Counterfactuals I

One of my favorite teachers, who taught history, once said that to earn a C in his class, you needed to be able tell him what happened. To earn a B, tell him how and what happened. To earn an A, he said, you needed to be able to tell him not just how and what but why things happened the way they did. In essence, to earn an A from him, you had to know enough background to be able to change history by changing one small detail 50 years before. Thus was born my love of alternate history and counterfactual thinking. Also, the beginning of a 9-grading period streak of A+ marks from him, a feat I understand had never happened before and did not happen again in his career, but in my defense, he said it couldn’t be done…

I’ve been thinking a lot in the past week about what would change in the world if we could go back in time and change the philosophical basis of Christianity from its Greek roots to a root based more directly in African philosophical thinking. The major difference, in broad strokes, between the two is that Greek philosophy (and the Western systems that descend from it) identifies the individual as the basic unit of human identity, where African systems identify the community, be it family, village, or tribe, as the basic unit of human identity. African societies even now are more communal than the vast majority of western societies, and are communal in a very different way from Asian societies, which are also based in less individually-focused thought systems than the Greek/Western thought systems with which we are so familiar.

We don’t have any written testimony from Jesus himself in the Bible. The best we have is the four gospels deemed authoritative by the early church, and the best we can do with them is to hypothesize that Mark, Matthew, and Luke (collectively known as the Synoptic Gospels because of shared material among and between them) were written at least two generations after the death of Jesus, possibly three, and that John is a generation later. In the Synoptic Gospels we see Jesus speaking more about communities than about individuals. This may have been in part because there was more eyewitness testimony available to the actual authors (that’s another post entirely) as well as because the early Christian communities for which the three were written were still defining themselves in the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE. By the time of John, individualism was rising; it was time for people to declare their choice openly, Jew (and thus potential enemy of Rome) or Christian (and thus, at least at the time, protected). John even puts the individual nature of salvation in Jesus’ mouth: “God so loved the world that God sent God’s Son, that whoever (singular) believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Of course, the sentiment continues with a global promise, but the emphasis—and the verse every Christian learns early on—is about individuals.

Paul, whose writing spanned 15 years staring about 20 years after the crucifixion (and thus starts 20 years before the earliest plausible date for Mark), wrestled with individualism in every church but Philippi, it seems. Certainly 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 12 focus on the need for individuals to recognize that they are also part of a community. We still read those passages as ideals for our church communities and for the Church Universal because we still haven’t grasped what it means to be the Body of Christ; most people read Acts 2:42-47 as if it were an impossible fiction even though it is, in fact, an ideal community rooted in the prophetic witness about the Kingdom of Heaven (and there is delicious irony in the fact that Marx and Engels found inspiration in that passage for The Communist Manifesto).

Now imagine that Jesus, Paul, and the writers of the four Gospels had lived in a society based on an African thought system which held community as the central core of human identity. We have to acknowledge that Judaism had been heavily Hellenized by the time of Jesus, but we can start from Jesus and move forward with our counterfactual. 

Would Jesus have needed to teach the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10)? Probably not in the way we receive it. The Samaritan might have been the victim in the alternate parable with the point being the necessity of saving an individual for the sake of the community to which he or she belongs rather than on the neighborliness of an unexpected rescuer. The Generous Vineyard Owner (Matthew 20) would likely be unnecessary, as the norm would be for each worker to work a full day for the good of the community. The Wedding Banquet (Matthew 22 and Luke 14) would have been a community feast from the get-go, so why tell the parable at all? Would the disciples have even asked the question that prompted the Feeding of the 5,000 (Mark 6, Matthew 14, Luke 9, John 6), or would they have figured out a way to care for the community ahead of such a large gathering because the norm was to think about the needs of the many first? If Jesus had been in an African community, would he ever have said, “Unless one is born anew…” or would that whole dialogue and discourse been more focused on the salvation of the community? 

How different would 1 Corinthians 12 be if Paul had written it to an African community that understood at a very different level how essential every member of the community is to its health and well-being than did the congregation in Corinth? I don’t think Paul would have had to explain that an eye can’t tell a hand to disappear or a head the feet to walk away; perhaps Paul might have had to encourage the community members to be more like an eye or a hand or a head or a foot and do what each was uniquely gifted to do…to claim more individual identity within the community rather than becoming less individually focused and more community focused.

And what of Christianity 2000 years later? How different would our churches look if our founding stories were community based? I dare say that how we identify leaders would be different, as would how we train them—a fact not lost on the United Church of Christ as we work together to provide many paths to ministry that hold a single high standard but each accommodate cultural, regional, and societal differences. Would we even have denominations, or would the schisms that rent the Church through the centuries have been less destructive, worked out in councils that actually accomplished more than the publication of a creed or a study document? 

Imagine that there’s only one church in each community, one that is focused on the needs of the community in which it’s based, one that works through its disagreements to achieve a consensus that benefits the whole of the church by strengthening its ability to serve the wider community. Or that there’s one church community in each town with many small group gatherings that focus on neighborhood needs, doing the things that we hear in Matthew 25 that Jesus may not have needed to say to a community-centered society—feed the hungry, quench the thirst of the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the sick and imprisoned—because no one was hungry, thirsty, or naked and all who were ill or imprisoned received regular visits to maintain the integrity of the community.

Of course, I’m exaggerating to prove the point; community-based groups are just as flawed, if in different ways, as individual-based groups. If the Body of Christ had been based on an African thought system rather than a conglomeration of Greek systems, in 2016 it would be no closer and no farther from the perfection of the Realm of God than we are today. The Body of Christ is, after all, only human, and the counterfactuals to that are a science fiction story waiting to be written. In the mean time, we can find hope and consolation in the truth that God’s love for us relies not on any thing we do or don’t do, on whether we live in individual-based or community-based societies, or on our understanding or lack thereof Paul, the gospels, or anything other than God.