Is the Spirituality of Christianity a Disservice?
I do not ‘self-identify’ as ‘a Christian’. I do however love the message of Jesus (of Paul, not so much). I do wonder if Christianity has performed a disservice by its stress on the spirituality of Jesus.
This time of year brings such rumination to the fore. The stress on spirituality in Christianity begins with the story of Jesus’s conception.
According to the Christian Bible, Jesus was conceived without sex. The Holy Spirit “passed over” Mary and she got pregnant with Jesus as a result. The spirituality of Christianity grows from there.
What if Jesus was only a regular man? Christianity would perhaps respond that in the first place there can be no such ‘if’ because to suggest any such thing is simply a false premise. Even so, it is a proposition that might perhaps be gainfully explored.
Christianity can be seen as stressing spirituality as a mechanism to attract followers. For many people a religion is supposed to be something over-awing, and what could be more over-awing than a virgin birth that was precipitated by the Holy Spirit that is the manifestation of God, the Creator of the Universe, in that World?
Christianity would likely respond to that by saying that the immaculate conception of Jesus is a fact. It is a fact because it is believed as a fact.
That is a perfectly valid response. Every belief is a form of extra-rational knowledge that only requires for its validity for any person its acceptance by that person as being valid. A belief that all human beings are somehow ‘equal’ — or ‘unequal’ — that is separate from any spiritual religion, but rather purely secular, is also valid in the same way. (If all people could accept that truth about our beliefs, including the limitations that truth puts on their validity, the world would become a more peaceful place.)
Still, what if Jesus was, at his birth, just another human person? Would that denigrate his message?
I don’t think so. For one thing, we can look ahead to Jesus’s death.
Karen Armstrong is one of my favorite authors. One of her books concerned what’s called the Axial Age, when in various places in the word, relatively contemporaneously , there was a broad pivot in religion. One thing I learned in reading that book was that Jesus was the only one to establish a new major religion in the world who suffered for his beliefs. All the rest lived to be contented old men, admired and even revered in their time — in the case of The Prophet, taken into Heaven without even having to die.
Jesus was nailed to a cross.
That is a fact of history. He was in his early thirties.
His death was noted by at least a couple of historians at the time. Crucifixion was a common form of capital punishment in the Roman Empire. For Jesus’s crucifixion to have been noted at all by historians of the time speaks to a certain contemporary significance.
Of course, in Christianity Jesus’s death is as imbued with spirituality as fully as his birth is. For me, though, his acceptance of that most gruesome form of death that awaited him if he did not abandon the path he was on meant that he absolutely, positively died as Son of God (though whether “the” or “a” would still be up for debate), whatever the nature of his birth might have been.
The point I’m getting at is that if Jesus was only a mortal man his life and death would have still be significant. It might be even more significant.
It is one thing for a being born as the Son of God to have lived the life Jesus lived and have had a supernatural courage that allowed him to accept that death. All that would be quite another thing for a mere mortal to do. It would require of that person a superhuman faith in God — but one any human being could aspire to attain. Anyone could partake in part of that kind of faith.