The One, True, Loving, Islamic, Green Bug-Eyed, Pantheistic, Pagan God of the Cylons

Well the new Battlestar Galactica TV show has drawn to a close, and the mysterious identity of the One True God of the Cylons has been revealed, at least as much as it ever will be. So it's time for some final thoughts on a show on which religion played a rather unique role. On Galactica the Cylons, who are a race of intelligent machines waging a war of extermination against humanity, are monotheists who worship the One True Loving God, while humanity is literally pagan, worshiping the same same gods that ancient Greeks did.


The Islamic God of the Cylons

Who was the One True Loving God? According to the show's producers, the show's religious landscape was originally inspired by the Western-Islamic conflict, with the Cylons cast in the role of religious jihadists bent on destruction of the pagan infidels. It was a great idea, and could have led to all kinds of delicious storylines. Our modern society's descent into the neo-paganism of consumerism and scientific materialism could have provided the basis of many episodes. Cylons could have made converts among the humans and imposed Sharia law, etc. But the producers quickly lost interest in this storyline. They were content to exploit the creep-out factor of having machines serenely say to the nuked-over remains of the human race, "God loves you and has a plan for you, and if He wants you to survive He will protect you from me now."


The Green Bug-Eyed God of the Cylons

But religious rhetoric was a constant feature of the series, and the mystery of the identity of the One True Loving God was one of the shows main "teaser" elements. His or her identity would only be revealed in the final episode. So who was this God? Throughout the show my money was on this:

Which is to say, some green bug-eyed (OK red-eyed in this case) monster giving orders from a hidden base ship orbiting the Cylon home-world. A real, flesh and green-blooded creature would have satisfied what I like to call the Midi-Chlorian Principle, which is this:

In any work of science fiction, every mysterious physical, mental or (seemingly) spiritual phenomenon can and must be given a materialistic, pseudo-scientific explanation, no matter how ridiculous or how destructive it is to the story.

The Midi-Chlorian Principle

Science fiction authors are relentless scientific materialists. Any time they incorporate any element in their stories that doesn't have a clear, scientific explanation, I imagine a little voice in the back of their heads torments them until they find something, anything, to explain it away. Perhaps the best, and worst, example of this came from the Star Wars series. The original series introduced the feel-good, gauzy religion of the Jedi, which grants the Jedi a mysterious power over the physical world, and which Yoda describes thus:

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmph. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.

I feel sorry for George Lucas. The little voice in the back of his head must have tormented him for decades, because by the time he got around to completing the second half of the series he somehow convinced himself that it was a good idea to offer this explanation for the source of the Jedi's power: it comes from the midi-chlorians, which are germs that infect the cells of all living beings, the Jedi more than others. They even have a blood test to detect your midi-chlorian count and determine whether you'll make a good Jedi.

There's a kind of storytelling perfection here: the midi-chlorians completely dissipate all trace of mystery from the Force without actually explaining anything, and they do it in a way that is laughably ridiculous. A worse storytelling element is hard to imagine. But at least the voices in Lucas' head are quiet.


The Pantheistic God of the Cylons

But alas, there was no green bug-eyed monster forthcoming in the final episodes of Galactica. Either the producers are immune to the Midi-Chlorian Principle, or they've doomed themselves to decades of torment from the voices in their heads. So I ask again, who is the One True Loving God of the Cylons? One opinion comes from Dr. Gaius Baltar, a character in the series, in the second-to-last episode:

Baltar: I see angels. Angels in this very room. Now I may be mad, but that doesn't mean I'm not right. Because there's another force at work here. There always has been. It's undeniable, we've all experienced it. Everyone in this room has witnessed events that we can't fathom let alone explain away by rational means. Puzzles deciphered in prophesy. Dreams given to a chosen few. Our loved ones dead, risen. Whether we want to call that God or gods or some sublime inspiration or a divine force that we can't know or understand doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's here. It exists. And our two destinies are intertwined in its force.

(Agnostic) Cylon: If that were true, and that's a big 'if', how do I know this force has our best interests in mind? How do you know that God is on your side doctor?

Baltar: I don't. God's not on any one's side. God's a force of nature, beyond good and evil. Good and evil, we created those.

The good doctor is clearly a pantheist. Pan-theism is the idea that all things are a part of God, and that what God is, is simply all things. Pantheists tend to reject the notions of good and evil, since both are part of the world and form a part of God, and instead frame conflict as two sides of the same coin: positive and negative, hot and cold, male and female:

Yin and yang, classical Chinese symbol of conflict as parts of the whole

If only we could see the big picture, the really big picture, we'd see that evil isn't really evil and good isn't really good, that they're both necessary parts of the whole that is God.

It is said that there are two types of pantheism: naturalistic pantheism, which doesn't conceive of God as a sentient, conscious Person, and classical pantheism, of which Hinduism is the prime example, which may conceive of God as a conscious Person. But in any case, I don't know how pantheism could fail to be reductionist, because a creator (or Creator) must always be more than his or her creation. Ghandi's movement from "God is Truth" in his earlier years to "Truth is God" in his later years is a movement from recognition of an attribute of God toward a belief that God is "nothing more than" one of his attributes.

I don't pretend to understand the pantheist point of view; my thinking on this is the same as C. S. Lewis'. After logic led him inexorably and unwillingly to the conclusion that God exists, the atheist-turned-Christian Lewis says he briefly hoped to find that God was "more of a place than a Person." But he quickly rejected this idea. For a God to be the creator of personhood, he must be more than a person, not less. Any "force of nature" god is clearly sub-human, less than a person. In the Trinity Lewis found the more-than-a-person concept he was looking for.


The Pagan God of the Cylons

But the producers of Galactica don't appear to agree with Baltar's pantheistic notion of the Cylon God, because they depict God as much more than a force of nature. He's conscious, he sends his emissaries out into the world (Baltar's "angels," which are people that only Baltar can see), and he manipulates the course of history. The producers laid down their final card with the very last lines of the final episode, when the two "angels" are talking to one another, 150,000 years later (in modern-day Tokyo) about whether the human race is about to repeat the cycle of robot-against-human violence:

Angel that looks like a Cylon: "Let a complex system repeat itself long enough, and eventually something surprising might occur. That too is in God's plan."

Angel that looks like Baltar, leaning forward warningly: "You know he doesn't like that name."

So there you have it, the Cylon God himself rejects the title of "God." He is, therefore, a pagan god, and the whole series turned out to be a conflict between a pagan god that exists v. pagan gods that may or may not exist. Thankfully, this wasn't part of any grand religious scheme on the part of the producers. They themselves admitted that they didn't plan the series out from beginning to end, and it's almost certain that the "angels" in the series were first conceived as Cylon agents appearing to and tormenting Baltar using some unknown alien technology. The producers were therefore saddled with "angels" who initially acted more like demons, and settled in the end to define them as mischievous pixies, who toy with humanity in pursuit of their own hidden agenda.

Actually, this isn't so different than the green bug-eyed monster explanation. A pagan god is just a bug-eyed monster that never dies. Perhaps the producers will silence the voices in their heads by explaining to them that the Cylon god is actually orbiting his home world on a base ship somewhere. It's a far cry from the seamless blending of Catholic theology with the pre-Christian nature worship that you get in Tolkien, but I'll certainly take this whimsical ending to the series over the sincere, neo-pagan humanism of Star Trek.


The Score

Which leads me to the ranking of Galactica in the world of spiritual science fiction and fantasy:

Show/Story	Grade	Comments
The Lord of the Rings	A+	Tolkien's blending of Catholic cosmology with pre-Christian fairy tale elements is so seamless and unassuming that I read the whole trilogy without realizing it had a Christian underpinning. Only when you read The Silmarillion do you see how carefully Tolkien wove his fairy stories into a Christian universe.
Chronicles of Narnia	A-	C. S. Lewis says he wrote his fairy tales to be an antidote to the pagan worldview that he saw present in most fairy tales, most of which literally originated in pre-Christian Europe. The world of these fairy tales is dualistic, meaning that good and evil are depicted as being equally powerful, equally likely to win in their struggle with one another. In the Christian worldview evil is a mere corruption of good, and is infinitely weaker than good. Hence the White Witch retreats in fear before the all-powerful Aslan. C. S. Lewis' stories are refreshing in that they provide almost the only unique depiction of good and evil that you can find in all sci fi/fantasy literature, but his Christian allegories are so heavy-handed that the message often distracts from the story.
Battlestar Galactica	C+	It turned out to be much ado about little, a pagan god fighting pagan gods, but at least they kept us guessing until the end.
Star Wars	D+	The awfulness of the midi-chlorian storyline almost makes you forget that the Force of the original series was already pretty bad, pure saccharine-soaked Kool Aid calculated to offend the fewest possible audience members. But I feel we need to cut Star Wars a break, because it's aim was low to begin with. Star Wars is really a fairy story set in a futuristic world, and the Force was just an excuse to populate the story with wizards and sorcerers.
Star Trek (1990s version)	D-	The later editions of Star Trek lost some of the earlier shows' passion for humanism, and settled into a bland, comfortable scientific materialism, with just enough socialism thrown in to make you glad they never tried to explain their philosophy in any depth. They were never completely cured of the disease of humanism however, as in the movie where the Borg queen decides that humanity is just too darned special to destroy, and instead wants the mighty human race to become equal partners with the Borg. Pity the billions of other, poor races of beings that populate the Star Trek universe! All they can do is look upon us with envy, and like Spock, hope and pray (well hope anyway) that they might one day be as wonderful as us. Strange that in some 40 years of storytelling they've never managed to explain exactly why the human race is so darned wonderful.
Star Trek (1960s version)	F-	A reminder of the famous warning that when people lose their religion, the danger is not that they'll believe nothing, but that they'll believe anything. The original show put the human race on a pedestal with such fervor that it can only be described as true paganism, a true attempt to make gods of men. In some shows they intimated that the destiny of the human race was exactly that, to "evolve" into almighty, omniscient and virtually immortal gods.

What are you?

It is said that soon after his enlightenment the Buddha passed a man on the road who was struck by his extraordinary radiance and peaceful presence. The man stopped and asked,

"My friend, what are you? Are you a god?"

"No," said the Buddha.

"Well, then, are you some kind of magician or wizard?"

Again the Buddha answered, "No."

"Are you a man?"

"No."

"Well, my friend, then what are you?"

The Buddha replied,

I am awake.

On the Role of Women in the Rise of Christianity, Part 2

Woman of ancient Rome

In my last post I reviewed the abysmal status of women in the ancient, pre-Christian Greco-Roman world. In this one I intend to discuss the status of women in the early Christian subculture, and the ways in which Christianity must have appealed to women in this time period. These posts are based mainly on the book The Rise of Christianity by sociologist Rodney Stark.

Perhaps the most gruesome example of women's low status in Greco-Roman society was the legal and socially accepted practice of female infanticide, which resulted in an estimated 58% - 42% male - female sex ratio in Italy, Asia Minor and North Africa during this time period. But according to a number of sources cited by Stark, the situation in the early Christian Church was reversed: women greatly outnumbered men. Why might this have been so?


Christian Egalitarianism

Here I would like to quibble with Stark's analysis, which I think is oversimplified. His line of reasoning is simply this: women, for reasons beyond the scope of my book, convert to new religions at a much higher rate than men. Additionally, amongst Christians infanticide and abortion were forbidden, so the birth and death rates of males and females were restored to their normal balance. This produced a surplus of women among Christians, which according to theories of sociology will lead to greater status and increased welfare for women.

My problem with this analysis is that many of the benefits Stark lists as accruing to women due to their increased numbers come directly from the teachings of the Jews, of Jesus and of Paul, teachings that predate this period of male-female imbalance. I believe rather that we should consider the abundance of women and their increased status and welfare in the early Church as a situation of mutual causation - women joined because the Church treated them well, which led to a gender imbalance, which created a subculture in which women could more easily assert themselves and guarantee that the Church would treat them well. In truth I think Stark would agree with me, but being a sociologist he chose to stick to the sociological side of the argument.

At any rate Stark quotes 1 Cor 7:2-7 as evidence that women enjoyed greater status among Christians, but as I said, this is also reason for women to be attracted to Christianity:

But because of the temptation to immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband.

For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does....

Stark comments that, "The symmetry of the relationship Paul described was at total variance, not only with pagan culture, but with Jewish culture as well." This symmetry in marital responsibility is a feature of Jesus' teachings as well, as we can see in Mark 10:11-12 when he overturns the one-sided Jewish arrangement by which a man may divorce his wife, with this:

"Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her;

and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery."

Stark argues that

[T]he more favorable Christian view of women is...demonstrated in their condemnation of divorce, incest, marital infidelity and polygamy. As Fox put it, 'fidelity, without divorce, was expected of every Christian' (1987:354).....Like pagans, early Christians prized female chastity, but unlike pagans they rejected the double standard that gave men so much sexual license (Sandison 1967). Christian men were urged to remain virgins until marriage (Fox 1987), and extramarital sex was condemned as adultery. Chadwick noted that Christianity 'regarded unchastity in a husband as no less serious a breach of loyalty and trust as unfaithfulness in a wife' (1967:59).

Christianity therefore provided a moral framework in which women's needs were not presumed to be of lesser importance than men's, which was revolutionary for that time and place. Nevertheless, our modern sensibilities take that for granted, and some of Scripture's more patriarchal statements about the role of women, which were probably considered scarcely worth noting in ancient times, sound harsh and unreasonable to us today. Stark takes the time to comment on one passage:

As to the status of women in the early church, there has been far too much reliance on 1 Cor 14:34-36, where Paul appears to prohibit women from even speaking in church. Laurence Iannaccone (1982) has made a compelling case that these verses were the opposite of Paul's position and were in fact a quotation of claims being made at Corinth that Paul then refuted. Certainly the statement is at variance with everything else Paul wrote about the proper role for women in the church.

I don't know how probable this interpretation of 1 Cor 14 is; I'd never heard of it until I read Stark's book. But I think it's sufficient to bear in mind the context of First Corinthians. The Corinthians were engaging in serious, if childish, abuses of the Mass. In those days each participant brought his or her own bread and wine to the service, and at Corinth the rich were refusing to share with the poor. They showed up hungry and behaved as if they were eating a meal rather than worshiping God: some got drunk while others went without. Women came to the service without the headdresses that were customary in Greece at that time, probably indicating a spirit of rebelliousness. (And if Paul's commandment that women keep their heads covered in church offends you, think about the last time you saw a man refuse to remove his hat in church or during the national anthem. As silly as these things are, people put great importance on them.) And on top of all that, parishioners, often several at a time, would start babbling forth in the nonsense language of tongues right in the middle of the service. If Paul's instructions are harsh it's because he's trying to put the hammer down, and stamp out these abuses by any means necessary.

There's no denying that Paul envisioned a patriarchal structure to marriage, in which the woman should be submissive to the husband, but again his instructions to married people embody the same symmetry of responsibilities between men and women that we saw in Jesus' prohibition of divorce, as can be seen in Ephesians 5:21-33:

Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior of the body. As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. So (also) husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.

"For this reason a man shall leave (his) father and (his) mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.

In any case, each one of you should love his wife as himself, and the wife should respect her husband.

Paul sees in the relationship between husband and wife a reflection of the relationship between Christ and his Church, so the wife should be subordinate to the husband as the Church is to Christ. But in turn the husband must love his wife as Christ loves his Church. In Christianity to love is to serve with humility; Christ washed the feet of his disciples, an act that the Jews would not demand of their lowliest slave. This is why Paul is able to begin his instructions with, "Be subordinate to one another."

Appearing as it did in the midst of a society in which "males could divorce simply by ordering a wife out of the household," this is clearly a revolutionary vision of the proper relationship between men and women. It's small wonder women found it attractive.


Advantages of Being a Christian

Stark lists a number of clear advantages women had within the Christian subculture over their pagan counterparts. The first and most obvious is that they were allowed to live beyond their first day: as did the Jews before them, Christians absolutely banned infanticide, female or otherwise. Christians also banned all abortions, which caused so many deaths among pagan women, and banned all forms of contraception, which protected Christian women from some of the more demeaning forms of sexual activity that were common among pagans, such as anal and oral intercourse. And Christian girls were far less likely to marry young than pagan girls: according to one study, 44% of pagan girls were married by age 14, while only 20% of Christian girls were.


The Role of Women in the Church

Women within the early Church held also greater positions of power than was customary at that time. See for instance 1 Timothy 11-13, in which Paul describes the qualifications necessary for deaconesses. Stark notes that "Deacons were of considerable importance in the early church. They assisted at liturgical functions and administered the benevolent and charitable activities of the church." He asserts that

there is virtual consensus among historians of the early church as well as biblical scholars that women held positions of honor and authority within early Christianity (Frend 1984; Gryson 1976; Cadoux 1925). Peter Brown noted that Christians differed not only from pagans in this respect, but from Jews: 'The Christian clergy...took a step that separated them from the rabbis of Palestine...[T]hey welcomed women as patrons and even offered women roles in which they could act as collaborators' (1988:144-145).

In addition to the testimony of scholars and contemporaries of the early church, Stark offers as evidence the fact that a large number of early Christian martyrs were women: the Romans were known to target the leaders of any group they attempted to suppress.

Finally, Stark notes that although pagan women also sometimes held positions of power within the pagan mystery cults, those cults were not central to the lives of their followers in the way that the Church was for the early Christians. "Daily life revolved around the Church," he says, and so the women who held significant roles within the Church had more influence over the most important force that governed their lives than did their pagan counterparts.


Christianity's Aspirational Opportunities for Women

Stark offers two additional explanations for how Christianity rose to dominate Rome, which I would like to tie back to the issue of the role of women in Christianity. First, Stark argues that Christianity was strengthened, while paganism was weakened, by the two major plagues that struck Rome during this time period. Stark believes that Christian survival rates were much higher than pagans, owing to the superior manner in which the Christian community organized itself in response to plagues. As is evident from the lives and deaths of the martyrs, Christianity really did give its adherents courage of conviction in the face of death. And the Christian conviction in a time of plague was to care for the weak and the ill, even if it meant risking your own life in the process.

According to contemporary accounts, the usual response of pagan priests, and even of pagan doctors, to a plague was to flee to the countryside. The response of Christians was very different. The bishop Dionysius wrote of one plague

Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ....

The heathen behaved in the very opposite way. At the first onset of the disease, they pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead...

While a Christian bishop is hardly an unbiased witness, there are many pagan accounts of ancient plagues that describe pagans behaving in exactly this way, and as Stark says, a bishop could hardly expect to get away with making a public declaration of this sort at a time when the plague he refers to was still raging if it were a total fabrication.

A community that organizes itself in the manner attributed to Christians will survive a plague in dramatically greater numbers than one that responds as the pagans did. By some rough but scientific measures, Stark estimates that 30% of the pagan population may have died during each of the two plagues, while only 10% of the Christian population would have. This could have had a significant effect in nudging the population of the Empire in the Christian direction, but I am currently more interested in the effect it would have had on Christian women.

Because it occurs to me that the role of taking charge of the sick, of attending their every need and ministering to them in Christ, is one that would naturally fall to women. In a society in which women were so undesirable that they were killed shortly after birth in large numbers, in which men largely held all the property, all the power, and all the opportunities for making a mark on the world through war or through business, Christianity offered women something that they could get in no other way: an opportunity to exercise heroic virtue. Christianity offered them a chance for greatness. For who could argue that the woman who stared down the plague in order to care for those who had contracted it was less brave than the man who faced death on the battlefield?

And these opportunities were not as isolated as you might suppose. Christianity, according to Stark, was largely an urban phenomenon in its early days, and the ancient cities provided ample opportunity for enduring personal suffering. In examining the historical record of one city, Antioch, over a period of 600 years, Stark calculated that between earthquakes, plagues, fires, famines, foreign invasion and riots, the city suffered a catastrophe involving significant mortality an average of once every 15 years. Women in this time period knew that sacrifices that are nearly unimaginable to us today could be demanded of them at any time, and Christianity gave them a way not only to face them, but to unite them to the suffering of a loving God, and through Him to conquer them with acts of virtue as heroic as those of any man on the battlefield.


A New Society

And they didn't have to become Joan of Arc to do it, which leads me to my final point. One of Stark's final explanations for why Christianity overtook paganism is that its doctrines revolutionized the way people related to God and to one another in a way that revitalized and reformed Roman society. As Stark puts it,

The simple phrase, "For God so loved the world..." would have puzzled an educated pagan. And the notion that the gods care how we treat one another would have been dismissed as patently absurd....

Indeed, as E. A. Judge has noted in detail, classical philosophers regarded mercy and pity as pathological emotions--defects of character to be avoided by all rational men. Since mercy involves providing unearned help or relief, it was contrary to justice....'Plato removed the problem of beggars from his ideal state by dumping them over its borders.'

This was the moral climate in which Christianity taught that mercy is one of the primary virtues--that a merciful God requires humans to be merciful. Moreover the corollary that because God loves humanity, Christians my not please God unless they love one another was something entirely new. Perhaps even more revolutionary was the principal that Christian love and charity must extend beyond the boundaries of family and tribe, that it must extend to "all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Cor 1:2). Indeed, love and charity must even extend beyond the Christian community....

But perhaps above all else, Christianity brought a new conception of humanity to a world saturated with capricious cruelty and the vicarious love of death (Barton, 1993). Consider the account of the martyrdom of Perpetua. Here we learn the details of the long ordeal and gruesome death suffered by this tiny band of resolute Christians as they were attacked by wild beasts in front of a delighted crowd assembled in the arena. But we also learn that had the Christians all given in to the demand to sacrifice to the emperor, and thereby been spared, someone else would have been thrown to the animals. After all, these were games held on honor of the birthday of the emperor's young son. And whenever there were games, people had to die. Dozens of them, sometimes hundreds (Baron 1993)....

[T]he issue here is not capital punishment, not even very cruel forms of capital punishment. The issue is spectacle--for the throngs in the stadia, watching people torn and devoured by beasts or killed in armed combat was the ultimate spectator sport, worthy of a boy's birthday treat. It is difficult to comprehend the emotional life of such people.

In any event, Christians condemned both the cruelties and the spectators. Thou shalt not kill, as Tertullian (De Spectactulis) reminded his readers. And as they gained ascendancy, Christians prohibited such "games." More important, Christians promulgated a moral vision utterly incompatible with the casual cruelty of pagan custom.

I can't help but believe that women must have found this new, Christian moral vision more to their liking than the pagan one.

On the Role of Women in the Rise of Christianity

I just finished reading The Rise of Christianity, a book by sociologist Rodney Stark that attempts to find plausible explanations from a social science standpoint for how the tiny Jesus movement managed to emerge out of the cacophony of religious voices of the ancient Roman Empire, and within four centuries to overwhelm and ultimately bury them all. Stark is not a Christian, but claims instead to be agnostic. From reading his book I would describe him as a closet admirer of Christianity, both as a social organization and for its moral principles. I suspect his interest in Christianity was piqued in part by the hope that he might find some value for his own personal spiritual life there. I also suspect that he hasn't found it, at least not yet.

It's a good book that reminds me of an even better and more ambitious book, Guns Germs and Steel, which attempts to explain, and fairly well succeeds at plausibly explaining, all of human history from the standpoint of sociology, geography, climate and vegetation patterns. In many ways The Rise of Christianity has a more difficult task than Guns Germs and Steel however, in that it's attempting to explain a single religious movement in a very narrow (three and a half century) period of history, for which there is not nearly adequate historical data for the task.

Overall, Stark does a good job at providing insights into how and why Christianity grew at the incredible rate that it did. I didn't come away from reading it feeling that I fully understand the pagan mind, and in particular he doesn't shed much light on the phenomenon of Gnosticism. Instead, he focuses more on the state of the diasporan Jews, from which he suggests a majority or at least a significant proportion of converts came; the state of women in pagan society and Christianity's special appeal to women; Christianity's superior mechanisms for building the social networks that he considers key to conversion, especially during the two major plagues that occurred in this time period; and Christians' superior birth rates. He does spend some time discussing reasons for paganism's weakness in the face of Christianity, but I still came away from the book with the feeling that there's a gap in our understanding there.

But Stark does an excellent job of describing aspects of the spread of Christianity that often go unnoticed, and in particular I was struck by his depiction of the role of women in pagan society, and of the resulting attraction Christianity had for them. As he mildly puts it, "Amid contemporary denunciations of Christianity as patriarchal and sexist, it is easily forgotten that the early church was so especially attractive to women." Completely forgotten may have been more accurate. In reading this book I was amazed to hear in what low regard pagan society held women. It highlights how revolutionary Christianity must have seemed by comparison. And it was fascinating to hear how Christianity provided remedies to some maladies that we mistakenly think of as purely modern problems: low birth rates due to men postponing marriage (and living the life of the urban playboy) until late in life, rampant divorce, contraception and abortion, and the feelings of isolation that come from urban life. It seems to me that ancient Romans would have felt right at home among modern, Manhattan metrosexuals.

The State of Women in Pagan Society

Unknown Christian woman of the early church

Male-biased sex selection is a problem we normally associate with the abortion practices of modern India and China, but in ancient Rome it was not only common, it was legal and socially expected. Stark notes that "Dio Cassius, writing in about 200, attributed the declining population of the empire to the extreme shortage of females," and indeed by modern estimates the population of Italy, Asia Minor and North Africa as a whole may have been 58% male and 42% female.

This disparity was largely brought about by exposure of unwanted newborns to the elements, a practice that was legal for all female and malformed male children under Roman law, and encouraged by both Plato and Aristotle. According to Stark, "A study of inscriptions at Delphi made it possible to reconstruct 600 families. Of these, only 6 had more than one daughter." The Roman historian Tacitus "charged that the Jewish teaching that 'it is a deadly sin to kill an unwanted child' was but another of their 'sinister and revolting' practices." Women's status was especially low in the East. Stark describes the situation for Athenian women:

In Athens, women were in relatively short supply owing to female infanticide, practiced by all classes, and to additional deaths caused by abortion. The status of Athenian women was very low. Girls received little or no education. Typically, Athenian females were married at puberty and often before. Under Athenian law a woman was classified as a child, regardless of age, and therefore was the legal property of some man at all stages in her life. Males could divorce by simply ordering a wife out of the household. Moreover, if a woman was seduced or raped, a husband was legally compelled to divorce her. If a woman wanted a divorce, she had to have her father or some other man bring her case before a judge. Finally, Athenian women could own property, but control of the property was always vested in the male to whom she 'belonged.'

Stark caveats this depiction with a note that the situation was somewhat better for women in the city of Rome and in the West generally than in the East, but he also notes that Christianity took hold the quickest precisely in those Eastern cities where the status of women was lowest.

He mentions in the passage above that abortion was a factor in the unequal sex ratio in Rome. Again, we tend to think of abortion as a feature only of the modern world, but the ancient Romans practiced it with such frequency that, due to the primitive state of medicine in that period, researchers believe that it "was a major cause of death among women in the Greco-Roman world." In many cases, it was the husband who ordered the woman to abort the child. Under Roman law it was his right to do so; the woman had no legal option but to obey.

The subjection of women to men in Roman society could only have been exacerbated in the extreme by the practice of marrying young, often pre-pubescent, girls to much older men. While men tended to marry late, almost half (44%) of pagan women were married by age 14, and 10% by age 11, according to one study. It was normal and expected that these marriages be consummated immediately; we can only imagine the effect that must have had on these girls.

According to Stark, Rome had "a male culture that held marriage in low esteem." It also had very different standards of chastity for men and for women. He writes,

Although virginity was demanded of brides, and chastity of wives, men tended to be quite promiscuous and female prostitutes abounded in Greco-Roman cities--from the two-penny diobolariae who worked the streets to high-priced, well-bred courtesans (Pomeroy 1975). Greco-Roman cities also sustained substantial numbers of male prostitutes, as bisexuality and homosexuality were common (Sandison 1967).

As to why women were treated so poorly in the ancient world, Stark doesn't have a good explanation, though he argues somewhat circularly that men in societies in which men outnumber women will attempt to dominate them as "scarce resources."

But the fact is that it was so. It was into this world that Christianity came, with a vision of relations between the sexes that was not just attractive to women, it was revolutionary. Christianity would attract women in numbers that flipped the usual state of affairs in Roman society: among Christians women far outnumbered men. Within the Christian world they held positions of power and influence that were extraordinary in that time and place, and they were treated with a humanity that far exceeded anything they would have experienced elsewhere in Roman society.

But that will have to be a topic for another post.

Come and see

They said to him, "Rabbi...where are you staying?"

He said,"Come and see."

With these simple words Andrew and an unnamed person (traditionally and most probably John the Evangelist, author of the fourth Gospel) became Jesus' first disciples.

St. Thomas Aquinas once said that we should pay attention to the little things that Jesus said, and he gave as an example Jesus' instructions to the man with the withered hand in Matthew 12:13: "Stretch out your hand." He doesn't say, "You're healed." Instead, he asks the man to do something, to make an effort, to reach out to him. To try. Little Scriptural gems like this are wonderful to behold, and when you find one you should cherish it.

This little exchange between Jesus and Andrew and John is one of my favorite of these. "Rabbi, where are you staying?" was an idiom used by the ancients to mean, "Teacher, we would like to learn from you. Where is your school, that we may become your students?" Jesus' response is revealing: "Come and see." He was not like other Rabbis. He didn't sit in a school with his select group of students. He moved from place to place, preaching amongst the people. If Andrew and John wanted to learn from Jesus, they would have to keep up.

As Christians we can't help but make Andrew and John's question our own. "Master, where are you staying? We want to learn. We want to understand." Jesus' response is direct and engaging. The words leap off the page; we can see him looking us in the eye as he says it: "Come and see." Jesus is a man of action, and like Andrew and John, if we want to learn from him, we will need to keep up. And unlike other teachers, he isn't here just to tell us something. He has something to show us, and we can only learn what it is by walking with him along the path that he walks.

Why can't he just tell us? What does he have to teach us that can only be learned by seeing him in action? I think there are two things. First, Jesus wants to teach us the way of perfection (and it's useful to remember that the early Christians described their religion as "The Way.") He wants us know what the perfect looks like, so that we'll know what we're supposed to be aiming for. He wants our aim to be true, though we may doubt our ability to hit the target. As Jesus says in Matthew 5:

"You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, 'You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment.' But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment, and whoever says to his brother, 'Raqa,' will be answerable to the Sanhedrin, and whoever says, 'You fool,' will be liable to fiery Gehenna.

"....You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one of your members than to have your whole body thrown into Gehenna. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one of your members than to have your whole body go into Gehenna.

"It was also said, 'Whoever divorces his wife must give her a bill of divorce.' But I say to you, whoever divorces his wife (unless the marriage is unlawful) causes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

"Again you have heard that it was said to your ancestors, 'Do not take a false oath, but make good to the Lord all that you vow.' But I say to you, do not swear at all; not by heaven, for it is God's throne; nor by the earth, for it is his footstool; nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. Do not swear by your head, for you cannot make a single hair white or black. Let your 'Yes' mean 'Yes,' and your 'No' mean 'No.' Anything more is from the evil one.

"You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on (your) right cheek, turn the other one to him as well. If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic, hand him your cloak as well. Should anyone press you into service for one mile, go with him for two miles. Give to the one who asks of you, and do not turn your back on one who wants to borrow.

"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same?

So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.

It's easy to understand what Jesus is saying here: that the exterior proscriptions of the Old Testament point the way to interior perfection. "Thou shalt not be angry with your brother" is the interior perfection of "Thou shalt not kill;" "Thou shalt not lust" is the perfection of "Thou shalt not commit adultery." "Turn the other cheek" is the perfection of "an eye for an eye" (which was originally intended to limit retribution, not to encourage it).

But these would seem to us unattainable ideals were it not for the example Jesus gave us by living them. In fact, Jesus' divinity brings to these ideals a fathomless depth, gives them an entirely new dimension, and heightens the urgency with which we ourselves pursue them. Jesus is God, and yet he submitted to these principles in relation to us. How important is "turn the other cheek?" So important that God himself, who was perfectly innocent of any wrongdoing, perfectly blameless, submitted to this principle in his own life, when he was attacked by evil men, even to the point of torture and death.

God created the universe, and is farther above us than we are above worms. For him to carry out these ideals in his life among us demonstrates a depth of love that is almost impossible for us to imagine. In fact, I would be willing to bet that an inability to conceive of a God as loving as this is the second most popular reason that people reject Christianity's concept of God. (The most popular reason being, ironically, that a God that allows evil in the world is not loving enough.)

And if God himself was willing to put these principles into practice, how serious must he be about them? What excuse can we have not to make them our own? Jesus makes no bones about it: these aren't lofty ideals that we can raise a glass to, and then ignore. He tells us, "Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me," Mark 8: 34.

The second thing Jesus wants us to know, which can only be learned if we "come and see," is him. And this lesson is deeply intertwined with the other, as we see in John 14:

"Where (I) am going you know the way."

Thomas said to him, "Master, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?"

Jesus said to him, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, then you will also know my Father. From now on you do know him and have seen him.

....Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me. And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him."

Jesus wants us to come to know him, and through him, to come to know God the Father. He wants us to follow his example not just because it is the way of perfection, not just because it is supremely important to God, but out of love for him. If Jesus' example demonstrates God's unfathomable love for us, then the proper response is not just obedience, it is to love God in return. To love God we need to know God, and that is Jesus' mission in the world.

This is a great mystery. For us to understand God well enough to truly love him, for us to be capable of offering a love for him that approximates in even the smallest way the love he has for us, is a seemingly impossible task. Atheists like to challenge God with, "If you exist, why don't you show yourself? Why this game of hide and seek?" I'm not sure what they're asking for. Universal parlor tricks? The sun dancing in the sky? (And yet even when God provides such miracles they don't believe in them.) But God wants to reveal so much more about himself than that. He doesn't just want us to believe that he exists; that much he considers obvious. He wants us to know him, to understand him, well enough to be capable of loving him. Through all of God's 2000 year journey with the Jews, through all of history itself, God has been straining to reveal himself, yearning to be known, struggling to help us to overcome the sin that resulted from his gift of free will, which was necessary for us to be able to make the choice to love him, but which continually prevents us from doing so.

And now God has taken the ultimate step to bridge the infinite divide that separates us from him. He has come to live among us, to show us by his example what love is, to love us even when we don't love him, to lift us out of the mire of sin from which we have failed time again to free ourselves. To be present for us in the most immediate way imaginable, in flesh and blood, that we may come to know him and believe in him. He stands before us with his hand outstretched, ready to lift us into a new life, if only we will come, and see.

There is no State

Then the Pharisees went off and plotted how they might entrap him in speech.

They sent their disciples to him, with the Herodians, saying, "Teacher, we know that you are a truthful man and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. And you are not concerned with anyone's opinion, for you do not regard a person's status.

Tell us, then, what is your opinion: Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not?"

The scene must have been one of great anticipation; the Pharisees' "trick" not particularly clever. Jesus had been preaching and working miracles throughout Israel for three years. Many Israelites, longing to be free of Roman rule, had come to believe he might be the Messiah, the king from the line of David who, they believed, would overthrow their oppressors and restore the independent kingdom of Israel. Now Jesus had made his way to Jerusalem, on the eve of the Passover, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, the celebration of God's deliverance of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. If ever Jesus would announce his kingship and begin the rebellion against Rome, this would be the time and the place.

Going to Jerusalem at this time was a nearly suicidal act on Jesus' part. Either he would begin the rebellion in a city that hosted a Roman garrison of overwhelming strength, or he would burst the hopes and expectations of the people, whose reaction to the disappointment might be severe. It would, in fact, be Jesus' final journey to Jerusalem; these were the last few days of his ministry before the Passion.

The Pharisees' "trick" was simply to force the issue. "Tell us now," they were saying, "which side you are on. Are we to pay homage to Rome or not?"

Jesus' answer to this question posed in Matthew 22:15ff is one of the most famous quotes of the Bible:

"Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God."

I remember when we covered this passage in Scripture class at Gonzaga. The Jesuit priest who taught the class (now I've forgotten his name) read the passage and said, "So you see how Jesus tricked them."

And I thought, "No." It seemed to me that he gave a straightforward, honest answer, though not the one the Jews wanted to hear. "My kingdom is not of this Earth," he seemed to be saying. "There's no conflict between Caesar's kingdom and mine. Pay your taxes, get along with the State so that your physical needs are met, so that you'll have peace sufficient to let you concentrate on what's really important, which is your relationship to God." Jesus seems to be arguing for a separation of Church and State.

This is in fact the message Jesus wanted his Roman listeners to hear, but this is the "trick" part of Jesus' answer. It's not the answer his Jewish listeners would have heard. It's ironic that many of us today who read this passage continue to hear, as I did when I was a college student, the "trick." We miss the real message Jesus intended for his Jewish listeners.

To understand the rest of Jesus' answer we have to pay attention to the seemingly innocuous verses that precede it:

Tell us, then, what is your opinion: Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not?

Knowing their malice, Jesus said, "Why are you testing me, you hypocrites? Show me the coin that pays the census tax." Then they handed him the Roman coin.

He said to them, "Whose image is this and whose inscription?"

They replied, "Caesar's." At that he said to them, "Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God."

"Whose image is this?" To understand the affect these words would have had on Jesus' Jewish listeners we have to remember that the whole history of Israel was one long, life and death struggle with idolatry. The religion of the Jews was not, as we sometimes imagine, safely carried through the ages in the isolated little corner of the near east that they occupied. No, paganism was constantly infiltrating the land of Israel, brought in through intermarriage with the pagans who surrounded Israel, brought in through trade, through the cultural assimilation that was to be expected when a simple nomadic people settled down near far more advanced, cosmopolitan cultures. It was practiced by the people of Israel, it was practiced by the pagan wives of their kings, it was practiced by the kings themselves. We forget that on several occasions the religion of the Jews was in grave danger of being wiped from the face of the Earth, replaced entirely by paganism.

The struggle against paganism resulted in some of the bloodiest scenes of the Old Testament. Think of Jezebel, the pagan queen of Israel who promulgated the worship of her native god Ba'al Melkart throughout Israel. She was thrown out of a window, "and some of her blood spurted against the wall and against the horses," 2 Kings 9:33 prosaically reports. Then they ran over her with a horse, and left her to be eaten by dogs. In Israel, any lapse into idolatry was a serious thing, a matter of national survival. Nothing was more loathsome to a Jew than an idolatrous image.

"Whose image is this?" Jesus asked the Pharisees. The image of Caesar, the emperor of Rome. At the time Jesus asked the question it was only 70 years since Julius Caesar had become the first Roman emperor to declare his own divinity. It must have been particularly galling for the Jews, not only to be ruled by pagan kings, but to be ruled by someone who claimed to be a god himself. It was a wound that was still fresh.

What's most hilarious about this scene is that Jesus did not pull the coin out of his own pocket; he tricked the Pharisees into pulling it out of theirs. By pointing out the image on the coin Jesus is calling attention to the fact that in using Roman money the Pharisees are carrying little idolatrous images around with them every day.

"Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar." Having pointed out the idolatrous image on the coin the natural response of any Jew would be to throw it away from them, and Jesus completely agrees. "Give it back to him, give it all back to him," he seems to be saying. Don't just pay the tax, throw all his idolatrous money back in his face.

Should we refuse to pay the tax? Should we rebel against Roman rule? This is the "extreme" position the Pharisees hope to corner Jesus into taking, but Jesus shocks them into seeing that these are insignificant little half-measures, which betray the interior compromise the Israelites have already made with paganism, a compromise brought to light by the little pagan idols each of them carries about with them every day. Jesus demands more than rebellion, he demands that his listeners recognize the creeping idolatry that has developed with in their own hearts, and that they renounce it utterly. He demands that God and Caesar each be given his true and proper due in the hearts and in the lives of his listeners.

And what then, does belong to Caesar, and what belongs to God? How would Jesus' Jewish listeners have answered that question? Based on their training in the Scriptures, this is what they would have thought: "Did Caesar form the Earth or the waters? Does he make the rains fall and the crops grow?" As God says to Job:

Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its size; do you know? Who stretched out the measuring line for it?

....Who shut within doors the sea?....Have you ever in your lifetime commanded the morning and shown the dawn its place?

....Have you entered into the sources of the sea, or walked about in the depths of the abyss? Have the gates of death been shown to you, or have you seen the gates of darkness?

....Do you give the horse his strength?....Does the eagle fly up at your command?

What Caesar is due, Jesus is saying, is precisely nothing. He has no place in our priorities. God is everything. Separation of Church and State? No. Jesus is saying, like the little boy in The Matrix, "There is no State."

Forgiveness of the Cylon God

I was watching an episode of the new Battlestar Galactica series yesterday. In the episode, a group of people find themselves in desperate need of forgiveness. Many of them are guilty of acts that saved their own lives at the expense of others. Their leader, in fact, through an act of self-centered carelessness, allowed the Cylons to discover defense secrets that led to the deaths of billions of people, effectively the entire human race. Now try living with that on your conscience!

This man, whose name is Gaius Baltar, has come to believe in the one true God, the God of the Cylons, and believes he has figured out the formula by which God will grant him forgiveness. It goes like this: "God loves us all. God is perfect, and God only loves that which is perfect. Therefore we are all perfect, just as we are." Baltar says this with conviction, as one receiving a great epiphany, to a round of weepy applause by all present. The actors are all excellent, and they try very hard to give the scene authenticity, but it doesn't work.

Why doesn't it work? Because people who have committed great sins, and people who have committed small sins who are attentive to their spiritual state, know that they are not perfect. "If we say, 'We have no sin,' we are deceiving ourselves, and truth has no place in us." 1 John 1:8. They will not be satisfied with being told that they're already perfect. They crave forgiveness, a fresh start, a chance to start over. And what's more, they want it to come in a tangible act, clear and visible. What they want, in short, is Baptism.

I am surprised about this. I've been versed in the symbolism of Baptism for some time, but it has remained for me a "not what I would have expected" sacrament: one of the many gifts of God that I would not have thought up myself, if I were designing a world. A rite that John the Baptist came up with many thousands of years ago that, inexplicably, captivated the nation of Israel for a brief time, before being adopted by Christ as the main rite of Christian initiation. But now that I've seen an artist's rendition of a God of Redemption without Baptism, it seems to me to be a much more natural and explicable rite; in fact, it seems to be the perfect response to a people suffering with their own sinfulness.

The symbolism of Baptism includes washing away ones sins; everyone knows that. What is probably less well known is that it also involves rebirth. The ancient Semites thought of water as a symbol of the Abyss, the nothingness that precedes existence. "In the beginning ... the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters," Genesis 1:1-2. In pushing the repentant sinner into the water, all the way in as it was done in the early days, he or she is symbolically being pushed back into pre-existence, only to rise from the waters anew, reborn into a new existence. The ultimate fresh start.

The Apostle Paul likened the descent into the water to a descent into the tomb with Christ, and the rising out of the water to being resurrected with Christ into a new life. "For we are buried together with him by baptism into death; that as Christ is risen from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also may walk in newness of life." Romans 6:4. The early Christians referred to Baptism as being "born again."

Thus Baptism gives the sinner exactly what they desire. A repentant sinner has come to a clear-eyed assessment of their own sinfulness, and they do not like what they see. Baptism does not try to sweet talk them out of that assessment. It doesn't tell them that, "If only they could see the big picture, they'd see that their sins are not really sinful." They are in a serious mood, and it treats their sins seriously. It gives them the concreteness of a tangible act, a moment of truth, a metanoia, which Father Nigro, my old Scripture teacher, described as an "I was walking this way, and then I turned, and now I'm walking that way" moment. And it provides the symbolism of death to the old way of life, and rebirth into a new life as a child of the Resurrection, as a child of God.