Reductio Ad

17  “And these signs will follow those who believe: In My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues;

18 “they will take up serpents; and if they drink anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”

Mark 16:17-18

That is very near the end and the final words attributed to Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Mark, the shortest of the four canonical Gospels.

And hoo boy, it packs in the crazy: you’ve got seeds of Pentecostal serpent handling, Charismatic glossolalia, Roman Catholic Exorcism, televangelist faith healers and more all rolled up in about fifty words.  Words, again, within the context of the verse, delivered by the resurrected Son of God: the very incarnation of God among men, the Word by Whom all things were created, and Who, immediately after speaking them, is received up into heaven to take His seat at the right hand of God.

There is a pretty fair chance you could, as I do, regularly attend a mainstream Protestant church all your life and never hear a substantive discussion of this passage, Christ’s final injunctions to his believers before ascending into heaven (as reported by Mark), and it’s commendation of the serpent-handling, poison-drinking, tongues-speaking, demon-exorcising, faith-healing ministry of Christ’s disciples, these signs, these proofs of faith.

Dig around a little and you will find it plenty discussed, though: discussed by the proselytizing atheists, the opponents of faith, further evidence of the inanity of scripture and the hypocrisy of believers.  I’d certainly grant that they’ve got Occam’s Razor on their side.  How to sort out these kinds of problematic (for polite, reasonable, church-going Lutherans and the like) prescriptions in scripture?  It’s all bunk: doesn’t get much simpler than that.

Actually, simply ignoring it isn’t such a bad option.  God is, after all, unsearchable, His paths beyond tracing out, that great inexhaustible Get Out of Jail Free card for every apparent irrationality of practicing a poly-millennial faith tradition in the 21st Century.

But as I keep stumbling over, the impulse among Christians to invoke mundane evidence in support of things spiritual remains strong.  Just today I listened to a pastor of my church go off on a tangent about the scientific research of intercessory prayer and its effects on healing, not an uncommon claim.  I am not a theologian and never will be.  Inasmuch as I am anything, in terms of organized epistemologies of knowledge, I am a scientist.  It is grating and intolerable to listen to science invoked in ignorance, presented as a sort of bland evidence of the miraculous, and of course not a word will be spoken about the broad and well traversed controversies surrounding these studies, or the counter-studies and meta-analysis which roundly denied that results of any significance had come out of them.  The bean counters of faith, the God in the gappers, will continue to selectively pull out these worldly endorsements of the orthodoxy, and package them for people like my minister to read in some venue far and gone from the practices of science, a nice sermon illustration to remind us that it isn’t so crazy to believe.

When I say intolerable, I mean just that: I cannot knowingly tolerate the presence of this sort of psuedo-rationality in my  conceptions of my beliefs any longer.  There’s no room for me between the stark schism of scripture, taken as a literal narrative of history, from discernable reality of the here and now, and the watered-down sham artifice of modern orthodoxy, with its God of the iffy statistical bump in the double blind trial.  If scripture is somehow going to keep working for me it is going to have to be in a pattern quite separate and radical.   But there’s plenty more to say about the way these things generally seem to be seen these days first, so I’ll keep digging into that for a while, yet.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 8, 2009 at 11:38 PM