Is Christianity Worth Saving?

I suspect that if we had the opportunity to view the real life and teachings of Jesus, we'd all be pretty disappointed.

The Gospels that record his life and teachings were written a few generations after his death, likely based largely on oral tradition.  The Gospel of Mark was written first, and it appears likely that at least Matthew and Luke were written after Mark and used it as a source.  Each Gospel presents a different theme and understanding of the significance of Jesus.  These themes can perhaps even be contradictory, for example concerning whether Jesus claimed divinity, and what exactly he taught about the Kingdom of God.  Other Gospels of Jesus exist but are not included in the canon, which was debated and chosen by early Christians centuries after Jesus died.

My conclusion in all of this is that the teachings we have "from" Jesus tell us more about the religious views of the people propagating those teachings than about what Jesus actually taught.  The story is of a man who teaches about the nature of God and how we may enter into His Kingdom and who is put to death after a mockery of a trial.  Such a story leaves itself open to insert our religious understanding to make sense of it.  Perhaps it even demands it.

The Tolstoy interpretation of the Jesus incident is that the Kingdom of God can be entered into each present moment by doing good for others.  The good done for others can only be based on love and cannot include the use of force. 

I like the Tolstoy interpretation.  Tolstoy had no use for any claims of miracles, special divinity, after-life, or a "coming" Kingdom of God.  He had use only for what he took were fairly literal moral and spiritual teachings that can help guide how man is to live life now. 

The problem is that Tolstoy's interpretation is an extreme minority one.  The best we can say for it is that it is vaguely echoed in the pacifist-minded Mennonite churches with their literal interpretations of the Sermon on the Mount.  If you were to list widely accepted core beliefs of Christians, you'd probably list items that Tolstoy thought were either non-essential or contradictory to the message of Jesus.  Yet Tolstoy thought of himself as a Christian, perhaps even a "true" Christian versus the majority of hypocritical false Christians.

I have two questions then as I consider whether I should enter a church:

1. Is the Tolstoy interpretation compatible with Christianity?  That is, can a personal of peculiar religious beliefs that do not include belief in the divinity of Jesus, or of Heaven or Hell, or in pretty much any of the Old Testament, rightly call himself a Christian?

2. If the life of Jesus is so unknown and we are basically filling in the blanks with our own widely varying religious beliefs, why even bother with Jesus?  Why not have religious discussion in terms that do not rely upon trying to claim the "true" meaning of Jesus? 

The Trouble with Rights, and Tolstoy's Solution

I used to think in terms of rights and justice. For a libertarian, this means trying to express laws to answer the central question: when is the use of force against others justified? While anyone can debate this question, most libertarians seek to resolve it through application of property rights. That is, you are always justified in using your own property as you wish, so long as you do not aggress upon the equal rights of others to enjoy their property. Moreover, if someone infringes upon your property rights, an initiation of force has occurred and you are justified in defending your property. The libertarian view is that rights determine what actions are justified, and as Rothbard might have said, all rights are property rights.

If only it could be left at that. Now not only do we need to determine where all of those imaginary property lines exist, but also when one person’s actions “cross the line” onto someone else’s lot. There may be entire web forums filled with nothing beyond debates over these questions. What may one do on public property like roads and greens? What constitutes unjustified pollution? Is intellectual property real property? Does a mother have full rights over an unborn fetus?

The real trouble comes when we realize that no two individuals will draw the exact same lines. The universe is not so neatly divided into separate, independent objects, and the result is that even libertarians scarcely agree with each other over where all the lines should be. This would be fine, except that libertarians also advocate the right of property defense; if one person aggresses against another by crossing a property line, the victim is justified in using force to defend the property. (How much force? Again, another line to draw.) Furthermore, the victim’s neighbor would also be justified in coming to the defense of the victim.

The potential here is that every libertarian’s philosophy is in violent conflict with every other libertarian’s. As long as you believe that strict property rights exist and that those rights are defendable with force, then you can justify some government apparatus that performs that enforcement. The most obvious example is with respect to abortion, where different libertarians may make different judgments regarding whether it is justified as a mother’s property right to her own body, or unjustified murder of a person. Those who take the latter position would also hold that a neighbor (or “just” government) may properly restrain the mother from committing such murder. Those taking the former would subsequently advocate that a neighbor (or their idea of a “just” government) could properly defend the mother from those seeking to aggress against her rights. The theoretical outcome is an escalation of force on both sides, and the question is not settled by persuasion but over who can physically subdue the other.

Is there an alternative to this potential conflict? There is, and it was pointed out to me in Leo Tolstoy’s work The Kingdom of God is Within You. I remember reading this passage on page 37 and realizing the error in trying to find the correct laws that may be justifiably enforced.

Meanwhile one would have thought it was necessary to point out at least some kind of solution of the following question, since it is at the root of almost everything that interests us.


The question amounts to this: In what way are we to decide men's disputes, when some men consider evil what others consider good, and vice versa?  And to reply that that is evil which I think evil, in spite of the fact that my opponent thinks it good, is not a solution of the difficulty.  There can only be two solutions: either to find a real unquestionable criterion of what is evil or not to resist evil by force.


The first course has been tried ever since the beginning of historical times, and, as we all know, it has not hitherto led to any successful results.


The second solution - not forcibly to resist what we consider evil until we have found a universal criterion - that is the solution given by Christ.

Tolstoy here speaks to the root question of when force may be justified.  Instead of drawing lines to separate good and evil actions, or justified and unjustified force, he rejects those lines altogether.

Some pro-life libertarians actually take a sort of Tolstoyan position with respect to abortion.  That is, they believe it is wrong but understand that others disagree and as a result do not advocate government force to outlaw abortion.  Why not extend such a position to all issues?

Tolstoy's John Galt Speech

I completed Resurrection, which was the last full-length novel of Leo Tolstoy and the only one written after his spiritual crisis. The book's introduction includes these summary remarks:

Resurrection is the great imaginative synthesis of Tolstoyism, gravid with the fruits of a lifetime's agony. 'It is a kind of shrapnel shell of a novel,' declared one contemporary critic. 'The novel is but the containing case. The genius of the author is the explosive force, which scatters its doctrines like the closely packed bullets among the enemy' - the enemy on this occasion being the whole fabric of society, the Law Courts, the prison system and, in particular, the Church.

One certainly gets the sense that the main character, Nekhlyudov, is largely autobiographical. Tolstoy's strength is in his characterization and description, particularly how he can portray the regeneration of spirit in a man. Resurrection is similar to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in that it is fiction chasing after its author's ideals of life. However, beyond that there is little resemblance between the two: Atlas Shrugged is built around a terrific mystery and turn-paging plot, but with one-dimensional characters making pages of speeches at each other. On the other hand, the story and pacing of Resurrection is only slightly compelling, but the characters are rich and believable. In contrast to the epic 3-hour-long speech of John Galt in Atlas Shrugged (the only part of the book I skimmed through), Tolstoy's main character summarizes the author's driving point in under 2 pages. Here it is (taken from pages 449-451):

'This is what it comes to,' thought Nekhlyudov, 'these people accept as a law something which is not a law, and they do not acknowledge the eternal, immutable, pressing law that God Himself has written in man's heart. That is why I feel so depressed in their company,' thought Nekhlyudov. 'I am quite simply afraid of them. And indeed, they are terrible people - more terrible than brigands. A brigand might, after all, feel pity, but not these men: they are insured against pity as these stones are from vegetation. That is what makes them so terrible. They say Pugachev and Razin were terrible. These men are a thousand times worse. Suppose a problem in psychology were set to find means of making people of our time - Christians, humane, simple, kindly people - commit the most horrible crimes without having any feeling of guilt, only one solution would present itself: to do precisely what is being done now, namely, to make them governors, inspectors, officers, policemen and so forth; which means, first that they must be convinced that there is a thing called government service which allows men to treat other men like inanimate objects, thereby banning all human brotherly relations with them; and secondly, that the people entering this "government service" must be so conjoined that the responsibility for the results of their treatment of people can never fall on any one of them individually. Without these conditions it would be impossible in our times to commit such atrocious deeds as those I have seen today. The whole trouble is that people think there are circumstances when one may deal with human beings without love, but no circumstances ever exist. Inanimate objects may be dealt with without love: we may fell trees, bake bricks, hammer iron without love. But human beings cannot be handled without love, any more than bees can be handled without care. That is the nature of bees. If you handle bees carelessly you will harm the bees and yourself as well. And so it is with people. And it cannot be otherwise, because mutual love is the fundamental law of human life. It is true that a man cannot force himself to love in the way he can force himself to work, but it does not follow from this that men may be treated without love, especially if something is required from them. If you feel no love - leave people alone,' thought Nekhlyudov, addressing himself. 'Occupy yourself with things, with yourself, with anything you like, only not with men. Just as one can eat without harm and profitably only when one is hungry, so one can usefully and without injury deal with men only when one loves them. But once a man allows himself to treat men unlovingly, as I have treated my brother-in-law yesterday, and there are no limits to the cruelty and brutality he may inflict on others - as I saw this morning - and no limits to the suffering he may bring on himself, as the whole of my life proves. Yes, yes, it is so,' thought Nekhlyudov. 'It is true, it is right,' he repeated to himself again and again, enjoying the two-fold delight of refreshing coolness after the torturing heat and the assurance of having arrived at the clearest possible understanding of a problem that had occupied him for a long time.

Tolstoy on the Hypocrisy of Church

The following passage strikingly reveals the abominable nature of Church worship. It is lifted from Resurrection, the last long novel Tolstoy wrote after his religious awakening. While this passage refers to a service performed in a prison and refers to acts performed in the prison, much of it applies equally well to most churches.

Here is the passage:

And to not one of those present, from the priest and the superintendent down to Maslova, did it occur that this Jesus Whose name the priest repeated in wheezy tones such an endless number of times, praising Him with outlandish words, had expressly forbidden everything that was being done there; that He had not only prohibited the senseless chatter and the blasphemous incantation over the bread and wine but had also, in the most emphatic manner, forbidden men to call other men their master or to pray in temples, and had commanded each to pray in solitude; had forbidden temples themselves, saying that He came to destroy them and that one should not worship in temples but in spirit and in truth; and above everything else He had forbidden not only sitting in judgement on people and imprisoning, humiliating, torturing, and executing them, as was done here, but had prohibited any kind of violence, saying that He came to set at liberty those who were captive.

It did not occur to any one of those present that everything that was going on there was the greatest blasphemy, and a mockery of the same Christ in Whose name it was all being done. No one seemed to realize that the gilt cross with the enamel medallions at the ends, which the priest held out to the people to kiss, was nothing else but the emblem of the gallows on which Christ had been executed for denouncing the very things now being performed here in His name. It did not occur to anyone that the priests, who imagined they were eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ in the form of bread and wine, were indeed eating His body and drinking His blood - but not in little bits of bread and in the wine, but first by misleading 'those little ones' with whom Christ identified Himself and then by depriving them of their greatest blessing and subjecting them to the most cruel torments, by concealing for them the good things that He had brought them.