At least theologically, there are two effective divisions between American Christians, One is between those for whom the gospel is itself the norm of all truth and the person of Christ therefore the founding metaphysical fact, and those for whom some other agenda or “theory” is the overriding norm. The other is between those who use “justification by faith” — or in the especially aggravated case of Lutherans, the “law and gospel” distinction — to fund their antinomianism, and those appalled by this. The language in which I have described the alternatives will doubtless betray on which side of each division I find myself.

-Robert Jenson, Christian Century (May 2, 2007)

As far as the gnostics were concerned, the “many” were overly fascinated by historical happenings, even by the historical events in the life of Christ. Elaine Pagels, writing on the ahistorical views of Heracleon, reports that he claimed: that those who insist that Jesus, a man who lived in the flesh, is Christ fail to distinguish between literal and symbolic truth. . . . Heracleon goes on to say that those who take the events concerning Jesus “literally”—as if the events themselves were revelation—have fallen into flesh and error. Concern about the mighty acts of God in both the Old and New Covenants was from a gnostic perspective a lower stage in the development of an authentic Christian understanding. To know Christ was not in any sense to have knowledge about the “historical man of flesh and blood” but rather to be personally related to the mythical heavenly being who liberates humanity from historical concerns…

…The reason for this totally different concern of the gnostics is their conviction that the root problem of humankind is ignorance. Judaism and Christianity in their orthodox expressions would understand the basic source of all our misery to be sin, humanity’s failure to meet God’s expectations or its own potential; gnosticism would see the human predicament as resulting from a profound blindness concerning the human situation. “Ignorance of the Father,” states the Gospel of Truth, “brought about anguish and terror. And the anguish grew solid like a fog so that no one was able to see.

Before delineating the various aspects of the gnostic type, it should be understood that the one primary ingredient for the birth of gnosticism is a particular mood. The mood is one of despair. The gnostic solution can be satisfying only to those who have no tangible or rational hope. Because a certain number of people at every stage of history are caught up in despair, gnosticism of one sort or other always has a following. Throughout Christian history, certain individuals and small groups have been drawn toward the gnostic way. That historical reality is not terribly alarming; every great religion has variations on the theme. When, however, we come to a period like that of the first four centuries of the Church, when the gnostic way almost prevailed, how can we speak of a mood? Can an entire culture be in despair? And if so, why?

-Philip J. Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics

What the gnostics knew was saving knowledge, a saving technique concerning the self. Probably the most often quoted gnostic formula sums it up: “What liberates is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what birth is, and what rebirth.” If the Gospels were written “that you might know the reliability of the words concerning which you were instructed,” 7 then perhaps it could be said that the gnostic texts were written so that the gnostikoi could know the truth, not concerning words, but concerning their own salvation. In gnosticism, there was not that extra step of going to a sacred literature which existed quite apart from the self and finding in it, as a fringe benefit, a truth that could be applied to the self. In gnosticism, the Scripture was sacred only insofar as it saved the self. Again, what was known in gnostic circles was personal. If it was not personal, it was not gnostic.

“The religion of man is always conditioned absolutely by the way in which the starry heaven above and the moral law within have spoken to the individual. It is, therefore, conditioned by nature and climate, by blood and soil, by the economic, cultural, political, in short, the historical circumstances in which he lives. It will be an element in the habit or custom with which, quite apart from the question of truth and certainty, or rather at the very lowest and most rudimentary stages of his inquiry into it, he compounds with the terms of existence imposed upon him. But the terms of existence, and therefore custom, are variable. Nature and climate, or the understanding and technique with which he masters them, may change. Nations and individuals may move. Races may mix. Historical relationships as a whole are found to be in perhaps a slow or a swift but at any rate a continual state of flux. And that means that religions are continually faced with the choice: either to go with the times, to change as the times change, and in that way relentlessly to deny themselves any claim to truth and certainty; or else to be behind the times, to stick to their once-won forms of doctrine, rite and community and therefore relentlessly to grow old and obsolete and fossilised; or finally, to try to do both together, to be a little liberal and a little conservative, and therefore with the advantages of both options, to have to take over their twofold disadvantages as well. That is why religions are always fighting for their lives. That is why they are always acutely or chronically sick. There has probably never been a religion which in its fateful relation to the times, i.e., to change in man (or rather in its own liberalism or conservatism or in both at once) has not been secretly or openly sick. And it is a familiar fact that religions do actually die of this sickness, i.e., of an utter lack of fresh believers and adherents. They cease to exist except as historical quantities. The link between religion and religious man in his variableness is the weakness of all religions.”

-Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I.2

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This recent MSNBC commentary on the conversation that reportedly occurred between President Obama and the owner of the Eagles concerning Michael Vick is certainly insightful, measured and nuanced. Melissa Harris-Perry certainly makes salient points about the racist legacy of our justice system and the American story in general. But at one point she questions the way we respond emotionally to Vick’s crimes, alleging that it is in part due to the “fetishization” of canines, setting them apart from other animals because they are our pets. Jim Gorant provides a better explanation as to why we respond with such emotion in the introduction to his book The Lost Dogs, which chronicles the story of Vick and his dog fighting ring:

…“Why does it matter, they’re just dogs?” The more verbose in this camp might elaborate: “People are dying and starving every daybigger problems. No one cares if you kill cows or chickens or hunt deer. What’s different about dogs?”

What is different about dogs? I had not directly addressed the question in the article. On some level it seemed obvious to me, but at the same time I couldn’t put a satisfying answer to words. As I started work on this book, the question hung over my head. As I was interviewing experts, reading books on canine history and behavior, touring shelters, and talking to dog lovers, I processed a lot of the information through the prism of that question.

The answer, cobbled together from all those readings and conversations, took me back to the beginning. Men first domesticated dogs more than ten thousand years ago, when our ancestors were hunting for their meals and sleeping next to open fires at night. Dogs were instant helpers in our struggle for survival. They guarded us in the dark and helped us find food by day. We offered them something, too, scraps of food, some measure of protection, the heat of the flames. In an article about the origin of dogs that ran in the New York Times in early 2010, one expert on dog genetics theorized that “dogs could have been the sentries that let hunter-gatherers settle without fear of surprise attack. They may also have been the first major item of inherited wealth, preceding cattle, and so could have laid the foundations for the gradations of wealth and social hierarchy that differentiated settled groups from their hunter-gatherer predecessors.”

Certainly, as man rose in the world, dogs came with us, perhaps even aiding the advance. They continued to guard us and help with hunting, but they did more. They marched with armies into war, they worked by our side, hauling, pulling, herding, retrieving. We manipulated their genetic makeup to suit our purposes, crossbreeding types to create animals that could kill the rats infesting our cities or search for those lost in the snow or the woods.

In return we brought them into our homes, made them part of our families. We offered them love and companionship, and they returned the gesture. From the start it was a compact: You do this for us and we’ll do that for you.

Our relationship with dogs has always been different than it has been with livestock or wildlife. The only other animal that comes close is the horse, which has undoubtedly been a partner in our evolution and a companion. But a horse can’t curl up at the bottom of your bed at night, and it can’t come up and lick your face when you’re feeling down. Dogs have that ability to sense what we’re feeling and commiserate. There’s a reason they’re called man’s best friend.

Melissa Harris-Perry is right to point out that our sensitivities to any form of animal cruelty ought to be higher. But the natural horror that the story of the dogs abused and murdered by Vick evokes is not the product of a recently developed fetish that could have only emerged in a consumeristic society of excess and decadence. The story is so horrific because it involves dogs, creatures that we can easily empathize with because they have developed, through the evolutionary process, the ability to empathize with us. They understand human emotion and that very capacity makes the depth and breadth of their suffering so painful.

In the Problem of Pain C.S. Lewis describes the process of training a dog as follows:

…the association of (say) man and dog is primarily for the man’s sake: he tames the dog primarily that he may love it, not that it may love him, and that it may serve him, not that he may serve it. Yet at the same time, the dog’s interests are not sacrificed to the man’s. The one end (that he may love it) cannot be fully attained unless it also, in its fashion, loves him, nor can it serve him unless he, in a different fashion, serves it. Now just because the dog is by human standards one of the ‘best’ of irrational creatures, and a proper object for a man to love—of course, with that degree and kind of love which is proper to such an object, and not with silly anthropomorphic exaggerations—man interferes with the dog and makes it more lovable than it was in mere nature. In its state of nature it has a smell, and habits, which frustrate man’s love: he washes it, housetrains it, teaches it not to steal, and is so enabled to love it completely. To the puppy the whole proceeding would seem, if it were a theologian, to cast grave doubts on the ‘goodness’ of man: but the full-grown and full-trained dog, larger, healthier, and longer-lived than the wild dog, and admitted, as it were by Grace, to a whole world of affections, loyalties, interests, and comforts entirely beyond its animal destiny, would have no such doubts. It will be noted that the man (I am speaking throughout of the good man) takes all these pains with the dog, and gives all these pains to the dog, only because it is an animal high in the scale—because it is so nearly lovable that it is worth his while to make it fully lovable. He does not house-train the earwig or give baths to centipedes. We may wish, indeed, that we were of so little account to God that He left us alone to follow our natural impulses—that He would give over trying to train us into something so unlike our natural selves: but once again, we are asking not for more love, but for less.

Dogs have a capacity to be taken up into a web and world of relations that is theirs not so much by nature as by grace. And being taken up into that relatedness can also cause them more suffering and pain than could be borne by their evolutionary ancestor the wolf.

Many animal rights activists wanted all of the Vick dogs destroyed citing the potential danger they could do to the already sullied reputation Pit Bulls. But in the end only 2 of the 51 dogs seized from the Bad News Kennel had to be euthanized. Many were fully rehabilitated and some even serve as therapy dogs today.

In the end of the introduction to The Lost Dogs Jim Gorant relays the feelings of one of the team members that worked with the rescued dogs:

To this day, I believe Donna Reynolds, one of the founders of Bay Area Doglovers Responsible About Pitbulls (BAD RAP), a rescue organization at the center of the Vick case, said it best. “Vick showed the worst of us, our bloodlust, but this [rescue effort] showed the best. I don’t think any of us thought it was possible—the government, the rescuers, the people involved. We like to think we have life figured out, and it’s nice that it can still surprise us, that sometimes we can accomplish things we had only dreamed of. We’ve moved our evolution forward. Just a little bit, but we have, and I’m happy to have been a part of that.”

Perhaps our bloodlust is also revealed in the vengeful outcry against Vick. Certainly what he did was inexcusable, but Vick wasn’t born wanting to do this. He grew up as part of a broken family system in an area plagued by poverty and crime. His sins were certainly shaped by being sinned against. Reading the story of the redemption of the Vick dogs gives me hope for the redemption of Michael Vick, and for every human soul.

He no longer plays his traditional social role of organizing us around a commitment to a single right way to live.  Nihilism is one state a culture may reach when it no longer has a unique and agreed upon social ground.

This de-centering of a culture’s shared sense of organizing values and ultimate meaning has some upsides. It allows marginalized minorities to “achieve recognition or even be held up and celebrated…Social mobility ─ for African Americans, gays, women, workers, people with disabilities or others who had been held down by the traditional culture ─ may finally become a possibility.” But it has its downsides for sure. With a loss of a shared universal sense of meaning we can be driven to live lives of quiet desperation, feeling that there is no God or god-like purpose that is worthy of our allegiance, we instead choose from a variety of consumer options and identities in search of self-actualization. To be sure, people may still engage in what look like lives of traditional religious devotion, but they can only do so in a delusional fashion, imagining that their neighbors can’t possibly be living admirable or meaningful lives because they do not share the believer’s commitments.

Kelly lifts up Melville’s Moby Dick as charting an alternate way forward. Melville rejects the impulse to search for a transcendent organizing center that would animate Western culture, coming as it does from the combination of the biblical and platonic traditions that have together come to shape us so deeply. He wants to replace this with a new polytheism:

Melville himself seems to have recognized that the presence of many gods — many distinct and incommensurate good ways of life — was a possibility our own American culture could and should be aiming at.  The death of God therefore, in Melville’s inspiring picture, leads not to a culture overtaken by meaninglessness but to a culture directed by a rich sense for many new possible and incommensurate meanings.  Such a nation would have to be “highly cultured and poetical,” according to Melville.  It would have to take seriously, in other words, its sense of itself as having grown out of a rich history that needs to be preserved and celebrated, but also a history that needs to be re-appropriated for an even richer future.  Indeed, Melville’s own novel could be the founding text for such a culture.  Though the details of that story will have to wait for another day, I can at least leave you with Melville’s own cryptic, but inspirational comment on this possibility.  “If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation,” he writes:

Shall lure back to their birthright, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; on the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove’s high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.