and Augustine’s worldview, is not borne of Judaism but Gnosticism and Greek myths.
Worse than seeing Paul as culturally divided, though, Maccoby has a generally contemptuous picture of Paul: Paul is someone who has failed to rise in the Pharisee movement; he is imaginative but lacks logical skills in his writing. His education is “feeble.” He cannot tolerate his own low social ranking in light of his vaulting ambitions. He is desperate to rise to power and make a name for himself, and he has no scruples in achieving his aims, even if it means demonizing the entire Jewish race. Less than genuine, Paul is an ambitious “adventurer” and “mythogogue” who appropriated Judaism, lied about his alleged Pharisee background, perverted the teachings of Jesus, and synthesized Hellenistic religions, Gnosticism, and Judaism for his own personal designs. Fiercely competitive and envious, he denigrated the other apostles while boasting that he was the number-one apostle with a direct line of visions and prophecies from God. He packaged his newly-invented religion as a way of flattering the gentiles of Rome and damning the Jews, making the gentiles the new heirs to the prophecies in the Old Testament. Paul’s genius, however unsavory, made his religion widespread and in doing so, Paul is the inventor of the most widespread, virulent anti-Semitism in recorded history.
The conventional reading of Christianity is that Jesus is the founder and Paul is the interpreter of Jesus the founder. But for Maccoby, this is a skewed representation. Paul does not so much interpret the life of Jesus as recreate it and in doing so he creates a schism with the other apostles who wanted to remain in the Jewish realm, as did Jesus.
But according to Maccoby’s narrative, Paul takes Jesus outside of Judaism and places Jesus inside a new picture frame: the Hellenistic mystery cults of sacrifice and atonement through blood. When the Jews rejected Paul’s notion of Jesus, Paul demonized the Jews for rejecting his vision. Then he repackaged his vision to more accepting gentiles, and he has no scruples in forwarding his plan and spreading it across the world. For Paul, his mission was less spiritual and more of an expression of personal power, vaunting ambition, and self-regard.
Maccoby reminds us that Jesus never knew Paul, but Paul wants to be the primary apostle, towering over the others who actually knew Jesus in the flesh.
Paul’s “personal inspiration” and visions, he would have us believe, make him the greatest of all the apostles. For all of Paul’s talk about humility and lowering oneself, his whole life was defined by lifting himself while castigating others.
Maccoby observes that the Book of Acts is “a propaganda exercise” which tries to conceal the rift between Paul and the other apostles.
To be blunt, if Maccoby is correct in his assessment of Paul, then Christianity is a fraudulent religion fabricated by a malignant, ruthlessly ambitious personality who packaged his cult to the Roman world first and then to the world’s gentiles all of whom usurped the Jewish religion for their own customized faith while demonizing the people who evolved within the traditions of Judaism, a sensible spiritual orientation that contrasts deeply with the anti-life, anti-sex, anti-Semitic, pro-hell Pauline cult.
So much for universal moral codes and the people of the world’s different faiths holding hands and singing “Kumbaya.” If Maccoby is to be believed, Christianity’s founder is an egotistical adventurer who created a religion that made him the Alpha Apostle while marginalizing the other apostles and, worse, painting the Jews as an evil people for rejecting his mad religion based on a projection of his own psychoses and “visions.”
Maccoby’s account of Paul is the most scathing I’ve ever come across. Slightly less virulent is James Tabor’s Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity. Tabor explores how Paul, who never met Jesus, could be such a dominant force in Christianity. Paul claims to have had out-of-body experiences and personal revelation of Jesus, making him the number-one apostle. He also boasts of working harder than the others He also has “far superior” commiseration with Christ and makes it clear that it was decided when he was in his mother’s womb that he would be known as Number One.
For Tabor, there are two Christianities: The “Christianity before Paul” and the one after. We can infer that the Pauline version is a corruption of the Jesus version.
Like Hyam Maccoby, Tabor argues that Paul had a “bitter break” with the original Jesus movement and essentially invented Christianity. He did this through a “literary victory, reinforced by an emerging theological orthodoxy back by Roman political power after the time of the emperor Constantine. Tabor argues that the “literary victory” is based on three things: One, the Gospel of Mark is Pauline in theology. Two, Luke’s Book of Acts expands Mark’s story and Pauline theology. Three, “six later letters written in Paul’s name” “muted” his radical message and “pleased the church.”
Tabor calls Acts “the master narrative,” which he hints is deceptive because the author wants to be anonymous and make the document appear older than it is. The date of Acts could be 90 A.D. or even “well into the second century A.D.” Such a manuscript should not be taken as history but as propaganda. For one, there is a “deliberate obscuring of the original Christianity before Paul,” a claim similar to Maccoby’s.
Paul’s claim of being the number-one apostle is reinforced when he says he was chosen, “unlike the other apostles, before he was even born--while still in his mother’s womb.” Paul is a “second Christ” commissioned to spread the gospel throughout the world.”
Paul’s rift with the others is indicated in his letters: “I am not the least inferior to these super-apostles,” whom he calls “false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:5, 13).
Tabor claims that pre-Paul Christians did not see Jesus as divine or as a “Dying-and-Rising Savior.” The James of the early Christians is “suppressed” and in effect canceled out. James argues for works and faith whereas Paul emphasizes the latter.
Regardless of whether or not we agree with Maccoby and Tabor, it seems clear that Paul is having no Kumbaya moments with the other apostles. Nor is he having a Kumbaya moment with the Jews. However, he has become a beloved figure to the gentiles and especially Christians who see him as the hero. Whatever strife he had with the other apostles and whatever rancor existed between him and the Jews, he remains the most venerated figure second only to Jesus in the New Testament. Moreover, many argue that even more than Jesus, Paul has had more influence than any figure on Western Civilization.
I would have to agree with that assessment. Paul’s notion of the individual groaning and depressed over his own self-destruction and crying out for transcendence and grace makes Paul, in writer A.N. Wilson’s estimation, “perhaps the greatest poet of personal religion.” It’s hard for me not to be intrigued, fascinated, and obsessed with Paul. It’s hard for me to deny Paul’s genius. It’s hard for me to deny the cogency that Paul presents our spiritual condition in direct contrast to Judaism, Stoicism, and Eastern religions, which deny our essential enslavement to sin as an inner saboteur that works against our best intentions.
While I’m fascinated and intrigued by Paul, Hyam Maccoby, on the other hand, is contemptuous of him. The Rabbi would have us believe that Paul is a second-rate thinker incapable of presenting a coherent theology based on sound syllogisms and basic logic. Paul is a fake Pharisee and a wannabe apostle. His ambition combined with his excessive self-regard makes him a thoroughly repulsive figure.
Such a portrait makes me wonder if Maccoby has made less of a portrait of Paul as a human and more as a fictional character for a novel or a movie. A brilliant and clever writer, Maccoby has recreated Paul as a sinister villain so sharp in his contours that he should be the principal in a novel by Tolstoy or a movie by Stephen Speilberg. Paul is the classic bad guy: He has an ax to grind, he is envious, he is boastful, and he is reptilian in his desire to dominate the other apostles. Is such a picture accurate or is it a tendentiously hostile caricature?
I’m tormented by the above question because part of me, like Maccoby, is repulsed by Paul, especially his writing tone, which at times makes him appear to be a pompous bore. On the other hand, his grasp of the human condition, especially as he presents it in The Epistle to the Romans, seems rather insightful and salient. Paul argues for the futility of all man-made salvation programs. We try all these self-improvement exercises only to fall off the horse over and over until we are in a state of demoralization and self-disgust. We are feeble creatures consumed by our own sin and must acknowledge that we need a savior to rescue us. So much for any notions of self-reliance.
I have to admit I have character defects and a personal bias that make me inclined to believe in Paul: I have difficulty embracing doctrines that preach self-reliance or having faith in Maccoby’s Jewish notion that our souls are not as helpless and self-destructive as Paul portrays them because I have the classic personality of the addict: compulsively dishonest even when I’m earnestly trying to be the opposite; self-obsessed, selfish, needy, consumed by overwhelming cravings, easily triggered into bouts of excessive self-deprecation, which only make my need to medicate myself with addictive behavior all the worse. I’m easily sucked into negative feedback loops. I tend to groan and exaggerate my woes as if glorifying my misery.
Before knowing anything about Paul, I believe I had the personality of Paul. There, I said it: I suspect Paul and I have much in common. I’m concerned, therefore, that if I allow a powerful writer like Hyam Maccoby to make me repulsed by Paul, I am susceptible to such repulsion because in many ways Paul is a mirror reflection of me. Don’t we all despise our reflection? Or if Paul isn’t my reflection, perhaps he is worse. Perhaps he is a projection of something dark inside of me. Therapists with a background in Jungian psychology might even say that Paul is in my ways my Jungian Shadow and a rather morbid Shadow at that.
My mother was upset when she saw me become a Christian in 1979 as a high school senior because the conversion did not make me happy. Rather, I was morose and spiritually broken. My sense of humor had vanished. My conversion was based on a fear of hell and a spirit broken by the idea that God put billions of people in eternal hell, including my Jewish relatives many of whom died in Auschwitz. My fellow church members had no qualms telling me that my Jewish family members who had recently deceased were in hell. The “good news” of the gospels had crushed me and put me into a depression, unlike any type I would ever suffer from.
From my mother’s point of view, my conversion was repulsive in two ways: I was using this new faith as a way of hiding from my real psychological problems and my faith was at its core anti-Semitic. It was a cult that blamed the Jews for killing Jesus and rejecting the Christian faith, and these two infractions made the Jews, in Christian eyes, evil people.
My mother may have been more tolerant of my conversion if it were a thoughtful Christian sect, perhaps Presbyterian, Lutheran, or even Quaker. But I had joined a nondenominational church, one that was considered both evangelical and fundamentalist. Scripture was taken literally. It appeared to her that the more I studied Scripture the more depressed I became.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I think at the heart of my depression and the sense that my universe had been taken away from me was that at the heart of my new religion was something called Penal Substitutionary Atonement or Anselmian Satisfaction. While not embraced by all Christians, this doctrine is at the heart of evangelical Christianity. It was definitely taught at the church I attended and was assumed to be the center of Christianity. It’s based on the idea that God is holy and hates sin so much that he sent His Son to die on the Cross as a way of making Christ suffer and killing Christ so He wouldn’t have to unleash such wrath against us, the human race of sinners. The personality of such a God implied by this theory depressed me so much that I wanted to give up on life and die. Religious studies professor Bart Ehrman writes about Penal Substitutionary Atonement this way:
The idea that God had to subject his son to humiliation and pain by having him tortured to death for the sake of others – what kind of barbarian idea is that? What would anyone today think if I told you that in order for me to forgive you for something you had done against me (say, lied about me; spread malicious gossip about me; stolen from me; physically abused me), in order for me to make things right between us, I had to have my son maliciously tortured and bloodily murdered? Then I could forgive you. You would think I was literally nuts. The idea that God required a bloody sacrifice of an innocent man in order to forgive others is deeply disturbing to me, now.
I was not only disturbed by the God of Penal Substitutionary Atonement. I was depressed. I didn’t want to be alive if such a God existed, but I could not shake the belief that indeed this was the God that ruled the universe. My life spirit had been drained from me. The more I converted to this religion the worse I got. A few years later, I would read that religious conversions don’t always result in a cherry rebirth but can have the opposite effect. As I would read in Alfred North Whitehead’s Religion in the Making:
Religion is by no means necessarily good. It may be very evil. The fact of evil, interwoven with the texture of this world, shows that in the nature of things there remains effectiveness for degradation. In your religious experience the God with whom you have made terms may be the God of destruction, the God who leaves in his wake the loss of a greater reality.
My mother had seen “the loss of a greater reality” exact devastation on me, and seeing me mentally disintegrate had taken a toll on my mother. She was diagnosed with manic depression, had multiple addictions which she was trying to address in various treatment and social support programs, and she had only been divorced for a year when I underwent my conversion. From the age of twelve to sixteen, I was an Olympic Weightlifter and bodybuilder with body dysmorphia, but in my late teens and early twenties, as I read more and more of Paul’s letters, I seemed to come down with a case of spiritual dysmorphia. Or what William James referred to in some religious conversions as a state of anhedonia, which could be defined as all-consuming sadness and despair. Watching me collapse into a state of anhedonia during my college years broke my mother’s heart.
She hoped to rid me of my fundamentalism, seeing the religion as an accelerant to a form of depression that mirrored her own, so one day in 1985 she encouraged me to attend a Fundamentalist Anonymous meeting in San Francisco. Founded by a former fundamentalist, lawyer, and graduate of Yale University’s Divinity School, Richard Yao was getting some press in the San Francisco Chronicle. My mother and I read some articles and we agreed that I would attend this meeting.
I attended the meeting at a nicely manicured home in North Beach. The host was a professional woman in her fifties with short silver hair and a perennial smile. Dressed in a black pantsuit and the owner of a beautiful home and a silver Audi, she told us she was a Wiccan witch and danced at night with her lady friend under the full moon. The rest of us were empty of any creeds. The guests talked about facing a post-conversion abyss and a meaning-of-life crisis. “Where do we go from here?” was a question that haunted most of them. One young man, about my age, tall, slender, long-haired, and wearing wire-rimmed glasses, expressed a fear that now that he had lost his faith he might go on a “fornication binge.” I was reminded of a quote that apparently has been wrongly attributed to the Russian novelist Dostoevsky because of some similarly worded dialogue in The Brothers Karamazov: “If there is no God, everything is permitted.”
If everything is permitted without consequence, then nothing matters. We have no soul. We are just animals or machines. Such nihilism seems so absurd that I am no agnostic in regard to that philosophy. While I struggle with religion, especially Maccoby’s notion of the integrated soul vs. Paul’s notion of the divided soul and the notion of hell, which has been powerfully and eloquently discussed in Christian writer Dale Allison’s Night Comes: Death, Imagination, and the Last Things and Christian writer Jerry Walls’ Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: Rethinking the Things That Matter Most, I have a deeply-seated belief in the idea of spiritual regret. I am obsessed with the idea that we can squander our lives, have acute guilt and regret for wasting our lives, and experience anguish as we look back and consider the kind of lives we should have led.
I am obsessed with the idea of a squandered life as a result of self-betrayal. This betrayal results from an Anti-Self that we strengthen to make this happen. This Anti-Self is referred to as “Part X” in Phil Stutz and Barry Michels’ The Tools. It is referred to as “the Resistance” in Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. Stutz, Michels, and Pressfield focus on creativity and focused work as a path to a life of meaning. They argue that learning to overcome our laziness, cynicism, and apathy is a moral obligation.
A similar argument is made by psychiatrist Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning. The crisis in his patients, Frankl observes, is not about neuroses; it’s about a lack of meaning. One of the exercises his patients do in therapy is to imagine being on their deathbeds, looking back on their lives, and judging themselves based on how they lived. Did they live a life of meaning? Life is so short. Did we make the best of it? Or to quote the narrator from Jim Harrison’s novella The Beast God Forgot to Invent, did we “piss our life away on nonsense?”
To be on our deathbed and recognize that we pissed our lives away on nonsense. That is hell. That is the dark place of regret and anguish in our hearts, the condition in which we weep, wail, and gnash our teeth. We lived our lives in the outer darkness.
In many ways, I flounder to this day in the outer darkness. I take little comfort in the works of Hyam Maccoby, James Tabor, Bart Ehrman, and others who have rejected the depressing worldviews I’ve addressed in this essay. I feel in many ways like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s description of Herman Melville: “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.”
In a general way, I believe in Viktor Frankl’s message that we were not put here to satisfy our consumer appetites but to serve others in a life of purpose. I believe that Phil Stutz, Barry Michels, and Steven Pressfield have a similar message, especially as it pertains to finding the discipline to be creative.
But I don’t know that such a philosophy is adequate to control my addictive nature. I don’t know if I need a more rigid religious system to govern my impulses and guide me to the right path. I don’t know if believing in general platitudes is sufficient to be the totally transformed human being I feel I need to be. In many ways, I am haunted by the words, “Many are called, yet few are chosen.”
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