I first came across the quote in Paul Johnston’s book ‘Wittgenstein and Moral Philosophy’ (still one of the best books on Wittgenstein). The quote itself comes from his notes collected in Culture and Value, and was written in 1937, in the midst of discussions about Kierkegaard and the gospels.

The quotation from Kierkegaard that Johnston couples it with is this:

It is from this side, in the first instance, that objection may be made to modern philosophy; not that it has a mistaken presupposition, but that it has a comical presupposition, occasioned by its having forgotten, in a sort of world-historical absent-mindedness, what it means to be a human being. Not indeed, what it means to be a human being in general; for this is the sort of thing that one might even induce a speculative philosopher to agree to; but what it means that you and I and he are human beings, each one for himself. (Concluding Unscientific Postscript: 109)

There are a number of other remarks from Wittgenstein (I know much more about Wittgenstein than Kierkegaard) that I would link in to the theme. One of the most important is his reference to William James, a philosopher who influenced Wittgenstein greatly. In a conversation with Drury he was recommending James; Drury said ‘I always enjoy reading William James. He is such a human person’ and Wittgenstein responded ‘That is what makes him a good philosopher. He was a real human being’.

The other one on my mind at the moment is this:

It is very remarkable that we should be inclined to think of civilization – houses, streets, cars etc. – as distancing man from his source, from what is sublime, infinite and so on. Our civilized environment, along with the trees and plants in it, then seems as though it were cheaply wrapped in cellophane and isolated from everything great, from God, as it were. That is a remarkable picture that forces itself on us. (Culture and Value, 1946 (NB Fergus Kerr’s translation))

That is what I shall be exploring and writing about.

A line of thought, which I have spent much of my holiday pondering, flowing from this post and the various Peak Oil/ Global Warming/ World War Three lines of thought (as referenced in the previous post). Which is simply this: Let us be human.

A remark of Wittgenstein’s, riffing a remark of Kierkegaard’s.

We have forgotten what it means to be human, we have embraced the less than human, and to be restored, we must contemplate the One who is fully human.

I think that’s what I will restructure my book around. And I will trial the sequence of thoughts through the next Learning Church program from the beginning of October.

And it will be hopeful.

How to Save the World: “There is nothing more to be said. There is nothing to debate. Acknowledge with a wry smile that our numbers, those of us who see Too Far Ahead, are growing. We are heading for a wall, and it is far too late to brake, but the worst part of the hideous messy crash is still a half-century or more away.”

Morning Prayer today had a reading from Chapter 7 of Joshua, that I have been pondering (full text of the chapter here) .

In part, I ponder it because of the question of God’s wrath, which is a theme for me at the moment (see here). The basic premise of the story is: God has delivered Jericho into the hands of the Israelites, and everything in the city has to be ‘devoted’ to the Lord. In other words, everything alive (men, women, young, old, cattle, donkeys) has to be killed (6.21), and all the gold and silver has to be committed to the Lord’s Treasury. However, one of the Israelites, Achan, covets some of the treasure, steals it, and buries it in his tent. The Lord takes offence at this, and the next Israelite attack on the locals fails, which causes the ‘hearts of the people [to melt] and become like water’. After a process of elimination, Achan admits to the theft, and the story continues “Then all Israel stoned him, and after they had stoned the rest [ie the stolen goods], they burned them. Over Achan they heaped up a large pile of rocks, which remains to this day. Then the Lord turned from his fierce anger. Therefore that place has been called the Valley of Achor [trouble] ever since”.

The god portrayed in this story is a tribal deity, one who demands obedience and offers rewards in line with such obedience – those rewards being principally the military victories sought by the invading Israelite army (and the demands often being the genocide of the existing inhabitants). How does a Christian understand such a passage? The only way forward, it seems to me, would be to allow for some sort of growth in awareness on the part of the Israelite community, that is, that the Israelite community shared the common understandings of the time (tribal deities) but that within the Israelite consciousness – uniquely – there evolved something which transcended that partial understanding (the evolution can be tracked most clearly in the accounts of the exile). Put differently, a Christian cannot understand the instructions given in this passage as being ‘divine’ (in the sense that, say, John 15 would count as divine). I would understand these stories as telling us as much, or more, about the psychology of the Israelite community, the harshness of their existence, and the way in which their religious language sanctioned that community behaviour.

What we have here, it seems to me, is a vivid description of a scapegoating process. The Israelites have suffered a military setback – something which is in tension with their guiding beliefs about their god’s guidance – and so in order to reconcile the situation, there must be a culprit found, who can be blamed, and then destroyed, thus restoring the status quo ante, and making atonement between the people and their god.

Of course, I have Girard at the back of my mind in making these comments. Most of all, I have the interpretation of the empty tomb, which I came across last Easter, and which I find tremendously fruitful. For the Israelites stone the scapegoat to death, and the body is covered over with a heap of stones – stones representing the death of the scapegoat, and also, symbolically, the communal guilt at murdering one of the community. The community of Israel continually misunderstands the living God, who is not to be found in such processes, and despite the teachings of Moses and the Prophets, they are unable to hear what God wishes to say. So God eventually incarnates his Word – and that Word is then scapegoated and buried under stone. The point of the empty tomb – the rolling back of the stone – is to overthrow that process – to say that God is never aligned with ‘righteous violence’ and the casting of stones.

The clash for the Christian is how to reconcile the God who is buried under stone with the god who advocates stoning – all the time whilst avoiding the temptation of Marcionism. The only way I have found that makes sense is to understand the Bible organically evolving, as a record of a dawning awareness of the nature of God – over against the gods – and as a record, therefore, which contains ‘error’ – that words are placed in the mouth of god which are not faithful reflections of the nature of God. The only way in which this can be structured is through making Christ the determining factor in interpretation – those elements of the Old Testament which are in tune with Christ are authentically His voice; those elements which are discordant are to be understood as part of the context within which His speech was originally heard. To make each part of the text equivalent in authority – either across the Old Testament, or between Old and New Testaments – is, to my mind, to do violence to the spiritual integrity of both text and reader.

Either we follow the god who executes, or we follow the God who is executed. That choice is also our πειρασμον (Mt 6.13).