Jesus Was Outside The Overton Window

Bentham’s Bulldog recently wrote on why he is not a Christian, despite being a theist. I had planned on avoiding BB related posts for a while but I couldn’t ignore this one. He was asking for it! Really, he wrote “If you’re a Christian, I’d love to hear a longform reply to these arguments". How could I resist?

BB laid out four areas of argument against Christianity. The first two I won’t address here. I also find the Trinity confusing, and just take it on faith.¹ Similarly, I also find the atonement confusing and take it on faith². I’m also going to only address the third argument, on the inspiration of scripture, indirectly. All three of those arguments are not in my wheelhouse, and I’ll leave them to others to defend.

Instead I’ll be putting my focus on his last area of skepticism: the teachings of Jesus. This was the section that got me hot under the collar and led me to angrily argue with the air over the following day. When you get a reaction like that you know that the topic is in your wheelhouse.

Before I begin with the response proper I do want to say that while I got riled up by his post I find BB’s honesty, straightforwardness, and willingness to learn to be extremely commendable. The man wants to believe true things, and he’s putting all his cards on the table. I respect that a lot, especially since he’s asking for responses on a topic that he almost certainly knows less about than many of the people who will actually respond. That’s not a crack at BB; I wouldn’t expect a fairly recent theist to know all the ins and outs of Christianity the way someone born and raised in the faith would. Speaking of…

Teachers Know Things That You Don’t

BB’s criticism of the teachings of Jesus has two prongs of attack. First, that many things Jesus taught were immoral. Second, that “most of the things he said are the sorts of things one could have been expected conceivably to say at the surrounding period.” This last one is important, as BB’s standard in this post is to compare the probability that the thing in question (Jesus’s teachings in the Bible, in this case) would have happened if Christianity was true, versus the probability that it would have happened if Christianity is not true. In other words, if the things Jesus taught are the kind of things you would plausibly expect him to teach if he was not the son of God then that’s evidence against Christianity. The more Jesus’s teachings conform to the kind of things we would expect a 1st century Jewish teacher to say, the less likely he was actually the Son of God.

I’m not going to spend time arguing that the specific examples BB gave of “immoral” teachings on Jesus’s part are actually moral. I could write a very long post about, for instance, Jesus’s proclamations against divorce, which BB finds morally “implausible”. But I think there is a larger point that can be more profitably made here.

When I first starting working at the job I currently hold, I thought my boss was a fool. Maybe even crazy! His ideas about how to do things seemed obviously wrong or imprudent. Yet after a few months I noticed something: some of the things he had told me that I had dismissed out of hand seemed to work much better than I ever would have expected. As a result I decided to hold my tongue while the boss was trying to teach me something and put some faith in him. That faith was that even if he said something that didn’t make sense to me I would trust that he knows things that I don’t know and he could be right and I could be wrong. What I discovered was that my boss was a lot wiser than I had ever expected. He actually did know how to do the job. Not perfectly, mind you. There were still times I thought something wouldn’t work and then it didn’t. But I learned so much more from him than I had ever expected, once I decided to put some trust in him and follow where he led.

This is something most people learn over time. It is wise to have some humility and (as Dr. Peterson says) “assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.” If you can’t do this then you can’t learn anything from anyone.

C. S. Lewis writes about this same phenomenon applied to problematic scriptures about Heaven in his essay “The Weight of Glory”:

If Christianity could tell me no more of the far-off land than my own temperament led me to surmise already, then Christianity would be no higher than myself. If it has more to give me, I must expect it to be less immediately attractive than “my own stuff.”...If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent; for it will be precisely the puzzling or the repellent which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know.

Now if Christianity is true we would expect Jesus to know a lot of things that we don’t know, particularly about morality. BB knows this better than most, since he believes we should care about the suffering of insects. Obviously most people believe he is very wrong about that! BB should expect the perfect God, made incarnate, would agree with him about caring for insects: in other words, we would expect Jesus to teach some things that everybody believes is wrong.

We should also then expect that Jesus will say things that seem wrong to us as well. Unless we are confident that we have morality perfectly figured out we should expect that the avatar of morality itself would say some things that we disagree with or don’t understand. Things that challenge us (the way BB often challenges others with his own teachings on morality).

Now of course that doesn’t change the fact that Jesus teaching things that BB believes are immoral is evidence against him being God incarnate. It’s merely that we should discount that evidence significantly because we should expect that God incarnate would be someone we don’t agree with perfectly. In other words, a Jesus that only taught things that BB already believed would be more suspicious than a Jesus that teaches some things BB believes (like caring for the poor) and other things that he disagrees with.

Jesus Broke the Overton Window

The Overton Window is a psychological concept that refers to the kind of ideas, subjects, and arguments that are acceptable to communicate in a particular society at a particular time. For example, in our own society advocating for the legalization of rape is far outside the Overton Window: nobody in polite society would make such an argument, or listen to someone arguing for it, and if you spoke up in support of it you are risking social condemnation.

When BB argues that most of the things Jesus said are the kind of things we would expect someone in the 1st century to say he is saying that Jesus’s teachings were mostly within the Overton Window of the time. BB writes that

If Jesus were divine, he’d have likely provided many important messages that were not obvious to the people of the time. The fact that he had no messages that seem like they couldn’t have been devised by a person of his time period is surprising…What is puzzling is that while he had some clearly good passages and some weird passages, there are few passages that would have been extremely weird at the time but that are clearly good in hindsight.

This is the part that really got my goat, because it simply isn’t true: Jesus taught a lot of things that were “extremely weird” for the time and what we would consider good. The fault isn’t necessarily BB’s, as it is an understandable mistake to make. It’s very difficult for us to understand what the Overton Window in Jesus’s time was like because our own Overton Window has been heavily influenced by Jesus’s teachings. So when Jesus says things we agree with we are inclined to think that’s a perfectly normal thing to say and not weird at all, because we live in a society that is majority Christian and has been majority Christian for well over a thousand years.

The historian Tom Holland (an agnostic³) wrote a popular book about this a few years ago titled Dominion. In the book he makes the case that Western culture today is profoundly Christian, even as fewer and fewer Westerners identify as Christians. Our values in particular have been shaped by Christianity to an extent that is hard for Westerners to appreciate. As he writes in the preface to the book

To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions…Two thousand years on from the birth of Christ, it does not require a belief that he rose from the dead to be stamped by the formidable—indeed the inescapable—influence of Christianity. Whether it be the conviction that the workings of conscience are the surest determinants of good law, or that Church and state exist as distinct entities, or that polygamy is unacceptable, its trace elements are to be found everywhere in the West.

…

The more years I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, so the more alien I increasingly found it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognized as my own; nor were those of Ceaser, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls, and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all. That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be Christian. For a millennium and more, the the civilization into which I had been born was Christendom. Assumptions that I had grown up with—about how a society should properly be organized, and the principles that it should uphold—were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’, but very distinctly of that civilisation’s Christian past.

BB mentions how Jesus said “Do not think I have come to abolish the Law and the Prophets: I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” as an example of how Jesus taught things within the 1st Century Jew Overton Window (namely, that we should have a high view of scripture). Yet this is misleading, as it takes the verse out of its context. The verse in question comes near the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, a long speech Jesus gives where he lays out a lot of his teaching. His audience was there to see what this radical new teacher everyone’s been talking about has to say. A lot of them were likely under the impression that he was teaching people to abandon the Law in favor of some new message.

So Jesus does a bit of rhetorical judo. First he addresses their concern directly and repudiates it by stating how he’s here to fulfill the Law, and that “not a single letter, not the least stroke of a pen will disappear from the Law”; but then he turns it around on them. Immediately after this statement of orthodoxy Jesus lays out in detail how exactly he is fulfilling the law: and each example he gives takes the form of a radical new teaching outside of his audience’s expectations. “The Law says you shouldn’t murder? I say you shouldn’t even call someone a fool in anger! The Law says you shouldn’t commit adultery? I say you shouldn’t even look at a man’s wife lustfully! The Law says you should keep your oaths? I say you shouldn’t swear oaths at all, you should just do what you say you’ll do! The Law says punishment should only be in proportion to the crime, and no more? I say that when people hurt you, and steal from you, and exploit you, you should cheerfully offer them even more with no revenge at all!”

He finishes this section on fulfilling the Law with the most radical, outside the Overton Window idea yet:

You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbor, and hate your enemy.” But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.

This right here is a perfect example of what BB was looking for: an idea that is really weird (for the time) and is clearly right in hindsight. Today it is fairly commonplace to believe that we shouldn’t hate anyone, even our enemies. I would hazard a guess that BB thinks we should love our enemies as well, since he thinks we should even love shrimps and beetles. Yet this was a radical idea that was completely outside his audience’s Overton Window.

In his post BB quotes several problematic passages of scripture from the Old Testament, including the infamous verse Psalms 137:9: “How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones against the rock.” The writer was referring to the children of the Babylonians who had destroyed Jerusalem and carried the Jews off into exile. BB can point to this as a verse that is advocating for something immoral, precisely because BB lives in a Christian society where everyone, even the children of your mortal enemies who killed your family and carried you off into slavery, is considered a person of moral concern. This was not the going idea at the time! If BB wants evidence of that, I present all those problematic verses from the Old Testament he quoted. These are clearly the writings of people to whom loving your enemies is a completely out of the box idea.

BB argues that scripture likely isn’t inspired because, for one example among others, it has sections where God commands the Israelites to wipe out the people living in the Promised Land. He rightly highlights these verses because it seems unlikely that a real God, a good God, would actually command such things. Yet why does BB think that a good God wouldn’t approve of wiping out your enemies to the last man? He believes so because he lives in a Christian society, a society that teaches children you should love even your enemies: and they teach that (knowingly or unknowingly) because Jesus taught it, at a time when it was a radical and frankly weird idea.

This is far from the only weird yet good idea Jesus has, and we can see this too in the weird yet good ideas of his followers: the early Christians. Those Christians did a lot of things that the ancient world considered very weird: they took in infants that had been abandoned to die of exposure and raised them as their own children. They took care of strangers who were sick, people who weren’t even family. They fed the hungry, and asked nothing in return! They were extremely weird people, whose weirdness infected the whole world until it seemed normal.

BB specifically asked why Jesus didn’t teach something really radical for the time, like advocating for the abolition of slavery. I wonder if he knows who the first person to publicly advocate for the abolition of slavery we have record of was? It was St. Gregory of Nyssa in the 4th century AD, who wrote that the practice of slavery was an offense against God and that the institution should be abolished. He wrote that “Not all the universe would constitute an adequate payment for the soul of a mortal.”

The earliest abolition activist was a Christian⁴, and it was Christians who ultimately destroyed the institution of slavery. In 1315 France become the first country in the world to abolish slavery, when the Christian King Louis X declared that any slave who set foot in France would be free. The abolition movement of the 18th and 19th centuries was fundamentally Christian: the most prominent activists were Christians, they argued in Christian terms, and they argued to a Christian audience. Devout Christians like Wilbur Wilberforce led the way to Britain abolishing not only slavery in their empire, but to actively shut down the slave trade by patrolling West Africa, stopping the slave trader’s ships by force, and freeing all the slaves they recovered. While many in the American South tried to use Christianity to justify slavery, in the North the abolition movement was explicitly Christian and used Christianity to condemn slavery, to much greater effect. As the famous abolitionist (and terrorist?) John Brown said in his final speech (before being sentenced to hang for trying to start a slave revolt):

This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that "all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them". It teaches me, further, to "remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them". I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!

BB was born in a society that knows that slavery is wrong. It knows that because of the efforts of Christians, spread over 1,800 years of slow social change.

Jesus Was Indeed Weird and Good

I could continue on in this way for hundreds of pages, but I believe I have made my point. BB argues that Jesus was sometimes weird, and sometimes good, but not weird and good at the same time. My response is that the good things Jesus says do not seem weird to us because we live in a society that was shaped by Jesus and his teachings. To his audience at the time they were extremely weird. They only seem normal to us because Jesus won.

1. Honestly, if the Trinity ends up being the real sticking point I would recommend BB just become a variety of Unitarian. But then again I’m one of those ecumenical types that think Unitarians are in Heaven too, so your mileage may vary.

2. Again though, if penal substitution is beyond the pale for BB I’d suggest going with another brand of atonement theory. Christus victor is nice, if a bit vague.

3. For now: he’s shown symptoms of late onset Christianity, though it hasn’t taken hold quite yet.

4. The only person you could argue was earlier than St. Gregory in calling for the abolition of slavery was the 1st century AD Greek philosopher Dio Chrysostom, in his work Diogenes, or On Servants. The work does depict the philosopher Diogenes arguing that you shouldn’t own slaves: but the point is undercut a bit because he argues that in the context of arguing that you shouldn’t own any possessions at all. At no point does he argue that slavery is wrong because it is bad for the slave; in fact, Diogenes chastises a slave owner for treating his slave too leniently, and as a result giving the slave a bad character.