coherence + Christianity

When did coherence emerge as a value of Christianity? This question has been on my mind for some time.

Christ's teachings were not systematic or coherent in the way that contemporary theology and teachings attempt to be.

Paul (probably the most popular savior in Christianity, although Jesus is a close second) is similarly not very coherent or systematic in the way that people want him to be. This doesn't mean that either of their teachings were incoherent (as a code word for nonsense or babble.)

If Christ meant for his teachings to be systematic, coherent, we would certainly have the Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Second, Christ not writing his own teachings meant that he was quite willing for his teachings to be misappropriated, misrepresented, misremembered, represented incompletely and ignorantly. If Jesus were concerned with the truth of his teachings, in the way that contemporary teachers, preachers, theologians are concerned with the truth and coherence of their own, we would have the Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

If we say that Christ came to be abused, why don't we extend this to the abuse and forgetting of his teaching by his followers, by those who came after him? This doesn't begin with misintepretations of the gospels but the very act of writing the gospels.

I'm not trying to call the gospels into question, or projecting sinister intentions on the writers of the gospels, because I dont see any such sinister intentions. But Christ gave up some very important claims when he left his legacy with his followers!

I'm also interested in the way that valuing coherence leads to splintering and disunity, just as valuing truth as an absolute necessarily leads to division. The idea that we can know truth combined with the value for coherence (the total domination and reconciling of knowledge) is totally antithetical to the ecumenical drive. The steady splintering of the church over the millenia derives from this drive to coherence, from the will to truth, as Nietzsche puts it (or does he?).

So where did all this begin? Augustine? Canonization? Aquinas? Probably none of them, since they themselves aren't enough to explain why coherence has emerged as a value.

reward and punishment

There is no connection between offense and punishment, or action and reward. There is no connection in value, no way to make the two equivalent in value. Steal a car and get placed in jail? Where is the connection? What is the system of values that allows these equations to take place? Likewise, rewards. Spent 10 hours lifting boxes and receive 100 dollars? Where does the connection come from?

Seeing offenders punished is pleasurable, but pleasure in others suffering feels guilty, so we believe that they've deserved it! Hard work is a pain, and we want to believe that it means something. But there isn't a connection between hard work and reward (or virtue and reward).

The logic can be maintained by saying that there are natural consequences to certain behavior, but why would I want to maintain that logic?

heroism and memory

Why value heroism in ethics? Where does it come from? In part, I think Christians have simply picked up the model of the bible itself, and the form of memory that is found within the text.

For years I have heard people talk about the bible as if it contains stories about ordinary people ("called to extraordinary things"). But this really isn't the case. We have very little in the text about peoples ordinary lives. They are introduced as ordinary figures, but they never remain that way, and we see only the heroic moments of their life.

Perhaps most obviously this takes place with the gospels, and Jesus himself. Why is there a twenty plus year gap in the record about his life? Presumably this is because the writers of the gospel believed that what happened in those years was unimportant. They privileged the spectacular events of his early and late life over the mundane events that took place between, and now we are forced to read poorly written inspirational novels to have a sense of what might have happened in those years.

To be part of the biblical story then, Christians are forced to see themselves as heroic figures. To the extent that they are not heroes, they are not part of the story. Or at least that seems to be the easiest response to the memory at work in the bible.

I am curious about the fact that people are so willing to find moral lessons and warnings in the texts and stories of the bible, but cant extend lessons to the form of the bible itself! In other words, you can talk about how awful a person was, but not how awful the letters and stories they wrote are. You can learn the mistakes from their lives, but not from the values at work in what they wrote. Obviously, I think that's a distinction that has no worth.