Conversatianity in the Gospel of John
Aaron Gaius Ricker Parks
When it comes to truth, "Jesus Christ says something rather remarkable," as John C. Medaille recently pointed out. "He claims to be 'the Way, the Truth, and the Life.' This means that the truth is, ultimately, not some object, such as a pure and distinct idea, but a subject, an acting, self-aware person."[1] Médaille applies this idea from John's Gospel[2] to ontological theory, concluding that, for Christian thinkers, "being resides in the divine."[3] If we extend the application to epistemological and dialogical theory as well, one possible conclusion is an approach to truth and religious dialogue that I call "Conversatianity." This Christian approach conceives of Truth[4] as a Person, and therefore as a Reality experienced in interpersonal contact (i.e. with God and other persons). I use the neologism "Conversatianity" for convenience of argument only, since - for reasons I will soon present - I do not think of the Conversatian approach as new. I do, however, think of it as handily applicable to "new" problems in Christian thought.
For example, if John's gospel is right, and Truth has a personal character,[5] the "post-modern" quandary of subjectivity versus objectivity in truth can be regarded by Christians as largely illusory. People who think of the Truth as a Person should feel freed both from the gnostic temptation to insist that truth is too monolithic and absolute to admit relativity, and from the agnostic temptation to insist that truth is too subjective to be meaningful at all.[6] A personal Truth would, like any person, naturally always seem different to different observers, and yet always be the same. This Johannine view of Truth could explain the shocking universalism of that gospel's opening assertion that the "light" that is Christ the Logos[7] somehow "enlightens every human being."[8]
From this point of view, we can better see and better understand why that gospel's famous Logos prologue also exhibits a strong Conversatian character. In John's two simple lines,[9] the God of the book of Genesis who creates with a word[10] is related to the Word (Logos) seen by Greek philosophy behind creation,[11] then to the Lady Wisdom (Hokmah) whom Jewish Wisdom literature sees behind creation,[12] and finally to the Cosmic Christ incarnated in Jesus.[13]
What I call Conversatianity, then, seems - far from being new - to be a well-established implicit Christian approach to Truth.[14] It is not, however, a common explicit approach, and therefore many Christians find it "new" and "strange," so I will include just a few more examples:
Intra-Religious Christian Conversatianity
It is well known that perfectly "orthodox" Christians worship a Trinity who is, in words attributed to St. Gregory, "at the same time both unified and differentiated ... a strange and paradoxical diversity-in-unity and unity-in-diversity."[15] Orthodox Christology further asserts that this paradoxical God became "both fully divine and fully human" in Jesus of Nazareth, making Christian dogma Conversatian at the core. The Christian Bibles[16] are also highly Conversatian texts, and include many assertions and stories that differ sharply. All Christian Bibles, for example, include the four gospel writers' highly contradictory accounts of who came to the resurrected Jesus' tomb and when, how many angels they saw there, and what happened next. Such contradictory accounts - like all other famous scriptural inconsistencies, both real and apparent - could have been edited and harmonized, but apparently the Christians who collected and assembled them were far more comfortable with "scriptural contradictions" than Christians are today.[17] These early editors shared - or at least respected - the Conversatian approach of Christianity's sacred texts.
Inter-religious Christian Conversatianity
Finally, it seems highly significant from a Conversatian point of view that all Christian Bibles[18] include material from texts and systems commonly called "non-biblical" and "non-Christian." The Hebrew Bible cites many "Scriptures" which are lost completely.[19] The apostle Paul repeatedly quotes Greco-Roman "pagan" poets and philosophers.[20] Jude and other books cite Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphical texts as authoritative.[21] Not only, then, do the Christian Bibles model intra-religious dialogue - i.e. conversation between different Christian systems of thought - they model inter-religious dialogue as well - i.e. conversation with non-Christian systems of thought. For many Christians, this is a difficult lead to follow. They are willing to accept the Gospel of John's use of the pagan Greek Logos concept, but they do not want to think about the implications of such Christocentric syncretism when it comes to engaging their own pluralistic societies. They are willing to accept that Christian life is, as Edward Moore argues, living in and according to the Logos of John's Gospel,[22] but they are not willing to engage that Logos in any other extra-Christian guise, even though John's Gospel also says that the Logos of Christ "enlightens every human being."[23] They are unwilling, for example, to think that if John's Gospel were written today it might begin with "In the beginning was the Dao." Such language would make many Christians very uncomfortable, even though it is a perfectly logical way to follow John 1's lead.[24]
"Hard-case" Christian Conversatianity
It should be noted that a truly Conversatian Christianity does not only try to connect with flexible "mystical" systems such as Daoism. It will also engage so-called "hard case" systems like Islam and Buddhism. Even on the most literal credal level, and at the points usually considered most deadly to dialogue with Christianity (such as Buddhism's "atheistic" stress, or Islam's "anti-Christian" texts), Conversatian Christians can engage "otherness" with respect, on its own terms, and open new doors onto new common ground.
Conversatians note, for example, that Buddhist "atheism" is often misunderstood. Many Buddhist groups and texts accept the existence of gods. Buddhism does not deny the existence of gods - it denies their relevance, since they, too, pass away. Conversatians further note that the Bible, in Jeremiah 10.11, agrees: "The gods who did not make the heavens and earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens." To an orthodox Christian, then, all gods and other creatures live and die in God,[25] not the other way around. The door is thus open to discussing what the Buddha means by the "saving" power of "the Uncreated."[26] This saving reality sounds more like the biblical God than any of the gods mentioned in Buddhist Scripture, and the Christian abbess Hadewijch of Antwerp also came up with the term "Uncreated" independently, to describe the indefinable Ultimate Reality that she said "undoes" the self. The points of contact with both orthodox Christianity's "death to self" and orthodox Buddhism's anatman are obvious.
Islam is similarly within hailing distance, for Conversatian Christians. For example, the famous Qur'anic "denials of Jesus' divinity" take the form of warnings against polytheism,[27] against any Messiahs too proud to be earthly creatures or be called God's apostle,[28] and against pagan-style ideas of literal (sexual) divine impregnation.[29] Conversatians note that orthodox Christians oppose all of these ideas too. The door is thus open to discuss a range of ideas as to what the Qur'an might mean when it says that Jesus was a "Spirit from God … the Messiah … His Word cast into Mary."[30]
Please understand - I point all of this out not to argue that only Christians truly understand Buddhism and Islam, but only as examples of potential common ground being wasted by non-Conversatian Christianity's polemic approaches to these traditions.
A truly Conversatian Christianity, after all, will not take the form of a colonial religious tourism that seeks to absorb other traditions. It will not seek to identify good ideas as confused Christian ideas. It will not even confine its energy and focus to identifying and building areas of agreement. As an approach that offers Christian Truth to - and accepts Christian Truth in - the non-Christian "other," Conversatianity also welcomes constructive disagreements, as well as useful concepts that only non-Christian systems have formulated; concepts that are not readily "Christianized" and yet seem to Christians to hold Truth and beauty. Such an approach allows Christians to share and to learn about the personal Truth they love, and to be true to their roots by growing.
Notes
[1] John C. Médaille, "Absurd Wisdom: An Apology for Euthyphro," Theandros Volume 1, number 2, Winter 2003/2004 (emphasis mine).
[2] John 14.6
[3]Médaille, "Absurd Wisdom."
[4] I will write "Truth" this way wherever the person of the Cosmic Christ is meant specifically, since capitalization is traditional both in references to Divinity and in the naming of persons.
[5] I do not believe that this quote in John 14 is meant merely as a colourful way to say, "I have the truth." The Greek is emphatic, and literally egoistic: egô eimi.
[6] This idea is consonant with traditional Christianity's ambivalent stance on absolute knowledge, and may even help explain it: "It is curious but significant that 'gnostic' and 'agnostic' are both dirty words in the Christian tradition: wisdom is not identified either with knowledge or with the denial of knowledge." Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1982), 67.
[7]ên to phôs - John 1.9a
[8]phôtizei panta anthrôpon - John 1.9b
[9]John 1.1, 1.3
[10]John 1.1's En arkhê is an obvious reference to Genesis 1.1's b'reshith ("In the beginning …"), which suggests a further parallel between the creating "Word" (ên ho logos, kai … panta di autou egeneto) of John 1 and the God of Genesis 1 who creates by speaking (wayomer elohim y'hi) being into being.
[11] According to Heraclitus, for example, the Logos is "the unity of all things, the measure and the harmony … With reservations, it is Zeus ... However, not only is it the universal substance, the source from which all things come but it is the principle that directs the universe ..." Milton C. Nahm, ed., Selections from Early Greek Philosophy (New York: F.S. Crofts and Co, 1934), 88.
[12] In Proverbs 8.22, Lady Wisdom says God begot (or "possessed, or "created" - qanani) her "at the beginning" (or "as the beginning") of his "way" (reshith darko), like an architect. Some versions read, "like a little child," but verses like Proverbs 3.19, Jeremiah 51.15, 10.12, etc., tell us that God created the cosmos "through (W)isdom," supporting a reading of "head worker" or "architect" here. The Wisdom of Solomon calls her the vehicle of all creation (pantôn tekhnitis - 7.22, 7.21 in Greek), and the image (eikôn) of God, who holds creation together (diêkê de kai khôrei dia pantôn - 7.24). The striking and consistent verbal and theological parallels with Christ as described in passages such as Colossians 1.15f are obvious, and obviously not simply accidental.
[13] kai ho logos sarx egeneto - John 1.14
[14] The idea that Christian unity embraces diversity is a clear (if underdeveloped theme) in Christian theology, stretching from Paul's letters to M. Rev. Prof. Mar Melchizedek's contribution to the Spring 2004 edition of Theandros, "The Interpretation Of Holy Canons Within The Canonical Tradition Of The Orthodox Church."
[15]Letters of St. Basil, number 38
[16] I mean here the various Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox canons.
[17] Examples could, of course, be multiplied at great length. Paul's letters tell us that Christians "were saved" (Romans 8.24), and "are being saved" (1 Corinthians 15.2), and "will be saved" (Romans 5.9). In the gospels, Jesus teaches that the Kingdom of God is both here already unnoticed (Luke 17.20f), and "coming soon in a way that will be impossible to ignore (Luke 21.25-32), etc.
[18] …and the various Christian traditions in general…
[19] The book of the Wars of Yahweh (Numbers 21.14), The book of Jashar (Joshua 10.12-13. 2 Samuel 1.19-27; and 1 Kings 8.12-13 [in the LXX]), The Acts of Solomon (1 Kings 11.41), Visions of Iddo the Seer (2 Chronicles 9.29), etc.
[20] Acts 17.28, for example, paraphrases Aratus, Phaenomena 5. 1 Corinthians 15.33 quotes Menander, Thais, Frg.218. Titus 1.12 quotes Epimenides, De oraculis/peri Chresmon.
Jude 14-15 quotes 1 Enoch 1.9 as an authority, for example.
[21] 2 Peter 2.4-5 also cites Enochic material.
[22] Edward Moore, "Some Notes on Orthodox Ethics and Existential Authenticity," Theandros Volume 1, number 3, Spring 2004.
[23] see note 8.
[24] This is, in fact, exactly the way in which some Chinese Bibles render John 1.1. (Daoism has numerous points of contact with Christianity, in its emphasis on kenosis and humility, in its concept of a pre-existent and pervasive creative power, etc.) These translations go on to quote Jesus as saying "I am the Dao."
[25] As Acts 17.28 (itself a quote from a pagan poet) says, "In him we live and move and have our being."
[26] … in the ancient text "The Three Characteristics and The Uncreated."
[27] 4.172, 5.72f
[28] 5.75
[29] 19.35f
[30] 4.171
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