IS CHRISTIANITY MORE HELLENIC THAN HEBRAIC?

    Decades ago, while book browsing, I came across a book entitled Christian Ethics.  Pulling it off the shelf and opening it, I saw nothing but blank pages—a joke, of course, but one with serious purport.  I could enjoy it without being shocked because I have always thought that Christianity—I draw a sharp line between the faith and the faithful—lacks a core ethic, something differentiating and defining right and wrong, and guiding its believers’ ethical conduct.

An ethic is a set of ethical principles which apply to action or conduct, not beliefs, character, emotions, or values; the latter, commended or condemned, cannot specify conduct.  For example, the injunction to be fair does not stipulate what a person should do, but an ethical principle like welcome strangers requires opening the gate, admitting them, and tending to their needs.

Judaism has a core ethic, or code of conduct.  As tabulated by Maimonides in the 12^th century, it consists of 613 laws of various kinds, with much repetition, in Holy Scriptures.  Most of a millennium earlier, before this codification, rabbinical scholars interpreted these laws in the Jerusalem or Babylonian Talmuds.  Jewish courts have ruled on cases in ways further interpreting the laws—a kind of benign casuistry.  In theory, Jews should live in accordance with their laws; in practice, Jews are no better or worse than others in this respect.  But the laws constituting their code of conduct define good and bad conduct, command respect, and urge compliance, in language reasonably clear and clearly judgmental.

The core ethic of Judaism took experience over time to develop.  First came a belief in one undifferentiated god.  The concept of such a god was a radical one.  Religions before and after Abraham were polytheistic, with many gods possessing diverse powers but without a set of ethical principles.  Judaism was radical in its belief in one god who was ethical and wanted Jews to be ethical according to His law—thus, ethical monotheism.  Reflecting are two covenants between God and Jews.  The First Covenant is a contract: God promises that Jews will be a thriving people in a promised land; Jews accept God as the one and only god; the outward sign of this contract is circumcision.  The Second Covenant is another contract: God promises to favor the Jews; Jews promise to live according to His law, first delivered by Moses at Sinai and developed since, as an example to all others.

After the conquest of the Levant by the Greek armies of Alexander the Great, Jews responded in two ways.  One was partial assimilation of Hellenic customs or participation in Hellenic practices; the other was armed resistance, notably and successfully by the Maccabees, the forerunners of the Herodian dynasty in the time of Jesus.  About him, born, living, and dying a Jew, we know only the little which the Synoptic Gospels relate, most of which indicates that he was Jewish in thought and practice.  What distinguishes Jesus from most contemporaries is his emphasis on righteous conduct rather than ritual practice.*

 

John and Paul relate little or nothing about Jesus; instead, they interpret him in ways more closely aligned with or more clearly reflecting Hellenic than Hebraic influence.  Paul’s hybrid background in Hebraic and Hellenic cultures informed his understanding of the divinities and theologies of their religions.  He was born, not in Jerusalem in Palestine, but in Taurus in Anatolia, in the Diaspora.  Raised a Jew in its Jewish community, he lived in a city the predominant religion of which was pagan.  Like pagan religions, it consisted of a collection of myths, some of miraculous births and deaths of gods or demi-gods, each with distinct powers and dedicated rituals, but neither any nor all having an ethic.  Popular in Anatolia was the cult of Dionysius, a dying and reborn god acting as an intermediary between the living and the dead.  So religions with plenty of gods and a paucity of ethic were familiar to Paul.  Later, his entire enterprise involved replacing the Hebraic with the Hellenic, which influence is paramount in Christian theology.

Paul did not think of Jesus as a god; that thought many decades later was John’s.  More decades later, Jesus had evolved from messiah to one of three persons of the Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  The relationship of these three separate persons—the Son, acting as an intermediary between the faithful and the Father—in a unified godhead is a central mystery of the faith.  Yet calling this three-is-one godhead a mystery cannot elide the fact that the Christian God is a complex, not a simplex, entity.  As such, it departs from monotheism and returns, however sophisticated or nuanced its explanation, to the multiplicity of divine figures characteristic of paganism.

Paul created an ethical vacuum in Christianity like that not only in Hellenic paganism, but also in its philosophy, with its lack of a core ethic.  For example, Aristotle’s well known Nicomachean Ethics offers philosophical discussion, not ethical guidance; to be happy, one must be virtuous, but virtue is neither defined nor, of course, codified in ethical guidance.  Paul created a similar void by repudiating Jewish law and replacing it with Christian love.  His word for this love is the Greek word agape.  This love is neither romantic or sexual love nor familial affection or close friendship.  Its features are kindness toward, enjoyment of, and loyalty and dedication to another or others.  Clearly, these aspects of love are general moral qualities, not specific ethical rules.  (Their best known Christian articulation is 1 Corinthians 13: 1-13.)  Paul’s contrast of Jewish law and Christian love is the basis of the quintessentially Christian dichotomy of the (dead) letter of law and the (living) spirit of love.  Today, Pope Frances repeats this antisemitic antithesis when he declares Jewish law dead if it does not lead to Christ.  Yet love is no core ethic because it is not a principle of ethical conduct, only a moral rubric which can cover almost anything declared to be a form of love.

The ethical vacuum created by Paul’s rejection of Jewish law and replacement by Christian love is reflected in the two earliest Christian creeds, the Nicene and the Apostles’, both of which reflect Hellenic traditions of miraculous births and marvelous deaths, and the omission of a core ethic.  Both avowals of faith begin with Jesus’ miraculous birth and end with his miraculous resurrection after death.  Missing is any word about his life between birth and death, except for a mention of his trial; not one word indicates his works: his miracles, ministry, or teachings.  In short, neither the New Testament nor the earliest Christian creeds suggest a core ethic.  When Christians want ethical guidance, as 17^th-century Puritans did, they turn to the Old Testament; today, their fundamentalist descendants often but not always do likewise.  So Christianity, in its Trinitarian godhead and its lack of a core ethic, is a religion more Hellenic than Hebraic.  However, unlike other pagan religions, Christianity has the virtue of the moral rubric of love (agape) as a potentially redeeming starting point toward a code of conduct—a definition with ethical application about which, however, Christians vigorously disagree.

Before the Synoptic Gospels and the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds, Paul realized that pagans in different regions, societies, or cultures would accept a new religion of a dying-and-rising god and promises of salvation and everlasting life if few strings—if no alien customs like circumcision—were attached.  Paul’s proselytizing strategy had three steps: One, it rejected Jewish law and its many demands.  Two, it replaced it with something stipulating no specific ethical demands, namely, one moral rubric, to love (agape), undefined, open-ended, and culturally adaptive; and three, leaving culturally specific mores in place.  This proselytizing strategy was effective and successful.  For better and worse, it enabled pagans-turned-Christians and Christians thereafter to be Christian in faith and Christian in works as they dubbed them so according to contemporary consensus on local mores.

Ever since, approved personal conduct or social behavior in a Christian community, not any code of conduct, has defined what may be called “Christian.” However large or small their differences, communities and individuals can still call themselves Christians, but their disagreements and disparate conduct confuse Christians and non-Christians alike about what it means to be Christian.  Today, in the parlous times of the Trump presidency, the definition of “Christian” has become highly polarized, hugely political, and heatedly polemical.  As a result and for many reasons, past trends of disaffiliation from churches and departure from birth religions have accelerated.  Mainline denominations have lost most, fundamentalist denominations have gained some, but the net is smaller numbers of people identifying as Christian.  The lack of a coherent core ethic and steadfast ethical religious leadership may be the most important reasons.  People want moral inspiration and ethical guidance; check-book charity, welfare drives, study groups, and Sunday schools are inadequate substitutes to meet these needs.

I do not intend my fundamental distinctions between Judaism and Christianity to be invidious.  I intend them to be respectful of both, and not disrespected by the canard of a Judeo-Christian tradition.  No such tradition exists; no continuum from Judaism, with its simplex god and its ethic, to Christianity, with its complex god and no ethic, exists.  Moreover, their fundamental purposes differ.  Judaism urges its followers to seek salvation in this world by adhering to God’s law and in serving as an example of such a life to others.  Christianity urges its followers to seek their salvation in the world after death, by means uncertain because of diverse beliefs about the relationship between faith and works in this world.  It is no digression to opine that these two basic differences between Judaism and Christianity suggest why Jews have not become Christians.  Paul designed a faith for pagans, not for Jews.  For pagans, it promises salvation and everlasting life.  For Jews, it represents a retreat from monotheism, a loss of ethic, and a loss of identity as a people; thus, it undermines the three pillars of Judaism: God, Torah, and Israel—a most uninviting prospect.  Paul’s rejection by the Jerusalem Church and Diaspora temples likely derives from the subversive nature of his preaching.

From my perspective as an unaffiliated, non-observant, classical Reform Jew, I offer two suggestions to Jews and Christians alike.  Both share similar texts; Jews have the Holy Scriptures, and Christians have the Old Testament.  So both share the Ten Commandments.  My suggestions are that followers of both faiths return to them for ethical guidance and ignore inflammatory instances and interjected abominations, to which these texts give little attention because they matter little in the Big Scheme of Things.  If Ten Commandments are too many, an appropriate starting point might be the Tenth Commandment, not to bear false witness.  Or, if Ten Commandments sound too dictatorial, perhaps the Golden Rule, shared by all major religions, might serve: treat others as they would wish or not wish to be treated themselves.  Admittedly, it is no final answer in societies with increasingly mixed cultural populations—we may not know how those with different cultural backgrounds wish to be treated or not—but it is a first approximation.

* The Synoptic Gospels implicitly criticize the Pharisees, or rabbis, by contrast with Jesus.  Admittedly, Pharisees, for what they thought good reason, were more concerned with observing the laws of purity, a necessary condition of holiness, than observing the laws of righteous conduct, also a necessary condition.  Jews had traditionally regarded their conquest and occupation as punishment for their straying from God’s law.  By the way, this view represents the Jews’ invention of history, an explanation of the causes of events.  To them, a return to His law would release them from foreign tyranny.  Not surprisingly, given the severity of Roman rule, Pharisees emphasized ritual purity as the easier, more practical, more popular, therefore more efficacious, way to demonstrate their fidelity.  The failure of this approach does not refute its rationale.  Jesus concerned himself, not with liberating Israel from the Roman occupation, but with ameliorating the lives and welfare of impoverished and oppressed Jews. 

PLAN B: ABORTION IS A FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT

[NOTE: This blog is a lightly revised version of the blog posted in 2017.]

The prospects for continued Constitutional protection of a woman’s right to choose (or not) to have an abortion are promising for opponents and perilous for supporters of Roe v. Wade.  Justice Henry Blackmun’s 1973 majority opinion has failed to persuade many in the legal community that it is solidly grounded and soundly reasoned.  (Of course, it has not persuaded many in some faith communities.)  Its inadequacies have provided the means to complicate the issue and have made it conflict-prone ever since.  Its history has been a tangle of medical, administrative, or financial laws or regulations restricting the exercise of this right at the state level and requiring judicial affirmations, revisions, or reversals at all levels of state or federal judicial systems.  Intensified efforts to erode the decision and increased odds of judges picked to reverse Roe v. Wade put this woman’s right at great risk.

One understandable response by advocates to this growing threat has been to rally in support of Roe v. Wade.  As the guardian of abortion rights and a symbol of women’s liberation for 50 years, it is not easily abandoned.  However, the increasing threat of reversal by a politicized Supreme Court argues that the time has come to re-think the basis of abortion rights.  The first step is to identify and admit defects and deficiencies in Blackmun’s opinion; the second, to construct an argument having clear Constitutional support and countering its opponents in their terms.

The abortion conflict has been a struggle on many battlefields between those arguing and acting on political principles and those arguing and acting on religious convictions.  But this political-versus-religious divide is a false dichotomy.  Abortion is a matter of religious belief and practice, inherently a matter of conscience.  Advocates of abortion rights could attract support and disarm anti-abortion opposition by arguing that First Amendment rights protect decisions about abortions.  They would force opponents to argue the supremacy of their religious convictions and, by court decision or state law, the right to impose their convictions on others.  Accordingly, this paper urges advocates to shift their defense of abortion rights from the privacy argument of Roe v. Wade to an argument based on The First Amendment, with its provisions for freedom of religion and from an establishment of religion.

1

Blackmun’s opinion summarizes legal, medical, and religious histories of abortion, with accounts of historical practices worldwide, English and American legal and medical traditions, and philosophical and religious beliefs, but makes little use of them.  On the one hand, his opinion, noting decisions discovering a right to privacy in various Constitutional amendments—First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth—regards the Ninth and Fourteenth sufficient to ensure a woman’s right to choose an abortion.  On the other hand, his opinion limits a woman’s privacy-based right by a state’s right to protect the increasing “potential for life.”  Blackmun defines this “potential” by a trimester division of pregnancy (weeks 0-12, 13-28, 29-40) on the basis of the then-existing knowledge of unborns’ development and their ability to survive outside the uterus at various stages of gestation—that is, their viability.  His opinion thus asserts both a woman’s right and a state’s right—with the result being unending attacks on or defense of Roe v. Wade and inflamed conflicts between women and their state governments.

Blackman’s opinion has major defects.  One, it disregards the acknowledged diversity of philosophical and religious beliefs defining life and its beginning.  Blackmun writes:

We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins.  When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer....[All Jews and many Protestants have given] strong support for the view that life does not begin until live birth.

Of course, “the difficult question of when life begins” is difficult because the answer depends on the definition of life, which depends, not on “man’s knowledge,” but on the meaning of a word with a remarkable number of meanings.  (My argument also applies to the idea of a pre-natal “right to life.”)  Obviously, the Supreme Court should neither speculate about “the answer” (emphasis added), as if there were one, nor stipulate one.

But it does, by commingling two distinct issues.  The first is a matter of religion: when does life begin—at conception, at quickening, at breach; the second is a matter of medical science: when is life ex-utero possible, and is that possibility independent of medical support or dependent on medical intervention.  Without offering an explicit rationale, Blackmun prefers the answer, the definition, of science to the answers, the definitions, of religion.  His preference apparently reflects an assumption that medical science provides a reasonable, practical resolution of irreconcilable religious differences.  The assumption is wrong.  A scientific definition of the beginning of life is a stipulation serving scientific methodology; it is not a standard for deciding non-scientific issues.  His preference, far from being reasonable, is coercive.  Since any scientific answer to this religious question corresponds to the religious convictions of only some, not all, women, invoking science as the standard presumes to tell other women that it properly dictates how their religion should define the beginning of life.  Whether he knows it or not, he favors one Christian definition of the beginning of life and disfavors other Christian and all Jewish definitions.  Whether he means to or not, he imposes one sectarian Christian standard on those Christians who believe that life begins at other stages of gestation and on all Jews, who believe that life begins at breach.

Two, Blackmun’s opinion is flawed by his resort to viability, a medical condition with little history in law or medicine.  Until the advent of modern medicine in the early 20^th century, viability did not concern theologians and lawyers, not to mention politicians, because unborns removed from the uterus or delivered before full term rarely survived.  However, once modern medicine enhanced their chances of survival, everyone assumed that what science made possible, society should accept as an answer to a contentious religious question or at least as common ground for dismissing it.  So most theologians, lawyers, and politicians, knowingly or not, made viability part of traditional Christian discussions determining at what point, conception or quickening, unborns attain the status of life, acquire religious and political endowments, and require or deserve legal consideration.  The resulting enactments or decisions may accord with majority views, but they ignore the religious beliefs and practices of others and thereby establish a necessarily religious standard of some which violates the religious convictions of others.

Even so, viability is an unreliable, dubious standard.  Blackmun’s trimester division of pregnancy was a rough approximation of the conditions of viability.  However, advances in medical science extend the conditions and thus move the boundaries of his division.  But these shifts based on scientific developments entail controversy and conflict, and enable legal challenges based on any claim, scientific or not, sectarian in motivation or not, which raises medical issues.  Ironically, for the religiously motivated, the earlier the viability, the greater the reliance on artificially assisted as opposed to naturally assured survival ex utero, with science in the role of life-giver, a role which they would otherwise assign to God.

Three, Blackmun’s opinion assumes that the viability of the unborn gives the state an interest “in protecting the potentiality of human life” or the “potential for life.”  This phrase has several deficiencies, not the least of which is a contradiction.  On the one hand, it implies that the unborn is not a life in utero, but a life only after delivery, when the “potential” becomes actual.  On the other hand, it treats the potential life in utero as if it were actual life.  It assigns the unborn the status, not recognized in Constitutional law, of a person entitled to the protection of the state.  Although Blackmun assumes and repeatedly asserts this potential-is-actual-life equation, he neither specifies the sources, nature, or magnitude of that state interest, nor justifies it by balancing individual and state rights over the period of the pregnancy.  He assumes that the state’s right increases during the pregnancy as the “potential for life” increases and thereby allows increasing restrictions on abortions.  He does not assess the woman’s interests or concerns during her pregnancy, especially under changing circumstances or conditions, or with greater knowledge.  Moreover, since most women, whether of faith or not, increasingly desire to protect their unborn over time, and since most religions specify increasingly stringent guidelines or standards for abortions, the legal concern for the “potential for life” is superfluous—one more reason to question the justification of a state interest or the necessity for state intervention.  Ironically, Blackmun’s opinion, so far from protecting a woman’s right provides the means for diminishing it.

The effect of Blackmun’s majority opinion has been to pit the state’s power to regulate abortion against a woman’s conscience to choose an abortion.  It has enabled a growing number of states to restrict this right of women almost out of existence.  Many attempts to restrict any aspect of abortion—medical procedure, clinical setting, administrative arrangements, or financial requirements—by court case, legislation, or regulation to impede or eliminate women’s’ ability to have an abortion if they choose to have one.  Many profess concerns about women’s health to justify requirements for medically or clinically unnecessary and sometimes dangerous procedures.  Although abortions are safer for women’s lives and health than induced or even natural deliveries of the unborn are, these facts count for little in the enactment of religiously or politically motivated restrictions on abortion.

2

Any thoughtful discussion of abortion addresses the relative weights of individual rights and government responsibilities in the context of federal and state laws, case laws, and the amended Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court in light of changes in social circumstances, political conditions, and legal thinking.  Underlying many state and federal cases are two fundamental questions:  One, does a pregnant woman have the sole right to choose whether to have an abortion at a time of her choosing.  Two, if not, what grounds give the government a role in that choice?  For, in almost all other matters of personal health and medical care, the individual has the sole right to choose or refuse treatment or specific treatments, or to delegate those decisions to another person.

Admittedly, government has a right to deny individual choice in some circumstances to protect the public.  It can require health procedures like vaccination or quarantine to protect the public because carriers of transmittable diseases jeopardize the health or life of others.  But abortion is not “catching”; one woman’s abortion cannot induce abortions in other pregnant women.  By ordinary standards applicable to medical decisions, no public health interest justifies government regulation of abortion.

Government can also prescribe or proscribe medical procedures or medications to protect patients from unreasonable risks to health or life.  Because abortions are safer than natural or induced births, they require no regulations essentially different from those of other approved and comparable medical procedures to protect patients.  Special regulations curtailing abortions address no unreasonable medical risks to women.  Again, by ordinary standards, no abortion-specific medical reason justifies a government limit on or denial of a woman’s choice to have an abortion.

Blackmun’s claim of a government interest in the “potential for life” is unrelated to conventional government interests in public health and patient protection.  Indeed, it shifts the focus of legal consideration from the woman to the unborn, with the problems which that new consideration involves, as noted above, and others.  For one, if laws to prevent abortions departed from precedent by defining unborns as persons entitled to the protection of law, they would not likely apply in all cases.  For instance, if an unborn threatened the mother with death or great physical or emotional harm during gestation, the mother would presumably have the right of self-defense by having an abortion.  His claim seems more a judicial juggling act and a political sop to the states than a sensible legal decision.  Blackmun might have meant to offer a compromise, but it effected a legal muddle and perpetuated a political and religious controversy.  The lesson should be that halfway Constitutional decisions settle no issues and satisfy no one.

3

America’s religious pluralism means that its religions have different definitions of the beginning of life.  State and federal courts should have recognized that controversies over abortion were religions controversies, however opponents couched their arguments.  Advocates of a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion have inclined to talk of political rights; opponents have inclined to talk about religious values.  Both meet in one and the same place: The First Amendment.

Blackmun’s opinion is perverse in recognizing, then rejecting, different religious definitions of the beginning of life.  Puzzling is its failure of logic to relate these religious definitions to religious beliefs, thence to First Amendment rights to freedom of religion and freedom from an establishment of religion, thence to the exercise of those rights in a woman’s decision to have an abortion (or not).  Using that logic, Blackman could have decided Roe v. Wade, not on the flimsy basis of penumbras of privacy presumably implied by various other amendments, but on the sturdy basis of the direct, explicit language of the First Amendment.

To defend a woman’s right to an abortion, advocates should prepare a Plan B if, as seems increasingly likely, a conservative Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.  That Plan B would advance the argument on Constitutional grounds which would be lasting in law and attractive to a Supreme Court disposed to extend religious considerations into public policy questions.  Plan B should be an argument clear and clean in moving from religious beliefs about life and its beginning to First Amendment religious rights to a woman’s right to choose an abortion.  A decision on that basis would deny federal and state governments the right to impose any restrictions on abortions different from comparable medical operations.  One result might be the reduction or elimination of the clutter and congestion in federal and state courts from partisan cases with irrelevant arguments about real or bogus medical science.

The fundamental question about abortion is a political one; who decides—the woman or the government?  The struggle over the answer to this question is one skirmish in the larger conflict between those who prefer a dogmatic theocracy to a Constitutional democracy in matters of faith and morals.  To the degree that government decides any aspect of a woman’s choice about abortion, it tips toward theocracy; to the degree that the woman decides, it tips toward democracy.  These are the ultimate stakes in the debate about abortion.

 In American democracy, with a religiously pluralistic society and First Amendment guarantees for freedom of religion and against an establishment of religion, no level of government has a legitimate role in a woman’s decision about abortion.  Since it is a matter of conscience, no democratic government has a right to restrict an abortion at any stage of pregnancy, to compel medical tests or procedures, to mandate medical information, or to require doctors to take into account anything other than her particular needs and well-being.