Granta (London 2020). 304 pages. Hbk. £12.75.
In The Godless Gospel, acknowledging that it’s often been previously done, Baggini asserts it is still a worthwhile endeavour to strip out the supernatural to produce a godless gospel and reflect on it to answer the question ‘Was Jesus a Great Moral Teacher?’
‘You can’t do this!’ C. S. Lewis has famously argued. Jesus claimed to be God and if not, was mentally ill or a liar. If not deluded or lying, then ‘you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher.’
Baggini replies that ‘Lewis is surely right if we take the Gospels to be accurate history. But most people who don’t believe Jesus was the Messiah do not believe he was mad either. They believe the more plausible alternative: that Jesus was a human teacher who was mythologised after his death. The authors of the Gospels added supernatural adornments to their confabulated version of his life. He was neither crazy nor divine, he was simply misrepresented.’
‘You can’t do this!’, say others who insist moral authority needs a divine source to legitimise it. Baggini replies with Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma to show goodness does not need God: ‘Plato asks whether the gods command what is good because it is good or what they command is good because they command it. It cannot be the case that rape and torture, for example, are only bad because the gods say they are. A good god could not make these terrible things good just by declaring that they were. The gods command what is good because it is good. The good, not God, grounds morality. Nothing is added to the reality of goodness by giving it a divine source.’
The book is divided into two major parts. The first explores Jesus’s teachings and practice regarding soul and character; the law; renouncing the world; renouncing politics; humility; non-judgement; against family values; sowing division; and good without God. In Part Two, Jesus’s ethical teachings are distilled into a hybrid, godless gospel by combining different versions of the same stories and teachings in the four gospels to avoid repetition and stripping out the supernatural elements. He leaves in ‘the Kingdom of Heaven’ sayings, which ‘I understand as referring to an ideal or inner state rather than to a supernatural realm’.
So, to Baggini, was Jesus a great moral teacher? Yes, but not as a great moral thinker with a moral system, but, primarily, as a ‘moral challenger’; he asks hard questions of us; he shakes things up; he’s very discomforting on moral issues, and that is the essence of Jesus’s enduring significance. ‘His teachings offer a much-needed challenge to our moral thinking that shakes us out of any complacency, a transformative element that can embed itself in any culture.’
‘This looks to me like the right way to frame the godless gospel for today. We can’t simply uproot Jesus’s moral teaching from its first-century Palestine context and replant it in the present day. But we can follow its spirit, rather than its letter, which is surely the most authentic way to take it anyway. And in its spirit, we find a series of moral challenges rather than a complete moral system.’
‘We don’t need to believe that the good to which we are accountable is divine or transcendent … Love and goodness are real enough to be of supreme importance, even if they have no existence beyond this planet.’
He concludes: ‘When Jesus’s life ended on the cross, that should have been the defining example of how seriously he took the idea of sacrifice and the need to live well, even if it meant living a shorter life. Over time, however, his followers needed a happier ending. They added a resurrection, ignored what he said about the Kingdom of Heaven being within us and imagined it as world to come. They made his teaching more palatable and more attractive, but in doing so they enfeebled it.’
‘Jesus should perhaps die once more, this time for good, in order that what matters most in his message can rise again.’
Clem Cook is SOF webmaster.