There’s something fascinating about the character of Barabbas in the Bible. He is the ultimate Christian type for all humanity, for Jesus literally dies for him according to the Gospels. Though the tradition is recorded nowhere outside the Bible, the Gospels tell us that it was the custom to release one prisoner around Passover time, and the crowds (who through the centuries become simply “Jews”) demand Barabbas be released and Jesus crucified.
Par Lagerkvist wrote a novella in the 1950’s about Barabbas after the crucifixion, about his desire to believe, to convert to Christianity, but his inability to go through with it. He sees Jesus crucified; he’s at the tomb at Easter (though of course he doesn’t see the resurrection, simply the empty tomb afterwards), and yet he still doesn’t believe.
It’s the curse of modern times — a will to believe and yet an inability to do so. Winifred Galligher writes of this in Working on God. The modern solution, Rabbi Burton Visotzky tells Galligher, is a fight:
[Belief] may be the battle of your life, but emotionally and intellectually, it could also be the most exhilarating one you’ve ever engaged in. Whether you experience God’s reality or are just intellectually intrigued by the idea, God can be a very real force in peoples’ lives – spiritual, emotional, supportive – that almost no other system can offer. But you must gird yourself for a fight and know that you’re going to have to try to reconcile very difficult things. Or at least hold them in suspension and bounce them back and forth and get tired. There’s no quick fix, but we have the benefit of drawing on thousands of years of religious thinking. You can’t learn it over a weekend. It’s an engagement for the rest of your life. (261)
More so than during Kierkegaard’s life, it boils down, for some, to a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. Evolutionary theory and the general advances of some sciences make belief unbelievable, but for some there’s always an intellectual draw toward the idea of a great Something More.
Barabbas probably believed in a Something More. He was, after all, a first-century Jew and by many accounts, a Zealot, hoping an overthrow of Roman control over Jerusalem would hasten the Messiah’s return. What Langerkvist’s Barabbas is struggling for is not a believe in God, but a belief that he himself saw God in the flesh, however oxymoronically that might have seemed then, or still seem now. Langerkvist’s Barabbas then is a parable of someone who is having trouble trusting a first hand experience of what others called the divine.
If it was that difficult for him, think how much more so it must be for us, separated 20 centuries from the historical object of faith.
“I want to believe.” That seems to be the cry of many in the twenty-first century. William James argued that that very will to believe was sufficient in some situations, namely those like religion which cannot be concluded on purely rational grounds.
Why believe, though? There are those of us who are torn, who sometimes think it would be wonderful to fall on their knees in thankful prayer but mostly think religion is an antiquated relic that will pass with time. It’s the experiential factor that is most unnerving for such folk:
Let’s not get too hard on the Holy Roman Church here. The Church has its problems, but the older I get, the more comfort I find there. The physical experience of being in a crowd of largely humble people, heads bowed, murmuring prayers, stories told in stained-glass windows … (Interview with Bono, from U2)
Seeing others people’s faith used to make me shake my head in disbelief. “How can people be so gullible, so naïve?” I used to think. But the older I get, the more fascinating it is, especially hearing the echo of five hundred people reciting the creed that’s been the backbone of Christian belief for centuries.
Mindless repetition for some, but looking at some folks’ faces, it’s easy to see the depth of belief there.
Looks like I should pick up Working on God, sounds like an interesting read.
I’m puzzled by your position that evolution and general advances in science make it “more difficult” to believe, a statement you’ve made here and elsewhere. I don’t think the difficulty stems from scientific advances but an emotional need for certainty that causes people to incorrectly supplant a philosophical, spiritual, or religious response with scientific methodology.
The scientific process is far more accurate at processing information than the spiritual or religious. If you really need to know how things work, you look at it with science. Those of us raised with a scientific mindset understand the value of that process, and it’s ingrained into how we think. So it makes sense that we would try to use it on the numinous. But our scientific ability is not yet strong enough to tackle the question of the existence of God. We are still dealing with what happens when you smack one subatomic particle with another subatomic particle, and God doesn’t that just blow some people’s minds?
Some folks look at the current failure of Science to explain or identify the numinous, and—being emotionally impatient for that sense of certainty we crave—jump to the unwarrented, unscientific, and completely unsupportable conculsion that the numinous is a myth or a fiction. And that eases the emotional discomfort of not knowing something, because we’ve convinced ourselves that we do.
But it does so the same way religion does: through supposition supported by the testimony of trusted experts. Not through data collection, not through analysis and testing and experimentation, but through pure guesswork and a few encouraging words from famous people that agree with what you already want to believe. Atheism is faith of another kind. That it replaces the doxology with a scientific phrasebook makes no difference.
First of all, I do recommend Working on God. It drags a little in places, but there are some real gems in it. The blurb on the back was a perfect description of me:
“Millions of Americans are finding it more and more difficult to apply the traditional demands of organized religion to their lives, and yet a complete absence of spirituality leaves them uneasy. Working on God is a book for and about such […] people, who are seeking to reconcile their spiritual yearnings with their skeptical intellects.”
Now, for your comment, “I’m puzzled by your position that evolution and general advances in science make it ‘more difficult’ to believe, a statement you’ve made here and elsewhere.”
I hope we’re not going to get into another brouhaha about science and religion! ;) Two examples of what I meant:
1. The belief in a soul becomes increasingly more difficult to maintain in the light of evolutionary psychology and advances in cognitive science.
2. The belief in a literal interpretation of the creation as promoted by monotheism has been discredited for, oh, a century or more.
If there’s no soul, if the universe is the result of chance (a position which is necessitated unless we want to go the route of ID…no, I didn’t think so), then what do we have left to be spiritual with or about? If it’s warm fuzzies created by a psychological/sociological phenomenon causing hormones to be released, it’s kind of like placing ontological significance in the fact that the loaf of bread you were baking did indeed rise because you added yeast.
And yet, I still read about religion more than most anything else. Hell, I was going to get a doctorate in philosophy of religion before I came to my career senses…
#2 is clearly true, there’s no doubt about that. This is where science is strong and religion is weak–the realm of hard, testable facts.
But #1 still strikes me as unfounded assertion. How does it become increasingly difficult to believe in a soul? It may be increasingly difficult to believe that one’s sense of self is entirely separable from the physical form, but that doesn’t mean there’s no soul. There’s an enormous chasm between saying “who we are is changed by what we are” — I think that’s a safe statement — and saying “we are nothing but meat.”
This deserves a post of its own, I think…
More later.