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Jesus as philosopher

I very much appreciated the article in the February 2k3 edition of Books and Culture, “Jesus the Philosopher” by Doug Groothuis of Denver Seminary. It was timely, pointed, and consisted of devastating argumentation against the gnats like philosopher Michael Martin who wrote much ill-motivated malicious tripe in his book, The Case Against Christianity. Groothuis's article alerted me to this recent addition to the stuff that a whole swarm of anti-Jesus intellectuals like to read and write. Groothuis himself proceeds in a strictly amiable rhetorical style about these whom I regard as philosopher-hatemongers; Groothuis provides a style which I can't quite emulate (as my preceding adjectives and nouns show). But as to Groothuis's own piece, I hope to be as strictly amiable as his article models for me. I like his article very much.

Groothuis' thinking is generally very good, but in a collegial way I want to address only one aspect of his discussion that isn't up to par, in my view. The aspect of his article that leaves me less than satisfied is emblematic in his title, “Jesus the Philosopher,” to which I pose a counter-title “Jesus the Nonphilosopher.” The stance I thereby take is not in bipolar opposition to Groothuis, as would be Martin's idea that Jesus has no claim to rationality. Mine is is not a contradiction, as I see it, to Groothuis's idea; but it is indeed a contrary to the formal stance of his B&C piece, an instance of a relation of contrariety, regarding which most logics used in religious and political discourse today seem disastrously unaware. A very important matter for anyone like Groothuis, who cites technical terms of the science of logic - reductio ad absurdan, a fortiori, tertium quid, and in the proposition “Jesus was giving a modus ponens argument,” he deftly points out the technical pattern, “If P, then Q; [since] P [is true], therefore Q [is also true].”

Now, logic is not philosophy, but philosophical discourse is largely dependent upon it (I'll come back to this point in a moment). Logic is a special science, whereas philosophy is a general science in dialogue with logic through the bridge-disciplines of the history and philosophy of logic. Each philosophy itself chooses what logic to validate and use. Groothuis mentions Aristotle, a good choice in my view. Aristotle not only gave us philosophy, but he also gave us three or four important books relevant directly to the special science of logic. The first presents a highly binomial oppositional type of logic, significant and systematic (as Aristotle always tries to be, along with Aquinas who largely followed his Greek predecessor, and whom Groothuis also mentions in the same breath with Aristotle).

This first logic of Aristotle turns on selecting out and prioritizing the principle of [logical] identity: A is A, and is not not-A. Yes or No?, as a lawyer may ask, trying to force a witness out of his/her own highly nuanced reasoning and reporting of events–which is not useful to a lawyer intent on destroying a witness's credibility. The principle of Identity when prioritized makes an airtight system of reasoning that renders every conceptualization into a strict either/or construction (called binomialism, oppositionary binomialism, or binomial oppositionism). When this technical apparatus of Aristotle's first logic is applied to living words, it denatures them, it acids-out the linguistic proteins and vitamins that consist of connotations, etymologies, meaning reversals of words, irony (where in speech, tone of voice or intonation and rhythm can undermine any just-surface meaning as usually shared by speaker and listener; there's a written version of ironic reversals of word meanings, too). Etc.

The meaning behind the word

If you've ever looked at a good lexicon of the Greek New Testament, you'll usually find a numbered list under each word-entry where the lexicographers present usages of the same Greek word from different ancient texts, the word shifting in meaning from one user to another over time. Indeed, the Greek NT meaning itself is sometimes demonstrated to have had a varying array of meanings for the same word, from book to book of the NT; you know, in John's Gospel a certain word means this, in the Book of Acts it means that. Each word has a life all its own in the extant records we have; by tracing them, we gain some historical insight into the always-changing meanings of words. In sharp contrast to lexicography and philology, logic and each philosophy try to freeze the meanings to assure continuation in the deployment of their own technical terms, and all too often impose that logic's or that philosophy's preferred usage of words upon those same-but-different words as they appear in the texts of ancient or later philosophies–where the words often are actually employed quite differently.

As mentioned, the Greeks not only established the base of Western philosophy and logic; they also insisted on establishing the literary sciences of philology and lexicography. Why? Because the literary heritage, which was the base of Greek education (Iliad, Odyssey, Theogony; the lyric form founded by Sappho; the tragic plays of Aeschyles, Euripides, and Sophocles; the odes of Pindar; later, as history writing emerged in its own right, the work of Xenophon and others, ... and philosophical texts like Plato's Dialogues ... and so forth). The Greeks invented and elevated philology in order to evaluate the variant texts of each and every one of these works that were being passed down generation to generation, to teach the literary culture largely to point out the way to the virtuous life of excellence, honor, and courage. All this simply underscores the achievement of Greek civilization and education (paideia).

It also helps us understand the history of different sciences: philosophy (the general science that deals with the multiplicity of views and kinds of discourses based on each philosophy's prioritized presuppositions); logic (which studies the structure of formal reasoning as such); philology (which every word-using science must fall back on, at least occasionally, just in order to quote anciently used words and their interpretations and usages in other languages over time); and lexicology / lexicography (which constructs the orderly lists of the word-items entries along with the historical notes of who previously used what word in what way in what works/texts from the past's previous usages, thus helping to establish a context for a specific usage of a given word or variant. Philosophy employs / deploys all these other sciences to assist it, if it chooses to; these other helping sciences can be called its “auxiliary sciences” (Adrian van Kaam). Theology and the formation science of spiritual development can use philosophy and all of the others mentioned as their auxiliaries. A philosophy can use theology and formation science also as its own auxiliary, each philosophy or science, including logic, has priority in its field. Philosophy cannot be reduced to theology and vice versa; instead of warring reductions of reality to one or another science, careful but always difficult dialogues should be pursued.

Concluding this first take: Aristotle's syllogistic logic based on an artificial binomial opposition of a word to its “opposite” needs precisely two premises plus a valid conclusion to provide a “logical proof” (QED); it also requires the presence of certain regularized components including “is” as the “copula” function of each premise and the conclusion drawn (the connecting link between the subject and predicate of each proposition ... “proposition” = logically valid sentence). But the artifice of Aristotle's Syllogistic Logic, as brilliant as it is and as useful at times, has to acid-out to whatever extent possible the historical and regional fluidity of word-meanings over time (Umberto Eco). We know from philology that there are words that begin with a narrow range of connotations and directions of meaning; these words become subject to semantic drift (because it's inherent in language to change as well as to bear continuity of meanings); the often infinitesimal drifts of a word's meaning and place of origin (or usage) slowly extend themselves to other connotations over time, to the extent that a stem word or even at times the same original “word” has generated opposite meanings, tiny step by tiny step of semantic drift. For these startup insights, thank you, Greeks philologists of old! Thank you for your work more than a hundred years before Jesus, and thereafter into the Christian Era on up to this day.

Grammatology

Grammar, in the stretched sense of a science of grammatology, also undergoes historical development. The Hebrew language, for instance, had no grammar-scientific help until after the founding of Islam and the latter's own cultural development, in which the Arabic scholars (after studying the grammars already anciently produced for the very different Greek language) invented a Semitic grammar based on the three-consonant root of words/verbs. After living in Islamic Arab cultures, the Hebrew scholars of their own ancient texts (especially the Hebrew Bible) were finally able to apply the three-consonant stem principle of the Arabs to the analysis of meanings of Hebrew words over time–within the Hebrew Bible itself. All this is rooted in the work of the earlier Greek philologists, lexicographers, and grammarians who found that logic was not enough.

So we see a few of the key elements involved in Aristotle's Syllogistic Logic. Yet, he went on to establish another main branch of logic–which I shall call Matrix Logic. Here, think of a quadrant diagram where all four rectangles touch a corner of themselves to one contiguous corner of all three contacting corners of the three other rectangles. Just as in Syllogistic Logic, here Aristotle's Matrix Logic was given a definite specific formula or device. What the quadrant matrix does in Aristotle is break through the artificial contradiction-only function of any two words defined arbitrarily as absolute opposites in meaning, based on “A is A, and is not not-A.” The four-element matrix, in contrast, besides having the two “opposites,” has additionally another set of “opposites” to intervene and mediate the otherwise absolute opposition of meanings of the first set, which is binomial only. Thus, in Aristotle's second logic, the quadrant matrix, contradiction is no longer the prioritized principle, and the possibility of contrariety is established. What were contradictories in the first, now are “only” contraries. This move is a step out of the straightjacket of syllogistic binomialism in Aristotle's first logic; and it remains schematic, formulaic, orderly—as with him it needs must be.

A famous instance of the solution of a clash of binomial-determined opposition is to be found in the history of modern psychology. Freud and his topmost colleague, Adler, came to an impasse on a foundational principle where they agreed there were only two possibilities in relation to one another only as binomial contradictories; the quarrel became intense and nearly sank the enterprise of the new psychological standpoint; along came Jung who shifted the debate by offering in place of Aristotle's first logic, Aristotle's second logic. Jung pinpointed the problem of the unnecessarily polarizing twofold possibilities, and then offered two further possibilities that allowed rethinking the presumed opposites now as not opposites but contraries. Aristotle saw that both Syllogistic reasoning and Matrix reasoning are of advantage only in certain circumstances involving educated thinkers.

Now, noneducated thinkers do certainly exist, both then and now. And in Athenian democracy where Aristotle held forth more than three centuries before Christ, there were educated thinkers, educated thinkers who were open to another type of reasoning than Syllogism or Matrix, and noneducated thinkers and perhaps nonthinking persons in the crowds who listened to public addresses and orations. These public-spoken discourses were a primary form of communal persuasion and political decision-making—there were no print media, there was no radio, nor television, nor.... Moreover, few people read books, which had to be copied by hand and often cost a fortune. In any case, Aristotle said there remained a subsurface reasoning still present in the primarily persuasionary discourse of public address of the time. This type of “reasoning” featured two characteristics—vividness of speech that deployed graphic metaphors to make ideas visible to the listeners, and emotional appeal based on knowledge of the crowd and the circumstance and how to strike a specific kind of emotional chord.

Later, of course, up to the Apostle Paul's day three hundred years later, there was a whole rhetorical approach that set out to excoriate the crowd, which Paul did at times by actions and speech (I'm thinking of Ephesus) and also another approach (like his gentler rhetorical moves before the shrine to the Unknown God on Mars Hill, Athens). Three hundred years earlier, Aristotle wrote all this up, too, and even provided, besides The Rhetoric, a related book, The Topics, which is a kind of systematic manual of prepared moves on various topical issues that an orator may have to face. Now all this was on hand centuries before the emptying out (kenosis) of God the Son and his Enfleshment as human in Jesus, anointed thus to be the promised Messiah who would save the world. But just because Jesus taught several specifics that can be recognized as extremely valuable philosophically, and did so using argumentative techniques that evidence a rich logical practice of reasoning (nonfallacious or not-invalidatable reasoning), as well as brilliant rhetorical effectiveness; still, that doesn't make him a philosopher in any not-fuzzy use of the term.

Plato and Christian philosophy

Philosophizing was a professional specialization in Greek Asia and then Greece proper—since Thales, some five centuries before the Advent of Jesus. Many say, and I agree, that Plato and Aristotle were the zenith of philosophy's development in its early native setting. And philosophy had special already highly developed sciences at its finger tips as auxiliaries: logic, philology, lexicography, and grammatology. I must add in passing that Plato is especially important to Christian philosophy because he highlighted the philosophical problem of the Law (and, hence, for us, the philosophical articulation of the Divine Law Order that must be assumed in any philosophizing that has as its basic distinction Creator/creature––in all the multiplicity of creatures and creaturely kinds).

I've already given some indication of why Aristotle is important. It's true that by the time of Jesus, this high-water mark of Greek-speaking, -writing, and -reading philosophy had devolved into the ranting of moralistic Skeptics and Cynics, along with a small minority of Stoics (most, however, were school teachers and pursued their teaching in classrooms, not marketplaces). And it's true that much of Paul's evangelizing style appropriated typical behavior of the ranters who made a place for direct negative public confrontation. Paul, of course, had more to offer, certainly more than the worst of the confrontational types; and it was Paul who spoke critically about “philosophy falsely so-called,” undoubtedly having these marketplace Cynics, Skeptics, and minority-Stoics foremost in mind.

But what about Jesus? He was everything Groothuis tells us, but he wasn't a philosopher, logician, philologist, lexicographer, or grammarian. Jesus did have a profession, a unique profession that has several names in the New Testament, names that identify Him as “the announcer of the coming of the Kingdom of God” in his own person, ministry, and ultimately sacrifice of Himself for the sins of the world and its eventual liberation. This was even then an established Hebrew concept, not reducible to the Greek concept of soter, but alive philogically in the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Septuagint version of what is for Christians the Old Testament, and in the Jewish community of Palestine in the days of our Lord's earthly direct ministry; in this He became recognized as “both Saviour and Lord.” Soon enough after His Ascension and the subsequent spread of the Gospel to the Greeks, Greek philosophers with varying degrees of training and skill in their profession, which varied from one school of thought to another over time, began to convert to Christian faith; it was they who had the problem of weaning themselves away from “philosophy not after Christ” and pursuing the vision of Christian philosophy, professional philosophy trying to the best of its ability to follow Jesus Christ—how to be a Christian philosopher. But Jesus was not one of those would-be Christian philosophers; He was the Saviour and Lord who set some philosophers in motion through conversion to try to become, not philosophers (which they already were), but Christian philosophers. Then a second generation arose, baptized at infancy, raised as practicing Christians, and it was they who became trained as philosophers, while already Christians. There's a lot to criticize in all of these early Christian philosophers, because Jesus gave them no blueprint for the practice of this profession in a Christian way. The first attempt to establish a Christian university to nourish Christian philosophy in a theological context was in Alexandria, Egypt. It had very mixed results, as do would-be Christian universities today.

We should not confuse acuity in reasoning and in rhetorical strategies (that we see clearly in the Work of Jesus) as among the required skills of His own unique profession and life-task; nor ought we confuse that Work with the work of a philosopher, even when pursued as a conscious Christian task. Of course, there are philosophers today who follow the nonphilosopher Paul's pursuit of a specific business practice in order to support his evangelizing work (Paul was quite learned in Greek literature, but his professions were respectively evangelist and “tentmaker” entrepreneur).

There again, in the case of both Jesus and Paul, we further must be careful in thinking Jesus ever did much actual carpentry work, or Paul much tentmaking with his “own hands” (although, if he says so, he certainly did some quite hands-on). In the times of the New Testament, you weren't a Carpenter or Tentmaker because you did manual labor yourself, though you might on occasion, to inspire and motivate your laborers, or to fill a large rush order, or in some crisis of the enterprise. Rather, you were a Carpenter if you inherited the skills, properties, tools, and management of servants or laborers who did the manual work of your business. Members of the Carpenters Guild were not members of a labor organization, but the inheriting business-owner members of a Trade Guild of owners (which protected aspects of the trade, such as who could be taught the secrets of the trade and convey the skills required—the “Carpenter” not necessarily personally teaching such skills, either—but having an authoritative directing role through ownership, or part ownership). Likewise, with members of the Tentmakers Guild.

Jesus of the desert

In the case of Jesus, as the first-born and inheriting son of Joseph, I think His training in this regard was also professional, but probably quite incomplete. For it seems to me that Jesus began early in Egypt a regimen of Scripture study with a learned, pious, and messianic-minded Rabbi who had heard Mary's story. And Mary paid money for this work by the Rabbi. After all, Joseph and Mary had to have money to travel to and maintain themselves in Egypt. When Jesus returned with His parents from Egypt to Palestine, at least on time for an entrance exam by Teachers of the Temple School, only to be turned down because of His perky learnedness which embarrassed his authoritative elders (was He something of a child prodigy in Scripture study?). After that, where did He go? To apprentice with Joseph the Carpenter's laborers to learn the trade from the ground up? I don't think He did much of that. Rather, Mary, just as she did in Egypt and in taking Him for the Temple School's entry exam, now turned to a messianic-minded Jewish Order in the desert of Palestine (just as Paul would do later as an adult, for three years) where Jesus spent most of his time up until the start of His public ministry (there were several desert-monastery schools, operated by different schools of Jewish spirituality).

I must add: This reading in regard to Jesus' special formation for a special world-significant task, His Work, also enables us to solve the problem of Nazareth vs. Bethlehem. May I suggest that Joseph and Mary “found no room in the Inn,” not because they had no money, but because there was no room in town owing to the large number of absentee owners of local land-holdings who came flooding in to register to pay back taxes on land and/or harvests they owned. In my reading, at some point, members of the Zerubbabel clan (see Richard Bauckham) moved from Bethlehem where they owned land, to Nazareth and perhaps other towns where they made homes for themselves to live in, and Joseph (re-)established his inherited Carpentry business. The colonial Roman government had many projects requiring the services of a Carpenter and his workers. The colonial Roman government also needed money, as did many others throughout the Empire. With this approach, we get more of a context for “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's; and to God the things that are God's.”

So, I believe the young student Jesus, rejected by the Temple School, returned to the desert monastery and from then on took up training in the skills of spiritual exploration, like fasting for gradually lengthened periods of time–all of which culminated in His journey into the desert, His temptation by the devil, and His emergence from the desert after God's tests (as understood by and according to the rules of the monastic Order under which he had studied and trained). This latter emergence led almost immediately to His baptism and His launch into his independent professional practice in pursuit of His unique task–as a professional meticulously trained for that task. I think the Order that trained Him recognized His specialness and did not try to keep Him with them in the desert—precisely because they recognized the messianic Scapegoat role that He took upon Himself in consequence of His training at their feet. One must account for the human side of His authoritativeness, knowledge, and spiritual experience as a result of long-term formation, if one takes up the question of Jesus the Teacher.

Yes, the Church, since Irenaeus, has long recognized and used formulaically the expression Xristos Pedagogos (Christ the Teacher). Philosopher? No. Teacher? Yes. Good at reasoning and rhetorical cleverness? Yes, as Doug Groothuis so refreshingly points out.

To conclude, when candidate Bush answered a reporter's loaded question, the Christian man who became President of the United States gave a fine rhetorical answer. It communicated, and threw the snottiness of the question back in the reporter's face–most graciously. Bush's answer was reasonable, but Jesus was not a philosopher. He belonged to and pursued strenuously a quite different all-demanding profession.