Wednesday, March 21, 2018

God Gets Skin in the Game

Jordan Peterson recently mentioned on a podcast that, “I do believe there are places where the mythological and the literal touch.” This was in reference to a question as to where he stood with the Resurrection of Christ. He expounded that “the material reaches up to the spiritual, and spiritual reaches down to the material, and they touch! And I do think that happens.” He didn't completely commit to an answer towards his Christology, but he acknowledged there is a mystery and miracle to all of it.

It took me years to understand what this meant, and Peterson himself noted that he will need further inquiry to the question of the Resurrection also.

What helped me with this is the idea that certain spiritual teachers have become ill by taking on the karma of their students. It's like a tonglen practice that goes awry. (In the Tibetan Buddhism, tonglen is a practice to connect with the suffering of others by taking in the suffering and giving out compassion.) So when Peter says, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed”, it's not that much different ...except Christ takes on the karma for the entire cosmos! Such a sacrifice could only be encountered by a brutal death to such extremes as Jesus had. Yet, His Resurrection transforms the sacrifice to one of Eternal hope.

Another way of looking at it came to me from Nassim Taleb, whose new book is aptly titled Skin in the Game. Taleb is big proponent of the idea that real evolutionary progress can only come from agents who have skin in the game. You have to be fully accountable for your bad ideas, so those bad ideas don't inflict a culture for future generations. You must take the hit, so your idea can die for the greater good. (Keep in the mind the reverse is true for the ideas that do work!) As he would say: “If you give an opinion, and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences.” 

In regards to the consequences of Christ, Taleb remarks,
“This allowed me to finally figure out this business of the Trinity. The Christian religion, throughout Chalcedon, Nicea, and other ecumenical councils and various synods of argumentative bishops, kept insisting on the dual nature of Jesus Christ. It would be theologically simpler if God were god and Jesus were man, just like another prophet, the way Islam views him, or the way Judaism views Abraham. But no, he had to be both man and god; the duality is so central it kept coming back though all manner of refinement: whether the duality allowed sharing the same substance (Orthodoxy), the same will (Monothelites), the same nature (Monophysites). The trinity is what caused other monotheists to see traces of polytheism in Christianity, and caused many Christians who fell into the hands of the Islamic State to be beheaded. So it appears that the church founders really wanted Christ to have skin in the game; he did actually suffer on the cross, sacrifice himself, and experience death. He was a risk taker. More crucially to our story, he sacrificed himself for the sake of others. A god stripped of humanity cannot have skin in the game in such a manner, cannot really suffer (or, if he does, such a redefinition of a god injected with a human nature would back up our argument). A god who didn’t really suffer on the cross would be like a magician who performed an illusion, not someone who actually bled after sliding an icepick between his carpal bones. The Orthodox Church goes further, making the human side flow upward rather than downward. The fourth-century bishop Athanasius of Alexandria wrote: “Jesus Christ was incarnate so we could be made God” (emphasis mine). It is the very human character of Jesus that can allow us mortals to access God and merge with him, become part of him, in order to partake of the divine. That fusion is called theosis. The human nature of Christ makes the divine possible for all of us.”
So what a better way for God to show his Eternal love than to get skin in the game Himself. “The reason why the second Person of the Trinity entered human nature was to achieve a face-to-face, peer-to-peer relationship with humanity, a perfect act of empathy arising out of His unconditional love” (Spitzer). It's actually quite brilliant; as an act of love or even as a mythological idea.

It worked so well, it got many others to get their skin in the game. It encouraged many of the early Christians to risk their lives and to make their “suffering a self-offering in order to bring healing, light, and love to others” (Spitzer). And this continues to this day as a beacon to aim for.